No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Ballet On A Staircase

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Bec Hill discuss millipedes, spiders, odd dolls and terrifying interrogations.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things of Fish, where we are joined by the incredible Beck Hill. Now, who is Beck Hill, you ask? No, you don't, because you're already a listener to a problem squared, which is her amazing podcast that she does with mathematician and comedian Matt Parker, where they spend their time solving everybody's problems. You probably also know Beck through her YouTube channel. She's got all sorts of stuff on there. I think notably you might know her for her flip chart comedy where she misses lyrics. There's videos about her show Makeaway Takeaway that she used to do as CITV. There's loads of stuff on there. And of course, if you're the right age or if you have children of the right age, you will know her from her books.

She has a series of book called Horror Heights. There are three in the series at the moment. The latest is called Dead Ringer, and they are, of course, available in all places where you buy your books. So that's all about Beck. will be a little thing later on towards the end of the show where we might have an object which we will sign and give away to one of our listeners. If you want to know more about that, you will have to sign up to Club Fish.

We will give more details on how to win that during our next bonus drop as a line, which will be out next Tuesday. Anyway, not much more to say. I mean, we do have a live show coming up, which I think the tickets might be all but sold out, but you can get streaming tickets from that. you can go to No Such Thing as a Fish.com forward slash podfest. Apart from that, really this is the end. It's time to say, on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Beck Hill. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, Here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Beck.

In 1927, a patent was filed for an upper artist designed to scare criminals into confessing their crimes by creating an optical illusion of a ghost skeleton. That'd do it. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, the paintant was filed, and I mean, it was granted in 1930. Okay. It expired in 1947, so if anyone wants to do it. to make that now. That made Coal of Jucy better, wouldn't it?

Where they're trying to get... Is that what happens? Line of duty? Line of Judy? Call of Judy. Is that video games? It is, yeah, yeah. I was just trying to work out how you fit there as well.

I think it'd work everywhere. Pop a glowing skeleton. Sorry, we'll get messages from the gamers. It won't work in Call of Duty. An intensely realistic war experience. Okay. It's more a kind of like, can you storm Normandy? Then where were you on the night of the fourth?

Which is what is. More games need interrogation. Exactly. The Mario interrogation. Where's peach? I was reading about show jumping the other day, you know, in the Olympics. And in the first Olympic show jumping, part of it was, just because we're talking about video games, the horse had to walk along and people would roll barrels towards them and they'd have to jump over the barrels like in donkey Kong. Isn't that cool?

That's amazing. Yeah. Imagine if that was your job. I roll the barrels at horses. Sorry, this was off topic so quickly. Skeleton. Oh yeah, so it was a light, do you know what? I couldn't find out whether it was a real skeleton or a fake one.

But given the date, I'm guessing it was a real one, but it was a life-sized skeleton with red glowing light bulbs in the eyes that would turn on and off to create the effect of blinking. And it was lit from the top and the bottom. and basically the suspected criminal would be put into a chamber, like a room that's completely darkened. And then the interrogator would sit behind this skeleton and talk through a megaphone that would sort of come out of the skeleton's mouth

and the skeleton would be lit a little bit to create the effect of a ghostly outline. That's amazing. Blowing eyes, yeah. Yeah, and the effect, the idea was the criminal would go into a, darkened room to begin with. So they're sort of going, what's going on? Where's the police officers? What's happening?

And then suddenly this curtain would raise and this furious glowing skeleton would be there saying, you did it, didn't you? Or whatever it was. It would work so well the first time on, on, I presume, everyone who was, who'd committed a crime and was trying to cover it up, as in it's a very striking experience to have if you're the one being, you know, questioned by a skeleton. But I guess that criminal fraternity would be more, you know, would be blase about it after a few years of the skeleton.

Well, everyone would know about it, wouldn't they? Yeah. They'd have to keep checking it out and, you know, different effects. Dress up the skeleton. There's a detail in this which kind of confused me because this is the 1930s, which said that as well as having the megaphone and the glowing eyes, it also had a camera in the head.

Yes. To film, would you get sound recording as well? It was to record sound as well. And it actually included a way of recording the sound and the visuals at the same time onto this film. That is very early, isn't it? We had phonographs and we had cinema and stuff like that. So I think it was a woman who did it, wasn't it?

Yeah. Helen Adelaide Shelby was renowned. Yeah, I think she basically took a load of things that had been invented around that time and said, oh, we could do this with this, oh, we could do this with this. Oh, flashing lights, let's do that for the eyes and stuff. One thing I couldn't find out was her decision to turn it into an interrogation thing. Like, that's quite a cool effect. If you were like, oh, we'll, we could create this effect and put it on stage.

Like, did she just read a Christmas Carol? was like, oh, I know what gets people guilty. But that's the thing as well. She doesn't come from that background. So it's Helena, sorry, or Helena, rather than Helen. And she was a real estate mogul. She was like, she used to bed on horses. There's nothing else in the literature about her that suggests that this came from any

background in policing or anything like that. And she kind of disappears as well. You don't really see her. And embarrassment. I found that she did die in 1947. Right. I found in the newspaper. papers. When it expired.

And they found that her father-in-law, Samuel, was a famous Civil War veteran. His first foray in the Civil War was down the Mississippi River, and the entire platoon was hospitalized because they all drank swamp water. That's all I found out. She had a husband called Edgar. That's the only other detail I've got. Stop blinding us for overwhelming information. It is, yeah, it's fascinating. All she's remembered for now is mostly this Scatterson thing.

I found out that Tom Scott, the YouTuber, had recreated this invention in 2020. So they recreated the actual skeleton and everything and did an experiment with three other people where he left them alone with a cookie and one of them had to steal the cookie. And then he interrogated them and they didn't know what he was doing. So he was just like, I'm trying out a new technique. And then he puts them in this room. and the first two I've scared at first

because they're in a dark room and they have no idea what to expect and then when a skeleton appears they just crack up laughing because you would though wouldn't you I mean I can imagine it being spooky at first but I'd be far more scared of a dark room

yeah so you know the one-way mirror thing yeah actually there's no such thing as a one-way mirror no there is it's actually a window that's the dullest fact I found in the course of research It's what do you mean? It's all about, yeah, lighting. Yeah, it's a window covered with highly reflective coating.

It's not a mirror. What makes the difference between, is it just because a mirror has like a steel background? I think the mirror has the, yeah, it's like a properly opaque background. Whereas with the one-way window, as all the kids will be calling it. A one-way window. It's just a lighting thing. The OWW. Because the lights are always off, aren't they?

