No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Innocent Apple

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss stickers, smartphones and a man who spent a lot of time cooped up. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now, before we start this week's show, I just want to tell you one little thing about it, and that is that it was actually recorded quite a long time ago, all the way back in February, in fact. And the reason I want to tell you that is because, first of all, it's obviously in the office, and we're all still in our homes at the moment. And also because there'll be a few things that we might say in there that might really perhaps give away that we didn't record it this week, uh, for. instance. I do talk about Jasper Carrot for a while and that probably would have been a dated reference any time that we'd said it in the last five years. But hey, when you listen, you'll get the idea. So enjoy the show and just marvel about how young we all sounded back in February. Okay, on with the podcast. And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, coming to a to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chisinski. 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, Anna. My fact this week is that in the 18th century, women express their political beliefs

by wearing decorative stickers on their faces. Wow. What kind of stickers did they say, like vote labor or? Yeah, screw you, Boris. Just scrawled all over their forehead. Very prescient of them. Women have amazing foresight.

And foreheads. A sticker on. This one, so facial stickers were in this huge fashion for about 200 years. And about the turn of the 18th century, they suddenly became political. And so there was one commentator, for instance,

who said that he went to the opera and he saw two parties of very fine women as he said, arranged in battle formation against each other. And he said one group was wearing patches and stickers on the left side of their foreheads and the other on the right. It became apparent they were wig supporters and Tory supporters. And I looked into this and this was a thing. So it wasn't the stickers were just like little like beauty spots or something,

but it was where you wore them that was important. Is that it? Yes, that seems to be it. Yes. So they started off as for decoration. But it got to the extent that there were some marriage contracts. where women would insist before they married their husband that regardless of the husband's political opinions,

the wife should be able to patch as she pleased. Wow. Wow. And so you would have one or two things, but did it get to the point where people, you know when you see full-face tattoos? Did you ever see people just completely? You would see, not completely, the full-face,

but you might see lots of these, like, fake beauty spots, and you could supposedly identify prostitutes because their faces had so many of these patches on them. Was that a sign of being? being sexy though, having lots of stickers. Well, having one sticker was supposed to be. And the reason is, supposedly Venus, the goddess of beauty, she had one mole on her face. And it was by that one imperfection that you could see how beautiful the rest of her face was.

And the idea was that they were kind of copying that. And by having like one little beauty spot, it would show the paleness of your skin perhaps or, you know, show off the rest of your skin. So if you have lots and lots of stickers, that means you're really, really beautiful because you've got. You need so many imperfections to disguise how fit you are. It could be that. You wouldn't believe what I look like without these stickers on, because it look really nice. It could have been that you are covering the symptoms of STDs.

It's a real gamble. So, sorry, I didn't think that we had glue sticker technology in the, when is this, 18th century. We had glue? Sure, okay. Were they kind of fuzzy felt stickers, that kind of thing? I actually don't think we had fuzzy felt. They would be made of various things So they could be made of silk or taffeter

Or leather sometimes And then they'd have Mouth fur apparently Mouth fur Mouth fur? Like on your tongue? No Have I suddenly developed a lisp? It sounded like mouse from where I was at

But Okay Oh mouse fur, okay I read mouth as well Ah Okay, right in And tell us what you heard So, and then they'd have on the back

Often a surface that you could lick So women tended to take them out of their handbags and lick them to attach them to their face. So you get very thin paper that does that. Or they had adhesive, so they'd just stick it on with some glue. Yeah, but sometimes the adhesive wasn't so great. So there was an article in The Spectator that spoke about a woman who had a beauty spot on her forehead, but by the end of the evening it had gone to her chin.

They got more and more elaborate as well, didn't they? Is it caught on? So I think it started in France, and the French called the Mouche, which is for flies, because they look like little flies landing on your face. but yeah they expanded to be weird shapes so by the end of the 18th century you'd have them cut into stars or sort of moons or crown shapes or any shape you wanted really you still get those don't you on small children yeah yeah and adults who like a bit of fun yeah why are you wearing that weird puppy dog on the middle of your forehead I was so considering doing it this morning

bottle out of it again yeah no you do get them like a little kind of um I don't know, stars and... Yeah. I've been very brave at the dentist today. All sorts. They don't stick those on your forehead now, did they? No, actually, I've got... I used to have one of those, but it was a safety pin one, so that's not for the forehead.

