No Such Thing As Anti-Drone Sharks

Cariad Lloyd joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss beeps, Pepys, embryos and streaming shows. 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

  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.comPARENTS to learn more.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things as Fish, where we were joined by our very good friend, who we've known for many, many years, Kariad Lloyd. Now, before I remind you about Kariad, I want to tell you that she has a potty, potty mouth. We have bleeped out some things in this show, but if you want to hear everything that was said, it's a bit of a joke, I'll tell you that, then you have to go to patreon.com/clubfish and join our Plenty More Fish tier, where you get an XL episode of every single show, and in this one, it is the full, unbleeped, unedited version, so really hope you enjoy that. But either way, Kariad Lloyd, what can I say about her?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  She is in the improv group ostentatious, she has got her own podcast, she's got the Weirdos Book Club with friend of the podcast Sarah Pascoe, she also has the Griefcast, and she has written lots of books, including her most recent kids' book, it is called Where Did She Go? Now, this is a book, very important, this will teach your kids about death in a nice way, in a friendly way, in a storybook way, but it's absolutely brilliant, it's such a clever book, it's so well done, it works brilliantly as a story, it works brilliant as a kids' book, but it has a message behind it, highly recommend if you have children that you get that, we all have a copy, Kariad brought some in for us, so we're very, very blessed to have got those.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  But yeah, Kariad is an absolutely brilliant performer, you will have seen her on absolutely everything in the UK, and no wonder, because she is amazing. Really hope you enjoy this week's show, no more to say apart from, on with the podcast.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  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 Cariad Lloyd, 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 my fact. My fact this week is that the idea to bleep and censor words during live TV and radio broadcasts began over 100 years ago, and was all because of one woman and her nursery rhymes. Yeah, so this is Olga Petrova. This was an actor who has a very interesting story,

• 3:08Speaker 02

  but why don't we talk about the censorship thing first? Because that's a real hot topic these days. It's been in the news very recently, the BAFTAs, when there was-

• 3:16Speaker 03

  What about that? What happened?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  They had a guy with Tourette's.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 3:21Speaker 02

  John Davidson, who a movie was made on him.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Things weren't bleeped, as I understand it.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Well, they bleeped other things, and they left that word in, and that was the controversy-

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Great movie, though.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  I swear, the movie, yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it's stunning. It's so good. It's really heart-wrenching.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it was a complicated moment at the BAFTAs, but it shows that this is a thing that's constantly in the news, because on live TV, how do you stop that?

• 3:47Speaker 03

  So when this woman read out these nursery rhymes in 1921, what was the word that was bleeped out? Was it [BLEEP]? Or was it [BLEEP]? And then, James, I'm hoping you-

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I'm gonna bleep those, yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Because I can't, I don't want people hearing that I've said those words on air.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I think it was worse. I think it was [BLEEP].

• 4:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  1921!

• 4:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  [BLEEP] was a fine word back then.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I know you say [BLEEP] all the time, Dan, but we're not allowed to say [BLEEP].

• 4:12Speaker 04

  You say-

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Not anymore.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  That's a shocker.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Well, anyway, so this was 1921. It was on Newark Radio Station and Olga Petrova had come on to read this nursery rhyme. And the rhyme went something like this. There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many children because she didn't know what to do. Now, this was a very sneaky reference to birth control. She was very good friends with Margaret Sanger, who was the founder of the American Birth Control League. And they all freaked out when she said this because it was a sort of blink and you miss it moment. But they certainly got it.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  So the normal rhyme is, there was a woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  But adding the word because really changes the meaning.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. She had so many children because she didn't know what to do.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so they freaked out because they thought if the if the networks heard this, they would shut down their radio station.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Another thing is that they just had World War One and there'd been loads of restrictions about what you're allowed to say on radio. And they just lifted all the restrictions and said, okay, you're allowed to say

• 5:19Speaker 04

  They shouldn't have called that sitcom.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  That was their first mistake.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  So they were really worried that if she said anything that was really dodgy, then they would just go back to the old ways.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  So I do love the story of Olga Petrova. Dan, you mentioned briefly that Olga Petrova was actually a stage name and her original name was Muriel, Muriel Harding. She was from Hampshire. She pretended she'd been born in Warsaw. It's all complete rubbish. And she also, she did the accent her whole professional life.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  She pretended to be like Polish.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Put on an Eastern European accent.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  But pretty amazing that, isn't it? That she she did, no one knew that. It wasn't like, she wasn't Dame Edna Everidge, you know? It wasn't a character that people knew about. She really claimed to be this and she was a big actor in her time, both in the theatre, where she was also a playwright and in movies. She was, she actually starred in a movie that was directed by friend of the podcast, A Guy. Remember A Guy? Alice Guy, who is the first female director ever. She did The Tigress, which was a movie by A Guy. Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  So a fascinating character who is responsible for all the bleeping, who then has this extraordinary background story.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  So just to go back to the original thing that happened, when she said she had so many children because she didn't know what to do, they didn't bleep that. What they did was they put some music on really loud, so you couldn't hear her microphone anymore, basically.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  So like end of Oscars, like get off.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  They swelled the orchestra.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Exactly like that. And then it was a bit later down the line that they came up with a bleep idea.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And what I can work out with radio was there was another engineer who was playing classical music. Now, 1921, are they, is that recorded music or is that someone literally live on a violin just waiting?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  I think it would be someone playing a disc or like a recording.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Wax disc.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  But no, they had classical music playing constantly on another line. And if someone said anything controversial, they just press the button and go to the other line.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  So they were prepared for something controversial then?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  They were constantly playing classical music on another.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  It's so weird. It's so weird.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Actually, on Classic FM, they're just effing and jeffing all the time.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Get to the tunes, stop swearing. Come on.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  It's so funny.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I think, so I think that was, that was the innovation after this very first time.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  They thought, right, we need a constant background.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  A mechanism.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  A safety net ready to go.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then slowly that evolved to become the modern day bleep, or how sometimes if you're just watching a broadcast, we'll just go to silence because that's another

