No Such Thing As The Metal Bloke

Nish Kumar joins James, Anna and Andy to discuss The Man Who Talks With String; The Man Who Sold The World; and the man you don't want directing your B-movie. Head to nosuchthingasafish.com/Risummer http://nosuchthingasafish.com/Risummer for tickets to our July shows at the Royal Institution! Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Jack Chambers, Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:58Speaker 01

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things As A Fish, where we are joined by the legendary, by the superstar, by the all-round top guy, who is Nish Kumar. And now, anyone in the UK will know all about Nish. He is very often seen on our televisions. And now he is on our podcast. If you are not from the UK and you're not familiar with Nish's work, then after listening to this episode, you will surely want to go to YouTube. If you search for Nish Kumar, you will find a full recording of one of his shows. And it's definitely worth checking out his stand-up because it is brilliant. If you are in the UK or in Ireland, then maybe you want to go and see Nish live. You can go to nishkumar.co.uk and you will find all the dates of his tour there.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  He is doing a work in progress at the Edinburgh Festival. And then he is going on the road in September. And he is very likely to be at a town near you. If you'd like to know more about us, then go to Patreon. Patreon.com/clubfish is the place to go. You can sign up there for free and get lots of little bits and pieces. Or you can sign up to one of our tiers and get even more. In fact, if you go to the Plenty More Fish tier this week, you will get an Extra long episode of this show. In fact, you always get one of those, but this show is about 20 minutes longer than the actual episode. And that is because Nish Kumar is so knowledgeable about so many different things, especially the subjects we talked about today. And so

• 2:24Speaker 01

  there are so many extra bits, extra facts, extra jokes, extra anecdotes, and it is all in there. But if you don't want to do that, do not worry. Just sit down and listen to this week's episode with Nish Kumar. I'm with the podcast.

• 2:52Speaker 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 Hobon. My name is Anna Tschinsky and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Nish Kumar. And we have gathered here today with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, in no particular order. Here we go, starting with you, Nish.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  My favourite fact that I've gathered in the last seven days is after James Cameron was fired from the film Piranha 2, he broke into the studios multiple times in the dead of night to improve the edit.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Quite a hero.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, he cares that much about the craft.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  It's so funny to think of the word craft associated with the film Piranha 2.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  It's not Bong Joon Ho saying to me, this is cinema. It doesn't quite feel, it doesn't quite feel like that. To give him his due, I think that is part of the reason why he is, I think he occupies, I think about maybe four or five of the 20 most profitable films of all, maybe not profitable, but most financially successful films of all time.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Because the sort of common thread of all of his movies is this sort of almost operatic grandeur being applied to very sort of mainstream conventional films. They get elevated by his sociopathic commitment.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  So hang on, is Piranha 2 in the top 20 grossing films of all time?

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Because I haven't seen, it's one of the Cameron oeuvre that I haven't seen.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  I don't think it's in the top two of the Piranha films.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I think all of the avatars are floating around in there.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  And certainly Titanic.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  I think it's cheating when your sequels count, which people do it with Avatar. They count Avatar and its sequel. It's like lump them together. Because, yeah, if you know this one's grossed a lot, then the next one's probably.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  But then it'll just be Avatar Marvel. And then I think like it'll have to be like.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Police Academy.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Police.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  What I found mad about reading about Piranha Two is how, like you say, it's surprising that James Cameron cared enough to break into the other's week. But how seriously they all took it? Because you think surely if you're working on these films in any role, you know, you're making a joke, don't you?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  No, Piranha One was huge, right? It was a, it was a big movie that did really well.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  That was Joe Dante of Gremlins fame, I believe. And then Piranha Two, Cameron had been hired to work on it. And we should say it's his first ever film he'd worked on as a director. And he was hired to work on it by the producer. And it sounds like it was a nightmare to work on.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  And he was fired quite quickly.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  They filmed in Jamaica, the outdoor Piranha bits. And then the actor moved to Rome for the indoor bits. And he was fired at the end of the Jamaica bit. So that's why he was breaking in. Like he was breaking in because he'd been fired from the project, but his name was still on it. And he thought, this is so bad. I can't let it go out like it is.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Thing was, there was this guy called Ovidio Asanitis.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  It's like to video, it's almost his first name.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  He really wanted to be the director, but because he was half Italian and half Egyptian, the American movie industry wouldn't let him be director. So he had to bring someone in. And his idea was, we'll bring a new person in. They won't do anything, but I'll be the real director.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  But then he brought James Cameron in, who kind of took it a bit seriously.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  So unlucky. One of the most demented, single minded people in cinema.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Because as far as he knew, he was a 28 year old nobody, right? He was like, good, I'm getting an intern on.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  I think he was obsessive. Was he like, is he a Roger Corman guy? I think he comes out of that sort of, Cameron comes out of that stable where they were just sort of all being trained to do everything in film. And then sort of thrown out into the wider world. A couple of years ago, I went to the Academy Museum in LA where they sort of have various bits of. Film ephemera, and they have his concept sketches for The Terminator. And when you look at the concept sketch of The Terminator, you go, that looks exactly like the film. That it's exactly like the film. And so the thing that you, my main takeaway from looking at those sketches was, this is a guy with a vision,

