No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Othello's Casio

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Cariad Lloyd discuss Groundhog Day, Citizen Kane, Spice World: the Movie and Groundhog Day. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everybody, Andy here. Just before we start this week's episode of Fish, we wanted to let you know that our special guest this week is none other than Carriad Lloyd. Carriette has been on the show before, of course. You may remember her very funny previous appearances. This time, she's back and she's better than ever. And the good news for those of you who are Carriad fans is that she has just written a new book. Carriette is the host of the grief cast, and the book that she's written is all about grief. It's about her grief, about other people's, about what we do when someone we love dies. and it's brilliant. It's full of interesting facts for those of you who like facts and if you are listening to this

you probably do and it's also very heartfelt, it's very personal, it's very moving, it's very funny, it's all of these things and more so do check it out it's called You Are Not Alone

and if you'd like to see Carriad in a live setting she is also part of the brilliant Jane Austen-themed improvised comedy group ostentatious and they are on every Monday

at the moment at the Arts Theatre just near Leicester Square in London it's a very funny show I can personally attest to that. Do book first. Okay, that's it. On with the show. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast,

coming to you from the relocated QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Carriad Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Carriad. Hello. My fact is that if you are having trouble with your grief, it might be Bill Murray's fault.

Oh, because he kills, kills and kills again. And then he finds people who are grieving and he hits them. That's his thing. No, because I should backtrack this and say that the reason it might be Bill Murray's fault is the very famous film Groundhog Day, which is based on the five stages of grief theory. The Five Stages, Grief Theory is a very, very famous theory began in 1969, created by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book on Death and Dying. And it really has been the most famous grief theory since them.

It has now contested heavily. It's considered not to be that helpful or useful. But it's still the grief theory that most people encounter when they enter the world of grief. It's the thing that people will come up to me still and say, oh, you know, I'm trying to do the five stages. It's not really working. And it makes me want to scream because it's, I can swear I can't I yeah

it's bullshit but the film Groundhog Day is based on the five stages which I think helps to promote this idea that the five stages of grief is something that you can work through grief is something that will end

can you give us the five stages I can then give you the five you wake up they're playing the same song as they were yesterday yeah yes something about a weather report I haven't seen this film James genuinely have you not

I'm afraid not you know what it is worth it is one of those it does stand up to watching them. James hasn't seen any films before about 2000. Something like that. Well, I've seen some. There's a few that make it through.

Normally, I'm absolutely fine when you say you haven't seen a picture of them. And sometimes you'll say, what that? I'm shocked. Grandhold day. I don't think it's like, I haven't seen it on TV much. Is it on TV all the time? In my childhood, it was a classic. It was one of those ones that would be all the time.

But that was in Australia. So, okay. I reckon it's denial. Oh, yeah. Acceptance. Denial of the next subject. And that is why people struggle. No,

the five stages. Grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, or the worst boy band in the basically. Yeah, and so that was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who defined these five stages of grief. But isn't she, I thought that when she came up with it, first off it was to relate to the dying, as opposed to grief. Yes, yes. And then, but then secondly, she also said this doesn't happen in any particular order. It's much like the facts on our podcast. Yes. It's, you can have, you could have acceptance but then later have denial. But they always start with a celebrity, don't they?

So on her book on Death and Dying, written in 1969, written in 10 weeks, she had something like an article in Time magazine where they were like, wow, this woman's doing amazing work. And then someone was like, you should write a book. And she wrote the book and it became the bestseller that it is. I mean, you can write a book fast. It doesn't mean it will be bad. It's just like it's very of its moment of its time.

She was an amazing woman. Like she was a founder of the hospice movement. She was working with people with AIDS in the 80s before that was considered like safe. She was incredible. And at this time, she was working in hospitals where people were terminally ill,

mainly with cancer. And this was a time when they didn't even use the C word. They would just say malignancy. And they would also not tell people. So, for example, if a wife was sick, they would tell the husband, not the wife. So she would be being told, she'd be having like radiotherapy

and she'd be told, it's to make you better. But they'd all be going to her husband. She's not going to live. So she came into this. situation was like, hmm, this isn't great. If you told people that they were dying, she observed when she did that and helped them through it, that they would go through five distinct stages and they would reach an acceptance. And it would, I mean, that makes sense. They would deny it first of all like, oh, no, I'm not really ill. I'm fine. I can't believe it's me.

Why am I dying? Oh, God, why did you do this to me? This is the worst thing. Actually, okay, I'm dying. I'm going to pay off my debts and apologize to all those people. So she was talking about people dying and I honestly in my research for my book couldn't find the moment that it became about grieving it just became about grieving because it was like well it's death it's the same room and it makes no sense for a grieving person like anyone who's been through any loss will tell you like you don't go through five distinct stages you get them pretty much all at once all the time and it can you know hit you five years later two years later 10 years later so I meet so many people who are like, oh, God, I feel so bad.

Like, I need to get to acceptance line and I haven't done it. And I'm always raging because I'm like, that isn't what grief looks like. But their reason it works in a film is that's how films work. They need to end and we all need to walk away thinking. I mean, not all films. Not all films. Not all films. Yeah.

I'm fingering a few mental suspects. What? I haven't seen that film. Hello. Although Andy McDowell is in that as well. Figure out a few mental suspense. She plays the doctor. She's really good.

We should just quickly say, because James hasn't seen Groundhogs a day. So Bill Murray is a journalist. He goes to this town to do Groundhog Day. The weatherman. He's the weather man. He wakes up in the morning and the day has begun again. He's conscious of it.

No one else is. And then the day of the end. So he's real time. Like a Russian doll of their TV show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Happy Death Day is like that. Yeah, yeah. But he reacts differently.

So first of all, he's like, this isn't happening, and then he gets furious. And he starts experimenting with his day. Like, well, if I do this, will I be here tomorrow? And it doesn't matter what he does. He tries literally everything. It's a weird moment where he starts fingering. And he's trying to woo Andy McDowell's character.

And eventually he works. Like, he learns everything about her becomes perfect and it still doesn't work. Oh, that's a bit creepy, isn't it? It's really creepy. It's creepy. That doesn't really stand up to today's standards. But it is a great film. It's a brilliant film.

Yeah, yeah. Cubla Ross. Oh yeah, Cubs. Cubs. Cubs, she has a cool phrase. She said later on, there's no such thing as, any guesses? Death. Yeah, death.

Oh, did she? Yeah, she said like she became. Her podcast is great. It's like a mixture of our podcast and your podcast. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. She said, she basically became so convinced there was an afterlife. But she said, we don't need to worry about death.

