No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Ninja With A Cat

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

Live from Gothenburg, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss ninja snorkelling, Spiderman's fall from a traffic light, and waiting at a train station for 120 years.

The name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that Sweden's public art body has just commissioned an artwork, which will hire someone to do nothing at Gothenburg's Corsuagen train station for the next 120 years. 120 years. 120 years. So that can't be the same person for 120 years.

It might be. We don't know about medical advances in the next century. Oh, that's true. So it could be the day. So this is a thing. It's called Eternal Employment. And Gothenburg has a new train station called Korsvarkin. And I don't know if you can tell a home,

but people here are very excited about it. There was a competition to provide a public artwork. And there were two artists who one called Simon Golden and Jakub Senneby. And they have, half a million pounds to spend, and they spent it on hiring an employee to do whatever they like forever. As long as you check in

and check out of your work each day, you will get 21,600 a month, which is enough to buy five beers here. But then the application, you can still go for this, by the way. The application deadline is the 15th of December 2025.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. and their duties will be taken up, well, the lack of duties will be taken up on the 15th of March, 2026. Okay. So if you're bad with deadlines like me, you can put that off for another six years.

And there's a job description online, which is quite poetic. It goes, there's a scent. Do you smell it? The scent of something. We smell it. It's seaweed. Your seaweed.

You want to be seaweed. You should. I'll be seaweed. You know that. Thank you for knowing. Thank you for seaweed. You're standing there, right there. Standing like what?

Like a prawn. A positive prawn. A flexible prawn. An unpretentious prong. A goal-oriented prong. Thank you. Thanks. Wow.

So I think that tells you everything that you have to do for this show. Yeah. Any questions? does that sound more normal in Swedish? Yeah, Google translates on a hell of a job on that. I like that. The way it's going to be as well is once the station is open,

the applicant has been chosen and he's got, or she has residency of the job, there's going to be fluorescent lights that go on on the station level or the platform levels to let all passengers know that the person doing nothing is at work. They're here either doing something or absolutely nothing and you can't tell who they are if they're on the platforms,

but there's going to be two rooms that they can go to. One is a glass room where you can see what they're doing, and the other is just a closed-off room, which they can just choose to sit in, and you never see them. But actually, they don't have to stay in the train station at all. As long as they clock in and clock out, they can bugger off all day. That's it? But there are things you can't do, so you can't go and get another job.

That is seen as not playing the game. But the job does come with a pension, and with holiday. Yeah? So you get a holiday from doing nothing. It's not actually a brilliantly paid job.

It's fine, but the salary is pretty below average. And I reckon in 120 years, it's going to be worth literally none. It's going up. It's going up within every year. And if you die,

they will just give the job to someone else. I think that's how jobs work, generally. Every competition. Many folds when everyone dies. I guess we need to retire that role of persons serving at the counter of McDonald's. It's just going to have to be an empty counter now.

We should say what is purposes, really, which they are making a point. So it's inspired by Thomas Piccote's capital in the 21st century, that very trendy book for anyone claiming to be academic, yeah, got some cheers. So it's about the return on capital being higher than the average. increase in wages. So it's basically there's this art price money, which was 7 million crore, I think, and the idea is that they're going to invest that and the return on that investment is going to yield that personal salary for 120 years. So the idea is money makes more money than humans too, which is depressing, but still fun for that person who's doing the job.

Can I say a very quick thing about, so this is art meets train station. And so, so the most ambitious crossover in movie history. And so I was looking into sort of entertainy art sort of things that were going on with train stations. And I read this fact, which is in London, in our underground station, we have the very famous iconic mind the gap. Mind the gap, which is set. So when that was initially recorded, it was recorded by a sound engineer called Peter Lodge, and he got an actor who was a well-known actor of the time, and he got him to record it. And he recorded Mind the Gap and stand clear of the doors.

and after it was recorded and they were sort of getting ready to send it out the guy suddenly said, I want royalties for every time they're played and they went, you can't have that, that's insane and he said no, that's my deal so they cut him off and they were going to re-record it but they listened to the recording of the sound engineer

