No Such Thing As Going To Spoiler Prison

Russell T Davies joins Dan, Anna and Andy to discuss scandalous lives, Swansea brides, and slipping through time. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://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 http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by Dan Schreiber Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia Get NordVPN two-year plan + four months extra ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fish It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee. Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:14Speaker 00

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• 0:16Dan Schreiber?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Fish, where today James Harkin is away, and we are joined by one of the juggernauts of British television. It is the writer-producer Russell T. Davis. You'll know his work if you've watched any British television over the last 20-plus years, starting with Queer as Folk. He did It's a Sin, Years and Years, an amazing futuristic show. And of course, he was the head showrunner of the reboot of Doctor Who. Amazing character. We were so excited. He was up for coming on the show. And he has a new book out, which is his autobiography. So if you have any interest in the world of TV, what it's like making it, what it's like going into productions and doing all the scripts, this is the book for you.

• 1:00Dan Schreiber?

  Because it's not just his time in Doctor Who and all the other shows I mentioned. There's other things like Casanova, which we talk about in this episode. And it's out now. In fact, I saw a copy of it in a bookshop just this morning on my way in here. So go get yourself a copy. I hope you enjoy the show. It's a bit raunchy. Uh, the first fact, just a heads up if you've got kids with you listening. I should add as well, if you're a member of Club Fish, you're going to have an XL version of this episode. And there's a lot more anecdotes from his life in TV in there. So if you want to get the full version of this show, go to patreon.com/clubfish, and you can find that there. Otherwise, please enjoy the show and on with the podcast.

• 1:51Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and Russell T. Davis. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Russell.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Casanova wrote his, it's called a memoir. It's a massive, massive autobiography, some pages of which are on pages watermarked with love hearts.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  There's the thing.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Because he was such a romantic guy.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Well, was he?

• 2:29Speaker 03

  He was.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Thing. I wrote a Casanova television series starring David Tennant many years ago, 2003, 2004?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  2005.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  And I had to read all 12 volumes of that autobiography, which was long.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Marvellous. It had just come out in paperback, and the paperback version has a portrait of a naked lady along the spine. So you need all 12 volumes to get the lady, a bit like the-

• 2:54Dan Schreiber?

  The Mister Men.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. Or you do that with like the MCU or something.

• 2:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Spider-Man across all the spine.

• 3:00Dan Schreiber?

  So for prudish people, they can take the boob-

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Take volume seven and re-out, basically. I couldn't look upon them, obviously. And that's long. Let me say, that's a long autobiography.

• 3:11Dan Schreiber?

  Is it?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I mean, the thing, I think the thing is about Casanova is that he's not that remarkable. He's remarkable because he wrote it down.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Because he wrote his life down. It was quite a life, I've got to say. He was kind of, he never lived anywhere, never settled. He's wandered all over Europe. And so gave us great insights into so many different countries and places. But, um, but all the, the sexual lore of the time, everyone was at it.

• 3:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Everyone's at it. He's not the great lover. He's not. Everyone was having sex at the rate that Casanova was. The nuns, priests, everyone. And he just happened to write it down.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Oh, we, I mean, because I read a review that was like, you know, by some counts, his sex count was up to about 135 different women, somewhere between 120 and 135. And then this review said, which was a lot by standards of the day. And I was thinking, that's a fuck of a lot now, guys. But you're saying, you're saying everyone else is doing it.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I don't think it was a lot by the standards of the day. I think literally everyone's at it. It's incredibly sexualized. It'd be amazing to really try and really portray what that was really like. Except that, also, there's no age of consent. It would kind of be untransmissible. You could, you'd have to show it on the dark side of the moon once. And that would be it to get, to get the full story of what it was like.

• 4:21Dan Schreiber?

  That count is not a high count. I've read Hollywood biographies where Warren Beatty, I remember he has a count that's in the thousands. I don't know how many thousands, but I do remember doing a calculation at the time. And I worked out that he had had more sex with different women than I'd had breakfasts. Not even hot breakfasts.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  At the same time.

• 4:42Dan Schreiber?

  So can I ask about the paper with the love hearts on it? Um, I read that they basically were largely unnoticed because they were watermarked. And in the hundreds of years since it was written, it's slightly faded. So if you hold it up to the light, you can see these love hearts that are on it. I thought that this was like novelty paper, but I think, they're not quite sure if he intentionally used that paper or not.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I don't believe he chose that paper because they're not particularly romantic books.

• 5:06Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  And he's not romantically swaggering through Europe. And he's not, I mean, he will fall in love with a woman every other day and then pledge his truth and then head off somewhere else. But it's not, it's not, it doesn't have hearts pulsating in it, I wouldn't have thought.

• 5:20Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Uh, I doubt that, I've got to say. I think towards the end, he was, he was, he lived a very, he lived to 73 or something. It was a very long age for a man in those periods.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Well, it keeps you young, doesn't it, doing that?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. He's the proof. Um, and he was a librarian, a castle at the end of his life. Really badly treated. He wasn't the man of legend then, as in most people aren't in their lives. And, um, so I would have thought he'd grab any piece of paper he could use. I don't think he was rich enough to choose. I think he was just scribbling away.

• 5:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  And also, he wasn't writing consciously something about love and women and sex. Although I do enjoy now that every review about him feels obliged to say, there was so much more to Casanova than just the shagging. And when you read about him, it was still a lot of shagging. So whether or not some of you think that 135 isn't a high number, I'm going to say a lot of shag, and a lot of extreme shagging. Like, we should actually cover-

• 6:14Dan Schreiber?

  Extreme shagging.

• 6:18Dan Schreiber?

  What's that?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Um, I would say, so one example of extreme shagging is shagging your daughter, I think we would agree. In his defense, it wasn't like he was a stay-at-home dad, so it's not like-

• 6:27Speaker 02

  You mean illegal shagging?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I think you've mixed up your words there.

• 6:33Dan Schreiber?

  Your order, my client was participating in extreme shagging, nothing further.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, the spin is, and tell me if it seems sympathetic in the reading of the book. Basically, this was his daughter by a woman that he'd shagged. And she really wanted to help out her own husband by getting pregnant. Because he, as all husbands were, was very keen for her to get pregnant with a son. And Casanova, her loving father, said, "Well, I'll help you out," and impregnated her.

• 6:57Dan Schreiber?

  Um, sorry, so he-

• 6:59Speaker 03

  To do her a favor.

• 7:00Dan Schreiber?

  Did he know that she was his daughter, though?

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:02Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  I've got to say, it's, because I have read all 12 volumes, and I read them diligently. And it's so constant and endless. I can't even remember that. You'd think that would be the standout moment in your memoir, wouldn't it? If that was any of us, like, wow, that chapter's amazing. Actually, it's constantly that, that. It kind of wears you down. It didn't keep me young, kept me old. I was exhausted by the end of it.

• 7:23Dan Schreiber?

