No Such Thing As A Shakespeare Burger

Nina Conti joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss ventriloquists, gogillath, Shakestheare, and Twintheth Nargaret. 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 Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I have type 2 diabetes, but I manage it well. It's a little pill with a big story to tell. I take ones daily, Jardiance, at each day's start.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  And for adults with type 2 diabetes and known heart disease, Jardiance can lower the risk of cardiovascular death, too. Prescription Jardiance, emigliflozin, 10 or 25-milligram tablets, are used to lower blood sugar along with diet and exercise in adults with type 2 diabetes. Jardiance is not for use to lower blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes, and not for people with type 2 diabetes who have severe kidney disease. Serious side effects include increased ketones in blood or urine and infection in the area between and around the anus and genitals, called the perineum. Both may be fatal. Severe allergic reactions, dehydration, urinary tract or genital yeast infections in men and women, and low blood sugar. Stop taking and tell your doctor right away if you have nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, tiredness, rash, swelling, trouble breathing, or swallowing. Tell your doctor about lightheadedness, weakness,

• 0:57Speaker 01

  fever, pain, tenderness, redness, or swelling in the perineum. You may have increased risk for lower limb loss. Call your doctor right away if you have new pain or tenderness, sores, ulcers, or infection in your legs or feet. To learn more about Jardiance 10- or 25-milligram tablets, ask your doctor, visit jardiance.com, or call 1-888-968-6648.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  We have the tech to get food delivered in 15 minutes, but we all have horror stories about buying tickets. The Game Time app gives fans the advantage. Get amazing tickets in just a few taps. Fees are included, so what you see is what you pay. And the Game Time guarantee means authentic tickets at the best price every time. Take the guesswork out of buying tickets to concerts, sports, comedy, and more with Game Time. Download the Game Time app and create an account for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of No Such Things As A Fish, where we were joined by the absolute legend, that is Nina Conti.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  That's right, Nina Conti, if you're not aware of her, is one of our great stand-up comedians, but she is also one of the UK's only ventriloquists.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  She's absolutely brilliant, she's so smart, she's so funny. She's been on QI back in the day, but now she's come back to join us, and, something very special, she has a movie out.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  That's right, it's called Sunlight, and it's now out on Prime for free. So if you have a Prime account, you should be watching it straight away.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely, it's such a good film, I've seen it. It's kind of your classic road trip movie, but with a twist in that one of the characters is like in a giant monkey costume. Sounds weird, but I promise you, I watched it, I absolutely loved it, and I'm sure you will too.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  That's right, and if you want more monkeying from Nina, she's even got her own podcast, which she co-hosts with her monkey that she does ventriloquism with, it's called Nina And Monkey's Podcast. It's everywhere where you get your podcasts, so check that out as well. But really, the movie, and I'm gonna be watching it tonight, I'm so excited, that's the thing to check out, it's called Sunlight, and it's available now on Prime.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yes, one more thing to check out, if you so desire, is our Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/clubfish, and you will find all sorts of amazing stuff on there. But this week, Dan, there's something very special for everyone, even if you don't pay for it.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  That's right, so if you remember, we had Olga Cock on the show a few weeks ago, and as part of it, we were trying to brainstorm the title of a big new movie. So this was about the founder of Grubhub, and the fact that he came up with it at school. Olga came up with the name Doughboy, but we asked you, the listeners, to send in what you think the movie should be called, and we made a video going through the process of hearing the pitches from you, the public.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yes, so if you want to watch that incredibly, well, quite painful 10 minutes that we went through, tried to find a good name, it's very funny, I watched it this morning, the Fishbusters have done a brilliant edit on it. You go to patreon.com/clubfish, and when you go there, there is some stuff for everyone, you don't have to sign up for any of the tiers, you will just see it, and this is one of those things.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  That's right, so do that now, check out Nina's movie. But for now, listen to it here, on Fish, here we go, on with the show.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Nina Conti, and once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Okay, my fact this week is that one of the most important people in Incan society was the ventriloquist.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  That's incredible. I mean, with a puppet, with a not moving their mouth, what kind of ventriloquist?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Not so much a puppet. It was, they were trying to throw their voice. So this is something I read in Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was about the Inca religion where they had a priest called the Yacaca who would tell the future with fire. So they would set a fire, they would blow a pipe and the flames would bounce around, and he would take some coca leaves, and then he would supposedly summon the spirits, and when they came in the smoke or whatever, or in the fire, he would start to divide the future, say what's going to happen, say what the leader should do. And a chronicler called Pedro Chiesa de León said that they did it by ventriloquism.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Hmm. It sounds like a good act. There was a rumour about the oracle at Delphi being a ventriloquist thing behind it, but also that there sometimes a sort of tube or tunnel leading back from the mouth that somebody is speaking into, like one of those things in the playground where you...

• 6:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I would think Incan society, there are a lot of severed heads going begging, you know, so you could, you could have the puppets if you wanted.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  You could. But that wasn't a thing then, was it? Ventriloquism, when it started, wasn't to do with puppets. It was projecting the voice to make people think it was coming from somewhere else.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  So this is what this is, it's projecting the voice. So it's making you think that the voice is coming from somewhere else.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  But ventriloquy being a stomach speaking.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Yes, so the oracle at Delphi, the story was put about that it felt like the voice was coming from either her stomach or sometimes from her genitals. Although those stories might have been written by Christians later who were trying to...

• 6:45Speaker 05

  And perverts.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Right. Not always different things.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  But gastromancers also is a thing. Yes. I don't know whether any of this is true because I learnt ventriloquism from Ken Campbell, who had no respect for the boundary between truth and fiction. But the way he told me was that gastromancers would go into supposedly haunted house and imbibe the spirit up through the genitals and guide into the stomach. And there they would soothe the angry spirit with chat. Okay. And then walk away with it.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Oh, and expel them outside the house?

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, who'd take them up?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Would you fart them out or? I think so.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Outside. You'd do that outside.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, who doesn't go outside to fart?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Gastramancy was a thing, definitely.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  It's all 2000 years ago. It's all quite hard to tell now. But supposedly noises made by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the dead. And the other word, I just really like it because you said vento and locqueer is stomach talking, isn't it? Ventriloquism. The other word, if you do the Greek, it's engastrid myths.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Very nice. I do like.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  So I like that all the original ventriloquists probably were just people with IBS. It was just rumbly tumbly going on all the time. Rumbly tumbly. Yeah, sorry. I've been watching a lot of Winnie the Pooh.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  It's very difficult to imagine it has anything to do with the stomach. I mean, it's definitely my throat where I do my ventriloquism and my mouth, the stomach.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  There are a few different ways. I mean, I'm not a ventriloquist, but I think there's one which is you're making a noise and not letting your mouth move. And there's another one which you make the sound much quieter or louder. So it sounds like it's coming from somewhere else.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  Like, looeyow.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the little man in the box kind of thing, right? And I think this is more like that kind of ventriloquism, I think.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  Nina, did you ever do the, the, I'm talking to someone over there? Or the, the voice is coming from your trouser pocket, sir?

