No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Auction For Auction School

Episode Date: September 15, 2017

Dan, Anna, Andy and special guest Jason Hazeley discuss the British Lawnmover Museum, questionnaires for narcissists, how Christie's auctioneers get over their nerves. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode and no such thing as a fish. Before we begin, we just want to let you in on the special guests that we have this week. He's called Jason Haisley, and he is one of the people behind all the funniest things you've probably seen on TV in the last however many years. He is behind that Mitchell and Webb look as one of the writers for that. He also writes for Charlie Brooker's screen wipe. He's also the co-writer, along with his buddy Joel, of the Lady Bird books, those adult ones that have come out, of the hipster and the cat and the hangover in the midlife crisis.
Starting point is 00:00:33 They got a whole new batch coming out this October, October the 5th, so do get them. And he is on because he's a really good buddy of ours and he constantly sends us facts. And we just thought this guy's going to be amazing on the show and he was as you're about to hear. So enjoy this week's app. Here we go.
Starting point is 00:00:50 And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Jason Haisley, 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, Jason.
Starting point is 00:01:29 My fact is, the curator of the British lawnmower museum is allergic to grass. So is it his mission to destroy all the grass in the world with the lawnmowers? By mowing it away? Yeah, exactly, yeah. God, it's suddenly very hateful that museum, isn't it? One act of revenge. One gigantic scale. This is a guy called Brian Radham, who runs the British Lawmower Museum in Southport.
Starting point is 00:01:56 He's an ex-lawnmower racing champion. What? Does that mean he sits on lawnmowers? Yes. You ride them around. He race them. But he had to give up racing because it was making him sneeze so much. Oh, that's so sad.
Starting point is 00:02:10 So he took his love of lawnmowers and turned it into the British Lawmower Museum. which is a place to behold, I have to say. Have you been to it? Yeah, I have. Is it actually really good? It's really good, because it's one of those odd bits of the British Museum that you sometimes get, where you just get lots and lots of iterations of the same thing, which just makes it so interesting.
Starting point is 00:02:31 So you're saying it's mainly lawnmowers? It is mainly lawnmowers, yeah. They do have what he calls grass cutters, which are lawnmowers he doesn't like, like the flymo, for instance, because the flymo doesn't have the helical, blade that cuts the grass. It has a thing that spins around and just wax at it. So it leaves a very unsatisfactory cut. So those are grass cutters, according to him, not lawnmowers. Right. So this, so I know that you've been there because I've read a book that you wrote called Bollocks to Alton Towers. Yes. And that's a chapter in it, right? It is. Yeah. So you did this as part of a big research
Starting point is 00:03:06 mission. Yeah, it was the, the mission of the books to try and find places to go for a day out that were unexpected, unusual, esoteric, uncommercial, that sort of thing. And there's lots and lots of little museums all over Britain. You know, there's a pencil museum in Keswick, famously. Which is great. Oh, it is great. But they had a terrible time. They were really badly flooded out.
Starting point is 00:03:27 Now, Keswick does flood, doesn't it? Yeah, and I think it was last year. I think they might have only just reopened after this terrible, terrible flooding that they had. Pensils can survive flooding, can they? If it was a pen museum, that would have been a problem. Terrible. But you can latch the pencils together into a massive raft to escape. That's true.
Starting point is 00:03:43 Now, if it was a blotting paper museum, it would be ruined, wouldn't it? Yeah. Disaster. Did you see at the Lawmower Museum the celebrity lawnmowers? Certainly did. There is Brian May's Qualcast. Oh. They asked Nicholas Parsons for a donation of a lawmower, and he agreed.
