No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Monet's Bog Cottons

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Dan, James, Anna and John Lloyd discuss Orwellian liars, neolithic fires, spicy pillories and dusty lilies. 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

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 Anna Tyshinsky, James Harkin, and John Lloyd. 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 Johnny. My fact is, when the impressionist Claude Monet lived at Giverny, he had six gardeners, one of whose whole job was to dust and wash the water lilies and clean the surface of the water. Wow.

I guess if you're famous for painting water lilies, you want them to look as good as possible. Yeah, exactly. They need to be picturesque. Although maybe you wouldn't paint the bits of dust on them anyway, would you? How do you dust a water lily? What are you using for that? A hoover? I think he just wet it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. But these were very special water lilies. They were specially imported from Japan. Monet was crazy about Japanese art, which you probably know had just arrived in France. When Japan opened up in the 1850s to the West, all these prints started arriving,

and all the impressionists were crazy about them. And Monet got a real bargain. In Zandam, he was in Holland for a bit. And there was a porcelain deal there who didn't know that these Japanese prints were going to have a Kupam World Fitness, and he wrapped all his china in them. And so Moni bought some cheap China with these amazing prints by Hokasai and Hiroshima and all that.

Oh, wow, cool. And I'm wearing a Hokasai jumper today. My God, so you are. Is that deliberate? No. Do you know, Hokasai is famous for this wave painting. People will know it. Well, it's on my jumper.

It's on your jumper. It's around. And it comes from a set of paintings called, I think it's called 36 views of Mount Fuji. But there's actually 46 views of Mount Fuji. in that set because he did 36 and they were so popular he did another 10 but he didn't change the name. That's great.

Too much effort. Did he run out of energy just to the end? That's interesting because Monnet also was famous for doing lots of paintings of the same thing, not just Waterloo's, steam trains he did, poplars, haystacks was very popular. Same with Cézanne, who was a great mate of Monnet. And Cézanne painted Monsard Victoire,

I think, 200 times and never felt he got it quite right. It's an extraordinary life because he struggled hugely with poverty and depression all his life. But by the time we're talking about the water lilies, he'd suddenly got rich, you know. I think the thing that really kicked it off was the heiress to the singer-sowing machine fortune. I think the name was something like Waynetta, something like what? What was she called? Winnoretta singer, she was called. And she came to see Monnet in 1886 and she loved his stuff and bought a paint.

and suddenly the whole place is full of Americans or coming to see. It was Americans, wasn't it? It was American money that came in. And is it Cassat, Mary Cassatt, who was one of the Impressionists? And she was arguably the most important one because she was the one who got all the Americans

really interested in it. Right. And then the Americans started buying all this stuff, and then the Impressionists just had loads of money and could do what they wanted. Yeah, I found a real affinity one because I actually been to Zandam. In fact, I bought a boat in Zandam.

and I've enjoyed it there for a year. And also poor of me. And every man kind of story. Because I often quote Monet, who had this great line, after 20 years the wall is still there, by which he meant to do things really well. You've got to get the other side of this block into the zone, into the settlement.

And I often quote that as something that I feel very much. But this is a guy who, age 28, he threw himself into the sane and attempted to drown himself. Yes. What was his plan there? Because it was unsuccessful, of course. And if you can swim, I think it is quite hard. Well, that was the problem.

He jumped in and then regretted and made it, and remembered he was an incredibly good swimmer and then back to the shore. It's currents. Currants take you under and stop you from getting back up. I know, but you've got to pick your bit. Like, if you can swim, and I think it's quite hard to just not move your body. In order to paint a water lily, you need to be a water lily.

Perhaps that's what was going on there. And he was that committed. That's really interesting that you say you identify with him, John, because he kind of reminded me of you as I was reading this, because as you say, he was such a perfectionist and, like, obsessive and did seem to have this conviction he wasn't doing well enough. He had another quote that was, my life has been nothing but a failure,

and all that's left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear. Oh, yeah, that's you, John. He did, he destroyed 500 of his paintings. Wow. In 1908, they had to cancel an exhibition because he'd slashed 15 of the paintings with a knife. Must have been seriously annoying for the gallery curators. But this is worrying, Anna, because...

I'd have to go over through that theory. I was like, why have I said this to my boss? But go on. John, no, no, don't go down to the Thames and drug yourself in, for God's sake. Have you read Steve Jobs' biography by Walter... Walter Isaac? Yes. It's a searing book about this terribly complicated

and really sort of mad person. And I suddenly thought Jobs' perfection is a bit like me. And I came back and I said to a friend, if you read the Steve Jobs bio and he said, yes. I said, do you think I'm a bit like Steve Jobs? And he went, um, uh, uh, you know, I don't know. You did genuinely go through a period of wearing Poloneck shirts. Was that after that biography?

No, I've always won them. Have you? You were the original. He got it from you, didn't you? It's a Navy thing, yeah. Oh, right. And the thing about the number, the volume of paintings that he, he did. Back to Monet, there's accounts of where he'd be painting a scene and almost like filming

a movie where your lighting changes and that's it for the day. He'd go, get me another, you know, canvas and they might bring another canvas that he was painting yesterday at that exact time so then he could continue on that. So he was constantly swapping in and out canvases of work and progress. And he also used, because he had so many children because of very complicated private life, as I'm sure you've discovered. Yeah, so similar to you again. That's so not true. So unfair. But yeah, and he would, there were eight children in the house,

and he would get a swarm of them, each to carry a canvas, and he'd trot off to the beach with all these children and work on all the canvases at once. Yeah. It sounds like chaos. And actually this element of his life reminds me more of Dan Schreiber, in fact. There we go. Too many kids.

The next insult is leveled this way. It's just the chaotic number of children. because, yes, he was quite poverty-stricken for a long time. And then... But then the art dealer who sold his art, who was Ernest Hoshaday, he was also poverty-stricken, went bankrupt. So moved in with Monet. Ernest brought his wife, and I believe they're six children,

in with Monet and Monet's wife, and their two children. And then Monet fell in love with Ernest's wife. And they're all... They can't pay rent, and it just sounds like, hell, God knows how he was putting together these really peaceful... blissful paintings. Yeah, Dad. Where am I in those things that remind?