There's no such thing as death. That's why she was great at getting people into acceptance. It's just like, don't worry about it, guys. It's fine. The first thing is in her original book, the 1916. one, she called the belief in life after death a form of denial. So she actually thought that life after death was complete bullshit. And then she went through a change in her life. So she came to like spiritual. Yeah. So she met a patient in a hospital who was called Mrs. Schwartz. And Mrs. Schwartz had been

pronounced dead. And then hours later, she was found alive by a nurse. So wondering the street. Yeah. So she went to interview her to say what happened. And she recounted that she said, I remember everything that happened. I remember being above my body. I remember a joke that the doctor told in the room when I was laying there dead, all that stuff. And that is what made... Appropriate. Report that. So Kubler-Ross basically went, ah, this is interesting and became obsessed with it. And she even went to have, as it were, out-of-body experiences through a guy called Robert Monroe. And then as she got further into it, she believed that she had spirit guides that she was contacting, one of whom was Mrs. Schwartz, who did later die and then came back to sort of

instruct Kubler-Ross about her ideas about the afterlife. And this woman is in charge of most known grief theory, known to human, like Western culture. Yeah. So one thing you write about in the book about here, is the Victorian mourning rituals and how, although they were very starchy and very formal, they did give you a kind of structure. And then you mentioned all the different paraphernalia of mourning. Yeah, they were mad. Yeah, I mean, it was really, the culture highly focused on that.

I can't remember if you read about this morning stationary. Yes, oh yeah, that's really common. Yeah, yeah, morning stationing. You get black-edged card. And when you receive that, you know. Oh, I see it to you is... I was thinking like rulers and... They had, um, in Regent Street,

J's of Regent Street was basically like the prime mark of grief and death. So you was where you went and got all your clothes from and all your hats and, like, gentlemen's funeral scarfs had to be a certain length. There was like a book that told you, like, everything, like from the length of the bow around your hat to the staff to the color of the ribbon on your daughter, your morning jellies. They kind of like made an industry of it. So what is morning jellies?

They're jellies that you have when you're morning? Would they be light black? I don't know, actually. I never saw it. I just read about it in the book. But is it for serving it awake for something like that? I guess serving after a funeral, yeah. Or maybe you have it like on a Sunday when you're feeling gloomy.

Well, jelly used to be, if we're talking London, there used to be pubs where if you saw someone eating jelly, a woman, that would mean that she was available. for sexual experiences. I didn't know that. I need to stop eating jelly in public. Purchased sexual experiences. Yeah, yeah.

It wasn't like a traffic light party. No, but if you're eating a strawberry jelly, you're none up for it. It's like a handkerchief culture. Muffer knuckle muffling. What was this? Say it again. Knocker muffling.

What's a knocker? So it wouldn't be too loud to upset the people of the house. Door knocker on your house. You'd muffle it if someone's died. Yeah. And you'd also, you'd have different. colors as well so like it was a black crate ribbon outside it meant adult and it was white it meant a child had died in this house and it would be muffled and there was so yeah there

was like it would cost you so much money to do a proper considered funeral like I think they read even a middle class funeral at the time would have been like a thousand pounds like it was really and they had funeral clubs where you'd all put money in every week so that you could get like the funeral you like that person deserves because if they didn't they considered their soul would wander around forever basically so it's like you're like you're you're like you your pension, you know, you'll put in every week. And then when you need the money, you can take it. Like a turkey club.

Like a turkey club, but for the dead. Yeah, turkey's dead, I suppose. But they don't get anything out. No, you're right, you're right. But they don't pay in, I suppose. Would you have like, you know, for a wedding, you have like a present list? Was there a similar thing where I'd like this at my funeral?

I think it was pretty set. It was. Yeah, it was pretty set. You just go. Can I just tell you one very tangential thing about knockers? Door knockers. This is, you told me it was tangential, but here we go. So I was reading about knocker muffling.

And then I just sort of went on a rabbit hole of door knockers. You know that in old Tehran, right? Yeah. Houses would have two door knockers. One was square and heavier and the other was more rounded. Can you guess why? One for the ladies? It's one for the ladies.

No. It's one for the men. The men use the big square one and women use the rounded one. And then you know who's knocking at the door. And so then the woman of the house might not answer the door to a man. That's really clever. reasons. They might also, I read this,

they might disguise their voice behind the door to ask the business of who's coming around. Oh, is that like saying, oh, they've got some big men here that are going to beat you up if you come in. Is that how you do? Is that what you do, too?

That's what I say. Just in case they might be coming into attack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to let people know what's happening inside. I shot at an imaginary dog. Yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah, that really works.

That's when Julius Caesar's coming around. that's that great machine Conity routine and she did in her sitcom where you order too many pizzas and the pizza guy's time was six and you go yeah it's here

it's here guys I'll bring it in a minute and then they're like it's just for you it's like it could make it bigger couldn't you Andy and have lots of different knockers like a knocker for your delivery guy

and the knocker for a Jehovah's Witness person or whatever don't come here I've got some big men in here I don't want to know about eternal salvation and so

How long was mourning in back? Depends. Okay. So they had a rule for every single situation. So like rule for like your second cousin, your second cousin's child, your sister, your, but for the most common people know it's like for a partner. So a widow would have a year in morning which had to wear black and then you go into half morning and quarter morning. And if you in that year got married, you were allowed to like not wear black for the day and then back in your black dress the next day. So you could have a new husband and be like, sorry babes.

Do you remember Alfred? He was great. wasn't it? I'm still pretty sad. When did we drop? It was it like a moment where we dropped this for some reason? Well, that's really interesting, Dan, because I don't think we have dropped it because I think we still have an expectation that we expect people to be over things by about a year. And if it goes past a year to two years and with grief, we're a bit like, oh, God, three years. Like, she's still upset.

And then, of course, you get the black armbands, which was still going up. Like, my mum wore a black armband when her granny died in the 60s. But I would say she's like the last person I've spoken to who. But you still get soccer players. Yeah, so soccer, I'm sorry, my brain went football in my head. I was really like sports, people and like military stuff still wear them. Oh, okay. But other than that, obviously, you used to just wear it day to day.

And that comes up on my podcast that people wish there was still a thing you could have that would mean like sort of handle with care. Because it's like you don't want to be a society that says you have to wear a black arm band. But for some people, you know, if you're going to a shop, you want a tube. It's a bit like baby on board. It's like I'm in grief, like just be careful with me. Like if I'm in a shop or like, you know. You have badges, don't you?

I did sell badges, yeah, but I couldn't keep up with the demand. What did it say? It said, please be kind. I'm grieving. And it had two little hands. And then one said, um, DDC member, it was in Dead Dad Club with DMC. And it was a little amazing artist called Camille Bersini who designed them. It was like a little purple ghost with a hat with a flower.

DMS. Dead mom's club. Not, I was thinking of run DMC. That can't be. I thought you. They're dead. They're dead. It's like that and that's the way it is. So yeah, it's a shame in a way that we don't have. Yeah.