In the room where the senior cops are watching the questioning happen. But the lights are always dark in that room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you turned on the lights in that room, you'd see them. The thing is, you want people to think it's a mirror, right? That's the whole point. If you say, we've got our window here, then they're going to go, oh, I thought that was a mirror. Like, you have to call it a mirror in order to keep up the illusion.

But everyone knows there are people behind there now. Do they? Yeah. No, the question is, you don't know whether there's someone behind there or not. I can't believe they exist, actually. Do they exist? I've never been arrested and interrogated. Have you been interrogated?

What did you do? I used to work in market research, my first job. And there was a market research house, which was in Slough. And I was conducting the surveys. How interesting. Like the focus group stuff. Yeah. And it was all one-on-one stuff.

It was with women between the age of 18 and 39 who had acid reflux. And they had to speak to me for an hour and a half each. And I had to ask them all the questions about their reflux. Oh, gosh. And did you watch them through a one-way mirror? There were people from, I'm not going to say, which pharmaceutical giant were watching them through the window, the mirror, whatever. And they were in the next room. after the interview ended, I'd pop next door and I'd say,

was there anything else you wanted me to ask? And they'd say, yeah, can you just ask question 17 again? Okay, so this woman, middle-aged woman with acid reflux, imagine I'm talking to, I'm here. There's a big window there, I mean mirror. Yeah. Is she thinking all the time there's someone behind that? Or was the illusion kept the whole time?

Because I reckon they wouldn't have, no. Otherwise, what's the point? I think I thought, I might have had to say there might be people observing, but don't, you know, don't worry about it. Just talk to me, look into my eyes. around the eyes. Yeah. Were you good interviewer or bad interviewer?

Like you get good cop and bad. Yeah. I was sorry. Tell us about the acid reflux. No, honestly, acid reflux is totally normal. Don't worry about it. You can tell me about it.

You're a sick puppy and you're going to burn. Yeah. I was not a very good interviewer. Right. And the weird thing was, it was just two of us working on the case, me and my boss. And after the fourth day of questioning sessions,

we came down to breakfast at the sort of like Premier Room. with staying whatever and we both had acid reflux. No. We talked ourselves into having it. That's really interesting. And then it turns out there was another window mirror that he's watching you. There's a bigger conspiracy.

And then another interviewer comes in and interviews you and they get it. Wow. I once in a focus group with the windows thing. But we knew that there were people because you just know like, oh, well, someone's got to watch. It's just so you don't get distracted. But we had to play video games and give feedback on the video games. I think it was a little big punner. Yeah, and I said there should be more interrogation.

I was wondering what happens if you confess, but the police officer you confess to as a Catholic because obviously they can't pass on what confessions, but it doesn't really. You mean if they're a priest? I do. But like it's a priest cop. That's the pitch of the TV series.

He's a priest by day. He's a cop by night, you know. But the priest is not allowed to tell anyone what's been confessed, right? Because although when I was at school and I used to go to confession, we had good priest, bad priest. The bad priest used to rat on you all the time. Oh, man. Also, there's that one-way mirror in the confession booth,

which technically they're not telling. Spooky images in Catholic churches, you know. Skellet would work great. Like the crucifix from the top and the bottom of blowing red eyes. But this is the word thing. So I think the rule in confession, so in confession, booths, the rule is the priest can't disclose anything to anyone. That's how I understand that.

Yeah. But there is some leeway, I think if there's... So, like, if Dan, I'm the priest, right? Dan comes into the booth and he says, I'm going to kill James. Fact number two is the next episode of Nosey Sing as a Fish. Right. I think I am allowed, as the priest,

I think some schools of thought say, I am allowed to go to the police and say, you might want to check on James, check he's all right. Yeah, yeah. It might be a threat to him at some point. But I'm not allowed to say Dan is going to kill him. Yeah. Yeah.

Same with psychiatry, right? When you admit, you know, planning to murder someone. Planning to murder James. It took me a long time to get that out in the sessions. It's a good therapist. It's a real breakthrough. Just kill him. What are you waiting for?

But they're allowed to pass on active threats, aren't they? They must be able to. I mean, there must be vanishingly a few cases of people in confession booths or therapy sessions saying, look, this is the time and place I'm going to commit the moider. I don't think it happens much I like that you tried to make it a lighter thing by course moira well this has gone a bit dark

let's say moida fun cop music is often used in interrogation tactics that's a big thing metal music particularly we've heard about that oh and like Guantanamo yeah and John Ronson wrote about the fact that like Barney music would be played

that Barney the purple dinosaur I love you you love you love that song over and over to make people go insane. Did they ever play the blobby Christmas number one? I bet they have. I bet they have. It's seen as torture. But one band that gets used a lot is Metallica.

And Metallica hate it because, you know, any musician would have this opinion. It's that music and politics, music and, you know, interrogation and questionable torture shouldn't be mixed. I wouldn't say, oh, musicians think that, but many other people. Yeah, I imagine most of them would. I think there is a band in the States, a Christian rock band that, were like, you can use our music. Demon hunters, I think they're called. Demon Hunter. It's not it's not quite. Bloody Elle. Yeah. So Metallica asked for their music not to be used, which it wasn't. There was an interview with the guy who has claimed that he killed Osama bin Laden. I don't know if

that ever was confirmed, the Seal 6 team. And he said that Metallica reached out to them and said, can you not use our music? And Demon Hunter, he claimed, then got piped up and said, you can have our music. It's fine. And here's some patches. Demon Hunter came out and said, actually, that's not the case. We didn't know what it was being used for. they just said they like playing our music, they made their own patches. So supposedly a demon... Like an iron on patch for your clothes or...

Like an iron on patch for your uniform. Really? Yeah, military would like to wear lots of different patches. They're like the scouts. This one I got for killing a son of bin Laden. You've earned your killing or some of bin Laden budge. Ah, whoof. Yeah.

What a dark doggie is to say that is. One of the most feared Nazi interrogates, was a guy called Hans Schaff in the Second World War. And he was not, he wasn't a soldier, he was a Polish-born, I think he was a farmer, he lived in South Africa, but he was fluent in English. And if you were an air pilot or air crew, when you were caught, you would go to this little town near Frankfurt and you would be put up in a reasonably nice digs. And they'd just talk to you for a couple of weeks. And Hans Schaft was the one leading these efforts.