No. That's for the clothes. Safety pin, really? Oh, it's a badge. I'm describing a badge. But what's interesting about that is, I think you're only brave at the dentist once, so you don't need it to be a badge. You only need it to be a sticker. Do you know what? You're right.

I'm confusing it with my... I've been to a party at Pizza Hut. badge, which is a badge, because that's the thing that lasts a life. If you go to a party at Pizza Hut in the early 90s. Yeah, you want to show off about that, don't you? That's why you wear badges. You don't want to be wearing a badge that says, I'd be brave at the dentist just to show off. You feel pretty silly at the military parade, wouldn't you, next to all the other medals?

It was just being brave at the dentist award. I got this one for bravery. I saw there's some drawings that people have done of some of the designs, and there was a horse and one and I think that's been questioned of it. That was satire, was it. That was someone taking, yeah, taking the piss out of how absurd they've gone. What a shame. I thought that was real too.

Yeah, I was really hoping that that would be, because I just thought how interesting heads must have been back then. No, I don't know. Well, just way more. If you're sitting on the tube and someone sat across from me with a horse and carriage drawn on their head and they had other cartoons, you know, I wouldn't need the paper, just read their head.

People still have tattoos these days. So do you just, when you're sat up the tube, just read people's tattoos? I do, but they give me a look that says, I'm not a friendly. Oh, well, this is the thing about other kinds of stickers Is that they could be indicators of how friendly or not someone is So bumper stickers

If people have bumper stickers on their car They tend to be more aggressive and territorial drivers Yeah, that makes sense Study in 2008 by Colorado State University And they surveyed people saying Do you have bumper stickers on your car And do you drive like a bastard And basically, people who said yes to one

Said yes to the other They said, yeah, I drive more territorial More aggressively, I do not respond constructively on the road when people get in my way. And how often are these the baby on board stickers? Because I do think that's a response. Well, I read that article and actually it said that it doesn't matter what's on the sticker, right? So you might have a sticker that says everyone needs to be kind to each other and you're still going to drive like a maniac. Yeah.

So baby on board as well. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Likely to be aggressive. Just one more thing on an alternative use for stickers for yourself, for decoration, is to cover blemishes. and so I think that's that's sort of where facial stickers

might have come from originally but men wore them quite a lot to cover blemishes or to accentuate them and so if men had been to war for instance it became quite common for them to come back and they'd put a scar sticker over their scar

I think if a scar sounded to fade or something then you'd put a big black scar there and so there's for instance there's a bit in all's well that ends well which now makes sense if you know it where Bertram comes back from war and it says he's got a patch of velvet on his face and it's unclear if there's a scar underneath. And it was sort of a thing that people did if they hadn't really seen much

military action and they were a bit of a coward and they'd run away at the first sign anyway, is that they'd suddenly put a big blemage on their face to imply that they'd been shot in the head. Wow. That's amazing. I've got a little scar on my face. Maybe I'll try and accentuate it. Have you? With some mouse fur. I want to do one of the sides. I'm not sure which side. That's a little one, yeah. It's one where you got shot in the Civil War, isn't it? It was, yeah. Obscene bumper stickers can sometimes be a matter for the law.

Okay. So there are these lawsuits that happen in the USA over whether you're allowed a particular bumper sticker or not or whether it's basically creating a public disturbance just by having it on your car. So in 2008, a guy went to the Georgia Supreme Court because he had a shit happens bumper sticker. Okay.

And he won. And then, more recently, this bit is very rude, by the way, but the police in Florida arrested and charged at a man who had a bumper sticker which said, I eat ass. And it was really big and it's right in the middle of his back windscreen as well. So there's no way if you're driving along that you won't see it. And was he referring to donkey meat, do we know? I'm not sure.