• 7:04Speaker 03

  and this is a man who I imagine will walk through and over anything he has to.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. He does come across as that.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  He's the Terminator.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, he is the Terminator. He is the Terminator.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  In a way.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I bet he thought he was the hero of that, but he was the villain.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  He was telling you about Terminator 2, but that's another matter.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  I watched those movies so many hundreds of times when I was palpably too young to be watching them. Because my parents didn't, my parents would stop us from watching things like, I remember my parents saw Pulp Fiction. And it's kind of the worst thing they could possibly have said to me, because I said, how was it? And they said, really brilliant. And I said, oh, great, can I watch it? They went, no. Well, why would you say that the movie was good? I was like 10 years old, I was like, why would you say the film is good? But they saw the Terminator box, they thought, yeah, it's robots and lasers, who cares? And then, you know, meanwhile, then they sort of walk in the room and a guy's using a fountain pen to dig his eye out. And I do, I do think my mom at that point was like, oh, okay, I think we might have misread the situation here.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  I mean, some people still aren't really sure what Terminator's about.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Look, I was impressed by what I learned.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna get.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna get a message out on my phone that we received from Anna.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  What's embarrassing about this is my first serious relationship was with a guy, it was for three years, and he was obsessed with the Terminator films.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Anna, please, we need to read out the evidence before we have your response to it.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Anna Tzadzinski, "The concept of Terminator is absolutely mental. I just thought it was about a metal bloke killing people." Which at the most basic level, it is.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Nothing you've said there is incorrect.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I suppose. It had more layers than I expected.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've not disproved your initial assumption.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Metal bloke is actually a sort of perfect description of Terminator. There was a real, like, between Terminator and Robocop, my childhood was defined by metal blokes.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Yes. We have Piranha Two to thank for Terminator. I didn't know about this. So basically, Piranha Two happens and it's a disaster. He develops a high fever. He's in Rome.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yes. So at this stage, he's not being paid anymore, is that right?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  No, he's off the clock.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the story, this is the crazy inception of Terminator.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  He goes into, he's hospitalized with this really high fever, but while he's in hospital, probably because of the Piranha Two stressful, sacking and all that, he has this vision of a skeleton robot coming out of a fire.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  A metal man.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  A metal bloke.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And crawling, because that's the only bit of Terminator I've seen, is, you know, that scene where he's crawling at the top of him. I don't know what's happened to the bottom, but he's crawling towards that woman. I couldn't look at whose side I was on. So in the Piranha Two debacle, Asanitis, it sounded like a bit of a douchebag as well, the producer. But, I mean, he did talk about James Cameron and, like, he is obviously a massive control freak. And he said, so Asanitis, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, but Asanitis, that's better.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And that was much better. What in the name of Super Mario Brothers was that?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  He did say Cameron was very arrogant and he said at one point, he just came out of his office and he saw his crew, the entire crew, and said, way out in the distance, out to sea, on a bunch of boats, when they were meant to be on the beach filming. And the first assistant director was fully clothed, swimming towards the shore. And he got to the shore and he pulled himself up onto the beach and he shouted at Asanitis, "That guy is a maniac", as in James Cameron's a maniac, "I'm out of here". And James Cameron, so Asanitis is like, "What's he done? Why are you all out at sea?" He was like, "James Cameron saw the perfect shaped cloud and he knew we had to film it". So the entire crew and set is now on a series of boats out at sea chasing a cloud.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Just following, chasing after it.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  The whole thing with clouds is like, "Oh, that one looks like a giraffe. Oh, it doesn't look like a giraffe".

• 10:50Speaker 04

  They change shapes.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  That's so weird.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  And listen, maybe this is, you know, and I, I say this as a huge fan of his work and maybe this, this is a bit of snobbery on my part, but when you hear stories like that about Kubrick or Coro Salwa, you're like, yeah, of course you have to get the perfect thing. This, what you're making is this kind of, this is a sort of work of art. When you hear about Piranha too, you think, have you lost your fucking mind?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  The, the, the other thing that I always like to bring to this, this is actually something that James Acaster introduced me to, and it's a real obsession of his. So in the book, The Futurist, The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Keegan, she narrates a story about the shoot of Aliens. And Aliens shot at Pinewood and I think Star Wars shot at L Street. And both of those films have the kind of same experience, which is an American director doing a science fiction film that a British crew of, you know, pretty hardened Union guys cannot have any respect for whatsoever. And like, they used to call, when they were shooting Star Wars, they used to just refer to the Chewbacca costume as the dog.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And so on the final day of shooting Aliens, so this, according to Rebecca Keegan's book, this is what James Cameron says to the crew. This has been a long and difficult shoot fraught by many problems, but the one thing that kept me going through it all was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out of the gates of Pinewood and never come back here and that you sorry bastards would all still be here. That's, that's, it's like rousing end of shoot speech.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  That's what Dan Schreiber says to us every episode of the show.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Before he goes on holiday.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, they, I thought there were huge problems with tea breaks.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Is this an alien?

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Star Wars and Aliens alike, basically the crew know very clearly when they're, when they're

• 12:41Speaker 03

  They're union breakers.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, you've got a union tea break and Cameron is there being an auteur and saying, but we need to film for 28 hours to get this perfect shot in the perfect way. And they're saying, well, we can't, we're going for our tea break. I love it.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I know. I read that he made movie posters, Cameron, before he got into directing.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Did he?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Um, and that he basically didn't watch the films because they're all terrible. So he He just got the name of it and he would just make something that he thought looked cool and then send it in.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  But in Mender, he was really a control freak with the posters for his movies.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And so with Aliens, some guy showed him what he thought the poster should be for Aliens. And he said, honestly, if I have the choice between that piece of shit and an all black frame, I'll go with the all black frame. And this guy obviously wasn't really listening and he then went to his designers and went, he wants an all black frame. And then we have the iconic, so he just says the word aliens.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  No way.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the strapline is this time it's war. Cause the idea is in the first film, there's one alien and the second film, there are thousands. And it's, you know, it's kind of a bit of a Vietnam analogy, you know, disastrous, overconfident American Marines heading into a war that like that runs out of control. But I think supposedly he invented the this time it's blah.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Really?

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Well, maybe was that, I think, was that this time, was that before this time it's personal? I know that was Jaws, wasn't it? Jaws two.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Was Jaws two this time it's?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Was that not first Jaws?