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Well, they mute it now, don't they? Or it's more common to mute it because a bleep is quite a funny sound and it also draws attention to what's just been said. If you weren't really paying attention, a bleep really draws your attention.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  And so shows like Jerry Springer used it to great effect because they noticed that when they were getting lots of bleeps in a show, that the ratings were higher and people enjoyed watching this. And so.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  On QI, we've been told in the past, we can't just bleep things. If they're offensive enough, you just can't put them out.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Because people still know?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  People still know, really. I think the rules are a little bit like case by case

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, depends on the context.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  My favorite things about this whole territory, and we kind of touched on this when we had Michael Palin on ages ago, talking about censorship because Monty Python had that a lot, was that comedy writers in particular actively. Tried to sneak stuff past the censors back in the day. And I was reading in America, this was a big thing on Mork and Mindy.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  So what's that, Robin Williams?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  It's a Robin Williams sitcom. Yeah, he's an alien who's arrived on Earth and it's a sitcom about him being on Earth.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  No. Oh, so good.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah. So he himself, this wasn't the story I was going to tell, but he himself used to sneak in foreign language swear words. And so they used to have a censor who had to have a grasp of multiple languages in order to understand what he was sneaking through. Much like in tennis, you know, how the officials often have to learn those multiple languages. But the writing team, it's very hard.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Polyglot, you know, what's Robin Williams been reading this week? Which obscene dictionary has he been reading?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, that's the thing. They obviously didn't have too much of a grasp because the Mork and Mindy team actually managed to get a character onto the show. I think it was just for one episode, but he was called Arnold Wanker. And Arnold Wanker.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  What language is that written?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  So when that, when that episode played in the UK, they did censor it, but it got away in America.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  That's so funny. What we've done before, there was an American sci fi magazine called Servants of the Wank, wasn't there?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  That was, that was with an H at the end.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  It was, yes. It was really, yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Servants of the Wank. What was the other one? The knobheads?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Planet of the knobheads.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Planet of the knobheads.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  I know. See the little meeting where they just didn't know, they're just, yeah, oh.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  I know.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  The guy, by the way, who played Arnold Wanker was called Logan Ramsey and his dad was in the military. And he's the man who sounded the alarm for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Just a random connection.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  That's an incredible fact.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  He sent, he sent.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Was it a big bleep that he did?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  It was a giant. Yeah, he, he was the one who wrote what apparently is the most famous messages from that signal saying air raid Pearl Harbor. This is no drill. That was from Arnold Wanker's dad.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  He didn't invent, this is no, this is not a drill though, did he?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Not sure.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  I didn't know that was Renee McGree. Wasn't it?

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Very, very nice.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Just when you're talking about swear words and because I am in ostentatious as Andy used to be, would you like some Regency swear words?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  I just thought, because I think the other thing that's funny about swear words, a lot of English ones have been around a long time. Some of them have gone. So if I give you adventurous, what do you think adventurous is?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  I feel like that's somebody hunts for rich elderly men and hopes they die.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  No, it's just a use of them as a prostitute or a wild woman. But adventurous is nice, isn't it?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Oh, don't go down that area. There's a couple of adventurouses.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Maggot pie?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Maggot pie.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Is that a part of the anatomy?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Oh, it's not? Magpie?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  A turd?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  No, it's just lowest of the low. Yeah, maggot pie. Like you're a scum, you're a maggot pie. That's nice.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Magpies were once maggoty pies.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  Oh, maybe, yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think so.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  When do you think Kiss My Ass came in?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Kiss My Ass.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Nineteen eighties.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Seventeen oh five.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Seventeen oh five.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Kiss My Ass.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Kiss My Ass, yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting that some of these have been around a very long time.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Because they do the job so well, you don't, they haven't changed.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can I tell you a thing about nursery rhymes?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  There was a lot of concern that nursery rhymes were too horrible for children.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  A lot of them are awful.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Because lots of them are, you know.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  I'd say ninety percent are.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  But there was a, yeah, there was an opera, there was a, there was an outfit that set up, I think, is, various sources say it's either Victorian or twentieth century. It was definitely trading in the nineteen forties, but it was the British Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  They became reform.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  It starts with nursery rhymes and then...

• 12:17Speaker 03

  What's all this about a barbed wire black sheep? Not sure about that.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Basically, the owl and the pussycat came to sea in a tiny boat.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  And it was set up by the two Jeffreys, Jeffrey Hall and Jeffrey Handley Taylor. And I can only find two works that were written by them. New Rhymes for Old, which was basically a new version of nursery rhymes. Things like-

• 12:38Speaker 04

  They're the original woke brigade, is that what we're saying?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  They kind of were, yeah. Three Kind Mice was one of theirs.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, very good. I mean, that one is really bad.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  That is, yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Is it? Yeah. I don't, I can't remember, Three Blind Mice, Three Blind Mice, they all- See How They Run. See How They Run. They all ran after the farmer's wife. She cut off some cheese with a carving knife.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Cut off their tails with a carving knife.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  I think it's fine. Anyway, Jeffrey Hall was reported as saying about his work, "I don't like children very much, you know. I really hate the nasty little brutes, but I've got to live with them when they grow up." So it was kind of, we've just been reformed children so they don't turn into little brutes.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Interesting. This carried on in the 20th century in America. And in 1959, Senator Thomas C. Desmond found research that said 60% of young people thought that old people were too old fashioned, sick and slow to catch on to new ideas. And he blamed this on nursery rhymes. And he said, like, for instance, the old woman who lived in the shoe, at the end, she whips the children. And he thought that this nursery rhyme in particular, and some of the others, were making people think that old people were witches or evil or cut tails off blind mice.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  So it was demonizing old people.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  There wasn't enough positive representation of old people.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. Whereas the-

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Old King Cole was a merry old soul, I'll give you that.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, Merry Old Soul was he.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  What a lazy nursery rhyme. Merry Old Soul, Merry Old Soul was he. I'd send that back if I was the editor.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  There's more to it.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  I said, you've said it already.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  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.comPARENTS to learn more.

• 14:39Speaker 02

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

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Yes, contrary to what maybe you were taught at school, or you know, Samuel Pepys's diary was ignored for hundreds of years, and when they did finally translate it, it turned out to be extremely racy and problematic.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Samuel Pepys, guys.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Samuel Pepys.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Can we just quickly say, for international listeners who may not know Samuel Pepys?