• 8:44Speaker 05

  I'm so bad at that. No, I like a nice puppet to distract.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  No, I've never been. I think people that do that fool me. I went to a ventriloquist convention and the guy was doing that kind of calling Nina, Nina from miles away. And I was looking around and he looked at me like, I was mad. Where do you think you are? You're a ventriloquist convention.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Vent Haven?

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Vent Haven, yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  I saw your documentary, which is, it's so good if anyone wants to check out about the world of ventriloquism.

• 9:12Speaker 06

  If someone's on the stage at Vent Haven and they do a good act, does the applause come from behind them?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  This is the amazing thing, right? The reason ventriloquism works so well is because humans are hardwired to if you see a noise and if you see something moving.

• 9:27Speaker 05

  See a noise, you're onto something.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  If you hear a noise and if you see something moving, then your brain just puts them together.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And that's because that's useful, right? If you see a rustling in the leaves and you hear the rustling, then there's a tiger there. You need to get out there, sharpish, right? But the really interesting thing is that that misdirection can persist for about an hour after you've seen a ventriloquist. So if you see a ventriloquist and they've got a puppet to their side, your brain has decided that's where the sound's coming from. And about an hour later, you'll speak to someone and they're speaking to you and you'll get confused about where the sound's coming from because your brain hasn't worked it out yet.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  And no one's really sure why that happens.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  And it's a bit like if you're on a train for ages and you're moving and you're moving and then you stop moving, then your brain sort of for a few seconds kind of can't work out that you're not moving anymore.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Or if you're, you know, when you walk onto an escalator and it's not moving and you expect it to.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a good one, yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  It's all this kind of thing that your brain just gets slightly tricked by the difference in movement.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  It feels like a good plot point for a movie where you get someone to watch a ventriloquist, but then you deliver some information directly to their face, but it seems as if it's come from the person next to you. So, "Oh, then you're a dick." And they're like.

• 10:45Speaker 06

  Good plot point.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Cassandra!

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Good plot point. They're, they're working on Now You See Me Four at the moment, I believe, so.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Very exciting.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  I'm trying to work out how I can make use of this.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Where can you?

• 10:56Speaker 06

  Do people, do you ever do signings where people get confused and talk to Monkey instead of talking to you?

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Well, I can't do signings with Monkey because he's on my right hand. And he can't hold a pen.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  No, it's very, I mean, even I believe the sound comes out of him in some way because I've done it for so many years that if somebody's going to ask, what would Monkey say? I feel like, well, let me go and get him and then I'll be able to tell you, which really is weird.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Nina, in 2010, there was a sort of survey done about full-time professional ventriloquists in the UK. And it was shockingly low, 15 full-time professionals.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  You're one of, you're one of the 15. And apparently it might not even be as much currently in 2026.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Because Nina's got rid of them all.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  They were all attacked by a monkey.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  But that's pretty phenomenal. The industry is critically endangered, basically.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  I don't think it's never gonna die. It's been through worse than this. I mean, I think it's here for the long run. For me, it was just like picking up the right pen for making thoughts come out of my head. And so it's not really... I don't know, the thought of ventriloquism as being some end of the pier thing with a big wooden mannequin, that might be gone. That might be gone, but I think it'll keep coming.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:24Speaker 06

  You guys used to run Incan Society. I'm just saying, you used to be predicting the battles being won or lost.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Through blowing up the lungs of a llama, apparently.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Inflating the lungs of a dead llama and reading the shape of the veins. The llamas had it so rough, from what I read, in Incan Society.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  You think that's why llamas spit at you whenever you see them, because they remember how badly treated they were in Incan Society?

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Nina, you mentioned the convention that you went to before, which was the Vent Haven one. And this is probably the most incredible thing about the world of ventriloquism. There is a museum where a lot of the dummies get donated if, say, the person has passed away or left the industry. And so there's a big house, the Vent Haven Museum, where it's just stacked with...

• 13:10Speaker 06

  That sounds absolutely terrifying.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Well, actually, yeah, a lot of the neighbours complained that sometimes they put the dummies looking out the windows down across at them and they asked for them to be... Can you... I'm sorry, that's scary. You've been inside, presumably, because you've been there.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's a very unique atmosphere because they're very uniquely bereaved and very uniquely quiet because they shouldn't be quiet. They had voices and they're never to talk again. And so they seem really extra still, having been animated. And they've got these little pictures on them, some of them of them on stage mid-flow. And so it does have a sort of eerie hand in death, all of that. Some survived a shipwreck.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  And the ventriloquist went down.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  Tragically, they were shouting, "Over here, over here." And they said, "Over there, over there."

• 14:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  Yes, there's some good stories.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  That was, I think he was called William Wood, the ventriloquist who died in that shipwreck. I think so, I believe so. And four of his dummies washed up to shore much later. And there's a lot of mystery about what happened to him. Were they killed by pirates? All that sort of stuff. And yeah, so his, his dummies, either all or just a few are in Bent Haven now.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Did they become really big on radio, I think. I remember that. When radio started, you got loads of vents on radio.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And obviously you can't see, like, people who are listening to this at home, they don't know that actually Nina's lips haven't moved this entire episode so far.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  But like, you wouldn't know, but because the acts were so good, it didn't matter, really.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  It's a character and a, and a stooge. It doesn't matter that you can't see the lips.

• 14:50Speaker 06

  They got mad ratings. I read that. So Archie Andrews.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  And Peter Bruff in the 1940s, they got on the radio, as you said, James, 12 million people tuning in. I mean, it's crazy.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  My podcast doesn't get anywhere near those numbers.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Is that what you would get anyway for a primetime show? Or was that a hugely marked?

• 15:09Speaker 06

  I think that was big. I mean, there was only two channels, weren't there? So, you know.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but also the population of the UK must have been, can't have been much more than 30 or 40 million.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  You're absolutely right. I mean, it's crackers. And I was reading a London Review of Books piece all about ventriloquism. It was from 2000. All I can find is this line that Peter Bruff, the keeper of Archie Andrews, used it to spice up romantic weekends with his wife.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 15:33Speaker 06

  I can find no further details. I don't know what it means. I think.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Sounds very sexy.

• 15:39Speaker 06

  I think we could tell what it means. I'm not speculating.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Um, is he the one who, I think he made a transfer to TV and then he got cancelled because people could see his lips moving?

