No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing as Proust's Sausage Roll

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Live from the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Popeye, Proust, Hankies and Spankies. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.   Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, happy new year. We have a little favour to ask you before we start with the 2013 episodes of No Such Thingers of Fish. 2013 episodes. Is that not? Oh, what year is it? James, oh my God, this is so sad. You've just woken up from a coma and you haven't realised that 10 years have passed. No, no. You mean this is an episode two of No such thing as a fish? I'm so sorry, but you're going to be delighted with how far we've come in the interim. Wow. Well, what have we done while I've been in a coma? Have we told the world? Have we made some books? Have we won any national comedy awards? Well, do you know, it's funny you should mention that. That's the one thing we haven't quite done yet. And we're delighted to have you back. We've had to simulate your presence for the last decade. Delighted to have you back to help us win them. Because that is what we're supposed to be talking about right now. It is the National Comedy Awards. And we are on the long list. No such thing as a fish for Best Comedy Podcasts.

We would absolutely love to get to the short list. If by any chance you like this show and you're here, so maybe you do, if you could go to QI.com slash vote and vote for us. We'd be hugely grateful. That's right. We would love to get on that short list. So please, please do vote. It'll take no time at all.

You can click through all the other bits. Like, we're quite near the end. So if you don't know who was the best supporting actor in a foreign sitcom this year, then it doesn't matter. You can just click past it, get to the podcast bit, click on No Such Things of Fish, put your email in, bish-bash-bosh, Job, Done. And we might get nominated for an award. I'm going back to sleep.

Enjoy the show. On with the podcast. On with the podcast. And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you live from the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. Anna Tashinsky, 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 my fact. My fact this week is that

originally Popeye, the Sailor Man, got his powers not from eating spinach, but by rubbing a lucky magic hen. I love the fact that you need to specify Popeye the Sailor Man. Oh, Popeye. Oh, him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is Popeye. We obviously know the great guy. I think that was the chicken. That was a chicken, though. Was that the chicken? So Popeye the Sailor Man, and he was a cartoon back in the early 1900s. And when he originally...

And also beyond, if you're remembering Popeye, and they're going, shit, am I that old? He lasted even beyond the early 1900s. I don't know if he's still on TV. He might be, but we all still know him. He's such an iconic character. and obviously he derived all of his powers from spinach. But when the comic strip that he first appeared in was happening,

he wasn't a main character. He was this sort of peripheral character who was introduced to the series. And there's an episode where he finds himself hired by Olive Oil, who becomes his girlfriend and eventual wife, by her brother who's called Castor Oil, who sails a ship to Dice Island, where he intends to make a lot of money in a casino

by rubbing the head of a lucky hen. And when he gets there, Popeye, gets shot by someone. So the first time we ever see him getting supernatural strength is when after he's shot, this little wiffle hen comes by, and he goes, well, I don't know how he talks, actually. I can't remember. Something like that.

Yeah. Oh, go, go, go, go. And he rubs the hen's head, and then he gets the supernatural power, and he takes out the shooter with some punches. And that's the very first moment. It was a comic strip, right? Yeah, it was in the comic strip. We wouldn't have known how he spoke, I guess.

It's just whatever's in your head is how he spelled. That's a very nice thought. Isn't there an American restaurant called Pope? Yeah, isn't it a chicken restaurant? Oh yeah. I go in there rubbing their chickens. You've been told. Spinwich didn't come in until quite a lot later, did it?

It was a few years later, yeah. I think it was 1932. And Popeye, like you say, I think this comic book series started in the mid-teens, 15 or 16, but I think Popeye became the main character in the early 20s. So until then, I think he was just relying on normal strength. Well, he's very strong.

I mean, he is very strong normally, but when he has a spinach, he gets access to. That's the whole point of those forearms, you know. Yes. Well, wait a minute, because your biceps are what make you strong. This has always been the bewildering thing about Popeye.

So he's got massive forearms, and the muscles in your forearms are the ones that control your fingers. So he's just a brilliant pianist. Well, don't do a thumb war with Popeye, is what you're saying. I did not know that Popeye is Jewish. Is he?

Popeye Jewish. So, LZ Seagal was the original cartoonist who drew Popeye. He was Jewish, and there was a lot of... There were a lot of sort of very, very subtle Jewish references and sort of jokes in the strip. Yeah, and to such an extent that, in Fascist Italy, because the cartoon was popular across the world, it was so, so popular.

When it appeared in Fascist Italy, the creator's name, Seagar, was taken off it because they were Amisemitic, and so, you know, but they still had to have the Popeye. Are you saying Popeye the Sailor was Jewish or that Seigar was Jewish? Well, Seagar was Jewish, and there are lots of references. It's a very sort of Jewish, inflected and influenced cartoon.

There's no actual scene of Popeye, you know, having Yom Kippur or whatever. That's amazing. Because weirdly, later on in the Popeye run, there was a thing where the original animators were no longer animating it, and it was outsourced to Prague in order for them to make the cartoon. So there was a whole series where Tom and Jerry was made in Prague and so on, and none of the animators out there had seen it. And this was because there was no money to do it.

So there was a run of 13 episodes, which are often called the worst 13 episodes. Of Popeye. Of Tom and Jerry, because no one had really seen it. But Popeye was done there as well. But the thing was all of the people, this is a credits thing, who animated in Prague,

had to have their names change to American names because they didn't want audiences thinking a communist country at the time was infiltrating communist ideas into their Popeye and Tommy and Jerry cartoon. Also, isn't it landlocked, Czech Republic? So, like, how would you have a sailor man there? Oh, I guess inland waterways.

Oh, the Danube. Yeah. Canal-based. Pot-Las a Danube man. Well, Mongolia has a navy, doesn't it, as well, despite being landlord. It does. Yeah. And Bolivia as well.

And Bolivia, yes. I mean, Captain von Trapp is in the sound of music. He's a, is he an admiral or something? Or a captain in the Navy of the landlocked Austria. It makes more sense if you're going to have a sailor man to have him on a coastal country. Completely, completely. It's weird. You know how we normally try and blow shit wide open?