That wasn't his defense actually. I mean, it absolutely should have been. But the police pulled him over and they said, can you amend it so it wasn't offensive? And he said, well, how do you suggest I'd do that? And they said, can you remove the second S from ass? So it would be I eat as. But then the grammar police come out. Guys, who's the grandfather, the god of stickers?

The god of stickers. The god of stickers. You all know this. Football albums. Panini. Yeah. Oh, no. I was thinking of Mr. Avery.

Oh, Avery. Stanton. Sorry. Sorry. Well, because you never do any of the office admin, Andy. You are not familiar with Avery stickers. But those of us who post letters every once in a while. This feels like more of a, it feels like the same.

whole fact has been building up to a grudge. No, so Stanton Averymate was the inventor of the self-adhesive stickers, as in you didn't need to lick it, you didn't need to add glue to it. And he still dominates the label market today. So I was looking into him. And he, so he built his first sticker machine. I love this, by marrying together a motor from a washing machine and a sewing machine, sewing machine parts.

So he smushed them together and generated a shedload of stickers. The company was initially called cum clean products, spelling come, K-U-M, which I think is a good thing was changed. How did he make his glue? He was actually very cagey about the process, but he was so pretty tired. He was super poor, and so he really dragged himself up from the bottom. He lived in a rented chicken coop while he was... He couldn't even afford the deposit on a chicken coop. Did he pay the chickens?

I don't know if the chickens own the coop. I think they were also renting. Oh, wow. Terrible flatmates. You get eggs every morning. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Do you want to eat an egg if your flatmate has just laid it before your horrified eyes?

I refuse to eat food that's come out of any of my friends' asses. However, delicious. That's amazing. Yeah, so cool. He could have written, I eat, and then in brackets, eggs that have come out of a chicken. Close brackets. Ah, so good.

Another strong defense. So many arguments are going up for. So he tried a bunch of businesses. How did he get a washing machine in the chicken coop? So I think this was post-chicken coop. And he got it because he married a slightly wealthy a lady who lent him a bit of money. Wow. And he thought,

the washing machine. Should we go back to your place, I'm thine? Chickens out tonight. So anyway... Did you invite them to the hendoo? We got laid that night. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the very first print run

of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had to be pulped after a bookstore owner discovered someone had sneaked a drawing of a penis into one of the illustrations. The first suspect has to be the illustrator, is she? Yes, we genuinely don't know. We don't know if it was the illustrator. We don't know if it was the photo engraver

at the actual factory where they were printing the book. What we do know is, when these books came out, at the end of Chapter 32, Huck Finn is meeting his aunt, Sally, and Uncle Silas, and Uncle Silas has a big erect penis drawn in in the illustration itself. and as a result, 30,000 copies had to be pulled. And they definitely check the plot, and they don't, it's not part of the storyline

that references Uncle Silas as erected in this. Weirdly, I read the book, and I can confirm there isn't a bit where Uncle Silas has an erection and is showing it off to his family. That must have been very disappointing when you got to the end of that. It's the only reason I bought the first place.

So this is obviously, it's a very important book in American literature. Ernest Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from one book and is called Huckleberry Finn. And the idea was it was the first book that used the vernacular of Americans. At that point, Americans were really writing in the tone of British and European authors, not using the day-to-day language and he kind of set the tone. Unfortunately, it's also a book that's laced with racism

and that's caused huge problems basically since publication. It's not a book that's sort of not been contemplated. controversial throughout the years. The language use is difficult and racist, and we should say that it's set. Mark Twain wrote it in the 80s, but it's set about 40 years earlier in the 1840s, isn't it? Yeah.

And the main plot of Huckabby Finn, for anyone who hasn't read it, is basically it's about Huck Finn, who is this kind of poor kid who, how old is he, 12 or 13? And he runs away, along with a runaway slave, who is called Jim.

And they run away together, and they are good friends, and Jim is a very sympathetic character, but at the same time, very problematically drawn. Yeah, one of the ones, Not drawn with an erect penis, like Uncle Silas, we should say. People have objected to stuff other than that,

so it was extremely controversial as soon as it was published, largely because of the kind of crudeness of some of the language and that was written in this native dialect. It wasn't just ordinary American dialect, it was proper Mississippi 1840s dialect, and it was banned for bad grammar and employment of inelegant expressions. Things like in 1905, a Brooklyn library banned it, because Huck not only itched, but he scratched.

