No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Rapidly Deflating Walrus

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss spectacular lost films, sensational Victorian plays and orgiastic tupperware parties.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered round our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Anna. My fact this week is that in 2016, Tupperware claimed to be holding a party somewhere in the world every 1.3 seconds. Bullshit. No.

How's that possible? You're just not being invited, and I know this is awkward. This is Tupperware parties. The reason I'm researching this is because I was talking to my mum a couple of weeks ago, and she said, I wonder if anyone goes to Tupperware parties anymore. And I said, what on earth are you talking about? And then she was saying about, you know, how in their youths, you'd have Tupperware parties. And they are a thing where a Tupperware salesperson, sales rep, basically throws a house party where they demonstrate and display all sorts of Tupperware.

And it's still really popular around the world. So they stopped happening in the UK in 2003. But they happen in lots of other countries still. Every 1.3 seconds, you could be at one. They make extraordinary claims. So they claim that France has half a million Tupperware parties every year, which, How many people go to a Tupperware party would you say? Eight.

Eight to ten. These days, none. Like, it must have been a bad year for Tupperware sales last year, right? Okay, so France has half a million Tupperware parties, each with, let's say, 10 people attending. That's still 5 million French people. No, it isn't. You're not saying that you only go to one Tupperware party every year, and it's like, nope, that's my fill for the year.

These Tupperware enthusiasts are going to more than one party. That's true. And also, there are Tupperware raves, which can. can get really out of control quite a lot of the time. They're illegal at the moment, but... You have to bring your drugs in a... It's like it's Tupperware. It is amazing the Tupperware story.

So, as you said, that's how they actually sell Tupperware. And it started off not being very successful. So it was invented by Earl Tupper, not an Earl. That's just his name. In, I think it was 1946 and didn't sell very well. And then this woman called Brownie Wise came along with her wise. with a wise attitude towards PR. And she was already selling various household goods via the house party.

And she bought up some Tupperware, sold it. And he spotted that she was causing a massive increase in sales this way. And I think within three years of her being on the scene, he took all his products off shelves and sold them exclusively at parties. And five years after she came on the scene, the company was making $100 million in sales per year. Wow. Yeah.

She absolutely smashed it. Yeah. She found out that whenever you put like some gravy in a Tupperware box and threw it across the room, she always got way more sales. That was the Pisturis, wasn't it? Bouncing the Tupperware across the room. The gravy frisbee. It's mad as well, isn't it, that this feels like, again, there's probably other research to suggest otherwise. But to me, it feels like this is the moment where we accepted plastic into the house.

So that's what they were fighting against, largely. Plastic wasn't a thing that you brought into the house. And a lot of people were very resistant to it. So it's so odd to know that in my head, at least, this is the moment where all of this now, all the plastic in our house is off the back of these parties that were happening with Brownie Wise in America. Interesting idea. I like it. Dan lives in a child's Wendy house, we should say, at this point. He's got his little cozy coop car in the corner.

Speaking of the actual Tupperware parties, have you heard of the parties they used to have at Tupperware HQ? No. It sounded wild. So these, again, were Brownie Wise's idea. It was called Homecoming Jubilee, and it was for hundreds of the Tupperware sales women who were, I think they were exclusively women who were selling the products in the home. So they had these, like a mad, ordiastic, not quite orgiastic, but they were pretty funky. Come on, Andy.

They were so far from orgeastic. No, no, no, no, no. What about this? 1954's big Tupperware rave was called a big dig. A big what? She buried. A big dig. All right, sorry.

She buried 50,000. thousand dollars worth of mink's dolls, diamond rings, gold watches, and tiny model cars around the place at TupperWHQ. And you had to go and dig them up. And if you found a tiny model car, you could swap it for an actual car. I mean, it sounds insane. Cool. They had Methodist preachers come and say that Tupperware was a way of fighting communism. They had a walk of fame, which was just Tupperware saleswomen on the walk of fame. They had a 40-foot mural called the Museum of Dishes. They had a pond where apparently, Apparently she baptized people. Really? Yeah, I haven't been exactly clear on why she was baptizing people. They did say, though, that Brownie Wise had a sort of religious aura to her, didn't she? She sort of was treated as a sort of high priest of the Tupperware religion at that time.

And she used to go around with the original slag, polyethylene slag that Earl Tupper had used. And she would allow people to stroke it and touch the slag, the sacred slag. I said it was orgiastic, and if you're touching the sacred slag, Dan, you should say what slag is. Yeah. Well, it's polyethylene, isn't it? It's like a plastic, it's like a black plastic mold. It's the plastic, which the Tupperware was eventually made out of.

So he was given one of these big lumps of cast off plastic from another company, and he used a process to turn it into this kind of see-through plastic container thing. And he kept the original version of it and then gave it to Brownie Wise, didn't he? So cool. And she said, just get your fingers on it. Wish for what you want. Know it's going to come true. And then get out and work like everything.

And it will. It is starting to sound more and more orgiastic, some of this language. They had a wishing well at company headquarters. That's sort of what you were saying, James, about the wishes. They had a wishing one. Like, that's the point you throw wishes into the wishing well, don't you, if there is a wishing well? and they got a wish fairy to come and doll out expensive gifts to the Tupperware ladies. Did she live in the well?

It's unclear. I guess she lived in some Tupperware somewhere. That would be cool. You know the thing of someone bursting out of a cake. Yeah. They must have had someone bursting out of some Tupperware at one of these boxes. I doubt it because I think the whole point of Tupperware is that it doesn't open without quite a lot of force. So you just basically got some asphyxiated woman in a plastic container.

