No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Pop Charts for Bagpipers

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Dan, Anna, James and Andy discuss remote Russians, minted Madagascans and a very brazen Dane. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that one in three people in the UK has seen the queen in real life. Wow. Now that's insane.

Feels high to me. There are about 70 million people in the UK. Shouldn't we start off with a survey of the people on this soon? Yes, 100%. And I've got some extra data to add, actually. I know that Dan has for sure, because Dan's actually properly met the queen. I went to Buckingham Palace. You've slept with her, haven't you?

Yeah. It was Philip. I slept with Phyllis, but she came in and served us tea in the morning. I'm sure you can be arrested for this kind of comment. Definitely. This is now the treason cast. Okay, so Dan has, to Buckingham Palace Garden Party, fine. Anna?

I don't think so. Okay, date. I meet a lot of people, you know. We should ask the queen. But if she's that, Anna. Yeah. Have you seen her, though, Anna? Like, have you, with your eyes in public seen her?

No, no, no, not in public. The only reason I hesitate is because I know my siblings have met her, because my brother's called Charlie and my... She meets all the Charlie. It's a ceremony every year. Are they like swans? They're like the UK swans. All the Charlies belong to the queen.

You've got a golden ticket and some chocolate that'll meet the Queen, didn't they? Yeah. I said that the wrong way round because my dad for his job meant that my parents met her and my mum was holding my brother Charlie was a baby at the time and the Queen said to my mum

what's he called? And she said Charlie and the Queen said, oh, I've got little Charlie as well. Wow, that's awesome. Which is weird because he would have been about 30 at that point. Okay, so it doesn't know, but that's a note. James? Well, I think I have seen her. It's kind of, I was very young when it happened.

I think when I was 10 years old, she came to Bolton, right? Okay. To celebrate Bolton's 150th birthday. And I think I stood on the street and saw her go past. And I looked on the Bolton Even News website to see what happened. and they said that everyone from age 9 to 11 was given the morning off to go and see the queen and I would have been tense, that makes sense.

But I asked my mum, and she didn't remember it at all. And I'm like, yeah, but mum, I have kind of a memory and it's in the Bolton even news that we were there. So surely it must have happened. And she said, well, I had three young children and a full-time job, so how the hell am I supposed to remember stuff? But I think I might have done. Put you down as a half.

Yeah. Okay. Andy? I'm a yes. Oh, yeah. Because she was. she was visiting the university I was at and she walked past,

but no face time with her, no personal contact. But I've also asked Anne Miller and Alex Bell, the other regulars, and they have both seen the queen, Anne was a child, and Alex was, I think, an ascot or something and saw a yellow blur in the distance, which he claims was the queen. Was she on a horse, the yellow blur?

Yeah, she came in third. She did really well. But that's, how many is that? There's one, two and a half with James. I think I'm a one, Andy. I really do think. Honestly, I think I've seen her. So that's five out of six.

That's extraordinary. Am I one and a half? Because I've touched her. Am I in a different category? You're not allowed to, Dan. That's the main thing. What are you're talking about? You're not allowed to touch the Queen.

Of course you are. No, you're... Well, she touched me. She touched me. Oh, that's completely different. Your Honor. But that's one of the main rules. There's no touching.

But there are... really any rules, right? It's just kind of etiquette. In fact, on the Royal Family website I think maybe they're trying to play it cool but they strictly say there are no obligatory codes of behaviour at all when you beat the Queen. You can pull your trousers down if you like.

You will be shot. Dan, you actually did pull your pants down, didn't you? And say, hey, I've got a little Charlie of my own. Oh, no. Next week's episode coming to you live from the Tower of London. It is nerve-wracking, though, all the protocols.

So I met her at Buckingham Palace. It was part of a party in celebration of her heading to Australia, and I got sent an invitation as supposedly a notable Australian, which is so bizarre. And you get with the invitation, you get this extraordinary list of protocol of how you approach the Queen if you meet her what to say, how to use Mom the first time, and then Her Majesty.

I've got the order wrong in that, but it's stuff like that. It's so much jumble. Sorry, you've also got the pronoun. wrong according to the Royal Family Official website. They're very strict. It's ma'am. It's the only bit of protocol they say is a rule address as ma'am as in jam. Well, she's from the north east, doesn't she?

So she always calls herself ma'am. It's never mum. It's always ma'am. But sorry, Dad, go on. No, I'm just saying with all that playing in your head, it's a very nerve-wracking experience to, you find it very hard to be present in the moment when you're meeting the Queen and shaking her hand.

Philip less so, because you're just waiting for him to say something a bit rude to you. He must have been in his element with all those Australians. Yeah, exactly. He just had to bite his tongue. He genuinely, when I shook hands with him, he kind of lent in as if he was going to say something and just went, ah, not worth it.

This little shake of his head just went, I don't need this today. But he didn't say not worth it. No, no, but you could tell with his look. His eyes said, well, because I got in a fight later on with one of his sons, Prince Edward, who came up. Who won?

He did. Because I was in his house. He kind of just sort of won it by default. He knows where the weapons are, yeah. He doesn't like QI, by the way. So he kind of insulted all of us. Yeah. He said, oh, is it that pompous show with the pompous Stephen Fry

who pretends to know all these facts? Well, at least he has seen it. Yeah. Christ, I think the royal family wants to talk about pomposity. That's true. Stephen Fry never insisted on a gold carriage. Not for the first three series, anyway. So, Dan, you're not the only.

an Australian to have met the queen. I mean, it would be insane if you were because you've been to a entire party. But this sort of ties in with the touching thing and the etiquette about not touching the queen unless you're shaking hands with her or whatever. But she visited Australia in 1992, which I guess

was a time before Dan Yor Garden Party with her. But the PM at the time Paul Keating, he put his arm around her, not in a kind of cinema yawn stretch way, but he sort of just put his hand on that small of her back, and the British papers called him

the Lizard of Oz as a result. Yeah. One newspaper wrote, Mr. Keating, in placing his hand in the center of her back, was actually touching that little fastener, which is the miniature linchpin of all women's femininity. What? Does that a thing? It is.