We seem to have closed shit wide shut there. Yeah. I like it. That's what we should do. Close shit, white shark. Just on chicken rubbing, specifically, there is an orthodox Jewish ritual called caparot

where you wave a rooster over someone's head and you say a particular prayer and then you slaughter the rooster and you get the slaughtered rooster to charity and it's an atonement ritual for whoever's having the chicken waver. Do you rub it on their heads or you're... I don't think you rub it specifically.

You just sort of waft it around above them. But maybe, maybe the wifflehen is a very subtle reference. to the traditional Jewish caparot ritual. Yeah, it could be. It's almost certainly not. There's also, there was an old English bit of folklore where if you wanted to stop your baby

from getting chicken pox, you would rub it with a chicken. So it could have been that. Right. Yeah? I'm so glad we're on chicken rubbing stuff because I actually did quite a lot of chicken rubbing work. I can feel a personal anecdote coming up. So chickens will sometimes flirt with each other

by rubbing themselves. on the ground. Okay. So, like, yeah, yeah. So there's this thing called preening oil, which comes out of a kind of gland above the beak, and it contains lots of information about the bird's genes and about it, you know, how suitable it is as a mate and things like that.

And so sometimes a cockerol will wipe itself on the ground, for example, to just show, to leave its scent for a prospective mate. Like a genome sequencing act. It leaves its genome sequence on the ground for the male to look at and say, oh, you're not prone to sickle cell anemia, thank God. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. The Etruscans used to rub chickens. So glad we're doing all the chicken-rowning stuff.

This is great. Go on, go on. So the Etruscans, and then the Romans after them. But they used chickens for divination. They thought they were kind of quite holy. And for good luck, you would get a chicken. It was always a dead chicken that you would rub, but you would rub it for good luck.

And that's probably where we get the idea of the wishbone from these guys as well. You know, like, if you cook a chicken, you get the bone out. People used to rub those little bones for luck. as well. Wow. And that's why we do that.

Now we just snap them. Now we just snap them. Rub it too hard. You don't want that to happen in most rubbing situations. So they get snapped. The hen in Popeye, sorry to stop us from talking about. I've just got one more chicken rubbing page. No, no, please get it out.

I'd hate for the listener to miss out on your golden research. I was reading Appalachian chicken rubbing rituals, and I just thought that would be a nice thing. There are lots of Kentucky wart superstitions. You know, when you have a wart? Yeah. I don't know what Kentucky wart is, though. It's deep fried, isn't it?

There are so many traditions or superstitions about what you do with your wart to make it disappear in Kentucky specifically. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, it's mostly rub something on it. So, you know, it might be a chicken gizzard or a chicken intestine,

but also bacon rind or beefsteak or one bean, or three beans. Just don't accidentally rub two beans. beans on it or whatever you do. Oh no, no. Then you come out and walk 10 to 2. Double warts, yeah, yeah. Kill a cat, bad start.

Take it to a graveyard at midnight and then rub the cat on the wart. Also, it gets rid of the warts. It feels like you go with the one bean out of all that. It's a very, it's a sort of step change process. You know, you try one bean and three beans. Then you kill a cat and take it to a graveyard. Anyway. You were going to say on Popeye's chicken.

Sorry, Popeye, yeah. I wanted to drag it back to Popeye apparently. No, no, no, that's fine. Let's do more rubbing chickens. What else do you got? Oh, thank you, Dad. Well, okay. Back, back, back.

Sorry, my mistake. No, so in the cartoon, we've got this mystical chicken, but it's not the only... In the comic strip, you mean? In the comic strip, and it's not the only animal in the comic strip that had these sort of paranormal mystical powers. There was also a dog called Eugene the Jeep.

And this was in a 1936, Thimble Theatre comic strip, and that's what Popeye was part of. I don't think he was a dog per se. He looked like a dog. We don't fully know what he was. And it led to one of the most existential, brilliant comic strips that I think the creator ever wrote. The headline of it was, What's a Jeep?

Eugene the Jeep, What's a Jeep? And this is what the comic strip for kids said. A Jeep is an animal living in a three-dimensional world, in this case, our world, but really belongs to a fourth-dimensional world. Here's what happened. A number of Jeep life cells were somehow forced through a dimensional barrier into our world. They combined at a favorable time with the life cells of the African hooey hound, the electrical vibrations of that hooey hound cell and the form.

were the same. They were a kind of kind of kindred cell. In fact, all things are to some extent relative. Whether they be this or some other world, now you see. For what, for six-year-olds, that is? He was based on a Polish person, wasn't he? Popeye was. Pop-pie was. Which I imagine they had to have had to cover up when they wanted there to be none of these communist influences. But this guy sounds like a bit of a legend. Frank Rocky Fiegel, who was from Seagard's home to

So he lived in Chester, Illinois, which is where Seagar came from. But his parents were Polish immigrants. And there's one remaining photo of him. And he does look like Popeye, but it's very hard to tell because he's basically got a pipe and he's bald. I think he definitely looks like Popeye. He looks like Popeye and he was constantly getting into fights. Which basically is what Popeye does, right?

He smokes, he gets into fights. Well, he was a boxer, wasn't he? I think. It was a boxer. And a nice guy, though, constantly starting fights, but a nice guy and always protected the children. We're talking about the sailor now, right? We're talking about the sailor. And apparently, according to his biographies...

Sorry, the Popeye is a sailor as well. Oh, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He did actually say at the very start, Popeye, the sailor. Quite specifically, you see why I added it now, Andy. And actually, this guy wasn't a sailor. The Polish... What?

No, he wasn't a sailor. He was just a down-and-out guy. So just a guy who liked getting into fights is the inspiration. Yeah. He didn't spend so much time checking out rubbing chicken facts. But he used to get sent money, apparently. His assistant, Seagal's assistant,

said they used to send him a little bit of money to say thanks for inspiring the character of Popeye. Wow. Seagar said this to the Randolph County Herald newspaper that it was based on this guy. And there was another person in the town called John William Shushit who was supposedly what Wimpy was based on. Oh, yeah.

So you know Wimpy, the character who's, I gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, all that. He's always in debt and he's always eating hamburgers. And according to this historian, John William Shushut also liked hamburgers. Interesting. Open and shut case. We've shut this shit wide clothes.

His name means joke, sweetly, Fegel, or Figuille. His name is prank or joke. Oh yeah. Which is kind of what Popeye is. It's pretty funny. A comic strip. He's got comedy.