And they would present you with this incredible dossier. They'd say, here are all your unit members' names. Here's your home base. Here's the commander's dog's name. Here's the pub that you guys all drinking. And they would present you tiny fragments of information that made you think they knew absolutely everything. Yeah.

Which meant you were likely to talk and give away secrets of, you know, the weaknesses of your planes or whatever it might be. But the incredibly weird thing is that Hans Scharf, after the Second World War, he went to work at Disneyland. Oh, wow. He became a mosaic artist. And he did Cinderella's Castle at Disney, or Disney World, I think, in Florida.

Yeah. That is, do you know what though? If I worked in Nazi interrogation that I want to go off and then work at a magical wonderland to do art. Like, you've earned that. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. I just imagine the interview where they want to find a mosaic maker. They're like, well, what did you do in your previous job? Well, I would be the one who asked the question. Okay. It is time for fact. Number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in real life, the author of Charlotte's Webb became the foster parent to the spider children he based Charlotte on. Okay.

Spider-dad. Spider-dad. Yeah. By spider-children, you mean the children of a spider and not half spider, half-dri-old? That's right. So, E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Webb, who also penned the classic Stuart Little and quite a few bigger adult books as well, the elements of style and is sex necessary,

which he wrote with James Thurber. These were huge books back in the day. He loved animals, and Charlotte of Charlotte's Web is based on a real spider that he'd seen. He'd spotted it one autumn in 1949, and he came back later and the spider was gone, and the sack of the eggs was still sitting in the web, and he thought, okay, I'm going to collect that.

So he took it down, and he put it into a box, And he goes to New York and he travels with this. And he has it in his office and the eggs survived. And they came out, these spiders and started crawling over his office. And they even had their webs shoot up and he saw them flying across the office. And he thought, this is great. I'm just going to let them do what they do. And so for weeks they just made home on his desk in his office.

This is flat, I think. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, in New York. And it wasn't until his cleaner came along who just went, I'm sorry, I can't clean everything but the spiders that are infesting this room. that actually then they were murdered. What? Why did she not walk around? I don't know.

I guess my cleaner doesn't kill my cat every time she comes around. She can work around the spiders. You don't have hundreds of cats, each the size of a tiny eyelash. I don't know. It feels like she could work around the spiders. Yeah, you'd think so. But she complained.

He said, fine. You can kill them. Just don't have a cleaner. Geez, I don't have a cleaner. That's how you'd not get your spider children murdered. Doing your own cleaning. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah. But it's quite nice to know that he never the fate of Charlotte, the spider itself. I believe the species. Exactly, the species once they lay eggs. Yeah. They only lived for a year, didn't they? If it's a barn spider. Yeah, I think so. Is there a spider called a barn spider? That's what that was, I think, was it? It's got a scientific name. I didn't see it. No, no, but I didn't even know there was a common name of a barn spider. I've heard of the house spider, though. So the spiders called Charlotte Cavatica. Yeah. And is Cavatica, maybe the scientific name? It is. So Charlotte A. A. Cavatica.

And the A is a shortened scientific word. Arenas, I think. Right, Aranus. I might be pronouncing that wrong. Uranus. Carbatica. All right. Cool.

Sorry, just to quick recap of the Charlotte's web. So there's a pig and a spider. Yeah. And the spider saves the pig's life by spinning words into the web. Yeah. Someone's going to kill the pig. Like, the farmer's going to kill the pig. Farmers going to kill the pig right at the beginning of the book, I think.

And then, yeah, in Charlotte and the pig have an unlikely friendship. It is weird that as a farmer, you would see the words written in the web and think, oh, this pig is incredible. Yeah, exactly. No one's like, oh, I'm pretty sure a spider's behind this. Yeah, this pig makes such good webs. So his, I actually didn't write down his full first two names, E.B.

Elwyn Brooks. Elwyn Brooks. Yeah, so E.B. is Elwyn Brooks. But actually went by the name Andy, his whole life. Did he? Yeah. And it's a really odd reason. He went to Cornell.

University, and there's a tradition at Cornell, which is if you happen to have shared the surname of the person who was the co-founder and the first president of Cornell, who was a guy called Andrew Dixon White, then you had to just be called Andy because he was called Andy. So they shared the surname White. And so he got given that at Cornell and then the rest of his life. That's what his wife called him. It's what his friends. It's what his colleagues. I wonder if that still happens at Cornell if you had the surname White that you get nicknamed Andy. Yeah. Yeah.

Elwyn. You know, it was a real pig as well as a real spider. Is it? Yeah. So a lot of it's really drawn from life because he lived in Maine on a lovely farm. And he just, as Dan said, he connected with nature a lot. And he almost preferred his farm to, well, he definitely preferred his farm to city life. But he kept a pig.

And in 1948, so three or four years before writing Charlotte's Web, he wrote the essay, Death of a Pig, which was all about a pig. which is all about a pig he'd been planning to slaughter which then got very ill and the pig had erysipolis which is a skin condition erisipolis yeah eris the skin condition

Dan famously couldn't pronounce a few years ago on this podcast that's amazing wow and it's dangerous because it can transfer to people as well friend of the podcast aerosipolis that's so weird and he wrote I discovered that once one has given a pig an enema there is no turning back

the pigs lot and mine were inextricably bound now. Oh. So he had to give the pig a medical enema at one point or another. And it really brought them close together. Sure. I love everything I've read about Evie Y, I love. He just seems such a dork. He would have been perfect, I think, on this podcast.

Like, here's an example of how dorky he was. So he fell in love with this girl called Catherine Sargent, Angle, who was a fiction editor who worked at The New Yorker. And he was a writer for the New Yorker. She was married at the time. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And they eloped and they had, you know, they had their marriage.

And then he said later on, I soon realized I'd made no mistake in my choice of wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, put in some tooth twine. I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me. Oh, that's so sweet. Well, I quite enjoyed finding out that when someone asked him why he wrote Charlotte's web, he said, I haven't told why I wrote the book, but I haven't told you why I sneeze either. And a book is a sneeze. That is his, yeah, and he doesn't know why he wrote it.

Inside you and you just have to, you have a story inside you and you have to share it with the world. Yeah, I guess so. And it leaves your body at 17 miles an hour. Yeah. And if you keep your eyes open when you're writing the bug, they will pop out. Did you see that letter that a little girl wrote to him asking him why? It was nine years after Charlotte's Weber come out and she said, when's the next book coming out?

And he replied, I would like to write another book for children, but I spend all my spare time just answering letters I get from children about the books I have already written. So it looks like a hopeless situation unless you can start a movement in America called Don't Write to E.B. White until he produces another book. Wow. That's harsh that, isn't it?

