No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Trigger's Stradivarius

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss valuable violins, validating vessels and Vincent Van Gogh.Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babel. That is right. Jindobri James Yakshimash. Great. Ah, yes. Where James and I have gone wrong is we are learning different language to one another on Babel.

But Babel is the place where you can learn a new language. It's such a brilliant tool to use. It makes it so much easier than anywhere else you're going to go to learn languages. It recognizes that lots of people learn languages in lots of different ways, so you can fit it to your preferences. Absolutely. And from the sound of what we said earlier, Adder seems to be learning Polish,

and I seem to be learning English. So we'll see how that goes over the months. But no, we all use Babel, and it is really good to get involved with a bit of self-improvement. Maybe you're going to travel, and maybe you want to develop professionally by learning a new language. It's useful in all those different ways.

They have 25 million subscribers worldwide, and they are science-backed. so it actually does work. You can make fast-lasting progress. And right now, we have a special limited time deal for our listeners. You can get 60% off your Babel subscription at babble.com. Forward slash fish. Go to babel.com, B-A-B-B-B-B-B-E-L-L-Sash-Fish

and get 60% off your subscription. Rules and restrictions may apply. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 2010, thieves stole a Stradivarius worth $1.4 million. pounds, tried to sell it for £100 and couldn't find any buyers. Oh, that is tragic. Is it because people saw the price, tag, and thought, if it was a really good violin, it would be more than that, so there must be some kind of scam. That's why I would think.

Very smart. Maybe this is what this person thought as well. Interesting, they've priced themselves out of the market, but at the wrong end. Yeah. Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're right.

It's even a terrible violin you'd think would be more than £100, wouldn't it? Like even your ropeiest kid's violin. If I walked into the shop and I saw a pack of sausages was 5P, I would instinctively think, no, not that. Do we know, though, that they were trying to sell it to very knowledgeable violin makers, or was it like a pawn shop, for example? They absolutely were not trying to do that. So this was a guy called John Morn, who did the theft, with a 14-year-old and 16-year-old accomplices. Oh, so sort of Fagan's gang style? Yeah, really nice.

Really nice. This sort of gang of rapscallions went to Pret near Houston. And this violin prodigy, Minjin Kim, was having her lunch. And she left her violin by the side of her. And they whipped it as the telegraph reported, as she ate her £2.95 sandwich. Okay. The next day, the thief and his two little rapscallions

went to an internet cafe in Tottenham Court Road. And they were Googling the word Stradivarius and 1696, which is the year the violin was made. And we know that because the person sitting next to them was a bus driver who saw what they were Googling. So they obviously knew kind of what they'd got. I think they'd probably freaked out, turned to this bus driver sitting next to them and said, do you want to buy this violin for $100 quid?

And the bus driver said, it's okay, my daughter already has a recorder. Incredible line. But also, these thieves, I'm sorry, they've done no market research on the audience. It's just the bloke sitting next to you in the internet cafe, do you want to buy a violin? That's terrible selling. Everyone knows that if anyone on a bus is going to do anything in the orchestra, there'd be the conductor. Very nice. Pretty nice.

Were they trying to sell it then because they realize they're in big trouble and at least they'll get a tiny bit of cash out of it? Or were they so bad at Googling Stradivarius's? After an hour, they're like, I think this might be worth 100 if we're lucky. Also, the idea of Googling 1696, along with Stradivarius, as though there's going to be a substantial difference between a 1699 and a 60. It's a Stradivarius. It's obviously unbelievable valuable. But I think they might not have even known what Stradivarius meant. Yes, exactly.

And so because quite often Stradivarius is they have Stradivarius written and the year written on them, right? So they will have just Googled whatever they've read. Fair enough. Right. I should quickly end this by saying it was recovered three years later and it then sold at auction for $1.4 million. Very sadly, she was unable to buy it back the original owner, Min Kim, because she had had it underinsured, basically. So when she insured it, they hadn't given her enough money for it compared to how much it was probably worth. But wait a minute.

Did they not just return it to her? No, because she had claimed on the insurance. And that means when something is reclaimed, the insurers own it if you've claimed. And so it is very sad. I think she wrote a whole book about the experience because it had been her lifelong dream. She had been a child violent prodigy. Yeah. She has this thing.

She now can't afford one again, of course. I guess on the plus side, everyone in the world's insurance premiums probably went down by a fraction of a penny because the company got a load of money. Do you know what? That's a really nice way of thinking about quite a sad story. There's a spot the accountant at the forum. Well, hopefully she's listening and that's reassured her. It's amazing reading about her relationship with the violin. That, you know, it was proper grief.

She got clinically depressed after that, couldn't get out of bed. It wasn't about how much it was worth at all. It was about her attachment. She was like, this was like a relationship. When someone said to her, couldn't you get another violin? she said, would you say that if my child had died? But she did then say after a few years of self-reflection that actually probably a good thing

because it was an unbalanced relationship. Like, you know, she needs the violin more than the violin needs her. You know, the violin's in control of things. And now she's got a slightly less expensive one which isn't as powerful and incredible, but which she thinks is probably better for her. Wait, you've got another strad? Not a strad and a marty, I think,

which made by one of Stradivarius's... So another big old posh one. Yeah, we should say, Antonio Stradivarius, he was a luthier, he was someone who mended broken instruments, stringed instruments. And so he lived from 1644 to 1734. So he lived very old. And in that time, he built something like 1,100 violins, violas, and a few others.

And we only have about 600 of them left, but they are to a connoisseur seen as the finest violins that were ever made still to this day. But actually, people have done blind testing of violins, and it seems that generally people can't tell the difference between like a really modern one that you get and Stradivarius, and you put blindfolds on them, you put in a room where they can't see what they're doing,

you give them to play, and you say which one's the Stradivarius, and usually they can't tell. So even violinists can't tell. Proper violinists are the ones they've tested it on. And then when it's not blind tested, and you hear reports of a violinist getting a chance to play one. They do report that it's the silkiest, most wonderful thing.

So that's such an interesting psychological thing. There was a journalist called Emma John, who also happens to be a violinist, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford had a Stradivarius there. And she played it, and she said every time someone would pick it up and play, a crowd would gather around. And yeah, that's how she described it. Just astonishing, different to any kind of thing she's overplay. That one is the Messiah, right, in the Ashmolean.

Is that the one we're talking about? That's the big one that they have there now anyway. It's supposed to be the one that's in the best condition out of any Stradivarius, but in fact it has been modified, as they all have. So around the 18th century, people changed what they thought violin should be like. They got a bit bigger. They got a slightly different body, slightly different neck. And all the Stradivarius has got changed slightly.