Because you never know what anyone's going through at any time. Yeah, yeah. Although I can see why the Victorians were very strict, obviously. Like you had to do it. And if a woman couldn't, you would no way you'd be allowed to walk around in like, you know, a bright yellow dress the next day. I think we'd have to draw a line on where, what kind of badges you'd have. Because I definitely would have like, be gentle, lost an eBay. purchase. Like, you know, I feel small bad, isn't it? I've only got facts about groundhogs.

Let's talk about groundhogs. Oh, groundhogs. You might? No. Groundhog Day is about groundhogs, is it? Because there's a special grandhog who comes up. And if he can see his shadow, it's going to snow for a month or something. If you've seen the film, Grandhog Day, all this stuff.

They get him out of his little nest. Punketani Phil, isn't it? But there are loads of groundhogs. That's an interesting thing. I mean, all over, lots of places have a groundhog celebration. I was just wondering if punk satarnie is the most difficult word that everyone knows how to pronounce. Yes, from the film Groundhog Day. But it's basically if he, they get him out and if he turns around and sees his shadow, then there'll be another six weeks of winter.

And if he doesn't, then the spring will come. How do they know if he sees it? Well, what I read was in real Punct satanee, there are two scrolls. And if Phil picks the scroll that says he sees a shadow, that's how they know he's seen a shadow. there's these secret scrolls. Do they look up the long range weather forecast and lace one of them with groundhog food or whatever? They must do, right? They must do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, um, it's, it takes place on gobbler's knob. Yeah. Um, do you know where the name goblers knob comes from? Hmm. There's two theories. If you get either of them, you can have a point. Oh, goblins.

Oh, no. No. No. No. No. Okay. It was it, was it, was it, somebody was gobbling a man's knob? and they said, we should call this Gobblers Knob,

because she's always there, she's always doing that. What, her, Jelly Sue? Yeah, Jelly Sue. And Jelly Sue didn't stick with me. That's not one of the two theories that I have. Okay, sure, fine. You stick with your theories, I'll stick with mine. Oh, is it where people ate on mountains?

Yeah, like a knob is just like a mountain. It's like a hillock. That's why I thought Goblin's knob, but because it looks like a goblins. No, no, no. Your theory was not bad. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, he's going to get it. So it's where the old shoe mender used to buy his trade, cobblers knob, and slowly it became gobbler's knob.

Why? Why did they start going? Because he gave a lot of blowjubs. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to call it gobbled. It's an offer to sell shoes. Is that like a happy ending for massages, but in the shoe cleaning trade? You know when he comes down to measure your feet?

He's ending down. While I'm down here. No, it's because a group of turkeys might have lived there. And then another theory is like Dan said Maybe there were hunters And then that's where they would eat their food after the hunt So they would gobble up the food But I think the turkey is the most likely one

That's good That is good I didn't know groundhogs The groundhogs are amazing Yeah So they really are So I didn't know they were the same as a woodchuck And it's the largest member of the squirrel family

What? Oh no And they're brilliant digers So they dig They'll dig several feet down in a row Right they live in burrows Several feet down then a few feet up, and then they level out and go along.

And then off the side of that main tunnel, they'll dig several different rooms, one of which is the toilet room, and they only go to the loo in there. And then when it's full, they just seal it up and they dig a new toilet elsewhere. They're very clean. Yeah, I was going to say the first thing that you said, they got down and then up, is that so they don't drown or like... To avoid flooding. Yeah.

What do they do if they go to dig another room and they're like, oh, no. That's a toilet. That's three years ago's toilet. Close up, close up, close up. You have to hit it. eventually. There's how many rooms? How long is... I guess you keep moving the tunnel down.

You really have to hide that when selling it, would you? To the next. What's that? Oh, do, don't. What's by on these walls? We want to extend. No, you can't. You can't extend that.

Okay, it's time for fact number one, and that is Carriette. Boom. Brilliant. It's actually time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there's a bus tar in Hong Kong, which is specifically run for people to sleep all the way through. Lovely.

Lovely. Lovely idea. Sounds great, isn't it? Is it because people are targeted in Hong Kong? That's part of the reason. What do you think,

Andy? Otherwise, it'd be a terrible place to do this. You just get people out and they're all like, no, I'm wide awake. We don't sleep in Hong Kong. Why can't they get a normal bus? I love steeping on the bus.

Why can't they just get a bus? Well, they could. It stops, doesn't it? And so they might wake you up and kick you up. Oh, I see. The idea came from. This guy, Kenneth Kong, he worked for a bus tour organizer. And he was chatting to one of his friends.

And his friend said he was really stressed. You know, he's got a really busy job. Couldn't sleep at night. But whenever he traveled to work on the bus, he would always kind of fall asleep. Oh, yeah. And Kenneth Kong thought, this is amazing. This is such a good idea. I'm going to do a bus tour where people are just encouraged to sleep.

And unlike a normal bus ride, we're going to give you a goody bag with an eye mask, some ear plugs. Maybe we'll get a very soporific tour guide. That's a good idea. But actually the first time they did it, they had the upper deck for people who wanted to sleep, and the lower deck was for people who wanted to have a tour guide chatting to them. Which feels like the wrong way around, because if you want to see the sites, you would be on the top. Exactly.

Really good point. But anyway, they noticed that a lot of people found that more difficult and didn't sleep. So now they're making two separate bus tours, one for sleepers and one for not sleepers. I also read as well that I don't know if they do this every single time, but they might start with a huge two-hour-long lunch. So you go into a food cover as you're getting on the bus. Oh, nice. You could do this for lots of things because there are lots of activities where you're put in a...

Like the cinema, for example, or theatre or an opera. That you go to sleep in a... I'm saying that it's very easy to fall asleep, especially if the thing is not good. I once went to a Bach concert, which is, you know... It's really sort of deep and sort of quite long notes. and stuff and about halfway through I looked around and literally half the men mostly I must say but they were mostly asleep yeah yeah it was really I used to go to lunchtime concerts at wigmore hall and I thought oh this is a exciting London thing to do but it was full of people like head nodding just

like oh it's so nice I'm on my lunch break it's very hard to yeah you could get like 15 minutes can you head bangers you know at metal concerts they're actually just about to fall asleep kind of wake it up wake up Gary it's just about to stop I once went to Brian Blesard's house and I was hanging out with him and he tells stories that go on and on him it was just me and him sitting in his adventures shed that he has and he was I was so tired and he was telling me stories and I fell asleep and I remember waking up with that sudden start and I looked up and he was still talking at amazing just didn't and we were definitely way further away than where the story was when I fell asleep we could hire Brian blessed to go out to people's houses oh yeah he must have some audio books you

can listen to oh I was looking up good um bus tours yeah oh okay the was a tour bus for dogs in 2017 in London. But it was a bit of a... Well, okay, it was the Rootmaster K-9. Ah-ha-ha. And there was a live commentary of dog trivia from around London. Okay.