And how did they get hold of that secret? We were sworn to keep it under wraps. But the queen, actually, it's not a linchpin. It's one of those strings that you pull out. When you pull it out, she goes, How do you do? How do you do? How do you do? How do you do? I think it's implying that he was trying to unhook her bra. Is it the minute? It says the minute little fastener, which is the miniature lynch

pin of all women's... Not lower back. Oh, no, it wasn't a... Sorry, it was just a... How old was she? Median back. You don't... Bras don't descend down your torso as you're pressed to. It's not like elderly women have got their bras around their waist. You know what? We're learning a lot here today, aren't we? This is... Yeah.

Real lesson for the last. But you shrink when you're older, so your back gets smaller, doesn't it? Just get closer to your shoulders get closer to your bum, naturally. I guess. This thing about one-third of Britons having seen the queen was part of a survey by YouGuth, wasn't it? And so I looked at some of the other things in that survey. And so 22% of people have seen Prince Philip. So that's one in five-ish.

The next most commonly seen is Princess Anne. on 17%. Only 1% have seen Megan Markle. She was the least. But she's not been going for as long as she... No, that's true. She's a new character.

Prince Harry was the same. It's 3% of 65-year-olds and over have seen him and only 5% of 18 to 24-year-olds. And it's just because the Queen has been going for so long and has been doing so many visits all over the place. So for people over the age of 65, 49% have either seen or met her,

which I just find insane. Well, it's true. It's like when she came, came to Bolton, it was like, it was just to get her numbers up, really, because like, she got all the kids along the street and she's like, oh, this is another, you know, 200,000 people. Basically, she's playing a long Pokemon game with all of us. We are the Pokemon.

It's Pokemon commoner, isn't it? She's got a list of all the commoners in the country and she's just ticking them all up. The list of people that she's met, I read that she has met over a quarter of all the US presidents ever. she's met something close to it. Yeah, she's met something close to 30% of all the presidents that America has ever had. That is insane.

Yeah. Oh, sorry. That is, that's breaking news for me. I was trying to find the most famous person the queen hasn't met. And so I went on to Google and searched for who's the most famous person in the world and then went down the list to see.

Yeah. And Googled, has the queen met this person? Has the queen met this person? Well, I didn't have to go that far because as far as I can see, she hasn't met Justin Bieber. And Google thinks that he's one of the most famous people in the world. They've never been seen in the same room at the same time, would they? Well, you see, Justin Bieber is another person whose shoulders are quite close to his bum, isn't he? Because he's a very small man.

Because I was reading about people who have met Justin Bieber. And Freddie Flinthoff, the cricketer, who is an extremely tall guy. He went to meet him and got a meet and greet with his kids and his wife. And they went down the queue. they got to the front and the kids got to see Justin Bieber, but the Justin Bieber staff wouldn't let Freddie Flinthoff go anywhere near him. And they said he doesn't like big guys. Because if you have Freddy, who's like six four, six five, something like that,

standing next to Justin Bieber, he's going to look like a little tiny glove. It's like why he only hangs out with Tom Cruise and people like that, Justin Bieber. Yeah, yeah. Also, Justin Bieber is why he wears his trousers so low. It's because he's trying to make it look like a distance from his shoulders to his bum is greater than it actually is. They're only a few inches apart, actually. The royal family have banned commoners from wearing their official tartan.

Oh, no. Can you believe this? Prince Albert designed a tartan for the family, for the firm, in 1853. And then several decades later, in 1937, there was a tartan manufacturer who wrote to them saying, oh, this is a lovely tartan, and we'd love to make it. And the keeper of the preview purse wrote back saying, absolutely not. You may not make this as exclusively for the royal use. Anyway, you would think that was in 1937.

Things might have changed a bit since then. In 2016, the palace confirmed that this remains in place. There is one person in the world who is not a member of the royal family who is allowed to wear the task. Can you guess who it is? It's guessable as well. It's definitely guessable. Nicholas Sturgeon?

It's not Nicholas Sturgeon. Is it one of the crankies, if any of those are still alive? Is Jimmy Cranky? Yeah. Is it the person who tries on stuff for the Queen? Oh, yeah. No, brilliant. Oh, is it the winner of the Cabotos in every year's Highland Games?

It's another lovely, lovely guess. It's a bit further away. That would be a great prize, wouldn't it? Is it someone Scottish? Does it have to be someone Scottish in this? It's someone who is almost certainly going to be Scottish due to their job. Oh. It's someone who might be wearing tartan as a matter of course anyway.

The person who paints the fourth rail bridge. No. It's not that. The backpiper on Princess Street who annoys everyone every morning during the festival. You were so... You know what? I think just to end this

torture's competition, I'm going to say... It's her alarm clock. It's her... It's her... Backpiping alarm clock man. Her bagpiping alarm clock man as the official role is. Yes.

Wow. I know. That's another incredibly long-lasting thing. There have only been 15 royal bagpipers since 1843. And they have to play for her every weekday morning. Not every morning of the week.

She's not a masochist. For 15 minutes, they play. And apparently, she doesn't ever want to hear the same tune twice, so it's a nightmare. There was one called Gordon Webster who said he had to know about seven or eight hundred different tunes. Yeah, but they must be running out by now.

Like, how long has she been queen? 60 years, what is it? Something like that. And every morning, apart from the weekends, she's had a different tune. They must be getting, they must be kind of getting down to the, all right, I'm going to do the killers today.

And she had that one? Well, she's had Mr. Brightside, but she has... That's a cool way to inform her of, like, the latest charts. Yeah. You just start playing the latest Ariana Grande. I don't know if she needs to be informed with the latest charts. Is that something that she demands?

Definitely. Well, maybe, you know, when she meets Bieber one day, she can say, love your stuff. Can I do one more guessing game? Because Andy's one went so loud. Oh, yeah. According to Ben Shott, who I think we all kind of trust, writing in The Spectator, a brilliant sort of collector of trivia. Who do you think is the most seen human ever to have lived,

as in the person that most people have seen in real life? Oh, wow. So someone who's done huge events and rallies and things like that, is it Donald Trump? Nope. Is it a politician from a really populous country, like Xi Jinping or Narendra Modi? Oh, is it the Dalai Lama?