Yeah, that is pretty harsh. But that is like the, that is exactly the sort of reply that I end up start doing on Twitter. Like with the reply guys and stuff, I'm like, oh, I'm just running under patients now. Do you reply to reply guys? I used to. Really? Don't bother now. No, no, no.

No. I've never heard that term. Is that just people who reply no matter what? Well, no, it's, it's quite a sex-specific thing, isn't it? Yeah, well, generally reply guys tend to be due to reply to women to, and in my case, explain our own jokes to us, or why they might be better somehow, even addition of something often incorrect. You do it all the time.

I do it all the time, yeah, yeah. Have you thought of trying harder? He had a really interesting process for writing, E.B. White. So he could never listen to music because that would get his attention diverted. And that's, I think, quite famous for any writer, anything with lyrics, get that away. But what he did used to do was sit in the bit of his house

that had the most traffic in it. So his wife passing through, his kids passing through, whoever was in the house. Yeah. Not like cars and stuff. No, exactly. But like just foot,

yeah, foot traffic from his family. I think that's crazy. I agree. I think that's really difficult to concentrate when there's so much happening. Yeah.

It's bad, isn't it? That must be one of the most unusual writing methods anyone's, any writers ever had. Yeah. To actively use. Is it like Dan Brown hangs upside down

or something to write? That sounds like a Dr. Zeus book. Dan Brown hangs upside down. Yeah, he would do that if he had, if he just needed thinking time, he would hang upside down. I don't think he physically wrote while he was upside down. Because the pen just wouldn't work after about two legs. Exactly. We might have a space pen.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, one of those anti-gravity or a pencil. You know, Stuart Little? Yeah, man. Oh, what is he, though? A mouse. Right. And was I right? I mean, wrong. Oh.

Oh. He's not a mouse. He's not even a mouse. Is he a dog mouse? No. No, he's, so he's a child. Very small. Who looks like a mouse.

What? Oh, right, really. It's very weird. No. In the book, it's described as, because he's given birth to by his human parents. And the book says he's the size of a mouse. And he has all the characteristics of a mouse. But he is quite indeterminate as species-wise.

So the book, it's not illustrated, is it not? Or is it? I don't know if the original edition was illustrated. Because in Charlotte's Web, the illustrator wanted to get. give the spider human woman facial features. Terrifying. Yeah.

And they were like, no. She'd just look like a spider. And so it was just a spider. But in the animated film, she was given... Like her face. She's got a lady face. Maybe that's why he...

Because he hated the movie, didn't he? Did he? Yeah, he saw it. And I guess like a lot of children's authors, like P.L. Travers, seeing Mary Poppins, the movie, hate the way that their work is translated. But he hated Charlotte's Webb. That might be the reason.

But this kind of... But this kind of makes sense that maybe Stuart Little wasn't a mouse, because he did have a bit of a bug bear about when people made animals a bit more human-like rather than, like, Charlotte's Web, it was a pig and it was a spider, whereas he can never understand Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Why are they driving a car? What the hell's going on there? A mouse doesn't drive a car.

Because I haven't read this book, because his spider quite realistic. Like, Bands Spider, female Bound spiders will stick some, like, silk out of their bum, and then walk around and it's got like pheromones on it and then the males will follow her around. Oh, there's a whole chapter about that. It's where the spider babies come from. Brilliant. But he did use a lot of technical terms. He explained like the different bits of the, like he was very, he researched spiders for

ages to get all of the understanding. So when you read it, you get an understanding about like, you know, this bit of the leg is called this. This bit of the hand. The hand. He's called this. He was incredibly shy as well, E. white. He was very, he's very anxious guy about pretty much everything. When he worked at the New Yorker,

he would sometimes go out of the fire escape if someone he didn't know turned up at the office. He'd just pop out, you know, of the window effectively. Wow. He skipped. Were any time it was someone he didn't know at the office or someone who's coming to talk to him? I think probably someone coming to took take office, isn't it? He wouldn't have done. Yeah, you're right. Because to me, it just sounds like someone who's smoking and trying to. Yeah, he skipped parties. He skipped the burial service of his wife of many decades. He skipped the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards ceremony where JFK was trying to give him a medal.

The National Medal for Literature Award. He skipped that too. He just did not want to go out. He was shy around women, wasn't he? Was he? Yeah, he once said, I have two smaller heart and too large a pen. And it feels like he didn't get to the end of that sentence. The ink ran out.

Yeah, he had. wife even when he was communicating sort of love notes and stuff he would still even hide behind an animal persona i don't think he was a furry i think he just didn't yeah i said i think anyone thinks that you thought that i think it now he wasn't a fairy he was a human with the characteristics of a fairy yeah um this is all by the way it's a guy called michael sims who wrote this amazing biography on him who discovered that charlotte was based on a real spider found out this story about the egg sack and he did an interview on NPR where I was reading this on and he said that when it came to the audiobook, the death scene, so spoiler alert, Charlotte dies in the book, he found it impossible

to read the death scene out loud and according to the producer it took him 17 takes in order to get it out finally. He said they would... How many takes did your book take that? I was just crying the whole way through. You shouldn't put the word erysipelas in. That's the problem. But he would go out. He would go out for walks and try and get himself together to go back in and do it.

And he would say, yeah, he was like, this is ridiculous. A grown man crying over the death of an imaginary insect, go back in and then just start crying all over again. Not an insect, mate. Yeah. Yeah, good point.

James is in the booth. Pressing a button. Maybe that's what he was crying. You know the final line is and then the insect died. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that one of the world's best dance choreographers is called Mr. Millipede. I should say this was sent him by a listener, so thank you to Maggie Mortensen, who sent it in.

Yeah, and Mr. Millipede, I think he's Benjamin. Yes. And now, now, James is looking, let's give me a look. Mili-Pia is how he would pronounce it. It's how he would pronounce it. It's how he would pronounce it, but it's not how I'm pronouncing it. He's not on this podcast. So, no, but it's Milipede.

Yeah, it translates into French as a thousand feet. Right? Yeah. There we go. I've seen newspaper articles interviewing him who call him the man with a thousand feet. Really? Yeah. That's great.

I think because he dances so well, it's almost as if he has a thousand feet maybe. Yeah. You think it might get a lot harder to dance. It would be hard. Yeah, if two left feet, but you've got like, what, 500 instead. And this is just a fact about someone with an amusing name in the world. of dance. Yeah.