  Can I present a theory? So this is a librarian at the end of his life, isn't he? And I knew him principally as a librarian. I'm a bit, I'm a bit shocked to hear about all this stuff, to be honest. But it's, it's, as you say, it's unending. He loses his virginity at the age of 16 to two sisters. And then they all have some bread and cheese. He's so attractive. He's going everywhere. He's having these amazing adventures. Is there a chance this is an elderly librarian who's making it up?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:46Dan Schreiber?

  I just wonder.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Because it's so picaresque.

• 7:49Dan Schreiber?

  I know he was a real person, because there are accounts of him meeting Catherine the Great.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I think it would be more entertaining. I think, because actually, it's kind of incest. And at the same time, he'll tell you exactly how many crayfish he ate that day. It's all of crayfish. It's crayfish mad. And I think he's got the most astonishing memory. Every bloody carriage he traveled in, every scent that he gave to a gatekeeper is in there. So I think, when you sum it up, if you read the little slim paperback version, then that sounds exotic and marvelous and maybe made up. In the full length of it, it's constant and not sexy. And not particularly masturbatory either. It would be better if it was. You'd have better fantasy than that, I think.

• 8:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  So I kind of believe it.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  The extraordinary thing is, I thought the same. I thought, come on, some of it can't be true. It's mad. But they have matched up everything they can match up. Every single ferry train he took, every single hotel he stayed in, every like castle he entered. They have a record of him going there. His, one of the famous things about him that's not sexy is his amazing prison escape. And you read his account of that, and you think, it can't be true. You know, he'd shipped away a piece of iron with a bit of marble that he found, made a hole in his ceiling, got caught, so then communicated secretly, I think, with a friar elsewhere in the prison, hiding messages in books, convinced him to chip a hole in his ceiling. They broke out. They crept along the ceiling of a palace, fell through a window or whatever, or skylight. And then they're met by a security guard.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And Casanova just says, "I can't believe you've locked me in here all night after last night's party. Let me out immediately." And the security guard believes him, and he's let out. And all of that is just, I mean, that is the Count of Monte Cristo style. But we know, we've got the records of the prison escape. We've got the hole in the, in the ceiling.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  And when you sum it up like that, it sounds a lot more entertaining than it does when you read it.

• 9:33Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  You live through every chip in that room. It goes on and on and on. He's not one for self-editing, so I believe it. I do believe it.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Okay. He sounds like a bore. Do you think he just bored women into submission? He sounds like actually he was quite tedious going on and on.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  They were all at it. It, everyone was doing, everyone was boring everyone in both senses of the word. They were like, it was all going on. It was, it was a highly sexualized world.

• 9:59Dan Schreiber?

  But apparently, he wasn't a very, he wasn't a bad character when it, I mean, who knows? But like, I read accounts of where he would sleep with a lot of sex workers, and he would not sleep with certain prostitutes if they didn't speak his language. Because he thought post-sex chat was really important. So who are you? I want to get to know you.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  You talk to women. Yes, yes, yes. He did, he did. That's why, when I did, I'm bringing it back to my version of Casanova. But I gave him a son on whom all the legends and the bad legends and the bad reputation, he did, were- Piled on top of. So that became the Casanova legend was he actually was all right.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  He was all right. He was just a man.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Although he wasn't, I really wanted to like him, you know, and I really wanted to find him a harmless, lovable rogue. I did you, I found his tone quite cruel. I found that he could be very callous with what it's, what he said about human beings. You know, there's someone who dies basically because of him and he's like, you know, did the shit. There's, you know, he thinks, oh God, I wish I killed him, but I needed him to get out. So if you're out there thinking he was a gentle soul who you could have converted, I think he had a hardness to him.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  I think that was the world. I think, oh, I'll kill him. I thought, oh, he's gone, he's dead, he's gone. I think.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did they think and feel differently? Did they? And I think maybe they do.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Um, cause he's never brought up for that. No one chastises him for that. He's never punished. He's punished for a million things like witchcraft and all sorts of blasphemy and stuff, but never for that, never for lack of feeling.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Is he in prison for the sexual misdemeanor?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  He shoves people off, I think. There was a bit of black magic, wasn't there? Or something they said or?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  I think offending, yeah, religion and public morals.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  They made up the black magic.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Cause he's offended, he's offended my morals with the thing with his daughter. So like.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. But a different world. It's like, it wasn't then.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  You just don't like extreme shagging.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  You'll have to ask my wife, all right?

• 11:49Dan Schreiber?

  Do you know the, the reason the memoirs came around is as a result of a prescription given to him by his doctor? So you, you know, the old gag of Grimaldi going to see a doctor and he says, you should cheer yourself up. I'm seeing Grimaldi. I am Grimaldi.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  This doctor said to him, you should try shagging Casanova. Cheer you up, but doctor.

• 12:06Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, no, it's not quite the parallel I was intending. He was seeing his doctor for depression and he was feeling melancholy and he said, you know what you should do? You've had all this amazing life. Go sit and write it and that's going to make you happy again. And he did, and apparently he was laughing and laugh. He could be cheering himself up and hence why it's probably so detailed and so long. He was fighting a depression.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  And he does only reach the age of 35 or something in, in the biography.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And I'm kind of glad he died when he did. Or there would be 24 volumes.

• 12:34Dan Schreiber?

  Well, apparently it stops on a final line. It doesn't conclude itself.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I think so. It's like drop down dead.

• 12:40Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, which is interesting.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Um, there's another story about him and a doctor, not the, um, the thing about him having depression and being told write your memoirs. This is when, um, he meets a stranger and the stranger says, thank you, Casanova. Thank you. You've saved me. You've saved my career.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Casanova says, what do you mean? And this guy was a surgeon and he spent years in poverty. He didn't get enough business at all. Then Casanova passed through town and gave so many people gonorrhea that this doctor's, this doctor's career, which he's had a very busy year and it was, it completely saved his career. And he said, um, but of course it's died out now and I don't suppose, um, I don't suppose you could possibly see your way. And he didn't have it this time, so he wasn't able to oblige.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  He's seeding.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yet what can I give them? Give my gonorrhea.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  I know.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  I kind of leapt into that autobiography, dying to write the moment where surely a man that sexual and that sexualized would have sex with a man. Never happened.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  And I really, and I really thought it would. I really thought if you're that open and all the society's at it like they were, and, and no, no, no, no. I'll be proved wrong by some scholar and I'll probably skip that page.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  No, no, no. But there is a bit with Bellino, isn't there?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Male castrato singer with whom Casanova falls in love and Casanova's astonished because he's, you know, he's, is it a ladies man or a man's man?

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  It's the one he, you know, he's, he's convinced that he was never, ever attracted to men. And he became convinced that Bellino was actually a girl in disguise. Grope's Bellino feels the sausage. Turns out it's a fake sausage. Bellino is a girl in disguise. Casanova's reputation for being totally 101% straight, unimpeached.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's a bit like a Shakespeare play as well.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  It genuinely is a, it's like, it's a phallus made of smooth guts around a piece of hide.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Really?