Peter Lodge who was testing the microphones going mind the gap and they went that's good enough and he became he was the original voice of the London underground the sound engineer testing the microphones. No way. That's great. Because we have quite a famous thing in London about

the mind the gap announcement or maybe the station announcement at one station I can't remember which which was recorded by a guy who died a few years ago and then they changed the recording because someone else got it they thought they jazzed up the station and the widow of the guy who died wrote to the station didn't she and said

please can you change that back? That's the only time I hear my husband's voice. Yeah his name was Oswald Lawrence. It was in bank station. It was on the northern line and they changed it back so she could always hear his voice saying it. Yeah. That's really nice. Yeah. Speaking of London, so there's, it's kept in practical. You're not even going to like where this goes, I'm going to say. So if you live in London, there's another job you can get, which seems quite cushy. It is to become a luxury product tester. And for that, you get a 75,000 pound.

salary, which is about $100,000 US dollars, and you get to test supercars, yachts, and private islands. Wow. Okay, so this morning I applied for this job. Let's see, this is, where you look up jobs testing luxury islands,

I found out there is a man whose job is to watch paint drying. This is a real job, and he's a real person. He's called Keith Jackson, and he works for an industrial paint firm, and a big part of his job is assessing the drying time of industrial paint.

And that doesn't sound important, does it? But he can't, he must have it the whole time, has he? He might have a break, he'll probably have a break. Imagine if he has a break for 15 minutes and he comes back and it's already dry. That's a bad day in the office, isn't it? And for fuck's sake. Do you think paint

is like a watch pot? Do you think it boils as soon as your back is to? But no, the reason it's important that it happens is because sometimes you paint things and then you need to know how long the paint will take to be dry. So for example, London Underground, they can only be painted stations between 3 o'clock and 5 o'clock in the morning. And then it has to be dry enough

to walk on. So this is a very high-stakes situation. Wow. Yeah. And the stakes are medium, low to medium, they're medium. But he said, he said people do laugh and find it amusing when I tell them what I do. He said it could be described as the most boring job in the world, but it is a very important one. Watching paint dry sounds quite easy, but it can be stressful at times. So, also, while you're looking at jobs of watching paint dry, I was looking at jobs of watching pornography.

And apparently, there's a nightclub in Denmark that's hiring someone to watch 20 hours of pornographic films for 2,500 £500 equivalent. And the reason is they want to select the best parts of the soundtrack that they'll make a playlist of that they'll play in the

nightclub bathroom. Sure, there's the reason. I've been looking at some kind of jobs that sound, some people who are kind of lazy at work. So this obviously would suit, this job at the train station would suit someone who's quite lazy at work. There've been some good people who have been in the past. So there was a civil servant called Carlos Ritchio. He was a Spanish civil servant. He skipped work for a decade. He used to clock in at 7.30 in the morning. And then he'd returned to work to clock out at 4 in the afternoon, so he's perfect for this station job. He took home a 50 grand salary, and he then,

when he was caught, and it was discovered that he'd just been skipping work for over 10 years, he then admitted to it fine. And then there was an art exhibition put on in the town that used a council venue, and the exhibition was called Love for Valencia, the works of a man who never worked, and it was booked under what turned out to be a fake name. And they discovered later, it was put on by him, this man who'd skip work the whole. time as kind of a pereen to his own glory at having skipped work. And there were paintings, there were sculptures and there were bronze busts of this man talking about how he'd succeeded and not working. The council discovered that it was him who'd booked it and they cancelled it.

But I discovered that he got no charges. He got no big fine. He was suspended from work, not even fired. Speaking of doing nothing, there is a hotel with a, or there was, the hotel still exists, but they used to have a suite called the checkout suite. And if you did nothing, then you used no internet, then you'd get the suite for free. Okay, so it worked out how much internet you were using and how much work you were doing. And if you used the time to just relax and do nothing,

they gave it you for free. This was the Hotel Belorra, which is in Gothenburg. Which is the hotel we're staying in at the moment? So I spoke to the receptionist this afternoon, and she said it ran for three months, and every single person who went there managed to get it for free. Wow.