Fine. And the route was between places where you could go for walkies. But wait, so the owners with the dogs? Yeah, that's the thing. There are dogs in Moscow who get on the tube, who live kind of down in the tube and sort of jump on between stops.

Like the pigeons do. I don't believe that pigeon. I've seen them. I've seen them. I've seen them. I read it. Okay. I've seen them.

Okay guys, pipe down. I've done research on this. I didn't get to read out a few weeks ago on the podcast. It was all about can pigeons get the tube and do they know they're doing it? And I literally saw the pigeon do it though. No, no, we didn't because he read a research thing. Oh, okay. A pigeon can be on the tube, but it does not have a conception of the map.

Oh, okay. I've seen a pigeon on a tube. No, but listen. Let me say, there's the tube bit that's overground. So then it's getting on at one stop and going two stops. And literally walking on, waiting by the door and then walking up. That's what I saw as well. So it's like, it's not doing undergrubbing.

tube, it's like, oh, if I get on at East Finchley. I'd be more impressed to see a pigeon on the underground tube than on the underground. But also, that would be dangerous and upsetting for the pigeon and distressing. It'll be fine. It sort of slides down the escalator. Well, we've seen it's much more normal. An outdoor platform, pigeon gets on,

ride some stops, gets on. For me, it's so normal it's banal. It's actually come around to banal. I can't even accept it. I wonder what you think, Andy, now that you've read this research. Are you trusting your own research? Are you believing the eyewitness reports? I've seen it.

Can I just want to clear this up? I believe what you've both seen. Yeah. You've both seen a pigeon hop onto a train. The train girl stop or two. The pigeon hop off. Wait by the doors. Wait by the doors.

No distress, no panic. Minded the gap. Pressing that button when it's the open button. That's what makes it clear that the pigeon's stupid. The doors operate anyway. Not on the overground. Not on the overground. I didn't see over.

I saw underground. Underground chain. My point is, I don't think they might be hopping on looking for food or something. I don't think they're not commuting home. They're not commuting home. It can't be. Andy, this is what I saw. It just waited by the door.

It was playing Candy Crush. It literally got on, stood and faced the doors like a commuter. Everyone was like, oh my God, pigeon. Doors closed and then it went two stops so that it didn't have to do. The two is more convincing. If it was a one stop. Yeah, no, it did two. It did like East Finchley,

to West Finchie Central, like to West Vinci. So it went out to North London and then got out. Mine had a baby on board back. If it's the several days in a row within the same half in our period, I will believe you've got a commuting. pigeon. Okay. So what were we talking about? So Bass is vague. Oh, Basto, dog tour. So you started this change. You said there are dogs on the Bosco cheese. Sorry. Can I just ask on your dog tour? Yeah. Yeah. It's basically a way for dog walkers to get from one walkies area to another one. And they gave

them stuff in the in the meantime. I think so. I think it was a, it ran for a few days as a kind of to promote the firm. Are your Russian dogs commuting there? I'm just living there. I think that's the idea is that they do go from one place to another where they No, they can get food for different places, but I can't really quite remember. Yeah, I believe that. Oh, that's fine. James has never, James has never seen it. I was saying, when I went to Moscow, I've been a few times, but whenever I've gone,

I've tried to look on the underground for these dogs and I've never seen them. Well, Andy still believe you, so. I was reading about the bus drivers, bus drivers of history. Oh, yeah. One significant and, I mean, very controversial bus. driver was a guy called James Blake. Oh yeah, of course. Rosa Parks.

He was the Rosa Parks bus driver. Here's the thing I didn't know. So he was called James Blake. It was 1955 this happened. The most famous incident. But she and Blake had beef already. Oh, I had read this somewhere because she was like a known activist, wasn't she? Like that was a big thing.

But 12 years earlier in 1943, she got on a bus, paid, but she'd got on the front entrance and Blake was the driver. And he said, no, you've got to get off and get on the, the, the sort of backdoors of the bus because that was the rules, segregated buses. And she got off to, God's sake, all right, she got off to get on the other entrance and he drove off, which was a thing they would do sometimes as a kind of cruel prank. So she avoided his buses for years, you know, when she saw he was a driver. And then that day she didn't notice that he was the driver.

She was tired. She was preoccupied. And so that's what happened. He was a bus driver for 19 more years after that. 19 more years? Yeah. Wow. Because it were quite, she, her story was one that sort of hit the right.

moment at the right time. There were quite a lot of stories of people who were refusing to step up from their seat and go to the back. I think even Rosa Parks' story slightly. Yeah, I was going to say, she wasn't tight. She knew it was all planned and they used her because she looked quite mild-mannered and they thought that it would be like, you know, a way for it to get on the bus and look like she wasn't going to cause trouble. But they absolutely, she was a super intelligent, brilliant part of the organisation and it was very, very well. They knew like they were going to do this instance. And Martin Luther King was part of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I genuinely actually only know that because of a Doctor Who episode from the Jody Whitaker period.

So that probably needs a fact check. But I think they would have got that right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a lot of seminal moments have happened on buses. So George Harrison joined the Beatles on a bus. Did he? Yeah, so he was sitting on top deck of a bus. Not on top of Paul McCarney's head.

He was giving him a shoulders ride. Yeah, Paul already knew him. And that's where he introduced properly to John Lennon. And John said, can you play a song that was a very difficult song to play on guitar? He played it, nailed it. And that's when they said you're in the band. So that's important. What a George Michael wrote Careless Whisper on the Bus?

I'm never going to dance again. Guilty feet have got no N17. It's the original. No, original lyric. I was a tour bus guide. Tour bus guide? Is that sounded wrong? No, I was, that's the right.

You were a tour guide who was on a bus. Thank you. I was like, tour bus guide is the way. Here's another tar bus. If you look over there, another tar bus is going past. So many tour buses. I was a tour guide on an open top bus for some time. in London and I got in trouble a lot, yes.

For what? Making stuff up? No, I never made stuff up. I made a joke about the royal family and someone wrote and complained and said I should be ashamed of myself and I disgraced my country. It was about Prince Andrew?

It wasn't. At the time, that sort of thing wasn't known. It was about Prince Harry taking drugs which was absolutely known and it was a really crap joke that every tall guy did on St James's. So the shops have royal warrants. So that's where they have a crest in the window

that means the royal family shop there. and the whole of St James is there's like oh, Barry brothers Barry brothers, Lobbon Coeses, there's all like the boot makers, the hat makers, and there's also a pharmacy on St James and you say that's where the royal family get their drugs, although I think Prince Harry probably gets hits

from somewhere else. It's a terrible joke. It's not, it's fine. And then they... And you got your first comedy review. Two stars. We got up at Bucking I said, this Bucking Palace and a couple marched up to me and they said, we're getting off. I said, oh, okay, they said, we don't want to. I said, oh, what's happening? And so, it's

It's you. We're getting off because of you. And I was like, oh, what you said? What you just said about the world family was so disgraceful. And then when the letter, they said I had disgraced Prince William. So they hadn't even been listening to my joke. You wouldn't make that joke about Prince William. That's the most annoying.

