No Such Thing As Ultrasonic Shark Welding

Live from the London Podcast Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss wet wood, Catholic calendars and nutless noise. 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 Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast. This week, coming to you live from the London Podcast Festival.

• 1:09Dan Schreiber?

  My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1920s, you could buy bathing suits made of wood.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  There are people at home, there is a picture on the screen, and they look like, they look like they're in barrels, don't they? These ladies.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Quite kind of cinched in barrels.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Pinched in barrels.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  I would say that's about as comfortable as you can make wearing wood look.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I can imagine the splinters were probably not very nice.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  I guess it was rot. It's a very confusing substance to make stuff that you get wet a lot out of.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  But then, on the other hand, when there's a big sort of shipwreck, what do you get? Floating bits of driftwood.

• 2:02Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  So, and that actually was one of the things, they advertised it as the fact that the wood floats, and so it made swimming much easier.

• 2:10Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  I see.

• 2:11Dan Schreiber?

  But if there was a shipwreck, wouldn't the other passengers use you as the thing to lay on top of?

• 2:18Speaker 04

  As the door.

• 2:19Dan Schreiber?

  As the door. Okay, and there was Leo, and then there was this random person, like a guy. This is so awkward. There is enough space for him, actually.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  And so I saw this on a website called thevintagenews.com, where they find old news articles, and these were spruce veneer bathing suits, and they were described as "simple, cheap and easy to make, but fashionable and modern." I think one part of it was, they were bathed in the part of America where they had a wood industry. You know, people were chopping down trees, making spruce panels, and they thought, "We can advertise it slightly by having them wear these swimsuits."

• 2:56Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  And they were also once used to encourage people to vote in the election. So they said that someone was going to be coming down to the sea in a wooden bathing suit, and people should come down. They announced that in the newspapers, and sure enough, when people did come down, they handed them like little cards saying, "If you want a lift to the voting booth, then ring this number."

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Wait, they thought a wooden bathing suit would be that much of a pull? They'd get enough people to the polling booth?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was the 20s. It was a happier and simpler time.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  It wasn't a day where you could just offer people $5,000 to vote.

• 3:35Dan Schreiber?

  I've seen a very old swimsuit from 1767, and it is Martha Washington's wife of George Washington. They have her swimsuit, and she had a swimsuit that came from a time where they sewed weights into them, so that when the women were in the water, it wouldn't float up and make them lose their modesty. So someone thought, "Let's put weights into the swimsuit."

• 3:59Speaker 04

  And to be fair, none of them could swim, presumably, so they're just paddling. Surely, surely Martha Washington's not swimming, is she?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  I think in those days, there was a lot of paddling going on.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  So much paddling.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  The Daytona Beach News Journal, I saw an article about these bathing suits, and they said, "You should avoid wearing them in a forest lake where woodpeckers are known to live."

• 4:20Dan Schreiber?

  Yes. Controversial swimming costumes?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Dan Schreiber?

  Name one.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  The one in the Olympics that made people swim faster.

• 4:28Dan Schreiber?

  That's good, but that's not the one I'm thinking of.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  The Annette Kellerman we've mentioned before, you know, because any women's swimsuit back then was very controversial, wasn't it? That wasn't a full head-to-toe covering.

• 4:37Dan Schreiber?

  No, you're right.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  That's another really good one, yeah.

• 4:39Dan Schreiber?

  People were arrested initially if they went in a swimsuit, yes.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  I should have said my, I should have said my fact, but I, I've got a lot of good stuff out of you guys now, which is also good. The bikini.

• 4:50Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Was controversial at first, partly because in the place where the, you know, the Bikini Atoll, after which its name, it was seen as being immodest, but not for the reason you would think.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  So, the Marshall Islanders, the people local to that area, and they have a tradition where women go topless, but they do cover up their thighs with a muumuu. And so the bik- With a muumuu here and a muumuu there.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  But I would have thought a muumuu is like, it's something that covers your whole body, no?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I think there are different versions of the muumuu, and the Marshall Islanders one is a leg thing.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  But they called it a muumuu?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yes, it's waist and below.

• 5:35Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  But basically-

• 5:36Dan Schreiber?

  Just a moo.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 5:37Dan Schreiber?

  Just a moo.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  And the reason the bikini was controversial there is because it reveals the thighs.

• 5:44Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, okay.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Really?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, not because it was skimpy, but-

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Ironic, because you'd think it would be about the others, if you know what I mean.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Wow. Oh, moo, is that a muumuu joke?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  It's the moo.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:56Dan Schreiber?

  Very nice.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And I think we should just quickly say that the bikini, it was named after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, because they were doing nuclear tests there, and because it was like a cool trendy thing at the time, that, you know, it was, it was quite controversial, obviously. Is that right?