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  So, Big Deal in the 17th Century helped run Britain's navy administrator, but the main reason he's famous is that he kept this diary for just 10 years of his life,

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  which covers a very eventful bit of English history, which is the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, war against the Dutch, which was a big national hobby back then, and the Restoration of the monarchy, because Britain was coming out of a civil war, executing the last king. So it's an amazingly interesting time in English history.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  And when you say translated, it's not that he was writing in a different language, he was writing in a coded...

• 15:34Speaker 04

  He was writing in a coded kind of shorthand, so if you've ever seen that, it's like a series of squiggles that stand in for letters or full words like that. So it was a very common language, and the Pepys wrote in a type of shorthand, which was called tachygraphy, which was quite common at the time for clerks.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Tacky means fast, doesn't it, in Greek?

• 15:54Speaker 04

  I wonder how linked it is to like 20th century shorthand, you know? But it looks very similar. So he wrote in a kind of shorthand. So for a long time, people didn't know what was in Pepys's diaries. They just sat. In 1818, another diary is published from a similar time, right? By this guy called John Evelyn, and it's extremely boring. One of his quotes includes, "A rich gentleman visited me." That's the kind of diary this man was publishing, but it was a huge sensation, because people were obviously desperate for information about that time, or how people were living. And so the master of the library at that time is like, "Ooh, we've got Pepys's diary." So he lends a copy of it, one copy to his uncle, who lends it to another uncle, who says, basically, "We need to translate this." So they get this guy, who's an undergraduate called John Smith,

• 16:39Speaker 04

  and they pay him £200 to translate the complete everything in Pepys's library.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Which is more words than Shakespeare.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  What era is this now?

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So now we are into around 1820, I think, this is what we're talking. And as he starts translating it, I said around 1820, he discovers that... Basically, a lot of stuff in this diary is not, I'm watching The Great Fire of London. A lot of this stuff is about sex. There's loads of stuff about sex.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  When they first published it, they keep some of the sex in. They changed the whores to mistresses. So they say that he has mistresses.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Adventuresses.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Adventuresses, indeed. And they keep some of it, but apparently there's constant edits on the book saying, um, OBJ, objectionable. So they were like worried about, they knew, they basically tried to, they, it's a cover up. It's a whitewash. They wanted him to seem like a moral figure. And when you're in primary school in this country, you study The Great Fire of London. And still to this day, my kids have had to study Samuel Pepys. Like a very big thing because he wrote this diary. He's famous for burying his wine and his Parmesan in his garden.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  So that's what my boys have said to me. Cheese barrier. Cheese barrier.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Cheese barrier. It's like an interesting fact. And he's sold to you, I would say as a kid in this country is like, oh, you know, there's like Charles Dickens, there's Jane Austen, there's Shakespeare, there's Samuel Pepys, like Nelson. He's like, one of our figures, you know, really important. But yeah, he has a lot of sex. He assaults a lot of teenage girls.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  His poor, his poor wife is having to cope with all this, you know? He married her, I think she was about fifteen.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  She was fourteen, which even at the time was young. I know we sometimes forget, like, but at that time, he was 22, she was 14.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  She finds out about his, one of his affairs and refuses to wash or eat for quite a while, which really pisses him off. But his favorite thing to do is to sleep with, um, men in the Navy's wives.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  So that the men are away, he's sent them away. He's in charge of naval administration. He knows where they are. He knows when they're coming back and then he sleeps with the wives.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  It's also a bit extorted if sometimes he's saying, I won't, I won't put your husband in the Navy.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Like, your husband won't have to go with the press gang and be away for years if you sleep with me. So.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  So it's very horrible. And he does also have an entry where he talks about masturbating in church while thinking of his friend's daughter. God forgive me, he writes.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  I can't tell if Andy's disgusted or that's a we've all done it smile.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Oh no, we've all masturbated in church about our friend's daughter.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  In fairness, he is like saving time because he's in church already and he's asking forgiveness at the same time.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  That's true, lessons to be learned there.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  And it's very problematic. Although other people argue, this amazing new book called The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary by Kate Loveman, she argues that the way he's writing about it is it's unclear how assault based it is, but I obviously he's he's not.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Because he didn't write in his diary how much consent was involved.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Well, we, yeah, you know, obviously it's deeply difficult for us to put that on the past.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  All I'm saying is more like Samuel Creeps. Yep, very nice.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  You've been waiting. That was worth it.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll tell you, one person he definitely didn't get consent from was the queen he kissed, which was Queen Catherine of France, unable to give consent because she'd died something like nearly 200 years before. So he was in Westminster Abbey on Shrove Tuesday in 1669.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  He was the right one, put it this way.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Basically, he was visiting her coffin. Her coffin was there and the lid had cracked and it became exposed and the top half of her body was there. And he wrote in his diary, "And I did kiss her mouth. Reflecting upon it, I did kiss a queen. And this my birthday, and I 36 year old, and I did kiss a queen."

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Oh my God. Did he ask forgiveness for that as well?