I imagine stepping into that household would fill me with the same sense of anxiety as like stepping into your house on a normal Saturday afternoon. Fair call. We should say his gardens were unpopular with a certain cohort, basically his neighbours, right?

Who were not fans because he subsumed everything to his art which went to the extent of him rerouting a local river to feed his years, to feed. Peru, yes, to feed his pond. And so all the neighbours who needed the river for their cattle farming and other things

were like, well, this is our water. And then they all panicked because they thought the lilies would poison the water supply because they were foreign and exotic. They were. And yeah. The lilies were really interesting because they had been invented very recently because all the lilies in France were white.

And there's a guy called Boréé la Tour Maliac, who came up with the idea of crossing French lilies with Japanese lilies. and he kind of crossed two together and came up with this new version and then he crossed that new version with some from North America to make all these different colours of lilies

and actually the in-between version of lily that he made is now extinct so he can't make that bit of science that he did ever again because the in-between step has gone but Monet's first order from this guy we have it and he ordered a load of water lilies from him but he also ordered some water smart weed

a horn nut and some broad-leaved bog cotton. So those paintings could have been paintings of broad-leaved bog cotton, if that had taken better than his water lilies. Yeah. The thing about him was that he was such an incredibly determined person. Renoir said if it wasn't for Mono, we'd have all given up because he went on beyond the pain barrier all the time. They weren't massively like to the very start where they were the Impressionists.

No, no, it was incredibly unpopular. They were booed and laughed at. Yeah, the word impressionism came as an insult. It was one of Monet's paintings was called Sunset and Impression. Impression sunrise, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but then one of the critics made some funny joke about it. I haven't written it down. I have is he was called Louis Leroy,

and one of his lines on Impression Sunrise was wallpaper, in its original state is more finished than this seascape. Wow, oh my goodness. And then when the Impressionist became famous, he then took all the credit for it. He was very proud. that he'd invented the name, but he'd rubbish them at the time. Oh, really?

How interesting. He was really rude about them. And then the second time they did an exhibition, it was described by a critic called Albert Wolfe as a horrifying spectacle, five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman. And the woman he's talking about is Bertramor-Morissau, and she's really interesting because she and her sisters were learning to paint, and they had a private tutor called Joseph Guichard,

and he warned their mother, considering the characters of your daughters, they will become painters. Do you realize what this means? In the upper class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might say, almost catastrophic. The idea that one of these girls

might become a professional painter is just seen as not an acceptable profession. Yeah, people said they have declared war on beauty. That was the kind of idea of what they were doing. And Zola said they shouldn't be called impressionists, They should be called actualists because that's what they were doing. They were painting the actual thing.

Kind of like losing a beauty filter, I guess. They're not actually, because if water lilies look like that, then I'd think I'd got something wrong with my eyes. It's blurry. Aren't they painting their impression of it? I think you are used to seeing dusty water lilies. No, because actually that painting that we're named, which was the impression sunrise,

I think he didn't have a name and he was going to call it like sunrise, and someone said to him, well, you can't really call it a sunrise. because it doesn't really look like a sunrise. And he said, okay, we'll just put Impression sunrise then. And that's kind of eventually after the insult where Impressionists came from. Yeah, right.

The thing about Monnet is that he was famous and immensely rich in his lifetime, quite unlike Van Gogh, for example. But you wouldn't forget that they were so, it was such a disaster at the beginning. So that exhibition that Louis Leroy commented on, when all the figures came in, the Impressionist found they each owed 184 francs to the gallery. They actually lost money It's like the Edinburgh Festival

Yeah And so they had another go One of their few financial supporters decided to hold a lottery In which the first prize Was one of Monnet's friend Renoir's paintings And they had this lottery And a local servant girl

Won the big prize She didn't won the painting Because you just heard everyone boo it So she got a cake I don't know If you offered me a painting Be it impressionist or not or a cake I know there are days when I'd go for the cake.

Yeah. It's just short termism, isn't it? Exactly, yeah. Because you have to go to the trouble of selling the painting in order to get the money to buy lots of cake, if that's how you want to do it. It's quicker just to get the cake. Really good point.

Yeah, yeah. The thing I love most about Monnet, and I didn't really know anything about what he was painting. I knew the water lilies. I didn't know about this garden, and the maintenance of the garden was so that he had the perfect thing to paint. There was nothing left to the imagination.

So it wasn't even just the water lilies. If trees that he were painting suddenly came into bloom and foliage is there. He'd hired gardeners to chop it away because it's getting in the way of what I had as the perfect painting. I've been to the garden. Have you? Yeah. It's just a garden with lots of tourists in it. But it's like... It's weird. He always painted the tourists out of the pictures, didn't he?

But it was like it was a Japanese garden. That's what he called it, I think. Oh, that's what he was aiming for. A Japanese bridge. Because he's got a Japanese bridge, like you say. And there's now, if you go to Japan, I can't remember which town it's in, but there's like a replica of it called the Monet Pond. And so it's like he copied the Japanese gardens and now Japan has copied his garden and called it the Monet Garden. That seems clear.

That's great. So the garden itself didn't immediately become a public place. It was many years in the family. And then the son, when he passed away in 1966, he handed it over. And it became part of a museum and then opened to the public. And they've had these amazing gardeners that have been working there ever since to preserve as close as possible to watch. he had. And so, as you said, James, they can't manufacture some of the plants anymore because a step is missing.

And so they have to find alternatives. But it's just, it's so wonderful reading the accounts of how they go through all his letters. They take the paintings and they hold them up exactly in the spot at the right distance and try and match the ponds to what is in the painting. So they're doing the exact same thing that he did, but in reverse again. In reverse, yeah. It's a really nice place to go. It's almost like Disneyland, I would say. It's quite fake, but it's like it's really, really beautiful and it's definitely worth us to him. He was almost killed in 1865 while painting. Oh yeah?

Yeah, a rogue discus knocked him out. No, I did it. 1865, he was painting in the open and there were a bunch of picnickers and some children and a discus suddenly caved to shot. Who brings a discus to a English tourist? That's amazing. It's what it says.