• 6:13Speaker 04

  This is, he insists not. So, there's this very famous contest between these two guys, and Louis Rea was the guy who invented the bikini that was called the bikini. He says that he called it the bikini because, at that time, everyone spoke of this island, Bikini, in the Pacific, and it was an enchanted, tiny little paradise. Now, it was the case that he invented it four days after the well-publicized massive nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll, but he insists either that passed him by, or he's now lying and saying, "I didn't name it sort of insensitively after something that led to 50 years of very awkward, almost war."

• 6:47Dan Schreiber?

  Right. He couldn't get anyone to model it, by the way. It was seen so controversial, so he went to all the classic models, they all said no, and all their agents said no. So he eventually went to a form of nude model. Her name is Michelle Nina Bernardini, and she did it, and she's still alive.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Is she definitely? I was trying to track her down.

• 7:07Dan Schreiber?

  From, yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Wikipedia doesn't list the date of death.

• 7:10Dan Schreiber?

  I can't find an obituary for her, and everything is referred to her in the present, and so she was born December 1st, 1927, so she's 98, going 99, and yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Still looking hot in that bikini.

• 7:23Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  She did actually model it again in the 80s, didn't she? For someone in about 1986, I think it was, aged 58. And she did look different to how she looked aged 20, modeling it. No offence, we all will, or do.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  So that was just an unnecessary slam on Michelle.

• 7:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 7:43Dan Schreiber?

  This poor 98-year-old woman's, "You've been mentioned on the show." "I thought she was dead." "Looked shit at 58."

• 7:51Speaker 04

  All I'm saying is, "Don't model it now, hon."

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Oh, God. So, the other thing about the bikini is that it was associated for years with sort of Miss whatever competitions, like Miss World or Miss, you know, countries and things like this. And this led to a really surprising controversy. So it was in the, I think in the 50s. What year did the French Revolution enter? Was it the late 40s, or was it?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  I think 46.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is 1951. The reason that we have the Miss Universe contest that we all know and love today is because of an argument over swimwear. So, there was Miss America, which was sponsored by a particular company called Catalina, right? They, I think they made Cossetts. And the winner was a woman called Yolande Bezi, and she was told, when she won Miss America, "You're going to have to go on the tour, and you're going to have to wear a swimsuit, a bikini on the tour." And she just refused. She said, "I'm not going to wear a swimsuit in public unless I'm going swimming. I just don't, that's, you know, that's ridiculous." She didn't really like all these promotional appearances she was asked to do.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  So the firm Catalina flounced off and created Miss Universe instead.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  So the reason it came out of it was her kind of principled stand about not just turning up in a bikini in places.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  She was being a prude.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Okay. Have you guys heard of Miss Gary Cigarette?

• 9:18Dan Schreiber?

  No.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  No. Is that where Miss Universe refused to wear just a cigarette over her crotch?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  It's kind of related to that. So it was a beauty contest held in Gary, Indiana, in 1944. So Gary is a city in Indiana, or a town. And you voted for who you thought was the best-looking person, and when you voted, you had to pay five cents, and all the money was used to send cigarettes to American soldiers. But the reason I would bring it up is the winner was Irene Kutchter, and she had to then go on a promotional tour, wearing a bathing suit made of cigarettes.

• 9:55Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, really?

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Can I say a thing about science trunks?

• 9:58Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  So, swimming outfits that are designed to help you go faster.

• 10:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  So for the Olympics, this is a big thing.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  You may have heard of LZR? This was a huge thing in the noughties. They were invented by, is it Speedo?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Speedos, laser ones, yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  And I just can't believe how good, because I naively thought, it's only a bit of your body that's covered, but of course you do get fuller.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And they were like based on shark skin or something, weren't they, I think?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  All of this, the fabric was bonded together using ultrasonic welding.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Like, like how sharks work.

• 10:33Dan Schreiber?

  Like sharks.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So that was, so they had no seams, so no seams means no drag. They had an internal core stabilizer, so you couldn't flop about in the water very much.

• 10:44Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  They sort of held you in place.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  So you would use less oxygen when you were wearing it, because it just made it easier. The only downside is, it takes 20 minutes to put it on.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  And everyone knows in swimming races, you're timed from when you start getting changed, don't you?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  You're actually time from when you're trying to find a pound for the locker.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, were they banned after that?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  They were banned, yeah, I'm pretty sure. But basically, every world record, they beat every world record one year.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Weird, because they are LZR, which sounds like it's loser, but...

• 11:22Speaker 02

  What do you think, let's say, for instance, you're on a water chute, water flume, and you wanted to get down as quickly as you can. What swimsuit do you think would be the best?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 11:33Dan Schreiber?

  I can tell you what it's not. It's not the one that I recently wore in Croatia.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Oh, dear.

• 11:37Dan Schreiber?

  Where I had kids waiting for five minutes as I shimmyed down what was a 10-foot-tall water slide.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Wait, what are you saying?

• 11:45Dan Schreiber?

  I'm saying I had the most embarrassing 10 minutes of my life, having to literally, like a dog, wiping its ass on the ground, shimmy down this thing.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  But are you saying that gravity didn't do the job?