Starting point is 00:04:02 And then, unfortunately, his shed was broken into, and his lawmower was stolen, so he gave them a pair of secretors instead. but the crowning bit of the celebrity department is Joe Pascuale Strimmer What's so great about that? Well, because I think just those three words marking out as being possibly the finest museum exhibit in the country, don't they? What I find really weird is that apparently they've got Albert Pierre points, the really famous hangman who hanged over 400 people, which is kind of a morbid thing to have in the museum. and someone on Pinterest pointed out when they went to the museum that it's actually hanging by a no is it so that's quite nice that is in dubious taste wow he just say the least he didn't moe any of the you know condemned people to death nor did he hang any lawn mows you're right that's been misrepresented i forgot to mention the other significant thing about the lawn mule museum is that it's upstairs
Starting point is 00:05:10 must feel fairly, we're in an alien habitat, aren't we? That's so funny. We're so far from the thing that we wish to cut. Like a Dalek Museum being upstairs. It's great. They've got a couple of other quirky things there as well. They've got a two-inch lawnmower, which is a lawnmower that cuts a two-inch strip through the grass.
Starting point is 00:05:28 Oh, wow. And Brian Radham, when he came across this, thought, what on earth could this possibly have been for? So he rang the manufacturer and said, why did you make a two-inch lawnmower? And they said, we deny ever making a two-inch lawnmower. So no one knows what this thing was for. Wow.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Do you know about Finnish postmen and lawn mowers? So postmen in Finland have started in the last year mowing their customers' lawns for a small fee because they're trying to find extra things to do because it doesn't take them all their time and maybe I think post is declining a little bit in terms of the amount of posts to be done. So on their quietest day, which is Tuesday,
Starting point is 00:06:03 you can pay them, I think, about 60 quid a month and they'll mow your lawn. Wow. But you have to provide the lawnmower. They're very insistent about that. That's like just on the postman, the lack of mail. In New Zealand now, there's one particular city that deliver KFC as well as your mail. Wrap it round the bucket with an elastic band.
Starting point is 00:06:22 They're doing a thing in France where you can get postmen to go and check on your elderly relatives. If you don't want to, I presume, you can pay. And it's called watch over my parents. Wow. And you can order them to call in and just check. No, just to check, they're all right. You know, either two, four or six times a week. So in pre-lawn mower days, when people used to have to mow the lawn by hand, by size, there would be tailor-made size, which would stay the same length.
Starting point is 00:06:48 And if you wanted to cut your grass different lengths in like the 17th, 18th centuries, then you added wooden blocks to your shoes or took them off. So if you had a lawn that you needed to be a bit longer, rather than changing the length of the size, or I guess the position where you held it, then you put some wooden planks under your shoes. What if you were really short and the scyth came in the same size? wouldn't you end up just hacking into the earth? No, you just have to put very large wooden blocks under your shoes. Stilts. I understand. Lorn mowing stilts.
Starting point is 00:07:16 I don't know the size with that long. Were they an accessory that you bought with them? I'm not sure if they came as a package. I'm sure they did a two-for-one deal. But you'd have to have all your gardeners would have to have different size blocks, wouldn't they, depending on their height? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:29 And there's probably an amusing mix-up where two of the gardeners got the wrong blocks on and then, you know, one bit of lawn was uneven. Yeah, that was comedy sketches. in the 18th century were all about incorrectly mown grass. Unless you had a very strict height policy when hiring gardeners. Yes. That would be the other thing.
Starting point is 00:07:49 Like, you know, you must be this high to go on this ride. Yes. You'd be one of those. I was trying to find other people who were, so lawnmower man allergic to grass. I managed to find a journalist who's allergic to newspaper. Yeah, it's really unfortunate. He still does his job, but he has to wear glass. but he has to wear gloves now whenever he's at the office.
Starting point is 00:08:10 And it's to do with the ink that they use inside. His name's Michael Dresser. He's been with the paper 38 years, so he's had this allergy for a really long time. And it's the pine resin that they use in the newspaper ink. So yeah, so he can't touch the newspapers. So he's allergic to that. Found a marathon runner who's allergic to exercise. You can be allergic to exercise.
Starting point is 00:08:30 In what way? So as soon as she started running and doing any kind of exercise, she would just come out with puffiness and rashes and all sorts. Does she still run marathons? Yeah, she does. Yeah. On other allergies, I think isn't Lisa Stansfield allergic to her own saliva? What?
Starting point is 00:08:51 How do you deal with that? I don't know. She was a singer. How do you deal with that? I guess get yourself a job which involves having your mouth open a lot of the time like she did. Oh. Wouldn't that provoke more saliva production? Good question. I haven't thought this through.