No, but there is a serious point behind Popeye. Is there? So there was a psychoanalytic piece done about him in an American paper in 1932. This is a paper called The Post Dispatch from a really, really famous paper at the time. You may not realize it, but Popeye is a suppressed desire.

He personifies the desire most of us have both to be strong and to sock some of the unpleasant people we encounter. A desire suppressed because we lack Popeye's muscles. Although Popeye himself says he would never hit anyone as hard as he could

because it's wrong to kill people. There's actually quite sweet... Wait, the cartoon character now. Yeah, yeah, the cartoon character. Okay, okay. The cartoon character wrote a letter to a paper in the 1930s saying, and I suppose Seagull probably helped him write it, saying he'd never hit anyone as hard as he could

because it's wrong to kill people, and he said he's been shot 120 times, but when bullets go through him, it doesn't bother him at all, except that he always has to block up the hole with a corks because he doesn't like drafts blowing through him. Beautiful. Yeah, people complained about the fighting because it was teaching kids to fight.

And so after that, he carried on fighting, but only for the honour of old ladies and children, later strips. Did children have honour? Yeah. I guess so. Original honour. All right, yeah. Old babies have.

But he was really positive for spinach eating at the time. There were reports, and I don't know how accurate they were, but during the Great Depression, they said that the uptake in children who were interested in eating food like spinach, well specifically spinach was 33%. And that bumped it up to sort of like the third most requested food

or favourite food of a child during that time. Yeah, the insane claim is that there was a survey done which asked children what they like to eat. Their first thing was turkey and their second thing was ice cream and then they claimed spinach. Which all seems very implausible. And then Popeye later on in the cartoons

he stopped eating the spinach directly out of the can. So you know he would like squeeze the can but apparently they were worried that children might copy this might get a can of spinach and eat directly from it and cut their mouths so he stopped doing it. Yeah, that's the kind of thing I would have done actually. I need to move us on to our next thing.

Can we mention very quickly the madness of the film, Popeye? Oh yeah, the Robin Williams movie. One thing about it, so there's the Robin Williams film in 1980 and it's not very good apparently. I haven't seen it. It's absolutely brilliant. I've seen it five times. It's really good. It's a classic. Rob Williams's first film. It's amazing.

Yeah, agreed. It's great. It's mad. All right, it's too against one. It's insane. But I have better taste. No, I haven't seen it, so it might be great. But anyway, the crazy thing about it is what it was like to film it. So the producer was a guy called Robert Evans.

Everyone who worked tonight admits that they were basically rolling in cocaine the entire time. And at one point, and they were all bringing cocaine on set. They'd open up camera packs and just cocaine would fall out of cameras. I haven't seen this film either, but is that why he does instead of spinach? Yes, it is, yeah. And Robert Evans had some luggage that was full of cocaine that he was bringing with him to the set. And it went missing at the airport as bags sometimes do.

And he thought, oh shit, A, we're not going to get our Coke. And B, if someone finds that luggage, I'm in trouble. And so what he did was he basically convinced the Maltese Prime Minister at the time, a guy called Dominic Mintov, to do an exhaustive search of basically the country to try and find his bags. And so Mintov said, why on earth would I do that? and he said, ah, well, I'm very good friends with Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger's written you a personal note, which is inside that luggage.

And I'd really love to give it to you. So it's really important that we track it down so you can read his lovely letter. So he did. His ego was flattered enough. He tracked it down for him. And then immediately, as soon as he'd done it, Robert Evans had to fly back to the US, meet up with Henry Kissinger and say, look, Henry, I'm so sorry.

But you have to write a fake letter to the leader of Malta saying what a great guy he is. Long story short, cocaine luggage situation. Do you mind? And Kissinger was very reluctant because Mintov was an ally of Gaddafi. It would have been very weird for him to write an affectionate letter. But he capitulated to save the shit-slash-good film.

He wrote a fake letter. Did he really? Well, sounds like he just wrote a letter. He wrote a letter. If you're Henry Kissinger and you are writing a letter, that's a letter. I guess it's fair. He backdated it. Oh, okay, that is fake.

It's a fakeery. I've just got a few more facts about chicken rubbing. We don't have time, Andy. It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Marcel Proust once woke up the members of a famous string quartet at midnight and made them all come back to his house to play a specific piece for him.

Because he... So cool. It's such a cool thing to be able to do. And this is before he was even really famous. How did he do that? How did he do it? He just, I guess people were more willing to do shit back in the day. It was...

It's sort of pre-telephones, right, this period? Yeah, you've got to know. At a point where not everyone's got a telephone. Well, no one's calling them. Yeah, he's going around to their house. Yeah, so four individual houses in the middle of the night to break them up. It's 11pm. He loved chamber music.

It's crazy than the Kissinger letter, I think. I don't know how you would organise that. Basically, he... 11 p.m., he thought, I'd love to listen to... César Fron, string quartet and D major, and nothing will stop me. And so he knocked on the door of the leading French violinist in Paris at the time,

Gaston Poulet, who was in his pyjamas and answer the door. And Proust said, I've got a taxi waiting downstairs. We're going to pick up your three mates and you're going to play me this piece. And so, yeah, you went around all their houses. One of them, the violist, was skeptical, apparently, because Proust was, he was wrapped in a big blanket and he was eating mashed potato

the whole time in his cat. But they all got in. Bruce had a very weird life. Should we just say Bruce is? Let's say who he is, yeah. So author of one of the greatest, certainly one of the longest novels ever written, Allerich de Tompherdue in search of lost time.

And, you know, that's about... That's his main thing, because he spent a long time writing it and then he died. And he was a huge eccentric in that he... His eccentricities were sort of half-born out of the illnesses that he had in his life, but he famously wrote all these books in bed. He rarely went to sleep.

He was allergic to dust. He was allergic to so many things. He had cork walls on his room at home because he tried to keep out any allergies from getting to him. He had really bad asthma, didn't he? Which he took cigarettes for. Classic.

I already had up to 10 asthma attacks a day, each one lasting up to an hour. Yeah. It's unbelievable that he wrote one of the longest books ever written, considering how much time you just spent having asthma, basically. But that was the thing by then, you would get these cigarettes, and they would have, like, opium in them and stuff.