• 20:15Speaker 04

  No. And it's the thing, it's like, the first set, it comes in 1825 and, you know, they really tidied him up. They wanted him to appear morally serious. We don't get the full translation of all nine volumes till 1971. So people don't really know what he's been up to until the 20th century. But he's, again, a bit like Dickens, who also, you know, has problematic behaviour. I find it weird that we teach children about this man.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I think, but if if you're not going to teach children about any problematic people from history, there's going to be a short lesson as well.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Let's stick to those short lessons, James. Dancing and reading of nursery rhymes.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  But not those nursery rhymes.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Kind mice.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  But you just have to teach both, I mean, to really young children.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  But it's weird to do it at primary school. I guess that's what I think. Like you could definitely say, oh, we have this diary. There must be other things from the Great Fire of London. He's so important in that section of primary school learning.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I think it's because the sourcing is, you know, we don't have as.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Much and it's just, yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  I think one thing that's interesting about him is the only thing we really know about him is this diary.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  So he must be one of the only people in history where the entire understanding of his character comes from his own words.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Like, he could have made all that stuff up, couldn't he, really?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  They say in the diary, it's very clear, he didn't, he wasn't writing it for posterity. It's not one of those diaries. He used to keep things in there that he couldn't keep in like his household ledger. So it's like, who's bribing? Who, who owes him a dinner? Who? So it's like, it's very personal record.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  He also ducks into other languages, even within his shorthand, he will, if he's describing something especially outrageous. You know, I did, I did make her tener mi cosa in her mano. Right. So that's hold thing and hand. Like, it's not, it's not a very sophisticated. This is, this is not the Enigma code we're talking about.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, he does, he does change languages, but he's also writing, as said, in a code anyway, and then putting it in another code.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And he also writes in euphemisms quite a lot. So which of these do you think is about sexy stuff? Did do as much as was safe.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Toss and tumble and take a boat to Greenwich with Captain Cox.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Never take a boat to Greenwich, sir. I would never do something like that.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Captain Cox?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Of the three things that I said, the last one is the only one that wasn't a euphemism.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Toss and tumble and what was the first?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Did as much as was safe.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  They also think he was infertile because he had, he actually had a huge gallbladder, gallstone removed. Like, and survived that operation, which he kept, it was the size of a tennis ball. And they think that maybe because he worried about pregnancies, but he doesn't seem to have had any children. He died with his wife dead and no children.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  He used to throw a party every year.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Every year.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, to commemorate.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Gallstone coming out. What a weird guy.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a pain, the painful procedure.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Lots of people died.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  They had to cut it out.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  It just sounds so unpleasant.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  His first entry is saying, I feel exultant. It is out. So like, that's when he starts writing.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 23:13Speaker 04

  And he only stops because of his eyesight. That's the only reason he stops.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Yes. And why was he worried about his eyesight? Too much time in church.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  The old Arnold Lanker.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  His wife had one portrait done of her. It's a really nice portrait. I've seen it. She was Elizabeth, wasn't she?

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, Elizabeth Saint Michelle or something.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  She was French.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  And it was, it was a really nice portrait. It was destroyed in 1830 by a Scottish nurse who thought it showed too much cleavage.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  And I've seen it and it does not. I'm not saying how much is too much, but I'm just saying it is.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  For the 1830s.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Do you know what though? I'm sorry. In a regency period, there was a fashion to have tops that came down to the top of your nipples. Like that was quite a ladies fashion. So.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Queen Elizabeth was sometimes wabs out at court.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  But that's even earlier.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  I think, I think.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Regency was like, top of nipples was a bit of a trend at one point.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  I think we did a fact on the show once about the fact that on a makeup table, a woman would have nipple makeup as well. Because it was such a thing that you would be seeing on a day to day occurrence. Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Gosh, interesting.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  They're the window to the soul.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And then she found him indecently engaged with his maid.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And I read the diary from that day when it happened. He says, my wife was struck mute and grew angry about two in the morning, wakes me and cried and fell to tell me a great secret that she was a Roman Catholic and had received the holy sacrament.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  So it's actually her fault. Is that, what's the implication? Isn't that weird?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Apparently she was constantly threatening to return to Catholicism.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  So yeah, basically.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  And he was always stressed about it. It's like, you can't be, I'll get in trouble.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  But then the next two or three days, he's basically like, my wife's still upset. Yeah, my wife's still quite upset.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And he only calls her my wife. He's just referred to constantly. He might never even names her in the diary.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I think it's a bit dubious.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  What?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  I just think if you only ever refer to your wife as my wife, that's not a very loving sign.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  Yes, I agree. Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Especially if you do it in a northern accent like my wife.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  It's either northern and Borat are the two my wives you shouldn't do unless you're from the north.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Is that the clue for you?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  In a book where he sleeps with so many women per day, he can't even remember the number.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  I'm saying there are plenty, I'm saying the signs are all there.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  There's a lot of red flags in his diary. At one point, I think he's described in a biography as prowling like an animal around Westminster to find girls to sleep with.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  All the animals that I've seen prowling around Westminster are foxes. So was he going round bins as well?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  He's basically the bin fox of the 17th century.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  It is interesting, a lot of historians, despite all of this information, I read an article by Max Hastings, who sort of says, "A lot of people do read Peeps as a person of his time. This was largely happening. A lot of men were going away to war, people were sleeping with wives and so on."

• 25:56Speaker 03

  If there was a diary of Henry VIII, it would be very interesting to read it.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, yeah, it'd be fascinating, wouldn't it? And I also think what's interesting about Peeps is he didn't come from a great family situation. His mother was a laundromaid, he was one of 10 children, he's number five and he's the only one who survived the oldest into adulthood. And he worked his way up through the system. So he's a very interesting character. I suppose I think what is so interesting is I was taught him so much at primary school.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I feel like he might be a secondary school thing too.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  But it came in handy in your career because you were in, of course, Peep Show.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, one of the first fibre optic networks in London was built in tubes that used to do the safety curtains in London's theatres. So you know the old iron curtain that goes down for the interval and up?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Big, heavy things.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Safety curtains to prevent fires in theatres.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  They were all operated by hydraulics.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Right? Fast forward to the 1980s, when...

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Where were we the first time?

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Oh, we were, let's say, the 1880s.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, that's a hell of a flash.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was actually.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  But that's okay.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  You don't need to tell us about that intervening 100 years.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  No. But basically, in the 1980s, fibre optic networks were all setting up shop, right? And it was BT, which had their own network and they had all their own tunnels. They had, you know, the old sort of post office tunnels and all their ducts under the city. So if they wanted to put in telecommunications stuff, they had their own network. But other companies were being allowed in on the act and one of them was Mercury, which was setting up another network.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Mercury Communications.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Mercury Communications, right. It was sort of privatized, like just a private firm. They needed some network of channels under London that they could use and they didn't have any. And then they had this realization, there was this thing called the London Hydraulic Power Company, which had operated this massive network under London in the 19th and 20th centuries. And it used huge amounts of hydraulic power to operate massive machinery. So like cranes down at the docks, all the safety curtains in theatres, car hoists and garages, all of it was operated by hydraulic power.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  It's just so cool, weird, but amazing.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Where's it come, where's the power bit?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  They draw the water out of the river and they, they, they heat it up a bit and they, they use the water pressure to operate massive machines.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  And you can just plug in, you're like, I'm just gonna use that, I'm on the hydraulic network.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  The hydraulics just means if I push some water here and there's a big old tube, then it'll push it at the end of the tube as well, right?