And so he ran to protect the kids, but in doing so, it's kind of like a secret service agent, jumping front of the president and taking the bullet, he took the discus. That's so funny. They say if it had hit him any higher, it might have, you know, it might have killed him. But it did, it knocked him out and he was bedridden for a while. So that exactly illustrates the QI principle, Dan, because I have read an entire book on Monet, a 300-page book on Monnet,

in great detail to research this thing. And I didn't know that thing about the discis. Really? And Dan got it from BuzzFeed's top 10, thanks a lot. Yeah. Which impressionist? or are you most likely to be a quiz? Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that Neolithic Europeans regularly burn their houses down for no apparent reason. Wow. It's amazing. It is unbelievable. So this is a culture called the Kukuteni Tripilia culture, which is usually in the Lithic cultures are sort of named often, at least.

on where the evidence of them is found. And they lived in southeastern Europe, in like Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, that kind of area between about 5,100 BC and 2,800 BC with lots of variation in how it's dated. But the bizarre thing about them is, from all the evidence we have, every 60 to 80 years,

they just burn down all their houses. So weird. Yeah. And entire towns, really. So they were, a lot of people think they were like the first civilization because they suddenly had these huge towns. The settlement sizes increased by 20 times. They sometimes call them cities, don't they?

Yes. I think it's a slightly optimistic. How do you know it was them burning them down rather than the neighbours coming along the end? Well, well, do I know. I've done some extensive archaeology. And I have learned a few things. A lot of people have said it might be that.

I think the reason they say it's not is that it would have taken such a huge amount of fuel to do it. So a settlement of 100 houses were really. require like four square miles of forest. And also it's so regular. It's this weird 60 to 80 cycle. There's a weird theory as well that they were actually reinforcing the structures when they were burning it because they found the walls actually hardened.

Just like, let's reset our houses. Get everything out. Let's burn the house down. Well, almost like firing a pot. Exactly. You have your clay and then you've set it on fire and it becomes hard. But I think I read one thing saying that might not be true because eventually you would burn it

and it would become really, really hard and then if you wanted to build another house on it it just made it really difficult because you can't put any foundations down because you just can't drill into it because in those days they didn't have the tools for it. Yeah. One idea is that it might have been ceremonial why they were burning these down, right?

Yeah. Because if you look at Chattelhoek in Turkey, which is an area we've spoken about before which is like a really old town, they did this as well. And we can find out exactly how they did it. And every time they would take all the goods out of the house, then they would clean the house,

then they would put arrowheads on the floor, and then the oven would be deliberately sort of knocked in and broken down, and then they would set fire to it. And it seems like they always set fire from the south of the house, no matter when they did it. So perhaps seeing as it was always the same, in this particular part of Turkey, at least, maybe there was a ceremonial reason behind it.

Yeah, and it does seem to have happened in a few other cultures as well. So perhaps that was just the done thing. they'd wonder why we don't burn our houses down. It's pretty amazing looking at drawings of what these places, cities, if we use that term, look like because they were massive buildings. And I don't place massive buildings to 5,000 BC. How massive are we talking, Dan? Well, okay.

Virgil Khalifa. Yeah, no, not that, but multi-story. They would have multi-story. And some places would be, if you can picture, the example that's given is two entire basketball courts would be the size of a place. And that, I don't know. Maybe that's my ignorance. of history. Certainly if you had that in central London, we're talking quite a few mill.

I couldn't find many examples of Neolithic housing, but Jericho is interesting. Supposed to be the oldest city in the world. Did you know that? It's on the Palestinian West Bank. And the Tower of Jericho is the oldest stone building in the world, 8,000 years old. How interesting. And the Neolithic housing in Jericho, they had the doors were in the roof. Did you know that? Oh, so they would enter ladders. You had a ladder. You put a ladder up.

You went in through the door and there's a ladder inside to go down to the ground floor. That's super fun. What was the reasoning for that? Because of defence, the whole thing is what's fascinating about, I had to look up, remind myself, what Neolithic meant. And as far as I can gather, it basically starts to the invention of farming about 12,000 years ago and ends with when bronze has invented about 4,300 years ago. So it's about 8,000 years. so not that long but the first humans came to Britain

around 700,000 BC so for 688,000 years human beings are just sitting about eating fruit wandering around surviving they were sitting about really just walking

they were wandering yeah hunting gathering yeah and Neolithic basically describes the time that humans became I suppose what we are like civilisation we'd settled we found farming we discovered farming and so we just started sitting there, farming stuff,

our diet's got much worse. Jared Diamond says it was the worst thing that humans have ever done, doesn't he? Inventing. Yeah, I think there's something to be said for that. And everything moves terribly fast, so 68,000 years doing nothing. And then suddenly you got farming 12,000 years ago,

chickens domesticated 10,000 years ago, roasted walnuts first eaten in France, 8,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, there were no white people then. Everybody was dark-skinned. Right. And then the first known pair of shoes is 5,500 years ago. So that's, you know. Oh, my God.

And sorry, the game changer was the invention of the agriculture. Agriculture is where we're talking about. Yeah, because everything follows from agriculture. Because first of all, you get a class system because somebody's got to be in charge. Somebody's got to decide things. You get religion starts growing up. Yeah, yeah. You start having grain and so your teeth get bad.

That's right. Terrible teeth. And then you've got property. So people, there's defense, there's warfare. There's, you know, what we call civilization. But the real problem is, it's basically Anna's short-termism of cake versus Renoir. It's that by farming, you can get lots of calories very easily. So you don't have to work so hard to get your calories.

But it's really bad in the long term, but it's really good in the short term. One of the unfun things about it was that it introduced overwork. So people have looked at the lives of undergatherers, and it was dreamy. They were only working a few hours a day. And then they would just be lying around in caves or whatever. And it was with agriculture where suddenly it became more. about production and production that people started working their asses off. And we haven't come far since then.