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Lovely.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Smooth guts to my dragon.

• 14:33Dan Schreiber?

  What was so interesting about the story you were telling, Anna, about how he broke out of jail is that final line is such a great little plot twist. And in my head, I'm, I'm hearing it as Casanova, but I'm also hearing it as a Doctor Who. And I think that's because the only Casanova I know and have ever seen is David Tennant.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Is just David Tennant.

• 14:50Dan Schreiber?

  But it does feel very Doctor Who-y in the kind of chaotic nature of an escape. And then there being just such a simple, finely comic twist at the end.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Were there previous ones? Like, I imagine, cause the, you know, the 40s and 50s were a more straight laced time. There wouldn't have been a kind of Basil Rathbone Casanova.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Oh, Frank Finley did it in the 60s and I think that was quite, I think it was like a Dennis Potter Casanova, I think. It was very dark. You look at it now, it looks very dark and very heavy. And I didn't watch much of it. I think it was much more of a treatise on male darkness by the look of it. Frank Finley is that? Yeah, Frank Finley. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:25Dan Schreiber?

  And it's interesting because you, you had two Casanovas in there. You had David Tennant, but you also had Peter O'Toole.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Did, yes.

• 15:29Dan Schreiber?

  Which playing old Casanova, uh, sort of telling the story. I, I love your meeting with him in the book.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Oh, destroyed meeting. Yes, yes, yes. That is a great meeting. I was, how much can we swear on this podcast?

• 15:41Dan Schreiber?

  We'll bleep it, so do it.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Okay. It's like me and the director were summoned to Peter O'Toole, like three days before filming, summoned to Peter O'Toole's suite in the Midland Hotel. And he's there in full grandiosity going, you cunts, you absolute fucking cunts. And I, whoa, hello? And, and there'd been some rewrites issued. You fucking ruined this. You fucking, are you stupid? And it was, I've got to say it was more aimed at her because I think coming from a film background, he had no concept that writers existed. It was all about the director. And so I kind of didn't get the full blast. Porcherie got the full blast and, and, but, and which I was kind of loving it. I mean.

• 16:23Dan Schreiber?

  That's why I feel like, I feel like that's almost a part of Peter.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  It was like a Sunday morning or something and I was being called a c*** by Peter O'Toole.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  It's kind of what you want him to be like. It was just one, and I loved it. And, oh, but the part was also, we couldn't work out what was wrong because we'd issued some rewrites. And, um, we're like harmless. These rewrites sort of said, I'll go to Venice instead of I'll go to Rome. And then I kind of realized he's in his seventies. He's learnt it.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  And his head's gone. It's a complete panic. So I thought, I went, how about if we take all these rewrites and just get rid of them? Exactly. Fine, get out.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  I thought, I thought it was going to be that he had had the impression he was going to be playing young, sexy Casanova and he had only just clocked. Can you imagine?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  An old decrepit librarian. What are you talking about?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Oh my God, that would be brilliant.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Okay, that's the story I'll tell from now.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Stop the podcast.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Stop the podcast.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Hi everyone. Today we are sponsored by NordVPN.

• 17:25Dan Schreiber?

  That's right. NordVPN, the all-in-one digital security app that gives you advanced protection when you're online.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  That's right. So Dan, how do you protect yourself from the sun?

• 17:36Dan Schreiber?

  The sun? I don't. I stay indoors. I have not been out for 27 years.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Okay. And how do you protect yourself from your sun?

• 17:43Dan Schreiber?

  Ah, I do that.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  So you've got to go outside to get away from him, haven't you?

• 17:48Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I'm in a real dilemma. It's the sun or the sun and, uh, I, I lose either way.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Okay. Final question. How do you protect yourself from online scams, Dan?

• 17:58Dan Schreiber?

  NordVPN, of course, Anna.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Of course. NordVPN's next gen antivirus, I assume you mean, that blocks scams and phishing before they reach you.

• 18:07Dan Schreiber?

  It's a wonderful thing that you should have as part of your security system when online.

• 18:11Speaker 03

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• 18:26Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, do it now. On with the show.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  On with the show.

• 18:34Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  My fact is, anyone working on an American TV show needs to know these colours in this order. White, blue, pink, yellow, green, golden rod, buff, salmon and cherry.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  That's not just American, that's British.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Really?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  It's everywhere. Same colours in Britain.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Yes, it's, well, I think the order's that. Yes, yes, yes. That's like, yes. I'm so glad to be here to correct you. Dream come true to come on your podcast and say, you fools. Shall we just go back to episode one? Edit me into them all?

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  I think you'll find. It's so annoying. No, we have that. We have that.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  So this is, yeah, yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  It's, it's universal. Well, it's because actually it's, the software is kind of universal. There's, there's one form of software that everyone uses. And it might as well be a monopoly because everyone works off it. And then once everyone works off it, every office works off it. So therefore if you're handing in a script, do it in final draft. So they've got the whole thing stitched up.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  And just, just to explain for those outside the industry, because, um, it's quite an interesting system. It's basically for script rewrites, right? So when you're on a TV set, things are constantly being rewritten and tweaked. And I can totally imagine, I've had this writing QI scripts as well, because we never came up with this system. Where you have no idea which version is which, and someone might be working up one version and someone might be three versions ahead. So this is the order of the colours of scripts, which tell you which version you're on.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Every new colour is a revision.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  And yet one of the colours is golden rod, a colour that no one has ever heard of.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Is it, is that golden?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Why don't they just call it gold?

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Call it gold.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Which, it doesn't really gold. It's just kind of orangey yellow, but it's, I don't know how those names ever came about.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  No, weird.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  And the funny thing is, it's like, you have to go through those colours. If you change one word, then the, and then if you change another word, a day later, you've got to go up the colour.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  Really?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It's like, because if you, if you change a field to the tavern, it's as simple as one word. Meet you in the field. We haven't got a field. Meet you in the tavern. That goes to a pink page. And if the next day someone says to you, oh, we've changed location, the tavern's going back to a field. You can't go back into that pink page because it's been issued. And then you go to blue or whatever order it is, blue, pink, blah, blah, blah.

• 20:42Dan Schreiber?

  Really hope there was one revised version of Casanova where the pages came in, the only change is young Casanova, Peter O'Toole.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. And you go through so many changes that by the time you've been there six or seven of them, by the time you've been through them all, then you go double blue, double pink, double goldenrod.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Double, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can even get to triple. Yeah. But everyone on a set is used to it. It genuinely works. On the front of the page of the script, it'll say what colour you're on. So if you're all up to goldenrod that day, you know, it means if someone's working off the blue page on that set, they're on the wrong one.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's such a good system.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  That's where we get the phrase, I'm on the same page as you.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  That's where I come from. There you go. It used to be I'm on the same colour page, but it just got shortened, didn't it?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  It just snipped in, yeah, yeah. Can I ask Russell, have you ever been involved with either self-destructing scripts or fake scenes in order to prevent against the possibility of leaks?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Oh, not. What's a self-destructing script?