Ben Shott thinks none of those. Ben Shott thinks it is probably Mick Jagger. And that's because he's been going for so long, so long and playing in front of massive, massive audiences nonstop and nonstop and nonstop and out of all the... Is he from the Rolling Stones? Yes. Of all the Rolling Stones, he does most of them.

Sorry. What a slam on the most seen man on earth. You don't deserve this fact. You don't deserve to be saying this fact. Oh, my God. Hang on. Can we just do a little straw poll among us? Who's seen...

We know James has to them. I might have done for all I know. I don't think I have seen the Rolling Stones at any stage. Any of them, I don't think. I've seen Jagger. I've seen all of them because I went to a gig once. Me too? I've not.

Dan, no. No. Surprising. No. So the queen in our little straw poll. Can you ask Alex Bell and Ann Miller as well, please, Andy? Yeah, I'll drop him a test. Yeah, Jagger was on the horse behind the queen.

Oh, that's such a answer. What we're just talking of rock stars, I've been reading Elton John's autobiography called Me, which is unbelievably good, very scandalous. And he meets with the queen quite a few times in the book, and he tells a story in it where he was at a party, and he saw the queen approaching a man called Viscount Lindley. And she asked him to look on after his sister, who'd been taken ill and retired to her room.

So he said, go and look after her. And he kept just partying. And so once he was fobbing the queen off too many times, she went up to them, and this is what Elton John saw. You know that thing of saying a single word and slapping a cheek of someone back and forth in between the words that you see in movies? She says that the queen went up to Viscount Lindley

and went, don't slap, argue with me, I am the queen. And then he went off to look after the door. And then Elton says the queen then turned to Elton. She stared at him and gave a little wink and walked off. That's what he says. I mean, it might have happened. It's in the book. Elton John's a fantasy.

I'm not sure he is. I think he tells the truth. I mean, can that have happened? No. No, because it's true. No, I do remember actually, in Prince's biography, he says that he saw the queen slamming Prince Edward's head. in a fridge door repeatedly, because he said he didn't like QI.

She said, you should watch QI. It's very funny. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1714, when a Dutch ship ran out of ammunition 14 hours into a battle, the captain sent a boat over to the enemy, asking to borrow some gunpowder and cannonballs so they could continue the fight. And did they give them the cannonballs? No. Can we borrow them as quite?

Because we'll give them back. We'll give them back really fast. Yeah, no, I think it was seen as a sort of a bit of a cheeky surrender, really. Because the captains actually, I don't know if it was the humor of it, ended up having a drink and toasting each other, sending some compliments, very nicely fought, well done. And then off they went on their ways. So neither ship was sunk in the end and neither was captured.

So quite a good ending. So yeah, so this is a story to do more with the captain, whose name was Peter Jansen Vessel, otherwise known as Tordenskjold. And he was a Dano-No-No-Nogeon nobleman who was, he's very famous in sort of the history now of Denmark. There's statues of him in Copenhagen, the most popular brand of matches, has his image on it. He's mentioned in the Royal National Anthem. He was sort of a big character at the time. But this was quite an infamous incident in what was known as the Great Northern War.

He was captaining this Royal Danish Norwegian Navy ship. And he ran into what they thought was a British ship, but was actually Swedish. And it was a much bigger ship than what he had. He never should have engaged in a fight with it, in a battle with it. And so he was reprimanded when he got back for having done that for risking everyone's life and the ship itself. So that he survived, but it kind of didn't work out for him for a while. Well, although he fought his case and won it in the end, didn't he? He was such a brazen man that it seemed like he just always got away with the stuff.

He seemed to be always doing things like this. And yeah, like you say, he was reprimanded. He was court-martialed and he managed to find an obscure piece of naval law, which got him off. So he was court-martialed because he persisted much too long. But then he found a bit of law that said that you have to pursue any ship that's fleeing you and got off scot-free and was immediately promoted. and he was constantly promoted in his life. But it was weird this battle because one of the reasons he was lucky, I guess,

was because he was quite, I guess he cheated. So he often went in disguise as another country. So in this battle, it would have looked to the outsider like it was a Dutch ship fighting a British ship because, like you said, he thought it was the British because the Swedes had sent a ship to Britain to have the Brits fit it out with some good gear. And the Brits were sending their ship back at the time. so it looked like it was British because it was covered in British regalia.

And then he himself disguised his ship as a Dutch ship so that he could sneak up on the enemy without them realising that he was the enemy. So it looked like a Dutch ship and a British ship, but it was actually a Dano, Norwegian and a Swedish ship. That's correct. It's unbelievable that anyone got anything done in this time. But what was the difference?

Is it like the flag? I guess it's the flag that they're carrying, is it? I think it's mostly flags, yeah. It's not that everyone on board was like with a cup of tea and a bowl of hat and stuff and a monocle. those union jack suits that had to toe. He died aged about 30, didn't he? He was incredibly young when he died.

And he died in a duel with a Swedish count. Yeah. And it was over a disagreement about cards. It feels like he could have, it feels like whatever war it was could have gone the other way. What did he say? It was great northern war. Great northern war. Well, it's like, well, Anna says, he was just incredibly brazen.

And what happens is you get promoted to captain, then you get promoted to the next thing, then you get promoted to the next thing, but eventually your luck runs out and you get killed in a jewel. Yeah. But what happened was, like, he was in this duel with this proper, like, what was he a captain or something like that, colonel. And the colonel was fully kitted out with proper warlike equipment,

like proper swords and armor and stuff like that, whereas all he had was his ceremonial sword, which was like, might as well have been made out of plastic and come from Fisher Price because it didn't really work very well. And so as soon as he got in the jewel, he had no chance. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

His name was given to him quite, it was after even this incident where he asked to borrow some ammunition. 1716, he was given it. And Tordinskilled translates as Shield of Thunder, like Thunder Shield. Such an awesome nickname to have. But yeah, it's interesting that that's what he's known as now. And it almost has been put as his unofficial or rather look seemingly official surname, even though the vessel. Well, it was his official title, I think, when he was knighted. That's what they knighted as.