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Like first Jaws, it's business.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Third Jaws, this time it's pleasure.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  About the shark and Brody going on a lads holiday.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Do you know what? We have Jaws to thank for the Terminator.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Because we have Piranha two to thank for Terminator.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Piranha one to thank for Piranha two. And Piranha one only existed because Steve, it was like a rip off of Jaws.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And Steven Spielberg went to watch it and they were gonna sue and say, you can't make this. And Steven Spielberg enjoyed it so much. He was like, oh, don't sue them. This is really great.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  And is that why? Cause then he, Joe Dante then?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Spielberg produced Gremlins?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so then they worked together afterwards.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Wow, that's amazing. That's really cool.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  We have so many things I haven't seen to thank for so many other things I haven't seen. I'm really grateful today.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  So what were you doing? We're the same age. What were you doing?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  I didn't know. I was going out.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  We should move on to fact number two. That's my fact. My fact this week is that the inventor of stand-up comedy was known as the man who talks with string. Because he was never, well, I will tell you what. Because he was never seen anywhere without his lucky string.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Consider yourself admonished.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  That's what.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  I thought you said what, as if you weren't going to clarify. That was just going to be the end of the discussion.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Moving on, fact number three.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  The inventor of stand-up comedy was known as the man of string. Okay, anyway, who's got a fact about Roger Corman?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  I just also want to clarify, he's not a man of string, he's not made of string, he just carries string.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  So we've got metal men, we've got string men.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Metal men, sure.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  So the man who talks with string, as in he talks but he's holding string?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes. This is a guy called Charlie Case. He tends to be referred to as the person who invented stand-up comedy, although obviously there's a lot of facets to stand-up, so lots of rivals in that claim. But he was born in 1858, so it was late 19th century. And this is in a book called The Legacy of the Wise Crack, which I mentioned because it had some other interesting bits in it. And he was basically the first person who took to the stage, as it says, with the explicit purpose of telling jokes to make people laugh. No props, no, well, no costume, they say, although at the time, almost everyone did blackface on stage, and he did do that. So...

• 16:29Speaker 04

  But I read he was mixed, he was mixed race, right?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Well, it's very unclear.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  It's not sure, yeah. The records are a bit...

• 16:36Speaker 02

  His obituaries say they think he was mixed race, but black people and white people at the time would go in blackface.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Yes, and black performers blacked up sort of his way into the industry.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  Because of the white performers, is that it?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, very strange. And we really don't know with him. I think he probably was, but people didn't mention it in his life. And then in his obituaries, everyone was like, he had a black parent and, and he had this string that he always carried on stage. And he fiddled with it constantly, couldn't be without it. A couple of times he forgot it, and if no replacement could be found, he just fully, you know, broke down. He said, "I might as well be without my hand." And he explained it, he said, "When he first went into business, he wore a pair of black gloves, and he would fiddle with them and toy with one of them, pick at the fingers, and eventually..." A bit like when you give a baby a rag, and then after five years you realise it's just a string. He'd picked at his gloves so much that they just turned into a string.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Like a blanket rather than a rag usually.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Why are you giving your baby a rag?

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Give your baby a rag? No, you know what, it is, this is, we need to start toughening up the younger generation.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  They're too woke, give them a rag.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  But there you go, so he needed that, and he, you know, he really did, he couldn't be without it.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  That's amazing. And I guess like it's to do something with your hands, right?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  I don't think, I've never heard this man's name in my life before, not in my life.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  No, he is not famous.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  It makes sense that it's in that period because here sometimes we're still referred to as the turn, and I never really understood why that was, and it's because in vaudeville shows, when they were turning the set from, you know, the acrobat to the sort of marching band, they would put the curtain down, and somebody would come out and tell jokes to stop the audience from getting bored.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And so they were turning the set behind the curtain. So the person telling the jokes is still sometimes referred to as the turn or front of curtain entertainers.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  And it's because...

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's, you know, particularly like a lot of the like old school guys who do lots of gigs at like Blackpool or sort of Butlins will call us front of curtain, and we were basically just there to stop the audience from getting bored.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Sometimes obviously had the opposite effect, it really depends on who you employ.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Oh, listen, I'd have really struggled in the vaudeville years. I'd have been a real struggle. Half the audience have left and they are asking for their money back. They, they thought they were gonna see elephants and instead they've seen a man yelling, "Help, David Lloyd George."

• 18:59Speaker 03

  He was really sticking it to Gladstone by then.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Nish, we need to clear the stage at the end of the show, so if you could come on then. Clear the auditorium.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  So this guy, was he British?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  What's he, oh my gosh.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Charlie Case, I think he was American.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  American, okay.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I think he was American.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  They were also, they had the same sort of tradition of vaudeville and when you do stand up in a matcham theatre, like the Victorians, say what you will about them, they knew two things, colonising my ancestors and building theatres. And when you do stuff in a matcham theatre, you understand, oh, this is what this is built for. Because the acoustics are so unbelievable. Good. A thousand-seat room has the same sonic dynamics as a 300-seat basement. Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? It's unbelievable. You know, I'm thinking of something like, Hackney Empire has loads of stand-up. They have a pantomime every year. And then Robyn just did a gig there, like when her last album came out. I think she did like a special sort of small gig. And so you're like, there's very few places where you can put like Robyn, a pantomime and me.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Can I just ask Andy which Robyn you thought?

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, initially I did think Batman and.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I thought Robyn Ince. Was it neither of those?

• 20:14Speaker 03

  No, it was.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  It was Robyn.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  It was R O B Y N.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Isn't there also, isn't it Robin Thicke?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Robin Thicke.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Now, Robin Thicke is a popular musician.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Opposite end innovation-wise. Possibly considered a de-innovator.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  She threw pop music forward five years and then he actually was a useful corrective to send it back.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice, nice, nice.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  An un-innovator.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was an un-innovator. He's sort of the equivalent of the barbarian horn smashing up, right?