How was your month off? So you just had. Yeah, they hadn't invented holidays and weekends yet, sure. This particular culture were amazing, though. The Cucuteni Tripilia people, I thought an extraordinary thing about them is that there are lots of symbols on their pottery that have been uncovered, completely well preserved. and they include, and this is from, as I think I said, like 5,000 BC,

they include both yin and yang symbols, so those perfect yin and yang symbols, and swastikas. And swastikas, yeah, I saw that as well. They seem to come up with both and I can't really find out. So they had Nazis? Yeah, it's very tense time. That's why they get burning each other's houses down. Isn't the swastika one of those sort of universal symbols,

it's found all over the world, isn't it? Well, commonly people think it came from the east. like, you know, Indo-China, yeah, and Hinduism. But it seems to have come from here. But I don't know if they did come about independently. It's quite specific shape. Yeah, and I think what they're saying about this one is it's the earliest examples of consistent usage. And so other places they're quite sporadic and maybe just fallen through the...

I kind of think it is a thing that is quite a natural thing. Like if I'm just kind of sitting here sort of scribbling on a piece of paper, sometimes I'll log down and I've drawn a squawstick. It's really worrying when we see that chance. And I just think it's because it's like a geometric figure. It's just like a few crosses and whatever. And you're like, oh, I'm going to cross that out. Right.

Do write in anyone if you have the same thing, James. I can't say I find myself subconsciously drawing swastikers. Well, it's a sour sticker as well, isn't it? That's a back-to-front one, is it? That's what James always tells people. There's an interesting guy. Did you come across Sir John Lubbock in your... No.

So he was the guy who coined the word Neolithic. And Paleolithic, actually. Extraordinary guy. I'd never heard of him before. Amazing scientist. And when he was about 12, his father came home and said, I've got some very good news, Johnny. Very, very good news.

And he thought, oh, I'm getting a new pony. But it was only the idea that Charles Darwin was going to come and live in the next village. So they became very close friends. And Lubbock was the guy who persuaded the dean of Westminster that Darwin should be buried in Westminster Abbey. and was one of his pull-bearers. I thought it was rather charming.

That's very interesting because in a weird mirroring of that, a couple of generations later, the person who came up with the term Neolithic Revolution as an Australian called Veer Gordon Child, and he was very good friends with another Charles Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin. And they both heavily influenced each other as well. And he was very interesting child.

He was a person who excavated Scarabray, which is an extraordinary... where they found the village. They found it. Yes. That's kind of the oldest Neolithic village in the UK, right? One of the Orkneys, isn't it?

Yeah, it's in Orkney and it is. I have actually been there and it's an amazing place because it's so well preserved and it's about nine houses and they're a thousand years older than Stonehenge and they're all still furnished. It was all stone furniture because famously not really any trees on Orkney so everything was stone and they have, as you walk in through the doorway,

you've got a fire in the middle, You've got a chest of drawers opposite and you've got two beds on either side. What were the chest of drawers? I was going to say that. Stone chest of drawers. Yeah. Yeah. I've used chest of drawers.

It's a place where you put your stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've done the estate agent. Yeah, exactly. It looks like a rock, but it's used correctly. Imagine this rock. It could be your office. It could be an exercise room.

And they also all had limpets. soaking tanks. That's the other crew could be a exercise room. It could be a limpid soaking tank. Whatever you're

into. What do you I mean obviously the answer is to soak your limpets but what is a limpid soaking tank for?

Apparently, as you've correctly assumed, it is for limpid soaking and the reason the limpets soaked was not, as you might think because they ate limpets.

We believe they used limpets as bait and if it soaked them they would soften a bit and be better bait. And then they'd tracked other things.

There's another theory, by the way, just jumping back to the burnt house horizon, as it's been coined. Oh, the Tricholian ones. Yeah, exactly. There are many theories as to why they were burnt. We've already mentioned a few. One other theory is that... I can just hear sometimes when Dan is coming up with a time-travelery, alien he.

What's it going to be today? It's not any of that. Go on. So there's a theory that Bigfoot would... What it is is... is that it's thought that if someone died in the house, then the house has gone from a house of the living to the house of the dead,

and so you burn it down to respect the dead. I mean, there's so many... That's a rational theory, actually. I take it back, Dan, no big foot involved. Talking of spooky mysteries, shouldn't we talk about Stonehenge a bit? Sure. Because that is really one of the big histories.

And that's sort of late Neolithic, isn't it? What's it about between 3,100 and 1,600 BC? Yeah. 1500 years it took them to finish it? I think it was late Neolithic for the world, but we were actually quite... slow to farm in Britain, weren't we? Yeah. So, yes, we were, we were, everything took, you know, it took thousands of years to reach

farming. Well, you know, it's just like, it's like a European thing, isn't it? We don't really like it. They recently, they think almost certainly that Stonehenger was built by the Welsh. Did you know this? They knew the stones came from Preseli Hills in Wales. But they assumed that the English went there, collected the stones and brought them back in. But now they think the thing was actually built in Wales Hang on, so built in Wales and then they did an IKEA style, took down and ships it over. Wow.

I went to Stonehenge. Like, there was a thing where you could go early in the morning before it opened for the tourists, and we did that, and they do not like it if you touch the stones. Did you touch it? No. Oh.

You could have done when I was a child. You definitely could touch. I know, well, you used to be able to, right? You used to even be able to chip bits off them. I think we might have said. How did they feel when you scratch that swastika on here? I love that story. In 1915, a wealthy barrister called Sir Cecil Chubb.

He went to an auction in Salisbury intending to buy a pair of curtains at a knock-down price and ended up buying Stonehenge. Darling, don't be angry. It reminds me, John, of that time that you bought the life-size Barbie ball. The Christmas tree Barbie for my daughters, yeah. It was a Save the Children auction And I was directing ads at the time

We had plenty of spare money And I bought this seven foot tall Barbie Dress as a Christmas tree for the girls And Sarah came back from the loo I just bought this thing She was so angry He was speaking to me for three months You should have been like

It could have been worse, it could have been stonehenge Yeah, it could have been Because similarly Successful Chubb bore this and he came home So darling And he told his one that he bought it as a birthday present for her. He was improvising, but she didn't want it.