Total Skyald Shield of Thunder, which would actually be a really used to the shield if it was made of thunder. It doesn't work at all. But you'd only hear him coming like five seconds after he'd already attacked you. That's true. It's a good point. Hey, you know the brand of matches you mentioned at the start, Dan? Yeah. That are named after him.

And they were named after him in 1882 when they were founded. And it was because Sweden had a monopoly on match-making. match exports. And so the catchphrase of these matches was, you can use these to once again strike at the Swedish. The idea was to take down their monopoly. Yeah. And they were bought by a Swedish company in

1972. In your face, Tordenskilled. So Torrenskild won this war in the end, or his side won it. And it kind of stopped the Swedes from being like an absolute, massive country. So at that time,

Sweden was huge. Like, they were in charge of most of like northern Europe. They even had a colony in North America at the time. They were kind of spreading out. And then it was kind of the Russians and the Dano-No-No-Nawijians. And the British were on both sides at various times of this conflict. But it was basically the Russians who wanted to stop the Swedish from being massive. And then when the Swedish lost, that was kind of the rise of Russia and Peter the Great and stuff like that.

But what I found really interesting is in this war, there was quite, a lot. I think there are three or four examples of women who fought on the Swedish side who were dressed as men and who no one realized until either they got caught or, you know, after the war and stuff like that. There was one called Elizabeth Olsdottor who was actually executed afterwards on the charges of having dressed as a man and serving as a soldier. There was another one called Ulrika Stalhammer who was let off because she did such good work for the army. So they caught her and they arrested her and stuff. And she got married to a woman,

but they arrested her and she got off. But there was... Sorry, James, did she get married to a woman with the woman thinking she was a man? Well, it's controversial, Dan, you see, because they got caught and it went to, you know, it went to court, and they said that the woman didn't know anything, and, you know, she only found out later on,

but we're not sure what happened there. But because this was happening, because it was really famous that it was happening, it was used as an excuse by homosexual, soldiers in the Swedish army because obviously that was illegal in Sweden as well, especially in the army and whenever they got caught

they would say, well, we'd heard all these stories about these women pretending to be men so we just assumed it was a woman and apparently quite a lot of people got off because they used that excuse. That is so slick. I just assumed that half the people on board this ship were very realistically

women dressed as men. That's like, is it Hannah Snell, who was the famous person around about the same time, the famous British women who was in the Navy, who was in the Royal Marines, I think. And she was shot in the groin at one point, which is really awkward if you're a woman pretending to be a man. And so she had to extract the bullet and deal with the wound completely herself to keep it secret. And she was like, oh, my balls, my balls are. I was going to say that, that would probably help with your secret going, oh, lobbed right off. I was looking into other sort of bizarre moments in naval wartime history,

and just sticking with the Dutch for a second, the capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder, this was in 1795. And basically, this was a battle between the Dutch and the French. And the Dutch were on a boat that was on a body of water that froze over while they were anchored. And so the French had the ability to not even need a boat or a ship to get to them. They went out on horseback with cavalry and they fought a ship on horseback.

It was a battle between cannons and men on horses with swords. And the French cavalry captured them. It's extraordinary the imagery. I just want to see the paintings of that. So good. What surely just fire the cannons into the ice create massive holes and the horses are going to fall right through them? See, that's clever.

Yeah. They needed my kind of leadership, because I think they just surrendered straight away, didn't they? Yeah, they couldn't run away. You know, Iran owns a fake US aircraft carrier, which is exclusively for the purpose of them attacking it. But the great thing is, it's reusable. This year they had their third ever attack on it, where they symbolically sink it, basically. But unfortunately, this year they tried it again, and it sank by itself. And it's now created a shipping hazard blocking a really important naval port.

So they can't get to it. How was it reusable if you sink it? Can you bring it back up again or not? Okay, so this is a really tricky thing. I think they didn't properly bomb it. As in when they do their displays, they might fly helicopters at it, they might fire it a bit. But they're quite careful to, I think,

fired it above the waterline or whatever, so they don't properly sink it. And this year it clearly decided it had enough because it just sank. And they don't have salvaged ships, so they now can't get it up either. Well, that sounds like good news, because it sounds like based on that,

they probably won't be actually attacking the US any time soon. What are you on about? They now know exactly how to sink one of these ships. All we have to do is try not to sink it. It's a good point. Do you know how you sink an ancient Greek trirem? What's a trirem? Is that a boat?

With three sets of ours, is it? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Just one of their boats. Well, how they sank each other? It sounds like the start of a joke, doesn't it? That's true. How do you sink a trirem? Well, do you...

They've all got holes that they row through. So do you just have to tilt it a bit so that the holes let the water enter? That's clever. That is clever. It's actually, that's how you don't sink it. Oh. So they would ram each other, right? They all had tough and prattles, and they would ram each other and try and sink each other that way.

And the rams are often at the water line. So, you know, if you hit them with the ram, that you know their hole below the waterline, they're going to sink fast. So genuinely, if you had a... If you were being attacked by another ship and you can't... get out of the way in time, what they would do is everyone on board would run to one side of the ship, which is about to be hit by the ram. The ship tilts over into the water. Then when the ram hits, it's hitting a much higher bit. Yeah. I see. And then when you tilt back, it's hit somewhere that's above the waterline. Exactly. Isn't that insane as a defense tactic to run

towards the massive battering ram that's about to hit your ship? That's amazing. But if you've half tilted your ship one way, isn't the battering ram just being given an easier job to flip you over entirely. It's not aiming to flip you over. Yeah, yeah. It's not like a spatula. You're not flipping a pancake. This isn't robot wars.

I just mean, by accident, not intention. Yeah, if Sir Kilalot is approaching you with the battering ram, what you... I don't think it would. If you're coming at that angle,

the physics of that wouldn't cause your boat to capsize. Largely speaking, boats are designed so that they don't flip over that easily. Yeah, true. It's true. Well, although, since... I mean, although some boats have flipped over, and we all know that. But famously, we were talking about the Swedish Empire and what powerhouse it was. And when it was this huge naval power in the 17th, early 18th centuries,

they thought to celebrate this, they build the world's best warship. And this was 1628. It was called the Vassar. It was 68 metres long. It was the most high-tech warship the world had ever known. It was painted in really stunning colours, scenes from the Swedish military. victories of history all over it. And so thousands of people flocked to see it launch from Harbour.