So apparently that's disgusting. And he said sweat when he should have said perspiration. So Mark Twain had been kind of unhappy with the way that publishing had been going. And he decided he didn't want to have normal publishers like before and get the money that way. He wanted to have a subscription service. So he sent people door to door with like, you know, the first chapter and said, look, there's this new book coming out. How do you fancy buying it? And then we'll send you all the chapters in future.

And he basically, because he did this, it meant he could have full control of it, which meant he had full control of all of the illustrations. And it meant that when the illustrators kept sending him stuff, he was like, don't like that, don't like that, don't like that, don't like that, do like that. Love that penis. So is that maybe why they pranked him? That's one theory that the illustrator hated him so much because he kept asking him to change things. That he was like, right, fine.

But they offered a massive reward to the pressmen working on the novel. a $500 award, which would have been a lot of money today. And no one fessed up, so there's no culprit. And is the investigation still open? I think the offer, the reward is still available. He had a terrible relationship with his sort of typesetters and proofreaders and everyone like that, didn't he? Which might be why they were so pissed off with him.

He hated them. And it does sound like they kept on trying to improve his punctuation and grammar, which was deliberately vernacular. And once upon getting a text back and seeing the corrections that had been made, He wrote to a friend, I've telegraphed orders to have the proofreader shot without giving him time to pray. So it was tense, I think. If someone wrote that about me, I'd draw a penis on their picture. It wasn't the most successful book that he published with that firm.

So the first two books that that firm published were Huckleberry Finn and the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, ex-president. And it was pretty much the last thing Grant did was write this book. And it was so successful that he gave Grant's widow, the biggest ever royalty check in American publishing history. It was absolutely massive. And it was thanks to that door-to-door technique that James mentioned because it was war veterans.

So it was Civil War veterans going door-to-door selling the book. And that's a pretty strong sell, you know. I might be wrong in saying this, but from the story that I know about that, it's that when Ulysses S. Grant died, his wife was really struggling financially and was not given any help from anyone. And Mark Twain published the book

and gave her that high amount of royalties before he knew it was going to be successful so that she had money to live off for the rest of her life. Apparently it's an extraordinary book, that autobiography. Really? Yeah, I've read so many things about it being the best book by anyone in government ever

as a solid... It's just incredible, apparently. Surely not better than The Art of the Deal, surely. Surely not better than Jacob Rees-Mogg's book about the Victorians. Can't be better than that, can it? Now, if we want to talk about offensive language

and things. Bart Twain wrote the first book on a typewriter in America. There's a bit of dispute over whether it was Tom Sawyer or another one of his books. It's usually credited as Tom Sawyer. But he used to love writing on a typewriter, and no one really had it at the time. So people used to write him letters,

and he would write letters back on his typewriter. They would then write back to him asking about the typewriter, and that got so annoying with so many people writing back to him, asking him, holy molly, what is this? This is incredible that he stopped writing letters using his typewriter. Really? She's got inundated, yeah. I really love his correspondence because he didn't really much like getting them a lot of the time, did he? I read one that he got in 1901, and the letter said,

Dear Mr. Mark Twain, I am a little girl six years old. I have read your stories ever since they first came out. I have a cat named kitty and a dog named pup. I like to guess puzzles. Did you write a story for the Herald competition? I hope you will allow you. answer my letter, yours truly Augusta Cortret. To which he replied, well, no, he didn't reply. He just wrote a comment on it saying, lay the attempt of a middle-aged liar to pull an autograph. He invented one game for kids, which I think sounds pretty cool. So he measured out a 817 foot path of his driveway, and he marked every single foot. And that was.

supposed to be a year and it was the year from 1066 when William the Conqueror arrived in Britain and the idea is you would walk along the path and at each point when there was a new king or queen in England or Britain then you would put a stake in the ground and you would be like oh this is Edward the first this is Henry the second blah blah blah and it was a way of having fun but also learning your kings and queens because in those days education was very much wrote learning like you just had to learn all these things and this was a fun way of doing it Or a very annoyingly slow way of getting to the front door after a long day in the office.