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Not cancelled.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Not cancelled in London.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Not the, yeah, the current. Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 06

  Oh, because he'd never learned to not look.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  He probably did, but maybe he just wasn't as good as people wanted him to be.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  He'd let it go a bit when he hadn't needed it.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  It's true. There are some sounds which are especially hard, right? The B, anything which is.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Plosive, yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 06

  Plosive, right. That is, but I presume there are ways of getting around that.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  There are ways of getting around it. And, but it's best not to fixate on them if you're a young budding ventriloquist out there to try and up the numbers. You, you, your B, you can't say because you have to, your lips have to meet. So you replace that with a G or a D sound. G or D. And the the techniques are that at the back you have your soft palate and you have the back of your tongue and if you hump your tongue towards the soft palate, you're making substitute lips in the back of your mouth.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  And then if you sort of hold the air behind that and then expel it, you'll get the B sound.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 16:47Speaker 06

  That's crazy. You're making extra lips at the back of your mouth. That's mad. I didn't, I'd never heard that that was how it was done.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. And and but the main thing is not to worry about your Bs sounding like Gs, because your main focus should be whether you're puppets making people laugh.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  And so all these things, they mean a lot at the beginning and then you don't, I've never enjoyed a ventriloquist act less because the Bs aren't very good.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Do you guys come across Thomas Britton in your research?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  No.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  He was an English charcoal merchant and concert promoter and he was killed by a ventriloquist.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Great.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  So you're throwing someone's voice to kill them. You're throwing your voice.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Shoot me.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  Shoot me.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, what did he say? Shoot me.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  That's brilliant.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Oh, did he, did he play on the idea that he was literally the voice in his head?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Um, it wasn't quite that. Basically, uh, there was a magistrate who was called Justice Robe.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  It's a great name for a magistrate. Uh, but he was a bit of a practical joker and he knew Britain and he decided to hire a ventriloquist to throw his voice pretending to be a spirit, um, telling him he, you know, your end is nigh and you're not going to heaven. And he dropped to his knees in horror, uh, thought it was a spirit and died from shock two days later.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  No. It's a hell of a backfire on a prank, isn't it?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  Well, I have to be very careful with these powers.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Your powers.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I know.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 18:38Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 18:49Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 18:54Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 19:00Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 19:20Speaker 10

  When your workday is constantly disrupted, your workflow isn't flowing. It's come to a grinding halt. You don't need an assistant, you need superpowers. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, is built for how you actually work. No new tabs, no switching apps, no losing your place. Go handles busy work like finding documents or summarizing email threads, so you can focus on the work only you can do. Try Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  OK, it's time for fact number two, and that is Nina.

• 19:56Speaker 05

  Well, I was reading Craig Brown's Mam Darling about Princess Margaret, and very surprisingly, we have Princess Margaret's birth to thank for horoscopes in newspapers, in the modern day sort of horoscope. What happened was, when she was born, John Gordon, who was the editor of the Sunday Express, was looking for an angle on the way he would write an article about her birth. And he tried to get Cairo, who was an astrologer, to write a prediction for her life. He wasn't around. Some, I don't know what happened. Did someone else answer the phone? His name was Nayler. He managed to get the job of doing this and he did a rather good prediction

• 20:40Speaker 05

  for her and the article was a big success. So then the editor of the Daily Express commissioned him to do another one and he again managed to predict an airplane crashing. It got lots of things wrong, but anyway, these articles went down very, very well.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  And then other newspapers looked at that and went, we should do the same. They hired their own astrologers and then it just exploded globally.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  And so if he hadn't wanted this article to be about Margaret, we wouldn't have this. And people wouldn't be wondering what my week is going to be like and reading this little thing.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  That would be awful news for any told dark strangers, wouldn't it?

• 21:21Speaker 06

  We should say Princess Margaret, for any international listeners or younger ones, maybe. Younger sister of the Queen.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  The true Queen.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Yep, absolutely. The true Queen, the late Queen.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  No longer with us, yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  No longer with us.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  For international listeners.

• 21:35Speaker 06

  Queen Elizabeth the second had a younger sister whose name was Margaret.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 06

  Very much the Queen's evil twin, I would say.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  What?

• 21:43Speaker 06

  I would, I would.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  I don't think she stood a chance at that life.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  No one in that family has a chance of being normal or in many cases pleasant, but.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Like, for instance, she was told who she was allowed to marry, wasn't she?

• 21:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yes. So there was a, the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 said that because she was in line to the throne, the Queen had to allow her to marry or not marry. Like she had to say, can I marry this person, please? And the Queen had to say yes or no.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  Up until 25, I think then she was allowed to choose, but it still wasn't okay.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  She'd fallen in love with a dashing divorcee called group captain Peter Townsend.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  Stunning.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, but then he ran off with the 14 year old after her. So I think she dodged a bullet.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  Nobody's perfect.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  That is true. That's true. Is that true? It is true. Well, they certainly, they certainly met when she was 14. When she was 14. I don't know if they ran off when she was 14. Is that actionable is what I mean. I'm pretty sure G C P T is dead now, isn't he? Okay. Yeah. Well, he, so he was, when they met, she was maybe 16 or 17, Margaret this is. And, and, and he was, I think about 35, 36. Yeah. So he was, he was a little bit older. He was divorced, which at the time was, you know, very scandalous. Um, and so she was told, you can either give everything up. You can live as a commoner, you give up this, you know, gilded life, uh, in exchange for the true love that you've, you've found. Or you can keep it all and not marry him. And she tried, I think I'll do the latter. Thank you. But as you say, he was probably a bit of a, a bit of a cad. There is a fantastic theory. Uh huh.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  And it's for anyone interested in Princess Margaret, this Craig Brown book really is, it's terrific. Like it's, it's so interesting that she had evidence, um, she kept evidence about her relationship with Peter Townsend. Cause there's lots of, you know, rumor, myth, legend about it. It was only seen to be a relationship because they were together at something and she picked a bit of fluff off his, Oh, yes. His collar or whatever. And that was, oh my God, they're an item. You know, that was at the time, huge P D A. Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  Like 70 years, just a different time. Anyway, but she has a license plate or she had a license plate, um, which she, uh, got rid of, uh, eventually. And her driver said, do you want to keep the, the old plates from this car? And she said, no, that's an incident from my past, best forgotten. And it was P M six, four, 50. Right? Now her driver, John Larkin, had a theory that that six, four, 50 is the 6th of April, 1950. And P M is either Princess Margaret or Peter and Margaret. And it's potentially when she lost her virginity, uh, in license plate form. Cool. To group Captain Peter Townsend. We've all got.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  I don't like, but that's, that's.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Imagine getting plates made.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  If you got them made in advance, you could see too.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  That is so random.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  The thing about her is probably someone to have met, known and had to work with. She was probably a nightmare to read about her. She's almost the perfect caricature of the opposite of Queen Elizabeth, who was very down the line, the rule book. She was, she was more, I guess, like rock and roll. She was hanging out with celebrities of the day. There was all these rumours that she was sleeping with many of them. Pablo Picasso was rumored to have an affair, desperately wanted to marry her. Peter Sellers, when he was at the height of the movie industry in Britain, was supposedly having an affair with her. And these stories came out that she used to have a partner called Colin Tennant. When they were in the bedroom during sort of heavy petting, as it was called, I don't know if it's pre-licensed plate days. She, she wouldn't allow him to call her by her name.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  She would say, you'd have to refer to me by my royal title, your royal highness. You had to refer to me as that. And so she was just a total narcissist as well with her power.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  To me, I don't like any of these stories of like royal family being assholes. And I don't know.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I do, I do, because it's interesting reading. As I say, I probably would have hated her if I met her very soon.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  It is, it is fascinating hearing things such as dinner didn't start until she arrived. Uh, so you'd just be waiting there, maybe for hours because she, she didn't really keep to other people's timetables. So you might be sitting there while the food's gone cold.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  And this is at parties, you mean, like she'd be.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  You were five minutes late to this recording this morning, Andy.