Yeah. I went to school with a girl called Aaron Trimmer who became a hairdresser. Nice. Brilliant. Shout out to Aaron Trimmer. So Mr. Milipede

is quite notable in the world of Hollywood. He has choreographed a lot of movies. He's done June, the first June movie. He did the choreograph for the giant worm dance. The giant milipede.

Yeah, the big Willipid that comes out. There's a dance in there, I believe. I haven't seen the movie myself. Oh, yes. There's a dance. There's a cool shifting dance over the sand. We sashay to avoid attracting the attention of the big old worms that live in the desert.

I see because they feel the vibrations of your feet. They sense movement. They're incredibly sensitive to it. But if you walk in a particular way, then they won't spot you. Is it a dance or is it just someone walking? Well, it's a gate. A gate. I'm not seen June, but I imagined that it was like a bit in the movie where they're like,

and now we do the worm dance. And then like everybody joins in. and they're like, it's just a step to the left. Yeah, basically it's, I'm imagining the time walk. Yeah, Mr. Milipede comes running out in Leotard. It's like a Jane Fonda video. Yeah. But he also did Black Swan, which was the ballet movie,

and it was on that movie that he met his future wife, Natalie Portman. So, yeah, Mr. Milipede is married to Natalie Portman. Just some hot goss. Great. Yeah. Yeah. They split up there, because he's got together with one of the words. from Dune.

It's not very sad. Yeah. But no, just ballet, unless anyone's got anything more on Benny Mill. Mr. Milipede has got a tattoo on his abdomen of a Bauhaus symbol,

which I think is quite cool. You know, the German architecture thing? It's like a profile of a face designed by a painter called Oscar Schlemer. And Oscar Schlemer is really cool. He had five of his artworks in the Nazi organized degenerative art exhibition in Munich.

Do you know about that? So they piled up a load of art. Well, basically, the Nazis decided, and Hitler especially, because he thought of himself as an artist, they got a load of like German artworks that showed the greatness of Germany and put them all in an amazing museum. And then down the road, they got all the stuff that they really hated and said, this is all degenerate. This, you know, and I mean, which one would you rather see?

Yeah. Like, it's so much... Trudging to yet another Hitler watercolor. Exactly. But yeah, Schlemmet had a load of stuff there. And then they had loads of rooms. Like, a lot of them were quite anti-Semitic, the names of the rooms and stuff. But they had some that was like an insult to German womanhood.

And then they have a load of paintings that were insulting German women. Right. And then madness becomes method and nature as seen by sick minds. Wow. Oh, yeah. These do sound quite cool. They sound amazing. Yeah, yeah.

Don't they? Very nice. Anyway, that's just a thing about Bauhaus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The movie Black Swan just very quickly while we're still on Millipede. There was a lot of controversy about the movie when Natalie Portman won the Oscar for it. Because, well, there's a lot of scenes which is to do with really intensive amazing ballet dancing. And there was a stunt double.

Natalie Portman was good at ballet, but she'd only done it for a year. She wasn't at the level that you needed to be in order to pull those moves. But the person who played the stunt double didn't get any of the credit. And there's a lot of questions about whether or not best actor should be going to someone who is not necessarily asking a lot of the best. I mean, there's a lot of emotional scenes in there. And, you know, so there's a lot of acting that goes on. So it's justified. I feel it should be a joint thing.

Yeah. Like if you win best actor for a particular role than anyone else in the film that had to play, whether it's a stunt double or a stand-in or something. Yes. They should all get on stage. They share it. But if it's someone doing the back of your head for a day where you were busy shooting a different sequence, like, They're in. They can come on stage, but they have to show only the back of their head.

Zeroska statuette is only the back of the Oscars head to as well. And they all have to dress in whatever the actor is wearing. They're all wearing the same outfit. So we change it from the nominations being the actor's names to the character name of the movie. Therefore, you can have multiple. The best character is a really good category. I really like that. Yeah.

And then, you know, then it's not as problematic when people eventually do something that makes you go, oh, oh, I don't like them anymore. be like, oh, I still like that character. Yeah, that's true. Interestingly, last thing on Black Swan, Black Swan was made by Darren Aronofsky, the director, and he also made The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke. And initially, Black Swan and The Wrestler were meant to be one movie where a ballet dancer fell in love with the wrestler,

and that was the initial movie. It was meant to be one cinematic universe combination, and then he just split it into two movies. That's brilliant. What? I would have loved to watch. Would Mr. of Millipede also choreographed for the restals? Yeah, the wrestling is...

Pro ballet is fake. There's a thing called beat deafness. Have you heard of this? No. It's like... I think I've got it. Yeah, do you think... No, I'm sure you don't.

It's like tone deafness, only you can't dance. It's quite rare. But dancing well is subjective, isn't it, really? Yeah, it is. I'm more talking about being in rhythm. So they'd watch Strictly come dancing, for example, and be like, wow, why are they not in time to the band? It's that kind of thing. Yeah, well, they would just...

It would be completely. completely alien to them. It would be, they wouldn't think they're out of time or they're in time. They would just be like, well, I don't know

what's going on here. He's just moving his arms and there's music playing but I can't put the two together. Right. I wonder if anyone famous has that. I mean, I definitely can't keep to time.

I found that out by trying to learn the drums. Oh yeah. After many lessons and a very patient teacher realize I just can't keep to time. I always get faster. Always.

And the thing is I love, like I love dancing and stuff. I did dance in high school. I saw a video and I am clearly half a beat behind everyone else. Like it's, yeah, yeah. I've just had to... What kind of dancing was it? I did interpretive because it's a lot harder to prove wrong.

Yeah, that's the best. There are some dances that it's clear if you're a beat behind. If you do the yokee and your arms in when everyone arms is out, that's really obvious. Because you'd have to do like group ones as well and that that was more like modern dance. Right. Yeah. So that one was one always out. Yeah, yeah

I'd love to see just videos of that Where someone doesn't know Hi yeah so we're actually on knees Not shoulders Didn't you do a bit of dance Me? Yeah you Where I'm thinking of your school

Because you went to a very interesting school Oh yeah yeah we went to a Rydolph Steiner school We did Eurythmi which is a dance invented By Rydolph Steiner So you used to go It was you know it's very kind to call it a dance What it is is you just get given a pole And you have to walk forwards

and backwards just moving the pole from vertical to horizontal. A metal pole? Yeah. You'd be disappointed if you go to see a pole dancer and that's... Dan telling you about the Yeti while he walks back and forwards. Ballet moves. Oh, yeah. Did you know, one of the most iconic sports logos of all time is a ballet move.