• 21:39Speaker 04

  I think it's a digital version that they then delete off your iPad.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Oh, right. It was the Avengers movies.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  It was.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  It would be that it after a time. I was once approached by a kind of Spider-Man spin-off for television and the security process was so long, I gave up. I went, I'm not doing that. I can't bear. I genuinely went, I mean, I might not have ever got the job, but they wanted me to submit and it was related to Spider-Man in some way, the Spider family or something. Honestly, after sitting there for 20 minutes and still not getting through security, I just went, fuck this. I'm not, I'm not going to do that. I can't be honest.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  What do you mean, digital security or you were actually standing giving a back scan?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  To read what they'd sent me. What they'd sent me was behind so many barriers and required so many emails and so many passwords that, and of course famously, never mind all those colours, they then print those scripts on red paper, so that can't be photocopied.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Right.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Can it?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, apparently. They say.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Christopher Nolan, I think, does the same kind of thing with his films. So this is very interesting. You have to have, sometimes you're not allowed a work email or a personal email. You have to have your own new email set up and then go through two layers of two-digit.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It's mad. I've never been there because I just went, life's too short.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  It just sounds crackers.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Can't be bothered.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I spoke to one of the writers on the show Succession.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  And I asked, did you ever do things like fake scenes or fake plotlines or whatever it might be to throw off people who were leaking?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  And this writer said, no, absolutely not. The idea that we would have had the time or the capacity, we could barely do the main show, you know, because the deadlines were so fast and all this. But there was a really interesting thing. Sometimes the actors got a bit distressed by the fact they didn't know what was coming next, because you might be writing an episode while you're filming the previous episode. I mean, it's, you know, it's tight when they want 10 new episodes a year or whatever. And this actually happened and I can't say who it was, but there was a moment where the writers realised one of the actors in Succession was getting early scripts from somewhere. And there was a leaker who was not leaking it to the public, but there was some kind of internal black market

• 23:43Speaker 04

  within Succession so that one particular performer could get the scripts very early. And the writer looked through and saw, oh my God, that's, hang on, that's a script that I haven't finished yet. How do you have that? And then some kind of system, unclear. Oh. They had to sort of do a mole hunt though for, I think, who was leaking the scripts internally.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, we faced that on that last, on our last two series of Doctor Who, absolutely every single thing leaked. This is in the book.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  No way.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  And every, but every little, every little nice surprise you put in, not just big parts, but every little nuance, every little cameo, every little thing you put in, everything leaked. And they have vast security systems at the BBC. Well, they actually found the person who was leaking the information, but he was a member of the public. So ever, and you can't actually go in and arrest a member of the public. I said, why can't we? If that's my copyright.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Actually, that's theft in my eyes, but I don't think the BBC ever liked to arrest a person for theft because the BBC's not going to come out of that very well, I think. Um, I get that.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Burning in you slightly to work out who it is?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Because behind that, that person is obviously friends with someone, somewhere involved with Doctor Who, who was leaking every single thing. And, you know, will I go to the grave and never know who it was? And it might, it might be someone I stood next to every single day.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Or it's more likely to be someone sitting in an office who might be on the desk at the back whilst all the technical processes, these things go through. And whoever it was is probably sitting there masturbating furiously to this podcast, having a nice time.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Well, we get a lot of that.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Narrow it down, narrow it down.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  But with a darling cat.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Why do you, it's so confusing. Is it a deliberate thing or is it just you accidentally got drunk and you told your friend everything in the pub, do you think?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  No, it's absolutely deliberate and consistent. And it's a power game, but also it's, I also think it's genuinely malicious. Because I think it does, I mean, it's not the most destructive thing in the world, but it's slightly destructive and no programme needs anything slightly destructive, because then, then you're in a chain with that then, you know, that might transmit to just 20,000 Doctor Who fans. That's fine. But they've all had it spoilt. And also you've got to look at the, when you get something spoilt, your reaction to it.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  It's got the word spoil in it for a reason. It's not an enhancer, is it? It's a spoiler.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I absolutely think it's theft. And that's why I'm surprised we don't go further with it, except actually it's so widespread throughout all fandoms and all television shows that if you start to imprison these people who are leaking, my God, the prison population would be in crisis.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Although fun on the wings.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Great conversations.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Spoiler prison would be good though.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Everyone's in for spoiling a different show.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Amazing. They're very creative, that would be.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  And you can script that as well.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  And then you just put a big sign on the building called BBC.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  But the one thing they don't say is what they're in for. This is spoilers. I was going to hop that on. It is extreme. I'll tell you that much.

• 26:41Dan Schreiber?

  We, we did a fact a long time ago on the show, Russell, which was about Dallas and the fact that who shot J R was the big question that dominated American society at that time, right? And they filmed every cast member shooting J R so that they got, including the cameramen, including the catering staff, they all came in and had a go at shooting him so that that wouldn't leak. But, um, yeah, but you never.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  And who was it?

• 27:04Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Oh, it was Kirsten. Come on. Kirsten. How could you not know that?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  I was about to keep thinking it was Maggie Simpson.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  I just remembered fake scenes that I had written, which are Doctor Who scenes, so your clickbaiters will go mad. So bear me out, which is that we were once told that the Queen wanted to visit the set of Doctor Who and that would be enormously prestigious for everyone. How marvellous. But she was only going to Swansea.

• 27:27Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  So our head of drama, Julie Gardner, was told, and she was not allowed to tell anyone for security reasons, which kind of makes sense. And so the only person she could tell was me. So in the middle of a shoot, she said, you've got to invent a scene set in Swansea. In the middle of this episode, that we go to Swansea and shoot and then it's like, oh, that's the one I'll visit that day. So then we can arrange that, but you can't tell anyone. So we couldn't tell the producer or the locations guy or stuff like that. So I, I suddenly issued this pink page with a scene where the target's like, lads, and it has to be in, you know, no one could say, oh, let's shoot this in Cardiff. You know, so it's like, it arrived on the Swansea seafront, the middle of an adventure,

• 28:10Speaker 02

  where the doctor's typically going, there's the mumbles, it must be this. And the entire production team's sitting there going, why have you done that? We can't afford this. Well, the producer are going, we can't have a date in Swansea. And I was going, that's a really, really important. And they go, it's not important. He just walked out and he says that's, and what's it more? And you literally were not allowed to say. It was on pain of death. And also I genuinely believed that would be very good publicity for the show. I thought it would do Doctor Who good to have the Queen there. And then the Queen changed her plans. Oh, and it's just all never happened.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, she went to Cardiff that day.

• 28:48Dan Schreiber?

  Um, I was looking into screenwriting generally, both for TV and for movies. And I particularly like when requests get made by the production heads and the screenwriter is asked to change the script in such a way that it just seems insane. One of the examples I found was there was a movie called Prick Up Your Ears, which is the story of Joe Orton. And it was written as a book by a journalist called John Larre and then Alan Bennett got it and he did the screenplay of it.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Great film. House, I'm just going to call on my Dan Bingo card that we've got.