But he turned it into a board game, didn't he? Or he tried to. It sounds really complicated. I didn't fully understand it, even asked to read it. I thought it sounded quite, it sounded a bit like battleship. So basically, it was another sort of history date memorization game, and essentially you'd have a chart with a series of dates on it, and each player would say a date, so you say 1918.

And then the other player has to say an event that happened on it. that date, say, the end of the First World War. See, I cleverly chose my date in advance, so I'd have something to say for it. I mean, you also chose a date that was nearly 10 years after Twain died when no one could possibly guess what was going to happen. True. But then a player puts a pin in that date if they get it right. And if they don't get it right, they don't get a pin. And I guess when you've covered up all your dates you've won, that's quite fun. Yeah. For a nerd. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that before vaccination was invented, the main method of inoculation against smallpox was to powder scabs and blow them up your nose. Or to get someone else to blow them up your nose, I suppose. It's very hard to blow up your own nose. And this was how inoculation worked for a long time. It was done in China a thousand years ago. This was the method. They knew about this. And it did work, didn't it?

It worked reasonably well. So if you were healthy, you would get some smallpox scabs and you would leave them for a little while because fresh scabs were likely to give you the infection properly. So they would be dried, aged smallpox scabs and they would be powdered up and then they would be blown up your nose with a special silver blowpipe for the procedure as well. The Chinese doctors had special blowpipes to do this. And then apparently the right nostrils was used for boys and the left for girls And you would maybe get some mild symptoms And some people did actually just then get full-blown smallpox But most people then got it you know some mild symptoms

And then were resistant to any following exposure It was a low percentage wasn't it? Yeah, yeah So this was a really decent way of doing it before we had the method of vaccination And we didn't know about this is that right? The 18th century took about 700 years to get over And it works by the same method as vaccination, right? Which is that it's an attenuated or weakened version of the disease in a scab.

And your body then makes antibodies that can fight against that and then it can fight against the main thing. Is that right? Yeah. There was another version where you had some powdered scab as well or you had some pus from a smallpox pustule and you would make a little scratch on your skin and then you would just pour that pus or rub that powdered scab into your skin. and that worked too. And that's called variolation, because variola was the Latin for smallpox. In 2011, the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond

had some things from its collection, and one of them was a letter from the 1870s that had a smallpox scab in it. And the idea was that the person who wrote the letter in the 19th century was sending it to his father, it had been taken from the arm of a child, and his father was going to make it into dust. and inoculate people.

Yeah. But then it never got to the recipient. And so they just found this letter. And of course, immediately the Census for Disease Control came in the hazmat suits. And said, holy shit,

we don't need to be having this, that the public can see this because smallpox has been eradicated basically, hasn't it? And so, yeah, in the end, there was some of the virus on this scab still, but it wasn't deadly enough.

I mean, it must have attenuated pretty hard for by that time. When was it? It was from 1876 and they found it in 2011. Wow. That is really spooky, finding it and not knowing what it is. You know, you just think you found a little button or something. Or maybe it's like a little sticker to put on your place.

But all these doctors had their own different methods of doing variolation and there were some celebrity doctors in Britain in the 17th, 18th century who worked this out. So have you heard of Johnny Notions? No. Johnny Notions. Sounds like he's got some weird ideas. Well, he was a Scottish doctor And he had a really successful method for variolating

Because he would collect the pus first of all And everyone had their own method of making it a bit less deadly basically So he would dry it with peat smoke So he had a lovely sort of smoky flavor for the past Very nice And then he would bury it in the ground Between sheets of glass Okay, with some campful

Then he would keep it there for seven or eight years Wow It's like he's making a whiskey, isn't it? Yeah, genuinely is. And then he would insert it, and he would then put a cabbage leaf on top as a plaster. And this was apparently a really good way of doing it, and it just gave you the nice amount. I suppose it does take the edge off the pus, doesn't it? It's a nice petee, cabbaggy flavour to it.