And it set off. And 20 minutes later, it tipped over. And sunk. And they just built it too top-heavy. And it keeled right over. Oh, my gosh. It's an amazing story. Is that the one they have in...

In Stockholm. In Stockholm. Yeah. I just heard about that. They dredged it and they have built an entire museum around it. And you guys are not going to believe this. Can you see the mug I'm drinking from? It's got a ship on it.

That ship is the Vassar. Look at the handle here. It says Vassa. Did you go see it, Andy? Did you go see it when we were there? It's where I bought this mug. You should have taken me. I didn't know about it.

I was busy dancing with holograms of Abba at the Abba Museum. I much rather would have been there. Some of us are doing long-range research for an episode of the podcast in two years' time. Nice crime, mate. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week. is that vanilla farmers in Madagascar stamp their names on each individual pod on the vine.

They stamp it. That's incredible. Yeah. It's like when you're at school, you have to have your name sewn into all your clothes. It's the same kind of thing. Except this is to stop gangs of robbers from stealing your vanilla. No, that's why I have my name stitched into my clothes.

Of course. Stop the gangs of robbers. You heard of pretty scary school, didn't you? They're really sweet, the little stamps as well. So this is because Madagascar is in the middle of a vanilla boom or actually sort of coming out of a huge vanilla boom. So it produces 80% of the world's vanilla. And prices just shot up a couple of years ago.

And there are these vanilla gangs, these huge gangs and robbers at night who come and they strip your vines completely bare because it's going for so much money. And so now the farmers literally put that either their name or sometimes they're serial number, a specific serial number, on an individual pod. So if you see it on eBay later, you could be like, oh, that was. I stole them to my farm. One of the problems is that once your vanilla pot is ripe, you kind of need to leave it for quite a long time, don't you?

You need to leave it for quite a few months to just get better and better and better. And the longer you leave it, the better it is. But the thieves know this. So if they get there early, then they have something which is still good enough to sell, but not quite as good enough that the farmer would like. It's a trade-off. Do you wait till the end so you get really high-quality product, or do you take it early so the thieves don't get it?

Yeah. Actually, I've just thrown it. That makes more sense of something I found out because the government has now banned people, the farmers in Madagascar, from picking vanilla too early because they have to be shrink-wrapped if they're picked early, and that can make them moldy, and it lowers the content of vanillin, which is the main flavour chemical. And they, in fact, you know how governments sometimes burn smuggled or illegal goods in public, so they'll burn ivory, for example, to destroy the market? They recently burned half a ton of prematurely picked vanilla pods. in public to kind of make an example about this law. Do you think that would have smelled nice? I bet it would. Oh, what does it sound amazing? Yeah. Like an amazing scented candle, a giant scented candle. They ran a huge bath next to it.

It's relaxing music. But it's amazing. The prices have leapt up, but weirdly, it doesn't seem to have leapt up specifically for the growers. There seems to be this middle group of people who distribute it, who are known as vanillaeers. And they're the ones that are sort of really reaping the money and building up all these areas in Madagascar now from, if you were living in a wooden, hutted house,

they're now brick. Like, there's a big change going there as a result. Yeah. Weirdly, the huge job in prices doesn't seem to have made it back to the original producers. Yeah. What a surprise. ...situation in this world we live.

Yeah, they're trying to write that wrong, aren't they? And actually, I read a very heartening article in, I think it was in the FT, which was saying that. that this is being clamped down on. And the reason it's being clamped down on is because buyers, as in us, are more discerning than they used to be. So all like the hipster sort of morally sound awareness of where your goods have come from means that there's a lot of pressure on big companies like Mars to actually make sure that you're not exploiting farms at the other end of the chain. And so what that means is, you know, the person who owns Mars goes to Madagascar looks at

farmers' situations and tries to sort it out. And I think there's a project called livelihoods out there now, which is making sure that the money's making it back to those original producers. But some people really did profit from growing them as well. There was a woman called Lydia Sower, who was interviewed in one article, who said that her husband was a fisherman a few years ago, and she wanted to plant vanilla. And her husband said, no, absolutely not terrible idea. And she did it anyway. And it's now worth about, she's got a tiny little garden with a few vanilla pods in it. And it's worth about $8,000, which is massive, massive there. Although she was saying this very, very proudly to a woman called

Victoria Mars who was visiting and who does have an 8% stake in Mars, which as this person pointed out, its annual sales are three times the size of Madagascar's GDP. So, you know, her jaw didn't drop, but there's down $8,000 in the same way

that this woman was hoping. You know how there are vinyonaires, as you said, Dan? There are also, I don't think anyone's called this vanigilantes vanilla vigilantes is the thing I'm trying to get. Because, as Anna was saying, there's so much theft.

So a few years ago, 15% of all the vanilla on the planet was stolen, which is a hundred. And some vanilla thieves would write ahead in advance. That's how brazen they got. They would write a note saying, we are coming tonight, prepare what we want. And that has actually led to quite a few deaths, because when these people have been caught, there isn't enough sort of justice available on the ground. So there are vanilla vigilantes now who are catching and even killing them. the thieves.

Yeah. That is brazen. They sound like they've taken a few leaves out of Peter Skilden things. Taudden Skil's book. Yeah. But can't you get round the poaching by, you know, just changing your name to the name that's on the pod? You know, the guy in your article is called Leon.

Couldn't I just arrive in town and change my name to Leon? Well, Anna also said, sometimes they put like codes and barcodes on. You can't change your name to 731-964. You can. I bet there's a child of a celebrity who's called that right now. Yeah. Elon Musk is up to something. You don't know what yet. So vanilla grown, like you say, 80% in Madagascar. But it's not originally from there, is it? It's originally from South America, South and Central America and North America, because Mexico, which is neither in South America nor in Central America. It's in North America. It's from Mexico. It's vanilla's from Mexico.

and it was invented by this woman called Princess Zanat, who probably didn't exist. But she was a princess from the Tottinaco people. And she was goddess, kind of, as well as being a princess. She was forbidden by her father from marrying a mortal. And she ran away to the forest with her lover, and they were captured and beheaded. And where their blood hit the ground,

that's where the first vanilla pods grew. And that's where vanilla comes from. It was an arduous way to invent something, isn't it? And then it got taken over to Madagascar, and more specifically Reunion, which is where they learned how to grow it. And it didn't work for ages because the pollen is inaccessible. The flowers are insane.