• 29:18Dan Schreiber?

  Absolutely.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Everyone you're interested in into this anecdote. I love it.

• 29:22Dan Schreiber?

  Well, Joe, Joe Orton was a gay British playwright. His partner, Kenneth Halliwell, murdered him with a hammer in their house and it was a horrible story. They were very young. The notes that came back to Alan Bennett, he says in his introduction, is, we love it, but could Joe Orton be American and could he be a heterosexual?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  No way.

• 29:42Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 29:43Dan Schreiber?

  And that, what do you do when a note like that comes through, Russell? Do you just abandon shit?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  You just have to dig your heels in. I did get a note saying, well, we thought this woman was super strong and we thought she was super clever. Why is she crying in this scene? And you see they're going, three pages earlier, her lover was shot dead in her arms. And you literally bang your head against the wall just going, who the? I honestly, it's incredible. But in those situations, you just.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  No, I think.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Dig in. You just sit there going, no, nothing's changing there.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  It's anti-feminist that you suggested a woman would cry, but something as small as that.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  It doesn't make us sound like a girl boss anymore.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Just on the madness of scripts and how up to the wire they can go. Tom Cruise had an episode in Days of Thunder in 1990, where they were rewriting the script so, so much up to the last minute, that he was actually, had to get in a car and do a car chase or something, or drive a car just after they changed the script. He hadn't memorized a line, so they taped his cue cards to the windscreen of the car. Now, I don't know how you don't see it in the filming, but so he could shout them out, which A, I find it so weird that you're expecting an actor to act plausibly while reading off cue cards and driving. But he did indeed crash the car as a result. Yes. He's had two car crashes, because that led me on to another script that he did in 2004, 2005, Collateral with Jamie Foxx.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Good film.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  And Jamie, it is a good film, and there's a car crash in that. And Jamie Foxx was responsible for accidentally crashing the car in a stunt. And he said it was very funny, because Jamie Foxx wasn't that famous at the time, and Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise. And he said, the crew and cars all just scrambled over Jamie Foxx, kicking and sizing. "You're all right, Mr. Cruise, you're all right." Poor guy, shambled on.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  I worked on that television programme that blew up Anthea Turner, live on air. You know that? You know, the television presenter, Anthea Turner, she was there. It's on every BBC Safety film, up to you. U P to U. We were so ahead of the day. When was this? Like, to 1992, 93?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  And Anthea Turner, live from one of those air shows indoors, they sat her on a pyrotechnic. She sat on a pyrotechnic, did that, and it was on a Saturday morning TV, did the link to camera, and it's probably, you'll find it online. So she's sitting there, and it explodes on her. She drops out of camera. And the careers that were ruined after that, because how did that happen? Who said, "Sit there"? There was never a clear story told, but, oh my god, when it goes wrong, it goes properly wrong. I'm just, I'm just like, the thought of, no offence to Anthea, but the thought of Tom Cruise, like, being, how much did that crew scramble? They must have wrecked. The desperate, astonishing that can happen. It's absolutely astonishing.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  It's amazing. Thank god it does, for the stories.

• 32:23Dan Schreiber?

  On death, there was a writer called Alvin Sargent, and he wrote four Spider-Man movies. So you might have worked with him had you gone through the security. But he always used to say, and he has passed away, that on his tombstone, he would have loved to have read, "Finally, a plot."

• 32:39Dan Schreiber?

  Wonderful, lovely. That's a writer.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  I want my tombstone to say, "Now available on DVD."

• 32:49Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  My fact this week is that in Wales, you used to be able to get married by jumping over a broom together, and divorced by jumping backwards over it.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Lovely. Did you have to be together as well for the divorce?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yes, I believe you did.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  You see, now, I'm now so old that you're running pieces of folklore past me that I remember. It's like, I know that, you sent me this information, I know the phrase, "Jump the broomstick."

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  As, as a marriage thing, that, and whether it's because I was born in Wales or not, but I instantly know that means marriage.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  I'm so glad you know that, because it was a common phrase because of this. I'm not sure how many marriages were done.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  It was, it was, and therefore 70, I've been, I wonder, I was six or going into the 70s. I literally, I can't think where or when it was said, but I literally know it as a thing. And also, the tradition, at the same time, the tradition of, of if a couple were in bed, of putting a broomstick down the middle of the bed to stop them copulating. That was a thing as well. Like, it was kind of a joke phrase you'd expect your grandmother to say, like, put a broom down the bed. So it was both marriage and the opposite of marriage. It's like, weird.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  There we go. Let's clarify, in case listeners start questioning your age, that I don't think that people were actually getting married this way, even in your childhood. But, yes, the phrase.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  The phrase, that's what Russell was talking about.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Was it called a bezem wedding?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  A bezem wedding, yes. Yeah, so bezem was the name for brooms before brooms came along. I never thought about this, but the word "broom" is just named after the broom plant. It was just the plant they made brooms out of.

• 34:25Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Didn't know, didn't know broom was a plant. Yeah, no, what's a broom plant?

• 34:28Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, nor did I, so.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Looks like a broomstick.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  No, I suppose it's nice that we have this word that just is a plant because of that.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  The bit that got me about this was the, the, the bit you're dealing with very likely is jumping backwards. And when I said that, I, I tried a little jump backwards, and you're lucky I'm here. Basically, that's really, surely, surely that was the earliest anti-divorce law in the world, because it's impossible to jump backwards. Can you jump backwards? I'll try jumping backwards. Let's all do it now.

• 34:58Dan Schreiber?

  I'll have a quick go.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Come on. It's like, be careful, because it's odd.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  I'm so glad Russell did the practicals for this.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  You see, it's, well, good, well done.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Very good.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's a, there's an odd though, isn't it?

• 35:09Dan Schreiber?

  It is, it's an odd feeling. There's an extra detail on that that I read, because I guess it's folklore, so things get attached in different ways.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Well, and lots of different ways of doing it, because every village would do it a different way.

• 35:19Dan Schreiber?

  But what I read is that in order to get divorced, not only did you have to jump over it backwards, but the broomstick had to be put in between your front door, and you had to do it leaving the house. So you jumped over it as you were going out.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  It's a threshold.

• 35:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  It was the same with the marriage, it was always, sorry.

• 35:33Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, you would do it going in. But one detail that was added is that you can't touch the broomstick or the sidings of the door, but then they don't say what happens.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  How big are doors in, in old Wales?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Small. We're little people.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Well, how are you both fitting? How are you both fitting side by side over the broom?

• 35:50Dan Schreiber?

  I think one at a time is what I'm assuming, right?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Do you think that's where carrying the brideover comes from? Over a broom, over an obstacle.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  God, you've got to jump over the broom while carrying your wife.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  While carrying the bride, and you deserve to be married.