Apparently, you were more likely to get a job if you could be seen to have smallpox scars. Because then the suggestion was, oh, great, you can work with us, you're not going to pass it on. You've had it already. That was seen as a sort of, oh, great, safe work, mate. So two of the earliest people who worked with inoculation were Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France. And they fell out with each other because Pasteur once was doing a talk and he used the phrase requie alamonde, which means a collection of German writing. but the translator translated it as Ogui Alamond, which means German arrogance.

And so Cot never forgave him for that because he thought that Paster was calling him arrogant. Although I think before that they loathes each other, if you read the dialogues that they have, the letters they wrote each other, it's just basically spitting with rage, you know, cock writing letters to Paster accusing him of stealing all of his ideas and vice versa,

saying you're a fraud, you know, really foul language. because there was this huge fight basically when we suddenly discovered the power of the idea of vaccination between a few scientists, wasn't there? So that was after Jenna? Yes, it was. Yeah, it was. Oh, okay. So Edward Jenna is the person who kind of we give the, we say, created vaccinations today, right?

He got it from milkmates. Did he? Yeah. Because there were milkmaids near him and he noticed that they got a thing called cowpox, which is a disease. that cows got and they would only get one single pus stool on their hands which is where they've been touching the cows because of all the milking and he theorized maybe this is a milder version of smallpox so then he did this amazing gamble jenna he took some pus from a milk made and he injected it into a child yeah and then six yeah not his child by the way although he did also do it with

his own child actually later on so fair play um i think when he knew it worked and then he six weeks later he injected the child with full-blown smallpox and he didn't know how it worked and yeah and then but later in life they became friends so him and the child yeah James Phipps he was the son of Edward Jenna's gardener which if it hadn't worked would have made the gardening very very awkward I think for a long time I think he would have ruined your rosebush after that he had smallpox when he was a child Jenna and one of the reasons that he kind of went into getting rid of it later is because he had such a bad time of it. He was very elated, so they gave him some of the pus or some scabs or something.

But he was prepared for that by being starved, purged and bled and locked in a stable with other infected boys. With other infected boys? Yeah. So they kind of veriolated all these people, gave them like very mild symptoms and then put them all in a stable. Meanwhile, Stanton Avery's outside of the checking coop. You don't know you're born, mate.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that you can tell if a movie character is a goody or a baddie by the kind of phone they use. That sucks now that I know that, and I'm watching movies. I know. Sorry, this is not just a spoiler of one movie, this is a spoiler of all movies. So this came up in my RSS feed, thanks to the blog Nita Ramah, which I follow. And it was an interview with Rian Johnson, who is the director of the film Knives. out and he said that Apple have forbid filmmakers from letting villains use their iPhones on the screen and so if one of your characters is using an Apple product then they must be a good guy.

Oh thank you. So you can't tell who's the good guy in the good, the bad and the ugly, for instance. Or it's a wonderful life. I'm not sure any of them had mobile phones in those. They've been edited in. It's yeah. But sometimes it's not clear who is a goody and who's a baddie. if someone pushes one person in front of a train to save five people, who will be allowed an iPhone at the situation? You're absolutely right. In any decent story, everyone has a mixture of good and bad at the list. Everyone has one iPhone and one Android. That's a good point. Actually, that saves it for me because the movie might have been sponsored by Samsung, for example. Yeah, of course.

So that's good. Okay, great. I'll stop Googling which phone sponsored all my movies. But yeah, there was also an article in The Verge that says that Apple says that its products should only be used in the best light that reflects favourably on Apple products. And they don't, according to Apple, they don't pay to have their phones in movies, but what they do do is give lots of free phones and MacBooks and stuff

to the people who are making the movies in return for them being... But they wouldn't show someone looking up on the internet how to kill orphans on a MacBook. On a MacBook? You couldn't do that on a MacBook, no. Yeah. Word to it.

in check this piss into the garden son. They wouldn't do that. But this is a thing called product displacement which is the it's kind of like

product displacement. Product displacement is where you replace a real brand with a fictional one because the original brand are really annoyed about. Oh, okay. So there's a film

called Flight which stars Denzel Washington as an alcoholic pilot who somehow he manages to pull off a crazy move. The plane's about to crash to you to, you know,

it's all gone wrong on the plane and he manages to fly it in upside. down and then land it the right way up at the very last moment. I've got to say the first five minutes of that movie is one of the best things I've ever seen. It's so tense. It's so amazing.