There must be something that the people of Gothenburg there just quite happy sitting around and going, you know what, we're just going to chill. You know what, if you've got a few sheets of slightly damp paint, the time flies by. It is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinski. Yes, my fact this week is that

Ninja's sword sheets had removable tips, so that if they ever had to hide underwater, they could use them like a snorkel to breathe. that's so cool it's so great and so they brought the sword with them as well right

yeah yeah you do bring the sword that's the main thing but basically being a ninja was all about kind of adapting to your environment it was like being a sort of 15th 17th century Japanese James Bond

it really was they had all these gadgets and one of them was the sword and the scabbard they would use it like a snorkel because hiding underwater was a major part of being a ninja what what

I've finally had to put this into words, but what? Yeah. So why would you need to be under water, is my question. So, basically, what a ninja was was, it was sort of like the flip side of a samurai. So samurai in Japan were very well-respected, honorable, noble fighters. And the ninja was the sneaky mercenary agent. They were very, very looked down upon at the time they were around, which, and they were, they had their heyday in the 15th to the 17th century in Japan.

and their function was basically espionars, so they were spies and deception and surprise attack and covert methods, and they did a lot of hiding and running away. And one of their main ways of hiding was using the water. So certain ninja texts from the time advised that in daytime, hide underwater so as not to be seen. You just spend the whole day underwater.

And so you need this snorkel-like thing on the end of your sword. And so the scabbard end can double as a breathing tube. One of the texts that I read, advising ninjas, said that the, at end of your scabbard, if you had the removable tip taken off, could also be a hearing aid or a megaphone. Cool. Wow. That's amazing.

It could also be used as a step ladder for climbing over fences. Oh, yeah. Well, you'd sort of jab it into the wall and... I think it might be... What I imagine, and this might be wrong, because this just came out of my imagination. But, you know, like, with a sod, you have that, like, cross bit that kind of hides your hand.

I thought if you turned it upside down, you could just step on it. Oh. I thought even if you stabbed it into the wall, you could bounce off the sword. Yes. Can I tell you a cool thing that ninjas could do? So ninjas had incredible abilities according to the old text.

One of the thing they could do is they could tell the time of day by looking at a cat's eye. So if you asked a ninja, what time is it? And a cat was around. They could look at the cat and they would study the pupil of the eye, which changes during the day

according to the sun. And if they can't see the cat, it's night time. Yeah. What that didn't happen, did it? No, it did happen? You would have to have a cat on you at all times. It's more difficult to carry a cat around

to know the time than it is to just guess the time. But it would be a party trick, as you would say... Well, then everyone at the party knows you're a ninja, don't they? They didn't go to parties. their whole raison d'etre was concealing their identity. You just called it

James Bond of... That's what James Bond did. You can't keep a cat underwater. They hate the water. They can do that. So patronised by these guys sometimes.

They could read cat's eyes. And also... Sorry, can we just... Do cats size actually change according to the... I think they do very slightly because of the amount of likes on the record change?

But that's not a reliable. indicator of time, is it? Because if you're in a dark room, but it's midday, and you look at the cat, and the cat's eyes are massive, you think, oh, great, it's nighttime I can leave my darkened room. It's not. It's midday. You're going to be spotted immediately. No, but this is a completely unworkable system. It's not a system. Yeah. I'm so angry. It's like saying they have an ability, oh, they don't do it 24 hours a day. It must be a it's, you know, they do it when a cat's around.

Like, that's... You know, I can do stuff on a cat's around that I won't need to do when it's not around. We don't need to know about your private life. I mentioned that it's very difficult to study ninjas because there's little solid evidence and a lot of rumour about what they could do. So there are a few really, really good texts,

like The Book of Ninja, which I'm sure Dan is drawing from here. But a lot of people sort of plain that ninjas could fly or that they could read minds thought that they could go invisible and that was all bullshit. But they could do a lot. But there are narrowest at noon when you see their eyes narrow at noon. It's 12 p.m. One way they could tell the time, which I thought was quite cool,

that wasn't one of the books. And this was written in like the 1630s, I think, was they said, a way to see if time is passing if you're hiding at night to ambush is work out which nostril you're breathing out of. Because your nostrils, so you know how you're only ever breathing out of one nostril at a time? And this swaps around sporadically. And the rule was that it swaps around roughly every hour. And so if you're aware that your nostrils have just swapped, then a hour's gone by.

All right. All right, ninjas. Synchronize your noses. Can I just say? Yeah. There are some people who think that ninjas weren't really a thing. Like, they didn't exist nearly as much as is now believed by popular culture. Because there's so little evidence of it.

