No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Low Sofa

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

Dan, Andy, Anna and Anne discuss the world's worst poetry recital, where all the world's hazelnuts go, and the first ever advert on Channel 5.

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 and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anne Miller. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week. My fact is that Scottish poet William McGonagall's writing was so bad, a circus hired him to give poetry readings under the condition that audiences could pelt him with eggs as he read. And he agreed to do that. He agreed.

He accepted the job. He was paid 15 shillings per performance and he was actually slightly on hard times. So he accepted it probably going, why, I need the money. And the eggs, maybe. Yeah. And it wasn't just eggs, was it? It was stale bread as well, flour. He got a lot of products that he could go home with.

Unfortunately, the performances were put to an end quite early on, and he was disappointed about that, supposedly. Yeah, weren't they put to an end because they were too riotous? It was in 1893, the authorities banned them because they were getting so out of control. People were just wildly enthusiastic about pelting him. He was probably pretty tough to get an audience, though. He was quite keen to spread his poetry,

regardless of how much anyone wanted to hear it. So he was like, great, they love me. Yeah, just a tiny bit of background for anyone who hasn't heard of William McGonigal. This is a Scottish poet. He was born in either 1825 or 1830. It's a bit disputed, and he was famous, very, very famous for the terribleness of his poems. Can I read out just so we know what we're dealing with? So one of his most famous poems was the Tay Bridge disaster, where a bridge had collapsed and lots of people have been killed. It starts off, beautiful railway bridge of the silvery Tay. Alas, I am very sorry to say that 90 lives have been taken away on the last Sabbath day of

1879, which will be remembered for a very long time. That's the level of poetry we're dealing with. And I'm sure it comforted the bereaved family members. He was a temperance campaigner and hated alcohol and stuff, was teetotal. And he blamed the fact that no one liked his poetry on alcohol. So he said they're all too drunk to be able to appreciate it. But it does kind of imply that you just, it was the kind of thing, you got really pissed and then said, should we go and watch some of a government?

But the last show at the fringe at 3 a.m. Yeah. Exactly. He started very late in life, didn't he? So he was about 50 give or take, because we don't know exactly when he was born. So he was, what was he before that? Was he working? I thought he was looming and weaving.

Didn't he think he heard a voice saying to him like, right, right, you must write. So he was like, well, this is what I'm going to do. And then the fact of whether he was good or not didn't really come into the equation. Yeah. And he really believed in himself as well. He once tried to read poetry to Queen Victoria. And he sent them a letter to the palace saying I would like to read. And they said, no, it's okay.

Thank you very much. That's fine. So he thought, I know what I'll do. I'll just walk there. I'll walk all the way from Dundee to Balmoral to perform to Queen Victoria. He did. He arrived at the castle and they said genuinely, no thank you. And he had to walk all the way back.

Didn't get to do it. Got a few centuries or so that he was. Yeah, on foot. Yeah, he introduced himself as the Queen's poet when he got there. He was a massive fan of Queen Victoria. There were loads of assassination attempts on her throughout her life. None of them were successful. And after one of them, he wrote,

poem in tribute to the failed assassination attempt, which kicked off like this. God prosper long our noble queen and long may she reign. Maclean, he tried to shoot her, but it was all in vain. For God, he turned the ball aside. Maclean aimed at her head, and he felt very angry because he didn't shoot her dead. It's quite nice.

We were reading these on National Poetry Day here in the UK. Happens to be, celebrating. As we're recording. He was always being victims of hoaxes. It was so sad, but also kind of okay because he seemed oblivious to it. There was the famous hoax when a group of students sent him a thing in the post saying that he'd won the order of the grand knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant, which was an extremely important Burmese title. And it was a title that was given by King Theebor of Burma for his amazing poetry. And they called him William Topaz in that.

And he thereafter made his name William Topaz McGonagall, which was his middle name. Yeah, that wasn't his birth name? No. I don't believe so. That was the first time it ever seems to get mentioned. I hadn't read that was where it was invented, but that's the first time it's mentioned. And then he had this award up on his wall forevermore,

thinking that the King of Burma had blessed him. It's amazing. I think as well, like he had a lot of weird stuff happen, but he did sort of invite some of it. So there's a story about he paid money to play Macbeth in the performance, or the Scottish play. And he thought the actor playing Macduff was upstaging him, so he refused to die.