• 28:38Speaker 03

  It's just so weird. And basically this system had gone out of business in, it lasted a surprisingly long time, till like the seventies or something insane like that. But this network was available and so they just shoved all the fiber optics through these hydraulics tubes.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Crafty.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And so these are not the, these are not like the wires that send the fiber optic stuff. The wires go inside the tubes, I think.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Because fiber optics are basically made of glass, they're like glass wires and the light sort of bounces off it. And like, instead of in hydraulics where water goes through it, you've got light going through it. And then you fire pulses of light and then your computer can read the pulses.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  It's insane.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Underground, instead of the water power, now the light is bouncing off the glass.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  It's mad, isn't it? It's insane. The whole world works on this basis now.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Arnold Wanker would not believe how the world has changed. Change.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  But it's it's amazing, this technology, when you read into it. It seems so wizardly, like it just doesn't seem real. And a new record, speed record, was recently set for data transmission using commercially installed fiber optic cables. They transferred 450 terabytes per second. What that translates is roughly 50 million movies could be streamed simultaneously with this amount of data.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Now you see me too, 50 million times at the same time.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  But that's basically all the tabs that I've got open on my computer.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  The one of the big names in this, because weirdly, you'd think that the inventor of fiber optics would be a household name, given how much this is changing the world. But Narendra Singh Kapani, born in 1926, he lived in an Indian city very near the Himalayas. And his science teacher, when he was a kid, told him that light only travels in straight lines. And he said, I don't think that's right. And he spent the rest of his life looking into that. Effectively, it was to get back at his teacher that he became interested in this territory. Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  It's such a personal, deep vendetta to take. And how we benefited from that kind of absolute stubbornness is wonderful.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I think in fairness to him, unless you've got an enormous gravitational pull, light does go in a straight line.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Fairness to his teacher.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But so what he became.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  His teacher's in the corner weeping, it was true in context.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  What he became obsessed with, which is what is fiber optic, is, as you said, James, the bouncing of the light. And how do you manage to do that so that it doesn't stop, that it finds any angle that it can go at?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  You can bounce it around the corner, basically, can't you?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  It's really cool. And you know who is a household name who was quite important in this? Alexander Graham Bell.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  He always turns up, doesn't he? It's communication.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  What did he do?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Well, he invented something called the photo phone. And that transmitted voice signals on a beam of light. So you would speak and then your voice waves would hit a mirror. They would create vibrations and then the light would vibrate. And then it would go to another place which would work out. What the vibrations are and turn it back into sound again.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And he thought it was the best invention of all his inventions.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  But that specifically didn't take off, right?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  No, because basically it would just be so garbled, you would hardly be able to hear it. And you like, the amount of data you would lose from that signal is just way too much.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  It would just really wouldn't work.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  That was the thing that had to be conquered, basically.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  So there was, the problem was you had copper phone lines for communication, which didn't have nearly enough capacity. And then you had microwave towers, like we talked about the BT tower ages ago, that's what kind of they used.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  And then they thought, wow, what about lasers? Could that work?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  And basically, what, and what medium does the light travel through best? And someone suggested optical fibres, but you, you would lose 90% of the power every 10 metres. It just wouldn't work.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  And then a scientist called Charles Cow in the 60s, he was working at a really stodgy British research outfit called Standard Telecommunications Laboratories, and he and a colleague called George Hockham, they worked out how to reduce the light loss and make the glass purer. And suddenly you could transmit signals a long way along.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Um, glass. And everyone else thought, no, this isn't the future at the time. And he, and Charles Cow insisted, no, fused silica is the way. It is the way we're going to communicate. And he was absolutely right.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  And he won the Nobel Prize for it.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  You know, decades later.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. He got his, he got his flowers.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He absolutely did. No, no, but like, it, you know, it's.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And now we got these things underneath all the oceans.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And that's how we can do Zoom to America.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  It's extraordinary. Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Or whatever.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  They've just laid these cables all over the planet.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  It's not right, is it? It doesn't feel right.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  They're covered in Kevlar as well.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't like it.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Why are you worried about it?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Three blind mice killed by fibre optics. No, it just sounds, it just, it's one of those things that modern technology does all the time, that you don't really understand it. And when someone explains it to you, your head explodes a bit of like, oh shit, that's what's happening. But you're just like, yeah, yeah, I, I'm zooming someone from San Francisco.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  I don't know how that works. I assume it's like a phone.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  So you've got these cables under the water, right? What do you think damages them?

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Fish.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Specifically large fish?

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Angry fish.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Large angry fish.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Large angry fish.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  I'll say sharks.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I would call a large angry fish as well.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  A shark, a shark.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  In actual fact, it's always said that that's true, but that is not true.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  I literally felt if I said shark, it was gonna go.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  We don't do that on this show.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  Thank god, it's very distressing.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  When you're on QI next year, look out for that one.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Because it's not all bleeps. Yeah, yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  This is an article in Wired by someone called Jane Raffino, and it's basically sharks do not eat wires.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  I guess why would they?

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  But we thought like, because there's electricity going through them maybe, and they have electro receptors, maybe they would do that. But not only does it not really happen, we know where the myth comes from. And it was someone about 40 years ago who had a new cable that was going between Canary Islands. They were testing it out and it wasn't really working. And they weren't sure what was causing the problem. And this person, this woman called Elaine Stafford, had to go to Paris to do a presentation about it. And she was like, well, what am I going to say about the stuff that doesn't really work? And her boss said, well, we've noticed that there's some shark teeth marks on there. So just say it's sharks. And she said it was sharks and then the myth took hold there.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  But since then, they've tested it, they've literally got sharks and given them wires and said chew on this.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Excuse me, my diet is actually very, very special.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  They're just not interested in them. Like, it turns out that sometimes sharks might bite them, but it's just an accident.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Sharks are such a fool guy to the humans. But if I saw a fiber optic cable advertised and I was in the market for like a 5,000 mile cable and I saw now shark proof. I would absolutely go for it. I would not consider that it might not need to be shark proof.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Well, it kind of is pitched like that because they do put Kevlar over it for reasons of being bitten or ripped apart under the ocean. So the cables under the ocean have Kevlar on them.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  But they do that because of this myth.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yes.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  So interesting.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  So they don't really need to do that.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  So is there a danger?