They're fertile for 12 hours after they bloom. So if you're a vanilla farmer, there's big pressure. You can't just take the weekend off, assuming that it'll be all right when you get back. The flowers bloom for one day a year for this 12 hours. And in Mexico, obviously, there are insects which have evolved to fertilize the flowers. Only one species of bee. There's only one species of bee called a melipone who can do it.

Although actually, you know, they've recently done a study and they don't even think it's that. Really? They always thought it was this one melipona bee. And they now can't, I haven't actually got any evidence that this even pollinates it. Something's pollinating it. Something in Mexico. That's all year. Yeah.

So for years, they couldn't export it around the world because, you know, You don't have the bee or the hummingbird or whatever it is. So the method is hand fertilising. You have to get in with a toothpick and rub the flowers, genitals, together. And that's what fertilises it, and that's what makes it produce the vanilla pods. And if you miss your window with the flower, you lose the pods. You're sort of trying to make it have sex with itself, aren't you? Against its will.

It's against its will. The reason they're so hard to pollinate is because they've got this lit between the male and the female parts of the plant. The idea is you don't really want to self-inseminate, because I guess over many, many generations, maybe that's bad for an organism. And so it's against the plant's wool that you lift the lid very, very carefully,

and you dip into the anther, the female part, and you get the pollen out, and you smear it all over the male part. This is definitely a side of the Me Too movement. I don't think any of us expected. So this was first discovered by an enslaved man in reunion called Edmund Albius. And he basically had this guy who was his boss, and he was telling him how they make

watermelons, but how they can't do it with vanilla pods. And so Edmund Albios decided, well, okay, you say you can't, but let's have a go. And he started messing around with it, messing around with it. And he came up with this kind of technique where you use a little stick or a blade of grass and you flip up this little cap, which I was talking about called the Rustellum, and you flip it up. And then with kind of a flip of the thumb, you move some of the male and female parts together and you smear them over each other and that's how you pollinate them.

And that technique is still used today in Reunion for sure. And I think actually in Madagascar, I think all over they use this exact same thing. And then he was given his freedom. But he really, you know, he really struggled afterwards and ended up dying in poverty. Especially as there was a French guy called Jean-Michel Claude Ricard, who came over and said, oh, this was my idea. I came up with this. And he went back to Paris and he told everyone

that he'd come up with this way of creating vanilla in Reunion. And everyone sort of fated him for being amazing. But then the former owner of Edmund Delbiots came to Paris as well and said, mate, like that is just not what happened. Like it was this guy, it's this Edmund Dalbius who went round and teaching everyone else how to do it.

And he's like a hero in Reunion and there's a statue of him quite near the airport and he's really famous. It's a good lie to make up. Yeah, quite a Trumpian thing to do. It is. It's just sort of wandered into a country, be like, I did that, that was me.

You know that thing, which is like 4,000 miles away, which no one can prove who did it? That was me. Yeah. The longest cake ever made was vanilla-flavored. What was it? It was baked this year in South India, in Kerala, state of Kerala, and it was 10 centimeters wide,

but how long was it? Ten centimeters wide is really thin. That doesn't... That doesn't have. help you at all with knowing how long it is. It kind of feels like... But can you tell us the airful area of the cake and then...

And the height, and the height, please. 2.4 kilometres. Very strong offer. 20 kilometres. 20 kilometres. No, that's ridiculous. 200 yards long. As you said that it was in Kerala, not Kerala and...

Not Kerala. How long is it? Come on. These interminable guessing games are completely destroying the experience of the podcast. It was six and a half kilometres, so James wins because he was close. It wasn't like 20 kilometres down. Where did they fit that? Because outdoors, you'd imagine you'd run into a lot of obstacles. It's very rare you get a six and a half kilometre run.

They did it in sections, and it goes up and down a lot. It's slalom. It's a great deal. Hang on, so it's not one. It's not one single cake that's six thousand. meters. Really? You can't call that the longest cake. That's not the longest cake.

The longest cake. The longest cake is every cake that's been made on bakeoff in the last 10 years if they don't have to be connected. I'm so confused about what's happened to it. You can clearly see in the photos of the cake that there are sections which slot into place, but I think they're joined. They are all joined together. It's like a big cake snake.

Okay. It weighed 27,000 kilos. And as I say, it was vanilla favoured, hence me mentioning it. So one of the best books about vanilla, I would say the best book, is called Travels in Search of the Vanilla Orchid by Tim. Sorry, James. Are you claiming to have read all the books about vanilla? Because it sounds a bit like you are.

And then you've ranked them all. It's a small field. It's a very small field. And they're actually all, if you press them up against each other, they just make one long book. Tim Eckhart, who Andy and I at least know. Yeah. He wrote the book about vanilla, and it is awesome.

There's lots of stuff about the history of vanilla in there. When it came to Europe, one of the reasons this guy was showing off about it is because it was an absolute amazing thing. So Louis Xeenth would have soup made of vanilla. Francisco Hernandez, who was the physician to Philip the Second of Spain, he said that vanilla could soothe the stomach, cure the bite of a venomous snake, reduce flatulence, and cause the urine to flow admirably. So if you've got a bad stomach and you've just farted really loudly,

attracting the attention of a snake, which has then bitten you, and you need a piss. Now, and your friend has been stung by a jellyfish, so you need to urinate on them. Just one... One vanilla part will do that. This one weird trick, yeah. Also, according to Bizar Zimmerman, who's a German physician from the 18th century, he says that vanilla cured no fewer than 342 impotent. men. So they drank vanilla and it made them

able to have sex again. So if you were, if you'd farted really loudly because of your bad stomach and a snake came along and a very beautiful person of the sex that you're attracted to has been stung by a jellyfish after you've urinated on them and they're so grateful you can then have sex with them. And so impressed by the admirable flow of your urine, you would be. This is a Bear Grills episode. I'd love Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Russian football team, FC Sackolin, are based in such a remote town that to get to their closest away game, they have to travel one sixth of the circumference of the earth. It's amazing. It's incredible, isn't it? Oh, my days. Like, this is incredible. So this is a team based in the town of Yuzh