She said, what the hell do I want those for? They're not going to keep the light out? So that's how it gave it to the nation in 1918. Wow, that's great. Now, whatever happened to the curtains, that's what I want to know. Exactly, that's the question. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that despite warning us that everything we say would be recorded,

we have lost all the recordings of everything that George Orwell said. Ironic. Yeah. There's nothing on YouTube at all, no clips. There's literally nothing. He was a BBC broadcaster. He was famous in his day, obviously, as a writer. Of course he was, yeah.

Yeah. He did multiple panels. He was always on broadcast, so we should have his voice somewhere. This is, thank God Alex Bell is not on this podcast. He gets very upset about the BBC's cataloging system. And you can understand it when you hear things like this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And actually, we have no video of him as well, except in 2003,

some footage of him was unearthed of him when he was, I believe, he was 18 years old. You see him at a school sort of like sports field, and he's the fourth kid in a line of kids who are holding arms linked up. And that's the only footage that we have of him before he was actually famous. So we don't have any footage. We got photos, obviously. And he was someone who was being monitored as well, because he was saying a lot of contentious stuff.

So you figure it just something would have survived. Yeah. And it's such a shame it hasn't because I think his voice would have been hilarious. It sounds like it was. Oh, really? Well, because he was super posh. And you know how when you watch old films like Brief Encounter about kind of not even that posh people?

And you can barely understand them. And George Orwell at the time, even his posh friend said, this guy sounds incredibly posh. So I think he would have been virtually incomprehensible to us. Yeah, there's quite a few people who do. describe what his voice was like. And something to take into account is the fact that when he was a soldier in the Spanish war, he was literally shot through the neck, like a bullet went in one side and out the back.

It somehow missed all the main arteries that would have killed him. He survived. But that affected his voice forever on in terms of volume. So he could never talk loud. It was hugely exhausting. He'd been at dinner parties and he'd try to say something. And everyone's like, what? And he just like, and he just couldn't get the volume behind up.

So do you think maybe we do have some recorded. of him, but it's just very badly leveled. Yeah, exactly. Didn't I read somewhere that BBC researcher interviewing said he sounded like Alan Rickman? Alan Rickman, yeah, that's what they said, yeah. So the thought is there is one bit of audio of him out there because it's this BBC researcher who found it in the archives but then kind of lost it. And one day we will get it.

These things do turn up. Yeah. Well, that's very exciting. In a way, this actually is a fitting fact because he actually said in 1984. that everything, every record is destroyed, right? It was like the end of history. He did actually. So this is like history has been wiped out.

Winston Smith says everything had been destroyed or falsified. So now all we need is for an Alan Rickman to come along and like fake his voice and create that as the new truth. Yeah. And then you've put his prediction. He also used to fake his voice, which is really interesting, when he was living in various guises during his life. So one of his most famous books, down and out in Paris and London, so he decided he wanted to live as someone on the streets and sort of, put himself into the real people's world.

And he would put on apparently a sort of cockney accent that he would sort of... Yeah, well, you think so, right? If he's talking like Jacob Rees-Mogg, he's not going to like work out well in Paris with the criminals, isn't he? Yeah, that's true. That's true. I've got some ironic facts about 1984 because I love the core fact. Within 200 yards of the flat in Islington where Orwell had the idea for 1984, there are now 32 CCTV cameras.

That's very good. And the most common book people lie about having read is Orwell's 1984. Yeah, yeah. Why would they do that? Well, James, you used to, you did a bit of a reason. You used to lie a lot, do you? But in our live fish shows, you had a thing about people, the top ten books that people

lied about. Tolstoy was on there. Yeah, but 1984 is the top one. I've heard that before. Yeah, yeah. No one's lying about, you know, JK Rowling, are they? No one's lying about having read the Chamber of Secrets. Do you know what I think it is?

I think it is. quite easy to lie about, because Big Brother as a concept is quite easy to understand. Room 101 is quite easy to understand. If people say, have you read it, you can kind of get away with it, I think. Maybe you sort of think you have. In Thailand, you know, you can be arrested in Thailand for reading 1984. Really? And for having picnics.

Those are the two really serious things in Thailand. What was the second one, sorry? Having picnics. Oh, gosh. I thought you said, I slightly misunderstood. I thought you said, at family picnics. You could only be arrested for reading it if you're reading at a family. picnic because it's very rude and he should be interacting. It's interesting you said about where he got the idea was in Islington. I think he's partly got the idea from his wife, Eileen, who'd already written and published a poem about 1984, 15 years earlier. Really? Yeah, yeah. Cool. About 1984 the year, like her predictions. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, hers was a bit more optimistic. It was about that the world was sort of sought itself out and, you know, she thought the knowledge of the past can't be wiped out. So, 19.

1984 that he wrote was almost the opposite of what she wrote. Right. Her one was written in 1934, so it was exactly 50 years behind. And she, yeah, wrote about what the future would be like. And she thought it would be great? Well, she's saying, yeah, kind of. You know, things might go downhill, things might be a bit bad, but in the end, everything will work itself out.

Really? Yeah, yeah. And he also based it on a Soviet book called Muay, which was written by Yefgeny Samyatin. Yes. Which is basically the same story. Is it? Well, kind of.

It's like, it's all about mass surveillance and stuff like that. And it was banned by the Soviet Union, but Orwell read it. And he did say that his next book would be similar to this wee. Fair enough. Sure enough it was. So he kind of, I wouldn't say he plagiarized it because he put lots of his own ideas in. But I think, like, if you take his wife's poem about 1984 and this Soviet book and put them together, it wasn't a huge leap to come up with what he came up with.

Yeah. I read 1984 when I was at school. So you claim. Oh yeah, yeah, Big Brother and the rooms, 101 rooms and something. But it absolutely altered my life. I do remember it being a game changer. And then the other book that changed my view of things. And it was part of the module we were doing at school was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Yeah, definitely me too. Those two were always paired together as these kind of dystopian books. So it was the most joyous thing to discover that Orwell studied under Huxley at school. Oh, yeah. had eaten, he told him French. I mean, that is just incredible. And Huxley wasn't an author yet. He wasn't, well, he certainly wasn't published and famous.