So, you know, they weren't that bad, but they were going into your lungs. But, yeah. And you said about telephones, Dan. So they did have telephones then. They weren't obviously super popular. But it was the time, do you remember we talked about this music that used to play through the telephone? Yeah, that's right.

In America, yeah. It's like the very Spotify in a way. Exactly. They had this in France, and Proust had it, because he was in bed the whole time. Wow. And so he had this kind of wires. set up to an earpiece, and he would listen to music.

So hang on, when he woke up the members of the String Quartet, he literally had functioning opera coming into his room. It wasn't that functioning, to be honest. Like, there was one time when there was a really loud crowd, and he thought that that was the song, because you couldn't really tell what was happening. So everyone was cheering. He was, oh, that was beautiful.

And they were like, no, no, that wasn't the song. But this was called the Theatrophone, and it was very popular in France at the time. Also very popular in Budapest. and there was Harper's Weekly said that this system in Budapest had made it the city that was full of illiterate, blind, bedridden

and incurably lazy people because they were all at home just listening to this music. That feels like quite a personal, that's a bit of a sub-tweet on Proust himself, isn't it? I mean, that's what he was... Well, it was a little bit, yeah.

I think they were more slugging off the entire city of Budapest, but yeah. So Proust's sort of habits when he was writing, So he went to bed in 1909 and he basically stayed there until 22. I think 22. I think he died and he wrote for 13 years

and one of his... And also he couldn't get a publisher. He wrote the first volume, really struggled to get it published. No publishers were interested. He had to self-publish it at his own expense. I think he'd inherited quite a lot of money so he was quite well-heeled. And there was one person who believed in him

and championed the work and wrote a lot of brilliant reviews saying you have to read this author. he is changing the face of literature and that person was Marcel Proust under an assumed name he paid for his own early reviews in lots of newspapers and he wrote them in long hand

and then he secretly had them typed up by his publisher so there was no paper trail and he described his own work as a little masterpiece he said what Monsieur Proust sees and feels is completely original I always think of it as the French trying to get one up on the British and Irish because I feel like we have James Joyce

and there's this impenetrable, you know, a thousand-plus page toome that we all attempt to get through at some point and then mostly fail. And then they have Proust, where they just did that, and then he wrote six more volumes, exactly the same on top of it. Well, I think Proust came first,

or certainly his first book was published before Joyce. Because, like Candy says, it was self-published, but he went to a publisher to try and get it published, this guy called Gail. on Gallimard. And Gallimard passed it on to a reader, and the reader just, it was really long, so he just opened it up on a random page, page 62,

and what he found was a boring and overwritten description of a cup of herbal tea. So he declined it, and then Proust had to do the self-publishing thing. But then, ten years later, Gallimard got another novel. It was a very long Irish novel, and it was James Joyce's Ulysses. Because I already regretted it for years, like the guy who turned down the Beatles.

He apologized, yeah. Yeah, he did a party afterwards, yeah. They did meet once. Proust and James Joyce. Yeah, in 2022, which was the year that he died. But it was one of the few times he actually went out, I think, and he went to a dinner party, and James Joyce was there. And then all I know is, I think James Joyce got quite pissed

and tried to invite himself back to Proust's house, and Proust had to sneak away. But do you have more detail? Well, all I read about the encounter is that they hadn't actually read each other's books. Oh, yes. One of the counter of two of the greatest minds ever. They have nothing to say. That's so funny.

There was a guy, before he wrote his mega series of books, he translated a couple of books. And Ruskin, he was a huge fan of Ruskin, right? And when Ruskin passed away, Proust decided that he wanted to make French translations of two of the books, except he didn't speak any English. So he had to ask his mum to translate it from him. And then he did a proper better translation of his mum's translation of the book. Oh, my God.

He bloody loved his mum. My God, if anyone's a mummy's boy. Yeah, because he lived with his parents until they both died. which is fine. And he used to write letters to his mum from bed when he couldn't sleep saying, you know, mother, I'm so sorry, I won't be able to get up and spend breakfast with you

and nothing would make me happier. Two thousand pages later, she wasn't. But his dad was quite strange and subjected him to this quite strange experience when he was about 16, which was that he was very worried about his son, Marcel's masturbation. Too much, not enough.

I just didn't think he was doing enough. doing it weird. I thought you'd have this fact. Love the rubbing cock facts. There were no chickens were involved, but he was a doctor, Dr. Adrian Proust, and it was a time when people thought masturbation was bad, and Dr. Proust thought that it could lead to homosexuality

because Proust was gay, in fact. And so I think that his parents might have thought, oh God, we think he might be gay. and so they said to cure him when he was 16, his dad gave him 10 francs, sent him to a brothel, and said, here you go, have sex with a prostitute, at female, please, and that will stop this awful masturbation habit. Ten francs?

Yeah, it was... How much that, is it? Well, back in the day, you're not going to splash out on the first experience because he's got nothing to get into poverty. Well, speaking of which he didn't, it was a failure. This was why we know about it, because Marcel Proust wrote a letter to his... grandfather the next day saying,

I'm really sorry, I need to borrow 13 francs off you. Papa gave me 10 francs so I can get rid of this dreadful masturbation habit. But what I did was I turned up, I broke the prostitutes three franc chamber pot, embarrassing. And then I was so embarrassed that I couldn't perform. And so now I need to go back and try again, but I also need to pay her for her chamber pot. So...

Amazing. Poor guy. We have this impression of him as a very sort of... ill and you know, constantly retiring to his bed. He did once fight a duel in his life. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it was over something that mattered to him a lot. He fought a duel when someone accused him of being gay,

of having had a gay affair. And his accuser was a literary critic who was called Jean-Laureen, who was also gay. So, to be clear, this is two gay guys having a duel because one of them said to the other, you are gay. Yeah. And to be fair. And they both survived, didn't they?

They both survived. They both shot and... They both missed. Marcel shot first. They went in the sort of region of his feet but didn't get him and the other guy missed outright. But you kind of, I guess, have to think about the times. Of course.

Yeah, yeah. He was outing him for something that might have got him killed anyway for being a homosexual. Maybe his dad, having ridden what he wrote was a... Yeah, it was a tough... He had a tough life, didn't he, Marcel? Or Marcel. Yeah.