Starting point is 00:09:08 Maybe she had one of those dentist things in her mouth the whole time. You know when you're having any work done, they have that suction. Well, that would have showed up on her singles, though, wouldn't it? Yeah, but you might have mistaken that for that sort of Madonna-style microphone. Oh, that's true, yeah. She's the ones that goes into the mouth, and there's a constant background harm on all of her singles. It's just the dentist suction thing. That's incredible.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Yeah. The other thing from the Lormo Museum is they've got, there was a prototype of a robot lawnmower there, made by Huskvana, I think I've pronounced that right, which cost something like a million pounds to develop and had a retail price of £2,000 and was so expensive that obviously it didn't sell very well, which is a shame because it's got a brilliant anti-theft device built into it. If it detects it's being stolen, it starts screaming. So Huskvana developed a screaming robot lawnmower. If only Nicholas Parsons had had one, Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Chuzinski.
Starting point is 00:10:16 My fact this week is that Jimmy Carter once gave a speech in Poland where he accidentally announced he wanted to have sex with all Polish people. So when he said we never fired a bullet, was he just talking about sexual frustration? This was, so it was his first trip abroad as president. It was in 1977, and he had this translator called Stephen Seymour, And he was a good translator, but Polish was his fourth language. And he was having to translate into Polish. And usually a translator is translating from the language into English, if they're your translator.
Starting point is 00:10:50 But Jimmy Carter asked him to translate his speech into Polish for the Polish people. And he translated the phrase, I want to get to know the Polish people better as I want to have sex with the Polish. Or I want to have carnal sexual knowledge of the Polish people. So that's what he did. And he made all these other mistakes in this speech. as well. For instance, he opened it by trying to say, I left the US just this morning to come here. And he ended up saying, I left the US never to return. And so it's on it. He was moving to Poland.
Starting point is 00:11:21 That would be a major league defection coup for the Soviets. It would, wouldn't it? I read that another of the reasons was that Seymour, the original translator, was a really good translator of written Polish, but it wasn't quite so good at simultaneous spoken translation. I see. So maybe that was something to do with it too. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:41 Yeah. So he should have been writing it down on a big screen behind people. Yeah. So my favorite Jimmy Carter mistranslation in one of his speeches is that we've all got one. He's got a greatest hits list. He was in Japan and he was giving a speech and this is post him being president. When he started the speech with a joke and halfway through he realized, oh no, this is not going to translate. I'm telling a joke and the punchline's just going to come out all.
Starting point is 00:12:09 wrong through translation of this Japanese translator. So I'm just going to get this weird, confused silence. But he's like, I'm halfway through. Got to do it. So he delivers the joke. And then the Japanese translator translate. And it gets this massive laugh, humongous laugh. And so afterwards, he went up to the guy and said, that is incredible that you
Starting point is 00:12:26 managed to translate that joke. You must be an incredible translator. And the translator said, ah, no, what I did actually was say, President Carter just told a joke, everyone must laugh. That resulted in this giant. nor of his lap. What a dude. Is that translator still working?
Starting point is 00:12:44 And does he do stand-up gigs in the UK, please? So did you know that Jimmy Carter set up a hotline that you could ring to report people for being too cool? This is true. He was a big environmentalist, Jimmy Carter, who set up the Department of the Environment in the States. And he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. And one of the things he did was that he, at some point, he passed a law saying that air conditioning in government buildings and businesses couldn't go any lower than 26.7 degrees Celsius, which is 80 Fahrenheit. That is quite hard. It is quite hot, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:13:24 And this affected 55 million people who all had a very sweaty time. But he set up a hotline so that you could ring and report people if they turn their aircon lower than that. That's great. And they could be given a $10,000 fine. No. Of course, Reagan took the soda panel straight off, didn't he? He did, yeah. When he went to the White House, put it up in the face.
