Oh What A Time... - #106 Games (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!Come with us, as we roll the dice and shoot a podcasting bullseye as today we’re discussing: games. We’ve got a brief history of chess, the game... of life (as in, the board game) and.. the word gams dvlopd by a collction of Frnch xperimental writrs in tha 60s.And why on earth did we as a civilisation take so long to get round to inventing the bicycle? And why were the bicycle prototypes so bad? And has anyone else ever been to the Segway Olympics? Questions we’re desperate for you to answer, which you can do at: hello@ohwhatatime.comIf you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Wandery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wandery Plus in the Wandery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hello and welcome to part two of games. Let's go on with the show. ["Wandery Plus Theme Song"] Right, how do you recover from one man's decision to grow a beard? Now this was the big problem. Is this a reference to me at university? No.
Starting point is 00:00:36 Because the look on your face when I grew a beard but I'd shaved off the moustache is something that will remain with me for the rest of my life. Such an odd choice because the beard was great. You've got a really nice, thick, black beard. It really suited you. But then you shaved the moustache off. Clean shaven moustache so you looked like a long distance lorry driver who does a bit of murdering on the side.
Starting point is 00:00:54 And it was a bad... Do you remember why I shaved off the moustache? No. Because it was tickly. Oh. Oh, no. No, I'm cool. Comfort over fashion. It's so lame. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:01:05 Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:01:13 Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:01:21 Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. I don't know, am I saying thank you? I don't know, should I be saying thank you? I look much, I look much worse clean shaven. Yeah, me too. I look like a baby, but a very elderly baby. It's really weird, like a baby. Had a really tough six months.
Starting point is 00:01:36 I surprised my wife on our honeymoon by going clean shaven one day. She was like, what have you done? That was the last time. Like you've ruined our honeymoon. It's terrifying how Lizzie notices this stuff. She just wouldn't notice. I think I could grow like a, I could shave my head into a mohican. She'd be like, hi Elle. And it just doesn't.
Starting point is 00:01:57 But it's worth mentioning Chris is referring to utterly clean shaven from head to toe. Elle, what if you did the Abraham Lincoln there like Tom? What if you grew in a full beard and just shaved the tash off? Well, you know, it's an option for my 50s, I think. Now, this was the big problem. It was the question which faced the American lithographer Milton Bradley. Now, he had a lucrative business selling prints of the then Republican nominee for president Abraham Lincoln, who at the time was a provincial lawyer. But then Lincoln decided to grow his facial hair, and Bradley's clients turned up at his shop to demand their money back because the print was no
Starting point is 00:02:37 longer an accurate representation of their man. This was an enormous problem for his business, so he plunged into debt, his printing press stood still. I would have to say that's not on him though, is it? No. If I ran the shop I'd be like, but that's just, that's the passage of time and things change within it. Do you know what it's a bit like? He cheats. It's a bit like...
Starting point is 00:02:56 It's not on me. I remember, occasionally there was a time in the UK when, certainly in England, when David Beckham was so famous, when he had a haircut it would be on the news. And then they would often interview David Beckham lookalikes who'd be like, yeah, well, I've got to cut my hair a lot, I've got to grow at Mohegan now and buy a sarong from somewhere. Because it was, you know, you've got to look like how they are. Even broader than the lookalikes, just generally when he got a new haircut,
Starting point is 00:03:32 lots of people would get that haircut in a casual sense. At school, kids would come in the week after he had had a change in head shave or whatever it happens to be, and there'd be loads of kids in the school that had something similar. My mate made such a funny point. I remember watching an England game at the 2002 World Cup in a pub. And it was that World Cup where games were kicking off at like 7am. And I was in the pub
Starting point is 00:03:52 with a couple of friends who were England fans. And of the men who were in that pub, I would say 80% of them had David Beckham's then haircut. And my friend Pete said, imagine if they'd all come to the pub with Michael Owen's haircut. It's like a really normal... Like Steven Sherrod's haircut. Steve Guppey. Now, he needed money, right? He was in debt and he was desperate to find a way out of this financial hole he'd found himself in.