Okay. And the rest is terrible, right? You didn't want to say it out loud, no, I've seen it too. It's shit. Well, Dan thinks the film is bad. I'm not going to tell you not to watch it, especially now the ending's been spoiled anyway. Well, the rest of the film is, I gather, just a lengthy legal process about whether he was right to save the play.

It's a legal drama. Imagine if you go to watch that film and your five minutes. late. That would be the worst thing ever. Oh, man. Oh, my God. They should make it into a short and release it in short films. Yeah. Anyway.

It's Rob and Zemeckas who gave us back to the future. He is an alcoholic pilot, Denzel Washington. The character, sorry. Not Robert Zemeckis, not Denzel Washington, the character. But he drinks Budweiser and a vodka that Budweiser own. Either while he's flying the plane or. shortly before. I mean, you guys have seen the film

so you'll know. But Bubbys were furious about this and they said, can you not show this drunk pilot sinking a bud before he flies the plane? And they refused. They said, there's nothing you can do. But that happens.

Sometimes movies do have to buckle to these bigger companies. So Slumdog Millionaire, when Danny Boyle made that, he gave an interview where he talked about the fact that he had some criminal gangs drinking Coca-Cola at one point, ice-cold Coca-Cola,

and I don't know what I'd say, like that. Are we, sorry, are you personally sponsored by Coca-Cola today? Wow. It was a refreshing ice cold Coca-Cola. So, yeah, I'm available in all shops. But yeah, they're drinking in that, and Coca-Cola took a sort of stand against it, and so they had to paint it out in the post-production of it.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Slumdog Mininet was the most bizarre film. I hadn't realized this, but obviously at the time it was so huge, and it won the Oscar, didn't it? Yeah. And it was massive. I hadn't realized it was made by the same company that makes who wants to be a millionaire. So it was one huge piece of product places. Wow. Yeah.

Isn't that Jasper Carrot who makes that? Yes, I did sell. Yeah. Well, he wrote Slumdog Millionaire. It might be. It's called Keladour. Yes. He's pretty hands off with it. But yeah, he's a direct beneficiary of both those things. I think it's Celadar, isn't it? It's a celladour. Well, it's a company called Celadour. Oh, of course. It's like Celadour. I just got it. I don't think it's deliberately named to be like the celladour. It might be. It's Jasper Carrot. He did. does love is, his punts. What's the metaphor behind that?

The cellar door. Don't look behind the cellar door. It's actually Jasper Sarat. Any international listeners who, wondering who Jasper Karat is, there's no time. So Celadour made this, who made Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,

and then they decided to make Slum Dog to sort of advertise who wants to be a millionaire. And the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire was one of the co-creators of who wants to be a millionaire. But the only thing that they stipulated was that at the end, and this is a spoiler where he's being accused of cheating,

the hero is being accused of cheating, the host of millionaire sort of tortures him backstage. And at that point they said, we can't have it look like the show is torturing this boy because that's going to make us look bad. So it's just got to be the host. So it's like Chris Terrance got out on a limb. It wasn't Chris Tarant in the film.

Any international listeners who were clinging on after Jasper Carrot. We're now giving up at Chris Terrant. So hang on, what kind of torture equipment does the host of who wants to be a millionaire have access to backstage. Like, you couldn't do more than a quick Chinese burn or a wedgy, could you? He's got that tension music. Yeah, he's got a super long advert break without telling him. I found out, just looking at product placement stuff,

I found out one of the first ever examples of product placement on a podcast. Okay. So this was in 2005. There was a show called The Dawn and Drew Show. Okay. And it was, the newspapers at the time, had to explain what a podcast was, which is, so the report I read said

a podcast is, or this particular podcast, is a program filled with strong language that is available only in a digital format and downloaded on iPods and other devices that play MP3 files. So that's what a podcast is. And this one was the Dawn and True show, and it was sponsored,

it was product placemented by Durex. Okay. And Durex had inserted their product into the show because it was hosted by a husband and wife. And the show featured the husband and the wife and their dog, tasting flavored condoms. That was the first ever

place for the co-cums. The firm said they were delighted and they said this is, quote, exactly how we want to position the brand. Were they condoms for dogs and humans alike? No, because you'd have to have a dog meat-flavored connoff.