Starting point is 00:13:46 He said they were a joke. Jimmy Carter has won three Grammys. Has he? Yeah. For what? Spoken word. So all the spoken word of his books that he keeps pumping out. He's written a lot of books, and he's won three Grammys,
Starting point is 00:14:02 but he's been nominated a lot more times. I think he, looking through the last. list of spoken word Grammys. He has been nominated more than anyone else. Really? Yeah. He lost in 1999 to Christopher Reap. He lost in 2002 to Quincy Jones. In 2008, he lost to Obama, but he was up against Obama, as was Bill Clinton. So three of the nominees were presidents of the United States of America, the Grammys. That was the big presidential race of 2008, wasn't it? That was the one I was watching. Yeah. Then he lost in 2010 to Michael J. Fox. Then he lost in 2015 to Joan rivers, but then he won in 2016.
Starting point is 00:14:38 That feels like a pity win. After all that effort, that feels like... Yeah, exactly. Just give it to him. I'll go away. I love Jimmy Carter. Do you? He's just the best guy. He's just the most principled moral guy.
Starting point is 00:14:50 So he's the only president who doesn't really take speaking fees. And any speaking fee he has ever taken, which is always minimal, goes to charity. Do you think he stopped taking them because he keeps making such massive gas at every single point? Insulting the audience by accident via translation. Always just coming on to whoever's listening.
Starting point is 00:15:09 He still gives, I was listening to a podcast, which is really good. It's the Washington Post presidential podcast, and they did about an hour on every president. So it followed Jimmy Carter from start to finish. You've got quite esoteric taste. An hour. We've had 45 now.
Starting point is 00:15:26 I mean, I haven't listened to, like, Rutherford B. Hayes or anything yet. I don't know how I'd fare there. But he still gives Sunday school classes and people come from all over the world to listen, but he's an evangelical, born-again Christian, so he just gives religious lessons at Sunday school every week. He's just such a decent guy.
Starting point is 00:15:45 Claims to have seen a UFO, hasn't he? Yeah, he's also a bit weird. It's a very famous incident of Jimmy Carter claiming to have seen a UFO. One of the promises he made in his presidential campaign was that he would investigate all extraterrestrial experiences or something, I think. And then when he got into power, he said he couldn't, because it was all too secret or something. He's too busy now to go,
Starting point is 00:16:05 around, it is a Geiger counter for ectoplasm. He builds houses, doesn't he, as well? Yeah, and amazing furniture. Does he? Come on, how good is the furniture? It sells for, I think I might have mentioned this before, but if I haven't. Yeah, he builds, like, beds and chest and drawers. Did you say it sells for a lot of money?
Starting point is 00:16:26 Yeah, thousands. Yeah, but how much would it sell for if you sold it under a pseudonym? Would it necessarily be an eccentric thing to do? Yeah, he sent his first text three years ago, Jimmy Carter Oh, well done Jimmy. Yeah. And his second text, this was the message of his second text he ever said. This was, I did not mean to send that first text about wanting to have sex with you.
Starting point is 00:16:47 I am sorry. I'm still using Seymour to translate all my stuff. Yeah, no, his second text was, that was my first text message. Yeah, he... Was his first text and this is my first text. Has it gone on like that since? Yeah, I know. It was to his grandson. And it was, did you see Colbert last night?
Starting point is 00:17:12 P. He ends it with P. Which I think he's referred to as Papa. But his grandson is on Twitter, so he did a screen grab of the picture. It might be president. Might just be a real ass about it. Or patio furniture maker. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact.
Starting point is 00:17:37 My fact this week is that narcissist, don't like looking at themselves. It's not weird. So this is a new study that's come out of Austria from the University of Graz. And the idea is that they took a pool of around 600 people and surveyed them to see whether or not they were narcissistic.
Starting point is 00:17:54 And so out of that, they found 43 people that they selected, 21 who scored really highly as being narcissistic, and 22 with lower scores. And they were shown pictures of themselves and close family friends and so on and their brain activity, which was monitored. Every time they saw the picture of themselves, when their eyes locked onto themselves,
Starting point is 00:18:13 it registered as not enjoying it. Yeah, which is... And that was not enjoying it more so than non-narcissists. Or maybe just enjoying it the same amount or... Not having a special surge of enjoyment, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I've just realised,
Starting point is 00:18:28 because obviously narcissus in the myth does like looking at himself. You've just got this fact. Yeah. He likes it a lot. Yeah. To his detriment, it turns out. But does he die? He doesn't...