• 26:00Speaker 06

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  We had to wait for you.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  We did.

• 26:05Speaker 06

  Are you saying I'm the Princess Margaret of this show?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Well, I haven't seen your registration plate of your car.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  I'm still, still waiting to get them made. I'm really excited.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  But I feel, I mean, I did find sympathy for her in that book because just the amount of comment about her appearance and everything, right from the word go, there were such trolls, there were diarists, they were very sort of camp and snippy diarists at the time, but they did not let, and I can't imagine an entire life that sort of, you're not really needed. It's the life of an understudy and she never got to go on and she never got to really do anything and it was a withering sort of a life.

• 26:49Speaker 06

  She spent lots of her life living in a flat, above or below. She and her mum, the queen mum, who as she became, just lived in flats, one floor up and down from each other. They mostly communicated by letter.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  That's amazing, isn't it?

• 27:03Speaker 06

  They just would write these rather curt, snippy notes to each other and then a footman would have to carry them upstairs or downstairs.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Like a text fight.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  It was, yeah. And it's mostly sort of, I'm sorry I said that earlier, you know.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Did the footman ever come down with like three dots?

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Wonderful.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  That's amazing. And then she did get married and then divorced, right?

• 27:25Speaker 06

  Yes, she married a county society photographer and the marriage didn't work out.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  But she was like the first person in the royal family to get divorced since Henry VIII or something stupid like that. And then all of the current sort of queens' children who all got divorced, they wouldn't have really been able to do that without her, or at least it would have been a way bigger scandal. But because she'd already done it, it kind of meant that it was a little bit less of a scandal when Prince Charles or King Charles got divorced and all the others.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Interesting. I think you're right.

• 27:57Speaker 05

  But she wasn't at all sympathetic to Diana, was she?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Was she not?

• 28:02Speaker 05

  No, no, didn't like it. Didn't like that divorce. Thought it was a real mess.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  The book is a story of her being unpleasant to everyone around her forever. It's amazing. But the thing about her birth is that I think she was the last royal to go through a particular process. So they were not going to become, her parents were not going to become king and queen at the time. It was 1930. So George VI was, as he will become, was the younger brother of Edward, who then abdicated. So they were not expected to be really significant royals. But even so, the home secretary had to be present.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Was that the one?

• 28:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  And this is so cool. So her mum was the Duchess of York. And the Home Secretary was a guy called J R Kleins at the time in 1930. He wanted to go to Brighton on his summer holidays. It was August and he was told, no, the Duchess of York is heavily pregnant. You've got to stick to her like glue.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And the idea was that the Home Secretary, is this right? The Home Secretary had to be there so that no one would swap the child out.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  Exactly. It's exactly that.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  It's amazing.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  And I know. So he wants to go to Brighton. The Duchess of York says, I think I'm going to go to Glam's Castle in Scotland. Just the opposite of Brighton. And someone said, well, just pop up on the train when she goes into labour. And he said, no, I can't do that. I can't. So he had to go up. He went up on the 5th of August with his ceremonial secretary and they had to wait until the 21st of August. 16 days, doing nothing in a nearby castle.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  She wasn't in labour for all that time, was she?

• 29:25Speaker 06

  No, she was just, she was just nearly.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  She was late as usual.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  She began her life inconveniencing someone and she carried on.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Wow. Do they not, they don't do that anymore, do they?

• 29:40Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  The Home Secretary still does.

• 29:42Speaker 06

  Juban Mahmood is, is on speed dial.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  I'm actually really impressed that you could remember the name of the Home Secretary.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  Time of recording.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  The place where she could let her hair down and sort of wear a caftan and everything was a must eat. Then you can see that property. You can rent that property for 35,000 pounds a week, dollars a week. And I've looked it up and it's really good. Can we all pitch in?

• 30:11Speaker 04

  What is it? Is it like a Caribbean island or is that the one up in?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Can I just say that I'm not really up for pitching in for a Caribbean island at the moment? Cause I think they're a little bit tainted.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's an extremely fancy property. Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  And that was, did she build that up as in was that her getaway or did she arrive on something?

• 30:32Speaker 05

  The guy you might remember.

• 30:33Speaker 06

  Someone else owned it, but when she arrived at the island, someone said, if you, would you like a gift for your wedding? Or maybe a plot of land? She said, yeah, plot of land. Thank you. Very swiftly. And then she built a house on that. But this is where she met someone who I think she was involved. With which is a chap called John Bindon. Mmm. And I only mention him because he was a really dubious figure. He was, he's just a sort of footnote here, but he was a kind of English underworld figure, like very dodgy. He knew a lot of gangs, I think was a gangster in many ways, living in the Caribbean. Anyway, his party trick was that he could hang five half pint beer tankards from his penis. No hands. No hands.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Wow. He must be popular Oktoberfest.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  I wonder, yeah. That's the most 1970s fact I think you could possibly come up with. Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  The ones with handles?

• 31:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, the ones with the handles.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Through the handle.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, half pint, half pint, but with the handle, yeah, yeah. Right. And that was his party trick? Yeah, it wasn't his day to day. Right, but you'd see it coming, wouldn't you? Sort of, oh, he's brought, he's brought the, he's brought the mugs, he's brought the big cups.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  This week on Britain's Got Talent.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  Oh, anyway.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know what to say about that.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  We could do that on, like, because like the ventriloquists on the radio, no one could see them. For all the people at home, no, you could be doing that right now.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  We're all doing it right now, even me.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Most of my stuff's about astrology.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Let's do it, let's do it. Okay.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Have you heard of William Perrin?