Okay, are we going to have to get it. Yeah, try and get it. Oh, I think I know what... Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Michael Jordan, the famous... Can we keep guessing?

I mean, I feel like I didn't get a guy. Sorry, sorry, sorry. The Nike swoosh. Sorry, go for it. I was thinking of the Olympic rings. Yeah, no, close. Do you want one more? No, no, no.

Okay. Yeah, so James is actually, as I said earlier, correct. Oh, wow. The very iconic Michael Jordan looking like he's going for a dunk. So his arms are out. He's got a ball in his hand. Legs are wide. It's not going for a dunk.

Yeah, you go for a dunk. He's dunking. Okay, okay. I'm going for a dunk. go for a dunk. Nothing but net. I've just been for a dunk. I had to bounce off the backboard.

That's, everyone assumes that that's him dunking. It's not. He's in a photo shoot that he was doing with a guy called Peter Moore. He did a ballet leap and that was caught in the photo and they thought that just looked so perfect a stance for this logo. Did he know it was a ballet leap? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

There's not too much information. on it. It's just from this guy, Peter Moore, who pointed out that when the photos were taken, that's what was happening. So we know that it was specifically that. So yeah, ballet in Michael Jordan land. I think, I might be wrong about it. No, I'm right about this. When my parents used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was about seven or eight, I said I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Wow. Ah, legend. And then I discovered football. Oh, you get to go on my list of famous people, calling you famous James. Famous people who started off as ballerinas or...

I wouldn't say I started off as a ballerina. Other people on the list? Tupac. The rapper Tupac. I did it with him. There you go. He was in my school in Bolton. Yeah, Tupac was, he was the mouse king in the school play, the Nutcracker, but he actually

studied... Interesting fact about the mouse king. Yeah. Not a mouse. Yeah. Just test the dimensions of a mouse. Also on the list, the Daleks from Doctor Who, a bit of a stretch. No, not really.

So Terry Nation, when he was designing the Daleks, he was inspired by the Soviet dance troupe, the Georgian state ballet, when they were performing in London, and believed that that would be a perfect, like he got, looked at him, went, wow, the way they glided, he thought a Dalek would be a perfect way of doing that. And so not only was that the inspiration, but the very first people who sat inside the Daleks were dancers to help with the movement because they understood how to, yeah, use their feet.

And that's why you never see ballet dancers going upstairs. Exactly. Incapable of going upstairs. I think Louis the... Who's the Sun King? Louis the 14th. Yeah, he was into ballet and that's how he got called the Sun King. It's named after a character in a ballet.

I don't know which one. Yeah, he was massive into it. He used to, like, try and do the dancers himself at, like, dinners and stuff. Wow. So what would they call? Because I was reading that ballerina is the word that you would use for a female ballet person. It would be Italian, wouldn't it?

So what's the word? We don't have an English word for a male. Ballerino. Probably. Valerinos, you know. Valerinos. Yeah, yeah. Ballerino.

I thought I'd take us down a different laneo looking at ballet today. Oh, yeah. And this was quite recent, the director of a leading German ballet company had to be investigated by police because he smeared a critic's face with feces, with dog feces. Wow. because she'd said too many bad things about his ballets. Yes, this is a terrible story. Yeah. It's a bit...

It was a, let's just a drive-by. It was a drive-by? It takes some skills, isn't it? Just going for a dunk. Like, oh, that... It's a very high passion. It was a critic. The critic had written very hostile reviews of the...

Of this particular ballet's... It was a previous show, I think. Yeah, in the Dutch mountains it was called, which had been performed earlier, furious with the review that was given. And they were putting on this new performance. What's interesting is, I don't think he knew that she was going to be there on that night. He just happened to have the dog poo at his pocket. Which makes it more interesting if that's the case. Come on.

No, it can't be true. You know, if he always have a dog with him, maybe. Well, it was his dog's poo. So I wonder if maybe he happened to have his dog with him at the time. God. Crakey. Yeah. I won't lie.

There's some reviewers who I think would probably Wow The same names, we'll bleep them out No, no, it's a confessional space You can say what you want But if I think there is a risk to them I will have to, yeah One of the, so the big, I mean it was a huge

I guess you'd say a sort of soft power thing For lots of, I mean lots of very big Eastern European ballet companies, especially Russian. So the Bolshoi ballet is very, very, very, famous Russian ballet. This is interesting. Again, it's people who you wouldn't think were ballerinas but

were. So, have you seen Diehard? Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. I know about this. Yeah, this is one of the henchmen in Diehard. It's Carl. The big blonde guy. Gets shot. No.

It's his brother that gets shot. Exactly. Exactly. He won best character in 1980. I can't believe you don't remember this. 16 people except at the Carl, Carl, the huge blonde henchman who's extremely tough. He, uh, he was a former principal lead dancer in the Bolshoi. Okay. Uh, well, I, because I've been to see a Belchoy in Moscow, and the guys who do

it, they're quite slim, but they're strong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has to be so strong to do that. Yeah, yeah. And it also takes a lot of strength to defect, which is what, um, Alexander Godinov did. Yeah, he was on tour in the USA. Big, those, big thing of ballet defections. Nuriya, is it? Rudolf Nureev, Nishnikov was it, the other guy. Rudolf Nourio defected at the airport. He was about to go back to the Soviet Union. He had his handlers from the KGB with him. And he fled to the French police who were there at the airport.

But he didn't do a, like, I don't think he did a cool move. Like a plea. Yeah. I wish he had a Jordan leap. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. That is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1997, Mattel recalled one of its cabbage patch dolls because it had started eating children.

I remember this. Do you? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, because I was really into Cabbage Patch kids. Were you? And I remember that that was going,

that particular toy was going to be released in Australia. And then when they got recalled in the States, they never made it to Australia. How interesting. I'd never heard of it before. But yeah, I mean, it's incredible. And when I say eating children, it was only bits of children, it was eating.

Yeah. I didn't manage a whole one. It was a toy which had a mouth, which you could feed food into, and it had a rucksack at the back, and then you would feed them a cookie or something, and it would go through the body, and then it would mysteriously arrive in the rucksack, and that would be the game. Genius. But children started putting their fingers into the mouths, or the hair, or whatever, and there was really no way to stop it.