Yeah. He wants some diagnose himself with a brain disorder and said that the only way to cure it was by drilling loads of holes into his... skull. Did he do that? He begged a doctor to do it, and the doctor, quite responsible for doctors at the time,

said, I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Well, in fairness, if that's around 1910, that was standard. Yeah, they were trampaning around that time. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Someone won a Nobel Prize for it.

That's right, they did, yeah. The main character in Alarachin of Tom Perdue is going to be the Madeleine. So the whole point of it is, not the whole point, But at the very start, he's kind of got this Madeleine cake, and he has a bite of it, and suddenly he remembers all the history and things that happened

because this evoked such a memory from him. So I thought I'd look into Madelens. Apparently invented by a young girl called Madeleine, who stood in for the chef to the Duke of Lorenne. We're not quite sure why, but the chef wasn't there, and they were like, you, in. And she only knew one recipe, and that was her grandmother's recipe for cakes.

and so that's all she made. And so she just made loads and loads of these and they were named after her, apparently. And in 2006, there was a thing called Café Europa. It was an EU thing where every country in Europe had to give their best cake or the best sweet thing and then they would sort of celebrate them all

and France gave them Madeleine. Really? Because they're quite crap. Oh, really? Yeah, they're just... Do you guys know what they are? They're like a little sponge cake. I've not had one. You will have had one.

They're just... You idiot, Dan. Of course you've had one. Ironically, they're very easy to forget. Yes. They're like a tiny little sponge cake. They're shaped like a scallop. Yeah, yeah.

A shell, you know, a seashell. Yeah, yeah. But in the original book, it was a bit of toast originally. I thought, this needs a rewrite. Yeah. I just wondered if you wanted to guess some other countries and what they did for their sweetmeats. Oh, my God, yeah.

Because France has so much, France. It's the land of cakes. Exactly. The Eclare. I would have submitted the Eclare. Well, you didn't. Did they win? Did they win with the medal? It wasn't a competition.

It was just like... What's the point of it then? What is it? What's the point of anything if it isn't a competition? I agree. This isn't a competition, Andy. No one wins this out with the four of us at the end. Don't be ridiculous. We've been scoring for the last 450 episodes.

I've definitely confident. I actually can't imagine Andy going home and having a little white barred where he puts out to stars. Another great win, Andy. Well done. The sole metric is a number of chicken rubbing references made throughout the show. Okay, so what other countries submit? I mean, yeah, just that.

They're all relatively easy to guess. Belgium. It has to be a sweet thing. Crosseant? Crosseons in Belgium. Sweet, sweet chips. Sweet sweet chips. Honey frit.

Waffles. Waffles. Portugal, pastel dinnata, for instance. Don't give it all away. Don't give it all away. Well, I just thought we'd go straight maybe to the UK. Can you guess what the UK game? Bloody hell.

Oh, that sort of pink Tottenham cake that you get in Greggs. It's very nice. It's so nice. I don't know what that is. I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Greggs. Okay, okay. Victoria Sponge Cake.

No, no. Think North. Bake on top. Oh, those buns. Thurvanof. Scottish. Scotland. Sausatrol. A Scotch egg.

They misunderstood the category, and they gave a Scotch egg. A deep-fried Mars bar. A haggis. A haggis. A haggis. A sweet haggis. A sweet... What? And sausage roll was fine? You said sausage roll. That was me? It was shortbread.

Oh. And Denmark went for the Danish pastry even though they were invented in Austria. Ooh. Sneaky. And who won? I think the Madeline bit is really only famous because it's sewn in the beginning. It's the only bit anyone's got to. I have to say I have read and intend to, when I have a period of time off next year, read properly. But I research to Tom Perdue, because I think people are really hard on it.

Even at the time they said it was impenetrable. And I think it's really fun to read from the 40 pages I read. But the Madeline does come up within those 40 pages, and it's not that relevant after that. But it did, it shows how much he agonized over everything that, as you said, Andy, it was a piece of toast for a bit. It was also a piece of stale bread, which is quite, I don't know why you would eat that. It was a sausage roll at one stage earlier. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that in the 1920s, a smart young man would have two handkerchiefs,

a blower and a shower. Yeah. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. What's there a difference between them? Yes, there is a difference. So I got this from, I was reading, old novel called Green Banks

by Dorothy Whipple, which is great, she's great, and there's a scene in it where there's a young man waiting for his girlfriend, and he talks about having his blower in his shower. And I just sort of piqued my interest. And it's very funny. Googleed it. I googled it, and it's hard to Google.

So the shower is the one you have in your top pocket, the sort of pocket square that looks incredibly neat and jazzy, and then the blower is the one you keep up your sleeve with all the snoss on it, and that's the Could the shower become a blower if you needed to?

Absolutely. But you couldn't make a blower a shower, could you? No, no. You can blow a shower but you can't show a blower. As the old saying goes. I disagree. It depends on where you're blowing on the blower. If you blow on the blower and like a top corner

and then you fold it down, half of it, it's like an iceberg shower. There's a lot of it below the surface area. Well, okay. Yeah, just don't blow on the show bit of your blower. But it could start to come through the pocket, you know, like... What? If you've got enough...

How's snotty are you? Then you don't want to snot seeping out of the bottom of your pocket with the show a proudly seeping out the top. No, that's true, yeah. I say keep them separate. I say keep them separate. Dan's the one who's proposed this maverick system where you can... But it's rare this usage of these phrases,

but it did exist at the time. It crops up in the New York Times in 1927, and it's a report about the handkerchief being something from ancient China. originally, but that those handkerchiefs were only showers not blowers. And it didn't used to be for that, did it? We only actually started blowing anything into handkerchiefs in about 400 years ago. And it seems like a long time ago.

But we had handkerchiefs long before that. Or kerchiefs, which are just, it's just a word for something that wraps around your head, in fact. A headkerchief? Well, this is what's so weird. A kerchief is literally a head covering, chief head, and then Kerr was covering. And so now we have a handhead cover. is the word. Is a head covering you hold in your hand, basically.

Yeah. I always thought that kerchief, when people say it, as they often do, was an abbreviation of handkerchief. Didn't know it had gone the other way. Anyone else? We know the first person possibly who blew their nose on a handkerchief. Kidding, really? What?