• 32:13Speaker 06

  No.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  He was the astrologer to Henry VII and Henry VIII. Because it used to be that you would have royal astrologers. He prophesized that Henry VII's wife, Elizabeth of York, would live until she was 80 years old and she died when she was 37. He forecast that Henry VIII would have a happy marriage, a long marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and that he would sire many sons and that he would become a devoted servant to the Catholic Church.

• 32:39Speaker 06

  Right. It's a tough gig, isn't it, being an astrologer?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Basically messed everything up, like he got everything wrong. But the reason basically that he did it is because in those days, as an astrologer to the king, you basically had to say really good stuff.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  It's like being an advisor to Donald Trump. You basically had to say how, oh, your hair's looking great today, Donald, kind of thing.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  And will tomorrow.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Because the two astrologers to Henry VI had been executed on grounds of treason when they forecasted that he would have a violent death. So you really couldn't forecast bad things, otherwise you get.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. There was someone even, at Henry VIII's time, Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent. Oh, yeah. And she was predicting the king's death. She wasn't even... She wasn't like an official person, was she? No, no, no. She was just sort of wandering mystic. And I think she was executed for it. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  I mean, it's a horrible thing to say something's gonna happen to anyone with or without the stars. I mean, just too invasive a thought.

• 33:39Speaker 06

  It's true. Mystic Meg, though. Like, she... She never said, "You're gonna die" to someone in the audience, though.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Imagine if she came on, she's like, "I don't know what the lottery numbers are this week, but I got some bad news for Susan in Kent."

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Time for fact number three, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that when Caucasian tourists started visiting the mountain gorillas of Congo, local guides went around wearing envelopes as masks so as to help the gorillas get used to the idea of white people.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is all to do with gorilla tourism, which is a huge help to many countries. It helps the gorillas themselves because it relaxes anyone wanting to poach them because they'll make more money by protecting them. Not like an egg, Andy. This is the poach word. Is that what you thought I was saying?

• 34:32Speaker 06

  No.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  You'd need a very big pan to poach a gorilla.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  So he gave me a look as I said the word poach, and I thought, "He thinks I mean eggs."

• 34:42Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  And he's reading the newspaper going, "Why are they arresting all these people? They're just making eggs."

• 34:53Speaker 06

  I gave you a look, Dan, because you said it relaxes the people who would otherwise poach the gorillas. And I just thought that was a funny way of putting it. That's all.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  I saw a video which had this story in it, and it was at the Kahuzi Biaga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the gorillas that they have there are the largest gorillas in the world, the eastern lowland gorilla. So basically, when gorilla tourism happens, a lot of white people start arriving from overseas. And largely, the gorillas there haven't seen white people before. So there's this one instance where... The locals got all these envelopes and they cut holes for eyes, two little nostrils and a mouth, and put a little bit of rope and tied it up. And they spent two or three times going back to meet the gorilla, because every time it kept running away, it was very scared. And eventually it got used to the look and they thought, we think we've got this right.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  So they asked the local authorities to provide a white man to test it out on. And so he came along and it didn't run away. And then they're like, great, the gorilla's ready.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I thought like he would have run away until he put a little stamp on the top of his head.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, uh, yeah, it's just a thing that happens because gorilla tourism from Europeans, from people coming over from America and Canada, provide huge amounts of money for a lot of different countries and a lot of local areas.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was controversial, wasn't it, at first? Because obviously the, the dream is for the gorillas to be living without human, without any tourism really. But it, as you say, it brings in so much money. And that money also gets, they've innovated, so it's definitely put back into the local community. So everyone who lives nearby is also on board and that's helping.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 06

  With living standards there and like, just it's, it's helping build up those communities and things like that.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  When places like Rwanda, where, you know, you had these huge outbreaks of, well, gorillas were almost completely made extinct off the back of it, or was certainly heading that way. So anyone who wanted to protect them was risking their life, but they weren't really being paid for it. And that's what this is now providing. And so, yeah, it's a, I've never done it myself. I've never gone, Nina, just purely because of your connection to monkey. Have you ever thought to do something like that?

• 37:00Speaker 05

  Well, I don't think I, I'd need more than an envelope on my face to relax a gorilla. I think if I met a gorilla, I'd send out so many signals to it to kill me. I'd just then put myself in that thing. I, it would all be fear and need and the air would be electric with this sort of

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  nosedive I'd be doing mentally. I love gorillas. I love orangutans. I love them. I want them to be safe. But I can't even imagine that a gorilla particularly cares about a face or the color of face. I feel like they would size you up. Weight, your, you know, your edibility.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  Lots of eye, there are a lot, there's eye contact and there's.

• 37:42Speaker 05

  There's eye contact, yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  I think the important thing, if you're near a gorilla, and if you're listening and you're near a gorilla right now, this might, this might save your life, is just go low status. Don't go in, you know, big swinging dicks, thinking you're all that, just, just look at the ground.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  No pint glasses, balance.

• 37:59Speaker 06

  No pint glasses.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  He died showing his body trick.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  But isn't like, cause there's quite a lot of different animals that half of them, it seems, you have to like make yourself big and scary. And the other half, you have to either run away or make yourself very small and.

• 38:19Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Don't run away, because they can run at 25 miles an hour. Um, don't, don't make yourself big and scary. Don't make eye contact. And they might sort of passive aggressively brush past you in that way of, you know, they're, they're a commuter who's like.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Like, did you spill my pint?

• 38:34Speaker 06

  A little bit and you, and you just sort of say, okay, yeah, fair enough. That's, yeah, that's on me. Yeah. And if they're, if they're charging at you.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 06

  Don't do anything. Don't run away.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  Cause most charges are a bluff.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  If anything, make yourself a bit smaller, go on the ground slightly, so it doesn't look like it's being intimidated by your size either. There's this whole, uh, sort of FAQ page on the Virunga National Park, which is in Congo, and it tells you all these details. So if it does get to you and it's angry and you're down on the ground, let it attack you, it says. It's, the attack may include severe biting and pounding or tearing with the gorilla's hands. But it will eventually stop if it sees you as not a threat. Uh, it might then just fold you into its arms and just sit with you. Let it do that. Don't try and take its arm off because its arm.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  Think I am.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  Very ambitious.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Don't try and lift it.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, if like you're in the cinema and you're on your first date and they put their arm around you and you like take it off them, they say, don't do that.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Don't do that. The gorilla, remain quiet and passive until it loses interest and goes. It has all of this on its website and right underneath all of this, there's a button that says, book online now.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Diane Fossey, by the way, who was one of the great primate professionals, I don't know what you would call it.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Like a Jane Goodall type?