So these were just two guys who would go on to change the world. It's a delight, isn't it? It's an echo of the impressionist really because not just that extraordinary coincidence, but Orwell was a contemporary eton of Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, and Ian Fleming. They were all contemporaries. So it's like a sort of nexus, like the fact that that Renoir and Emil Zola and Baudelaire

and, you know, people are all famous were just young people in Barisville. Who would have thought he would turn out and not have successful people? It was kind of help when you're all extremely rich, posh, white people. Although, to be fair to all, well, yeah, it wasn't, you know, he sort of got a scholarship or something, didn't he? He did.

His mother was, um, she had a really exotic name. She was called Ida Limousan. No. She was born in Penge. That's where are you still live? Yeah. Wow. Cool.

Well, I was actually just saying that Penge is not a very exotic sounding place. It's not. And they try to change that in Penge by calling it Pongch. Okay, genuinely. Genuinely, yeah. We live in Pongue. But to be fair, she was only on holiday in Pongj. Right.

She was actually grew up in Mo Lamin in Myanmar. On 1984, the process of writing it sounds really horrible. Fun though it is to read. He was really sick, wasn't he? Oh, yeah. had terrible TB, and he went to the island of Jura, very remote spot on the Scottish island of Jura, to write 1984 after he'd been widowed.

So Ilylin had died very unexpectedly. And so a very sad time. He'd taken the son he'd just adopted. I think they adopted a son about six months before she died. So he took the son, went to Jura, and it just sounds like agony. And he'd write that TB was gradually killing him as he forced out this awful book.

But he's, again, he's... sounds a little bit like Mornay is so determined and kind of gutsy. So he did things like once a bunch of cousins came to visit and he took them all on this fishing trip and he's got a bad TB, the boat capsized, they really nearly drowned. I think he just managed to scramble him and his son to a rock and drag them out. So very nearly died but made his TV a bit worse. But yeah, it sounds like he's really living the awful life that they lived in. 1984, at least suffering-wise. Yeah, because he had TB all his life, didn't he suffered it from all the time.

Very sickly. But again, like Monet, incredibly determined, you know, going to the Spanish Civil War as a reporter and then joining up on the socialist side. And then in the Second World War, he really tried to get into the army, but they wouldn't let him because of his TB. In fact, one friend said he tried harder to get into the army than most people tried to get out of it. And so instead he joined the Home Guard.

famously, you know, because he thought that once Hitler had been defeated, it might be transformed into a Catalan-style revolutionary militia to overthrow the British ruling classes. Wow. The Home Guard were going to have a coup. Considering he was so anti-fascist, he did have a Hitler mustache when he was young. Yes. But he was also oddly anti-communist.

Did you know that? Yeah, he was. Because he hated the communists, having met them the Russians in the Spanish Civil War, how cruel they were. He was a socialist, but he didn't like the communists. Yes, that's right. Well, I thought 1984 was about how good. Communism had gone wrong a bit, wasn't it?

Yeah. I think. Anyway, go on. So he kept a sort of McCarthyite list of people who were communists or fellow travellers, which he then, just before he died, he gave it to the foreign office. That's right. Did he? Yes, that's right. And dobs.

Sneaky blood. It was kept secret for 54 years. And on that list are J.B. Priestley, Michael Redgrave, the actor, and Charlie Chaplin. Are we sure he didn't just not like these people? Maybe, yeah, maybe. Yeah. He also is responsible for Weather Spoons. Yes, I've read that.

Yes, he wrote that. I've forgotten this essay on the perfect pub, didn't he? He wrote his essay on a perfect pub. And it's called Moon on the Water or something. The Moon underwater, yeah. There is a weather spoons that's called that, I think. It's a lot, actually. There's a lot.

It's one of tension. Do you mean Pange? Sorry. He said that it should have a very convenient location. It should have a very good atmosphere without any loud music so you can chat to each other. There should be fights every Saturday night. No, he didn't say that one. He said you should be able to get a variety of different.

beverages, including non-alcoholic ones. But then having said that, some of his friends said that whenever he went to the pub with them, he would only allow them to drink dark ale no matter what they ordered. They would say, oh, I'll have a gin and tonic, and then he'd come back from the bar with some dark ale and say, well, that's what you're having? What are he having? What are you having? Rom and Coke?

Yep, cool. Oh, don't let George get it in. Twelve dark ales, please. And the bag of crisps now. He did say this is what of him reminds me of you, John, which is... No. He believed this was according to the ODNB. He believed that no meaningful idea was too difficult to be explained in simple terms to ordinary people,

which is basically the QI style of writing, isn't it? I think that's very true. I think he's a very QI person, actually, because here's one. To see what in front of one's nose requires constant struggle. That's very QI, I think. there are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

That's great. So, John, I wonder if you have any insight into this, but Orwell historians have claimed that they believe Room 101 was based off his experience at the BBC and being in such torturous conference rooms and meetings. Really, went to Spanish Civil War, suffered and TB years of his life struggle,

live down in Paris in London but working at the BBC this is really interesting Down and now it's in Studio One there's a particular echo for this to me because I used to have the next door office Douglas Adams when we were both young radio producers and we looked across at Broadcasting House

but the back of it from 16 Langham Street and there was a window in there that was all blacked out and we thought that must be room 101 in there and we fantasised about all this and we were going to write a story about how the BBC had a coup in London

because you remember how weird things were in the 70s, the three-day week and the Labour government was going to be a sort of counter-revolution. I think James of a stretch might remember that if he remembers the first six months of his life. I didn't even do three days work in those days. But wait, so what? So it felt like Big Brother was happening, big auntie. Yes, we thought there was going to be some sort of counter-revolution.

Right. And the idea was the BBC were going to lead this from this secret room. and they're basically going to take down all the telephone lines and done it as a drama. They've cut tanks in Trafalgar Square. It was all a completely faked coup where nothing had taken but people thought it had, so they all stayed home.

Right. As it was, the blacked out window was just David Attenborough's dressing room. The spookiness goes on because about that age, it was 24, something like that, I had a call from a very senior BBC executive. You had a strange voice like that. It was very high. and asked if I'd like to go to dinner.