And just carried on. Apparently, that was before he started doing the poetry. So it was in his first career. And there was a review of that play. And I think it's one of the earliest times he appears in any write-up. But there was a reviewer in the journal who eventually wrote that after an extremely long sword fight, where despite being hit multiple times, he's not dying, the reviewer wrote that McDuff resolved the matter in a rather undignified way

by taking the feet from under the principal character. So he had to be rugby tackled on stage. He was almost never paid to write a poem. all came from public readings, but the very few times he was paid was when he wrote advert poems for things. So, Beechams, you know, the Beecham's pills? The cough stuff. Yeah, exactly. And so when they were launched, they were kind of cural. They were meant to cure absolutely everything. But they didn't really have anything in them. They had aloe, ginger, and soap. That

was what was in them. So. Yeah. So for a fee, he wrote the following, What ho, sickly people of high and low degree. I pray ye all be warned by me, no matter what may be your bodily ills, the safest and quickest cure is Beecham's Pills. It's quite good. Yeah. I want some Beechams right now. Just hearing that. How did that start again?

What ho, sickly people. You frequently did that kind of bang headline at the start of a poem. So he went to New York. And his poem there starts, Oh, mighty city of New York. You are wonderful to behold. Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told. They were the only things that seemed to arrest my eye,

because many of them are 13 stories high. It's so weird, isn't it? Because you don't know whether to feel sorry for him or not because he did seem oblivious and he kept on almost asking for it. So he'd always dress up in full Scottish regalia with, you know, killed and sporren and stuff. Even on the trip to America, he was dressed like that all the time. And the thick skinness means that there are some psychologists

who agree with the historian who first suggested he might have been slightly autistic, partly based on the fact that he seemed immune almost to this constant criticism and also his obsessive repetition of stuff. So over 60 of his poems begin with the word twos. And the phrase beautiful to be seen is in about 50 of them. He was really proud of that line, Anna. It's an incredible line.

Shakespeare would have been proud. I found this really interesting. And I don't know if this is well known. Professor McGonagall is named after William McGonagall. Yeah. And J.K. Rowling has actually confirmed that that is the, case. Yeah, she said she likes the idea of someone so fabulous being named after someone so absurd, didn't she? Yeah. Which I thought was, because Magna Gould is a, she's a complex

character by the standards of Harry Potter, isn't she? She's not totally good. She can be a bit of a strict old cow sometimes. Oh, well, let's not be saying that, but we're not, we're not willing to talk about that yet. Classic Slytherin sentence from Anna there. I used to live in Edinburgh, and there's a lot of street names that you recognize from Harry Potter books and near the Statue of Grafries, Bobby is a churchyard, and there's a gravestone for Tom Riddle. Yeah, you can see the actual. And what's interesting about that is that is the exact same graveyard where William McGonagall was buried, which I've been to. Are you saying William McGonagall was Lord Voldemort?

I'm saying I think J.K. Rowling took a quick creative trip to the graveyard and bashed out all the names she needed. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that one third of all hazelnuts in the world go into Ferrero products. Yeah, so Ferreiro Roche, Nutella, things like this. Tic Tacs, which they also make. How many hazelnuts in TikTok? That's 75? Yeah, about one per Tic Tac.

75 Tic Tacs per box. So, yeah, this is a piece that was published in Forbes recently, and it was a profile of the company, basically, which is a very well-established family firm, basically. It started in the 1930s with one man who had one pastry shop, and it's now become a thing that uses a third of all the hazel. or not's in the world. Yeah, they're a big deal.

They're a big deal. That's what we're saying. The main owner, he passed away only four years ago, Michelle Ferreiro. And he was, you know, his fortune was up to 15 billion. I mean, it's... His top 50, well, the guy now is top 50, richest people in the world. It is massive. But Michelle, people always said, was a very, very humble man, didn't they?

So he was the guy who basically his dad made the Nutella chocolate, but he made it in sort of a loaf that was quite hard and sold it in slices. This was in post-war rationing time And he thought a way of sort of recreating chocolates To add hazelnuts instead because there's a chocolate shortage But yeah, he sold it in slices like bread And he used to give a slice of Nutella away free With each loaf of bread as a way of kind of pushing it

And then his son, Michelle, added some oil And then it got all spreadable And the rest is his picture And it's so confusing because Nutella Was originally sold as pasta What? As in its name. It was sold.