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, her and Jane Goodall, there was, there was one other as well, the three of them roughly at the same time, under the sort of mentorship of a man called Lewis Leakey, all went out into different bits of the world and studied primates and she was not a fan of this gorilla tourism. But I think it was different then, we didn't know quite enough and we didn't know what good it does for them now.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  And the money wasn't going into local areas as well. We didn't even know they existed until like the mid 19th century. Really? Yeah. That's incredible. In the West, obviously, like in Europe. So there was an American missionary called Dr. Thomas Savage, quite a good name for someone who likes to find gorillas. But he went to Congo in 1847 and managed to, be told by the locals were to see those gorillas. And he brought back some bones and stuff and then brought them to scientists in, in Europe. And they then described gorillas for the first time. And then there became like this big sort of thing of everyone loved gorillas. So you had gorilla ballets in London.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Oh man, really? And tutus and?

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Oh no, sorry, no, it was people, it wasn't actual gorillas. It was like.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Not like the bear baiting and.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, no. Costume for that show is a very, very high risk job. It just became fashionable to do like gorilla themed things.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  This was the curtain open, so the costume designer sat there with a gorilla in his arm over.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  The ballerina who normally gets thrown a couple of feet in the air just goes right through the ceiling.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  No, there was also a gorilla quadrille for piano that was very popular. The sheet music was very popular. So yeah, it became like a little bit of a meme.

• 41:35Speaker 06

  That's great. I love a micromania, which always happens whenever there's anything new. Um, the really impressive people who work in these two national parks where you get uh, mountain gorillas, which is the, one of the rarest kinds, that the, there are lots of other kinds of gorillas, but the mountain ones are the rarest. The really impressive people are the vets who are patching them up after they've had fights with other gorillas. Wow. So they, they go in to the gorilla's territory every day in small teams. Um, they're checking their health and they're stitching up the gorilla inflicted wounds and you can't put a plaster cast on them if they've got a fracture.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  Um, oh, they, they do put casts on, sorry, but it's not plaster because they're just, they rip it off. So you have to put on a fiberglass one and then paint it to match their fur. Wow. Paint the cast. It's just, it's so interesting. This. Amazing. It's really hard.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Do they fight each other a lot?

• 42:26Speaker 06

  I think a reasonable amount, yeah. Cause you get male groups, don't you? You get family groups and then you get all male groups.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  And I think there's a bit of a, there's a sort of lad pad area. And then they'll occasionally leave the lad pad and try and found a family and things like this, as do we.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, these doctors, by the way, Andy, they're amazing because not only have they been patching them up and supposedly this has been uh, responsible for the survival rates are going much higher. The fact that they've got dedicated doctors now, but also there've been a lot of mysterious gorilla deaths that they don't understand. So if a gorilla dies, it kind of dies on its own. And then by the time anyone finds it, it's half gone, the, the body's disintegrated somewhat and they can't really work out what it is. Doctors have managed to get to gorillas that have recently died and worked out that one of the biggest killers is.

• 43:14Speaker 06

  Ventriloquists.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Ventriloquists. No, but it is vent, it is ventilation because it's humans passing on the common cold and flu. And they're really susceptible. So people, tourists, when they go there and they probably go, God, I'm gonna just hide the fact that I'm feeling a bit ill so that I can see the gorillas. They're passing on really dangerous disease.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  I think you had to wear face masks, didn't you? Even before Covid, it was one of the places that, you know, you would see people in Asia wearing them and you would see people on safari wearing them.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Yep, exactly. Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 06

  I think you have to stay several, seven or 10 metres away from the gorillas now because just, you know, don't give them a cold.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the reason that I'm not gonna stand right next to a gorilla.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  No, no, I would, I totally would, I totally would, just snivel.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  But take their arm off, but make sure then you wash it for 10 seconds while singing happy birthday. I remember there was this thing about, they gave you like glasses, which it looked like your eyes were looking in a different direction because of the eye contact thing.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Oh, cool. Really?

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could print them out and it'd be a tiny hole in them so you could see the gorillas, but the gorilla would think you weren't looking directly at them.

• 44:23Speaker 05

  Be careful which way you turn your head and accidentally set it off.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  You're staring at a baby gorilla view while mama's standing there.

• 44:35Speaker 05

  Exactly, you're staring right at the one on the left, yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  And there was also a thing in Toronto Zoo where they asked visitors to stop showing gorillas videos on their phones. And they, the people in the zoo just said, we'd rather you didn't do that.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  I took monkey to the zoo once and they really did react, like the capuchins or little ones, they were little ones. And they went jumping around, they went crazy and it was, yeah, that was really extreme.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  You had your hand up one of their friend's ass, like that's not gonna.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  Are we all gonna get this treatment?

• 45:09Speaker 05

  They really didn't like my material.

• 45:16Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 45:31Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 45:42Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 45:47Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 45:53Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  My fact is, the greatest Shakespeare editor of all time is also the worst Shakespeare editor of all time. This is about a guy called John Payne Collier,

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  who was an academic in the 19th century and a really well-known Shakespeare scholar. And the only thing you need to know for this is that basically there's no original Shakespeare manuscript, so.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  So when they say like first folios, what are they?

• 46:41Speaker 06

  So first folio is the first collection of plays. And we have a few that were printed in what's called quarto, which is where you fold the sheet of paper twice, a sort of a cheap early edition. We have a few first.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Well, we don't have him actually writing it.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  Exactly. We've got no manuscript. And so the search has always been to find the most original possible version of Shakespeare's plays. And most plays that you get these days are a combination of quartos or first or second folios. The folios are the collections where they were first bound up, right?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 06

  So you need to find something as early as possible to get more authentic Shakespeare. That's the thing. And so this scholar, John Payne Collier, 19th century, he found a book in Great Newport Street in London. And it was a copy of the second folio, which was printed less than 20 years after Shakespeare's death, right? So relatively contemporaneous. And he noticed, when he properly looked at it, that there were 20,000 handwritten corrections in the margins of this text. There were extra bits, there were the observations. So this was extraordinary because this would make the book he had found the most authoritative version in existence of Shakespeare's work. This would make it super significant.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, really exciting. People went nuts. He had, he had moved Shakespeare studies forward massively and he'd faked it all.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Really?

• 48:05Speaker 06

  It's the punchline. Yeah. That's why he's the worst of all time.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  They were his annotations.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  They were his annotations.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, people noticed, didn't they, that the handwriting looks suspiciously similar to his actual handwriting?

• 48:15Speaker 05

  So his own handwriting exists somewhere, does it?