• 20:44Speaker 04

  But I thought, isn't this on first-name terms with Robin Thicke? Is this likely? Can't be.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Ince makes more sense because I am on first-name terms with Robin Ince.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  That's what I thought.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thicke and I, I'm going to amaze you here, we've never crossed paths.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I was looking at some superstitious comedians.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Um, so I looked at Hilda Baker, who was a Bolton comedian from the 1950s. Uh, and she considered the colour green to be so bad luck that you weren't allowed, no one was allowed to wear green in the whole theatre. But apparently this is quite a common thing, or it certainly was in the mid 20th century. And the reason is that Molly Eyre, who died on stage during the hypochondriac, was apparently wearing green when he died on stage. And I've never heard this before.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  That's also why, because Tommy Cooper, of course, died on stage wearing that square red hat with the black tassel. The fairs. And no one, no one wears that anymore.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  I didn't know Molly Eyre Tommy Cooper.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  He did, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  That's incredible.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  They didn't call it that back then.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  In the hypochondriac as well, so he was like, oh my god.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Was he playing the title role?

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So people thought it was part of the...

• 21:55Speaker 04

  And would he be coming off, you know, in between scenes saying, I'm really not feeling well? And they're saying, oh, no, of course.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  He's Daniel Day-Lewis in it.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Of course, we don't call it that now.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  But that was the thing with Tommy Cooper, right? He collapsed and people thought it was a bit.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you superstitious, Nish, about any aspect of a show?

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Ah, I'm trying to think about sort of pre-show rituals. The most important thing that I always do is I always piss before I go. Like, I'm obsessed. Even if I don't need it, I'll try and force one out. And I think part of it is because I read this thing. Apparently David Cameron used to give speeches on a slightly full bladder. Because there's some idea that-

• 22:38Speaker 04

  That's an episode of Friends as well.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Oh, is it?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Joey gets a role where he really needs, and they're just so impressed by his urgency.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  His urgency, yeah, because he needs to pee, yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  And then he starts doing it for every role.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Apparently having to pee makes me a really good actor, that's why.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  So Cameron, David Cameron's the same.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  But then I also read that Hitler used to do that as well. And I think, I don't know whether any of that's correct, but when I read that, I thought, well, I want to be like Hitler or Cameron. I'm gonna make sure I speak with the emptiest bladder possible in front of an audience.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  You know what? I always have a wee before I go on stage as well. But I also, I do the wee and I sit down when I'm doing the wee. And then I sit down for another 20 seconds and then usually a little bit more comes out. And I got that tip from Sandy Toksvig, who got it apparently from Princess Anne.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  What?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And I thought, I want to be like Sandy Toksvig and Princess Anne.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  You mean there's always more pee?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  According to Princess Anne.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Just holding back. Princess Anne, you got a UTI, girl?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Um, that's fascinating.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  I'm just, I'm so disappointed that when you say I always people going on stage because David Cameron, I was just desperate for it to be that David Cameron once went on stage and wet himself.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Like a Star is Born. Just a really dark Tory party conference.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Right, just, or just after the EU referendum. After he walked out of Downing Street and that was the result and quit. He just immediately pissed himself. He was wearing dark trousers, so I don't know.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  That conference where they all stood really legs apart.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's why he was doing, just shaking it out.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Um, on comedians' superstitions, Carol Burnett, first woman ever to host a variety show, I think. She, at the end of every show for her whole life, tugged her, like, did a little ear tug. She's 93, so I shouldn't know that she did. Um, little ear tug at the end of every show. Do you know why she did that?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Why?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  She, when she went to do her first show, which was the Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show in December 1955, she was 22 years old, she was playing the girlfriend of a puppet. And she told her grandma, her nanny, she was like, "I'm gonna be on telly." And her nanny said, "Oh, say hello to me, will you?" And she said, "I can't really do that on TV, but I'll give you a little sign, this, on my ear, and forevermore." And she said it just means, she said at first it meant, "Nanny, I'm here and I love you." And then later it meant, "Nanny, I'm here and I love you, and your cheque's in the mail."

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so nice.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  That's really nice. Pavarotti?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Funny.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Funny guy?

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Really good comedian. It's a shame, because it's on the undercard of his career, but he was a funny dude.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  He was very superstitious, and he wanted to find a bent nail before a performance.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Backstage. And he believed that if he found one, that's really good luck. And it's a theatre, so there are, you know, there's carpentry going on, there's often a nail around the stage. But his iron would frequently just leave nails strewn around, so that Pavarotti would find one before a gig, and therefore have a great show.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  That's, I think that's probably the kind of stuff my tour manager does, without me really fully understanding it. I think there's a lot of unseen work being done by the people around me, to get, to sort of get me on stage.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Harold Lloyd?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Very superstitious. He had a nice big house near Hollywood, and there was an ornamental fountain outside of it, and he thought it was extremely bad luck to drive around the fountain.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And so he never did it at any time in his life, and the only time he ever did it was the hearse on the way to the funeral.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Wait, his own funeral?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And the interesting thing about this is, his house, after he died, became like a filming location. And in The Godfather, Westworld, Beverly Hills Cop, and Commando, someone drives around that fountain, and then later in the movie, suffers a horrible, horrific death.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  Have they written that in?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  As in, they've written it in.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  That's very nice.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  That's nicer than what we all thought, which was that just someone had a horrific death.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that's Andy.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  My fact is, when David Bowie auditioned for the BBC in 1965, the judges ruled that he was a singer devoid of personality, that his band was not particularly exciting, and that there is no entertainment in anything they do.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  There is no entertainment in anything they do.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  It's unambiguous. This guy's going nowhere.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  That's not, it's not your shit, is it? It's really cutting and, ugh.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's much more scientific. So this was a thing that existed. It was called the Talent Selection Group, and it was a BBC institution that pulled together various radio producers

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  to just assess everyone who wanted, you know, to be played on BBC Radio.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  So...