I don't think kids were deliberately putting their hair in them. I think the hair was getting caught. The hair was getting caught. I can imagine them putting their fingers in deliberately, someone with a one-year-old child that, you know, that might happen. But anyway, once you put any part of your body into this mouth, you couldn't get it out. Because behind the lips of the doll of these two metal rollers, right? And they only rolled one way.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And they had about 100 incidents reported in this Christmas time. It started off just a few. And then suddenly, like, more and more and more people started saying, yeah, my kids are being eaten by this doll. Just legally, I did find a claim by Mattel that these are all isolated incidents, but that really raised a question of how many incidents do they have to be, to stop being isolated? There were about 100 isolated incidents.

Exactly, yeah. I mean, they did sell many, many, at least hundreds of thousands of them. They sold a lot of them, and so it's a very low percentage of children who got eaten by these dolls. One is too many, isn't it? It rather feels that way, yeah. Oh, dear. But yeah, cabbage patch kits. They're incredible.

were these dolls, there's an extraordinary thing that I never appreciated about cabbage patch dolls which is basically the handmade to be each one is very different from like not even the model, there's obviously different models but within the models each one has differences in it because they are basically hand-crafted. They're all supposed to be kind of unique

like for instance I got one. Yes. Oh, it's still on the box. Well, I only bought it yesterday. Oh. This is not one that eats children. This is just a normal. cabbage patch doll. Wow. Wow. And as you can see mine is called Leona Jade. Oh, you've got, is it a ballerina? Yeah, she has like a little birth certificate and adoption

papers and the idea is that they're all unique pretty much and. And that was different as well, wasn't it, that you didn't buy a, you didn't buy a doll. You didn't buy a doll. You got the birth certificate. Yeah. Oh, I've got them. I've got the birth certificates and everything. Yeah, yeah. I had one called Alice, who had came with hair like products. So you could style the hair. It came with a little thing of hair spray. So you could do its hair. And I wasn't a dull kid.

Like I didn't like Barbies or anything like that. I was more into trolls. But the Cabbage Patch kid, there was just something about it. Did you, do you know about the cute schema? No. The schema of cuteness. So there was a study done by a university in Japan. Of course, they would study.

cuteness. And it was to look at the things that we respond to as humans to decide that something is cute. So the forehead is normally quite large, big eyes, the eyes usually quite low on the forehead, and sort of chunky short limbs and things. And they believe that the reason that cabbage patch dolls became so popular and became like, because they weren't, they didn't do anything, not like, you know, before all of these, the original ones didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't do anything. They didn't eat children. They think that the reason they went so big is because it violates the cute schema. So if you look at a cabbage patch doll, you'll notice that the eyes are actually quite small, quite close together. And so there's elements about them that are considered

grotesque, but not enough. I find, I don't, I don't, I don't, I found a bit creepy. And that's why, because it divides people and people either think they're cute or creepy. And so people would talk about them because people go, oh, they're so cute. And other people go, no, no, no, they're really creepy. Yeah. And as we know from just the media today, if you can cause a divide in public opinion, people will talk and debate and argue. Yeah, my, um, yeah, my wife won't let me take this home. I bought it. I really really doesn't like it. Is this new? Is it like an eBay? It's brand new. No, I bought it. Oh, so this was in a shop, right? Yeah, yeah. So does anyone want one? Yeah, I'll have it. No, no. I thought what we could give it away to one of our listeners.

Should we do a bit away to someone on Clubfish? I'm pretty sure I just claimed it, but yeah. No, of course, of course. Yeah, you should always give away adopted children as a size. It's just be a double adoption. Yeah, let's do that. Okay, we'll work out a competition. The thing about the sort of the look of the freakish look and so on,

that led to one of the great myths about Cabbage Patch kids that circulated in the 80s, which reading this kind of makes me miss being a kid again and falling for these amazing legends. Dan, you still fall for these things. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But the story was the reason they looked like that was because President of America at the time, Ronald Reagan gave a directive to the makers of it to show what we would look like following the survival of a nuclear holocaust and to get us used to the idea that we're going to look

quite freakish and it would be normalized by the time it happened. We would sort of accept it as normal humans being like that. And that went around for, yeah, it's such a great story. But it's, you know, obviously not true. But that's... Oh, really? Remarkably, it's not true. That's so funny.

I find everything about them a bit rum. Yeah. Really? Well, did you guys read about the Babyland General Hospital? Yeah. Was this part of it? Well, actually, it's mentioned on this box. Is it?

Is it? There was a young boy called Xavier Roberts, who discovered a magical cabbage patch. And he built Babyland General Hospital where his children now live and play until someone takes them home to care for them and love them. Right. And that sounds like,

Just a bit of corporate guff. Actually, it's a real place. Yeah. So he kind of, well, I'm sure we'll get on the history of how they were originated. But in 1978, I think he opened up, and I think it was a former medical facility. Yeah. He opened up Babyland General Hospital. And you could go there as a punter and they held live births at the hospital.

And there was a write-up on slate. Okay. Every half hour or so, an employee dressed as a doctor or nurse gets on the PA and announces there is a code green. That means that mother capital. is in labour. And it's time to head to the magical crystal tree to watch a baby being born. The birthing process lasts under three minutes. Not realistic.

A nurse in scrubs and latex gloves stands among the cabbages and tells the crowd that mother cabbage has dilated the full ten leaves apart. That's such a gag for the parents. I know. Like the kids have no idea. The parents are going to be like, I see what they're saying. As the crystals, well, there are more very specific parent gags. As the crystals at the base of the tree begin to glow,

the nurse gives the cabbage a shot of imagicillin and announces she will be performing an easiotomy. A pisiotomy gag there, as opposed to a C-section, which stands for cabbage section. The nurse gently spreads the cabbage leaves, reaches in her gloved hands, and slowly pulls out a naked doll. The kids in the crowd murmur, gasp, and applaud.

Wow. People say that's creepy. It's so weird. I would love to see that. But the whole story was one of the other reasons. they became so popular because it, rather than just being a doll, it was this whole, you're buying into the mythus. Yeah.

Like you're actually adopting a thing. You know, the parents who'd be like, oh, that's a really cute idea. And oh, oh, my kid can adopt a doll and stuff. And so, yeah. And it worked. That's amazing. It really did work because they were absolutely massive. They were.

When they first went out, when was that going to be in like the 80s? Early 80s. Yeah. And there was riots when people were trying to get them in show. and I was reading some newspaper articles from the time about these riots that were happening in the states. The Citizen's Voice newspaper, this was in Pennsylvania. One pregnant woman bit another patron and knocked his hat off. I think she was just trying to eat a cookie.