You bought pasta Jandoya, and it was a, that's how it was sold. It's because it's paste, right? Must be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They don't get it. So you boil it?

No, it's exactly as Anna was saying. It turns out you think you're getting pasta and then it's a loa for bread. I'm so confused. It's just because they're Italian. Pasta is just going to be Italian for paste, right? Wait. So it'll be paste. When the Italians say pasta Carbanara.

They don't eat pasta like we do at all in Italy. It's all spreadable. It's all spreadable. Do you know where loads of their factories originally were? They were also in factories, but a lot of the factories they started off with were former Nazi missile factories. Wow. Yeah.

I guess there were a lot of empty ones and they were like, well, we'll use the space. Yeah. It's true. It's true. The usage rate of Nazi missile factories dropped off dramatically. I can't imagine looking at the machinery and thinking, I think we can adjust this just a little bit and make chocolates out of it. No.

Also, it's amazing how Nautela's managed to shake off the reputation, isn't it? It's like Volkswagen. They're both born of Nazism, and yet somehow it's fine to possess them both. Are they? They wasn't made by Nazis, Nettela? Well, it's got the associations, hasn't it? What's the factories? But that's post-war.

That's post-war factories. I'm not actually suggesting which would boycott Nattela. Because I think I'll lose one of my food groups if we do. Well, they're kind of is a link, I'm afraid, to Italian fascism. So Pietro, who's the guy who founded the company, in 1938, he moved to East Africa trying to sell biscuits to Mussolini's troops who were stationed there. Oh, did he? So there's a little bit of a link, but not a full-on link, obviously. I was also saying, in defense of Nutella, didn't, isn't the using Hazelnuts, was because of the rationing from the war.

So it came out of the consequences rather than because of the ideologies. Yes, yes. Fascist didn't make Nutella. I've never claimed that. Natella, please don't sue me. So Hazelnuts. Yeah. Three quarters of the world's hazelnuts come from Turkey. Yeah. Okay. They've absolutely cornered the market.

And a quarter of the world's hazelnuts, so one third of those produced in Turkey, it sells three quarters of the total. A quarter of the world tasel nuts are produced in a single Turkish town. Yeah. Hazelnut town. And they had a terrible frost in 2014. Oh no. And a third of the harvest was wiped out.

And prices rose by 60%. Yeah, this is ordu, isn't it? Yeah, ordo, exactly. I mean, obviously, it's in the fields around the town. It's not exclusively in the town. But Nautela are trying to smash the cornering of the market, yeah, because they want a bit of variety in case there's another frost. So they're moving into Georgia and Abkhazia, another traditionally very calm and politically easygoing region, which won't be. So they're prey to a lot of local politics, basically.

But every year they have half a million tons of hazelnut shells to get rid of. What do they do with them? They sell them for cheap heating fuel. Oh, cool. Eco. And I can't remember what else they do. Well, here's one thing that the Ferreiro people do. They use the hazelnut shells, and they've been testing, and I don't know if this has been put into practice.

This was a few years ago. They've been making it into the wrapping that we have for... Yeah. So they've reintegrated it into the packaging to make themselves totally resourceful. For Nutella? No, for Ferreiro. Perero. That's amazing.

That gold stuff. This is from the project coordinator at Ferreiro. We have access to large amounts of residual byproducts, which we realize could be used constructively. So the company's idea was to use the... nuts to create the packaging for the chocolates. Hey, if you ever want to know what to call a specific bit of a Ferrero Roche, I have the answer. So I was reading about how it goes through the factory and you know it's got all these amazing devices that, for instance, that sense if it's misshapen and automatically puff a bit of air to knock it off the production line and all that funky stuff.

And then there's a moment where all of Ferreiro Roche is, is this wafor, that rounded wafer, which by the way, took him Ferreiro five years, the same. story goes to try and hone how to make a wafer curl. Apparently he was in his factory on his own for five years. That's as legend goes. I never thought of that. But he curls the wafer and then they're in the factory and they've got a hazelnut in them and a teller spread. And before they're dipped in chocolate and hazelnuts, that little ball is called a pickpock. So if you ever suck the chocolate off the outside of a Ferreira Roche, you can say, I've got a pickpock. So they've got tick tic tacks, pickpocks. It's very good naming. They should, they should market that.

