No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As HMS Kevin

Episode Date: July 1, 2016

Live from the Udderbelly Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss houses made for burgling, flimsy warships and graffiti in the sky. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:02 Another episode of No Such Thing is a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the Utter Belly in London South Bank. My name is Dan Schreiber. And please welcome to the stage. It is Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. We have gathered around the table with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact this week. My fact is that the way to defeat the British Royal Navy's most advanced destroyer
Starting point is 00:01:02 is to put it in warm water. So the British have spent a billion on six massive destroyer ships. These are ships that in their press release said this is the most advanced technology. These are the most advanced ships of all time going into the oceans. It turns out that their engines can't take warm water. And so if they go to the Persian Gulf, for example, the whole ship just breaks. It just completely breaks. Why would we ever want to go to the Persian Gulf?
Starting point is 00:01:32 It's dangerous there. We should just start wars in Iceland. The defence was that they weren't anticipating having to go somewhere like the Gulf. So John Hudson, who's a managing director of BAE system, said the operating profile at the time was that there would not be continuous operations in the Gulf. As if that was just out of the question at the time that we'd end up there. So yeah, they didn't expect to have to go anywhere. There was a response from the MOD.
Starting point is 00:02:00 They said this is quote from the... is the FT article on it. The MOD added that the ships remained one of the most capable warships on the planet. But only parts of the planet. The Rolls-Royce spokesman said, this is not the fault of Rolls-Royce,
Starting point is 00:02:15 it is the laws of physics. Can't do anything about those. That's insane. Yep. That's amazing. Is it the fault of Rolls-Royce and so on for making the engines better? Is it the fault of the M-O-D for not telling them?
Starting point is 00:02:29 Rolesor is certainly claimed as the fault of the M-O-D. Yeah. And the MOD probably says it's Rolls-Royce's fault, and everyone says it's Isaac Newsome's fault. Yeah, to fix these ships, actually, when they do replace the engines, they're going to have to drill a huge hole in the underside of the boats, I think. So you've really got to tear the whole thing apart at this point. Wow. And it's a billion pounds each, I think. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:51 But that is, of course, only three months of the money that we're going to get back from Europe. Did you know there's one vertical shipwreck in the world, which is just... sticking up completely vertically at a 90 degree angle to the seabed. Wow. And this is HMS Victoria, and it's a really interesting story. So it's, um, this was a battleship in the late 19th century. And it was one of the biggest battleship wrecks that the UK suffered. And it was because of this guy, Admiral Tryon, which feels like a...
Starting point is 00:03:20 He just turned up at the Admiralty one day. Just trying that on. And it did not go well for him. So he did, he gave this bizarre order in 1890s. he was a really well-decorated Admiral in the Royal Navy, and he was just off the coast of Lebanon, and there were two main ships leading this big fleet, the HMS Victoria and HMS Camperdown.
Starting point is 00:03:42 And he, suddenly, via semaphore, gave the instruction to camper down that those two ships that were running parallel to each other had to turn inwards towards each other and do a full circle in order to come back. And the turning circle of those ships was collectively two kilometres, and there was one kilometre between them.
Starting point is 00:03:58 So it was physically impossible. Again, it's a law of physics, issue. It was physically impossible for them not to crash into each other. So the captain of HMS Camperdown ignored that the first time round, but when he gave the order a second time, he just had to obey because that was what you did in the 1890s.
Starting point is 00:04:14 And so they did this turn and lo and behold, these two ships, both just captained by the same guy, crashed straight into each other. One of them plummeted to the bottom of the ocean, yeah. His last words were, it's all my fault. Whoa.
Starting point is 00:04:29 Yeah. His last words, what, on his deathbed? or his... Well, he died in the shipwreck. A lot of people died. You're kidding. Bizarly, 357 people were rescued, but sadly, 358 people were drowned. And so it just tipped it over the edge.