It was so annoying. But yeah, I got in quite big trouble. Did you apologise? No, they've gone. They're long gone. All right. What'd you mean? Unrepentant.

I'm glad you weren't my boss, Andy. You know a London bus? Just a London bus. Oh, yeah. The double-decker red. Big red bus. Do you know how long they are in terms of how many London buses they are? They're one London bus.

No, they're 1.2 times the length of a London bus. And that's because they're new root masters. And if you ever look at like, whenever anyone says, this is so stupid. But whenever anyone says, this is like 10 times a length of a London bus. They're talking about their old London bus. Oh, talking about the Rootmasters. Yeah. But they've got the new ones, which are 1.2 times the length.

Brilliant. I genuinely interested in that. Do you know, I bit like, I love. I'm the age of remembering route masters, and they were great when you could jump on the back of the bus. Obviously, it wasn't safe, but it was brilliant. Yeah. You never had to worry about missing a bus.

You just ran. You could still jump on. No, because they closed them all, because it wasn't safe. Do you remember the old ones? Like, had no door. They're totally open. Yeah, yeah. No, sorry, I've jumped on the back of one where the door was open.

Oh, really? Wow. Andy, you were so lucky. You jumped on a bus and it was open. You didn't just run headfirst into glass. I was sneaking off one bus and onto another one. It was after a party. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm going to go to my showbiz life. You know, we're familiar with the Spice Bus. Yeah, of course. From Spice World the movie. Oh, yeah. You can, you, you can rent it now? Can you? Is this a hint for your next birthday?

No. Is it still so... It's tedious, I haven't seen this movie, but is it like, I think it's like Union Jackus? That's not missable. You have to watch Spice World Day. Meatloaf is the driver. Is it still, does it still look the same as it did in the...

Yes, it's still, the exterior looks the same, but the interior, unfortunately, obviously in the film, the interior was this huge three-story palatial. It couldn't have been what it was, yeah. And it's just a bust. Was it like bigger on the inside kind of thing?

Yeah, exactly. Well, they never, I don't think they made a kind of space-time definition about how big it was. Just kept showing you different rooms in it. Like a groundhog's nest, basically. They all had their own zone. Yeah, there's one more,

there's one more full of shit from the spice girls than if you tap through it. Oh my God We spoke about the Dave Matthews band A few months ago Oh yes Did you know the Dave Matthews brand? I know Dave Matthews band

There was this thing in 2004 Where they dumped 800 pounds of raw untreated sewage Into a river The Chicago River while they were crossing a bridge On that said their tour bus Yeah From their tour bus

And they were unfortunately They were crossing a slatted bridge And there was an open top tour boat Passing by beneath the bridge Could I just say it was the driver rather than the band Yeah, to be fair, I was like the band were there like, now. So anyway, that was a huge thing led to a lot of...

I think there were apology letters. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they apologize. But I was reading about what happens, how you release what they call the Blackwater, you know, the sewage from the thing. And, you know, buses have changed a bit since then. I think they've been altered a bit. But I was reading an interview with the bus driver from 2016 about how you release it.

And there is a switch that says dump, which they keep. That's supposedly they keep it by the driver's left elbow, which feels risky. Thanks to the indicators. But these days, there's like a nuclear button, there is a plastic cap over the switch. So you have to make a conscious decision to lift the cap before.

I mean, we all need that in our lives. Make a conscious decision to drop your shit. They should put the key for it inside a person. Sorry, this is a call back to something the other day. Yeah, the idea of a nuclear button, you put the key inside a person so they had to kill the person to get to. And the president had to do it himself.

He has an initial. But how's he going to keep that inside him? Without shitting it out? It'll be under his skin. Oh, okay. I thought you meant like swallow it and then go through the shit again. In this case, the missiles are going to be in two minutes.

President is sieving a poo. I'll find it. I'll find it. The keys covered in sweet cut. Are you sure you want to let's up the plastic cover? Not yet, not yet. Oh, God. Okay, it is time for fact number one.

Okay, I'm sorry. They say I love won't pay the rent. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that for many years, the secret of the British Army's balloons was known by a single family of Alsatians. Wow. By which I mean people from Alsace. Were they all on a bus together?

this is a thing where so there's ballooning took off if only the people at home could have seen the way that you've built up to that life I know the face you lifted up the plastic button and you dumped

you press dump on your joke took off I thought I could do it I could go for it couldn't I they'll all laugh and we'll just move on and it won't be made a big thing off the British army they were

experimenting. They were making hydrogen balloons and this is in the 1880s. So it's a hundred years or so after, you know, the Montgofia brothers and so on. And hydrogen balloons are great in lots of ways, but there's a problem. Hydrogen molecules are so tiny that they escape from almost any bag that you keep them in. Yeah. Keep them in the bag. I'll put them in the same-jew bag. Go on. Exactly. The time I got home. A whole lot gone. And so they were looking for a way to improve the balloons. And there was this family, the Vinling family. They were a family of Orthodox Jews. They came from Alsace in France, and they had their own effectively secret proprietary method of making these balloons. And they'd made some for a scientific toy shop in the east end of London, which is cool, called Mr. Herons.

And the commander of the first royal balloon factory was called Major Templar. He hired the Vinling family. He bought their secret effectively. And then for a few decades, Britain had this big advantage in balloon technology because the Vinlings were on board. And they were kind of supervising the first balloon factory. They had to be persuaded to tell other people how to make the balloons because they originally, it seems like they wanted to make the balloons themselves. We'll do it all, we'll do it all.

We just don't want to tell anyone. I can understand that. It's pretty amazing as well. So it was a guy called Henry Coxwell who was walking through this scientific toy shop and saw this thing. Can you imagine like during the war effort, you're looking for ways and suddenly here's just a toy for kids that is going to give you the great advantage of the war. And what did the toy do?

It was like a little hot air balloon. It was a blue. And it worked basically. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And the method that they used was a thing called Goldbeater's skin. So it's made from the lower intestine of a cow. And what they would do is they would stretch out the lower intestine.

And because, as you were saying, Andy, nothing could escape. Molecules can escape is what they found. But what's amazing is that when they were, when they make the balloon itself, you wouldn't sew it together. So sewing might be a problem because there's micro holes that if you miss whatever, something can escape. But with this intestine skin, all you had to do was make it a bit wet, emit damp. And then it would just stick. And that would be strong enough to make it. It's so cool.