I don't want to eat one that someone else has taken the chocolate off. I was reading a bit about the fact that this family that created the whole Ferrero Empire are incredibly secretive. We were saying humble before, but also incredibly secretive. No one knew virtually anything about them. And for a company that was so massive, they never did any real publicity of their own. Their website, it was spotted in the Telegraph back in 2009. This is since changed, so possibly since the owner Michelle had died. but they only had one financial press release on their website up until 2009

and it was two sentences long and that's the only thing they ever had. Yeah, he gave one interview, Michelle, in his whole career and even when he gave that interview, which was right towards the end of it, before he died, he wore dark glasses the whole way through. Do you think it wasn't actually him? Yeah, you're right, he blatantly said one of his... Media-savie. Yeah, media savvy umpulumpur from the factory.

Wow. It's still his brother who's in charge. It's now Dravani. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They're basically like real-life Woliwankas, but without the killing off with children. That's true.

Not killing, but like leaving. Someone else has joined the sweepstake to get sued by Nathale. I think the Royal Dahl estate is just coming to. You're going to be sued by Harry Potter. Why? I was. That was Anna again.

It's all me. Because of the graveyard. No. That's real. William McGonagall's buried there. And there is a Thomas Riddle. Oh, yeah. You did claim J.K. Rowling has no imagination.

She just wanders around graveyards like a creep, stealing her ideas off the gravestones. J.K. Rowling is the graveyard. writer that our world has ever known. It's too late now, Dan. Oh, man. You've said the words. I found out something about Shakespeare's Globe, because Shakespeare's Globe was partly built on

hazelnut shells. What? Wow. So they were excavating the original one before it was rebuilt. And what they found, a layer of hazelnut shells, and they assumed that maybe this is the leftovers from people snacking on them. But it turns out that that wasn't the case because they were an ingredient in a kind of mortar, what was called a poor man's mortar.

So it was mixed with cinders and ash, and it let the rain. water filter through but supported the building. So when they rebuilt the theatre, the theatre sourced seven and a half tonnes of hazelnut shells from Turkey. Wow. So a special military plane flew them over and they were pounded into a mortar and they were put under the floor. So the Globe today is still on hazelnut shells. That's extraordinary. That's cool. That is so cool. We sometimes need a button like an alarm for like best fact of the podcast. Okay, we've hit best facts. They used to be called hazelnuts until really recently they used to be called filberts now have you guys ever called philbert's no because i was just reading an askin the atlantic which happened to be from

1996 and someone said the filbert or as people seem to be calling it these days the hazelnut newfangled nonsense isn't that weird oh that's named after a french shape we should bring it back um should we move on yeah yeah oh can i just mention natella jars in 2015 one caused a fire This is in Twickenham and sun rays refracted from an empty Natella jar that was left on a window sill and it burned an entire house down and killed a pet dog. So don't leave your Nutella jars out. And don't sue us Natella. Anna, you've absolutely gone for it. They're Nazis. They'll burn your house down.

Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is Chazzynski. My fact is that the earliest depicted sofas were five feet high off the ground. There's this great article in the Paris Review, which is a review of a book called Now I Sit Me Down by a guy called Wittold Ribzinski. And I really want to read it. And in that he mentions this couch, which appears in an alabaster carving from the 7th century called The Garden Party. And it's from Assyria. And it shows a king reclining on a sofa and it's five feet high.

And he's got his queen slightly below him on an also quite high chair that has a footstool to me. it. And so yeah, the earlier sofas were like that. And this was in Nineveh in 645 BC. And the height of your furniture apparently was related to where your social standing was. Do you know that the French word for sofa is canopy. So if you're in France and someone offers you a canopy, they're offering you a sofa. Really? They're much more generous at their dinner. He gave out so many canapes. Yeah, it's because it's a sofa for the thing to go on, isn't it? We call it that because it's like a couch for the food to sit on. What?