Starting point is 00:04:44 And so as he was going down, he said, it's all my fault, to which I guess everyone on board his ship replied, yes, it is. Wow. And his name was Tryon, wasn't it? Tryon, Admiral Tryon. Yeah. My favorite kind of nominatively determined captain of a ship
Starting point is 00:05:00 was Captain Schlicht and he was a captain of a German U-boat it was U-126 and it sank off the coast of Scotland because the toilets flooded. Really? I don't know what caused the original blockage
Starting point is 00:05:16 but what happened was they flushed it a couple of times and it overflowed but the batteries were underneath the toilet so it wasn't a very well-designed submarine and so the water went into the batteries that released a load of chlorine gas. And then they were like, oh shit, there's chlorine gas everywhere. So they had to go
Starting point is 00:05:35 to the surface. And then when they got to the surface, the British just went, oh, there's a submarine. Let's shoot it. Wow. Here's the thing. Really early submarines, they were basically at the surface almost all the time. They were pretty much surface ships that had the capacity to dive. But the really odd thing is that even in the Second World War, to have extra observation, a German new boat would surface, and then it would send up a kite with a man in a little seat. And he would look around. This truly happened. This is within living memory.
Starting point is 00:06:04 He would look around and he could, because obviously you can see dozens of miles in any direction. You can see any ships. And then 53 kilometres, apparently, was the maximum you could see. And the only disadvantage was, obviously, it immediately gave away your position. And you would then have to dive really quickly
Starting point is 00:06:19 once you've seen who's in the area. And the guy is still attached to the submarine being pulled down, is he? He, I think they, I think they, I think they, get him back on board and then they say, deep breath, we're going on.
Starting point is 00:06:36 When the battleship arrives when the British warship arrives, it's just a bloke in a kite. Submarine? No, I think so. I'm sure I've heard of notice that. So the US Navy's most advanced new battleship is called
Starting point is 00:06:54 the USS Zunwalt and it is so advanced, it is so stealthy that in fact it's too stealthy and it's going to have to carry big reflective pads so other things don't bump into it. It's about 400 feet long and it can make itself look on radar like a 50 foot long fishing boat. One quick glass thing. You know the ceremony, the launching ceremonies of boats. So every time a new royal boat is launched, then we smash a champagne bottle or a woman
Starting point is 00:07:19 customer only smashes a champagne bottle into it. And I didn't realize the first instance in this was in the 18th century. And the person who first smashed a champagne bottle onto a ship's Hull was the Princess of Hanover, and she, according to reports at the time, threw the bottle at it. So now we smash it, but she threw the bottle at it with more energy than accuracy, missing the ship entirely and injuring one of the spectators who put in a claim for damages against the Admiralty. Does that mean that he was technically the ship? Is that how it works? Does the Navy have to use him? This is HMS Destroyer. This is HMS arrogant.
Starting point is 00:07:59 the HMS Kevin. HMS Bloody McBlood face. Okay, it's time for our second fact, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1988, Singapore held a beauty contest where 60% of the judging marks were awarded for how good a contestant's website was. So this was a way to promote the internet in Singapore in the 90s, And it was their leading internet service provider called SingNet, and they had a competition to find intellectual beauty.
Starting point is 00:08:35 And 60% of the marks were awarded for internet knowledge, which was producing your own homepage and also sitting at a laptop answering internet trivia questions. Wow. And designing. It was just a laptop on stage, and they came out and designed a website. Also, do they have to design it on the spot?
Starting point is 00:08:53 Yeah, yeah. Doesn't it take days? Not if you use Squarespace, Base.com. So obviously, beauty contests, we probably all think they're a little bit sexist.
Starting point is 00:09:06 But according to Miss America organization, they claim to be the largest scholarship organization solely for women in the whole of America. Hmm. I think that's been debunked.
Starting point is 00:09:19 Yeah, by John Oliver. Yeah. It's a shame because it got such a rigorous round of support from the audience here. I think they do give out some scholarships, but they don't give out nearly as many as were originally claimed. So modern beauty contests were invented by Pee Barnham, who we must all know.
Starting point is 00:09:35 He is the guy who kind of started circuses. He was a big kind of circus king of America. And he started them in Delaware in 1880, and it was a panel of judges who chose, and one of the judges was Thomas Edison. Really? Yeah. And it was to promote a beach resort outside of the normal kind of time
Starting point is 00:09:54 that people would go to beaches. In 1955, America had a sausage cross. Queen? That was a competition. There was a huge rash, in the 50s especially, of really, really heavily sponsored competitions. If you Google image search, I've done this, and it's safe, so don't worry. Took a risk. If you Google image search, sausage queen, you'll find... Find the picture of this poor woman. She's wearing a bikini, but she's also covered in sausages. Well, there are in Colombia, there are loads and loads of beauty pageants. So I think the BBC worked out that Colombia holds 3,794 beauty pageants a year, a year. Calm down.