• 27:32Speaker 03

  How old was he in 65?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Very young, very young.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  He was 69 when he died in 2016, and I can't, I'm now struggling to do the basic mathematics.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  So he would have been 18, 17 or 18. So he was, he was very young, and playing with a band, and the band was called David Bowie and the Lower Third. And it doesn't sound like it was a good audition. I mean, you know, I don't think it's too...

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I mean, when you're 18.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  I can see the picture of him. I think he was, he must have been playing the sax and singing, I think, possibly.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Well, they did three songs, because that's what you brought to the Talent Selection Group. One of them was by Bowie himself, one of them was by James Brown. The third one was Chim Chimari from Mary Poppins, which is a rogue choice.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  That makes 100% sense to me. Like, if you think about his music, it is music that exists at the intersection between James Brown and Mary Poppins. Like, actually think about it. If you really think about it, there is like this interesting combination of black American music and English whimsy. And actually, there is, there is something of both of those in Ziggy Stardust.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  Well, if you'd been on the Talent Selection Group, maybe it would have gone differently. But it did not. Another verdict, I don't think the group will get better with more rehearsals. Just devastating, you know.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  One of the most weathering things I've ever...

• 28:49Speaker 04

  They could give them all the time in the world, they're not going to change, you know. Terrible.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  That was terrible and you've peaked.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  That is brilliant.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  It's a bit like Simon Cowell, isn't it? Would you say like that kind of slightly withering sort of?

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't think it was big dogs. I just think it was random producers from across the Beeb who were pulled in to, you know, assess. And they assessed a load of different acts. They, you know, they came up with various quite ropey judgments on acts who went on to be huge. But it's an audition, it's at the very start of your career. They don't all go well, you know?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  And he took ages to get successful. I hadn't realised. I think by 1969, so before he was at all famous, he'd already been in seven bands, many of which he founded. Um, then 1969, Space Oddity was rushed out to coincide with the moon landings and was like the theme tune for that. And was huge. But then he disappeared again.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  And I don't think he had another hit for about four years. Yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  No, he didn't disappear. He's just simply moved, he was living in Bromley.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Which is essentially the same.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Potato Pata.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Sorry, he was in Beckham at that point. But yeah, he, he was sort of, that period of his life where after he turns 18, he kind of gets very fixated on this like mime teacher. Who is like a really, really influential person in, in his life. But also it's worth seeking out some of the kind of first album, which I think is self titled. Or maybe it's called Space Oddity.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  It is.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  It's self.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  David Bowie.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's David Bowie. That, it's, it's worth checking out that era of it because it is not, I say this as a very, very big fan of his.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  You've hidden it, you've hidden it well.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Beckham, no problem. Well, of course Beckham is in Bromley, so.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it's bad.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Like, we just, but it's sort of Bowie at this point is, he sort of goes through so many different iterations. And yeah, he falls in with, he's, he, he goes, studies at mime school. Then he, the first album is sort of very like flower power-y, like tail end of summer of love hippie stuff. But then the shift between that and The Man Who Sold The World is extraordinary, right? It is an incredible transition. He basically really gets into the Velvet Underground. And that is the thing that kind of unlocks.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  He's just trying all sorts of things. He's trying so much out. Can I just say one thing on the mime thing? Because I found out a little about this. This is insane. So he falls in with this mime artist called Lindsay Kemp, right? And becomes so entranced that Bowie nearly abandons music for interpretive dance. Yeah. When he was, again, not very famous yet, he opened for T-Rex. He supported them on, you know, tour as a one-man mime act depicting China's invasion of Tibet. Brilliant. And that is a challenge. That's a challenge, right? As a one man. Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  It's my favourite.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Odd enough that there are a few of you.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Got to think outside the tiny, invisible box.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Basically, the T-Rex audience hated it for two reasons. One, come on, we're here to see T-Rex. And secondly, a lot of them were communists and rent for it now. So this was a few months before Space Oddity came out. He later wrote to John Peel, who'd seen this, said, "You decided the problem was that I was doing mime. You didn't like mime. And until I came here to America, I never realised that you were right. Nobody in the world likes mime."