Starting point is 00:18:39 die, but he gets turned into a flower. I would say that is a kind of death. That is a plot twist I did not see coming. It's a daffodil, isn't it, that he was turned into? Well, we think it's a narcissus. It's like a daffodil. There's a flower called narcissus, which is, yeah. And they sort of droop over the riverbank, Daniel,
Starting point is 00:18:54 and they look like they're looking at themselves with their little trumpets. Yeah. So that's why he was turned into one of those by the gods. I think he starved to death first because he was so captivated by his reflection. And I should just say, for the pedants out there, when anyone who's watched QI that we don't know that the etymology of narcissists, the flower, comes from narcissists the person. To me it seems so obvious that it definitely does.
Starting point is 00:19:15 It's a flower that he was turned into and it drapes over lakes. But some people say it's related to a word that means to poison or something. Okay. They might be totally unrelated to each other. Do you know how to tell if someone's a narcissist? You just ask him. Because they don't care. They'll say, yeah, I'm a narcissist.
Starting point is 00:19:35 Oh, that's true, yeah. The psychologists have developed a one-question test for narcissism. Wow. And it's a pretty good one. And then there's a more advanced one, which is a 40-question test. But it replicates pretty closely the one-question test. Do you guys know about the Anna-Face facial beauty analysis? No.
Starting point is 00:19:54 This is the thing you can do. I thought, okay, well, let's do something about looking at yourself. So I went on this website, and it takes a photo of your face, and then it analyzes you, and it gives you your facial beauty analysis. Sounds like the kind of thing a narcissist would do. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. So I was just, I was role-playing.
Starting point is 00:20:10 So this is what my, this is how my facial beauty, beauty analysis reads. Your nose is too long for your ears. Your inner ocular distance is too big for your eyes. Your nose is too wide for your face width. Your face is too narrow. Your nose is too wide for your mouth. Wow. Look, only some of that is true.
Starting point is 00:20:32 It's pretty brutal, isn't it? What I got stuck on, though, is your nose is too long for your ears. How do those things correlate? How are you not that your ears are too short for your nose? Yeah. Why's the nose to blame? What's my nose done? I don't think you could fit it in your ears, even if you wanted to.
Starting point is 00:20:52 No, I don't think so. God knows I've tried. Well, it's not that long, then, is it? If you can't even fit it into your ears. So what was it trying to tell you? I think it succeeded in telling me exactly what it wanted to tell you. It may just be an exercise in, I don't know, abuse, honesty, no idea. What's the URL for that?
Starting point is 00:21:13 It's Anna face, A-N-A-Face. Anna-Face, definitely doing that. I was looking up stuff about looking in mirrors. Yeah. You know the thing about animals looking in mirrors, which I think we must have mentioned before. That they do it? That they do it.
Starting point is 00:21:28 And the way to tell if they can tell that they are the animal in the mirror is by painting a dot on them, and then if they try and get rid of the dot, that's how they know. This was invented by a guy called Gordon Gallup Jr. This was his innovation experiment in the 1970s, although one of the first people to do it was Charles Darwin, who in 1838 went to London Zoo and entered an orangutan's cage with a mirror to experiment.
Starting point is 00:21:54 Wow, really? That's been done all this time. Yeah, wow. And the orangutan loved it. He said she was astonished beyond measure. But did you know it was her effect? I don't know. I don't think he did the dot test. Do you know about the 17th century fashion for having a mirror hanging on the wall of your drawing room?
Starting point is 00:22:13 And then next to it, an oil painting of exactly the reflection in the mirror. What? No. Really? Yeah. Why? I couldn't find out anything more about this. I just, I came across this fact and then couldn't get anywhere further with it.