It's overlapping. And it just, it is like, how did the Wilings find this out? Like, I'm sorry. How did this one family be like, oh,

you know that cow intestine we've got hanging around? Let's stretch it out, dry it and put like, what was going on in that family? It's Mikey's birthday. Have we got balloons? Like, sorry, that's what made me laugh so much because it's amazing.

It's like really amazing what they did. and discovered, but what was going on in Alsace? Well, they were already using this stuff for gold beating, which is why it's called Gold Beater's skin, right? Yeah. But what are they using it in gold? So you would put your gold in between two pieces of intestine or paper or whatever, and then you would whack it, whack it, whack it, to make it really, really, really, really

thin. And so then you would have gold leaf instead of a gold bar. Oh, and that's right. It still comes in as two bits of paper, the gold leaf. It does. Yeah. What? Do you buy gold leaf?

You can buy it. Like, if they're decorating, people use it for it. like if you want to do like a gold effect on tables or on food or... I have had biscuits covered in silver. That's a de bloon. Silver leaf. Silver what? They're Indian.

Oh, silver leaf. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Silver leaf. They're really, they're popular.

It's not, sorry, I've got to sound like an emperor there. He's doing well with his silver biscuits and two knockers. But the amazing thing is about this gold beating rate. So you're making gold leaf out of a piece of gold. And you could get a sheet of gold. that was two millimeters thick and then knock it down, make it thinner, thinner,

thinner. So there was 100 nanometers, right? And it's hard to say what that is. But it's basically, it's like if I was squashed into a flat sheet, which is the thickness of a human hair. We're not going to do that, James. No, I was going to do that to you, are they? Well, you know, they get hit by a bus.

But yeah, yeah, that's how much. They reduce the thickness of a sheet of gold by 99.996. And they do it using this paper, this ox, you know, this gold beaters paper. But that's the second process. To get it down to two millimeters, you need to put it through a different two pieces of paper. And that's called Montgolfier paper. And that was the same paper as the Mongolfiase used to make their balloons. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah. So the first section of gold beating was Mongolia paper. And the second stuff was this gold beaters paper. Wow. Because the Montgolfiase, they came from a family of paper. paper makers and that's how they got into hot air ballooning because they had all of this amazing paper to use and they turned them into balloons. So cool. Wow.

It's so weird how one invention leads to another. Yeah. And it was the reason I knew about this is because we talked a while ago about jobs in the UK that don't exist anymore and the last gold beater, I think, went out in the UK maybe in the last 10 to 20 years. It feels like a very labour intensive job. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

Also, for the size of the balloon. that they were making during the war. Oh my God, yeah. You needed a lot. So one kind of classic Zeppelin would require 250,000 intestines in order to make the size balloon that they needed in order to do it. Again, how did they first get the idea? And it was mostly women, right?

Yeah. The Vineland family was... It couldn't been just them, right? They must have taught it to... But it was women that were doing all the work. Women did the skin... The skin... stretching.

The skin... ...treating. Yeah. That factory was staffed by women. I think there was one Fred Vindling. There were a couple of sons, but there was Mrs. Vining and two daughters who were the chief balloon makers for the army. And it was such a secret as well that when it eventually got seen that it was being used by the countries, that was seen as treason. And this guy, Major Templar, who was the one, he actually got charged with betraying military secrets because they thought this was so secret.

No one could have known it. He was acquitted because I think they worked out that he didn't do it. but that's how important this was to the war effort. But it kind of didn't matter for a few countries because what you needed was cow intestine. So they were being farmed in America and they were being imported to here. But Germany couldn't get them because they stopped.

They have cows in Germany. I don't think they had enough at the time. I think we've mentioned once before that Germany had to choose in the war between airships and sausages. It's a hard choice to make. You're in total war. Your society needs to survive. It is the worst choice to me.

Oh, come on. Yeah. In fact, they still use balloons in war right now, don't they? Do they? For instance, well, we saw in the news with the so-called, like, spy balloons. Oh, yeah. They're coming back in. It's a new fashion trend.

In Ukraine war, I think both sides use balloons. They kind of put them up there so that the other side kind of uses a ammunition trying to shoot them. Like, they're not, they're just distractions, really, but they are still used. Well, there were barrels balloons in the second world. You saw images of London at war There are all these balloons floating over And it's to make

You know bombers have to fly higher To fly over them And they have steel cables hanging down from them So you can't fly around under them So that they're a good air defence And those were largely staffed by women There was the women's auxiliary air force They were on the ground

They would operate the winches basically Because there's no one actually up there In a ballad balloon or hanging beneath it So yeah And balloon command was set up in 1938 Oh yes please Even at D-Day Good morning balloon, come on.

What color? Pabble? Yes, plenty of those. How old is he? Seven? Oh, we'll see what we can do. D-Day had the Barrage Balloon Battalion who were specifically bringing to the Normandy beaches the balloons. Wow.

Yeah. They were pre-inflated in the UK and then sailed over to defend the... I think that's good because if you're in opposing territory, you don't want to be like... Stretch it. Stretch it out a bit. you're absolutely right they didn't show that in the beginning of saving private Ryan did they

I'm asthmatic sir I can't do this speaking of women in war the UK's first official policewoman was Mrs Edith Smith of Grantham and she became a sworn officer in 1915 and the home office weren't very happy about it because they said that women were not proper persons

that's what they said it's something we have to live with I know, but this is amazing. Quite a lot of the stuff they made her do was spy on women on behalf of their husbands who were away at war. Oh, wow. Wow, the power of the patriarchy.

You can work for us if you take down your own people. I was always all the having affairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have we ever mentioned the hello ladies? Hello. Have you ever been before? Hello ladies. Hello ladies.

No. Hello ladies were a group of women. They were in the battlefields of France. They were basically the operators who connect phone calls. The telephone operating ladies, yeah. But they were doing it on the front lines. And so while being bombed, just connecting these phone lines to make sure that these crucial calls could be made back. And at the height of it, the Hello Girls were connecting 150,000 calls a day.

And there was 223 in total that we're doing. Yes, yeah. But a lot of those were calls being made to a policewoman in Grandfather. Okay, what's she doing now? Well, did they look like they were friends? Or did they look like it was more serious? Yeah, and they, annoyingly, after the war, they weren't considered for veteran status and benefits because they weren't seen as part of the military. And it took until 1977.

Oh, my God. Petitioning presidents constantly to get them any kind of compensation, but they finally did it. But they were essential to the war of the hello girls. Yeah, you were there. You know, yeah, you were out the front line. You went there there, exactly. Oh, my God. That's awful.

I just got one more fact about balloons. Yeah. Go on. There has only ever been one balloon. hit and run accident in the UK. Okay, amazing. 2004. Are we talking hot air balloons?

Yeah. Ocombe, Cumbria, retired couple, sitting in their cottage, having a nice time. Suddenly, bang. Hot air balloon. So, someone stole the chimney?