So there was a Japan expert from the University of Leeds who said that ninjas actively didn't exist in the way we did. But that's what the ninjas want you to think. Oh, yeah. They're so good at hiding. They're all just underwater. So the kind of the thing of someone, basically the idea of someone running around in black pajamas

is not coherent as an idea because it would be very obvious. So it's mostly agricultural land at this time in history. Yeah. So you'd be dressed as a farmer if you were a ninja. If you see a guy running around in black, soaking wet pajamas with a cat under his arm, he's going to stick out.

But I mean, so there is lots of... So he gave an example, actually. So the year is 1600. Two of your enemies are fighting a battle. So you send a couple of guys dressed as farmers to the area to watch the battle and report back about what's happening. That's ninja work. So that's the kind of... A lot of it was more, I think, observation than, you know,

nunchucks and threats. But it was extremely surreptitious. So historians that people tend to think are very trustworthy from that period. Recorded it, there's a guy called Fujibayashi who recorded a lot of the ninja's methods. And they were bound by a sort of spirituality, which was ruled by five elements.

And these elements were wood, fire, earth, metal and water. And these all represented different ways of fighting or hiding or getting away. And they're really funny. So he recorded the ways you'd use these different elements. So in the water one, it would be, for instance, you'd use your sword as the breathing tube, or you would have to be trained to throw large quantities of duckweed on water that you think you might escape through later,

so that you could then hide among its leaves and float with them to safety. Okay, yeah. Very clever. I found one that might be an earth method, if that's one of the elements. So there's apparently a skill called Uzura Gakure, which is curling oneself into a ball to look like a rock. So you believe that one. No, I actually don't. But then there's someone who comes disguised as some paper and they can just be it straight on.

You know, it's just saying that they don't carry animals with them, cats with them. But they did supposedly carry crickets with them, boxes of crickets. And the idea was if they needed to go somewhere but they were a bit noisy, they could then release the crickets and the crickets would make crickety noises. and then they could quickly shuffle over to where they need to be. Ah, that's, okay. How do they keep the crickets quiet?

They keep them in a jar or a box. This is much more plausible than the cat thing so far. They also used to wear fake children feet. What do you mean? The crickets? Yeah, no, the ninjas. So it is said, I need to say, it is said, it is rumored,

that the ninjas used to wear. on the soles of their shoes, sort of either children's feet or an elderly woman's foot. I don't know what that looks like. So the footprints in, let's say, the sand or like, you know, their soggy feet coming out of the river would be like, oh, a child must have been

swimming in that. So they would be deceiving to all. It's true that American cattle rustlers used to wear shoes which had like cow hooves on the bottom of them, so you would think that it was cows that had gone past or horses rather than humans. And in Bhutan, it said that yeties can take their feet.

and put them on backwards so it looks like they've gone that way when in fact they're on that way. I was really trying to help. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one month before the French Spider-Man successfully climbed

the second tallest building in the world, he was hospitalized after falling from a seven-foot-tall traffic light. Now, this was to promote his climb of the second what was at the time actually the tallest building in the world, which was in Taiwan. And he was climbing this traffic light. The photographer was there.

He slipped, fell, got 40 stitches, was hospitalized, and it jeopardized the actual climb itself. They thought he might not be able to do it, but he did pull through. Wow. And he is an urban climber. He is. Yeah, his name is Alain Robert. And he is online. I don't know the community that well, but when you see online, he's sort of regarded.

as the greatest urban climber of our day. I mean, he's in his mid-50s now. I think he's about 56, and he's still climbing extremely tall buildings. It's amazing. Although he's bound from climbing in Britain. We don't like him. He was, I feel kind of bound for him,

so he climbed the Heron Tower in London, very tall skyscraper, and he was arrested the moment he reached the top. I just feel like, so it took him over half an hour, and they just waited for him at the top. And as soon as they got... What else are they going to do?