Starting point is 00:22:27 But it was, I don't know whether it was in order to show off the artist or in order to show off what the mirror is. can see. Yeah. Right. What hassle, because if you ever wanted to redecorate, you always have to hang
Starting point is 00:22:38 those two next to each other then. Yeah. And in the same position, actually, obviously, because you can't move the mirror, can you? Otherwise, it's not going to reflect the same thing. And also, if you walk up to the wrong one,
Starting point is 00:22:48 you might think you're a vampire. There was another weird fashion for the clawed glass, which was about the same time, I think the 18th century, which was a period of time where people decided that beautiful views
Starting point is 00:23:03 landscapes actually looked more attractive in mirrors than they did in real life, just with the bare eyes. And so this clawed glass was invented and people would walk up mountains and they'd take a clawed glass with them. And the idea was that you got to the top of a mountain and then you get to take out this mirror and it would be a tinted mirror. So it gave it a bit of a ethereal dreamlike quality and you'd get to look at the view in a mirror and then go down again. But you'd have to face away, wouldn't you? From the view. Yeah. Look into the mirror. See the view behind you. Imagine how bizarre that is. So you're facing, away from the thing you've come up the thing to see
Starting point is 00:23:35 so that you can look at it in the map, which is exactly like the selfie thing where you get a load of people facing away from the view with the camera held out in front of them. So that's the original selfie. That's it. It's sort of the original selfie. Yes.
Starting point is 00:23:49 Yeah, kind of. We all got quite excited about that for a minute. It was good. So listen, Narcissusis then was, because he was in love with his own reflection, he might not have liked seeing a picture of him. because that would have been the right way round. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:24:05 Ah, yes. Absolutely. So that's why people tend to much prefer their reflection to pictures, isn't it? Yeah. Because the image you're used to seeing is the one in the mirror. But as soon as you see a photo, you think, oh, my face is probably. Your nose is too long for your ears. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show.
Starting point is 00:24:30 And that is Andy. My fact is that clenching one's buttocks is a technique Christy's auctioneers are taught to stop their hands shed. But it doesn't actually say where they're being told to put their hands while they're clenching their buttocks. Yeah, so this is a piece about extraordinary things that Christie's has found out over the years. It's by Christie's. And one of them was this amazing fact about how the auction has calmed themselves down. Wow. Is this them holding priceless bits of art, or is this when they're actually conducting the auction?
Starting point is 00:25:02 I think when you're conducting an auction, because you're standing at the front in front of everyone and you're gesturing. So you have to. look in control of the situation I suppose. So that apparently comes to you down. I don't know what the mechanism is whether simply the focusing on another muscle in your body removes the tension from your hands.
Starting point is 00:25:19 Yeah, must do, right? I guess so. I don't know. I'm trying it now and I think it makes you a bit more shaky. So I guess the shaking is because they talk about auctioneers as being a sort of an acting gig almost. You get up on stage and you need to make the audience love you because that's
Starting point is 00:25:35 going to make an auction successful. And on Christie's site they were saying with interviews of various auctioneers that the first 10 seconds is where you need to grab them otherwise you might not have a successful auction which seems bizarre if you're there to buy things do you know what I mean like it's you're not buying off this guy it's credibility you're buying because there's but you are it's so I mean I remember going to a which is quite similar what's it called when you go to a charity thing and raffle
Starting point is 00:26:01 no the one that's above a raffle where you bid for super raffle One of those things where you donate a holiday Or you donate your mansion for a week Oh yeah, I've been to loads of things Where have been to those of things where people have donated their mansion? Where have I been? We mix indifference circles What is it called?
Starting point is 00:26:21 It's a charity auction Yeah, so you know when you go to a charity auction It's you inspire people to buy stuff Just by being that charming I remember going to one recently And Clive Anderson was doing the auctioning And people definitely bid on stuff That they would absolutely not have
Starting point is 00:26:35 had he not kind of cajoled them a bit here and persuaded them a bit there. I think it makes such a difference because it's in the moment, isn't it? That's what affects you in an auction. That's true. I did a gig not too long ago with a Christie's auctioneer, and it was a very rowdy room, and it was a charity night. It was raising money for this new university for brain studies, and he was given a lot of stuff to auction off,
Starting point is 00:26:56 and the room was chaotic, as you would expect. It was in the VNA. Everyone was just busy on round tables eating. So he had to try and maintain their attention in order to sell. all this stuff. And he did this trick. When he felt like he lost the crowd, he went, he made that noise. And every time the crowd would silence, look back to him and then he'd continue on with the auction. But he did it like 50 times during the night. Well, they all ponies.