Starting point is 00:04:27 So he started tinkering with the new idea of board game. Now, Lincoln had won the election, he was in the White House. So Bradley, Milton Bradley, he began the process of creating what he called the checkered game of life. So he took inspiration from checkers or drafs, as we call it in the UK,
Starting point is 00:04:44 and from the other classic, snakes and laddersders and he came up with a game that moved players through various stages of life. Now he wanted to avoid any association with gambling so players used a teetotem rather than a die and the rule book promoted a moral journey to virtue and a happy old age rather than one of like vice and finality. So there's a contemporary... That doesn't feel like a particularly exciting tagline. Feels very much of its time. Now this is a contemporary newspaper account from Chicago. It explains the original design.
Starting point is 00:05:17 You see the squares marked happiness, ruin, intemperance, virtue, etc. Because the game conveys deep moral lessons. Tough sell to the kids I ain't gonna caravanning holiday. Right then, who wants to learn some moral lessons? Does anyone feel particularly virtuous? I know it's raining. Should we play the checkered game of life? Wow, this is incredible. Yeah, now his game launched in the autumn of 1860, so very quickly, up to 45,000 sets in the first year. Wow. So to follow up this success, Bradley hit upon a genius idea. Now the Civil War was
Starting point is 00:05:57 ongoing. So he reasoned that carrying full-sized board games would be impractical for those in the armed forces. So this is great. I didn't know this came from this. He came up with a pocket-sized version of the game, ideal to fit in a knapsack or in a care package sent from home. Like a travel version. Because we had travel chess, we had travel drafts. Travel Scrabble. Travel Scrabble. Now he also printed miniature versions of traditional games, including checkers, backgammon and chess, with the miniature playing pieces. With all of this activity Bradley he was
Starting point is 00:06:30 well on his way to turning his idle print shop into a substantial company and it was all based on the humble board game. So spin-offs from the checkered game of life included buying and selling which taught the value of money, American politics, which turned the presidential race into a card game. And retailing the donkey, which was the ancestor of Buckaroo. Really? That's a bit of a departure, that one, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I don't know where the virtue is in retailing the donkey. Now, there was enough demand for these products that Bradley was able to publish an annual catalogue, matched by catalogues from wholesalers. By the First World War, the company had a product list
Starting point is 00:07:06 of 700 items covering activities such as trade, or underworld travel, and department store shopping. Wow. Now eventually, he admitted the source of his inspiration for his board game, which was a much older game invented in England at the start of the 19th century, and designed by the children's author, George Fox. Now Fox had called his game
Starting point is 00:07:25 The Mansion of Happiness and it was a morality game designed to teach and reinforce Christian values of the sort Bradley himself had learnt as a child. The game had crossed the Atlantic in 1843 where it found a ready market in Puritan Massachusetts and sales was spurred on by the crazy board game launched that year by Dr Busby, a card game which was a bit like Happy Families. Now Bradley though, he was the one who made the fortune. So his games crossed the Atlantic, finding a market in England in the late 1860s that matched the one that was in the United States.
Starting point is 00:07:57 And with these English contacts, Bradley then introduced other pastimes into the American diet, including croquet. So he bought croquet bat. Wow. And then he published a set of rules under pseudonym as Professor A. Roevin, 1866, because obviously he's now a big deal in England, so he's bringing English things back to the US.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Now, there were those such as George Swinnerton Parker of Salem, Massachusetts, who recognized that Bradley hadn't exhausted the board game market. So Parker founded his company, which eventually became Parker Brothers in 1883. And over time, they would publish games such as Monopoly and Risk and Cluedo, and they even bought the rights
Starting point is 00:08:37 to produce The Mansion of Happiness, and that edition appeared in 1894. The third one, which is a company we'll all have heard of, Hasbro was founded in 1923 as Hasenfield Brothers by Polish immigrants to the United States and Hasbro would eventually take over them all. So the checkered Game of Life was remade in 1960 to mark the centenary of Milton Bradley's invention and this new version known simply as the Game of Life, is very different from the original,
Starting point is 00:09:12 which obviously was very moralistic. It's a bit lighter. Yeah, yeah, it is a bit lighter. But the concept also is to make as much money as possible and to become a millionaire tycoon. So at the height of American capitalism, greed was the game of life rather than happiness. Wow!
Starting point is 00:09:26 That's fascinating. I've no idea what Milton Bradley would have made of that. Yeah. But you know, we can be a little too kind to Milton Bradley. He obviously was a capitalist as well. Don't know what his moral code was. His products helped to drive forward the toy market and fill the shelves at department stores all over the world.