That's a good advert, though. I mean, it's so secure that if your life depends on it, you can't escape. One of the thing they did just on that subject is they did something called carrot calling, which what would happen is you'd go to your party and then you'd get some Tupperware, and then you'd put some carrots in your Tupperware, and then you put some just on the shelf wherever you keep it or in the fridge, if you're a weirdo that keeps your carrots in the fridge. And then they would say, okay, well, let's come back in a month's time

and see how the carrots look that were in your Tupperware. compared to the ones that are on your shelf or in your pantry, right? And so that was not only a way of proving how good the Tupperware was, but it was a way of making sure the same people came back to your party to buy more shit. So it was pretty clever. That's really clever. Just one thing about Tupperware that I found bizarre is that a third of its revenue comes from makeup sales. Topperware makeup.

And in fact, in South America, it's more than half. In Uruguay, 70%. And I could go on. In parts of Uruguay, 90%. There's one house in Uruguay, which is 100% Tupper-Weir make up. What is the makeup? Is it a famous brand? So they bought up a bunch of beauty brands in the early 2000s.

And this is when the guy who was running the company at the time, I think it was a guy called Rick Goings. He realized that in South America, he ran some stats and realized that people spent much more on makeup than they did on food containers. He said that he checked something called the Vanity Index, and South American countries rate most highly in terms of people who care most about their appearance. And so they launched makeup there instead, and it's super popular. I suppose, like, you would have Avon parties in the UK, wouldn't you? Like, who would sell makeup and stuff like that?

You do. And Summers parties? I think used to be a thing. Yeah, definitely. They must still be a thing, mustn't they? I think there was an article which claimed that there were 4,000 Anne Summers parties every week. Every second. They had a falling out, didn't they in the end?

Earl and Brownie, the two combined geniuses. So Earl was sort of the inventive genius and she was the PR genius. And he thought that it should be more about Tupperware and less about her. And it was becoming quite about her. She was the first woman ever to appear on the cover of Business Week. Because of her fame as this Tupperware queen, she ended up writing this self-help book called Best Wishes. and Earl Tupper eventually thought, no, she's becoming too self-involved and hungry for fame. And he fired her in 1958 and sold the company shortly afterwards.

I read, and I don't know, I think there's a lot of speculation because we don't fully know the details of the falling out. But there were a few rumours that he thought that once he passed away, if the business went to Brownie, it would go down because no one would want a woman at the head of a company, which sounds mad. but it's apparently part of his thinking. I mean, there's a lot of rumours. It's very strange. I read one that in 1957 she had held a massive Tupperware party on a Florida island for 1,200 people, and there was a torrential thunderstorm which injured 21 people, and that led to lots of lawsuits.

And so this is the most charitable explanation of why she was fired, is that that was a big mistake. But it does seem like it was quite a lot to do with Tupper's ego. And in fact, there's more evidence, because you know she used to bury things on Tupperware HQ property. Once she had been sacked, he had a hole dug on Tupperware company property and dumped 600 copies of her book into the hole and buried them. Wow.

And that wasn't so he could throw a big party where people got to dig on her book as a ground. No, it was not. Did he put it in Tupperware or is it just into the ground? I think the point was not to preserve the copies of the book for future. I know. That's what I was just thinking. he would have shot himself in the foot there with that idea. He did go a bit strange afterwards, didn't he?

Yeah. He, what did he do? He moved to Costa Rica. He basically sold the company, got a whole load of money, he didn't want it to get taxed, and so divorced his wife and went to live in Costa Rica. I know. He did.

Although before that he bought an island, which I think he wanted to live on. He bought this island called San Jose Island, which I'd never heard of. It's just off the coast of Panama. And he wanted it to become a holiday. resort. And that makes him sound very Richard Branson, but I think it was an island that, you know, didn't really have people on it and probably didn't cost a huge amount. And so he wanted it to be

this glorious resort. And it looks stunning. And I've seen pictures. Golden Sands beaches. He hadn't investigated it enough because it had been the site of massive chemical weapons testing and dumped by the US, Canada and Britain in the 1940s. Oh my God. So he sent a couple of staff there. They got quite badly burned and damaged from that. And they realized that it was uninhabitable. That's bad luck. He was. He was. an amazing ideas man, from what I can tell. There's a lot of inventions that he tried to make that never ended up being realized, which I think is a bit of a shame. He had the no-drip ice cream cone, which I couldn't use. That's a great idea, isn't it? That is. That is one of the only

problem with ice cream cones, really. Yeah. Actually, you know what I would invent? You know the best thing about an ice cream cone is where you snap off the bottom of the ice cream cone and you turn it into a tiny little ice cream, a tiny kind of microcosm of itself. Do you know that? So you snap off the bottom of an ice cream cone, so you have a tiny little bit of cone, and then you take a tiny little bit of ice cream from the top of it,

and it can be like you're a giant, because you have a tiny ice cream. Or you could resell it to other kids around you and make back your money. But then I would invent one where they kept regrowing the bottom, so you could do that an infinite amount of time. That's weird, because I, so do you not do the thing where you snap off the bottom

and then you suck the ice cream out through the children. That's what I do. Ah, well, you could do both of those things if you, you know. Yeah. No, you're all mad in different ways. These are not acceptable ways to get. As he stands next to the ice cream van and tells the children what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do.

I've got my tray in front of me to catch any spare drops. Yeah. You thought the ice cream van man was scary. How about the creepy guy standing next to us catching our droplets? A couple of other inventions by Earl Tupper. Fishing poles that weighed your catch as you were reeling it in. Great idea. He invented a machine to make it easier to clean and dress chickens.

A dress, I imagine dress as in for cooking, not as in putting trousers on the buss. Andy, did you read this one? Because I can't work out what it would be. A fish-powered boat. I didn't read that. That was one. The idea is you get a really big fish and you attach it to the bottom of your boat.