So I went to my head of department, just having come out of an English public school that a man 30 years old of me had asked me to dinner, I said, do you think this is all right? So we'll be very careful what you say. That's the managing director's hitman. I thought, what? Because it was well known that everybody in BBC had a file on them,

and if you were a communist, had a Christmas tree in the corner. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went out for dinner of this bloke, and I had too much a drink before I was terribly nervous that I was going to say something wrong, and he would say, do you like football? And I go, not really, do you?

No, do you enjoy opera? And I say, not really. Do you enjoy it? So it was a very uncomfortable dinner. And I went home and nothing happened. And years later, I was talking to the guy who had started Channel 4 and I told him this story. He said, oh, you were definitely being recruited for MI 5 and you blew it.

If only you said he supported wolves avidly, that was the key. So I was actually being recruited for the Secret Service. and I didn't realize it. Wow. But Blackadder wouldn't have existed if you had been. So, you know, what's better that you end up the Cold War 10 years early? If you had been recruited, you wouldn't tell us. You might tell us the story.

And then it might end with, and then I was never recruited. That's... Dun, dun, done. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 14th century London, one punishment for selling unclean spices was to be put in the pillory and have the spices set on fire beneath your nose. What would that do? Like, do we know how mad?

Because it sounds like it could be quite nice. Is it like one of those scented sticks you get in your house sometimes? Have you ever seen... No, no. Have you ever seen on the internet when they do like the nutmeg challenge or the cinnamon challenge or whatever it is? And they try and eat one spoonful of spices and it all goes terribly wrong. Yeah. I reckon it's that times a thousand.

Yeah. You're just going to get it in your... sinuses and your eyes as... It would burn like a thousand. It would burn like mad. Yeah. In your face. Yeah, it would be awful. So I read this when I was trying to nail something about eating fish on a Friday for QI this year.

I reckon that people in the UK eat fish on a Friday for economic reasons, not for religious reasons. I can't work out if that's true. So if you know this, if you're a historian, you know this, get in touch with me. But while I was doing that research, I found the paper called Butchering in medieval London by Ernest L. Sabine. And I read that and he gave it. They have loads of good info about the food trade in the 14th century.

And in 1393, when John Hadley was the mayor, he was a grocer, he came up with this new law. You said when John Hanley was the mayor, like, do you remember when John Hadley was the mayor in 1393? You must remember that. The John Hadley era, of course. Hadley years. Sorry, go on. So he was a grocer, as we all know, and obviously had lots of ideas about the grossing trade. I mean, I'm telling a lot of people what they already know here, but I'm going to go through the base.

he came up with a law about adulterated spices and said that basically you should be not selling spice which isn't pure and there was one particular guy, a foreign merchant who had come over to London and was selling dodgy spices and he was sent to the pillory and had his false powders burned underneath him.

Wow. And that pillory, by the way, is where you put your head in... It's like stocks in a way. It's like stocks, yeah. People might throw tomatoes at you, but in this case he was being burned. Yeah, the stocks are different

because the stocks are just your feet. So they're better because you can dodge the missiles because you can move your upper body. Yes, you're doomed of the pillow. And Hadley as well, he prescribed that all spices must henceforth be garbled by an official garbler. Oh, saffron. Oh, fombin.

So, garbler. So garbling. So I didn't know what this was. Garbling. So garbling is where you sift through a spice to get rid of all the stuff that isn't a spice. So let's say you've got a load of peppercorns, but there's loads of little ant legs and little bits of flies and stuff in there.

You sift through it and you just get the good stuff. And that's garbling. And it comes from an old Anglo-Norman word garbillet meaning to sift. And the garbling that you were doing, Anna, comes from an old thing where you would get a text and you would take out all of the bits that you don't want to say and you would just include the bits that you do want to say. So let's say you took something from the Bible.

you might say, well, actually, I quite like the adultery part. So I'm not going to mention that, but I will mention the stuff about not coveting my neighbour's ox. And that was known as garbling because you were sifting through the words. And then it eventually became like garbling your voice and garbling. So it's almost become the opposite, because now garbling is more like including extraneous stuff. It's certainly not the direct kind of communication. Exactly.

Yeah. Weird. This seems to be a bit of a theme, this means of punishment for adulterating spices. I actually read that in 1444 in Urenburg, an adulterator of saffron was burned at the stake over a fire of his own saffron. Yeah. Wow. It's an incredibly expensive fire.

Yeah. It's the most expensive spice saffron, I think, isn't it? Yeah. It is because you can only get it a tiny bit from each saffron flower, can't you? So you have to get like 200,000 saffron flowers. And then you can't taste it anyway, guys. Yeah, might as choose to... Tamar it, guys. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

This was the saffron shell code, wasn't it, in Nuremberg, about saffron. Sounds like it. And you could be hung, drawn and quartered for selling dodgy saffron. Really? They were really hard on saffron, I guess, because it is so pricey. Yeah, but if you were a woman, you wouldn't be hung, drawn and quartered, because it was seen as bad to hanged draw and quarter women, because you might be able to see their belly as you're pulling out the innards.

Maybe someone might get turned down by that, I don't know. Really? But you weren't allowed to show a woman's stomach so you couldn't hang drawn quarter someone and so they would be buried alive instead. It had a special kind of pillory for women. Did you know that? No.

Few, T-H-E-W-E, which is a... Is it with boopold? Stocks. It was just... It was sorry, it was the stocks that kept the legs together. Really? Really. That's so funny.

And I thought this is like... It's really interesting. There's a company called Spices Pillory in Nantwich, Cheshire. Yeah, I just couldn't believe that. It's now just called Spices. It's now just called Spices, but it's in 38 Pillary Street, Nantwich.

Really? That's so funny. And so I was just checking this out on Wikipedia, and it says on the pillory entry that people who were put in pillories were called pillocks. Citation needed Wikipedia, I think. It does say citation needed.

That's never going to last. Pellet comes straight. And it's kind of bullock basically, doesn't it? Yeah, I think. Yeah. So do you think that people with the spices burning under the nose were also pelted with fruit and things? Oh, I would think so, yeah. Because one of the things I liked about the pillory was that it was kind of quite a democratic thing.