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  I mean, the biggest danger would be if you were trying to take down the Western world, right? You would, you would deep sea die.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Or the Eastern world, that or the Eastern world.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Oh no, I just don't like the Western world. I'm very happy with the Eastern.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Don't tell your plots on the show. It's really obvious.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  It's definitely a thing that in warfare. People will try and snap each other's cables to stop internet. Yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  That is something that's currently happening in the Ukraine and Russia war.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Which is that soldiers always carry on them a pair of scissors because drones now use fiber optics. So if they get a drone, they break into it and cut through the fiber optics in it. So it can't send back messages and details of where it's being held.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  But they're not carrying sharks with them to do that job. That's.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  These cables that are running all around the world under the sea. Obviously, there are a lot of them out there now and some of them are falling out of use. So this year, the first ever fiber optic cable has been hauled back out of the ocean. It entered service in 1988.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Within 18 months, it was completely full to bursting with, you know, the capacity was used up.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Transatlantic Telephone Eight is the name. And there are now companies which are setting up shops saying, well, we're going to recycle this stuff. It's got loads of copper in it. It's really useful. And there are, I think, three companies in the world which do subsea cable recovery. But if you're one of those three companies, there's loads of stuff out there that's not being used anymore.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  It's sad that something born in 1988 now has to be taken out and put to sleep because it's not working and it's too, it's too full.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  I'm roughly ready for that.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question about the tech? Cause and this is, this is one of those, talk to me like I'm an idiot. Okay.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  I'll do my best.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Never.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Dan, you don't have to tell them. It's fine. I've noticed. They're really cool with it. They're really fine.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  It whizzes along.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's light bringing information, right?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  The light converts the information into ones and zeros as it bounces along the tube. What we receive on the other side, are we receiving a reconstructed version of that image?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  We're getting zeros and ones.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Basically. And then your computer knows what, how to turn zeros and ones into everything else.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  It's extraordinary because basically that means everyone's got a unique version that's being recreated on their end. So it's rebuilding on every single different device.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  I mean, that's pretty extraordinary.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  It's a unique. Creation.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  There is a set of zeros and ones that equates to Jesse Eisenberg's face.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  But what, how's it getting through the Wi-Fi?

• 38:10Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  That's the next bit, because I've got fibre optic, but it's not, my computer's not plugged in, plugged into it.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  So then it's sending waves through the air.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  From your router.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Send it out and people.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Radio waves.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And then those waves that go up and down, up and down.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  You know how this is like the fun, this is like your comedy podcast. So I think like, I, I just felt my brain leave my body.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Well, we specialise in that too.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I think the, the good thing is that you don't have to understand it, right?

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  That's the great thing about the modern world.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  I just have a recurring anxiety that I will be the one that goes back in time and have to explain all this stuff to people of the past.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Oh, you know that wonderful t-shirt of like a modern guy surrounded by ancient people and they're saying, but how do these antibiotics work? And he's saying, I don't know.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Theatre invention.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  In the fifth century B.C., Ischylus comes along and makes an incredible invention of theatre. He introduces a second actor on stage.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  The producer's saying, we don't have the budget for an Ischylus.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Isn't that amazing? Until then, you would only have one person erating the story.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  He brings a second actor on. One hundred years later, Sophocles comes along and introduces the third actor.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  It'll never work.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  This Sophocles is crazy. It's just for two people, max. I want to see a duologue.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  We call it a love line, not a love triangle.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Was the third person a butler?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  The third person was a way that you could interact between two different people without one of them knowing everything.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  May I ask a question? Where does the Greek chorus come in?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Sorry. So you had the chorus and you would have one actor.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  I see. Oh, yeah. And they would often, the chorus would often talk to one actor. Yeah. And they wouldn't talk to, and the messenger would come and deliver a monologue about what's happened. They wouldn't often deliver it to the person. They'd be like, I'm a messenger. I've just told so-and-so, just told Zeus this. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. That's fascinating.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Now that would be a fun time travel. Bring him back now to the future and he'd be like, oh no, this has got way out of hand. What have I done?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Just sort of Game of Thrones.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Who's that guy? Who's that guy? We don't know. We don't know.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  We don't know. You don't need to worry about it. It'll, just forget it. Season six explains everything.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Okay, my fact this week is that embryos are more muscly than you.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Very funny. James was pointing at me for the listener at home. And I'll take on any embryo in a fight.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  They should put that on Netflix. I'd pay to watch that.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  One man against 100 embryos. Who will win?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  This is a fairly recent study from Howard University in Washington DC. And they made some 3D images of human foetuses and found that we get extra muscles in our hands and feet when we're embryos and when we're foetuses and they disappear before we're born.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And they're kind of muscles that you get in other animals, like lizards have them and chimpanzees have them in their feet, which makes them more