And then the fish swims along the river and just pulls your boat along with it. The boat is directly above the fish. Yeah, yeah. Is that real? Is it just one fish? None of these are really real. A lot of them like that. Well, no, but the concept was real, right?

Sure. I mean, they were written in like his notebooks from when he was a teenager, some of these. So I think they were. Oh. I mean, there were ideas, but I don't think he ever really thought that we were. were going to take a load of boats and attach fish to the bottom of them. That could be the green energy solution that we're all looking for. It could be. That's what we want to do.

You'd like stress the fish out a bit more. Yeah. It makes sense, though, the invention of a fish weighing rod, because you need to make sure you're reeling in a big fish if it's planning to drag your ferry over the channel, didn't you? Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1868, there were five different plays on, in London's West End simultaneously

where a train burst onto the stage and threatened to run somebody over. Wow. This was a huge theatrical trend. So I've got the names of the plays. They were called Land Rats and Water Rats. That's one play. Rail, river and road, danger, after dark,

and my favourite, the Scamps of London, great-sounding play. And in all of these plays, there was a train drama scene where a train burst on. And the trains were obviously in, you know, quite detailed wooden flats that were mounted on rails. So they were able to burst onto the stage.

Lots of kind of sound effects and smoke and stuff. Yeah, exactly. And this was a massive thing. And I think it was because of a play the previous year called Under the Gaslight. It was. That was the first time it was really big on stage. The guy who wrote it, he was called Augustine Daly. And he claimed that other people had nicked his idea.

And then other people said, no, you nick this from somewhere. Well, he was, he won the court case. So I think technically we have to say that it was his idea. He's not going to see. He claimed that he was just walking down the road and he tripped up over a piece of, you know, pavements or something. And he hurt his toe and had to hop all the way home. And when he landed back in his bed, it just appeared to him the idea from nowhere,

as opposed to the fact that there was actually already an idea out there. Yeah. It's the weirdest. We actually have his first-hand quotes from that moment, and it breeds so bizarre. He says, I was near my door and I rushed into the house, threw myself into a chair, grasping my injured foot with both hands, for the pain was great, and exclaiming over and over again, I've got it, I've got it, and it beats hot irons all to pieces. It's like, we should say this, sorry, the idea that we're talking about is not the train crashing through, though, is the person tied to a railway idea. So this was a meme. Oh, sorry. This was the start of a meme in 1866. which began with this under the gaslight play where someone's tied to a train track and a train's coming towards them at the very last minute you whip them away and that was his genius idea right?

Which, by the way, the stubbing his toe had nothing to do with it is bizarre. He just happened to stub his toe at the same time. Exactly, yeah. But this play was held at the Worrell Sisters, New York City Theatre in 1867 and was absolutely massive. And it wasn't actually, these days I would say we would see that meme and it would be like a, you know, a damsel in distress who was tied to the rail tracks

and then some, you know, mustachioed hero would come and save the day. But in this case, it was actually the woman who saved the man. There was a man in the play called Snorkey, and he was tied to the train tracks, and then the woman protagonist would come and save the day, and then Snorke would exclaim, and these are the women who ain't to have a vote. Oh, really?

Yeah, so it's quite a political little thing. But the play was run by these sisters called the Worrell Sisters, and they were massive. They were the daughters of a clown and kind of grew up in the showbiz. And they kind of started doing these burlesque acts, where they would take the piss out of other plays and stuff like that. And then eventually they did so well that they managed to buy their own theatre in New York City, and that was where they put on this play.

And the most famous one of them was Jenny Worrell, and it was written of her that the beautiful voluptuous Jenny Worrell sucked late, drank champagne, owned fast horses, wore diamonds, squandered money to left and right until the public grew weary of her. Oh. And then she died in poverty in the end, so it's not a fun story. Unfortunately, she was also the daughter of a clown, so she had size 64 shoes, and that made it very hard to socialise.

I do think, when Snorke says, and these are the women to wait to have a vote, It's slightly, like, did he believe in suffrage for women before a woman saved him from a railway track? Sometimes you need that moment of clarity like stubbing your toe or being saved from a train. I think no one should have the vote unless they can prove that they've saved someone else's life. It's quite similarly, just in the case of it switching, and it used to be a woman who saved a man, the first known cliffhanger, literal cliffhanger, was in Thomas Hardy's a pair of blue eyes. wasn't it in 1873.

And so this was really the age of the cliffhanger. That's what that train scene is, is because it's the very last minute when they escape. Was this a novel, Anna, or did he write plays as well? Yes, no, this was a novel, a pair of blue eyes. And it features Henry Knight, who's the hero, and he's left dangling off the edge of a cliff. And then the whole book is him dangling,

at which point he reviews the entire history of the world whilst waiting to be rescued. And that's the book. And then at the end, I believe his love interest pops up and fashions a rope out of her own underwear to haul him to safety. Wow. Luckily, she'd just come back from an Anne Summers' party. Yes, it was very flimsy.

It snapped immediately. He died tragically. I can't believe after all the crap we got for ruining the ending of another classic literature novel that you've gone ahead and spoiled the ending of this hardy one. Yeah. What was that? Anna Karenina.

Yeah, that was it. Ah, another book featuring, weirdly, a train, which runs somewhere. Oh, God, no. Stop listening. This sort of trend was a Victorian melodrama, it gets called. And it was a really big thing. The idea was basically sensation. You had huge theatres, often with three or four thousand seats in them.

And so theatres were engaged in an arms race to come up with the most sensational stuff. And a lot of them were thanks to a guy called Bruce Sensation Smith. Have you heard of him? He came up with loads of amazing kind of theatrical gimmicks. one of them is of a diver descending into the sea, right? So that's what's happening on the story. But to show that, the boat he's in, that got lifted up into the flies, right? So it looks like he's descending because the boat is rising and rising above him.