We know the first person who wrote about it. Okay. And this was a guy called Desiderius Erasmus, who we have mentioned once or twice before. The philosopher? The philosopher and religiously. scholar, but he also, and we have said this before, he wrote a best-selling book on etiquette. And at one stage it was a best-selling book in the whole of Europe for dozens and dozens,

if not 100 years after the Bible, basically the Bible, and then this. And in this book, it said stuff like, do not be afraid of vomiting. It is not vomiting, but holding vomit in your throat that's foul. Politely disagree. Okay. Well, let's see. Having been up and down some high street. on an early Sunday morning.

Sometimes you do wish people have held it in their throat a bit. He also said, if you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn around discreetly and throw it somewhere. Oh, that is good advice. That's good. And finally, do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.

So, yeah, just a medical. I think it was him, sorry, who said, because this was just about the time when handkerchiefs were starting to be blown noses on. Have noses blown on them. And so some didn't, some didn't. And he said, if you need to blow your nose, you can do it on the floor, not a table.

On the floor? On the floor? Yeah. Blow your nose on the floor. Oh, right. Oh, I see. Put your finger to you in our stroll and blow it in the direction. Yeah, sorry, you don't have to rub your face against the floor. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But he said, if it is visible, you do have to keep stepping over it and on it until it's gone away. And he was basically because people were doing that or wiping it on their clothes and he said this was an improvement, which I think even Andy will admit. Yeah. The handkerchief?

Yeah. Definitely improvement. No, no, it's blowing on the floor compared to blowing on your clothes. Because I would say, I'd probably do a subtle blow into my cuff rather than onto the floor, wouldn't you? Depends on the scale of the blow. Yeah, I just think it's completely...

Sounds like with your leaking handkerchiefs is a dangerous manoeuvre. There was a thing that I read, which is that there was a period where people weren't carrying two handkerchiefs on them, but 30. This was actually as part of defense against bullets.

So what this was is, in the late 1800s, there was a physician called George E. Goodfellow. He lived in Tombstone, Arizona, or certainly was there at the time, and there was a post-mortem that was done on a man who'd been shot, and there was a silk handkerchief

in his breast pocket, and they realized that the silk handkerchief had significantly helped for the bullet to penetrate less. It was like, wow, that dented the force of which it went. So he thought, what if we dressed in lots of handkerchiefs,

then we would never die. So he invented what was... This is such a chaotic. Premature bulletproof vest, whereby you wore 30 layers of handkerchiefs on your body. Yeah. And I think it worked. I think people were shot.

It did until he got a really heavy cold and he just having to keep pulling out. It became less and less safe. Did people actually wear it? Or was it just him trying to market his product? It was him just experimenting with the idea of bulletproof. didn't need to be metal plating, which is what everyone was using at this point.

The problem is 30 handkerchief vests weighed much more than a metal plating, so it's impractical. It is why no Morris dancer has ever been shot. Yeah. Because they've got the skills to move the hanky into position at the right time. So, handkerchief.

Yeah. The word hanky-panky. Oh, okay. Does it come, is it related to handkerchiefs? It has nothing to do with handkerchiefs. It's not short for handkerchief, pancacheetheets. No, it's not.

Can it be now? I just imagine Andy going back home to his wife, little bit of handkerchief, pankerchief. I'm only wearing 27 layers of handkerchief tonight, darling. Is there a fact with that? Not really. Well, it's that hanky-panky has nothing to do with sex. It's just completely originally meant juggling or trickery.

You know, underhand-doing. But still nothing to do with hankies because you would think... Still nothing to do with hankies. It's maybe related to hocus-pocus-pocus. Right. Hocus-pokos-pocus, hanky-panky. It's a very sleazy magician, sorry. Hocus, panky-ponky.

Have you guys heard... of the Valsalva effect. The Valsalva effect is something that we've probably all done. We must have all done this, which is when your ears are blocked, or you know, you're on a plane and you get descending, it's the action of holding your nose

and holding your mouth and blowing it to get your ears popping right. That's what you do to equalize as well, isn't it? Yeah. So it's the opposite of blowing your nose. You're sucking in, you're basically you're using the pressure that's shooting inwards. So that's used for a number of things. It's for, yeah, for relieving your ears.

It's for people with abnormal heart rhythms. They use it to relieve chest pain. They say if you do have abnormal heart problems that you should always consult a doctor before doing that, just to make sure that you don't make the situation worse. But another thing that it's useful is for people who suffer from premature ejaculation.

Oh, really? Because I have very bad sinuses and have... And literally, do that Valsava effect, I would say about 20 times a day. Right. And I don't want to know what personal link you're making to what video is the first one. I want to know what's coming. Not you.

Yeah. You'll manage it. Yeah, so pretty exciting, isn't it? So you're supposed to do that mid-sex? I think, I couldn't see where they said if it was before or during, but I'm madden it's during, and I'm not sure how you can disguise that as a sexy thing. So, next time you're having handkerchief handkerchief at home, Andy.

Try it out and let us know if it's before or during that it's required. They are sexy things though, aren't they? They were used for sexy purposes back in the day. In the 19th century, there were another one of these things where there was a whole language behind handkerchiefs that lovers could use to convey messages to each other.

And there's actually a book, because we've talked before, I think, about the language of flowers. If you sent flowers in a certain arrangement, it meant different things. Fans? Fans, the language of fans. if your fan is three quarters open, it means I'd like a hand job, but not a blow job, or whatever. Although it's usually the woman with the fans, so actually, anyway.

You're an absolute menace in the summer, aren't you? What if you just want to keep cool? Being pounced on. There's a book published in 1879 called A Complete Guide to Glolitation containing handkerchief. glove, fan and parasol flirtations, and a complete language of flowers. So we have to assume everyone memorized this at the time,

so they understood what each other was saying. But drawing your handkerchief across your forehead, do you know what that means? Sweaty. Yeah. It either means you're sweating profusely, or it means we are being watched. Oh, okay.

Don't jump me. Across the cheeks was, I love you. Face cheeks? The face cheeks, yes. It's worth knowing. Yeah. This is where the problems can come if you don't know. I didn't actually note down the ass cheeks one,

so you'll have to just decide for yourselves. Through the hands. If you're talking to someone, then weave a handkerchief through their hands. Oh, yeah. I hate you. Oh. Really?