Smash it into their chimney and their roof and then flies off. Oh my God. I know. It was blue, yellow and red. I'm going to say, in defence of whoever this was, if you're flying,

I used to live there. If you're flying over and you're out of control enough that you hit a chimney, you're probably out of control enough that you can't stop. To leave your details, yeah. It's quite dangerous because around there they have quite a lot of Ministry of Defense flights. They practice around there. Do they? Yeah.

Oh. Well, it's the only known. Known. It's a never found. They still never found. I didn't find a follow-up to the story. Maybe they did. So that's interesting because only a couple of days ago, I watched a video on Instagram

of a hot air balloon. coming in close to it, there's a whole group of people picnicking on the side of, in this grassy bit of the hill. And they're all, they all turn around and look at it. Everyone gets up and they're filming it. And it just keeps descending and keeps descending. And it suddenly hits the ground and mows through all of them. They're all diving out of the way, all their chairs go through.

No one's hit. Everyone's okay. And it takes off again and disappears off into the distance. And I don't know if they got their details later. So that might not count as a hit and run. But could you claim a picnic over a chimney? my picnic was ruined. If they put everything back together

they noticed there was one sausage roll missing. He just grabbed it on the way out. Just left a sausage skin. Make your own balloon. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Orson Wells' nose rarely made appearances in his movies.

Wow. Can you give me some of his movies? Yes, Citizen Kane is perhaps... I've seen... I have, but I don't remember any noseless man in that. Well, he was never noseless. Oh. He never, yeah, he didn't.

I mean, people would talk about Sittson Kane in a different way. There was no nose on his face. Like, he spends his whole time lusting over, what was it? Rosebud. Rosebud, memorializing Rosebud. He'd be memorializing his nose. No, thank you. I nearly started watching Citizen Kane last night, but I got.

Have you not seen it? No, I got quite tired. It's incredible. It's incredible. Why the only one here who hasn't? Yeah. Oh. the worm turns and builds its little nest down.

Sorry, I'll keep going with that. Builds a little nest down, then realizes this is full of shit from a ground honk, carries on. Actually, absorbs it because that's his deal. You've got to watch Citizen Kane. It's classic. I've seen a couple of his.

What have you seen? The magnificent Ambassadors. Oh, I haven't seen that. Very much a B-side these days. It is great. The third man. Which he did a direct. He just is in.

Yeah. Oh, sorry, but he was such a director. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, that's okay, so for the people that don't know, Orson Wells, citizen Kane is often regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. I actually was surprised I went on to IMDB. I expected to see it behind Shawshank Redemption. It was actually 95 on the top 100 list, but I think, you know,

there's three Avengers movies in that top 100 ahead of it. So I think that's been altered. Yeah, you went on to IMDB. I think you'd check like Guardian's top films. Yeah, exactly. It's the Paddington 2 of its day. Yeah. It really was.

It absolutely was. Orson Wells was, as Andy says, he was a director. He was a writer. He was an actor. He went from radio to stage to film doing iconic things in every single place. He supposedly created a national terror when he did War of the Worlds on radio. That's been mythologized to be a lot worse than it actually was people, you know, claiming they thought aliens were really invading. We're really kind of newspapers just bumping that up.

But one thing about him is that for someone who was so confident and he was known to be so balshy and people would talk about his. rage and his passion, one thing he was absolutely insecure about was the size of his nose, which he thought hadn't really grown since childhood. And so every single movie that he did, except basically for one movie, as far as I can tell, which was the third man, he always had prosthetics on his nose. And sometimes applying it himself, there's an account by a guy called Lewis Gilbert, who was a director, and he did a movie with him in 1959 called Ferry to Hong Kong. And he said that basically he would do his own nose. And the problem was is that his would be quite different shot to shot.

Yeah, they said it was like wonky or green. Yeah, sometimes it was tilting upwards. Sometimes it was tilting downwards. Occasionally it just went sideways. It was not a consistent nose for the entire movie. Yeah, I read one quote saying he said that his nose had not grown one millimeter since infancy. Which I don't believe it. There's no way he had an actual baby's nose.

I felt bad, though, because when you do look at it, so I was like, what? No, he doesn't. And then I saw a picture of him without it. And I was like, I guess it is small. I think it doesn't fit his personality because he was known for being this like huge raconteur, character like absolute, almost, I guess, Brian Blessed style, like fill the room.

It doesn't, you expect him to have a much bigger features and the rest of his features are quite big. Not there's anything wrong with small nose. He allegedly, he kept every fake nose. And he had a glass case for each one. And he also gave them more names. That's quite common in prosthetic. and wig world on TV they sometimes give them names.

Really? Yeah, I don't know why. I guess because often you have to look after a wig. So you have to kind of like wash it and preen it and stuff or preset it so you would give it. It's not uncommon to give it a name. Carrie, you've done a lot of sketch comedy on TV or a lot of shows where you're a comedy character playing a celebrity like Murder and Successful.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Have you ever worn a prosthetic nose? Yeah, I have. I'm trying to think now. I had to wear loads for Murder Successful, but I can't remember which one. I think for Cheryl Cole, I had to. a prosthetic nose. Did it have a name?

I think we called it Cheryl, to be fair. He didn't call them the actual names. He was in a film called Touch of Evil. Oh, yes. One of them that's classics. A nose from that was called Sandra. Oh, well, they always women's names. One of the King Lear one was called Sloan Jr.

So I don't know if there's a character called Sandra in Touch of Evil, but there's no character called Sloan Jr. In King Lear. No, it's gone of Roles. Gone Rawls' brother is Sloane. Yeah. And actually, when he was making that film, I think they lost his nose halfway through production

and it had been posted and it hadn't come through and they basically halted production on this big Hollywood film while they searched every post office in Hong Kong for... To find his nose. Awesome Wells' father

it was called Dick Ed. His name was Richard Head Wells. Wow. And he's pretty cool Awesome was a father. He was a kind of inventor and an engineer. He invented a glider,

get this, which was attached to a steam engine on the ground. Okay. So it's a plane whose engine is on the ground and the plane flies up there. And then...

You know what it feels like? What? You would have angular momentum on it. If you just try to go forward, you'd end up going in a circle like those fairground rides. Yeah, yeah. Maybe.

But it did not work. Well, maybe it worked, but it didn't... Didn't catch off. It didn't take off. Hey! Dan, you mentioned the War of the Wells thing. Yeah.

He came a bit depressed afterwards because he said that he had two lots of friends one lot of friends had heard the recording and one lot hadn't and anyone who'd heard it would want to tell him everything what they thought about it

and anyone who hadn't heard it would tell him tediously why they hadn't near a wireless on the day so that everyone he spoke to to all wanted to speak to him about that is that like how you guys feel like people just come up to you with facts

or they go I've never done me not only into podcasts a lot more of the latter than the farmer I had to say I read an interview with him from 1939 and he said that no one has said anything original about that broadcast for at least nine months. Wow. There's a weird coincidence, which is that H.G. Wells was in America and he was driving around and he got lost.