Got caught. Another woman was punched in the face by a female shopper. One woman chased a man through a parking lot calling him an SOB. The Simi Valley Star from California. said one woman was swinging a baseball bat wildly at other women to get one of these dolls. And it wasn't even the last doll in the shop that she was getting. Apparently, because all these dolls are slightly different from each other. She'd seen one that she particularly wanted and she just didn't want anyone else to go near them.

So she was swinging the baseball bats. And in 2008, four kids entertainment ink, who at the time owned the license for these, they released a special edition of the dolls to commemorate the riots. Oh, wow. Isn't that amazing? That's awesome. Did it come with riot? No, it was just like riot gear.

They've become slightly different over the years. Like, this is the one that I've got here is a bit more finally and a bit more toy-like than the originals. The ones that they did to commemorate, they were more close to the original. Yeah. You can see, I mean, it's, you know, since becoming a parent and understanding the Christmas rush to get toys, you can understand why movies like jingle all the way are so. you know Arnold Schwarzenegger's most relatable movie it's that was all about a toy have you not seen

it's the most relatable movie absolutely now I never think of all more than cold and the barbarian yeah yeah even more than Conan even more than junior even more than Terminator yeah it's yeah more than kindergarten cold terminator three rises the machines no no no quite quite relatable so Xavier Roberts the person who invented he's mentioned on the side of the box and correct in your James, highly controversial. 21-year-old art student when he first notices that there is a German techniqueing of needle molding, and he sees a lady called Martha Nelson, who is making these doll babies, and he goes, oh, that looks really interesting.

She has adoption papers for the babies. She has original names for the babies. He goes off, changes the technique ever so slightly, but it was very much lifted from what this woman was doing, And then he kind of went off and ran with it and got all the credit for creating this new style of doll. Yeah, because basically she made this doll, right? She was selling them to him because he owned a gift shop. And then he wanted to up the price. She refused.

And so refused to give him any more dolls. And so he said, well, I'm just going to make them myself then. Basically, that's what happened. And did he want to mass produce them a bit more? He did, yeah. And then the official website says that he was into needle molding and that he learned quilting skills from. his mother and all that kind of stuff.

It seems very much. It does. Yeah. So what we're saying is that the side of the box here where it says that the bunny bees, we're saying they're not involved at all? No. I think one really weird thing about this doll. I mean, there's a lot of weird things about this doll.

But supposedly there's a guy called Xavier and he runs a hospital that looks after these cabbage babies until they're adopted. But that's the guy we're talking about, Xavier Roberts, right? But if you look at any of these things, he's signed all the buttocks. James is just showing us the doll's butt. If you look at the bum of the doll, his signature is on the bum.

And I think that's kind of a weird thing for someone running a hospital to do to their babies. Well, it's like those surgeons, isn't it? You know, the surgeons, sometimes they get in trouble because there are a few surgeons who got in trouble for burning their initials on a patient's liver. You know, mid-operation, and then it turns out you've just, you know, and it's kind of, I guess it's a fun joke.

But that's effectively what Xavier appears to have done on all these ties. Well, maybe you signed them with pen and they went off and got it tattooed afterwards. Oh, that's right. Could have been their own decision. You're right. In 2020, I'm bringing in trolls, my favorites. Yeah. There was one, it was called the Poppy and Sing Doll, I think.

And basically, she had a little button on her tummy that you would press it and she'd be like, Ray, let's do a song or something. But she also had a button underneath her. So when she sat down, she would say other things. but that happened to be right, right in the crotch, like right in the gusset. It was where that button was located. And most of the sounds that she made when you press that were gasping.

Are her going, oh, and wee, yeah. Like, it's just sound effects. So there was a petition to recall it by a lot of furious parents who said that it would be grooming children. We've got room on this doll for two buttons. Okay, we've got the tummy one. Great, belly button, brilliant. Can anyone think of where we should put the other button?

You know, the hand. There's also a Play-Doh had the Play-Doh mountain cake, Cake Mountain, sorry, the play set that came out recently for Christmas, but the extruder, you know, it looks like a syringe. Yeah. That you would put the Play-Doh in to do the icing on the cake. Yeah. It's incredibly phallic.

Like, it fulic enough that it definitely wasn't a mistake. Wow. Children won't understand, but, you know. Yeah, yeah. Is there like the equivalent of beat deafness where you're just phallic and sexual innuendo blindness? Like Tobias in Arrested Development where he doesn't understand all his innuendos. Yeah, exactly. I hosted a makeaway takeaway on CITV, which obviously went so well.

They decided to close a channel. And, um, but that was an arts and craft show. It was really, really fun. amount of times they had to stop filming because they go, uh, it's looking a bit phallic, like anything that you would make, like anything like,

because anything you make, there's something, there's usually a moment where you have to make something that's sort of like sausage shaped. It feels like that might be your problem. She's doing it again. Close the channel. Close it.

Shut it down. It's like close encounters of the third kind with mashed potatoes. Like I'm just, yeah. 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. And Beck. At Beck. At Beck Hill comedian or bechill comedian. If you spell it wrong. Actually, no, you spell it the same, but you just pronounce it differently. Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or why not email us on podcast at QI.com. You can also find all of our previous episodes up on. on our website, no such thing as a fish.com, but why bother listening to our podcast when there's a far superior one out there

called the Problem Squared by our guest with us today, Beck Hill, and also one of our very close buddies, mathematician, Matt Parker, amazing guy. Beck, give us a quick rundown of the podcast. Our listeners send us problems and we solve them. Matt solves them and I help. Are they math's problems or personal problems? Most of the ones that Matt answers are math's ones and the ones that I solve, yeah, usually personal or creative.

Right. Like how big a burger can you fit into your mouse? Nice. Cool. And how's it going? It's doing well. It's doing well. But we have set our sights on, we're trying to surpass you guys in terms of positive reviews.

So we're on 2,000 five star reviews on Spotify at the moment. You guys are on 11,000. Wow. We've set our sights on trying to beat you. We've told people not to then give you less than five stars. Okay. You've just told them to not. for you at all. Give us five stars.

Okay, cool. That's a big backhanded compliment, isn't it? I've got a problem I'm going to be writing into your show with Beck. All right, we'll do check it out. Also, Beck's brilliant kids' books, horror heights. They're amazing. The third one's coming out very, very soon. Just come out. Yeah. Dead Ringer. Check that out as well. And come back next week for another episode of the two-star reviewed. No such thing as a fish. We'll see you then. Goodbye.