• 36:02Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  It's quite, it's quite interesting, the sort of, like, the reasons behind it was basically, so it was a non-church wedding, and the community that it persisted in the longest was the Romani communities in Wales, because they didn't do church weddings. And so this was another way of getting married, and, you know, without needing the church. But it was also a way of, if you've been knocked up and haven't got married, it was a way of ensuring that your child wasn't raised as an illegitimate nothing. All I can think of is the word bastard, but I don't think we're supposed to call children bastards anymore when they're born out of wedlock.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  You said the word illegitimate, that was, that was the one that you.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  That was the one, okay, yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You skirted right over it.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  That will languish.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  You don't want an illegitimate child. So it was like a way of saying, "I am officially married, but I'm not saying that this guy actually now has to raise a child. If you send me a bit of money every now and again, I'll just stay living with my mum. She'll raise the child as her own, and it will have the status of a bezem child, which is a bit better than just being an illegitimate child."

• 37:01Speaker 02

  That's a horror film, The Bezum Child.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Yes, write it.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  More Welsh romantic traditions. Your love, your love spoons.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  That's weird.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  That's the biggie. Really, I've got a, I've got a Welsh love spoon.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  You're weird, Ben. What, what do you do with it? Is it on the wall?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  I don't, you know, it's so nice that I don't use it for anything, that's the problem with that. But it was, I didn't realise how much of a thing it was.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Oh, and they completely exist still.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't, I wouldn't go to a wedding and expect to be given one or seen one. But it's a tourist thing now. It's literally just tourists.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Like horse bros, you know, it's that.

• 37:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. Because it sounded like it was how you courted someone, and you, and it had all these little symbols on it that suggested what you were envisaging with them going forward.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Sorry, that sounds rude, okay.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  It's not like a Casanova, there are 17 sexual positions running down the broom.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Very big, very big love spoon, yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  No, they are cliché though, it's like, if, if I invented like a Welsh soap opera that was really coy and sweet, I'd call it Love Spoons.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. But the, the idea is the man carves it for his intended. And it's either you're away at sea, and your car is whiling away the long hours, and that's the way you've chosen to do it, or you.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Like scrimshaw.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Or that you're actually going and sitting with your girlfriend or your wife-to-be, and this is a way of just passing the time in the long, long evenings, when you're only allowed to chat, so you may as well be whittling something while you do it.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  But is that seen as, is it always men doing the whittling? It's a man's thing.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. I believe so.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  I would say that's an offensive date. If I, if I'm going on a first, second, third date, and the guy spends his whole time whittling an effing spoon, I'm going to think I wasn't captivating enough company.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I think he was taking that.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:42Dan Schreiber?

  What would you think if he gave you a knitting sheath? That was the other love token that would be handed over.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Well, they're quite sharp, you mean.

• 38:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, in Wales.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Finally, you've outreached me.

• 38:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, there's.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  I don't know these.

• 38:53Dan Schreiber?

  It's basically if you were putting your sword away into a sheath, it's the equivalent for knitting needles, so that you would have them at the ready to pull out and knit as soon as you were.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  "Look, I need a jumper."

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Have we mentioned the bundling before as well? Because you mentioned the broom down the bed.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  But the other, more aggressive version of that, if you thought, there's no way this young man's going to be stopped by a broom down the middle of the bed, you would be tied up in a sack and put next to you, and I'm, I don't know if this happened in the 60s or 70s.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Wow. But the man or the woman was tied up in the sack?

• 39:25Speaker 04

  I think of, anyone who was willing to be put in the sack went in the sack, basically. But it was lower half only, but occasionally, I think, again, with especially dangerous, you know, young men or women, they'd be tied up to the neck in a bag. And then, and then you were allowed to lie in bed all night chatting with your intended. But it was just a safe way of ensuring that no hanky panky occurred.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  And it was both people in separate sacks, or both the same sack with a division?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  What do you mean one sack? You can't, if you put them both in one sack, that's incredibly dangerous.

• 39:50Dan Schreiber?

  That's extreme shagging. That's, you totally got it wrong there.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  This is why we get the phrase, "in the sack", "was she good in the sack"?

• 39:57Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Indeed. I, I think so. I read one source, so again, there are various versions of bundling. One source, I think, says you do have a sack which had like a division in the middle, so they're both in it, but you can't cross the boundary.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  What, it's stitched, it's stitched down the middle, like a kind of two?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  I think maybe, yes.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  You can just have two sacks. I think, as ever, all of this stuff happened sometimes and in different ways, in different places.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  And initially, bundling actually didn't involve any sacks. I think it was the Puritans who made it a bit like that. And I think back in ye olde Wales, it was just meaning two youths who wanted to shag but weren't married, and bundling meant you can have them in a bedroom together, in bed together, and they'll chat all night in inverted commas. I mean, I read in an 18th century account of old Welsh customs, and this person was saying, "People attest to the innocence of the occasion all over Wales, but the number of times you get something happening nine months after one of these moments."

• 40:52Speaker 02

  There's a hole in this sack.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Oh my god, going back to that original fact, I read the whole jumping over the broomstick, that was also the case for enslaved African Americans, because they weren't allowed to marry.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  So that was the only ceremony they could invent.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Homestead, their own accommodation, and their own rules of making their own society.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  And still is.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  That they found, yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  I think still is a traditional thing to do in some communities, and I think there's a lot of debate about where that came from. But I think the most likely is that it did come from this Welsh custom and that it was partly, you know, Welsh sailors travelling all over the world. And partly then, you know, Welsh migrants brought it to America and working class Welsh and English Celtic people in America were there with the enslaved Africans and they passed it on. A crossover you wouldn't expect.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Amazing, comely ambience. That is lovely.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Are you from which bit of Wales?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Swansea.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Swansea. Oh, where the Queen has not been.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Dammit.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  And was this, so all this stuff that we're talking about is, it was folklore, but was there stuff in your time that you mentioned to people down in, say, England? And they're like, you guys used to do that?

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny. No, I mean, it's funny. I've not thought of jump the broomstick since I was, when you sent me this article, I just knew that phrase.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Oh god, I didn't exactly, I didn't go to university going, guess what we do in Wales? We've got a broomstick down the middle.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  So I've never thought of it as, also Swansea's the only place in the world, I think, that calls a porter cabin a demountable.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Oh, lovely.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  A demountable classrooms. And I thought everyone called them demountables. So I would go through, I'd go, oh, you know, the meeting's in that demountable over there.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Well, like the porter cabin, we called them demountables.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  That's an extraordinarily different word.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Because my school, my school was, I went to a great big comprehensive school of 2,300 pupils, pupils. But in the first year, it was closed down because of the great high aluminous cement scandal. You think these recent cement scandals are new? We had them in 1974, schools were built with high aluminous cement, hospitals had been built with it, swimming pools collapsed because they were built with this faulty cement. So all these buildings were closed down. We literally went through this again recently. Astonishing. And no one remembered high aluminous cement. So our schools were closed down. So our school was rebuilt entirely out of demountable classrooms, like 40 in a field.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  What's a, why demount? Is it like dismounting?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  I think you could dismantle them. You could put them up.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Dismantle.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Dismantleables, you might as well have called them.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Oh, dismantables.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  And demounted. But only Swansea have ever heard that word. No one else has ever said that.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've never heard that. Yeah, that's great.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  One thing that originated, invented in Wales, actually, the idea of the radio play.