Starting point is 00:10:38 You're all beautiful. But there's more than 10 a day. And so they've had to branch out. So they have Miss Onion. And that's where you have to prove your extensive knowledge of onions. They have the international coffee pageant, which similarly, Miss Coffee is someone from Japan, bizarrely, who proved her knowledge of Colombian coffee well enough. They have donkey pageants, which are really popular, which is where you dress up donkeys. And this takes place in rural
Starting point is 00:11:05 Colombia, and it's where you dress up your donkeys as political or famous figures. And you prance them around. So at the last donkey pageant, I think, one of them was Barack Obama. He was draped in an American flag, so he was wearing an American flag, a sort of a dress, and he had a USA tie on him. And in the end, the prize actually went to a donkey dressed as a Colombian preacher and Barack Obama's handler apparently was seen storming off in outrage. I would have, I'd put a bag of oats on my donkey's nose and then it would be donkey oaty. Are they mixed? Mixed. On the flip side, I was reading about, and it's terrible that this exists, but this does exist. In Zimbabwe, there's an annual Mr. Ugly competition.
Starting point is 00:11:51 And it's been going for four years. This will be the fifth year, 2016. Last year, they had a situation, a huge controversy, because the person who was awarded the top prize of Mr. Ugly in the country was deemed too handsome by most of the people who were in it. Mainly it was the guy who's won it three years in a row who was like, this guy's not ugly, he's just missing teeth. I can't believe the contest got ugly.
Starting point is 00:12:21 They really stuck to their guns. The guy, one of the main judges said, Sierra made a tremendous, this is a guy who won, Sierra made a tremendous effort to enhance his ugliness by pulling facial stunts. Masvenu, who was the former champion, thought he is so ugly that he didn't even need to try hard. That cost him the crown.
Starting point is 00:12:42 And so, yeah. So none of the judging panel said, oh, I just thought voting him would be a protest. I didn't think he'd actually win. That was not. Yeah, satirical, show we do. Yeah, the most satirical we've ever made. Yeah, so a thing about the internet in Singapore.
Starting point is 00:13:03 Yeah. Okay, so in 2001, Singapore banned campaigning on the internet during its election. So Minister for Information and Arts, Lee Yok-Swan, said, A free-for-all internet campaigning environment without rules is not advisable. On the internet, once a false story or rumor is started, it's like water that has been spilled, it's almost impossible to rain in the matters, especially in the limited period of an election campaign.
Starting point is 00:13:31 I think we can all agree he was way off the mark there. They were quite into promoting the internet around that period, weren't they? Because they had an internet festival in the year 2000, and the centrepiece of this festival was this guy called Nicholas Eng, who was a computer engineer who had founded this company called Wave New World. and this was all the talk of the millennial Singaporean internet festival. And as the BBC reported, he said that the internet and this new media explosion in the year 2000 have brought us email, e-commerce, DVD movies, interactive games.
Starting point is 00:14:06 But something is missing the sense of smell. And he was starting up a company called Digi Sense, which allowed you to use the internet, but smell as you were doing it, all the sense that would be appropriate to the website that you were searching. You don't always want to smell the thing that you're looking up. If it's sausage queen, you know what you have? If you Google the phrase, smell the sausage queen. We cannot guarantee that I say. It is crazy, though, because I remember the internet in 1998,
Starting point is 00:14:38 which was pretty basic. So the idea that there would be a massive competition at that time. Yeah. Seems ridiculous. I went to Juddrell Bank, which is in Cheshire's. A big sort of, what is it? They look for aliens, don't they? Yeah, a big telescope.