Oh, really? And the Messiah, which is in the Ashmolean, which, like I say, is supposed to be the most close to the original. It's had its neck lengthened, its base bar has been replaced, its bridge has been replaced, its tailpiece has been replaced, its pegs have been replaced,

and its soundpost has probably been replaced, and its strings have probably been replaced. This triggers Stradivarius. Yeah, exactly. Do you know why it's called the Messiah? I think it was called Le Messia, which it means Messiah, and I think it's because Lionel Messi.

Yeah, that's absolutely correct. It's a current owner. They're normally named after people who used, own them before. So there's one called the ex-Huberman, which used to be owned by someone called Huberman. There's a joke behind it, basically. It's a half-legendary joke, whether or not it's true. But it is called the Messiah. And it was a person who was called Luigi Taricio was the owner of it. He kept it in Italy, and he used to visit his friends and say, I'm going to show you the Messiah.

And he just never brought it along. And so people were like, do you actually own it? But he didn't say at the time, I'm going to show you the Messiah, right? Because it wasn't called the Messiah yet. He used to say, I'm going to show you my violin. I'm going to show you my violin. Exactly. They called it the Messiah because, like the Messiah, it was eagerly expected but would never appear. And so that was the idea behind it. I see. But you can see why she was very into the idea and connected to her violin.

I think the name has something to do with it. Because these have individual names, the Messiah, the beach back. There's the Bennett, there's the Canadian. There was a golden period that he used to make them. And in that golden period, 1713 is one of the big years. And he produced two violins in that year, one called Daniel and one called Shriver. What? No, he didn't.

Yeah, and obviously named retroactively that he didn't name them himself, but you can get a Daniel and Shriver. And he called Craig or Indiana? No, I looked into that. I couldn't find that. For your middle names. No, but the only other connection to the podcast that I could find is that there is also a violin called Lord Borek. Now, he, I believe. Hang on, he wrote in.

Yeah, a number of times on our club fish shows. About Big Ben. Right. Lord Borek wrote in about the numbering on Big Ben and whether it's an ex. And he's an actual lord from the house of lords. Yes, he's a real lord, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so there was a strad called Lord Boric. Yeah.

And I looked into it, and I'm pretty sure that his great-grandfather was the owner, and now the person named after the Stradivarius. Really? You should have written back to him before the show, see if we could borrow it. I reckon I can get twinkle-twinkle up. There was some other strad thefts over the ages. My favorite one is the theft of one that belonged to a guy called Roman Totenberg. And this was taken in 1980.

and I just kind of like the chutz part of the person who took it. So Roman Totenberg was a good violinist. He was the teacher of a guy called Philip Johnson. And actually, Philip Johnson was a very talented but very troublesome, naughty, annoying student who got expelled in the end. Totenberg was the only person who defended him at the time. So a bit unfairly, Johnson turned up at one of Totenberg's shows in 1980, nicked his strad.

And people actually saw him. A, a lot of people said, look, there's a guy who looks a bit shifty around here. we think it's that guy who was really misbehaving. He was ranting about how he doesn't think Totenberg deserves his strad. We saw him walk past Totenberg's office a number of times where the strad is. And even given all of that circumstantial evidence, when Totenberg went back and found it was stolen, they weren't allowed to search his house because it's all circumstantial.

I think even the guy who stole it, his girlfriend slash wife, said, I think he's stolen it. And they still didn't say it was enough evidence. I remember when my laptop got stolen and I could see with five, my phone exactly where it was. I could see the building where it was, but the police wouldn't go and get it. Yeah, really? Was your laptop worth $2.1 million? Well, it had all of my facts on it. So it's priceless, actually. Yeah. It's actually a weird you social relationship I have with my laptop. You know, sometimes I think I need the laptop more than the laptop needs me.

It's called Daniel Shriver. It's called Daniel Shriver. That's my password. But this guy was so brazen once he'd nicked it. and everyone knew he'd next it, he didn't want to sell it. So he ended up being so poor, he had a shoplift to eat food, but he still didn't flog it. Also quite hard to flog a strat,

because everyone knows it's stolen. But he would turn up to his local orchestra and just play it. And then people would say, oh, that's a nice filing. Can I have a look? And he'd quickly shove it back in the box and make some excuse.

Yeah. That's crazy. If I was him, I'd hide it in a machine gun case. Oh. I think you could get even more trouble Yeah, and then the end of that story is that Totenberg Never gets to find out where it was He dies

The year before this guy, Johnson, died And the wife found it in all his belongings So there was a one year overlap between their deaths Where if someone had just gone through his stuff They could have got the end of the story For Totenberg, but he died Oh, that's tragic And they had a ceremony returning it to the family

After it was discovered It takes ages when someone's died to go through all that stuff, you know. I blame the poor woman. There is a theory about why they're so good. It's partly that Stradivari was a genius. And it's partly that they're not that good. Partly that they're rubbish. But in between that, there is this theory that it's due to the weather at the time

because Europe went through this period called the Little Ice Age from about 1,300 to about 1850. And the idea is Stradivari got all of his wood from a particular forest in Italy. and it came from particular spruce trees and those spruce trees during this period of colder weather grew more slowly and the wood is more dense and as a result those are supposedly the golden period ones where he did turn out some actually quite good violins and I just love the science that's gone into it

the scientists did they compared ring patterns in the violins to the international tree ring data bank which is a huge vault of tree records from 6,000 different places around the world, 6,000. And they clustered patterns, and they did a lot of clever analysis, and they found these master chronologies

of trees across Europe, and they traced it down to this particular bit of this particular forest at this time. And so that's one of the reasons why they... There's quite a few different theories as to why they're so good. So one idea is that the wood was treated with borax

to prevent worms from eating it, and that supposedly made it better. There's another idea that they made the varnish with volcanic ash. Wow. So that made it better. Really common one is the varnish itself was Cocheneal varnish. It's made out of insects, I think, Cochernille.

But this was supposed to really help the resonance of the instrument. And the thing is that he was the only one using Cocheneal because he was making instruments for extremely wealthy, powerful people and had everything at his disposal to make the best violins, which is why I think probably they were the best ones. Right. You know, like he just had every chance to make the best ones because he was making them for the royal family. Also, there weren't that many.