So the crowd decided what they threw. So that if it was a minor offence, you get soft fruit or whatever. And if they really didn't like you, if you've done something horrible, they throw stones and saucepins. And people were actually killed in the pillory. Dead dogs and stuff like that. There was one guy who in 1727 was convicted of attempted sodomy. He's called Charles Hitchin, and he went into the stocks wearing a suit of armour

because he was so worried that people would throw heavy, hard things at him. That's amazing. And did you read about Daniel Defoe, the guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe? He did a satirical pamphlet, which somebody took literally, and he was put in the pillory for seditious libel, which is a really serious political offence. and the crowd all turned up and they thought he was absolutely great

so they just threw flowers at him. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's very cool. It's really interesting. This is a punishment that fits the crime, I suppose, which quite often happened in the olden days. So in 1482, in Bebrick, which I think was a village in Germany,

there was a vintner who'd adulterated his wine with something else, and he was condemned to drink six. quarts of it, of his own wine, which is six litres. That is a lot. It's a lot. Well, the article about it, which was written in 1952, just said, from this, he died.

What a way to go. That's so interesting. People think, you know, you sort of think, oh, that's the sort of thing they did in the middle ages. They cheated by making, instead of saffron, they did turmeric. But it still goes on today, adulteration of spices. Mm, massively. And I'm just reading in Tartal. the big Indian multinational.

The insurance branch has a thing on that of typical adulteration of spices in India, such as you put sand or powdered chalk in sugar, brick powder is added to red chili powder, papaya seeds to black pepper, chickery to coffee, sawdust to ground cumin seeds, and use tea leaves to tea.

So that's how they do it. And in the... They also put mud, stones, pebbles, marbles and filth, apparently in some spices. Marbles are never going to fit through those tiny holes. The rules from the US Food and Drug Administration on filth in adulterated spices are really specific. So, for example, the maximum amount of filth permitted by the FDA in 50 grams of ground paprika is 150 insect fragments and 22 rodent hairs.

In all spice, it's 300 insect fragments and 10 rodent hairs. Somebody checks all these. And in cinnamon, it's 400 insect fragments and 11 rodent hairs. What you really want to get into if you're a food adulterer is canned or frozen spinach, because they're much more generous with their limits there. So for every 100 grams of canned or frozen spinach, you were allowed 50 aphids and or thrips and or mites for 100 grams, or two or more three millimeter or longer larvae or larval fragments

or spinach worms whose aggregate length exceeds 12 million per 24 pounds. That's how much How much? You get a lot of mites and thrips in there. Spinach is very light, though, isn't it? Yeah.

Like how many kilos of spinach was it? That was 100 grams. 100? Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, it's quite a lot of ant. The most adulterated spice slash herb in the EU according to a 2022 report is oregano or oregano.

if you're American. It's the most adulterated. Yeah, it is 48% of samples that were checked were contaminated with... Sage. Sage. I think you'd be able to taste that. Do you think? If someone puts sage... Time? No.

Marijuana. Grass. No, it is olive leaves. So they just basically add olive leaves to the oregano leaves and then mush it up. I mean, if you're not noticing, sod it. You know? Who can even taste herbs and spice it?

anyway. They're just for show, aren't they? Just for, like, there's this huge thing. They're just to make your covers look fancy. Just get some ketchup and mayonnaise and stop being such a snob. No, there was, it's just, I'm just saying this because there was a big

sting in 2021 of a criminal gang in Spain. Oh, I thought that was something they found in some spinach. How much of a bee is there stings? Just the sting, it's fine. It adds spice as it goes down. No, this was 2021. There was a criminal gang in Spain that was done for making fake saffron.

So Spanish saffron is an incredibly expensive, sought after saffron. And there was 17 people arrested, and it was found that a huge proportion of it was actually fake, so it was mixed up with other stuff. Yeah. But mostly mixed up with Iranian saffron, which had been imported. Feels okay. And which I think does taste the same. I'd be amazed if people could tell the difference.

So there was one Paris. A Parisian chef who said that making sure you've got legitimate saffron is as time consuming as checking all the other produce in your food combined. And I would say, don't worry about it. No, I don't think I'm going to go to a restaurant and go, this is Iranian saffron. Wow, that's amazing. Bread is one that was adulterated a lot in history, wasn't there?

And you could be really badly punished for being a baker. Hence bakers doesn't, I guess. Yes, so the idea you make a 13th bun so that the weight. of your 12 buns is actually so it was like a yeah for non-English because exactly you make a 13th bun and that's what Baker's dozen is as opposed to 12 because you're in so much trouble

if you'd made 12 buns but they were just a little bit light it's like to be safe chuck another one but it's a serious matter because bread is what people live on and you can't cheat on that whereas in 2017 I think it was they censured a Massachusetts bakery for listing love as an ingredient of their granola They said, made with love, and they took them to court.

I think that's fair enough. Me too. I hope they got life sentences. Chuck a dog at them. So just on baking as well, in the 18th century in Turkey, if you undersold your bread, you were getting trouble, and you might get hanged. And that was common enough that if you were a master baker, I said master baker.

Yeah, yeah. You might imply an assistant who got more wages, but they were the one who would take the fall if you got in trouble. Right. Tense, isn't it? Yeah, would you take that job? Worthy extra money. I'd be more concerned if I saw Master Baker list love as part of the ingredient.

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 all be found on various social media accounts. I'm on Instagram with at Shreiberland, James. I'm on Instagram.

No such thing as James Harkin. John. I'm on Instagram, John Lloyd QI. That's right. And Anna? You can get in touch with the podcast as a whole by emailing podcast at QI.com or tweeting at no such thing. Yep, that's right.

Or you can go to our website. No Such Thing is a Fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. There's a link to Clubfish, which is the private members club of our podcast. and there's also lots of bits of merch and so on. Do check it out or just come back here for another episode. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then.

Goodbye. I just like to draw geometric figures on bits of paper. That's my gudels. Are always geometric figures. Don't need to explain yourself at Nuremberg.