Yeah. The food relaxes. Traditionally, it's stale bread. It's supposed to be in a canopay. And so the stale bread acts as a sofa and then you plonk your salmon on top of it and that's a canopy. That's great. I didn't know that.

I think you may have lost your best fact of the podcast. Yeah. Do you know that in the 50s there was a trend for cardboard sofas? What? Yeah. There's an article in popular mechanics in 1954. It was that they called the trend paperboard furniture. and they were very excited about it because you could use pulp and waste paper,

and so it could be recycled or you could find it in different ways, very lightweight. And I quote, the furniture is relatively inexpensive, extremely strong and durable, and can be disassembled when you move. Newlyweds can use it to bridge the gap until they can afford the kind of furniture they want for life. So basically, rather than send you a box with stuff in it, just take the box. Sofers are one of the reasons why Romans did away with cutlery for a while.

So that reclining on couches became really popular and was brought from the Arabic world, the Middle East, where this original fact was from into Europe, and the word sofa comes from an Arabic word. So the Romans started doing it, and then you're using one hand to lean on. You're propped up on one elbow, and so you can only eat with one hand,

and so you can't be having cutlery because it gets right in the way. It just looks so uncomfortable, the Roman way of dining, where you're lying on your side, on a couch, with a table with food on it next to you. It just looks mad. Yeah.

And it takes up so much space, because everyone's lying down. Yeah. So the theory is that that's how the last supper happened. Everyone was on the... Everyone was lying on their sides in a kind of U shape. So you'd have about four people per side, each side of the U. But it does mean that you're facing someone's back.

Yeah. They're lying in front of you facing away from you. And the guy behind you is facing your back and trying to talk to you. And you've got someone's foot in your face. But I just think it would... You'd want to make sure you're on the right part of the room because there's a thing about if you go to sleep on your left side, you look like to get indigestion because you're a food enters your esophagus.

It goes that way. So if you lie on your right, there's one way that if you lie, you can get indigestion because the food can't go in easy in one way that's easier. So if you're lying on the wrong side in the room, lying down still not great. Yeah. But maybe it would be slightly more comfortable.

I think I'd risk indigestion just to have a conversation with a human rather than a wall, maybe. You're all in a circle. Or a spiral. They all tended to lie the same way often in those paintings. So maybe they'd crack this indigestion thing. They were like to turn around. Yeah, that's really amazing. I didn't know that. So furniture generally is quite recent. Almost all the furniture we see today,

there was an article in the New York Times that was saying pretty much everything you see was invented between 1670 and 1730. So once sofas came about, like a lot of things, after ancient Roman, ancient Greece and everything fell, they just disappeared, didn't come back for ages. And things like armchairs or sofas or basically everything except just one table where you do everything and then your bed just wasn't a thing. And along with it apparently came the new sofa attitude, which was when women started being a bit sexier and more relaxed because the sofa encourages you to slightly drape yourself over it. So there's a theory that that kind of loosened up women's behavior and morals, I think. Wow. So suddenly men around the world were going, hey, there's some sexy ladies all of a sudden.

That's when the population started to really rise. Yes, right. Wow. I did find out about the first man to make a chair factory. Because before this guy, he was called Michael Thone, he was a French man, all chairs were lovingly handcrafted and made. He was born in 1796 and in Vienna, 40 or 50 years later, the mid-19th century, lots and lots of restaurants and cafes and coffeehouses are opening. And they need chairs. They need hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of chairs.

And it's too much effort for individual craftsmen to laboriously carve chairs. So he had this brilliant method where he would cut wood into strips. He'd boil bundles of them in glue and then he'd bend them into the shape in a mould that he wanted them to be so it's a more effective way of doing it and then he developed ways of bending whole wood You know whole pieces of wood

So it was bending rather than jamming together Which is obviously much less labour intensive Yeah and then DeMongrew so high That he had to open five factories by the time he died So he was a huge chair pioneer Thousands of thousands of thousands It's weird to think of the first ever Jack Factory

Michael Fonnet Michael Fonnet. Yeah. Then on the very opposite mass produced, do you know when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got married, they had, for their meal, they had a massive custom-made marble table. And instead of place cards,

they had everyone's names engraved in the marble table. Whoa. But they got married in. It's late. Imagine having to transport that back to California. Wow. Imagine having a last minute seat positioning change. We've actually fallen out.