It wasn't like violins that existed for thousands of years. You know, they'd just been invented. He was one of the early inventors of the violin, really. And, yeah, basically, the violin had that century, yeah. And it was him and then a bunch of other people whose violins are also very famous, like Guarneri, who had the most expensive one and then Armani. But I do love, do you always feel a bit of Jacqueline Hyde when you read about these experiments where you think, how cool that scientists have found this and given that we know it's a load of old bollocks

anyway and no one can tell the difference why are people wasting their time don't we still have malaria do you find yourself doing that not really it's just me yeah I think it's been done yeah if you're not every scientist can try and cure malaria

otherwise there's going to be lots of other parts of the science that you're right sorry we can't fix your computer because we're trying to him in his laptop again I think it's more like people are so unwilling to believe the result of the study.

I mean, this poor woman who did their study that showed people can't tell the difference in the sound. People laid into her, didn't they? And they said,

the methodology's all wrong. She went back and did it again better. She found exactly the same thing. People can't tell the difference. And still, they just sell for so much and people say, what's the key to how good they sound?

And it's obviously that you're holding a strad. I don't think we've ever talked about the thing in 2019 where there was a city in Italy called Cremona, still is. And they had a stratavirus

that they wanted to recall the sounds of because they were making a live. of Stradivarius sounds so that, I presume in the future, you can get it on a synthesizer and just play it like that, you know? It's where he's from, by the way, as well. Cremona. Yeah, he was from Cromona.

Well, this all starts to make sense. They were making the Stradivarius sound bank, and they had to record this one violin in particular, and they had to make the whole city go quiet for ages while they record the sound. So they cordoned off five blocks right in the middle of town, and in the auditorium they were in, they turned off the ventilation. you know, because that might make a slight noise. They turned off the lifts just in case in a different bit of the building, a tiny bit of sour game in.

Ding! They unscrewed the light bulbs in case there was a slight electrical hum from the bike. They just did absolutely everything to make it as quiet as it could possibly be for literally 100 metres around. I love it.

And then did the person completely fuck the piece up? Yeah. Just really squeaky. They got a 10-year-old to play it on the synthesizer now but there's a cough in the middle of the main night. Yeah, yeah. I imagine someone did cough. at some point, you know, when there's Rembrandt's Day silence.

And have you ever walked into a room not realizing it's a two-minute silence? I'm thinking, how are you doing, John a cup of tea? I'm pretty sure I've done that to you at the airport, actually, and everyone turns around and goes, shh. Oh, yes, you did. When we were on tour, that happened. Yeah, I think it did. So I imagine someone did that to the strad and got a similarly ego-destroying response.

Does anyone know why the aircon's being turned off? I had to come up the stairs. It's really dark in here, by the way. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babel. That is right. Jindobri James Yakshimash.

Great. Oh, yes. Where James and I have gone wrong is we are learning different language to one another on Babel. But Babel is the place where you can learn a new language. It's such a brilliant tool to use. It makes it so much easier than anywhere else you're going to go to learn languages. It recognizes that lots of people learn languages in lots of different ways, so you can fit it to your preferences.

Absolutely. And from the sound of what we said earlier, Adder seems to be learning Polish and I seem to be learning English. So we'll see how that goes over the months. But no, we all use Babel and it is really good to get involved with a bit of self-improvement. Maybe you're going to travel. Maybe you want to develop professionally by learning new language. It's useful in all those different ways.

They have 25 million subscribers worldwide and they are science-backed. So it actually does work. You can make fast-lasting progress. And right now, we have a special limited time deal for our listeners. You can get 60% off your Babel subscription at babble.com. Go to babble.com, B-A-B-B-B-B-B-E-L-L-Sash-Fish and get 60% off your subscription. Rules and restrictions may apply.

Okay, on with the show. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. Just wanted to let you know. we are sponsored this week by car gurus. Yes, so are you wanting a new car, but you don't really know what kind?

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Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is, there is a testing body in America, which makes sure bins are bear-proof by testing them on live grizzly bears. Makes sense. Yeah? Absolutely does. This is the work of the interagency grizzly bear committee, the IGBC. And just a quick shout out to where I got this fact.

I got it from a book called How to Keep a Plain in the Sky. It's by a guy called Alex Davies, and it's all about test engineering, basically. It's the way in which engineers make products safe. Things are tested to destruction and beyond to try and make sure. sure they work in the real world. And it's such an interesting book. So big shout out to the author, Alex Davies. The Bear Agency Committee, this is an American thing. Basically, if a bear gets into your bin or your food canister when you're camping, that's a problem, you know. Because it makes a mess. Because it makes a mess. But it means they're more likely to go towards places where humans are,

right? Exactly. If they know they can get a picnic basket from the humans, then they're going to go towards the humans a lot and they might attack them. Exactly. So they test all these products which are sold as bear resistant and there's only one way to prove if it's bear resistant which is to get it in the ring with a bear so they have a bear on staff called co-book the destroyer who is their MVP he's really really good at it but they have a few bears they tested on and the thing has to survive i think it's one hour of bear contact time yeah and then they get a sticker from the IGBC and that sticker means that it can go in um like god i really thought the ball you make the bear yeah bear gets a little like you go to the dentist

Come on you. You tried really hard. I read an article about these guys, and I like it that they're all problem bears that they use. They only use problem bears. Is every bear not a problem bear once? It's quite near humanity.

These are bears who have previously gained access to unsecured foods, so they know that they're up for it. And Kobach is like their code breaker. This is the one who's just got into things that no other bear has managed. And that went just very quickly, because you've given a shout out for the book,

That is the name of the book in America, Cobuck the Destroyer, just for any Americans who want to get it because it's coming out just now. And I do like, there's a point that Alex Davies makes, which is that we're so obsessed with inventors, and we remember the name of inventors, but what this book is trying to say is there's a whole other level of innovators

who, once they get the product, have to refine and fix it. They're kind of a silent genius that we never get to see. We have the same on our British bins, but with the less interesting foxes. They get tested on foxes, yes. Coral products who make food caddies. They have their own fox fondly called Felix, they say.

And they also have a bunch of rodents that they haven't named. And they trial all of their bins on Felix and their rats. I did not know that. Yeah. Doesn't seem to work. Foxes seem to get into bins left, right and centre. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't seem to work at all.

My wheelie bin, they absolutely worked out to get into that. Have they? Yeah. Very clever, aren't there? You can't out a Witter Fox in the end. We've all read fantastic Mr. Fox. Yeah. Yeah, I do keep live chickens in my bullet bins.

I was looking at quite a lot of bin. I got really sidetracked by bins. Oh, great. And other testing on bins. There's a company called Simple Human, which I really like, actually, it's an environmentally friendly company that makes stuff. It tests its pedal bins with a massive robot called the Punisher.