But also then they revealed huge tanks of water behind him, which have real fish swimming in them. So as he descends, you see he is surrounded by actual fish. That's so cool. That's very cool. Not everyone was that happy with these sensational plays. W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, he said about these sensational plays, every play which contains a house on fire, a sinking steamer or a railway accident will succeed in spite of itself. In point of fact, nothing could wreck such a piece

except carefully written dialogue or a strict attention to probability. He said, avoid these two stumbling blocks and your piece will succeed triumphantly. Me, ow. I know. I think Dickens felt the same. Again, I think people would go to see the melodramatic moment rather than any plot or dialogue or acting, wouldn't they? And Dickens said of a play called The Streets of London,

which had a city burning down in it. And the name would change depending on what city it was in. So it would be the streets of Bolton when it went to Bolton for the streets of Glasgow. And Dickens said of it, it's the most depressing instance without exception of an utterly degrading and debasing theatrical taste that has ever come under my writhing notice.

Wow. Well, that's extraordinary. I guess it's just the equivalent of a blockbuster film, though, which you know that there's an incredible scene where a plane disassembles itself or whatever. Yeah, it's a Dwayne Johnson movie, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it's a Michael. Yeah, I would have loved them.

Imagine what Dickens would have thought of Transformers for. There was like a response to it, wasn't there? So in the 1850s and 1860s, there's a guy called Tom Robertson, who invented a thing called Cup and Source of Realism. And what that was, it was the exact opposite of these train crashes and fires and drownings and stuff like that. And this was reported as being really, really unusual. If there were a few people talking in a kitchen, say, Robertson would put on stage as many chairs as would realistically be found in a kitchen or a dining room, as opposed to everyone else who would say, well, there are two people talking, so we only need two chairs. So we'll just put that.

So he had everything that was really realistic. and there was one where someone was making a pudding on stage and this was absolutely the talk of the town because it was so unusual that someone would really be actually making a pudding while they were doing the talking. And instead of that kind of projecting and really shouting these kind of what was happening in the play, they would just talk as a normal person one.

It was just like a realistic thing. And to start off with no one would put these plays on because they were like, well, where's the fucking car crash? Where's the train crash? We don't have it. but eventually there was one or two theatres that did it and then that's kind of where we are today a little bit, isn't it? Sort of, except the chair thing.

I think the chair thing still doesn't happen and that is revolutionary. You do not see spare chairs in place. And that's bullshit. You're right? I was reading up on sort of general theatre stage props off the back of this fact. And so just a couple of things that I found.

There was a story of Orton Wells when he used to be performing in Julian Julius Caesar, he played the role of Brutus. And he preferred a real knife because a plastic knife didn't really give the proper shine in the theatre lights. So when you have a real blade, it really bounces it off and makes it look real. Anyway, they had to take Julius Caesar to the hospital because he was stabbed by also. He collapsed.

Yeah. And yeah, at the end of the scene, he was taken to the hospital where he had to recover for quite a long time. At the end of the scene? I would say, bring the scene to a close a little bit early. I think everyone's watching going, bloody hell, Julia Caesar's good in this, isn't he? Wow. But doesn't he get stabbed about 40 times in the, because it's loads of people. By lots of different people, though, presumably Osam Wells was the only one with an actual knife. Everyone else was just doing the plastic thing. Awesome Wells was so devoted to his craft, he handed out 40 knives and he recruited his worst enemy to play

Wow. Speaking of that, there was a production of Dad's Army in 2010 in South Wales, um, local production. And they realized in a rehearsal that they were accidentally using live grenades, uh, which they just found. Don't panic. And it was Corporal Jones, who was the man who realized. Yeah, I know. And really. They realized as he was looking at it, he thought, oh, that's funny. This does look good, doesn't it? In fact, there's a pin still in it. And They had found them in the garage of a cast member's father-in-law and just driven them to the theatre rattling around. And they had to call the bombs squad to come and blow them up.

Oh, wow. You know what they do for drugs in films? Because some films, they have to take lots of drugs. Like, is it like a flower or icing sugar or something, I would have thought? Yeah, it's pretty close. So prop masters, basically are the ones they have to test all the drugs themselves to make sure that you can take it as an actor and not immediately start choking or whatever. So fake cocaine in The Wolf of Wall Street, that I think was vitamin B powder.

And that was fine. They use moss instead of marijuana in films, which... Oh, Andy. I imagine Andy going to his moscler and accidentally getting some marijuana and going, what's this bullshit? I felt calmer and I wanted to feel tense. Yeah, magic mushrooms are just mushrooms. They just use some mushrooms, but non-magic mushrooms.

That makes sense. It does. One more thing about the sensational plays. Yeah. So there was rules about what you could show in the theatre, and then they got slightly loosened, but you still had to pass things through the Lord Chamberlain's office. And so in the 19th century, in order to get things through the sensors, you wouldn't put swear words in, for instance.

You would have other things that people would say. And so you have loads of awesome insults, like people would call each other a rascally night hawk or a herring-gutted, villain and stuff like that. And also, sometimes the, like a villain, instead of going, fuck you, you bastard, you stop my amazing plan, they wouldn't be able to do any of that dialogue. You should write scripts actually.

That was stunning. Well, I would do if it could go back into the 19th century because instead of using that amazing dialogue, you would just shout out whatever your psychological state was. there was an American play which was adapted for the British stage. And when the villain had his plans filed, he just shouted out, Confusion! No. Dan, I think we have a new catchphrase for you on this podcast.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when it wants to sleep, a walrus will sometimes hook its tusks onto a small iceberg, and sleep while floating along in the water. Isn't that cute? It's so cute, apart from the quite big, fat, blubbery things and probably quite cold, and it's a cute idea. They're so cute, I think that's a very cute.