Starting point is 00:09:44 And it all began because a politician who had lots of other things on his mind decided to grow a beard. Isn't that crazy? That's amazing. So he was from Maine and he died in Massachusetts. He was a working-class Protestant. I can't believe he had 500 products. 500 product lines. Trained as a draftsman after high school in Massachusetts, which is where, in Lowell, which is where Jack Kerouac is from. And then he set up as a lithographer. That's amazing. He was working in Rhode Island.
Starting point is 00:10:14 That's where he set up his shop. After the success of his early board games, he became involved with children's education, notably through the frugal method of learning through play and via the kindergarten. And in addition to board games, he manufactured learning tools, magazines devoted to education,
Starting point is 00:10:29 and even a set of wax crayons. And they existed well before Crayola came along. Wow. Yeah, yeah. This guy's a genius. I know, I've never heard of him. Ideas Factory, that's fantastic. My sister-in-law lives in North Wales with my brother, and she's a Welsh speaker, and so is
Starting point is 00:10:47 her daughter. They were playing Monopoly once, and then during it she went, wait a second, I've got a great idea. Why don't, there should be a Welsh version of this with Welsh place names. This would do so well. So she rang up. Is it Parker? Is that the company? Whoever it is that owns Monopoly. And they were so excited. This is going to be my money making scheme. Rings them up and goes, Hi, I've got an idea for a board game. They're like, okay, and what is it? She goes, it's to do with Monopoly. They go, okay, we'll put you through the right department. Hello, okay. So yeah, so what's the idea? And she said, I can't tell you that because you might steal it. They said, well, you have to tell us it, otherwise you can't go any
Starting point is 00:11:31 further. So, she was stuck in this impasse. She goes, okay, well, I just worry if I tell you you're going to steal the idea and I'm going to lose the money. I just worry about telling you. And the guy on the phone goes, can I ask, can I guess, is it a regional version? It's sort of like a silence. And she goes, well, yeah. And he goes, which region is it? She goes, once again, I can't tell you because it might nick it. And he goes, shall I read the regions we've got? And then you could tell me it's one of them. He starts reading all the regions, gets down to Welsh, which of course has taken about
Starting point is 00:12:11 60 different options. Yeah, because there's the Swansea version. Yeah, anyway, good talking to you. That's it, phone down. Oh my God, there's a carbon version. This was going to be her big money making scheme. That is that person's job, is answering the phone to people who think they've invented regional monopoly. That is as easy a job as being the king's chessboard person. Apparently when he said the thing of is it a regional version, it was in a slightly sort of tired resigned way.
Starting point is 00:12:42 That's so funny. That's probably the eighth call he's had that day. Can I just check, is it a regional version? Is it? Monopoly set in Bristol by any chance? Yes. OK. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:12:54 Thank you. We've been selling that since 2005. Bye now. Well, that was fascinating, Al. That guy's an absolute legend. 500 product lines and also bucking Bronco. Is that what it's called? The one, the precursor to that? Is that the horse game where it chucks everything off? That guy's an absolute legend. 500 product lines and also bucking Bronco. Is that what it's called?
Starting point is 00:13:06 The one, the precursor to that? Is that the horse game where it chucked everything off, did you say? Buckaroo, that's the one. That's what he, yeah. I can't believe that the game of life came from like this sort of Christian moralistic. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:17 Yeah, I know what you mean, but I can see why it would reflect that sort of. Also the checkered game of life really does suggest life's ups and downs, doesn't it? Yeah, checkered. Boy is it checkered. You may as well call your board game not all plain sailing. You will no heartbreak the brand new game from Waddingtons. Aren't games supposed to be a relief from the stress of life? I know, like, why would I try to replicate the stress of life in a board game.
Starting point is 00:13:47 Exactly, make your board game called 9 to 5. Which is loads of admin. New for Christmas from Hasbro. It's the new game working through your lunch break. Right now, let's go back in time to 1960. You sat at a table in Paris, France with some experimental writers, Italo Calvino, Georges Perrec and Raymond Cuesno. And you're discussing right now how to transform literature through the use of all sorts of literary games, including multiple choice plots, lipograms, pranks, hoaxes and other forms of amusement. This group is called the Workshop for Potential Literature or ULIPO. So, do you know
Starting point is 00:14:48 what a lipogram is? A lipogram? Yeah. No, I don't actually. I don't know. It's amazing there's a word for this. It's a kind of constrained writing or word game in which certain letters or groups of letters are avoided. Okay. Yeah. Right, so write a sentence without the letter E or whatever. Exactly that. And boy, did they really go for this. So, George Porek was a French novelist and filmmaker. His parents were killed in the Second World War, actually.