And so he pulls over and he goes, excuse me, so can you help me to find where I'm going? And it's Orson Wells. And they make the established, they establish that each other each other. And this was not long after Orson Wells had done War of the Worlds. But of course, he wasn't a big face back then, Orson Wells. He was a radio guy. knows, that's for sure. You know, you couldn't have gone like,

oh, I'm going to pretend I don't know who Orson Wells is. I wonder if H.T. Wells was recognizable. Quite possibly, from the back of books. Were people just less recognizable back in the day? Yeah, I guess so. You didn't have more, you didn't have author jacket photos in the same way that you do these days. And as we know, author jacket photos are not representative

of what someone looks like in real life. Excuse me? Holding out my book. Yours is, but most people are not. Thank you. Thank you. I also read some newspaper articles from the after the recording went out to see, you know, did it happen?

Or, you know, was this kind of craziness? Did it exist? And the journal Times, I read, they collected articles from all over America about what had happened. And they said that Senator Clyde Herring of Iowa had called for more regulation of the press as a result of everyone thinking

that the Martians had attacked, which is pretty typical. Apparently in New York, one person had called the police and said, I want a gas mask, I'm a taxpayer. And the police had just said that that had definitely happened. And there was a town of concrete, which is in Washington State.

And apparently there was a power cut just at the moment the Martians put their death rays into action. This was reported the day after it went out. So I think it did happen. But the thing was, like, they did advertise that it was fiction. They said right at the top. Awesome Wells comes on at the start and says this is fictional. And then they had four times in the middle. they said just to remind you all this is fictional

and then at the end he comes on and says by the way that was a play you just listened to there was a good Radio 4 documentary about what happened and how to I mean there were people who obviously did lose their mind but it's a tempting myth yeah yeah exactly like the five stages oh guys

like it's nice to believe that that would be true yeah it's just kind of it's nice to believe that people back in the day were so stupid they didn't understand radio you think oh we've come along so away we understand radio now you know wells wells um wells

so dan you mentioned his most famous film appearance maybe and certainly maybe the one he's most famous for these days is in the third man yeah where he it's in vienna it's after the second world war it's and it's an amazing that is unmissable way it's incredible so good and there's a big scene there's a scene in the sewers of vienna where they're chasing he's playing this mysterious um sort of black market dealer and and and you know crook and um he's he's very very dodgy

but they did the filming in the sewers of Vienna and they all went down there they were actually very clean in lots of places and the director had his coffee brought down to him on a silver tray by a waiter from one of these old Viennese cafes you know the only person who refused to go down into the sewers. Awesome Wells.

Yeah. And they had to build a fake sewer in Shepperton. Wow. Is that the famous shot of him though in that really like the really white circle and it's him in it's either a body double or it's Shepton and everyone else had filmed their bits in Vienna.

Yeah, I know. He wouldn't have been able to smell it anyway with his own nose. I mean, he was, like, I can't remember what a film it was, but it was filmed in the deep south, and that actress was quoted as saying, like, it was so hot and sweaty

that his nose was, like, falling off. My nose is running. But, like, he was, if he was a woman, he'd be called a diva. Like, the things he would refuse to do. He was a divo. Yeah. And the guy, I think it's the guy

who plays Yago or Cassio, wrote a whole book about the experience. of filming Othello of like how insane and awful it was like that was his kind of made his money on this yeah called Cassio yeah so one that loves Desimona and starts off all the trouble he's one who has that great line beep yeah yes Andrew yes fellow English literature scholar yes apparently when he was directing Othello was that a film the fellow is a film yeah yeah it's a great film it's really interesting I think he might have also staged a stage version of Othello because apparently when he was directing that, he would push the actors around the stage with a 20-foot

pole shouting, to hell with the method. This is the Wells way, act, you sons of bitches. Amazing. Do you know where Orson Wells is buried? No. No. This is, he's buried. Can we guess? Yeah, have a guess. Have a guess. Perlishes. Oh. It's just the most famous cemetery I can think of. That's in Paris. Okay. Let me, let me, let me rephrase. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're like this. You're like this. I'm going to rephrase the question. because this is actually the wrong angle. Remember a few weeks ago when we had Sarah Pascoe on, we talked about the guy who invented Pringles being buried in a Pringles.

Tube. Once you pop, you can't stop. So where is Awesome Wells buries? In a film canister. A film can't. In the Hollywood Hills. Very good. He's in the Hollywood sign.

They poured him in. Into the O. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the three. Ourson Wells is a Nile. In a well. Awesome Wells is a Nile. Is it? He's in a well.

James got it. James got it. No way. He's buried. He was, this is years after his death. His daughter brought the ashes of him to Malaga in Spain to a place called Ronda, where he's now on the property of a retired bullfighter who he really liked. I've been to Ronda quite recently. Have you? Yeah. That's the end of the anecdote.

Okay. Awesome Wells is in a well. Wow. In Malaga. Lovely city, Malaga. Is that the end of that anecdote? It's surprising because you think, like, you associate it with package holidays. It's really nice.

It's incredibly. The cathedral is called La Manquita, I think, which means the woman with one arm. And it's because it's got two towers, the cathedral, but only one of them was completed. So one of them is short than the other. Simon Callow, the actor. Yes. He is maybe one of the biggest Wells experts on the planet because he's currently writing a biography of Awesome Wells. he was he started working on it in 1989 when also and wells had been dead a few years he thought

well do two volumes take about three years 1992 be done great book one was published in 1995 okay took a bit longer fine but i better do it but book one fine right book two volume two was in 2006 volume three came out in 2015 and he's now working on volume four it's so it's such a huge project he's done other stuff in between um four weddings and a few rules in there at some point he's a busy man Pop Idol. Is that him? No, no. Who among us doesn't make that mistake? I always made that mistake.

When they go to him at the judges' chair, he's surrounded by books on Wells, and he's conducting interviews. Okay, that's it. That's 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 we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter, James. At James. At James Harkin. And Carriad.

At Lady Carriad, because I did it a long time ago. And because of your David. And because of my David or at Carriad Lloyd on Instagram, it's all where I am. Right. And, yeah, you can also get us on at No Such Thing. Or go to our website, no such thing asafish.com and check out all all all of our previous episodes. But most important of all, get yourself to an online bookshop or a real bookshop to pick up, you are not alone. Carriad's book all about grief.

And it's tied in with her podcast, Griefcast. So give that a listen as well. I'm sure you have already, but get back to it this week. Has anyone died? Get back in there, guys. But that's it for us for now. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.

Goodbye.