I mean, it's not that massive. It's like human size. But the Punisher, or can you guess what it does? It opens the pedal bin repeatedly and violently. I don't actually know if it has to be too violent. What's the punishment part of it? I think it's just punishing for the bin once it has been open and closed at least 150,000 times, which is what it does.

That's incredible. Which is the equivalent of doing 20 open shuts a day for 20 years. So that's what the punish. Fair enough. You do open your bin quite a lot, didn't you? Absolutely. Yeah, and 20 years seems like a... Actually, that's quite long to have it.

But that's really long? I've had my bin for 12 years. Have you? Yeah, my main bin in my house. Oh wow. You're just so confident about how long you've had your bin for. I got it when we got the house and I knew when we got the house. I know, easy equations.

I got married in the same year, so. It was just as if you had a man. A big thing in the book is like how you replicate real life conditions, but you're also trying to do standardised experiments. Do you know what I mean? And those things are slightly intangible with each other. So, for example, planes are tested with having chickens fired at them. even though chickens do not typically go into plane engines because they're mostly on the ground.

Yeah. Right? They're easy to get hold of. And also, there's not going to be a bird that's much bigger than a chicken. Well, I mean, geese are much bigger. That one that went down in, you know, the Sullenberger miracle on the Hudson. That was a flock of geese, all of which are much bigger. That's true, actually.

And it's not that hard to get frozen geese. Or an ostrich at Christmas. Get an ostrich for God's sake. Listen to Mr. Scrooge here. Go out and get me the biggest turkey you find because I've got a Boeing engine here. Would the Hudson not have happened if it was a flock of regular-sized chickens? I don't know because it's, again, they... It was the number of them that went in.

It was the number and it was the size. So they're always trying to find out a thing where you can do the test repeatedly. So chicken is perfect because you can get four-pound chickens really readily. But even these days, they're using artificial chicken, bird-simulant material, which is just a sack of gelatin. So again, it's like that's not a real world thing, but it is completely standardized. So I think that's really interesting, you know. I think I've seen that in the vegetarian section at my local test go.

Yeah, lovely. Bass and bird simulant. Fire some tofu into the engine. They call it torture sometimes, don't they? When you're testing one of these products again and again and again. And torture has been used in advertising quite a lot over the years. So RCA Victor radios, they would take two different radios and do torture tests on them and show that theirs was the one that would last for the longest.

TimeX did the same, where they would sort of whack their watches with hammers and stuff and say, look, ours is the one that survived. And there's a web, a YouTube series called Will It Blend? Have you ever seen that? Oh, yes, I have seen that. Exactly, yeah. It's just it's an advert, basically, for a blender.

I didn't realize it was an advert, actually, when I've seen it in the past. Yeah, yeah. And the idea is that the blender is so great that it can blend all these different things. And so they get like a rock and they put it in, they go, will it blend? And then an iPhone and then what I thought it's going to be an advert for the iPhone that it couldn't blend. No, it's not. Right.

Yeah, for the. But they could do a partnership, I guess, with the iPhone and the blender. Someone's always going to lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that because a lot of the stress tests are about quite large things, about plane wings and the turbines and all that. I like the really simple ones. And there's an example in the book, which is the Zildjian symbol. And we've spoken about this symbol before.

It's the symbol that every drummer uses on the drum kit. You love these so much. Yeah, and I bet I've pronounced the name wrong, but they have someone who up to 4,000 times a day takes every single symbol and just gives it three taps and they know the quality of what should be out there and that's when one is free to go. So it's just someone in a room going, ting, ting, ting.

On the same symbol? No, no. Every individual symbol, up to 4,000 a day of these symbols come through and he does three taps on each and he says yes or no. He's the quality control. It's quality control. so that's quality control. You think that would be incredibly boring to do.

I would send you mad with bored, but fortunately it's a drummer doing it, so they don't know it's boring. Just a drama joke for you there? There you go. Very good. Is he testing the quality of the sound then? Like, oh, this sounds is a bit of glass.

What sound is he expected? I know. Gah! Someone's put a chicken in this one. It's like the person at the Maltese factory who looks at every single Maltese that goes past and make sure that there's none that are too big or too small.

It was bad. It was bad. I'm not. I can treat faster than the cameras. Do you guys know what a tenderometer measures? The tenderness of something? Yes, meat. Of what, though?

Meat. It should be meat, shouldn't it? Tender. James Blunt singles. Yeah. What needs to be tender? Tender. You actually, I don't think you'll guess this based on that question.

Turkey tenders, like, they're like turkey strips are called turkey tenders, aren't they? Oh, I didn't know that? I thought they were turkey twizzlers. I are. dinosaurs? You've all gone too meaty. It's actually classic, isn't it? How sensitive the product? Oh yes. What needs to squish?

Something that tells you how bruised you are. It's actually something that you want it to be almost less tender. It's misnamed. It's peas. I'm going to put you out your misery. It's peas. This big machine, the tenderometer invented in 1937 and still used the exact same machine

or copies of it today. And it's to make sure you know exactly how much force they can withstand because you don't want your peas to be too mealy. So actually it should be called like the crunchometer or something. So wait, it is smashing. Yes, but what it does, I know what you're thinking, you can't use the peas, but you smash. Well, that's a problem with all of these things, isn't it? It's like, okay, we've smashed this mobile phone 200,000 times now we'll sell it. That's not how it works. We need a better system. Yes, I think you're usually smashing one in the batch, aren't you?

And then you say, all right, the rest of the batch must be good if that one works. Mobile phones are tested. What is the high? highest that anyone has ever dropped a mobile phone and for it to survive. I'm going to, I'm sorry, James, to do this with the guessing game. I'm going to say from space. Oh, wow. Okay. From the International Space Station.

I've definitely seen a video of someone filming themselves on a parachute jump and it fell out, but it happened to land somewhere on like bales of hay or something. Unfortunately, the person did not land on a bale of hay. Exactly. For the phone survive. It's somewhere in between space and a parachute. Okay. A very high plane?

It was from the stratosphere. It was from 100,000 feet above Sweden. A Sweden particularly hard surface? Is there a reason they chose? The reason they chose it is, I think, because mobile phones are made in Sweden. But it was definitely near the S-range space centre, which is in northern Sweden. And the main problem was, once they dropped it, finding it. Yes.

I mean, surely it's got a thing in it. Find my phone. Find my Rino to your phone. There's not much signal up there, I think. Harkin would have found it if it was laptop. That's the shock. But they managed to use tracking

to narrow it down to about two kilometers. Right. There's still a lot to look. And it took the five hours searching in the wilderness to find it. And then they turned on and it did work. And it did? Oh, that's great.