Starting point is 00:14:50 I'm sorry. So it was in the 90s and we didn't, no one had the internet, we didn't have it in our school, so we all went there to kind of look at the internet. And I remember going in there. I know, it's amazing. But I went in there and kind of searched for fantasy football,
Starting point is 00:15:07 which I was into at the time. And it kind of just picked up the word fantasy and gave me lots of things that as a young teenage boy I'd never really seen before. Whoa. A georgive knight. A georgive knight, yeah. That's ironic considering the rhyming slang
Starting point is 00:15:20 that Dodgerald Bank is. Guys, we need to move on in a sec. I think we ought to, yeah. Okay, I have one little thing about contests in Singapore. Yeah. So in 2009, men's sports in Singapore was so bad that they couldn't find a sportsman of the year. What?
Starting point is 00:15:42 So 2008 was an Olympic year as well. The president of their Olympic Council said, unfortunately, it was a bad year. None of them really achieved anything noteworthy. So I had a look at what they did in the Olympics. And the table tennis team went out in the group stage. None of the sailors made the top 20. Their only track athlete went out in the first round.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Their only shooter lost in the first round. Their only swimmer lost in the first round. And their only male badminton player lost in the second round. So you think you might have won. But he had a buy in the first round. Time for him. fact number three and that is Anna Chisinski. My fact
Starting point is 00:16:22 this week is that there is a network of fully furnished fake apartments in the UK whose sole purpose is to get burgled. Wow. That's amazing. That's amazing. How many, when you say a network, how many... That's so bizarre that that's your first question. Who owns
Starting point is 00:16:39 them? So they are owned by the government. So this is, there are a lot to answer your question. Apparently that helps. They exist in every major city in the UK. there are a few of these. I found this out in a new book just come out of this year called A Burglar's Guide to the City.
Starting point is 00:16:55 It's by Jeff Manow and it's so good. And yeah, it's this capture house program that the government runs which is where you build a completely fake apartment that's totally kidded out with a lot of nice technology with some furniture that's often donated by the local police force apparently that they didn't want. And you build this apartment in a way that will hopefully lure burglars. to burgle it. And unbeknownst to them, they're all covered in this chemical agent, which can only be
Starting point is 00:17:25 seen under UV light. So whenever the burglar who's burglaring it touches a handle or walks across the floor, then he's covering himself in this chemical agent, which then leaves a trace of where he's been. And also they're full of cameras. So basically, they're there as traps, so that burglars come in, and then the police follow immediately afterwards. And they're all over the place. And you wouldn't know if there was one in your apartment building. They're everywhere. So you can say, you wouldn't know if what was your home was one of these, if you've Burgle? Maybe it is. I want to know how they lure
Starting point is 00:17:52 burglars to burgle them. Do they have people sort of ostentatiously carrying in, you know, really nice tellies and stuff? Saying, oh, I must get a second lock for this door one of these days. As soon as I get back from that long holiday, my last ago. Thank God we got
Starting point is 00:18:08 rid of the dog. Yeah, it's basically that. No, they're often targeting one specific burglar. So they'll be... Wait, that's a man. It's amazing. It's genuinely incredible.
Starting point is 00:18:20 They target that particular burglar's motorcycle andis. So if he only robs first floor flats, for example, they'll try and make sure that one of their capture houses is a first floor flat if they can. And then they walk around outside of shouting, Marjorie, can you remind me to open all the windows? It's so warm. And then they'll leave a window open and they'll try and, you know, get him in. It's true.
Starting point is 00:18:41 It's that police thing where you pick up so many clues from it the way a burglar operates, and you really can rig up a house or a flat so that it is going to attract that one burglar in the area. And one burglar can raise the crime rates of one area massively because he and his gang or she and her gang will just be operating on lots of houses every day of the week. I was looking into, so police having to fake things in order to get results. Confessions.
Starting point is 00:19:06 Yes. So one of the things I read about is that bomb and drug sniffing dogs, when they go around looking for any, you know, their airports trying to sniff out drugs and so on, apparently, if they don't get a win, if they don't manage to smell out some drugs, they get quite depressed. Psychologically, sniffer dogs actually get depressed that they don't have a sort of, they've done a good job.
Starting point is 00:19:31 So what the police will do is they'll fake a situation. Yeah, yeah, honestly, where the dog can then sniff out someone and be like, oh, and they just get members of the public. They pay them to do it and they bust them. They pay members of the public. I don't know if they pay them, but they set up fake drug busts for, So that dogs can feel better. It's a great fact.