• 48:18Speaker 06

  I think we've got his Shakespeare signature. We have like six signatures, but that's about it.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  But he spells the word Shakespeare, the surname Shakespeare, different every single time.

• 48:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  So, yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  So, so this John Pen Collier had, had become the talk of the town. It was a huge deal. This, this mysterious figure, the old corrector, who had made these 20,000 annotations, it was all just complete nonsense.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Why did he do it, Andy?

• 48:41Speaker 06

  I don't know. Why does anyone forge things like professional glory glamour?

• 48:45Speaker 04

  As you say, he was already at the top of the game.

• 48:47Speaker 06

  He was.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  He was the guy. So to do that was...

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Maybe for the lols?

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Ah, the lols.

• 48:53Speaker 06

  And I, I, this book was very successful financially when he printed, you know, here's my version of the volume. So it did make him a lot of money at first.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  And I guess he weirdly was collaborating with Shakespeare because he was suggesting edits to certain lines and rewrites, wasn't he? Which would have then been taken up as the new version, possibly.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Or at least certain texts would do that.

• 49:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  So...

• 49:15Speaker 06

  I should, I should say this all came from a fantastic Financial Times article about, about it. It was really, really good.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  What was the period, Andy?

• 49:21Speaker 06

  This was the mid 19th century that he was, he was covering this.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so Shakespeare at this stage is becoming like...

• 49:27Speaker 04

  He's dead, yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  He's, his plays are becoming a big deal, right?

• 49:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  They, they, they went up and down, didn't they?

• 49:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, there's, there's big interest at the time in Shakespeare for sure. Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  I'm really curious what these notes were that he had a thousand and...

• 49:44Speaker 06

  Twenty thousand.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Twenty thousand, a lot of improvements he wanted to make. And were there, were there alternative line readings or what were they?

• 49:53Speaker 06

  I think some of them were, yeah, and others were just skipping or amendments or, I mean, it was, I think, a bit of everything. It was a lot of changes, yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  But he's putting it on a very old manuscript as well, like on top of anything else. That's desecrating.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  It's desecration.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, this, this very important, it was old presumably, yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Because I think they worked out the ink that he had used clearly was not ink that was from the time.

• 50:16Speaker 06

  It was new ink.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Like it went to that kind of forensic level.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  He really hadn't thought it through.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  No, he just, we probably just sort of get away with this. I mean, yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  There were quite a lot of people who were making changes around that time and even before that time, weren't they? So Baudelaire is the famous one, like Baudelaireizing means to sort of change something because you make it less rude, I suppose. But it wasn't just him. Alexander Pope, who's a friend of the podcast, he was changing Shakespeare and rewriting bits that he thought weren't good enough. And he thought, I can make it better. Lewis Carroll, he made some version of Shakespeare plays where he cut out all the obscene bits.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  So it was like quite a trend of people thinking, oh, this is very lowbrow. We're going to remove that stuff. And some people thought that the reason that Shakespeare put those rude bits in was just because the audience liked it. And really, if he, if Shakespeare had his way, he would have made it all very highbrow.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  Oh, that's how I feel.

• 51:15Speaker 05

  But actually, I always think about when it comes to the funny bits in Shakespeare, which aren't always very funny. And the fool is often the real low point. That, that's what that guy did, the guy who did it first. That's what he did. It was his bit and he knew how to make that funny. And then something, it's almost like doing somebody else's material. I don't know if that's true, but I mean, that's what it feels like sometimes.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Because Shakespeare would have had his favourite actors.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  He would have had a real funny guy who was hilarious with the skull or whatever, but yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  In 400 years, a Michael McIntyre routine won't have the same punch that it does today.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Untrue.

• 51:52Speaker 06

  Untrue.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  I can imagine Dan getting some old Michael McIntyre scripts and just rewriting them a little bit.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Mandrill.

• 52:04Speaker 06

  Nahum Tate was another one in the 17th century. This is only about six years after Shakespeare died. Rewrote King Lear to make both the king and Cordelia survive, which, spoiler, spoiler, they don't in the original. For 150 years, the character of the fool, who's a big deal in King Lear, and he's not very funny, but he's very integral to the plot. You know, making King Lear realise he's been mad, you know. The fool didn't exist in the play for 150 years because Nahum Tate wrote him out. And this is why people need original Shakespeare's is because it's very hard to tell what is in the original text if you're going off even something slightly later.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  Yes, right. And this, the Royal Shakespeare Company, which you were part of, Nina.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  I was, I was there for years.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  That's been a hugely important thing in getting Shakespeare back onto the stages in the West End. And Stratford-upon-Avon has become the place that people now go to see. I mean, that's where you were based, weren't you?

• 52:58Speaker 05

  That's where I was based.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, for those years.

• 53:01Speaker 06

  What were you, did you start as spear carrier and then work your way up?

• 53:05Speaker 05

  And I'd never managed to work my way up. I was furniture, really. I was what's called players cast, which means you just sort of get in, you get the odd bit to do. I did play Audrey in As You Like It. I made a lot of it, I think. It's not many lines. And I was the courtesan in Comedy of errors. And it was really, they worked you very hard. You never had a day off and you often had to go to voice coach or you were just working all the time. But I didn't have very much to do on stage and that did make me mischievous. And it did make me want to do something more. And that's when I became ventriloquist, actually.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 53:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Interestingly, William Shakespeare was an amateur ventriloquist.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Was he?

• 53:52Speaker 06

  He could throw his voice behind an arras. That's a specific Hamlet-based joke. James, you can plug a laugh in there, can't you?

• 54:02Speaker 04

  I can try. It'll be hard to find a realistic one for that joke. No, um, so.

• 54:09Speaker 06

  Because Polonius is hiding behind the curtain and Hamlet says, a rat and stabs him. Well, the way you all reacted, I thought you didn't.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  I didn't know Aris.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  I didn't know Aris.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  It's a curtain.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  I also was too hack. I was too obvious. McIntyre would have done it.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  No, um, uh.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  He was a ventriloquist.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Well, not really. Vent Haven Museum, the one that houses all of the dummies, was founded by William Shakespeare Berger.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 54:35Speaker 04

  That's also something you can buy and strap in a pod.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  How would you like your burger? I'll have it as you like it.

• 54:43Speaker 06

  Superb.

• 54:45Speaker 05

  Sorry, guys.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  Um, and also the list of the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, it's pretty amazing, the alumni that you're part of, Nina. I don't know who was in your year, but, you know, obviously people like Ian McKellen and Judi Dench and Brian Blessed, you know, all these people were, were part of it.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  I had David Tennant.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  You had Tennant.

• 55:02Speaker 06

  In your year.

• 55:03Speaker 05

  Tennant was, um, yes, he was in Comedy of Eras with me. It was his curtain stand.