• 43:27Dan Schreiber?

  Interesting.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  This is very cool. So this was in 1924, I think, and BBC was in its very, very early days. And, you know, they, they've done a few bits of Shakespeare on the radio and they've done an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. But they've got a big night coming up, which is going to be a few of these things tied together. And the commissioner is saying, it just feels like we need something, something that's actually written for the radio. And a writer called Richard Hughes, who was 23, said, oh, I'll, I'll write you something. And they said, well, we've only got four days to go, so there's no, there's no way we can do it. He said, so I'll write it tonight. So that night, he wrote, I love this, it's called A Comedy of Danger.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  And it's, because it's Welsh, it's in a coal mine and it's, you know, it's like, so a party goes down a coal mine and they get into difficulties and all this stuff. And he knew nothing about coal mines. He was, I think he was trying it on because he was Welsh and he thought that's what they would want. Yeah, pretty much. He said, you know, he wrote it in one night and it went out a few, three days later, it was recorded and bang, first ever radio play written actually properly for the radio.

• 44:30Dan Schreiber?

  Do we still have it? Was it recorded at the time or would that have just gone out and disappeared?

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Oh god, those things, 24.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, seems unlikely. They haven't kept Doctor Who episodes from the 80s practically, so I'd be surprised.

• 44:40Dan Schreiber?

  We've probably got a script somewhere.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  I like him. He was a grifter and a grafter at the same time.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  They used to believe in knockers, apparently, which were tiny miners who mined under the ground in Wales and alerted real miners to where the location of mines was. And Welsh miners up until the early 20th century would say, the only reason we need to dig here was because we heard the knockers knocking away. And you'd hear, and I just read such sincere attestations that people will say we're crazy, but I heard them drilling the other day.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  That's a Doctor Who story. There we go.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Get, yes, do the knockers.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Knock them up.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Brilliant, yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  I think it'll need a name tweak, won't it?

• 45:25Dan Schreiber?

  Stop the podcast.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Stop the podcast.

• 45:27Dan Schreiber?

  Hey, everyone. This week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Salee.

• 45:30Speaker 03

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• 45:41Dan Schreiber?

  And it can be a nightmare when you are, say, in a tapas restaurant, you haven't sorted out a plan on your phone, but you do desperately need to make a call and you are going to rack up a huge bill as a result. And so Salee is your protector.

• 45:54Speaker 03

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• 46:06Dan Schreiber?

  It's also got 24/7 support. It's really essential. You really don't want those bills, guys, if you're going overseas.

• 46:12Speaker 03

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• 46:31Dan Schreiber?

  Do it now. Okay, on with the show.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  On with the podcast.

• 46:39Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the only way that there will ever be a reboot of Back to the Future is if someone goes back in time to change history. So this is the fact that Bob Sedmecus and his producer friend, Bob Gale, who was also a writer with him, had a clause put into the contract when they were making Back to the Future, when it was sold, that you can never make a remake of it, you can never make a sequel without our approval, and we're never going to give that to you. So it's a quick pitch, Russell. I think there's actually a good idea for a movie to be called Back to Back to the Future.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Back to the Future.

• 47:17Dan Schreiber?

  Where you go back in time to get them to stop writing their claws.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Employ that lawyer. That's an astonishing deal.

• 47:23Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, really.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  That is breathtaking.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Is it? Wouldn't that be a hard deal to do? I feel like you could just write it down.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Anything ever, ever, ever.

• 47:29Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Like even like your big novels and stuff like that.

• 47:32Dan Schreiber?

  Bob Gale's always asked about it and they say, when is Back to the Future 4 coming out? And the one quote that I found was, he said, you know, you don't sell your kids into prostitution. It's the wrong thing to do. We put the end of part three for a reason and they're not buckling on it. They just think they would only do it if they had Michael J. Fox. They're not going to have Michael J. Fox do it. Therefore, that's the story. That's what you get.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Hold on, could I ask, this is a reboot, not a sequel, right? So there's, it's in the contract that they can't remake the first one, but they can, you can remake a Back to the Future.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  They made the sequels.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they made the sequel.

• 48:03Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly. Yes, they made all three, part one, two and three. And the contract that they've suggested, the clause is that no reboots or sequels without their involvement. Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Can I check? Did they sign this amazing contract before it was really successful?

• 48:18Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Because.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Mostly at the beginning.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Because that makes it easier because then no one's demanding, we must have this. And if you can get it signed before it's hugely successful, maybe that helps.

• 48:28Dan Schreiber?

  Absolutely. I think that was the case.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  But at the same time, studios just want to keep everything, everything. I mean, I've had, I've had deals fall through just because American companies will want the stage rights. And you sit there going, I'm, I'm not going to give you the stage rights. And the whole deal's been cancelled because of that. So they are rapacious. So to let someone do that, that's a great lawyer.

• 48:48Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  That's really, really astonishing.

• 48:49Dan Schreiber?

  Well, it sounds like that might have been a bit of, that bit of Hollywood anyway. So Ghostbusters had a similar clause, not as strong as that, but it needed approval of, of Ackroyd, of Bill Murray and maybe one, and Reitman. And the reason Ghostbusters 3 took so long to come out is because Murray just didn't want it. He had, he didn't even write it. He was just one of the stars in it and he had a veto over whether or not they make it.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Really?

• 49:11Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. So maybe Hollywood's contracts were just a bit looser back then.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, those were the days. Wow.

• 49:19Dan Schreiber?

  There's a great fact that we did as a headline fact on Fish once, which is that the person credited as the official consultant about the future for the movie Back to the Future, he was their consultant, was the great grandson of H.G. Wells.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:31Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that's who they brought on to it.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Well, do you think that man just piped up and said, I'm their grandson of H.G. Wells and lied?

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I know how I did the job. Because really, what credentials does that give him whatsoever? Any more logs in it?

• 49:45Dan Schreiber?

  No.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's right. There wouldn't be at that period. Yes, that's quite correct. Absolutely.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Can I tell you something about Chinese time travel?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  This is really interesting because we did a fact maybe.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Go from left to right.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  10 years ago, maybe, we did a fact of saying that time travel narratives are not legal in China and that they crack down on it. Because of course, if you're changing the past, you might be changing the future and therefore you might be implying a world in which, you know, China didn't, didn't have a communist revolution, all of this stuff. So it's really interesting. That has changed a lot in the decade or so since we discussed it because there are now loads of stories which have alternate histories. But it turns out the main use of the alternate histories is to take modern political thinking and technologies back so that everyone could be communists even better and even earlier. Really, they're really popular. And they're basically make China great again stories, like Red Dawn,

• 50:42Speaker 04

  where the main character goes back to 1905 and says, hey, communism, 45 years early. So I think that's fascinating.