Starting point is 00:19:52 These guys always have to tell me what I've actually got a good fact that you've done very well. Have a biscuit. Do you want to hear about a couple of... Do you want to hear about a couple of cool devices that you can get if you don't want to be burgled? Yes, please.
Starting point is 00:20:07 Sure thing. A lock. A lock. So you can get a thing called fake TV, which is very cool. And it's this panel which is just flashing LED lights. but from the outside, it looks exactly like someone's indoors and watching telly. Why don't you just leave your TV on?
Starting point is 00:20:24 Good point. Great. That's stuff there business model. No, I think the idea is it uses a lot less energy than just leaving your tele on all the time. Did someone watch Home Alone and see the Christmas scene? That's a business model. That is a thing you can buy. It's called fake TV. And I've seen it.
Starting point is 00:20:45 It looks right. I didn't burgle the house. And there's another thing you can get You can get an anti-theft security smog jet machine This is for things like banks and things like that But if there's a break-in It just floods the entire room with smog Wow
Starting point is 00:20:59 Yeah That's very cool And the baggler goes in and goes Oh I'm in the 19th century Just on the subject I was looking for fake things and police And I just found a story that I rather like From last year
Starting point is 00:21:13 This is from Sutton So not too far from here and it's that in June of last year police in Sutton turned up to a house because they'd had a tip-off from the RSPCA and they had a standoff over a snake which was loose in someone's garden and they had a reasonably long standoff
Starting point is 00:21:29 until it was pointed out to them that it was a garden ornament snake but they were standing really still watching it and it wasn't moving and they weren't moving and then a resident told them it's not real and I just love the quote it was a neighbor was called
Starting point is 00:21:45 Gary Hollins, a 43-year-old who lived nearby, and he said, I could have told you it was a fake snake because the paint is peeling off it. Hey, snakes shed their skin. True, good point. We need to move on to the final fact. Okay, maybe we should do some
Starting point is 00:22:01 hilarious burglary stories. Sure. Shall we? So I went on the internet and looked for some burglar headlines from the last few months. So a burglar was caught after knocking over a tin of white paint, during a break-in and leaving footsteps leading all the way to his door.
Starting point is 00:22:21 Oh, man. There was another one who was caught by police after having a bite out of a cucumber and leaving his DNA inside the cucumber. There was a post office burglar who was caught after he tried to buy a car with £1,000 in £1.1.000 in £1.000. And there was a Kentucky burglar who was arrested after accidentally dialing his phone 911 while he was talking to an accomplice
Starting point is 00:22:49 about the burglary that he was just about to do. Oh my God. They just overheard him saying what he was going to do and then they caught him. Wow. Do you remember there was that story about there was a couple who were downstairs and they'd arrived back home and some two people were in their house robbing the house.
Starting point is 00:23:06 Sorry, no, it was one person. One person was in the house so he quickly ran upstairs and hid and was trying to plan his escape route. And according to this story, the burglar is upstairs, and he's just sitting there kind of going, okay, what do I do? They're downstairs, and one of the couple says, oh, I heard a hilarious joke today, told the joke, deliver the punchline, the recipient just didn't laugh, and then they just heard this, and the burglar couldn't help but go, I wonder what happens in that knock-knock joke, pisses himself, and then they busted, but they called the cops, and they went to joke.
Starting point is 00:23:40 That's so weird. It's a true story. We need to move on to the final fact. Okay. Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin. I don't think it is. James has done this. It's my favorite.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is... Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. Thank you, Dan. My fact is that the world's biggest skywriting firm recently turned down a request to draw the largest ever penis in the sky. That was worth waiting for. So skywriting, we all know, is where planes loop the loop, and they release smoke in various patterns to make letters or shapes or whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:24:25 And the really cool thing is there are only five full-time skywriters on the planet. Only five people who make a full-time living. A lot of sort of freelance that people do it part-time. There's an amazing article on the website Quartz about this, because there's a family firm of people who do it, and they have various rules. So they turn down swear words. They won't write really rude things in the sky.