• 55:08Speaker 06

  Because it's very serious and they take it very seriously. Did you ever get to do any more fun productions? Did you ever get to do something like Bouncy Castle, Hamlet, or whatever it might be?

• 55:16Speaker 05

  As fun as it got, was a five hour play called Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw. And that, that was, that was light entertainment. I was nude in that and I got birthed from an egg.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Oh, poached or?

• 55:35Speaker 05

  Very poached, yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Um, you will, I think Nina, know about this story. There was a very big hoax that was pulled off for the RSC.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  That's a good one.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, whereby it became, for a moment, the Royal Dickens Company as opposed to Shakespeare. Um, do you want to, do you want to tell this story? If you know it, you might know it.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  The best, I mean, the best I can remember is Ken Campbell, who was the guy who sent me on the ventriloquist path. He wrote letters with a fake.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Headed note paper from the Royal Shakespeare Company saying that we are now moving on to Dickens.

• 56:10Speaker 06

  Very good.

• 56:11Speaker 05

  Moving on from the bard. And he wrote to all the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and actors, offering them roles in Dickens' plays. And every single letter he signed, "Love Trev as Trevor Nun."

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Trevor Nun was the artistic director at the time, and I think I'm right in saying that he was away overseas on holiday at the time. So he had no idea. I think I'm right.

• 56:34Speaker 06

  And he wouldn't have been in contact because it's not like you're on your emails because this must have been a while ago.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 06

  That's so good.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  So he came back to all this chaos and no one knew who did it. And finally, Ken revealed that he'd done it to Newsnight, I think it was, who finally tracked down that it was him. But yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And they gave him criminal lighting, he said, as he was interviewed. He got Hoax's Blues after he posted all these letters because nobody answered for a very long time.

• 57:00Speaker 06

  Really?

• 57:00Speaker 05

  It didn't seem like anything was going to happen.

• 57:02Speaker 06

  Normally, if you write to an actor saying, "I'm offering you work," you've got to reply by return of post.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  I would like to have seen this more in Dickens' society.

• 57:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the weirdest production I've ever seen was in Konigsberg Castle in Denmark when we were on tour in Denmark.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  And the castle is the original Elsinore, or it's the one that inspired Elsinore?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 06

  I think it's the, it's the one. And they were doing kind of walking Hamlet around the place. So, you know, you'd see one scene in this room and then you'd, you'd wander off and you'd see another scene happening in this room. And these actors are kind of running between each bit, but there were some tourists who did not really respect the boundary between art and, and audience. And there were some who were just wandering up to Hamlet in the middle of quite an emotional scene just to have their picture taken next to him.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 57:54Speaker 06

  He's trying to have his epic final sword fight with Laertes and there's just an elderly Chinese lady standing literally next to him, touching him, just grinning for the camera.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  I did.

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Fantastic.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  I did a Macbeth one, which was similar to that, but during the scene in Glam's Castle, Princess Margaret was born.

• 58:13Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  Beautiful.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  We mentioned earlier about Shakespeare's name and we have a few versions of his signature. Two of those signatures are on his marriage license and his marriage bond. But on those two documents, the name of the woman is different. So on his marriage licence, it says that he was married to Anne Whateley, W H A T E L E Y. And then his marriage bond says he was married to Anne Hathaway. And we don't know why. It could be what most people think is probably it was just a mistake. And they just misheard it, or in those days, spelling was different. And so these, maybe she was called something in between those two. But there's another version, which is basically, he was gonna marry

• 59:00Speaker 03

  this person called Anne Whateley, and then he changed his mind and married Anne Hathaway instead.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Isn't that amazing though? That's incredible. Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  So bizarre.

• 59:10Speaker 04

  It's amazing how little we know about him. I know it's not when you really dig into how much we knew about people. And Softin said we know way more about him than, but we don't know enough to know that he definitely wrote the plays according to a lot of debate.

• 59:24Speaker 06

  Like, what is that sentence? We don't know enough to know that he wrote the plays.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Well, we don't, we don't have the, we can't conclusively. It's a big debate, isn't it? Within, like, you would think for someone we knew so much about.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  It's not a serious debate, though.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Well, Oxford University Press recently gave a co-credit to, who was it? One of the major other playwrights of the time.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  McIntyre.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  McIntyre. There's a brilliant bit where Macbeth, it's weird that it's in Macbeth, and Macbeth's going on and on about, you know, getting onto a plane and the awkward etiquette. Yeah, it's really funny.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Well, also, a lot of his stories are basically ripped off from other stories.

• 59:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like Romeo and Juliet is based on a story by William Painter. We're pretty sure, because it's pretty much the same story. That was based on a poem by Arthur Brock, which was inspired by a collection of stories by Pierre Boistau, which was in turn inspired by a novella by Matteo Bandello, who was inspired by a story by Luigi De Porto. So it's like a story as old of time of two star-crossed lovers, both carking it at the end.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  Spoiler alert again, spoiler alert, sorry.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  You're wasted as a blur brighter for the back of books.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on @shreiberland on Instagram. James?

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  My Instagram is @nosesthingisjamesharkin.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Andy? At Andrew Hunter. And Nina?

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  The Nina Conti.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  The Nina Conti, yeah. So follow that, because you post up a lot of information about things that are upcoming, including the fact that now available on Prime is your feature-length movie that you co-wrote, you star in, that you directed.

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  Yes, called Sunlight. Very excited that that's getting out in the world. It's been seven years in the making and it's my proudest thing to date, so.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. James has watched it and says he liked it. James has never said he liked anything to anyone in this room outside of that situation.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Genuinely, if I didn't like it, I would have pretended that I'd never saw it. But I did. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  So good. Well, that's available now if you have Amazon Prime and, uh... Amazon Prime mate, more like.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  Yes. It is more like.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  I have no comment about that joke.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Hey, listen, if you want to get to us as a group, though, podcast at qi.com. Send all of your emails there, because Andy goes through them all, and he cherry picks the best ones for two separate places. We have Little Fish, which is our Monday show, where he takes all the best facts that you guys have sent in, and we spend a whole episode going through all of those. You can listen to those apps every Monday. And then the other half are the correspondents that we take to drop us a line, which is our audience feedback show. And if you want to get access to that, you just need to go and join Club Fish, which is part of Patreon. So patreon.com/clubfish. You'll find lots of different tiers there. There's lots of extra bonuses. It's a really fun place, so do check it out. Otherwise, come back here next week, because we've got another episode. Just a quick thank you, as

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  ever, to Liang Li and Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the Bigger Fish Buster team here at the QI offices. And we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.

• 1:02:51Speaker 11

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 1:03:04Speaker 12

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,

• 1:03:49Speaker 12

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 1:03:51Speaker 13

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.