Yeah. So a few places on the internet doubt this, but I am pretty confident that it does sometimes happen at least. There was a book by Francis H. Fay, called Ecology and Biology of the Pacific Walrus, where they write that on numerous occasions I have seen warruses resting or sleeping in the water with their tusks hooked over the edge of the ice,

their body laying either horizontally or vertically in the water, the tusks appear to function both as a prop for the head, keeping the mouth and nostrils out of the water and as an anchor preventing the animal from drifting away with the current. So it does seem like it does occasionally happen. It's not the only way they sleep, but from time to time they will do this. It's so sweet.

They're very promiscuous sleepers, aren't they? What do you mean they have sex or not? No, I don't at all. I just mean they'll sleep anywhere. They'll sleep around. Yeah, literally around as in different locations. Imagine if that was another meaning of that, the misunderstandings you would have. That's what I've been saying for years, yeah, yeah.

When we're on tar, you always tell your wife, oh, I've been sleeping around for the last two weeks. Absolutely. But they sleep leaning over. If they're in captivity, they'll just lean up against the edge of the end of the day. their pool and sleep there, or they sleep on the bottom of the water as well, which is magical, but briefly, because otherwise they will die. That's the most common way

they sleep is on the bottom of the water, but then they come, like you say, wake up every now and then just to breathe. It's every three minutes they have to come up to the surface. Really? Yeah, it's just a nap, really, that they're having. But they do it. They can sleep up to 90 hours, can't they? So that's a hell

of a... When they're doing the 19 hours sleep, they're somewhere much more comfortable. Yeah, that is... It's like having such severe sleep apnea, really, isn't it? Is it just every three minutes? You're, oh my God. But they can sleep for 19 hours, but they can also swim nonstop for 84 hours sometimes. It's crazy.

So they're just pretty hardcore. Isn't that one of the longest that any animal is known to stay awake in one go? It's very unusual. So humans can stay awake that late, that long. But if you stay awake that long, you're going to do yourself some damage. and you basically have to have someone holding your eyes open the whole time. So it is possible, but it's really unusual. But they actually do it semi-regulately.

Just actually how they managed to go up and down in the water is quite interesting, actually. So when they do wake up on the bottom and need to get to the top, they've got pharyngeal pouches, which are these air sacs between, like, sort of their throat and their chest around their sternum. And they can hold 50 litres of air, which is about the same, I realized, as four party balloons. which actually I was most surprised at how many leaders where a party balloon can take. Wow, that's a lot though, isn't it?

Because presumably it must blow up like a party balloon. Yes, you can actually see the little lumps, I think, can't you, when they're inflated, and that takes them to their top. And that means that they can bob up and down vertically, and I think they can sleep like that. Wait, hang on, Anna. It doesn't take them up to the top.

If they're at the bottom of the seat and they haven't remembered to inflate their pouches, there's nothing they can do about that. They use it to stay up when they're up. Yeah, sorry. When they breathe out, do they kind of fly around like a party balloon when you let me go around? Sometimes you hear that squeaking, farting sound when you're in the scene. Oh, that'd be terrifying because they weigh over a ton some of them.

One of those untethered in a room and flying around would do a lot of property damage. They can eat as many as 6,000 clams in a single feeding session. And I went on to... One walrus. Yeah, one walrus in one session, 6,000. and clams. And I went on to the website of a seafood merchant in Borough Market, and that would cost £15,000 per meal if they bought their welks and clams from Borough Market. I don't know what sort of lovey media wars is your thing. The Borough Market is an expensive place to buy your clown.

They're so cool. They're so weird. Their skin is amazingly thick, obviously, because they need to keep warm in the water. But their skin is four centimetre thick, which is about 30 times thicker than human skin. And then under that they have another, is it 10 centimetres of blubber? Which is, it's such a thick layer. They're pretty toasty, I think, in the water. It's a lot. And, well, they're so heavy that a good way to hunt them if you're a polar bear, if there are any polar bears listening, is to cause a stampede. So they're actually quite difficult to hunt as a polar bear because they're so massive on their own. It's quite hard to kill one on its own. But they always hang out together in huge groups. And they're so heavy that if you start chasing them, they'll

stampede over each other, and they'll often crush a few of them, few of each other on the way. And then you can pick up, pick up the leftovers. So the young ones are incredibly cute. I know we were saying the bigger ones might not appear cute. I think they are. But the young ones definitely are. And they're also really sweet with humans as well. So there's been a few scientists that have talked about the fact that when a baby walrus is, when they're working with baby warruses, it will sort of rest its head on the scientist's lap. and then it won't feel just content with that. It will try and climb onto the scientists

as if to just cuddle it in the way that a small puppy would just want to get on top of you and sort of cuddle into you. That is quite cute, but what if it thinks you're an ice flow and then tries to dig it... That's what it feels like. They're not humans with ice floes.

Yeah, they're not just going to go stab at anyone. It feels like they're climbing on top of you like they think you're a lump of ice or something, no? Yeah, that's true. No, it's because they're thick, So they're very similar to earwigs in this one way, which is that they're positively thigmotactic, which means that they love being touched. They're incredibly social, like you say. And that's why they're often huddled together in big groups because they are always

touching each other. 90% of walruses will be touching another walrus when they're land. And so when you look after them, when they're in captivity, like at the Alaska Sea Life Center, I think, for instance, they employ four people round the clock per walrus to be there just hugging it and keeping it from them. No. No. That's what they do. Four walrus huggers for every walrus.