They don't love strawberry, do they? That's incredible. So anyway, I'm just saying we've got further to sink before we You know your, this is not a bit of product placement, but we're recording this podcast on a Mac computer. And we're all good guys. Now, if you were to close that, don't close it because we might lose the recording, but you

would see that the apple is upside down as you're looking at it. So maybe if you half close it, you see it's kind of upside down as you're looking. Now, the reason that is, is for product placement reasons. So it was in Legally Blonde, which is a properly great film. She is using an Apple Mac, but the Apple is upside down to what we have it today, because that's the way it used to be. Because it makes much more sense that if you have it closed and you're looking at it, the Apple is the right way up. Oh, yeah. And that's how it used to be.

But then there was an employee called Joe Moreno who said to Steve Jobs, look, if we're going to put these in movies, what we need is when it's open and you're looking at it, the apple is the right way up. And so they changed it. Or if someone's just watching you in a cafe, of course you've got to put it the right way out for the people looking at it, not the one who owns it already. That's really interesting. So basically the Apple on your Apple Mac is not for you. It's for everyone else.

Yeah. Wow. Some advertisers, this is sort of the next step they're doing for advertising and things. So advertisers in soap operas are now selling billboards inside the fictional locations in the soap operas. Whoa. Yeah. So Coronation Street is a fictional street, but it's a fictional street with advertising billboards on it. And, you know, jewelry shops and other shops are buying up advertising space

in fictional Coronation Street. Yeah. So clever. And there's a new thing also that other advertisers are doing where, you know, you'll be able to digitally alter what viewers see on screen when they're streaming. So you'll be able to... So different people see different things, is that like you saying? So if you are watching, let's say you drink whiskey and your TV knows that you drink whiskey,

there might be billboards for whiskey brands in the background. Whereas if you... But what if you're... a person who like secretly buys dog meat flavored condoms and you're watching Coronation Street with your parents. That's such a good point. That's such a good point. The whole family looking at each other suspiciously.

It's like an Agatha Christie. Yeah, exactly. Well, they might do it based on the time of day even. So if you're watching late at night, there'll be adverts for... As we all do, watch Coronation Street later. Absolutely. Have another late night set. Yeah, there'll be adverts for, I guess, late night stuff, like swearing.

Wow. Whiskey. If you're watching in the morning, there'll be advocates for cereal and orange juice. Or whiskey. Just one ironic thing about this fact is that apples are a sign that someone's a villain. What? Huh? In films, apparently, people have spotted this.

If you're the baddie, you're always eating an apple. Not always. This isn't true cross films. So, Mr. Bond. The bad guys in Doctor Who do that, don't they? Because an apple a day keeps the doctor away. This is true. Please send in more if you've seen them.

But Draco Malfoy does it. Jeffrey Rush, in the paragraphs of the Caribbean. It's going to crunch it down on an apple. Colin Farrell, when he's playing a vampire in something or other. And it's got a name. It's the arrogant apple. It's really just to show your dominance. It's kind of showing you're so.

aloof. I can eat an apple as well as talking to you. I don't give enough of a crap about what you're saying to stop eating my apple. I wonder if there's like the history of the poisoned apple in fairy tales and things. That's been theorised on the internet, James. You should check the internet out for more on that. Garden of Eden? Again. Traditionally. An apple was eaten there. It's all on the forums. It sounds like we can think of everything on the internet, Anna, so I'm not worried. 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, James, at James Harkin, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Ed Jizzisdski. You can email podcast at qI.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. Why not check the internet out as while you're there? And we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Bye. Anyway, our sponsors

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