Starting point is 00:24:49 And they've also turned down someone who wanted to get the largest ever penis drawn in the sky. But they did, earlier this year, write over California the words, Trump is disgusting. But they now regret it, and they say they wish they hadn't taken it because they want to be kind of apolitical.
Starting point is 00:25:04 So by writing the word Trump, they did kind of have the world's biggest penis in the sky. Yeah, so the other cool thing is, so there are two, I didn't know, there are two main ways of making letters in the sky. You can either do it with one plane, which is where you have, and you have a sort of smoke jet, basically, it's an adapted exhaust out of the back of the plane. And you can either have one plane, but it takes ages, and you can only write about 12 letters maximum. And it takes a couple of minutes to write a single letter. Because the letters are huge. Each of the letters is as tall as the Empire State Building.
Starting point is 00:25:37 Whoa! Yeah, they're massive. And a single message is at least five miles long in the sky. This is very exciting because there's now a new thing you can do called sky typing, which is where you have five planes next to each other, right? And they're all flying in formation. And they have a computer-controlled system which releases puffs of smoke at exactly the right moment. So they're all writing either on or off in the sky.
Starting point is 00:26:00 And that produces slowly. Like an inkjet printer kind of thing. Like an inkjet printer. Yeah, yeah. And it slowly produces the word like that as they fly across. So you can do longer messages now. using sky typing. And that's the old new divide in skywriting. That's amazing. My favorite one was from a few years ago, and it was just suddenly appeared in the air,
Starting point is 00:26:20 How do I land? And it was a comedian who did that. It was a Kickstarter. He decided he wanted to help Skywriting come back. He thought it would be a great place to put a joke up. And so he did a Kickstarter, and they raised $4,000 American dollars. That's how much it cost to have something like, How do I land? But do you know that actually it was a really windy day? And so they did the H and then by the time they'd done the O, the H had already gone. Oh! And by the time they did the W, the H and the O had already gone.
Starting point is 00:26:51 And he said, if you watch the sky for 20 minutes, you could probably piece it together. This is a guy called, he was a comedian called Kurt Braunola. Yeah, he still is a comedian called Kurt Brer. But he's just so people know who he is. Kristen Shaw, who is in Flight of the Concordes and so on. It's her comedy partner. So he's very big in the States.
Starting point is 00:27:14 But when he did this, unless you really, really watched and saw each letter go, you couldn't really tell what was happening. So what he did was he took a photo of each letter before it blew away, and then he put them all together in a composite photo, and then put it online saying,
Starting point is 00:27:29 this is what it would have looked like. Oh, no way. Because he could have just Photoshop the whole thing. it would have been I really like so back in the sort of 60s it was used there was so many plans
Starting point is 00:27:40 that skywriting was going to be the main way that you would advertise your company I think you're right and pretty much it was when TV came in and suddenly
Starting point is 00:27:48 we could get advertising into everyone's homes immediately and that was when skywriting's like oh we don't really need this anymore and it didn't need to be
Starting point is 00:27:55 a cloudless sunny day for the advertising to reach your home which it did but there was a lot of alarmism about skywriting in the early days of it, that it was just going to be this, like all new technologies, it was going to be this awful thing. So I was looking in the newspaper archives and people were writing things about it like in 1932, there was a debate in the House of Commons
Starting point is 00:28:19 as to whether we should allow advertisers free use of the sky to do this sky writing. And those MPs who were against it said it was a desecration of the sky, so monstrous it should be completely prohibited. And it was decided the inventor would promise not to do it in their cathedrals are monuments and would agree not to vulgarize the sky. But people thought it was going to ruin it. People thought it would just spiral out of control and the entire sky would be occupied by constant adverts. Well, they kept saying, yeah, in New York, they were worried that people living in high-rise buildings would be pummeled by the smoke that was coming down. So they were recommending close your windows so that you don't die effectively, which was not true at all. And it was
Starting point is 00:28:59 a sloppy business as well. 1961. I read this amazing report where someone went up, did the message, came back down, looked up, saw that they did it wrong. It was because it's very hard to do. It made a mistake. Went back up, put a cross through it, and redid the whole thing again. Do you know what the first ever skywriting message said? No. It said Daily Mail.