Wow. They serve other purposes as well. You know, they feed them. You can't do much while you're hugging a walrus, you know. You can be on your phone. You can be on your phone. Yeah, you're right. But then, I mean, no one wants to be hugged by someone who's also like doomscrolling

down Twitter. That is a really good point. No, the walrus is to have a tendency to go, look, can you put your phone down to for having a moment? I was looking up an experiment that was done on walrus's And this was in 2009 You know six flags the theme park in America No

So it's a huge chain of theme parks in America And they have a few branches all over the place But in 2009, six flags in California Built an artificial walrus vagina Did they? Okay Yeah Like a roller coaster

It was not for the public to have a go on. Oh, okay. What was it for then? It's in a theme park. It's a warrous vagina. Yeah. This is an animal-focused branch of the theme park, and they had a few warruses in,

and they wanted their warrass civu-kak to perform some sexual acts, so they could get their first-ever semen sample of walrus. Oh, I see. Yeah. And there was a scientist called Holly Marasso or Maraca. I'm not sure how that's pronounced. but she was in charge of this and the largest artificial vagina on the market was too small.

They did buy one which was used for cart horses, but it was tiny compared to what Superkang needed. If they come to my Anne Summers party that I had last week. Well, his penis was 22 inches around. They had to custom build it from a big old pipe. Wow. Because it was just too huge. That's amazing.

And I wrote to her. I wrote to the scientist, but she hasn't got back in touch with me. I said, did it. Yeah, amazingly. Sadly, I don't think it worked, did it? I think Sivukak died childless. He was very obedient, though, I think Sivoucac. So he was very good at exposing himself, and she learned what turned him on. So she realized that when there were workmen using power tools, hammers and stuff, nearby,

he would expose his penis and that he just particularly liked those sounds. He was aroused by them. and so eventually they made these certain noises to make him expose himself and then they trained him eventually to roll over and expose himself on the word penis so you just shouted penis. Imagine if you listened to this podcast. He'd never get back on his back again. One thing I find interesting about walrus vaginas actually

and I assume this is true of lots of other animals but I'd never seen it before is male warruses are famous for having bones in their penises, the baculum, which is the longest, I think, in the animal kingdom, the walrus baculum. But they also have a clitoral bone warruses. So they have a bone in their clitoris. And this is something that does happen in a few animals, but is obviously less common than the penis bone. And it's called a borebellum.

I never heard that word before. A clitoral. A borebellum. A-A-U-M. And that's what you call a clitoris bone. So look out for that word. Their teeth are very crucial, as in their tusks. So they have a hierarchical system. But the most important thing to your social status, they think in Worris hierarchies is the tusk. So if you break your tooth, if you have a bike accident or something, then suddenly you go from being the most sought-off, a desirable man on the block to being nothing. Very sad. Oh, that's awful.

They do walk on them, don't they? on their teeth. What do you mean? They sort of walk on them. And in fact, their name, their scientific name is Odo-Bainus Rosmarus, which literally means tooth-walking seahorse. It's a combination of latter than old Norse. And it's because they jam their tusks into the ice to drag themselves along. A bit like locking onto the icebergs. Yeah, they do. And they also use them to break up the ice. So there was an example of a, the females get very protective over their children. So if you get in,

between the child and the mother, then she'll come after you. And there was an example of some scientists kind of moving a child from one place to another, and the mother came after them and kind of slammed her face down with her tusks into the ice and used it as an icebreaker to open up the route so she can swim through it. Wow. That's so cool. It's scary. That's the stuff of horror films.

I know, because they swim really fast as well. Like, they can swim three times faster than Michael Phelps. Oh, wow. Yeah, 22 miles an hour, max speed. So imagine that coming at you with smashing down its tusks and swimming three times as fast as Michael Phelps. Dan's still cute? All I'm thinking is Earl Tupper missed a trick by getting just fish. He should have strapped a walrus of the point of the time.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that for many years, the horror film The Unknown, was missing because the last surviving print was accidentally placed into a pile of hundreds of film cans, all marked unknown. So this was a movie that was made in 1927, and it was fairly popular in its time. It started a very big actor called Lon Cheney. And the prints, as for a lot of movies around this time, just went missing, and no one knew where it was. And in 1973, after years and years of it being missing, it was discovered in the archives

of the Cinematec Francaise, which is a big institution in France that has lots of. of archived movies, and someone must have accidentally taken their copy and popped it into a big room that had a bunch of unknowns of films that had no information about them. And so there it sat for all these years until they uncovered it. And it's great that we have it again, because as I say, Lonchaney, big deal in his day. Sounds like an amazing movie, doesn't it? Yeah. It's about, well, it's about this guy who is a criminal and he goes to the circus pretending to be someone with no arms. And so to do that, he kind of ties his arms to his torso and then wears the shirt and clothes so no one can tell that he actually has arms. And then he falls in love with this

woman Nanon, played by Joan Crawford, before she became really famous. And she is terrified of being touched by men. So that works even better that he doesn't have any arms, even though he does have arms. And then... Match made in heaven. That's so sweet. I know, it is, isn't it? And then, well, it is until she finds out on his wedding night that he has arms. Oh, it's going to happen, isn't it? Anyway, so he then has a rival called Zanzi and kills him, but the police can't take any fingerprints from him because he doesn't have any arms. And so he escapes.

How does he kill him? He has arms. He has arms. Everyone thinks that he doesn't have arms. Oh, God, I fell into his trap. I think he didn't have arms. I should have known. Did he kill him because Zanzi or whatever he's called saw that he had?

had arms and he was like, there's nothing left to do now but for me to kill you. You know what? I've gone too far already because we're always giving away spoilers on this show and I get so much shit for it on Twitter. I'm not going to tell you what happens at the end of this movie, but it's really good. And one amazing thing about it is that what was the name of the guy who played him, Dan? Long Cheney and C-H-A-N-E-Y. Cheney, I reckon. Lon Cheney, yeah, that's right. But he had a stud double called Paul Desmook who didn't have any arms because in the play, the character had to like drink with his feet or he had to throw things for his feet

in the circus he was like a knife thrower but he did it all with his feet and so he had this actual performer called Paul Desmuk who would do all this stuff for him and the way that they did it is sometimes he would double for him if you could do it with the shots and stuff if you could not see his face

but most of the time Desmuk was doing the same job but he was doing it just with his legs and perfectly synchronized his legs with the actor's body and so they cut it. So you only saw the top of the actor's body and the bottom of the stunt doubles legs and so they could do all that stuff.