• 50:49Dan Schreiber?

  I did, because I remembered that fact and I thought, okay, Russell with Doctor Who, was that ever a problem? And I found an article that said in 2017, China finally signed a deal with the BBC to allow for Doctor Who to be shown.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 51:00Dan Schreiber?

  And so I looked into it more and before that, I found a blog by a lady called Susan Bloomberg-Cason. And she's an English teacher and she wrote a thing saying, I teach English speaking and listening to groups of post-grad med students here. And in order to help them learn, I put on an episode of Doctor Who. And she said, after a while, the conversation in the room started to get a bit heated. And then suddenly one of the students leapt to his feet, raced to the front and paused the episode. They followed a four-minute rant in Mandarin in which I'm told, this particular cardiologist decried both the programme, the choice of showing it, my parents' marital status and a few other interesting things. And then they all complained and said, sit back down, he's just trying to get higher up in the party.

• 51:41Dan Schreiber?

  And they watched the rest of the episode, but there were heated students who thought, time travel, not allowed. This is immoral.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Also cardiologist, he's got two hearts. I mean, that's.

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Lovely. It's so heretical. Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Wow. There was a big fuss about the BBC signing a deal with China and then was never heard of again.

• 51:57Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  I'm not aware of a single.

• 51:59Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, really?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Screening. Now you say this, I remember that. And now I'm going, I never, I'm not aware of a single sale to China or a single Chinese viewer. That's weird. What happened there? We may never know.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Tell us, if you're listening in China.

• 52:10Dan Schreiber?

  One of the early chunks of the book, of your book, is the reboot of Doctor Who. I mean, you have.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Thank you for bringing it back to my book. But you really appreciate the strenuous effort. The publicity was looking at me saying, you should be doing this, Russell.

• 52:24Dan Schreiber?

  I was being kicked under the table, actually. I mellowed. No, but you did do this. You did take on the juggernaut. And I was quite surprised by some of the details. I'm not sure if you've ever said those before, but it wasn't meant to be David Tennant. So you were recording.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Peter O'Toole.

• 52:39Dan Schreiber?

  It was Peter O'Toole.

• 52:42Dan Schreiber?

  No, but almost the equivalent, because it was Tom Baker that you initially thought that you would bring back.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Wait a minute. In 2001, I was brought in to, I kept on being brought in to meet various different people every time. And at that point, I was like, well, why not Tom Baker? Why not have, you know, the world's greatest living doctor is still sitting there in retirement. So it was discussed. And then the tide came in and the tide came out. And it was never mentioned again. And different people came in and blah, blah, blah. But it was talked about. Yeah. It was like, wow, is he so brilliant?

• 53:10Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  I was, I became obsessed, speaking of the history of Doctor Who, with something now these guys will be bored by, which is the first voice of the Dalek. It was a guy called Peter Hawkins.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  So the Daleks are often compared to a pepper pot. Everyone knows this, right?

• 53:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  What was his other big role? A flower pot. He was the voice of Bill and Ben, the flower pot men.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  That's really good. Pepper pot, flower pot.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Pepper pot, flower pot. Thank you.

• 53:39Dan Schreiber?

  Can I say a fact? We have a listener called David Lever, who sent in a lot of wonderful Doctor Who facts recently. And we weren't able to do them all. But I just like this one so much that when The Deadly Assassin, now regarded as one of Tom Baker's best episodes.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Great show.

• 53:53Dan Schreiber?

  Was released, the head of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society hated it so much, he immediately disbanded the society. And then David adds, this was the last time Doctor Who fans ever got disproportionately angry.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Great.

• 54:10Dan Schreiber?

  Russell, did you, when you read the 12 volumes of Casanova's autobiography, did you read his five volume science fiction novel?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  No, I didn't. Is that available anywhere?

• 54:20Dan Schreiber?

  I don't know. We know details about it, though.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  It's people who live on the moon, isn't it?

• 54:23Dan Schreiber?

  No, they lived in the hollow earth.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  In the hollow earth, that's it.

• 54:26Dan Schreiber?

  It is wild.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Which is quite a long running hollow earth theory, isn't it?

• 54:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  That's very, keeps coming up.

• 54:32Dan Schreiber?

  It was kind of the.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Knockers, knockers.

• 54:34Dan Schreiber?

  Knockers.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  It was, it was the knockers.

• 54:36Dan Schreiber?

  That's all connected.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Casanova's knockers. That's why we're here.

• 54:44Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, there we go. Yeah, it was, I mean, it sounds amazing. It sounds incredibly inventive. Basically, it was a two, I think they were a brother and sister, and they go into the earth.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Go and they get stuck in the earth. So they all, what happens?

• 54:57Dan Schreiber?

  The brother and sister with it. Well, I mean, everyone was, was at it in the proto-earth inside our planet. They were 18 inch tall, hairless humanoids with red, blue, green, mixed colored skin.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Going back to Wales now.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  I could say that.

• 55:14Dan Schreiber?

  They would get some of their nutrients, or a lot of their nutrients, from the breasts of women, one of which produced milk, the other which was wine.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Oh, Jackerman, Jackerman, Jackerman. That's what it was like then.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Mine do that, actually, so.

• 55:28Dan Schreiber?

  Well, this is very exciting. Russell T Davies' Casanova's Knockers coming soon.

• 55:39Dan Schreiber?

  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 we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on at Schreiberland. Andy?

• 55:49Speaker 04

  At Andrew Hunter M.

• 55:50Dan Schreiber?

  And Russell.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Please don't bother me.

• 55:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Really? What the hell are you talking about?

• 55:55Dan Schreiber?

  But if you want to see stuff that Russell's up to, you do have an Instagram account, which is very active.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  I do.

• 56:00Dan Schreiber?

  Catches lots of fun adventures. And you've got your new book out. So that is out now. It's the story of your life in TV, basically. So we spoke about Casanova and Doctor Who, but there are so many more shows, years and years, Queer as Folk. It's a sin.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  It's a sin, children's shows, soap operas, everything.

• 56:17Dan Schreiber?

  Everything. It's a fantastic book. I've read it. It's called The Queerest of Folk. It is out now, so get your copy. You can also ask us some questions about this episode, if you want, by emailing podcast at qi.com. Andy goes through all the emails. He will pick out those questions. He will bring them to our special bonus episode, which is called Drop Us a Line. And you'll find that as part of Club Fish, which is on Patreon. So go to patreon.com/clubfish. There's lots of extra bonus stuff there. Do check it out. But if you have maybe an extra fact that you think you want us to know about, why don't you send that? Because we collect all of our best facts and we bring them to Little Fish. That's our Monday bonus show. So if you want to hear one of your facts read out loud again, podcast at qi.com.

• 57:01Dan Schreiber?

  Otherwise, come back here next week. We are going to be back with another episode. Thank you, as ever, to Liang Li, Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the wider Fishbuster team. And we'll see you next week. Goodbye.