Starting point is 00:29:20 It was an advert for the Daily Mail. It was in 19202. And it was invented. Skywriting was invented by this guy called John Savage. It was a pilot. And the war was over. and he sort of started experimenting. So this is cool.
Starting point is 00:29:36 He had been an agent to a chap called BC Hux, who was the first Englishman to do a loop-the-loop in a plane. Wow. What? Yeah. Wow, cool. He had a flying agent, apparently. And then, so after he'd experimented with this Daily Mail advert,
Starting point is 00:29:49 he went to the USA, and he wrote, in the sky above New York, Hello, USA. But no explanation, nothing. Then the next day, he sent someone else back up, another pilot, and the message he wrote in the sky was, Call Vanderbilt 7100, which is the hotel he was staying at. As soon as people saw that, they started phoning the hotel by the hundred saying, I must buy this as an advert.
Starting point is 00:30:14 That was his only advertising method. I think he was proving the effectiveness, wasn't he? So I think 47,000 people called within three hours, and it was sort of improved the effectiveness of this advertising that they all called. But someone, I like this in 1961, there was a guy who was one of the very few people who was employed as a skywriter and he had hated his math teacher at school, he said. And so he did the sky writing
Starting point is 00:30:39 with the advertisement that he'd been employed to write in the sky. And then he had some spare ink in his tank. And so at the end of his working day, he scrawled 4 plus 1 equals 6 in the sky as revenge against his high school mass teacher. Isn't that nice? That's amazing. How is that revenge?
Starting point is 00:31:00 But yeah, it relies on. a lot of things. The mass teacher seeing it. The mass teacher knowing it's him. The mass teacher giving a shit about him anyway. But also, it's not a revenge to still be enumerate. I'll show my English teacher by unlearning
Starting point is 00:31:15 reading. I was reading a few years ago, and it's I can't read out the whole passage, but it's really worth reading this person's account about how when in, I think it was around 2008, they were doing a someone hired Skywriting team to write piece now
Starting point is 00:31:30 across the sky. So there was a protest going because Obama was doing some sort of talk and they just wanted to say, we want peace, no more war, all that sort of stuff. So the big problem that the pilot had is that they misjudged the size of the words. And as they were finishing up the words, they were heading directly into territory that the military said, this is not an aerospace you're allowed into because we have the president down there and you will be shot down. That's amazing. Yeah, someone in the plane going, we need to turn around. We need to turn around. They're going, I need to get there so I can make the turn up to finish the W on the now. So in the end of it, read, B's no.
Starting point is 00:32:06 We need to wrap up, really, say. Can I quickly tell you about a chap in Melbourne, this was a couple of years ago. He wrote, he proposed his girlfriend in the sky with sky writing. He wrote Marie, that was her name, marry me, across the sky, and she said no when she saw it.
Starting point is 00:32:21 No. Did she also send a plane up to say no? Because they've been together for years and years, and years and then they'd broken up and then they were getting back together and they were thinking he was thinking this i think this will clinch it and um he he said at least i know i've tried my best do you know that's so weird because there's another guy in melbourne recently who got involved in skywriting because he had a girlfriend called prue and he wanted to send her a valentine's day message in the sky saying happy valentine's day prue but couldn't afford it so he started a
Starting point is 00:32:54 kickstarter for everyone else who had a girlfriend called prue in the world and said, if you will contribute to this, then we'll put the message, Happy Valentine's Day, Prue, love me, so no one knows which one it was. Oh, there was a guy who wrote, sorry in the sky above, I was an American city,
Starting point is 00:33:11 and no one knows who it was, but I imagine a lot of people will have been using that. That's for me to you. I am sorry. Boris Johnson's already got a second one on the go. Okay, okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.
Starting point is 00:33:25 Thank you so much for listening. if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James, at Eggshake, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. And Chisinski. You can email podcast at qI.com. Yep. And you can go to no such thing as a fish.com.
Starting point is 00:33:43 We've got all our previous episodes up there. You can also go to no such thing as the news.com because we have a TV show, and you can watch all of our previous episodes there too. We will see you again next week. Guys, thank you so much for being here in the South Bank of London. Thank you for listening at home. We'll see you again. Goodbye.

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