Starting point is 00:15:16 One in active service, the other at Auschwitz. And George Porek went about creating a lipogram. He actually produced a novel called La Disparation, published in English as The Void, a complete novel which didn't use the letter E. That's pathetic. I read that and I was like, it's giving me a headache. Can you imagine how difficult that would be to write a novel without using the letter E? Why?
Starting point is 00:15:50 I've not got a problem with the letter E. There are certain literary devices I've got a problem with. There are certain storylines and tropes I've got a problem with. I would avoid them. But the letter E for me is fairly benign. In fact, I would say I love it. Isn't this the English language's most used letter? Well, I love it, is he saying? Tom, as one of the nation's finest comedy writers, can you imagine a challenge like that, of trying to like, would you enjoy that? No, and I think we could probably agree that writing a novel is hard enough on its own. Like, that's enough of an undertaking.
Starting point is 00:16:29 I'm impressed already because you're writing a novel. You don't need to then go, just in case you thought that was good. Imagine being his literary agent. You've got your feet up on the desk and you're like, excuse me, mate. You've been one of my clients for 10 years now. I love your work. I've read your latest. Like the story, I can't help but notice there's an awful lot of E's in this. Will Barron I don't know if I'd notice.
Starting point is 00:16:52 Jason Vale I once wrote a novel only using the letter E. It's about a man who fell down a well. Will Barron Very good. Jason Vale It's all right. It's okay. You're very kind. Well, obviously, writing a novel without the letter E is very challenging when you consider that in French, the first person is G, you can't say that. You can also get the French word for and is et, so you can't say that. And you couldn't even write his own name because obviously, George Perrec has got a few Es
Starting point is 00:17:24 in it. He couldn't even write his own name, because obviously George Parek has got a few E's in it. He couldn't even say his own name. I wonder if the translated version, because that's a... I know a lot of translators. It's a difficult job, but you're making a difficult job very tricky. Do you mind translating this novel for me? Yeah, sure. You're not allowed to use that as an E. Who is this for?
Starting point is 00:17:43 Is it for them as a personal challenge? It personal challenge? Doesn't it feel like it's for the reader? Because from a reader's point of view, I'm not thinking I'd love to read a novel that doesn't have a letter E in it. Is it for your pretentious friends that you want to impress? It probably is an element of that, isn't it? I think it is that. That's really what it is. It's for that small group to go, look what I've done. This is insane. Yeah. Yeah. It's for that small group to go, look what I've done. This is insane. Yeah. That's incredible.
Starting point is 00:18:07 Of course, there is an aspect in the age of AI. It wouldn't be as impressive now, but to be doing that back then in the 60s is incredibly impressive. You know that's come from his own mind. A letter that I think we could probably do away with, I don't think there's much need for Z A letter that I think we could probably do away with, I don't think there's much need for Zed, really, in general. S can often do that, can do what Zed is doing. If we were ever to condense down to a 25-letter alphabet, that is the one that I think we'll probably go. How often are you using Zed, really? Unless you go into the zoo, when are you using it? Yeah, and you could get around a horse like black and white animal. That's how you get around saying zebra without it.
Starting point is 00:18:47 Yes. It's easy. And a lowercase 100 in Z often looks quite daft as well. Yeah, exactly. Parekh. So obviously he's written this first book, La Despairation, his second one, 1969. He's like, right, I'm ready for a new challenge now. Here's what he does for his book, Le Revitant, in 1972.
Starting point is 00:19:11 He only uses E as a vowel. There is no A, I, O or U. E is the only vowel in this book that he published in 1972. Okay. That's harder, isn't it? That's harder than the first book. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, it just gives me such a headache to take on this kind of challenge. It's just so unnecessary. I know. And it's both a lip... So writing that technique is both a lipogram and an antilipogram.