Shno Sacklenzsk, which is in the far, far, far east of Russia. And they're in the third division of Russian football. And the way that the third division works in Russia is it's such a big country. They want all the teams to be kind of close together because otherwise you have to spend so much money traveling. So they put all the teams that are next to each other playing each other. But unfortunately, there's no one else around this town of Yushno Sackolinsk. And so they've been put in with all the teams around the Black Sea and around Dagestan

and stuff like that. And so when they play Krasnodar, which is one of the teams in their league, they have to, if they want to fly, it would be at least 16 hours, just over 16 hours to get to this game. You could drive, but it's a 132 hour drive, a total of 9,781 kilometers, because you have to go a slightly weird way around. And I looked at it on Google Maps, and it says, warning, this route includes a ferry. This route has tolls. This route has restricted usage or includes private roads. Your destination is in a different time zone. So it's not an easy place to get to.

So I'm suspecting stuff like this bit is guarded by a wizard. At the time of writing, they haven't won any away games this season so far. They've won quite a few home games, well, they've not won any away games. But they did have a few good seasons a while ago. They won the league a couple of times in the last few years, but they refused to get promoted because if they get promoted, they're going to have to start playing lots of teams in different parts of Russia

and then they won't be able to do this thing which they do which is they go over and they play loads of games at once and then they come back so they don't go every week if you know what I mean. That is cleverer. Is the time difference between them and their nearest team is eight hours? It's so weird.

But the thing is it's not their nearest team. So if they played in the Japanese J-League, for instance, they're actually quite close to Hokkaido. So let's say all the plane stopped and they had to play either against someone like Krasnodar or someone around there or against Hokkaido, it would take them two days quicker to get to Hokkaido than it would take them to get to that part of Russia. And that's if they were to walk to Haqaeda and get a car to Russia. That's how much closer it is. They could walk to the ferry, get the ferry and walk

to the football match two days quicker than driving all the way across Russia. Wow. Yeah. And we could, if they were doing that distance and we had to do the equivalent, we could drive to Moscow, back again to London, back to Moscow, back again to London, and probably one more route before they even got there. It's what a distance. They're closer to the Seattle football team in the American League than they are to their nearest Russian rivals. It's insane. So there's not a lot of sort of neighborly antagonism is what you're saying. It's not like Man United Man City where you shag the wife of someone who's now married the person across the street. Exactly. It's not like Liverpool, Everton, where you literally cross one park to get to the other ground.

It's like, yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. It's more like there are fault lines left over from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which are diplomatically tricky. Wasn't James, wasn't there a bizarre thing that happened with one of the British teams, or two British teams that got to the final of some cup? And they had to, it was Arsenal in someone, right? They had to fly. I think it was Chelsea against someone. Chelsea Spurs or Chelsea Arsenal or something. But yeah, then the final was in Baku, I think, Azerbaijan and they had to they both had to go all the way over there for it.

That was in the UEFA Cup or something. Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize that this place is basically in the islands of Japan, isn't it? I actually didn't realize that Russia claimed a portion of what I would have if I looked at a blank map, assumed was Japan. And I think, no,

sorry, Putin really hope you don't listen to this show. And I think isn't the south half of the island is Japanese? He turned off when we started making jokes about short people, I think. Yeah, exactly. That's it. It's basically a part of, well, it's right on the border of Russia and Japan. Geologically, I guess it looks Japanese, but it's a very disputed territory. And there are still some islands, the Kural Islands, which are disputed. But this is Russian sort of, is Russian and is Russian administered. Yeah. I don't know why anyone plays football in Russia. It sounds like an enormous hassle for so many teams. It's just, it's too big. Even if you're playing for Vladivostok, which at least is attached to a lot of.

it by land. It's still, I think, 10,000 kilometres east of St. Petersburg. So a week's train journey. And I think there was quite a nice story in 2006 where three fans of Zenit St. Petersburg, which is a football team there, they drove to Vladivostok because Peterborough were playing an away game there. So they drove the whole week and a half there. Once they got there, their car broke down. But to reward their loyalty, their team gave them a new car. Wow. Oh, that's cool. Of course, the reason that people play football in Russia

is because the Soviets like to force people to play football back in the day. Actually, it was quite thought of as a bourgeois sport originally because it was brought over by Scottish people in particular. And the first person who brought it over there was a guy called MacPherson, who was arrested after the revolution because they saw football as being a bourgeois European thing. and they shouldn't be doing it in Russia.

But the first ever football match in Russia was in 1893, and they squeezed it in between two tug-of-war competitions. So there was a big tug-of-war thing happening. And they were like, well, what should we do in the middle because we're just sorting out our rope or something? And they're like, oh, let's have a game of football. That's so funny. They cleared all the severed arms off the pitch

before they got the footballers on. Oh, dear. But yeah, handball. and it's just the ball rolling over someone's hand. And then the most famous team in Russia is Spartak, Moscow, and they came along. When the Soviets were controlling everything, they were the team of the people.

And there was a load of brothers called the Starastin brothers who started Spartak. And then very mysteriously, they got sent to the Gulag about three or four years later because they started a people's football team. But they were so popular that when they got to Siberia, the guard in Siberia knew about, them and so let them kind of practice the football. And eventually Stalin's son Vasily was so into

football that they brought Nikolai Sturisd back from the Gulag so that he could live with Vassal and Stalin and he would just live in his house because he was such a big fan of this footballer. That's so awkward. Imagine if Lionel Messi just moved in with you or something. Even if you thought he was a great footballer, I still think that would be awkward around the dinner table. I think it would. Pass me the salt and he does no other head kick to you or something. Stalin was, just speaking of Stalin, was exiled to Siberia six times between 1913 and escaped five times. Well, speaking of people who escape a lot and the passing of someone quite famous, Diego Maradona, who passed away recently, very sadly, he used to, didn't he go and used to play football at the request of Pablo Escobar while he was in prison?