They're not going to climb down the thing, are they? He's only wasted half an hour I think that's okay You're right And then he's wasted the 20 weeks Suspended Jail sentence that he got And 500 pounds Well he also in 2012

He was spotted inside the Shard building In London And the building's owners Subsequently obtained an injunction Preventing him from ever returning To their building I thought you're going to say He realised

I'm on the wrong side He's walking up the stairs Going this is easy So he's climbed over 150s guys scrapers and one thing he says is that the first two metres are almost the most important because after that the police can't grab your feet as Anna was saying the police are often there waiting for him when he gets the top of a building and I've read in interviews that the only thing he has on him is chalk for his hands as he's

climbing and he wears special shoes but that's not quite true because I think what he also carries on him is his hats so he knows what time it is Box of cricket So no one can hear him coming His climbing shoes Are actually in the shape of an old woman's feet That looks like the old woman climbed The South Face of the building

Sorry No, what he actually does carry with him Is his passport and his lawyer's number And he just hands that to the police As soon as he gets there But it's a surprisingly common thing Like urban climbing It's something that there are quite a few heroes

Of urban climbing in 2016 there was a guy who got in trouble because he tried to scale Trump Tower and he spent three hours doing it and he was using suction cups on his hands, like his hands and feet in fact, so it was massive suction cups and he reached the 21st floor

but NYPD were desperately trying to catch him, it was bizarre to watch, so they kept on sort of smashing windows up the building to try and reach out to grab him and they couldn't get him. They kept trying to impede his progress by climbing through air vents and stuff I think and they just couldn't do it and eventually they set

up to massive airbags like mattresses in case he fell down just below him and on the pavement. And he was asked afterwards why he'd done it. So there was this huge rigmarole, took three hours, reached the 21st floor and then the police sort of sprung out of a window and grabbed him and pulled him in. He said, why on earth have you done that? And he said, look, I'm just a political researcher and I really wanted to meet Donald Trump. You know, just we were talking about Alain Robert. Yeah. He has vertigo. Really? He suffers from vertigo. And vertigo is So feeding the urge to

To throw yourself off a great height Isn't it? It's not fear of height No It's more like Inner ear problem Which makes you dizzy and stuff Oh I thought then you've got the urge

You felt like the ground was coming towards you I think you feel very I think you feel very dizzy And you feel a bit unstable And he's had that since 1982 And he's still done it Yeah He had it after he was

Showing students how to climb With his hands behind his back And then fell 26 feet off the wall Yeah He's married with three kids and I read an interview with his wife because they said you must be you know freaked out every single

time he goes and climbs a building how are you feeling and she sort of kind of said well I knew what I was getting into really because when she first met him both of his arms were in plaster casts from a fall the one thing that defeated him in London in 2002 was the weather he got three quarters up the way of number one Canada Square in Canary Wharf

and it was so cold, wet and windy he just got completely stuck and had to rescued by a window cleaning lift. Wow. It's embarrassing. But it's got a long and illustrious history, urban climbing, which, by the way, it's called, what it's got a number of names, it could be called edificiering or stegophily.

So that's the official term for it. And I really like the etymology of this. So the Greek stegos is roof, so it's lover of roof, so it's like climbing up onto roofs. It's from the same route as what's like the other word that you'd assume was stegosaurus. Yeah, it's from the same route as stegosaurus, because that means roofed, lizard, because when they first found the Stegosaurus, they thought...

People climbing up it. It had a roof on top. No, it was, so they thought that the plate on top of a stegosaurus would be horizontal rather than vertical, so they thought that it had a roof over it, so it's called roof lizard. That sounds cool. It is cool. But an urban climbing, ostrogophily, has a long history in Oxford and Cambridge University, so the first urban climber was a guy called Jeffrey Winthrop Young, who published a book called

the Roof Climers Guide to Trinity at College at Cambridge, and it gave really detailed instructions on which routes to take up. And then there was another guy called Noel Howard Simmington, who wrote one in 1937. Again, nine climbers guide to Cambridge. And his pseudonym was Whipple Snaith. And this is so weird. The person who reviewed his book and wrote about the details of climbing up Cambridge buildings

was also called Whipple. He was called Tom Whipple. So the modern day Cambridge building climber is called, Tom Whipple. I know Tom Whipple. No way. Well, I don't know if it's the same Tom Whipple. I'm sure it will be.

I know the circles you're moving. Nice. Have you guys heard of the human fly? Hang on, there's no anecdote. To knowing Tom. Well, he's a journalist. Yeah, he is. He's a very nice guy.