• 32:08Speaker 03

  It is an insane period. And listen, thank God that doesn't exist because I imagine it doesn't now look high art. It looks like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I imagine, I imagine. But weirdly, that's, you know, Lindsay Kemp was a huge influence on him creatively, and they were lovers at the time. When you look at things like Ziggy, when you look at the video for Ashes to Ashes, even though that was sort of because he was also falling in with the neuromantics in the early 80s, you still see the influence of theatre and mime.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, I mean, we loved him anyway, but also it was really exciting because I went to school in Orpington, down the road from the school he went to. But he lived in Beckham and they tried to get him to come back. Like in the, in the early 2000s, he was like, absolutely not. When he went to America, in interviews, he would refer to things as being so Croydon if they were bad. But he was, that's why, you know, like the Buddha of Suburbia, the whole novel is really about growing up in Beckham and Bromley and feeling depressed until you realise David Bowie lived there. Like how that like unlocks the protagonist's creativity and sexuality.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I was the same with Hilda Baker, the Bolton comedian from the 1950s.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Like everyone from Bolton.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  You've only just started wearing green now.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  One of the formative moments of his life came from that time in Beckenham slash Bromley, where he's, so famously his eyes sort of look like the different colours, don't they? And this has actually put me off him a bit and I messaged Dan Treiber, cruel, we're doing a podcast about David Bowie, who Dan Treiber absolutely loves, but saying, I don't really like him. And I think it came from this, when he was 15, he had best friend George, they both fancied the same girl. And George got a date with her and Bowie called George and said, listen, I've spoken to her and she doesn't want to go out with you actually, but she didn't want to say to your face. So George doesn't show up, then finds out Bowie's tricked him and then goes into school next day and Bowie's boasting about how he's now going out with this girl.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  So George, quite right, goes and clocks him in the face in the playground, damages his eyeball. Said he really didn't mean to hurt him, but what, he meant to hurt him a bit.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Funny way of going about it.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  I meant to hurt him emotionally when I punched him in the face, yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Didn't mean to cause him permanent damage, but it gave him this condition called anisocoria, where one pupil is larger than the other. So his eyes aren't different colours, it's just one pupil's small, so it looks like his eyes are like coloured. And I really liked this from an interview with a magazine, I think someone had written into the magazine with questions for Bowie. And one of the people said, hey, what would you say to that kid at school who punched you in the eye in case he's reading? And Bowie said, I'd probably say something along the lines of, it was great seeing you last week, George. Did I leave my lighter in your car? Because they remain very close friends.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  So you said that he almost gave up to be a mime. He also almost gave up to be a Buddhist monk, didn't he?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Did he?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's because he got in with some Buddhist monks in London. But also he read a book, The Rampers Story by Tuesday Lob Sang Rampar.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Andy remembers as a friend of the podcast.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  He's a big deal.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  He is a big deal.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Because he was not a Buddhist monk.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  He was in no way a Buddhist monk. He was a plumber from Devon. Who pretended to be a Buddhist monk. And wrote about this, about his life as a Tibetan monk until people kind of came to his shows and said, can you read this thing that's in Tibetan? I can't really read Tibetan and I've never been to Tibet. And he said, oh, it's not my fault. I was possessed by the spirit of a monk when I fell out of a tree trying to photograph an owl.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And then, and then they said, yeah, that's not true, is it either? And he went, oh, no, no, fine. Actually, it was all dictated to me by a Siamese cat called Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  But the point is that a lot of the Buddhist sort of things that was happening in the time and everyone getting into Buddhism was down to this guy's book and he was completely.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, the cat later wrote, I think, two of her own books.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  Through Tuesday Lobzang Ramper. And one of them is called Living with the Lama. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  It's hard when a cat writes a book called Living with the Lama, because I think you do have to clarify in brackets afterwards that you mean the Lama as in religious Lama.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  You can do a lot with the cover art.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  I'm afraid you are not getting away with a James Cameron black square on that one. That it's essential that we clarify with the cover art.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  That's so funny. I don't know. There's a Bowery Ramper highway of understanding. That's amazing.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  So what you Bowery fan, big Bowery fans, what's the view on the whole thin white duke, quite intense flirtation with fascism, Nazism, that kind of stuff?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  One word for the, for the Nazi stuff? Your friend and mine, cocaine.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  If you watch the Alan Yentob documentary Cracked Actor, which is his US tour, I think in 76, 75, 76, you can't believe he didn't immediately drop dead.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  He was, the rumor is at the time that he was subsisting exclusively on a diet of cocaine and milk, but he is in, he is in. He's coped himself into a psychosis. There's a bit in it where he just starts going, they're following me, they're following me. And he is.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  He is truly in a kind of psychosis. And I think people want to intellectualise it and say, well, he had this fascination with it. It's not any of that.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  He did read a lot of books.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  He did read a lot of books.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  About the Nazis.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  But I think people want to talk about it as a kind of intellectual, like an extension of his interesting character and performance. He was gapped out of his mind. And I don't mean your friend who's standing too close to you at a party and asking if everyone hates him. I mean, he was seeing things.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  He was, like, David Bowie was such an extreme party animal that he had to go to Berlin to clean up. He had to go to Berlin to get drugs out of his system. That's how many drugs he had in his system at that point.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  Can I just say, reading lots of books about Hitler and the Nazis is not actually a sign of anything. That's just a sign of being a middle-aged man, all right?

• 38:34Speaker 04

  I'm currently ploughing through the last days of Hitler and it's terrific. No spoilers, please.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  I saw him on the last tour he did in 2004. And he sort of had, he had something like a kind of heart valve problem about two months later. And then he never toured again. He sort of would make like these intermittent public appearances. But I went on my own. I went, this is an appearance where I was going on my own to see a lot of gigs. And I saw him and James Brown in kind of quite quick succession.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Oh, and Mary Poppins, I hope.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  And Mary Poppins. And the David Bowie gig is the only time someone asked me if I was lost and needed help.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Wow. Wow, the only time.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Are you okay? Are you lost? I was like, no, I'm here to see, I'm here to see David Bowie. And I've always carried resentment towards a man who was sat two rows in front of me wearing a Lou Reed Transformer t-shirt. And I, at the time, I remain a big Lou Reed fan, but I was really a big fan of the Lou Reed album Transformer at the time. And Bowie said, we're going to do a song by the Velvet Underground. And I cheered. Bear in mind, I'm at this gig on my own. And I assumed the man in the Lou Reed t-shirt would also cheer, and he didn't. And I was like, you're the fan of only Lou Reed's solo output? You've got no time for White Light, White Heat?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Maybe he's not, just not a cheerer, you know?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  He really, he made me look like an absolute twerp.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  That is, I would say, the smallest grudge I've ever heard. Carried for the longest time. Because of how long you've kept something.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  It's 22 years. I still think about that guy and I'm like, that guy in the Loubrey T-shirt.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  We should move on to our final fact of the show, and that is James's fact.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Okay, my fact this week is that the Swedish political party called the Centre Party and the Danish political party called Left are both right wing.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Are they trying to just nab sneaky votes on a ballot, people who haven't heard of them?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  No, not really. So I was reading an article on electoralreform.org.uk and it was a list of badly named parties. Basically, these parties all started off kind of left of centre 100, 150 years ago. And things change, like the Democrats and Republicans have swapped over a couple of times, I think, of what they believe, right? And also the, what's that window called?