Can we sit apart? No. Unfortunately, you're right. Oh, my goodness. It's literally set and stuff. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anne. My fact is that the first advert to be shown on Channel 5 was for Chanel number 5. So good.

Lovely. So nice. It's very pleasing. What a coincidence. So it launched on 30th of March, 1997. The Spice Girls launched Channel 5 where they sang the song 54, 3,2, 2, 3,2, 5. It was a night of wild entertainment I watched it this morning

because I've never seen it before The full launch night Yeah do you remember it? I remember very excitingly people turning up to rejig the TV Yeah Because there were only four channels then So it's like we were getting 20% more

Yeah Yeah, yes We were so excited about what brilliant programs Channel 5 would hold Little did we know What I've forgotten though Was that half an hour of the launch night Was just showing trailers for shows

That were coming soon Yeah Clever The first ever advert that was put onto TV was in the 50s, and it was ITV's launch night. It was the first time it went on, and it was an advert for toothpaste, Gibbs SR toothpaste. And it's quite cool because, you know, first TV advert, and already they were employing a lot of the tricks that are used in modern day adverts. So the toothbrush itself was in a big block of ice. And obviously, you can't use a big block of ice on a set.

You know, it will melt too quickly. So it was made out of plastic. So immediately they were using fake props to be the actual thing. Yeah, it's quite cool. But yeah, so that was, yeah. And that was the first in the UK, wasn't it? Because there was advertising. Exactly.

It was the first in the UK. Yeah. I read a really strange thing about advertising now and the future of it. So did you know that with old sitcoms, old, but like relatively, like, finished sitcoms, like, however met your mother, what they're doing now is they're still selling advertising spots because they're going in, they're digitally altering the shows for products that came out after the show was made. Oh, yeah. So, like for films. So, like for films. A can of a new soft drink.

Well, the example was about. a movie that come out a few years after the episodes. They changed, I think, a TV screen and a coffee shop. And they'd be a lamp post in one scene. They put a poster for the film on the lamp post. So they're selling this digital space in shows. It would just cause me so many questions. Yeah.

How is this? How did they know this film was coming out? Yeah. That's such a fun idea of updating, though. Like, the way that Anna just went, oh, M.G. If, like, in 40 years time, someone's listening to this and we digitally insert whatever the, you know, P, T, D. That's all the good one. Which is going to stand for what exactly?

Prime. Time. Time. Prime time dude. If we're saying that, that is not a world I want to live in. I read a thing about the first adverts ever, but this was on Wikipedia and I haven't been able to back it up independently. But it's that the earliest adverts were in China and that they were oral. So you would get bamboo flutes played to sell confectionery.

I think the first advertising was going around playing a flute and saying, hey, do you want to buy something? So you would create a jingle on your flute. I think so, but I'm not sure. I think in the UK there was a version where they would, like, early, like, sort of flyering, they would hand out leaflets and it would have the sheet music so you could sing the jingle to yourself. You could take it home and be like. That's right.

That's very funny. It's so weird. She's so funny. So much less appealing, the idea of something being advertised by your dad kind of badly trying to interpret sheep music. I reckon we could set that William McGonagall, Beachham, to music. Yes.

You're right. If it had been handed out with a flyer, people would love it. Yeah. Do you guys know what the cheese pool is? The cheese pull. The cheese pool, an advertising term. Okay.

Any guesses? The cheese pull. It's like a pudding of cheese. Sounds like a bay bell on a string. Close-ish. I think it's an advert that offers you something exciting, like a cheese, but then it pulls it away. So it leaves you curious and it leaves you to go and

find out more about the product. These are all brilliant guesses. None of them are even close. It's, you know, in pizza adverts when the pizza slice gets pulled away from the pizza, every pizza ad, the cheese pulls away, and that's the cheese pull, and all adverts like perfume or pizza have it, adverts that are trying to advertise

something. I've never seen a perfume advert with a shot of pizza being slowly pulled apart. Guys, it's become a metaphor for a broader advertising technique, which is basically using an image that specifically really, really triggers your different senses that site so by a visual suggestion you see that cheese but it triggers your sense of taste so and I

watched a lot for this research you desperately want pizza because there's a word thing with perfume that you're advertising something that you can't show because it's a smell exactly you can't be like oh look how great it looks I guess why you have complicated bottles but you want to sort of give the vibe of what you're selling I guess rather than the actual product because you can't you need the cheese pool because you can't actually show a smell um I found other thing about perfume in 2014 a Californian firm announced that they were making perfume for cows. Okay.