Tell us about the human fly. Yeah. His name is Tom. So... Okay, we need to move on, actually. No, no, no. So the human fly was a guy. called Henry Gardner, and he was one of the first really impressive building climbers. He was

in the 1910s and 20s. He climbed 700 buildings without gear, frequently wearing a suit, and he was paid to do it by companies to promote their offices in the new skyscrapers. So in 1916, he climbed to the ninth floor window of a skyscraper, climbed into the window of a bank branch, and opened an account at the bank. That's all the stunts he did. Or he would do, you know, you're a sky scraper. He climbed, you you know, he opened an insurance thing, and he was, he was really, really famous. We don't know what happened to him. He went missing in 1925. Oh, really? He probably fell off a building, didn't he? If you were to guess.

I'm afraid he might. That Robert guy does it for money now, doesn't he? Right. He basically does it sponsored, and he usually uses actual climbing gear and stuff like that. But actually, a lot of people do die. So this Harry Gardner, who was, actually it was Grover Cleveland, the president, who nicknamed him the human fly, apparently. and he said that 120 of those who have sought to imitate me in this hazardous profession have fallen to death.

So he was saying that that happened. And people have looked into this. Scientists have looked into it. There's been a study in 2006. And they said, in every country, there is an excess of male deaths due to potentially avoidable reasons. According to their theory,

this is what they quoted as saying. Men are idiots. And idiots do stupid things. And on that note, we need to move onto our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in the early Eurovision song contests,

songs could not be performed in public before the event. One Danish song was banned after the composer whistled it in a TV broadcaster's canteen. Wow. This is incredible. So, yeah, this was in the bit where you had to become the Danish entry,

and there were six different songs and this guy was just in the canteen having his lunch and he was just kind of whistling it to himself and then they did the actual thing where they performed it and the people were there going, it sounds a bit familiar isn't it? And then they got banned. No way. Was he maybe

secretly doing it to try and cede the tune in people's minds or if there's no suggestion of that? You know what? I haven't thought of that but yeah, I mean probably not. I think that's a very cynical take. What an amazing song that they were like, wait, that the song I heard in that canteen a week ago.

What a shame it couldn't enter. Yeah, that's true. What a great whistler he must be. Whistling, everyone is a better whistler than they are a singer. It's easier to match a tune that you've heard whistling than it is singing. There are some people who can't whistle, right? I've met a few people who can't whistle. Right.

So, yeah. Well, okay. Hang on. If you can whistle, you are a better whistler, probably, than you are. I'm saying that's much weak. Tell me about Tom Whipple. That's interesting, really. They've looked at that.

That's not just your opinion. It's not just my opinion. This isn't an opinion-based. They've done studies to test the picture with things. Asking people, can you repeat this tune sung or repeat it? And it's because, I mean, you know, it's obviously much easier to make a tune on a musical instrument because they're specifically designed to match specific notes.

But muscles are just a bit less precise. in your opinion. You know, when the Eurovision song contest first started, Britain decided we didn't want to take part in this Eurovision song contest. So we decided to have our own British song contest of British popular songs, which was won by Dennis Lotus,

who was born in South Africa. The thing that I don't really understand about Eurovision, and I think it is bigger here than it is in Britain, written about it is the constant insistence every year that it's not political it should ever be political and it's just about the music when it is so patiently political i don't understand why everyone doesn't embrace that so there are a bit like everything about the history of eurovision in 2009 though it was just after the russia-jorda conflict and georgia had to withdraw its entry because the organisers had told them they had to change their lyrics and the title of their

entry song which was we don't want to put in which is a very unveiled reference to Putin. So, yeah, and then it's back and forth all the time. Yeah, there was, when it first came, it was supposed to bring Europe together. But Turkey pulled out in 1976 because Greece were taking part. But then Greece pulled out in 1975 because Turkey were taking part. Greece censored Ireland in 2008 because they mentioned Macedonia and they censored Finland in 2007 for being satanic. But then Finland censored Israel in the same year for mentioning nuclear weapons. and this year Israel's embassy complained to the Netherlands after they parodied their Eurovision winner

and Iran moved all of its diplomats from Azerbaijan in 2012 in protested at it hosting the contest even though Iran's nothing to do with Eurovision and when Israel won in 1978 the TV show in Jordan told viewers that Belgium had won and in 1973 Portugal arrested the writer of its own song because they thought it wasn't fascist enough so glad

I'm so glad we're all friends together do you know Salvador Dali was involved with the Eurovision song That's a easy Yeah 1969 The stage

So it was in Madrid And the stage had this giant sculpture A metal sculpture on stage And that was designed by Salvador Dali But not only that He also designed their press material

All the press packages and stuff Yeah That sounds like an early job Yeah it does Doesn't it Now he was a man Who had trouble telling the time It's basic.