Just him and Pablo? Just, yeah. Well, no, I'm sure there were teams that were. were put together. But he had, at this particular point, I think it was in 1991, Escobar was in quite a luxurious prison. He kind of ran the prisons, didn't he, to begin with? Of course, Escobar and Maradona had quite a lot in common.

They had some shared hobbies, didn't they? Yes, they did. Did they? Maradona was once sent home for the World Cup for taking cocaine. I just, I just cottoned on, as you guys said. You thought maybe he also collected or whatever it was, the Escobar had in itself. Shall we talk about Siberia for a while?

Yeah, sure. So I was saying before about people being sent to Siberia. In 1591, this is the earliest example of anyone being sent to Siberia, and it's not anyone. This was a bell in Russia, which was found guilty of sedition and flogged and exiled to Siberia. And that was because the bell had been rung to celebrate the assassination of Dmitri's son of Ivan the Terrible. and so the son had died and the locals were happy about it

and so they rang a bell and then they put the bell in court and sent it off to Siberia. Was it because they couldn't identify any of the bell ringers so they... Was it a way of letting the bell ringers off the hook? It could have been that. That is the epitome of a workman blaming their tools.

It's not where that came from. It's not really the bell's fault, is it? It doesn't feel like it. It doesn't even know it's about... It also feels like flogging a bell is going to cause it to ring again and then you'll have to block it from. This is never-ending cycle.

Have you heard of Magadam, which is a very remote city, kind of two days north of the nearest train tracks and things like just a very, very remote city in Siberia? They have a mayoral position, and they're having a nightmare filling out at the moment. There have been zero applications for the job of actual mayor of the city. And there are 92,000 people in Magadam. It's not a small place. And they've extended the deadline to mid-December. So depending on where this goes out, you might still be in. time. What happened to the previous

if the seven last mayors all died in suspicious circumstances or something? A lot of people say that you kind of won't be able to change things properly and there's a fair bit of you know, graft and corruption and it's probably a pretty thankless job. But when the story broke

for the first time, there have been no applications. The boss of a funeral firm from Tomsk 4,000 miles away said he would apply and he said, of course, I don't know much about the city and it would be better if I They'd lived there a while, but I've never had the chance. So he said he's going to apply it.

His main policy is to build a crematorium. Okay, well, that sounds like he's just going to be greasing the palms of his crematorium friends, doesn't it? It does, yeah. We've never actually talked about the amazing Lukov family, but if you're talking about the Siberian wilderness, they're kind of the epitome of it. So this is a family who basically fled the Bolsheviks, and it's in the 1920s, 1930s, family.

I think at the time, went into Siberia and just lived without ever seeing another human soul until the 1980s. And it is insane. Their lifestyle, they didn't bring much stuff. So they had to, when their clothes started to fall apart, they had to grow hemp from seed in order to make new clothes out of that. They wrote by dipping sharpened birch sticks into honey supple juice and writing. But they raised his family and there's one surviving member, Agafia, Lukov, And she is now in her 80s, but she lives completely by herself in the middle of the tiger, middle of nowhere, 150 miles from the nearest town, a thousand meters high on this mountainside. And she wasn't discovered until the 80s when these geologists were flying over in a helicopter

and saw their tiny little hut that they were living in. And it just sounds, and they were kind of famous in Russia, weren't they in the 80s for a while? When they were found in the 80s, they said to them, oh, you guys probably don't know that the Second World War has finished and they went, what's the Second World War? They went before then. That was in the 30s, I think, or the 20s when they went, like Anna says. But yeah, when they were found, they were kind of taken around the country as almost like kind of a side show almost, I suppose, which is like, look at these amazing people that

have been living in Siberia. And Agafia, Lukva kind of was, they said in one article I read that she saw airplanes, horses, cars and money for the first time. But then basically said, I ain't having any of the shit. I want to go back to where I live. Because she says that whenever she leaves the town, she always gets really bad asthma or it's bad for her skits. She just doesn't like it.

She doesn't like the noise and all that kind of stuff. So she's just kind of happy where she is now. And every now and then they bring her like food, I think like once a year, they bring her things. And people knit them socks and stuff, didn't they? And knit them things. Yeah. Just earlier when I said about the football team going back on the route passing a wizard,

I mean, this is it. Almost. This is her. It was really sad, actually. When they were discovered, I think there were five of them. And then in the 80s, they all suddenly died and left her on her own. But the thing that most amazed the dad, he was told everything. They were told about the moon landings.

They were shown at television, which they became kind of addicted to, and then thought it was the devil. So repented of it immediately. they were told about the moon landings and refused to believe they happened, which is fair enough. The thing that most amazed the dad was Sellephane. He saw this thing where she was like, it's like glass,

but it crumples. They couldn't believe it. Yeah, and they didn't know what plastic bags were as well. I remember reading. That was a new thing for them. I believe Mick Jagger was flown in just to top his numbers up. And they were like, yeah, of course we know who this guy is. But then the big problem now is

they do go in there every now and then and drop her some supplies, and especially, like I said, people knit them socks and knit them clothes and stuff. But of course, like with coronavirus, you just do not want to be going into an area with a very elderly lady who's not really had any human contact for decades and decades and decades. And so that's a real issue with them at the moment. You know what they should do? They should set her up on a date with, do you remember that Brazilian guy, the man of the whole, the most isolated man in the world? They should get those two. That would be a very charming rom-com.

We own copyright, Mr. Spielberg, just to say, because we mentioned it on here, so we'll take 10%. That's how that works. Just one last bit of data before we go. Okay. In the breaks between facts, I texted Anne and Alex to see if either of them had seen Mick Jagger live. Yeah, go on. Anne said, no, I have not. Okay.

And Alex said, no, I don't really know who he is. So James, if you want someone to talk to about this random guy, me and Alex are like the man of the hole and the lady in Siberia. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or go to our website.

No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We got all of our previous episodes up there. We have links to bits of merchandise. And we also have a few live shows coming up. So do check in there occasionally to see where to get tickets from. Okay, that's it. We will be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then.

A good bye.