Isn't that cool? That's so clever. Amazing. So a man with no arms pretending to be a man with arms pretending to be a man with no arms. It's many layers. It's like the Shakespearean boys pretending to be girls to be boys, isn't it? Yeah.

On that song by blur. Is that the name? Boys with no arms who like girls who have arms, but hate men with who have arms. Dan, you mentioned Lon Cheney. Yeah. He does sound incredible. Yeah.

So he played so many different things. He played lots. He was called The Man of a Thousand Faces because he appeared in all these different costumes, all these different roles. I mean, I've written down clowns and pirates. I imagine his range was even broader than that. He played lots of foreign people, which obviously you probably wouldn't do today. But in the 1920s, he played so many different roles and kinds of person that there was a popular joke. and this was the joke, it was, don't step on that spider.

It might be Lon Cheney. That's brilliant. And he was a master of disguise in terms of his dedication to makeup within the movies he was in. So, like, for example, there's one movie where he plays both the hero and the villain. And he was so convinced that his makeup could transform that. When he played Quasimoto in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, he took the idea of having a growth over his eye so seriously that with the makeup done, it resulted in him having permanent short-sightedness off the stress that he put on onto his body.

He often used to put himself in physical pain in order to get that appearance right. So when he was playing a legless criminal mastermind, so in another movie he played a legless criminal. He bound his legs into a tight harness, and that actually cut off a lot of blood vessels in his legs so that he did kind of lose the use of his legs. But then for the sequel, didn't have to have a stunt double, so that was useful. So yeah, exactly. But yeah, and he was a,

he was a silent movie guy that was in that transfer to the talkies. And in fact, when it became the talkies, it's so interesting, he wrote for his first movie, because he did five different voices in his first ever talking movie. He signed a statement to attest to the fact that it was, in fact, his voices. And this was sort of published so that people believe that it was him who had an actual voice and that he was talking. Was that publicity for the film? So because people wanted to hear him talk? Yes, exactly.

No, it's publicity just to say you may think that this is being dubbed. I'm not just the man of a thousand faces. I also do voices. And the man of a thousand faces, five voices. No legs. Yeah. These lost films are incredible, the ones that keep popping up everywhere. And you mentioned the Cinematech-Francéez, was it, Dan?

Yes. They've been recategorising their films since 1992, so nearly 30 years now. They still have another decade to go. They've just got so many films that they're trying to work out what they all are. It's quite hard to see the difference between a lost film and a film that no one's looked for yet. I think this is a problem that the BFI had when they created in 2010 their 75 most wanted films list. And they've been finding them at a rate of not, really. I mean, as soon as they publish it, people were getting in touch going, oh yeah, I got the DVD

of that. Yeah, yeah, here you go. Which is that such great news. So of the top 75, they've discovered 18. I think maybe one of them or a film that was famously lost was gaslight, which is interesting because the reason it was lost is because MGM tried to gaslight us into thinking it didn't exist. No.

So this was the original film called Gaslight was released in 1940, and I think it was a British version. and then MGM got the rights to it and released it in 1944, but they got the rights on the one condition that all copies of the 1940 film, even all the negatives, were completely destroyed. So if anyone said, what's the film Gaslight? Maybe it's this one.

What are you talking about? This is the film Gaslight. And the only reason actually we have the original 1941 is because the director of it, who was called Thorold Dickinson, much cooler names in the other days, had made his own personal copy. And so he went and produced it.

And that's work. the word gaslighting today comes from, isn't it? Because it was the movie, maybe based on a novel, I'm not sure, but it's based on someone's boyfriend who tries to convince her that she's gone mad or something, right? Yeah, based on play, I think. Isn't it, he tries to convince her that it's something to do with gas lighting

in the house? I can't remember what he's just, yeah. Yeah, so he's always, he basically makes the lights go down lower. And then she, who's played by Ingrid Bergman, says the lights have gone lower. and he says, no, they're not, you've gone mad.

And then he does lots of other stuff. I mean, that's not a really, an obvious symptom of going mad, is it really? He should have, like, dressed as a rabbit and danced around in the front room. And he said, did you see that? He's like, what are you on about? That would be... That was the next scene. I should have got Lon Cheney in to do one of his weird jumping around with no arm.

Lon Cheney appears to be stuck in the bath. No, no. What are you on about? Just your mind playing tricks again. Oh, that's a Lonchene's back, and this time he's got eight legs. One famous movie that's missing is the arrival of a train at Vincennes Station by George Melier. So one of the oldest of all the cinematographers, a French guy who did lots of really early, very, very short movies of things happening, for instance, trains arriving at stations and stuff like that. But why I find really interesting about this one?

it's an 1896 film which we don't know where it is but what we do have is we have a flip book of the film which in 1896 is essentially the same thing that's so cool the one just every frame has become a page in the book have they stitched it back together to turn it back into a film they should do they should because then they can say it's based on a book that's popular for films there is weirdly just a combo fact there

There's a myth that when film was in its infancy, there was a silent movie. It was just of a train arriving in a station. But it was, I think it was face on. It might have been by the Lumier brothers. So the train is coming right towards the camera. Oh, yeah. There was a myth that this was so realistic and terrifying for the audience who'd never seen cinema before, that the audience bolted.