Good. But for human benefit, so the idea was to make cows smell like humans. No. Yes, so mosquitoes would bite the cows instead of biting people. It's definitely going to be unintended consequences. That's so bad. I was reading that Benjamin Franklin wanted once to invent a perfume, and it was an anus perfume. as in what if we turned our farts into perfume?

What if? Well, captured them? No. No, yeah. Although that is something that people used to do. But what he wanted was for scientists to focus on creating some kind of medicine that you would take that would mix with the gases that were down there so that when you did fart, it would come out with Chanel number five. Yeah.

Did he have a suggestion then? What did he say? No, he was asking for scientists to look into it. But that was his idea. We can all ask for scientists to look into it. look into stuff. Yeah, but not all of us with Benjamin Franklin. I didn't invent this too.

Can I just say one thing, which I don't think we've ever mentioned. So the Egyptians were really into perfume. You know, we're always finding it in the tombs when we excavate them. And they thought that it was like the sweat of the gods and stuff. So Mur was the sweat of the god Rha. And then her ben oil, a different perfume, was squeezed from the eye of Horus. But one thing they used to do is wear perfume cones on their heads. And that you see it in a lot of Egyptian art.

Cones. Yeah, it's like a waxy cone. Like an inverted party hat. Cool. It's like a party hat. But what it was is a wax cone and then it had perfume on the inside and you'd go to a banquet. And because it was quite hot in Egypt, it would melt as the banquet proceeded and release the perfume sense into the air. Presumably as wax kind of rolled down your face.

And then like dried in your hair. Dried and congealed in your hair. It's like, why spray it on yourself when you can bring the bottle with you? You follow the perfume bottle. You are. Feel the perfume. Be the perfume. You are the perfume.

I have a couple of Chanel facts. Yeah. So Coco Chanel, I didn't know this, wasn't called Cocoa or Chanel on her birth certificate. Really? Really?

Yeah, so her first name is Gabrielle. Cocoa's a nickname. And her story name is Chanel, but it was originally spelt with an S before they end, so Shaznell. Shaznell. She's got a different ring to it. It's not as chic as it.

Shaznell number five. Shaznell from Wolverham. And then, It takes, so for a 30 milliliter bottle of the perfume, it takes a thousand jasmine flowers and 12 roses, which is a lot into one wee bottle. And I like to look, if you shop at Chanel often enough,

you get your own custom mannequin made to your exact proportions so they can make you clothes. No way. And I can't imagine how much money you need to spend before you're at mannequin level. Oh, I thought you meant that they made you a custom mannequin so that they can practice spraying the perfume on you. Oh, for the clothes.

So they measure the dimensions of your neck to make sure that it's right for you. Sorry, as a design house. Sorry. They have the mannequin. They make other things. I think propium is kind of a one-size-fits-all. Generally, generally.

We'll have an X-L, please. A cow to cover in it. I was reading about the making of Chanel number five, its origins. So it was this guy who created fragrances called Ernest Bo. And when he was presenting his sense to Coco Chanel, He had numerous scents that he wanted to show her. And he numbered them number one to number five. And then there was a second batch, which was number 20 to 24.

And she went through and she picked number five because that was the best one. It happened to batch of six to 19 because that's what I'm like. Yeah, exactly. And he never used to smell when he was creating the perfumes. He did it all basically like a mathematical formula. Oh, really? He knew the smells and he knew the combinations so well that he just used to write the recipes. And he said it's like writing music.

Each component has a definite tonal value. I can compose a waltz or a funeral march. That's quite beautiful. Yeah. Like playing with smells. Well, what is a good smell? It's all bullshit, isn't it? What?

There's no smell to say it's kidding. You're just silly flowery smells. Rounding off today's lawsuit challenge. With it's all bullshit to the makers of Chanel. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. to get in contact with us about any of the things 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. Anne. At Miller underscore Anne. And Shazinski. You can email podcast. At QI.com.

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We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.