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Overton.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  The Overton window moved, so people who were a bit left wing or a bit right wing are now more centrist or whatever. And that's what's happened with these two parties, which is the Swedish Centre Party and Venstra, which is the Danish for Left. And the Danish one is the main right of centre party and has been for 25 years. And the Centre Party, it depends on their leaders because they are a little bit centrist, but at the moment they're more right wing.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  But you can't change the name. It's easier to change your opinions, I guess, because everyone knows what the party is. Everyone knows the name.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  They're not really tricking anyone because everyone knows, everyone in Denmark knows this party.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  I like that you say it's easier to change your opinions. You're suggesting rather than change their names, they should just become left wing.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  I wasn't really suggesting anything. I hadn't finished that thought.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  But it is a bit like if Krispy Kreme doughnuts were like, we're plumbers now, but we've got a really strong brand identity. You're like, well, you could just change it. No, no, Krispy Kreme's in it. Listen, I will say, in terms of tailoring this podcast episode to your guest, this could not be more clearly my internet searches. Electoral reform. form.org, James Cameron's Wikipedia page and a video of David Bowie talking about the internet.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Denmark also has the radical left party, Radikale Vonstra.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Where are they? Where are they at?

• 42:21Speaker 02

  They're on the left, but they're the least radical of all the left-wing parties.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Really?

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Something with radical in its name is centrist.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  It's so good.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  It is the problem, and listen, I don't, I am painting with a broad brush here and I understand there is more nuance to these things, but it is sort of the problem of talking about Scandinavian politics because you're like, these guys are really right-wing. They only believe in partially comprehensive state cover thought.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  I think the thing that distinguishes them is there are parties that, they're basically parties that are like, that are socialist socialist. And then there are parties that are nationalist socialist. Like there are some pretty.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Wait, when you say nationalist socialist, that has.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  I'd leave a few bucks at the bar.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's still some people, there's still some consensus around some economic principles. But I think there's more, some more divergence around.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  So we believe, we believe that everyone gets a year's maternity opportunity to leave, but we do also believe in invading Poland.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I believe there's an element of that.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  There's a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment among certain parts of Scandinavia. So there's a guy called Rasmus Paladan, who's a former member of Vensstra. He's probably the most famous right-wing politician in Denmark. And he's like burned Korans and stuff like that. But there's a group called Free Jazz Against Paladan that follows him around the country and plays jazz very loudly and very badly at all of his events.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Is jazz the right, I'm not saying they're doing it badly, but is jazz the right genre of music to, I suppose it's quite surprising, you know, goes in new directions, which is quite useful.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Famously anti-communist jazz, wasn't it? It was pushed by America to kind of stop communists from liking communism.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Was that?

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Well, and also the musicians themselves were not, were not aware sometimes, genuinely not aware. Nina Simone died without ever knowing that she.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  She was a CIA asset?

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that an African tour of hers. Oh God.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  What?

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Guys, you've got to watch a movie called Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. Soundtrack to a coup d'etat is an incredible film about these American state-funded operations to send jazz musicians as kind of soft power missions around the world. It's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And they didn't know that they were being, they were pawns. Yeah, they didn't, they didn't know where the money was coming from and, but also, you know, a lot of the-

• 44:43Speaker 04

  We've had another $300 million in the account. No one, no one likes jazz. They're starched. Sorry, what's the, what's the reasoning that it's, would the CIA stop people liking communism?

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Specifically in the African continent, sometimes they were cover operations for the sort of travelling State Department delegations that would go out with them. But also, a lot of these musicians did not have rights in their own country. And, and there's some really heartbreaking stuff in the documentary about Louis Armstrong and the kind of disgust that he feels because he does understand that he's being used as propaganda for a white government that is not giving him rights in his own country. It is, it is really, really brilliant and sinister. And what was done to Lumumba in that country by Western governments in service of the mining companies, because they might have liberated these countries, but they did not take the huge mining companies out of those countries.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  And the cobalt in phones still comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there are still Western countries that might not have colonised them in the conventional sense, but the large corporations that are exploiting these countries for their mineral resources are effectively financially colonising them. And, and now this podcast has really taken the full Kumar turn. That's an exciting ride.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  But in the Soviet Union, the idea was that they had certain approved musicians and approved literature and approved all this kind of stuff. So if you shove in some jazz singers, some surrealist art, stuff like that, then people will start thinking in a non-communist way.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  That's sort of freedom. Freedom. Jackson Pollock, was he?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  They just wanted to get rid of him.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  Very interesting.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Some more weird names in politics. Have you guys heard or have we ever talked about the tiny Indian state of Meghalaya? Meghalaya? Meghalaya. This place is extraordinary. So they, there's a weird trend for weird names there. Like loads of people there call their kids weird names. No one really knows where it came from, just like people from this Indian state call their kids strange names, which means that people who run for political office often have weird names. So people who've run for political office there include Frankenstein moment, Field Marshall Maupiang, as in first name Field, second name Marshall.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Great.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Billy Kidd Sangma. And someone who's gained office there is Adolf Lou Hitler Rangsak Marak, who's an Indian politician of the National Congress Party. He was a minister in their government. He was asked if he felt awkward about it and he said, "I am aware at one point in time Adolf Hitler was the most hated person on earth, but my father added Lou in between the Adolf and the Hitler, so that's why I am different."

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And you were very disappointed when you got his biography, weren't you?

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Lot more regional Indian politics than I had really bargained for.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  And the cover was just a black square. We really could have done with the clarification of some cover art there.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting how political parties arose in the first place. I think they were invented in Britain. Certainly in Britain, it was the Whigs and the Tories.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  And that was the end of the 17th century and it was all to do with the question of Catholic succession, which was a big deal for a long time. And it was very controversial. And the Whigs wanted, it was about the Duke of York, actually. Should the Duke of York be in the line of succession?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And what do we think now?

• 48:02Speaker 04

  It's a debate that rages on.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  The Whigs are coming back going, "I told you!"