Starting point is 00:19:42 Okay. It's ramped up the complexity of writing a novel. Yeah. It's mind-blowing. The Oolipo practitioners also came up with other ideas and other literary games. The other one, which I mentioned at the top, was the multiple choice plot. Many as kids, many of us have had a kind of choose your own adventure story where the path through the novel is different according to the choices we make at the end of every chapter. I loved this device as a
Starting point is 00:20:09 kid. That I can get behind. Huge fan. Yes. Why isn't it bigger? It should be bigger. Why isn't there a big novel that is multiple choice? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a huge opportunity for someone. We've of the multiple choice, enter the Argentine novelist Julio Cortesa, although not directly associated with the Oulipo, he took on the challenge of a multiple choice
Starting point is 00:20:34 novel. And his novel, Hopscotch, was published in 1963. There's a few ways you can navigate through. You could just read the chapters in order as they are numbered, a conventional narrative flow where the story develops in a really straightforward manner, or you can hopscotch it, non-linear reading. So in this more experimental aspect of hopscotch, Cortesa provides a table at the beginning of the book which offers a different order for the chapters. And this is where the multiple choice concept comes into play. The reader can choose the order of the chapters, skipping around the book, creating a completely different reading experience and it's kind of... Wow!...and it's meant to reflect the fragmented,
Starting point is 00:21:15 disjointed nature of modern life and thought. I admire the invention of it to be honest. Oh come on, just give me a nice story. Kid finds something in a den that is evidence of criminal activity. They don't go to the police, they decide to investigate themselves. In the end the bad guys end up in jail. That's what I want. Don't want a hopscotch plot. I like the letter E. Lots of pictures, big writing. Let's keep it simple. It just reminded me, as a kid I had a Crystal Maze book. I remember laying Crystal Maze on the TV show, you'd go like Aztec Zone, and he was like, do you want a physical, a mental game? And you would pick, and you would go to a different page and do that activity, and like
Starting point is 00:21:59 answer the questions, and then go to a different bit and find out whether you were locked in or not, and then you could get to the end and work out how many crystals you got. That was a great book. Should be bigger than it is. Yeah so you could opt for Hopscotch to hopscotch through the book and yeah it's meant to be the chaos and unpredictability of human experience and also allows for new interpretations and deeper layers of meaning. Other Oolipo techniques include S plus seven or the N plus seven. So this is a 1961 invention of the poet Jean Lascure, which involves replacing each noun in a text with one seven places later in the dictionary. Okay?
Starting point is 00:22:40 So you'd write your novel and then for every noun you go get the dictionary out and you look at your noun and then you go Seven places later the dictionary and you replace that word with whatever's there L you look like what you do it. Why you do it? My first question to that author would be and she's left you again Do you want to go grab you gonna have a chat and a beer? Because this isn't okay. This isn't normal. Yeah. It is hard enough writing. So every letter, which is every noun, every noun rather. Yeah. Every noun in a sentence. Replace the letter seven letters later in the alphabet.
Starting point is 00:23:22 Exactly that. What a waste of time. What are you doing? Also, I feel for the sub-editor, there's someone who has to go through and check everything. Yeah, you have the original text and the noun seven places. You're having to put up with this rubbish. You're thinking, this is not why I got into this job. I've been to proofread that. There's a lot of maths in this latest job. And it doesn't, I mean, it's not going to make a lot of sense, is it? I just don't, it's going to be so hard to write a story that was going to make sense.
Starting point is 00:23:50 There was another invention as well they came up with, which was called Pielish. Now can you guess for me what Pielish means? Is Pielish a French description of something, Pielish? Or can we read into the word pie? You can read into the word pie. You can read into the word pie. We can read into the... Oh, is it something to do with pies and the number? Yes. Okay. Is it...
Starting point is 00:24:11 This is crazy. This is a real headache. You're taking the original word and then extending it beyond its length so it's longer than, you know, to a certain amount of places or something. So it's like 12 extra letters of the alphabet. This is all going to really get on my nerves. I can taste it. The worst pie you've ever tasted. To write in Pielish, you have to write sentences
Starting point is 00:24:35 and the letters within words have to match the number sequence of pie. So pie, 15 digits or whatever, it's like 3.14159, et cetera. So the first word in every sentence has to be three letters and then the next word has to be one letter and then it has to be four letters and then it has to be one letter in the sentence.