The 19708 won was particularly controversial. So, 1997 it was the one that Israel won, I think, and during the contest it became obvious that Israel was going to win. And most Arabic countries were transmitting it on their TV stations. And they cancelled the transmission as soon as it became obvious. So they were just quickly flipped to another channel with no explanation. And actually, you say that Jordan said that Belgium had won, and they just replaced their transmission with a...

bunch of daffodils. Very cool. S subtle. There was a, you mentioned the British equivalent. Yes. There was a Soviet Union equivalent as well, which was called Intervision, the Indivision song contest, and it only happened four times. And we've spoken about this before, is this was the way that you voted.

It was that a lot of people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union. So you had to turn on your lights if you liked the song. and you had to turn them off if you didn't like the song and they just measured the load on each country's electricity network and that determined how many points you got. That's clever, is that?

That's true. And it was amazing, it was like, it was the wild west of songs, of song contest. So for example, one entrant in those four years stayed on stage for 45 minutes. Wow. Just kept going until they were removed. The thing about that is that you had to,

I think someone else pointed this out in an article I was reading you had to sit in pitch dark for all of the songs you didn't like so you can't turn your lights on how miserable you don't like the song anyway also bizarrely Canada was an entrant in two of the I think four years that that was going they have weird entrance like the fact that Australia is in Eurovision is obviously a bit weird and also a bit painful because they have the highest score

on average the Australians I'm an Aussie Oh dear, hi So good We've been in five times And in three of those five We've made it to the top ten Yeah, huh?

How'd me if you were? What did you come this year? I feel we're all on a loser against Sweden Yeah Do you know if you actually go to the Eurovision Song Contest What you have to do Is adhere to very strict rules about what can go in with you

So like most places you go to There's a list of things that are allowed to be taken into a venue but with the European song contest it's things like helmets adhesive tape golf balls are not allowed and shopping trolleys they specify shopping trolleys

it just feels like that each year they're responding to one disastrous entry so I think about within the last decade the Greek team performed on a trampoline did they? Yeah so I don't know if trampolines are on the list no I mean no this is not for the people coming

it's not for the people I'm sorry it's for audience people Sorry, okay. There hasn't been someone in the Eurovision song contest just singing and hitting golf balls

into the audience. I'm surprising. So, there was the Russians who came second, I think, a few years ago with that team of grannies

who baked bread on stage. Yeah. I mean, it is a strange contest. There was, in 1985, the contest was held in Gothenburg. Cool. It's such an easy way

of getting a cheer, isn't it? Shameless. And it was very popular amongst British viewers, and a lot of people tuned in where you wouldn't really think they would do. And that's because the Swedish entry was entitled Bra Vibrationaler.

What? For the people who are in this room, I believe it means good vibrations. Ah, right. I see. Brab vibration. In 1997, Denmark's entry was a rap in Danish about a guy who had fallen in London.

love with a woman from directory inquiries. In 1980, Norway's entry was a song about the construction of a hydroelectric power plant. Estonia in 2013 had a song which repeatedly just said the phrase, a local man called Korsakov went to Latvia yesterday.

And in 2006, Lithuania had a song called We Are the Winners, which just said, we are the winners again and again and again and again, and they came sick. I want to know if they ever found the local man called Corsican. We're going to have to wrap up, guys. Well, okay, one more thing. The first person to get Nilpois, as in no pints in Eurovision,

was a guy called Jan Tegan from Norway. Okay. But he became a national hero because he got no points. And his song was number one for two months and remained in the top ten for three more months afterwards and he also had the number one album called This Year's Loser. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter. James. At James Harkin. And Shazinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can also go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We have everything up there, all of our previous episodes, all of our upcoming tour dates. That's the end of our show, everyone. Thank you so much, Goplinburg. You've been amazing. We'll see you again.