So that's what, 100,000 feet? That's sort of three times a plane, isn't it? Three times a plane's normally 30,000 feet-ish. Now we're flying at 30,000 feet. So, yeah, three. times that. So it's basically in the stratosphere. And it had a special rhino shield case on it,

which is what helped the impact. What is this rhino? What is this rhino shield thing? It's the name of the company that makes the case. I see. Okay. Oh yeah. You wouldn't have it without a case from 100,000 feet. You're asking for trouble, aren't you? Absolutely. So if you're over the age of

55 and you drop your phone or will survive anything because you always keep your phone in one of those leather cases that pop us up, don't you? And also you've got a Nokia 3310 still. out there. They will actually go all the way from space. Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Van Gogh sometimes ate his paint. Was it on the canvas? Are there paintings where you say this is from his hungry period

where there's just a little nibble missing? No, it's not that. There is a myth that he ate yellow paint to cheer himself up. I have never heard this myth before. But the Van Gogh Museum debunks it on the FAQs. You've got to have something to fill up the FAQs, haven't you? And it does seem like he ate the paint, but it seems like he did it because he had a thing called pika, which means you sometimes, you just feel like you have to eat something, and it's something that's not normally eaten by humans.

And he seems to have a craving for something called turpines. And turpines are also found in absinth, which we know he drank a lot of absinth. and we don't really know exactly why he had this cravings. His doctor thought that he was deliberately trying to poison himself because he was so depressed. We don't think it's that either. It just seems to have been a thing that his brain just told him that he needed this. And it is not common, but a not uncommon thing for people to have.

Isn't Peaker thing when you're pregnant? Yeah, you can get coal and stuff. Soil and coal. Yeah. And it's good for you, isn't it? And broccoli, sure. Soil, coal and broccoli. Stick to spinach.

I think it's like sometimes it can be good for you if it's broccoli But broccoli is edible So that's where it starts being piquar I guess I guess so yeah So do Van Gogh go to his doctor and say I keep eating pain what do I do about it He did to a few doctors actually

Because he had quite a lot of problems They thought he had epilepsy But certainly he was having all sorts of health issues And one of them thought it was Due to Turbentine poisoning Another one thought it was due to too much sun What, that he was eating his pain? No, that he was just having these mental disorders.

But did he say to the doctors, I'm eating pain? Or did the doctor say to him, I think you're eating pain. Well, they looked around his mouth and he had a little bit of pain. I'm not sure exactly who said what, but certainly the doctors did know about it. Yeah, because he was, I didn't really, well, I didn't know anything about Frank Garth really, but he was quite unwell in the last couple of years of his life in particular. And sometimes he was in institutions. I mean, he's still painting at an incredible.

incredibly rapid clip. But when it did happen that he was discovered drinking the paint, he was restricted to pencils for a little while. Yes. But he had himself committed to an institution, I think, partly because of this. The health issues that he had couldn't have been due to turpentine toxicity, because before it gave him any convulsions or mental problems, he would have also had giddiness, redness and burning of the face and throat, itching and burning of the anus and painful, urinating and defecating. So he would have noticed before the... the convulsions and mental problems began. I don't know. You look at some Van Gogh paintings and they could have been done by someone with a very burning anus. That sort of frantic

hurling the brush around. That's what I get. That's what that period's called, the burning anus period. Exactly. I think he's a bit of an icon for late starters in life. Oh yeah.

Because he only decided to become an artist at the age of 27. I think he died in his late 30s, didn't he? I don't think he saw 40. Yeah, 37 I think. 27, he did,

he had done so much other stuff and it hadn't really taken. So he'd been an art dealer and his brother, Theo, was an art dealer. He was a big part of his story. He'd been a teacher in Ramsgate. Not paid. So I don't know what the deal was

with his employment. He was just not paid for it. But that didn't work. And then he became a preacher and that didn't work. And eventually at the age of 27 he took his brother's advice. His brother kept saying,

I think he should become an artist. And he did. Yeah. And he was from a huge arty family, family of art dealers, wasn't he? His brothers, I think his dad was an art dealer maybe. But yeah.

The thing that struck me about Van Gogh reading up on him is that he was such a nice guy. Yeah. Like genuinely seemed like the most unbelievably gentle. In fact, the whole family, very gentle, very sweet in a time when you'd think everyone has to be very masculine. You know, you said he became a preacher. What he did when he went to preach, he went to a mining district of Belgium, I think, as a preacher, and was working with lots of very poverty-stricken communities. And he did the Allwell thing of he gave away his clothes, his bed,

all of his money and he went and he lived as them preaching to them. He tended to the sick all the time. He was actually fired from his preacher job ostensibly because he wasn't very good at public speaking and organising people. But we think because the clergy thought, this is a bit weird, this bloke's kind of making friends with the poor. You mean he's living too like Christ? That was certainly his version of events.

I don't know. What's quite nice is you don't often hear about who the man was. You often just have these bigger ideas that he cut off his ear. that, you know, he was in the institute and so on. There's an amazing book that I'm reading at the moment by Bernadette Murphy called Van Gogh's Ear. And there's a description of what he was like from his friends.

They said he had a strange gate. He had distinctive rapid footsteps. Due to the loss of 10 teeth in 1886, he had a slight speech impediment, spoke quickly, which combined with his Dutch accent, apparently made it for it hard to follow. He spoke multiple languages. He spoke English, so hence Ramsgate.

He spoke Dutch. French. You never hear that kind of side of Van Gogh, just the day-to-day stuff. I want to know how you lose ten teeth in one year. We've all picked up on the same detail, no one. Those are all the languages, mate.

He spoke French, did he? Okay. Yeah. Ten teeth. I know. You know what's weird about his name, Vincent Van Gogh. I always thought, oh, that's just his name, right? But he's like Da Vinci.

That's of Gok. From Goff. Yeah. But he signed the paintings, Vincent. But he signed the paintings of Vincent because I think he wrote a letter his brother, no one can say Van Gogh. Yeah.

So he just said, I'll just sign the Vincent. Well, it's true, no one can say. No one can say, he's absolutely right. His main influence, I love this artistically, was his cousin. Did you guys find his cousin's name? No. What was that? Anton Move. I did find them, yeah.