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Flexible.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Flexible. Yeah, they can grab things.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Even after, oh, so as as adult chimpanzees, they'll have these muscles.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  They absolutely do.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  I didn't realize, because I thought they were, I thought it was a thing that no mammals had these. Maybe it's the hand ones that have completely passed out.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Because that's a famous fact, isn't it? You don't have muscles in your fingers. Like, that's a very old QI fact.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The muscles that move your fingers are in your wrist.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Yes, but you used to have muscles in your fingers when you were in the womb.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yes, right. It's a shame that this doesn't come up on the first shots, you know, the ultrasounds that you get. Sort of these bodybuilder poses from your, from your growing child.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Is it a boy? And how much is he lifting?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So unfortunately, these are just muscles. Muscles in your hands and your feet. It's not like big arm muscles and stuff.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Massive biceps, yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  There are apparently a few adults that have this. They found one or two people that still have them, that they didn't atrophy. But it doesn't really happen often. And also it's quite a small sample size. We don't know for sure that it happens in all human embryos. Could have been these lizardy muscles were just found in members of the royal family.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Lovely. I didn't see for the longest time where you were going with that.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  But yeah, it does seem likely that most, if not all, fetuses have these extra muscles.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  So cool. And it's, is the idea it's a hangover from when lizards were becoming mammals?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  That is what they're saying because they're found in lizards, they're found in fish as well. These muscles in their fins, but they're not found in mammals.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  And we have a little tail as well, which sort of shows that's like between the fourth and six weeks.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Some of us still do.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Like little tadpoles when you, when you look at a very early fetus.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Does it get absorbed back in?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I think it becomes your coccyx.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I've always heard that that tail, that it just kind of, yeah, becomes part of your spine.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  All these things are called developmental atavisms.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  So mysterious.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  It's weird that the body goes through the effort to make them and then merges them into something else. Like rather than like, why waste your time, guys? What's, it must be doing something that is there for that bit of time.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, quite often with these things is different genes that make all the different stuff. So if you did turn that gene off, it might stop this from happening, but it might stop other stuff from growing at the same time.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Yes. I was looking at what happens at the very earliest moments of you being you. So literally just after the fertilization of an egg. A sperm cell fertilizes an egg. One of the very first initial phases of your life is showing a bit of cleavage.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  Well, I'll take that. That sounds more like me than you.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  That's what the process is called. When the single cell zygote, the fertilized cell, first thing it does is it divides itself into two. And then into four, and that process is called cleavage.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  And who named it that? What male doctor said that looks like showing a bit of cleavage? And it's actually, it's basically about to be an embryo.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Look at our discovery.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  So cleavage just means cutting, right?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And so the way I usually use the word cleavage is in like stonework.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  I just didn't expect the end of that sentence to be that, James.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  If you get a piece of slate, the cleavage of it is how easily it cuts. And actually, the cleavage in your-

• 45:03Speaker 04

  James, whatever turns you on, that's fine. No one is shaming you here. No kink shaming here. If it's slate, if it's clay, it's up to you.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  So the cleavage in your chest is a euphemism because people didn't want to use any other words for it. So they used the stonework word.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yes. This is way older, isn't it? Like cleavage for stonework is way older.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Much older, yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  What about decolletage?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  That feels like an oldie, but actually that might be a 40s one or something.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  But it's the French word for it, isn't it?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's also euphemism, like peeps did, using foreign words.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. All the terms are so cool. I just went, I didn't understand plenty of them when I was reading these very detailed genetic descriptions of what individual cells are doing. But, you know, the primitive streak is something-

• 45:49Speaker 01

  And what's that?

• 45:49Speaker 03

  That shows, that's the kind of-

• 45:50Speaker 04

  It's a great band. They're really good, yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  It's again, you're a handful of cells at this point, and the primitive streak is this structure that forms, like a line up and down. Imagine a pear shape, that's you at this stage. And again, you're a few cells. And the primitive streak is this little line that goes up and down, and it establishes bilateral symmetry. So symmetry, top to bottom, that's what happens then. Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Symmetry, top to bottom was the first album, I think.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Would you not say more symmetry, side to side in the human body, rather than top to bottom? Otherwise, that sounds like you've got a head at the top and a head at the bottom.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  You're absolutely right. It's the opposite of what I said. It's the opposite. It's left and right symmetry. You're absolutely right.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  I like the term, this is for a bit later in a pregnancy, but the quickening.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Oh, the quickening, yeah, yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  It's a cool term, old English term.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  The feeling around 16 weeks of pregnancy, when you get the flutters of movement of a baby.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  They still call it that.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Do they?

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's still some, like midwives still say, oh yeah, it's a quickening.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  It's a quickening.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Not all midwives, but I have heard that phrase, having been pregnant twice.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  But that's, that is, that used to be the way that you would-

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Because you wouldn't have pregnancy tests.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  And also you can miss periods and not be pregnant. So yeah, you'd need to wait for your quickening to know.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  But you do, you're feeling rough well before that.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Well, not everyone does.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I suppose not.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, so some people have no, it's called morning sickness, but let me tell you, it's 24 hour sickness. Some people don't have it at all. So you could, and that's how some people don't know they're pregnant. People have no symptoms.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Well, that's the best magazine article ever written was headlined, My Dodgy Kebab Was A Baby. And I read that in Love It magazine many years ago and it stayed with me.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And he later became Luke Littler, the dance player.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  It's funny the pieces of prose that stay with you, isn't it?

• 47:31Speaker 03

  It's weird. Everyone's head has this stuff in it.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Well, you all knew Andy so well and I want to read out one of his favourite pieces.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  I thought it was a kebab, but it was a baby from Love It.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  I must say, I was blown away by fibre optics and I think even more blown away by the lifespan of an embryo and the fact that they can be frozen and the fact that there was a child born in 2020 who was born from an embryo that was frozen in 1992, a 27-year distance between the two. And it's really remarkable and you can have multiple embryos from the same person, which means that you, 27 years later, can have siblings born by using the embryos that are connected.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  That's a buddy comedy. That's a buddy comedy. Sorry, that's a buddy comedy. They're siblings, but they're 30 years apart in age.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Are they also cops?

• 48:24Speaker 04

  But yeah, I know not to.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Funny coincidence. They're cops.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  I have friends who've had IVF and the eggs were fertilised at the same time, but there's an age gap between the siblings, but really they were born at the, they were created at the same time.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Quite often they talk about themselves as twins, despite the fact that one's got a three-year head start on them.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And they were there together at the same, like, so they were there in the same thing.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Can I just say that obviously you start off with a blastor-pore which becomes your anus? And your anus tunnels its way through the rest of you to become your mouth.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  I would argue blastor-pore is a better name for an anus, certainly.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Certainly in my experience on some nights.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  That was a kebab that night, wasn't it?