Starting point is 00:24:54 So for example, to write a sentence in Pielish, how I need a drink alcoholic in nature after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. That is a sentence in Pilish. So three letters, one, four, five, nine, so on, right? Right, yeah. And this was part of a TV show called France's Biggest Lose, where they got a collection of the lamest people ever to write the most boring books of all time. Are you ready now to have your minds blown?
Starting point is 00:25:26 Because I'm going to convert that pilish sentence into N plus seven. So we just read a pilish sentence, how I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. Let's now N plus seven that. So for every noun in that sentence, I'm going to replace that word with the noun seven places later in the dictionary. Are you ready?
Starting point is 00:25:49 Don't feel you have to, Chris. How I negotiate a driving alcoholic in navigation after the heavy legs involving quantum medicines. There you go. And so... Do you know what's crazy? It takes all of the fun out of books. And I love books. And also, both of those sentences in their two versions are bad. They're bad sentences. It's like, it's just boring sentences which aren't particularly pleasant to listen to. Surely after about a paragraph tops, you're like, okay, yeah, yeah, I get this now. Okay,
Starting point is 00:26:25 fine. That's enough. We'll put that back on the side. It's mind-bending work, isn't it? I wonder if a bit like, I remember studying Shakespeare at A-level, when you're writing in the sort of structure of Shakespearean sonnets and stuff. It's very hard when you're set that task to write a sonnet as a kid. But I suppose if you do that all the time, you must end up doing it naturally. I wonder if you just end up getting a knack for it. It becomes easy, writing without... Not easy, but easier, I would say. In the same way that if you do lots of...
Starting point is 00:27:08 I know what you mean. Like Tom does, if you do lots of gag writing for TV, you just get much quicker at writing scripts because you just learn efficient ways of doing things. I'm sure that is right. I'm sure it's like a new language, isn't it? Yeah. To some extent, that's what it is. So yeah, the whole idea of Oolipo, this group, was that you would come up with literary devices that would add constraints to writing and a bit of a game for the writers and for the
Starting point is 00:27:34 readers. Maybe show off a bit. But the idea is that literature is about entertainment. They were entertaining themselves, hopefully trying to entertain the reader along the way. Do you know what? Although I can't embrace it as the idea of a full novel, I do actually like those sort of games at Christmas and stuff. So there's a game where one person in the room takes a book from the shelf, so that person knows what the opening sentence is of that book, and everyone else has to write down what their version of what they think the first sentence of the book will sound like. They're all then read out, and whoever gets the most points, whoever gets the most people think that's the real sentence, they get the points and they win. And I do like those sort of word games, but that's just sort of like a brief thing, as opposed to writing a whole novel without the letter E, which feels like
Starting point is 00:28:21 too much time has been invested in that. It's fine, it's a fun little thing for write a paragraph and a Christmas debt on it, whatever, a bit of silliness like that, but investing three months in a novel. If you were reading an article in the paper, it would be quite a fun thing to reveal in the first line of paragraph two. And keen-eyed readers might have noticed that there isn't the letter E in that first paragraph. But a novel. Come on. I'll tell you what, I'll end with this. There is a Place George Pirek in Paris, and I'm going to send you the road sign there, and maybe you'd just like to describe it. Here
Starting point is 00:29:02 it comes now. Okay. Place George Pirek. and maybe you'd just like to describe it here it comes now okay place George Parekh oh that's great so it's a it's a road sign or at least it signifies where this person that the net the guy who came up with it is it yeah George Parekh where he lived and all these are not present on the sign. So plaque, g, org, space, s, p, space, p, space, k, b, we're good. They could have written prick. We're all thinking it. Do you know what? I admire the invention, but I think it's pointless.
Starting point is 00:29:39 Yes, I agree. So that is the end of games. Thank you so much for listening as always. If you do want to support the show by becoming an Oh What A Time full-timer, it really makes the world of difference. A lot of effort and time goes into this show, not just from us, but also from our fantastic historian, Darrell, and our editor Jodie, all the people that make the show. And it's one of the ways you can support the shows by becoming an O What A Time full-timer. It's £4.99 a month. You get the show ad-free, you'll get first dibs on live tickets, you'll also get access to all our bonus subscriber-only episodes. There's loads of them now for you to listen to, and
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