They all shit themselves en masse. Every one of the 500 people shit themselves. No. That's not the urban myth. It's a good urban myth. It's the one I've been spreading. Anyway, it doesn't seem to have ever happened. That's the thing. No one has ever bolted or shat themselves on mass if they still wanted to have a trade. Another film which has gone missing is the first film ever directed by an African-American. And actually, loads of these have gone missing. So there was a thing which I didn't know about,

which went from 1915 all the way up to the 19th. 1950s called race films. And what it was was Hollywood was making all these movies, but at the same time, other people were making films specifically for black people. So you would have black directors, you would have black actors, you would have black producers, you'd have basically black people doing the whole thing, but they would only be shown in theatres that were usually segregated so that only black people could even watch them. And there were like hundreds and hundreds of these things made, but almost all of them went missing. And then in 1983, there was a, um, called the Southwest Film Video Archives in Dallas. And they rang up this kind of historian and said,

look, there's a load of old tapes here. They're just taking up a load of space. We're going to get rid of them. Do you want to have a look through them? And he went, okay, well, I'm going to have a look through them. And it turned out that it was all of these old, what they call race films. And now we have loads of them back and they're restoring them all and people can watch them again. Wow. That is that cool. Yeah. It's amazing how little people thought ahead at the time. It's something that actually Alex our colleague gets really agitated about when so much the BBC's archives

have gone missing because they just didn't really preserve stuff. Well, they taped over it. It wasn't that it went missing. They decided that all these tapes were useless hanging out in the back rooms. Classic comedies that were made were all destroyed. So Peter Cook,

British comedian, he begged the BBC to give him the tapes so that they wouldn't be destroyed. I'll buy you new tapes, he said, and you can have fresh ones. And they still said, no, it's our property, so we're just going to make sure it's kind of destroyed. And so it wasn't even lost. It was actively destroyed. We should say why they also, why there are so few, another reason, as apart from people destroying them, is that they just burn so easily. They set on fire. The early film, nitrate

film, it can combust at 41 degrees Celsius. So... And you're in L.A. I know. I mean, it's... And also the other problem is that it has to go through a projector gate, obviously, reels of film, you know, balanced or a projector, pushing it through the projector's gate creates friction. Guess what that does? Frequently sets it on fire. And also, the substance it's made of nitrate film, it produces more oxygen as it burns,

which adds to the flame. It can keep burning even if you put it underwater. It's staggering that any of this stuff is even left on the planet. It's so unstable. It just doesn't want to exist in a stable form. So one movie that was destroyed in the 1920s was a movie called Humorisk. which was a movie that was the only silent movie of the Marx brothers.

This is before they went into talkies themselves. And it was destroyed on purpose because Groucho Marx hated it so much that he bought up the film and he burnt it so that no one could ever see it again. And you always hear of artists who dream of that scenario being able to go and remove from the shelves. George Lucas did a Christmas special for Star Wars. His dream is to sledgehammer every single copy out of existence and no one can. But Groucho Marx managed it.

He got rid of me. That's amazing. Wow. That's like, I mean, this is off topic. We're just thinking of people who hate the films they produced and wish they were destroyed. I remember reading an interview with Patrick Stewart, who said that his biggest regret was doing a film called Wild Geese 2. And he said the only reason he took the role is because he was offered the exact same amount of money for it as a repair for a window in his house had just been quoted. I don't know what kind of windows he's got. Nice windows. Yeah. Oh my God. The guy who was his glazier must have been just. like Stephen Spielberg in a mustache or something.

And he's like, yeah. This will cost you $13.6 million. Do you guys know when the last silent movie star died? Well, how do we define a silent movie star? Because, for instance, the guy in the artist, that was a silent movie, wasn't it? Oh, I'm not counting Jean-Dougardin as a silent movie star. No way. Sorry, last person from the original silent movie.

Okay, so I would have said they were probably, they became. talkies in the 20s, didn't they? Is that when that? So let's say someone was 10 when that came out and they died when they were 100. Yeah, possibly a couple of years ago. Yeah. I'm going to

say there was a kid who played the kid in the movie The Kid. No, but did you not see the prequel to that? The Fetus. Lon Cheney played the Fetus like that. Yeah. He built himself an entire womb.

But Jackie Coogan was in that movie, the kid, and I'm going to say him. He was Uncle Fester in the Adams family as well. He died in the 80s. Okay. So, all right. So James and Anna are saying the last couple of years, and you're saying the 80s, Dan.

James and Anna are closer. It's 2020. Baby Peggy was her name. Not her forever. She lost the baby element. she lost the Peggy element. She changed her name. But she was so famous. She was one of the highest paid movie stars in the entire 1920s, which was a gold rush time in Hollywood. She was so famous, she was the mascot of the 1994 Democratic Convention in New York. Wow. She turned up on stage next to,

I'm not sure who it was, Rusefeld or someone. And that was back in the days of silent conventions, wasn't it? Oh, oh for those days again. Yeah. The last adult man to be an asylum movie was a guy called Shep Horton, and he only died in 2017. And he was in the silent movies, Shep Horton. Shep Horton? Yeah, H-O-U-G-H. But he was called The Last of the Great Nobody's.

Incredible. So he was in hundreds of films. He was in Gone with the Wind, Big Sleep, Cleopatra, Wizard of Oz, but always just as a kind of handsome dude in the background. But you can see him in all of these films. They've tracked loads of the movies he's in. He was in a dozen films a month. Wow. I know.

You feel like he definitely when he, that was on his CV, he coughed over the last word, didn't he? Well, they'd call me the last of the great. No. But after he died, they put his gravestone in a pile of other gravestone of nobody. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things

that we have said over the course of the show, you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website. No Such Thing is afish.com. You can check out all of our previous episodes up there, as well as links to certain bits of merchandise that we've released over the years. And that's it for now. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then. Good. Bye.