Wow. Horrible. There was another one later in the 1970s, which was in the LGBTQ community. And you might wear different handkerchiefs or bandanas, and the collar might tell you what your fetish was. So if you're in a club with like-minded people, it would tell them what you're thinking.

Also, cartoon characters tend to wear hankies and bandanas around their necks, because necks are quite hard to draw. Oh, really? And so... Oh, no. No, they're not. Fred Flintstone wears a light blue sort of cloth around his neck. Apparently, he's into fallacious.

I'll rattle through these. Fred from Scooby-Doo, red, fisting. And Captain Pugwash, light cream, rimming. So, it's just... If they happen to be in a club, then that's what we happen. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1960s, owners of a theme park in Pennsylvania

had guards with plastic bats in their Tunnel of Love ride who were instructed to give an admonishing thwack to any bear bums that they saw. Cover that with a handkerchief now. So this is a true thing that happened. In actual fact, it didn't just happen in Pennsylvania. It happened in a few different places. And when you're saying plastic bats,

I'm thinking of table tennis bats. I'm not thinking of plastic winged mammal bats. I have seen them. They are table tennis bats. Some of them were actually almost in the shape of the hand. You know, like one of those big sort of foam hands? It was plastic, and they would whack the bums like that. And it's because they didn't want people making out

or worse in their tunnels of love. No handkerchief, pancache. No, hangargeet. So this was an article. Originally, I read this in Mental Flass, which is an online magazine. And I followed it up and found an article in the Pittsburgh City paper.

And this is about a place called Kennywood Theme Park. And there is a ride there called The Old Mill. It was constructed in 1901. It's their oldest roller coaster in the whole place. And it's one of these, you know, like a log flume where you're going in the water, but there's no up and down bits. You're just kind of slowly going round in the water, and there's like things to see on the side.

So there might be scary things, there might be skeletons, or there might be sexy things or whatever. Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Fair enough. And then I found this YouTuber called Defunct Land, and he's done a video on this,

and it's one of the best videos I've ever seen in my entire life on YouTube. It's all about this place. And he found an article from 1934 saying that this tunnel of love was a really good place for people to make out. And he found other tunnels of love where people were whacking bear bums. And he asked people, have you or anyone you know ever kissed or had sex on the tunnel of love in Kennywood? And he tweeted saying that I have received the most explicit, disgusting and shocking emails. I have ever read. Really?

So this was really... And there are newspaper articles from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s even, all of them saying, this is a place to go and make out. This is where kids make out. This is so famous for that. It's only six minutes long, the ride. Yeah.

Four minutes more than I need, buddy. Well, I've got a technique with a nose that I can. I wonder for how many people who got slapped on the butt by the... ping pong paddle, that turned into a sort of exciting new fetish that they didn't realize. I think there might have been a bit of that. There must have been so many Christmases where the partner

was going, yeah, yeah, I bought some ping pong paddles. I don't know, I just want to get into the sport, you know? It's just like, no reason. Can I say something incredibly boring about this theme park Kennywood? Yeah. So it was a trolley park originally and a few weeks ago on the podcast we mentioned trams. Yeah. That episode hasn't gone out yet,

but we will have recently mentioned trams. And what's, what's, a trolley park? I'm so glad you asked, Dan. What are you doing? A trolley park is a miniature adventure park or a park with rides

that's put at the end of a trolley line. So a trolley is just an American word for a tram, basically. And it was to encourage people to use the trolley car network at weekends. So you would normally use them to get to work, but at the weekend they were being used so they put something to attract people.

Exactly. And so, sorry, I just thought we were all having so much fun and I just wanted to talk about tram, infrastructure. No, it's a good pallet cleanser. That's a good idea. Any more on this? No. Well, just one other ride that there was at Kenywood in the early days, which was

sorry, not a ride. There was one thing, an attraction, called the House of Mystery, but no one knows what it was. Did no one ever come out of it? It's been lost to history, unfortunately. And there was one thing called Springwater, which was just a water fountain, the stream of water coming from a spring, and there was a tin cup.

you could use to get a drink, but they had electrocuted the water so that you would just get an electric shock every time you try to have a drink. That's pretty clever. That was entertainment. Yeah. Anyway.

These rides are tunnels of love, which you don't really see much anymore. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one, myself, a fair one rider or a theme park or whatever. Apparently there's a few, like, in the UK. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, they're basically the equivalent of rides that we've all seen at parks

where you essentially get on them when you can't be asked a cue for one of the good rides again. And so you just sit on this really, slow, boring boat. And so they were often haunted rides that were converted into tunnels of lava or vice versa, weren't they? So I think this one at Kennywood

went on to become hard-headed Harold, horrendously humorous, haunted hideaway. That's right. Sounds like a worse ride. They also branded it as a Panama Canal. So you would go down here and it was a few going along the Panama Canal. That's great.

It is, but the Panama Canal is literally just a canal. There's no fun and stuff on either side. No, you're right. And then in the end, it was rebranded as Garfield's Nightmare Ride. All of these... The cat. Yeah. Or President James Garfield.

Who weighs everything through his anus for the last three months of his life. Weird ride. But... Yeah. The guy, this guy, Defundland, who did this amazing video, he said that he thinks, after getting all these emails, that there are at least two people who were concerned. received on that ride.

Oh, great, really? Yeah, and Kennywood theme park now uses the slogan, Welcome to the family. Oh. But that's just a coincidence. Yeah, yeah. The tunnel of love, really, I think,

I've read something saying there used to be hundreds, as in maybe 700, across the USA. Yeah, the USA's big, but that has a lot of tunnels of love. Yeah. But it all sort of sadly came to an end

because of the sexual revolution. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. It was society became liberalized. Yeah. So basically you could snog in public. You didn't know we'd go into a tunnel. And because they were such a shit ride,

that was really the only good thing about them. Right, yeah. Another strike against the sexual revolution. Do you guys know what was the fastest way to travel in the entire world in 1880? I'm going to say, a tunnel of love. That is a ridiculous thing to say. It was so slow.