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, Whigs wanted him out and Tories were much more arch-traditionalist and they wanted to preserve the succession.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  So what they were trying to conserve was the Catholic line of succession?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's maybe a bit upside down from what we think today.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Were they called the Tories? They were called the Tories and not the Conservatives at that time?

• 48:28Speaker 04

  Tories was originally an insult. It's kind of Irish bandit. And I think Whigs is also a kind of insult as well. Every party name starts off as an insult and then devolves into a actual name.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Poop party.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  You've got to be careful the insults you embrace and the insults you cast aside. But yeah, and actually, because we were talking about Swedish politics, Sweden was dominated by the hats and the caps for about 100 years. They were the two parties and the caps were, was an insult. So the hats were meant to be the like strong militaristic, they were named after the big tricorn hats that like proper posh people had, members of government, military. And then they said, you nightcaps and they were referring to the, you know, this floppy like wee wee wee nightcaps.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Really? And did they wear them? Like, did they embrace it and wear them on the campaign?

• 49:14Speaker 02

  I don't think they actually went into the trouble of sourcing nightcaps and embracing them, but they embraced their names, the caps, and they were like, they were the wigs in the Tories of their day.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Are they still worn, would you say, nightcaps?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Because I would. You obviously do wear one.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Well, I've got one, yeah, yeah. But I just want to know if anyone, I would be curious if anyone wears a nightcap.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  People wear bonnets to help manage curly hair.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, that's true.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Bonnets are still used, yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Are they used night, are they called nightcaps? I don't know.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  They're normally known as bonnets, I believe, still.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Were they used to keep your head warm? Is that the point of them?

• 49:42Speaker 04

  I assume so, yeah, because it's so much colder back in the day.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  I would assume that it's.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  The Little Ice Age.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  If you still wear a nightcap to bed, podcast at qi.com.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Send Andy a picture.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  If anyone's still wearing a nightcap, with love, they are listening to this one.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Let's be honest. A big Ebenezer Scrooge number.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  That's one I want, that's one I want, yeah, yeah. Do you want to come on upstairs for a nightcap?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Just two people sat in hats, one of them looking confused and disappointed.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  I'll get the warming pan.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  I do like a frivolous party.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  I'm a big fan of the occasional protest parties. One of them, I mean, the Wikipedia of frivolous political parties is terrific if you just want to read through. So many places that have frivolous parties, it's beer related. Very interesting, as the Friends of Beer Check, Bellerin's Beer Lovers' Party, Austria Beer Party, Australia Lower Excise Fuel and Beer Party. I just go, it's not in Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, they've all got a Beer Lovers' Party or a Beer Party.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  There was definitely a light beer versus dark beer, uh, political rivalry as well, I think, in the late 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I like in Denmark, the Union of Conscientiously Workshy Elements, which I don't think we've actually mentioned before, founded by Jacob Haugard in 1979. And so they were demanding lots of mad stuff and it was a complete joke, like better Christmas presents for everyone, Nutella for all army field rations, better weather, tailwinds on all bike cars.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Better weather.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Denmark, more Renaissance furniture in Ikea.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, you'd back it, Andy. But in 1994, he was elected, Haugard was elected unexpectedly, really didn't expect to be, got 23,000 votes and it was a hung parliament. So suddenly he was in this extraordinary position of having the deciding vote in a lot, a lot of situations.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  So when the, when the Lib Dems came in and did a coalition with the Tories, they said, well, we will do it if we can have one of our policies, which is proportional representation.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Which one did he go for?

• 51:50Speaker 02

  They genuinely did introduce Nutella into army rations for a while.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  I think it doesn't exist anymore.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  The Lib Dems didn't get PR over the line yet, so these guys are still technically one up on the Lib Dems.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Did they have a referendum about the Nutella?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  It's an easier one to win, isn't it? He did say in a moment of foresight, he made a portrait of him, he got a portrait done of him and had it hung in Parliament and he said he commissioned it to warn people that any crazy populist moron could get elected. And this was in the early 90s, so.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  We learned our lesson.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  We learned it too late.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  There was a survey this year of places in the North Caucasus and they asked for people who you think would be a good person, who your leader espouses their views. And a lot of people went for Stalin. In fact, I think Stalin might have been the top respondent. But 4% of people said that they wanted their leader to be like T-800 from the Terminator movie.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  And we're back. And we're back.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  And he, is that the baddie or is this the second Terminator?

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Well, this is the thing, this is the thing.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  He's the baddie in the first one and the goodie in the second one. He gets reprogrammed and he goes from being a baddie to a.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  He's like Nick Clegg.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  I see, but the reverse.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reverse Clegg, it's the old reverse Clegg.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  It's the old reverse flag. In the first one, he's trying to get people to go into the metaverse. And in the second one, he's promising to get rid of student debt.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  The old reverse flagging.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Okay, we should wrap up on that. Thank you so much for listening. We have been No Such Thing as a Fish, and thank you to my co-podcasters, James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Nish Kumar. Nish Kumar, if people want to contact you, where can they do it?

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Contact me. You can find me at nishkumar.co.uk, and I'm Mr. Nish Kumar on Instagram and some other platforms, I think. But you can watch me doing 97 minutes of stand-up, if that's something that you'd be interested on YouTube, or you can buy tickets for my tour, or you can do both. No such thing as a Nish. Thank you.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Lovely stuff. And Andy and James, you also have social media profiles, which we've mentioned lots of times before, so I'm sure you all know them. And you can contact the podcast by emailing [email protected], or go to at nosuchthing on Instagram. And if you want access to our secret special club, which has lots of extra content, we release our duel, which is our listener feedback episodes on there, and other exciting things as they come along. Just go to patreon.com/clubfish to find out more about that. But for now, we will see you again next week. Goodbye.

• 54:51Speaker 05

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