Who was a successful artist? And do you know that Anton Move was famous for painting in grey and blue tones? He never painted in Mov. Wait, but if you put grey and blue together, isn't that sort of my kind of? Dirty blue Yeah you got to add some red in haven't you But yeah Isn't that funny

That's very weird Molde means Mallow like marshmallow in French That's where that comes from Yeah It's really interesting Because we all have this impression That totally underappreciated in its time

This post impression more like It's good stuff Because he was a post impression Yeah no no we understood it I think I've I'm trying to say something Andy Thank you Dan We all have this impression

that he was unappreciated in his time and that I guess I thought you know he died and then ages later he lots of his paintings were sold but actually first of all he went to art school and the students who met him a lot of them said he's clearly a genius you know he worked insanely fast

he created these extraordinary canvases his tutors hated him because he didn't do what they asked him to do so they'd say paint this statue in the middle of the room and he'd like paint the walls and the floor and the chairs and the other people but you know people who remember him said Yeah, he was pretty damn good. And his whole family said he's a genius.

Theo, his brother, devoted his life. And then Theo's wife devoted her life to making the world realize he was a genius. And also it was literally straight after he died that he became famous, right? It was like within sort of five years, there were these big exhibitions on where everyone was going, oh yeah, he's good. He was kind of almost famous, wasn't he? He was so on the cast. He was part of a group and he did have some exhibitions of his work before he died. And even ones that were shown to the president of friends.

at the time. So it was, you know, I think if he'd have not died, he would have been famous within two or three years. Right. I think. Yeah. Dying helps an artist. But yeah, and he only, he sold just one, didn't he, in his lifetime, to Anna Bok. It was the red vineyard, and it was sold for 400 francs. And she was, she was the only female member of a group called Levan, which was a group of Belgian artists, but they were Pissaro, Monet, Goggan, all became quite famous, because these Belgian artists really like them and started putting on exhibitions for them. She was one of the first people to own a car in Belgium.

Wow. In Belgium. Well, this was in the 18, well, in the 18, 19, like turn of the century. So, but more importantly, she would drive alone or with her female friends. Like, she wouldn't have a man with them all time because they liked to drive around doing outdoor paintings.

So, wait, who was this? She was the one who bought. She was the woman who bought the only Van Gogh in Van Gogh's life. Wow. I saw a few claims that actually he sold a few more than that, but it's never... Yeah, I don't think we have... It's more like he sold six. I don't think we have like absolute evidence for any apart from this one, but yeah.

Some of them apparently he would barter for more paint, which is kind of amazing, isn't it? What do you mean? He'd give away a painting for more paint? Well, he'd paint and then he'd sell the painting for paint. Yeah, yeah. And then he'd turn that paint into another painting. Yes. Actually, that is perfect.

Oh, so he did sell that. If we're carrying those as sales, then... Well, you would have to pay tax on that, really. On the pain. I think so. If you're bartering, you still have to pay tax on the amount. You're joking. I'm afraid so.

I'm in big trouble with the authorities. My little barter shop for home. Speaking of the authorities, the FBI, they have an arts crime unit. And as part of their arts crime unit, on their website, They have produced a list of the 10 most wanted missing pieces of art that are out there or things to do with art and culture. And there was a big moment where a bunch of paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum, which is in Amsterdam. And they caught the guys, but they've never recovered the paintings. So it's still up there on the site.

And there's 10. They've got their top 10 list. And one of the other 10 is Estradivarius. So two of our topics today are sitting on the top 10 list of the FBI's most worst. wanted missing bits of art and culture. So cool to be sitting in prison. I'm always jealous of those guys. I take that back. I'm not jealous of them.

But it's cool to be sitting in prison thinking, ha, ha, ha, I know where this is. But I'm not telling you. Is that what they're doing? They must be, right? If they take it. And is it, are you thinking when I get out, I'll get it back and then? I'm more thinking you've got one over on these dickheads who put you in prison. I think these are the police. Yeah.

I'm sorry to sound like a cop. This unjustified imprisonment. for sealing the old price was painting. Oh, my God. Well, a lot of them were stolen by Nazis. I don't know what you think about those, Sanna. Oh, look, once you're a Nazi and an art thief, maybe a couple of years, you know, in the source.

So basically, Van Gogh was very popular in the Jewish community in the 30s and 40s when he hadn't become really, really popular yet because they were a bit less conservative than the non-Jewish collectors. And Van Goghs were like still, they were expensive, but they were still kind of affordable at that stage. And so a lot of the Van Goghs were in Jewish collections, and of course the Nazis basically stole all of those. And by 2021, I haven't got the current figures,

but the Nazi era provenance internet portal, which goes through all of the paintings and sees if they might have been stolen, they list 73 Van Goghs in American museums. They say have questionable provenance. No way. So there's quite a lot of them on display. which might have been plundered in the war. Interesting.

You would think that there would be records going back that far that would be able to nail it but it is just a bit. Yeah, it's difficult. Especially because he painted so many, I imagine that's part of it. He painted sort of a thousand.

Yeah, and you can't really tell what any of them are. Yeah. Because they're all just squiggles, aren't they? It's all just squiggles. He's not Kandinsky. I say something about the squiggles.

So the squiggles that I was referring to is Starry Knight. Oh, you're a famous one. You will have seen parodied everywhere. But scientists have looked at it and found that the squiggles that he put between the stars are an exact model of turbulence. Like, let's say you're testing an airplane by throwing a chicken into it. You need to see where all the wind's going.

And you can see the little eddies and the little walls that the air makes. And the starry night is almost exactly what scientists would see if they fed that into a computer. But the really interesting thing is he did loads of these similar paintings. But some of them were done in the institution and some of them were done when he was not having his mental issues. And the ones that were done when he was having his bad periods, they're the ones that are more correct. Wait, are we saying he could see turbulence in the sky? It's kind of weird. I'm not saying that, but there is kind of like, if that was possible, that does seem to be what it's suggested.

I like it. I like it. He had extra vision. No wonder he was a genius. Do you want a few bonuses on Van Gogh? Yeah. Go on. I just want you to guess what these things are.

Van Guff. It's an app where you put in the sound of your fart, and it gives you, it turns it into a beautiful painting. That's really good. Isn't the type of sound that an exhaust on a van makes? Oh, you're all good. It's just a logistics company based in the UK. It's sadly been liquidated now.

Oh, okay. Van Koff. Okay. Van Koff. Vincent. Vancoff. That doesn't really help you. Okay, but it's not a van then. I'm just going to a van every time. Yeah, maybe it's

a comedian or something or someone who goes on stage and does lots of coughing. You remember that farta, rolling the farta? Yes. Lepetamine. Lepetamane or whatever. Yeah, so this guy can cough the National Anthem. Or puts paint in their mouth, swells it around and spits it out into a canvas. The guy who can cough the national anthem had a very

bad COVID, didn't they? The work really dried up. No, it's Doncaster's drop-in health van. It is a van, Dan. I'm sorry, it's called Vincent Van Koff. If you've got a minor ailment, you can drop in if you're in Doncaster. And Vincent Van Schoff. Well, it's obviously a freight van somewhere.