Starting point is 00:27:22 It was an amazing technique. Like, that's how he shut up an entire room. Yeah. One of the things I didn't realize is that auctioneers will keep an eye on each other as well. So one of them, if they feel that, you know, if auctioneer A is up there and he doesn't think he's quite got the room. He's not inspiring them enough. He can nod to auctioneer B who'll come up and take his place and try and raise the temperature of the room. And it works the other way around as well. Auctioneer B can just go up to him and tap him on the shoulder and go, you've lost him, mate, I'll do it. Wow. It's like a tag team. Ouch, imagine if that was true in all performing arts. Imagine Andy, if you were bombing one night
Starting point is 00:27:53 and Dan just comes up behind you, taps you on the shoulder and says I'll take it from him, me. What do you mean imagine? Well, remember, I think it's the word you're looking for. They used to, in the old days, I have to do mock auctions, the auctioneers at Christie's, before the bosses of the company to just make sure that their skills were good. The bosses would just sit around with the drink and then the auctioneers would have to do a mock auction. It's all a bit more professional now, so they get voice actors and acting coaches in to teach them about engaging the voice and maybe also about posture and engaging the audience, I don't know. Well, Christie does in-house courses if you want to get into it. you spend, you do a workshop with one of the other, yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:33 Wolverhampton actually has a two-year degree for auctioneering. Yeah, they teach you to auctioneer and to value things as well. How much do I bet for this place on the Yorkshire University auction course? I get £9,000, $9,000,000, $9,000,000, $10,000,000, head ten. Yeah, so did anybody look up butto-clenching? No. No more than usual. So butter clenching, you're all aware of the international penny-chuffing competition, are you?
Starting point is 00:29:00 Well, this takes place annually at the new inn in Wedmore in Somerset, where the contestants have to clench three two-pence coins in between the cheeks of their butters, then walk, waddle or hop four yards across the pub before depositing the coins in a pint glass. Wow. Oh my God. You get one point for every coin you get in the glass. And the last report that I could find from 2015, three people scored nine points. Is that the full...
Starting point is 00:29:32 So they managed three journeys across the pub. Do you have to pick them up with your buttocks? That isn't indicated. Okay. Nor is what happens to the coins afterwards. Whether they go into a particular till. Is it a full pint and do you have to down it once you've finished? No, it's just a pine glass.
Starting point is 00:29:52 That's a shame. That would make the competition more fun, I think. It would, wouldn't it? Yeah. That is fantastic, though. I don't like to brag. I think I could do that. well there's only one way to find out
Starting point is 00:30:03 to Somerset here's the other thing of course right if you put yourself in the room there that's a lot of bum isn't it yes now what happens is apparently they have they have some sort of modesty blanket that they put around themselves while hopping waddling
Starting point is 00:30:19 or walking four yards across a pub with some money up their ass didn't David Souchay the Poirot actor He did a lot of butt clenching as well. Did he? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:33 To get into the roll. To get the waddle, right? Yeah. He wanted to be as pert as an auctioneer, didn't it? Yeah. Is it called the Soucher sashay? No. Have you made that up?
Starting point is 00:30:43 Yeah. We'll keep it. Trademark. It feels like it's not mine to trademark, I don't think. Guys, telegraph headline, David Souchay. I stuck coin in buttocks to walk like pyro. And also to win this competition at the new inn in Wedmore. No, he was caught.
Starting point is 00:31:00 bought in a pub in Somerset with a modesty blanket around the places and money up his ass and he said, oh, I was doing it for the role. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy.
Starting point is 00:31:25 At Andrew Hunter M. Jason. At Jason Hoseley. And Chazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. or you can go to our website,
Starting point is 00:31:35 No Such Thing as a Fish.com, where we've got all of our previous episodes. We've also got links to our tour in October and November and also a link to our book coming out November 2nd, The Book of the Year. Okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then.
Starting point is 00:31:50 Goodbye.

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