I know, but everything was slow at the time. Maybe there was a point in 1880 where all trains broke. All the horses were lame. Okay. Was it... Go on. I'm just kind of... Because I know this sneaky man.

What he does? Is that sneaky? Is it... Was it an underground train system that was one of the first of its kind, underground in Paris, that led to the Louvre? And so it was the tunnel of Lur. De Lurv?

He's sneaky. He's not the Riddler. Okay. I'm gonna have a pun. Fastest trains at the time. I'll just say, in America, they were only about... 30 or 40 miles an hour. In the UK, I think we had up to about 60 or 70 miles an hour.

I'm talking about something that was going at 112 miles an hour. And this is public transport. In 1880, it was something you could travel on. It wasn't like you jump off, because if you jump off the Eiffel Tower or something. I wouldn't say jumping off the Eiffel Tower is transport. And in 1880, definitely not. Another bad commute, darling, yes.

Okay, no, no, no, but I think, so the title of love is a kind of boat ride that you go on. Is it something like a log, It's exactly a long for a... So, I found an article in the Chicago Herald in 1886 that told of a group of loggers, right? So they're at the top of a mountain, and they created these flumes.

They were kind of metal flumes, which they would send the logs down, and they would all go down to the bottom, and that's where they would process them. You cut them at the top, you would send them down. Really, really steep. Now, at the end of the day, all of these workers would get on one of these logs

and fly down. Oh my God. Okay. So cool. It was a quote and they said we all looked at our watches we had made 16 miles

in eight minutes and 40 seconds. So that is an average speed of 112 miles. Average. Bloody hell. They did go in down there. It's so terrifying. It's absolutely amazing.

There was a journalist in 1875, I think, he went to report on the Nevada log flumes and they look so cool and there is video footage of the logs going down at them and they could be, you know,

like they were built really high on scaffolding into the air, like 70 feet in the air, and they were these channels which they zoomed down. And yeah, this journalist said, does anyone ever go down it? And they said, yeah, yeah, you can totally do that. Now, I still don't know if the loggers on this one actually did go down it, or they were pranking the journalist, because the journalist said, okay, I will.

The two owners of the log flume said, all right, well, if you're doing it, I guess we'll do it. And none of the loggers agreed to get in with them. And as they pushed him off, one of the logger shouted, a flume has no element of safety. You cannot stop, you cannot lessen your speed. You have only to sit still, shut your eyes, say your prayers, and wait for eternity. Bye!

Smile for the camera at the way now. And that's what their log flume rides are based on those, right? Yeah, yeah. Wow. I think they've all shut down other log flumes, but I think there was one operating relatively recently in Washington,

in the state of Washington, which took an hour to go along. So it might have been a bit slight... Yeah, yeah. They weren't all really... just the ones on mountains were. Lassie went on that one? Did she?

An episode of Lassie where Lassie went on a log flume. Okay, great. Nice. Good. Right not. She deserves a break. Is Lassie? Is she? Yeah.

I didn't know that. Lass. A Lassie. It's in the name. It is in the name. Jane Austen could have gone on a log flume. That's the exciting. It's one of my main interest is whether Jane Austen could have done any of the text.

we talk about. So she was alive when... But not the ride, the log flume, the actual log flume thing. A tunneled boat ride. So this was a ride, actually. It was in France in 1817, which is the year Austin died,

so she wouldn't have had a great time on it. What a way to go. What a way to go. She died of something completely sort of ordinary sound of it. If she died on a log flume, it would have been perfect. It was called the Sok du Niagara,

Niagara Falls, and it was a boat which fell down a slope into a basin of water. I mean, it's pretty much a plastic lot to him, right. Anyway, Jay Austin. I have a red Mansfield Park. Is that about a theme park? Yeah, Man's...

I can't believe you thought of Mansfield Park. I was going through sensibility. No, that doesn't work. Have you guys heard of... There's a sex theme park in South Korea called Love Land. Have you seen it? No.

It's amazing. I mean, we say it's a theme park. It's kind of like a sculpture park and it's just lots of penises and lots of people in positions of sex. So it's not... You can't ride... as it were.

No, I don't think so. Just looking. Yeah, you can... Well, they do say there's a few hands-on exhibits, such as the masturbation cycle, which is you basically spin a thing and you move their hands for them as part of this little exhibit.

Like, it's a statue kind of thing that you do. Right. And then there's this really weird thing, and I couldn't find anything more about it. I searched quite a bit. It's this giant... It's like a five-foot-tall see-through penis with sort of like computer workings all inside of it.

And it's just got a little plaque next to it. And it's got a lot of words in Korean, which obviously I can't read. But then there's only one English word on it, as far as I could see. And the word is Terminator. And that's... I don't know if they're saying that's his particular penis or if it's a penis of the future, coming back to our time to... Would he have donated his penis?

I haven't seen Terminator. Is that the sort of thing that the character would do? Yeah, I'll be back. control them back, how this? Yeah, that's on Jeju Island, isn't it? Yeah. Originally, Jeju Island was like a honeymoon destination, but it was, after the Korean War,

there was a lot of arranged marriages, so a lot of the couples had never seen each other or really met each other before, and so they would go to this honeymoon destination, and they were really an experience. They didn't really know what to do, and so they had, all the hotels had professional ice breakers who would kind of sit next to you.

If you're having dinner at a restaurant and if you're being a bit awkward, they kind of start the conversation. God, that's a great idea. Aww. Sorry. You would be the worst human on earth as an icebreaker. Did you know there was a trolley system on the next?

Where are you going? Come back. I'm saying I need one. Not that I can be one. I don't want to talk about traps any more than you do. It's all I can think of. Wow. This really is a cry for help. Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy. At trams, trams, trams. James.

And Adam? You can email podcast. At QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. You can also find a link to Club Fish, which is our very exciting behind the scenes membership club. There's awesome things on there, extra episodes, behind the scenes, sort of correspondence episodes and quizzes.

There's also access to our Discord where you can discuss all interesting things, like how Andy would make a great icebreaker, whatever it is you wanted to chat about. And also there's a lot of really fun merch up there. So do go there. I want to thank you so much. much Bloomsbury for this great show. Thank you so much for having us. And we'll be back again with another episode next week for everyone at home. We'll see you then. Goodbye!