Cabab van or something. I thought it was somebody who takes a piss out of post-impressionism. Lovely. It is a food waste recycling truck in Merseyside. These are very loosely connected to the painter itself. Anyway, the others in the Merseyside fleet are Bindee. Ezel, Oprah Bimfrey and the Bincredible Hulk. It's good.

I can find... Not Osama bin Laden. I know! Much better. Woke. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone.

We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babel. That is right. Jindobri James Yakshimash. Great. Ah yes. Where James and I have gone wrong is we are learning different language to one another on Babel. But Babel is the place where you can learn a new language. It's such a brilliant tool to use.

It makes it so much easier than anywhere else you're going to go to learn languages. It recognises that lots of people learn languages in lots of different ways, so you can fit it to your preferences. Absolutely. And from the sound of what we said earlier, Adder seems to be learning Polish and I seem to be learning English. So we'll see how that goes over the months. But no, we all use Babel.

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and get 60% off your subscription. Rules and restrictions may apply. Okay, on with the show. Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the author Thomas Hardy proposed to his second wife by taking her to the grave of his first wife, pointing at the vacant plot near it and saying, that's for you. Romance. What did she say?

She inferred that that was a proposal and she was sort of pro it. And then they sort of just got engaged off the back of they started talking as if they were engaged. I see. So, yeah. He was not the most forward of men when it came to that kind of thing. So his first wife had died. His first wife had died. Yes.

Because her grave was. Yeah, she was in the ground there. That's well inferred, Andy. Yes. I don't know if you would have got the implications of his statement. Inferred and interred. bag. But no, you can have a grave without being dead yet.

Absolutely. What? You can. You can buy the plot, can't you? Sure. That would have then become, shall we kill my first wife together? And then you'll get the next one.

And then I'll murder you? Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a very creepy proposal. It is. It sounds like a murder threat. Yeah, yeah. In fact, is it possible that it was?

And then he felt too awkward to say, oh no, you've misunderstood. And so he just said, okay, let's get married when she assumed that was what he was asking. So he married her to just soften the awkwardness of life. Yeah. Well, I got this fact from a book, which is really good actually. It's called Six Poets by Alan Bennett. And it's best poem, so it's curated by him, but then also little bits of biography in between each poem. It's a really easy read, and he's very interesting with it. And so she was called Florence Dougdale. She

became the second wife of Thomas Hardy. So yeah, it did work as a proposal. And I think he was a slightly socially quite held back character because in the book it also explains that he used to walk in the road so that he didn't need to bump into people on the sidewalk he just hated having contact with people the people who were the help in his house if they needed to put his jacket on

maybe back in the day people would literally put your jacket on they would just drop it on his shoulders and then he would do the rest because he wouldn't want any contact so put your own fucking jacket on from the start Thomas you should have learned that Montessori technique that kids can do where you put it on the ground backwards and you kind of shove your hands.

Yes. Pretty cool. Yes. It's so cool. So do you think the reason people put it on his shoulders is because he didn't actually know how to do that bit? I reckon. So, sad, yeah.

So this is about proposals. Proposals. Marriottes. I found a place that is cool to propose and which has seen a lot of proposals. Okay. The London Eye. Okay. I think within the first decade of it opening, it had about 5,000 wedding proposals.

So that is more than one per day. Wow. How do they know? You can just go up, right? But then you'll tell people as you get off right, you'll tell the staff, weren't you? We just got engaged, right? Yeah, yeah. So basically they now offer a proposal pod with three different packages.

And I think these are so funny because they sound so mad, right? Right. There is a musical proposal where, I'm just quoting from the website here, as the pod reaches the top of the arc, our musicians, hidden as tourists, begin to sing and play your special song. Oh my God. The idea is they've smuggled their instruments onto the... The pod with you.

So I presume one guy's walking very, very straight. Darling, darling, that guy seems to be pulling an elbow out of his ass. Don't look over there. Don't look over there. It's a surprise. Look at the House of Parliament. Is it... Because I would make sure if I were proposing someone on the Lander, you do it right before you're about to get off.

Because you obviously don't want to do it near the start. No, you want to do it. top. No, because then when they say no, you have to wait for half an hour for it to come down. Yeah. I just think it's a funny place to propose. Because, yeah, if you're stuck, you're stuck. That's 15 minutes, you know.

If they say no, you've got to do the whole down, going back down bit, which is the worst bit, because you've already seen all the going up bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you'd say yes and then say no at the bottom. That would be what I think. And then run off as the thing opens. No, but presumably that's part of the pitch is that's the opposite. Propose as early as possible.

If a nose on the way, you've now stuck in the space. Like usually whoever says no gets up and leaves the dinner table or goes, oh, Brian, and runs off. You've got half an hour now with that person. Turn it around. Turn it around. Yeah.

Or maybe if you say, will you marry me? And they say no. Then the guy pulls a trombone out of his ass and goes, whoop, wah, wah, wah, whop. David Bellamy. Do you remember David Bellamy? The politician. No, not the politician.

He was a naturalist. Oh yes, yeah, yeah. He had a big beard, and he would go around, go, oh, look at this, lovely, stop. He was on TV in the 80s. And he was, so, oh, not naturist, sorry. Naturalist. I'm thinking, where's he going to hide the trombone? Under the big beard.

So naturalist, okay, got it, got, got, got. And he proposed to his partner, Rosemary Frey in the middle of a waterlogged swaginum bog. Very much. Lucky lady. This is according to the Oxford Dixury of National Biore. and he used to call Rosemary his sphagnum widow because he loved moss so much. Fantastic. Why is she a widow when he's still alive, presumably when he's called?

Sometimes you would say like a golfing widow because I play golf all the time. So it's as if I've died by playing golf. And for him, it's as if he's died. He's actually going looking at moss in bogs. He's ever heard that, Anna, a something weird, like a FIFA widow or whatever. I think maybe I have. I think in the context of sphagnum moss, even I couldn't stretch to understanding how that would take up all your time.

And yet I know you. All these romantic proposals, very old-fashioned, obviously, they dated this day and age, but were even dated in the 1960s. I read an article in the Aberdeen Evening Express from 1961, which was all about the tradition of the romantic proposal and how it was over a century out of date, saying that the idea of proposing to someone by moonlight or by candlelight,

over a century out of date. So they're saying even in 1862, this was too old-fashioned. But I found, and I thought this was really interesting. Propose means to offer to marry someone. Sure. Ask someone to marry you. But when did, so that's an old word. When did pop the question come to mean that?