• 49:07Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, it tunnels its way through you.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  But you're making it sound very sentient, like it's like, come on guys, let's go, go, go.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Go, go, go.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  But some animals start with the mouth and it tunnels backwards to become the anus.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  That seems like the civilized way to do it.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Well, we unfortunately are the anus first.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  We go blast off first.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Is it all mammals?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  There can't be a division with the mammals.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  It's, and the other ones called Deuterophores or something?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. And part of you, when the, again, when the, you're like one cell, then two cells, then four cells. At the four cell stage is the last point where we are all the same and all the cells are identical. Even at that point, like the next cell division to eight cells, um, the cells have worked out, worked out. I'm being, you know, I'm anthropomorphizing there, but like they've, I suppose they are humans. But they've, they've, the cells.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  This is, this is what a one person dialogue is like.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. When is the chorus coming on?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  I'd sack the chorus to give that a full state of time, I'm afraid. So even after those two divisions.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  The cells have their genetic signatures sorted out and they know whether they're going to be, be likely to come part of the fetus or part of the placenta. So half of those cells go in, go off to be placenta cells.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  It's wild, it's wild.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  It is wild.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  And then fetuses can send stuff through the placenta.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That can become part of the mother, right? That was one of the most amazing things I learned when we had kids.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  What's, say that again?

• 50:34Speaker 04

  The embryo is a part of you, there is a part of that baby in you. And this is used a lot when you talk about miscarriage or baby loss. So a lot of women feel like when they have a baby loss, they feel like that baby is still with them. That's kind of a euphemistic way. And then they now have discovered there literally is a part that embryo would have gone into the bloodstream and remained with the mother.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  The fetus can send stem cells through the placenta into the mother. So let's. Say you get an injury, the baby can send stem cells into your body that can then turn into any part of tissue and then can make you feel better.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  And if you have a C-section, then your body needs to repair itself, right? So it needs skin cells. There's still stem cells in the placenta from the baby that can come into your body and become part of that scar from the C-section.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's like they're still, which is why we use phrases like, it feels like you're with me, it feels like your heart's been ripped out. Also, if you have Rhys's negative blood, O negative blood, and your embryo doesn't have that, the first time you have a baby, that's fine. But their blood goes into your blood, your body goes, that's a foreign type of blood and it starts attacking it.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  So this is what they used to cause, someone would have a healthy pregnancy and then they'd have lots of miscarriages afterwards and they would never understand why. And it's because the mother had O negative blood, the baby's blood wasn't O negative. So every time they got pregnant again, the body, her body would start attacking it going, this is like bad, we should get rid of it. And now, if you're Rhys's negative like I am, you have to have two special injections. You have injection while you're pregnant and injection afterwards if your baby is not the same blood type. Otherwise, your next pregnancy, your body will literally go attack it.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Because they don't know what it is.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Extraordinary.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Whereas if your baby is the same blood type, you're sharing the blood type, it's fine. Both my kids do not have the same blood type as me, so I had to have this huge, it's called anti-D injection. And let me tell you, it's a fucking huge needle gun.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  That's insane that you created a thing that's different, like that's wild.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  I know that's probably just basic science, but it does sound wild when you spell it out like that.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  It is wild, it's also annoying.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  You know the best way of testing an egg?

• 52:37Speaker 04

  For what? Soft or hard boiled?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  You put it in water and if it floats, it's gone off.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  You need four minutes boiling and then 30 seconds in cold, I think.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  So this is if you're doing IVF and you want a way of testing a fertilized egg. So you've got the eggs fertilized and you want to see how viable they might be.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  The best method, or a really useful method, is to just give it a squeeze. With your fingers?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  They're too small to squeeze.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  They're too small to squeeze with your fingers, but I think you have special.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Andy learnt the hard way.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Special little pincers. It just has to be just right, basically, not too firm, not too soft.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  And that, those eggs.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Like an avocado.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Like an avocado. And those eggs which squeeze back, which push back a bit, you know, when pushed, are likelier to become, to produce healthier embryos, basically. So that's only been known for about 10 years, that method.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Wow. One more developmental atavism. You have things called pharyngeal arches in your face and they kind of help you to chew and help you to smile, the little sort of muscles or kind of swellings of tissue in your face. They originally were the gills.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  What the hell?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  When we were all fishes, we used them to breathe and we don't need them anymore. So they've turned into things that help you express yourself with your face. Smile.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  So did, but did gills do that for fish? Like are other fish looking going, oh, you look sad.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  I wonder if they're expressing themselves in a way we don't recognize. And they're like, God, Dan's a bit grumpy, look at his gills.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Down in the gills.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  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 at Shreiberland on Instagram. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  My Instagram is Nosice Singers James Harkin.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  And Carrie Ed.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  At Carrie Ed Lloyd.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Yep, Carrie Ed's got a new book out at the moment, very exciting. It is a kids' book. It's called Where Did She Go? It's illustrated, it's really beautiful. You've got a few kids' books out.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  So the Lydia Marmalade is a middle grade book set in Jane Austen times. This is a kids' picture book to talk to children about grief and death. So it's like a way of having a story that helps you explain to a child perhaps what happens. And this one's called Where Did She Go? And it's illustrated by Tom Percival. I'm also on tour with Ostentatious and you can listen to my Weirdos Book Podcast with friend of the show, Sarah Pascoe.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, huge back catalogue online. Go check that out now. But yeah, also if you want to get through to us as a group, podcast at qi.com is our email. You can send us your favourite fact.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  If you send those to that email, we will cherry pick the best of them and bring them to our Monday bonus show, which is called Little Fish. So you could hear your own fact read out on the show. Or if you just want to send us general feedback about things that we've said, little adventures you've had related to the topics that we've discussed, you can send them in and they'll be used on Jewel. Drop us a line, which is our mailbag episode. And that's a sort of secret private members episode. It's part of Club Fish. Club Fish lives on Patreon, patreon.com/clubfish. Go check it out because there's lots of really fun things there. There's an Excel version of the episode that you've just heard. There is a video version of Jewel on various different tiers. We have online quizzes. Go check it out. It's all lots of fun. But otherwise, just come back here next week because we're

• 55:52Speaker 02

  going to be back with another episode. A quick thank you, as ever, to the Larger Fish Busters team. That's Liang Li and Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the other gang that are involved in making this show. And we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  She's been thinking about the 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.

• 56:29Speaker 02

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• 57:04Speaker 03

  Rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zellar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Soler. This is an advertisement for Soler paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  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.comParents to learn more.