Ah, so it's either going to be like 700 AD and it's in the venerable bead or it's going to be 2012. Yeah. What are you going to plump for? 700 AD. I think 2012, outside of things. But I think if it did exist, it meant something. very different. It wasn't, you were popping a question that was not to do in marriage. So, I mean, it did originally mean you would pop any question, but the phrase pop the question

used specifically just to mean, ask someone to marry them, is older than propose. So it was 1722. It was first used in a magazine. And in fact, it's really interesting because in this reference, it's about whether a woman should propose to a man. So 1722 in a magazine, there's an exchange. And it says, I should be glad to know your sentiments about whether it would be improper for the lady to pop the question first. That's stunning. Isn't that amazing? That's so good.

There would have been people in life who remembered Oliver Cromwell being in charge who were reading about popping the question. A woman popping the question, no less. That's crazy. And to propose without having to specify to propose marriage, as in using that to mean offer of marriage,

is 1771. So half a century later. Right. That's brilliant. And you used to shorten it, you'd say, has he popped? Has he popped yet? Is it a bit of a personal.

That's a matter of a question. We're going to wait until after the wedding with being traditional. You know, Thomas Hardy's way of doing it with his second wife to be, it might not be as about as it sounds if you were living in a different culture. And who knows, maybe he had read about this in Japan. But that is one of the ways that you would propose to someone in Japan. You would say to them, do you want to be buried with me?

All words like that, I want to be buried with you, maybe, as a softer way of saying it. I read this on a Japanese website. The idea is that when a married couples die, there's a lot of family plots in Japan, and you would often be buried with the family plot. And that was a way of saying, I want to be with you till the end of our days, and you will be buried with my family. So become part of my family. Let's get buried together.

It might be a bit out of date, but it definitely existed. I mean, we say till death to us part. There's just a way of saying, till death, do us continue not parting? Or something that makes more sense. That's really nice. It's really beautiful. Yeah, yeah. I've had a lot of refusal.

I did read We've all been doing cryptic Crosswords together recently about a proposal in the Times crossword Which is quite nice This was about a decade ago And it was a

The crossword editor Was a guy called Richard Rogan Who I actually met He was a very nice guy And he helped a guy Proposed to his girlfriend Deleth Right So he put her name in the crossword

As an answer I mean it's such an unusual name That I feel that even if I knew Someone called Deleth Yeah And that looked like it must but the answer to the clue, I'd be like, it must be Delilah or something.

It can't be Delilah, yeah, yeah. Pretty Welsh girl, widely thought not to be all there. So it's in the middle of widely thought. The name Deleth is in there. I love those ones. And the guy drew it to her attention, because I think it had Deleth and it had, will you marry me, as two phrases in crossword.

But the guy had to solve the crossword and then pointed out to his girlfriend as his way of proposing. Her response, when they wrote this up, was this was a typical gesture by her new fiancé, who she said was a smite. at the best of times. It's not very romantic to say, hey, look, I've managed to do the crossword, is it? And stop the stormwatch.

Right, 2734. Pretty good. In China, you can propose to a dead person. Or people sometimes propose to dead people. Okay. Okay. And dead people get engaged to each other. Were they both dead?

Yes, where they're both dead. This is the tradition of ghost marriage, which has been going on since at least the third century. We've got evidence dating back to the third century. And it's when the family members of a dead person find someone of the opposite sex also dead to marry them for various reasons. Or

sometimes you'll marry a dead person to an alive person and so the reasons are tax. That happens in France for sure. We have talked about it in France. We have mentioned the French thing. But you need like permission off the president or something to do it in France. And that again

that's a legal thing. If your husband dies and you weren't married. That means you get none of the money but then the president says, oh, you should have gotten married so you get some of the money or something. So it's slightly different in China. And this isn't all over the China. This is just in a lot of parts of China. Culturally, if a woman dies and she's single, then

no one looks after her in the afterlife because it's your husband's descendants who look after you. So you're like, oh my God, there's no one to care of you. We can't we're your family. So we'll have to find you a dead man to marry and then you'd go and propose to this dead man's family and say, can your dead son marry our dead daughter? Because otherwise there's no one to look after her.

Okay, Bridget Jones 5 should be afterlife-based. Yeah, I don't like that, yeah. Like, that's cool. Okay, okay, yes. Renézalweg, you know, it's still, but she's died. It's a way of getting Colin Firth back into the series because he died, he's Darcy.

Yeah, so they meet in the afterlife, they don't know each other, but it's like, oh, our families have just set us up. We have to spend eternity together now. This is a film. I'm sorry, but it is. There you go. Or the other one is actually, if a man has died, And Bridget Jones's dowry.

Sorry, you're still brainstorming. I'll give you a minute. Bridget Jones's dowry. It's good. It's good. It was worth it, actually. Sorry. Sorry to cut across you.

What about Bridget Jones's die? Did? Is it that someone's going to go back into the underworld to get her out to bring her back? No, no, no, no. It's better if she just stays. She's staying. She's staying. You can actually marry a dead person if you're alive.

So this also could be another sequel because if a man's died and he's got no descendants and his family need descendants, they can marry him to a live woman. Then that means his family can adopt children of this marriage. Guys, I'm going to go out there. I think they should have stopped Bridget Jones at the first one. I don't think we're helping the world to make new ones.

What? Disagree. No way, mate. Someone hasn't seen Bridget Jones's baby. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm at Shreiberland on Instagram, Andy. At Andrew Hunter, M. James.

I've noticed his thing as James Harkin. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where should they have? Instagram at no such thing or email podcast.u.com. Yeah, podcast at QI.com. That's the most important address of all because if you have something to say to us, if you've got a extra fact that you want to add to what we've just said, well, we'll go through the inbox, and he picks out the best bits of those, and he brings it to drop us a line. That is a bonus show that we do, and you can only access that if you're a part of Clubfish, which is our secret members club. Go to patreon.com slash clubfish. There's multiple tiers of stuff that you can get there.

Do check it out. Or if you're emailing because you have a great fact that you want us to read out, send it to us to us, and Andy will pick those out for us to read on Little Fish, which is our bonus Monday show. We put down our facts. We read yours. We love it. So please do send them in. Otherwise, check out our website for any upcoming live gigs. Or just come back here next week because we're going to be back with another episode. And we'll see you then. Goodbye.