• 11:59Dan Schreiber?

  Gravity left the slide. It's just whatever my shorts were, I need to send them back.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Really? So is it, is it that?

• 12:08Dan Schreiber?

  Everyone was looking over.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  I think like Dan said, that's not it.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, right. Well, I'm imagining something smooth and slippy, something coated with a substance.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is something called speed shooting, which does appear to possibly be a thing. I've seen a report on an online magazine called Outside Magazine and nowhere else on the internet, but it does appear to exist. It seems to be a German thing. And you try and go down the water chute as quickly as you can. And they've tried all sorts of things, like different swimsuits, soaps, oils, waxes, gels, types of cream, like you say, Andy. But the truth is that the quickest you can go down is basically no swimsuit at all.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Uh-oh.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  But the rules don't allow you to do that.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Then you really are going down after that.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Well, what you have to do is, you have a small, very small swimsuit, but you cross your legs, and then you put your heel on the chute and your two shoulder blades on the chute, and the rest of your body is planked as much as possible, so you only have three bits of contact onto the chute. And that apparently helps you go down. If you'd have done that in Croatia, Dan, you'd have been a king.

• 13:19Dan Schreiber?

  Can't think of that.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  And what are you supposed to do if you want to really emergency slow down halfway? Because you're already scared.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Well, then, one thing that they do say is like, it's these very, very fit men who are very good at it, because they can clench all of their muscles and get really tight. And then, but it's them, and it's always them up against what they call the cannonballs, which is the really, really fat guys who just fly down and use momentum to get down to the bottom as quickly as possible.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  That's clenching bullshit. Just eat a lot of pies.

• 13:53Dan Schreiber?

  We've got to move on, guys. We're running out. I bet we've all got so much more stuff. The monokini, you heard of the monokini? It was invented, so the bikini is bikini, two parts. Monokini was just the bottom bit, kind of like what you were talking about with the mu mu earlier.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 14:09Dan Schreiber?

  And you had two straps that went across. But it was for bare naked women on the top to go out. And it was, it caused huge controversy, but it also kind of...

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Sorry, it was two, sorry, it was a pair of pants, and then you just had straps going around your neck, because you didn't have any boob covering.

• 14:22Dan Schreiber?

  Kind of like suspenders, exactly. But they didn't do anything to cover the breasts. And this was invented by a man who's called Rudy...

• 14:29Speaker 02

  No kidding.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  This was invented by a pervert called...

• 14:36Dan Schreiber?

  It was Rudy Gernreich, and this is, he's a very famous name in the world of fashion, because in 1964, when he did this, he sort of started a lot of the sexual revolution of the 60s. And he invented multiple different things. And near the end of his life, he invented the pub bikini, which is a normal bikini, but where your, the bottom bit of the bikini is, there's a little kind of see-through window where your pubic hair is, for you to sort of just show people as part of a...

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Pervert. I don't know, we don't need to go further into it.

• 15:06Dan Schreiber?

  Fair enough. All right, let's move on.

• 15:12Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that before she goes on stage for the opening night of a play, West End actress Rachel Stirling will always make sure to eat the ashes of a Bond girl.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  That was a great reaction by whoever went, "What? What?"

• 15:34Dan Schreiber?

  Very confusing, absolutely, but let's, let's unpack it. This is, this is Rachel Stirling. If you're a fan of shows like The Detectorists, she's in that. So Mackenzie Crook's girlfriend-turned-wife is Rachel Stirling. She also happens to be the daughter of Diana Rigg, who is a very famous actress who passed away a few years ago. She was in a James Bond movie and multiple other things, The New Avengers, all that sort of stuff. And she passed away, she was cremated, and they gave her ashes to some people, her friends. One of them flew it over a field in a biplane and let it drop and so on. And Rachel Stirling noticed that not all of the ashes left this little vial. There's like dregs that are just kind of sitting in there. And she was very nervous on opening night.

• 16:19Dan Schreiber?

  For the first time, she had to go back on stage after her mother's death. And she had it on her, and she thought, "I need some Dutch courage, and I want to bring her on stage with me." So she put her finger in, she took a big old swipe of the ashes, and she ate it. And that's now become her lucky thing. So anytime she does opening night, she'll eat a bit of her own mum.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so you said, you said she will always be sure to eat the ashes of a Bond girl.

• 16:43Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  It's this one specific Bond girl, Diana Rigg, right?

• 16:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Because presumably, she's going to run out of those ashes at some stage. And then they're going to look for Ursula Andress's ashes as well.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  She'll start murdering other Bond girls. Oh, my God, that's a good plot, that's a good plot.

• 16:57Dan Schreiber?

  It is a good plot.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:59Dan Schreiber?

  No, she, it's just one, but she did say, she's mentioned it to other actors, and they say, "Oh, I do that too." Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Oh, come on.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  What, with her mum?

• 17:06Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, no.

• 17:09Dan Schreiber?

  No, other, other mums are used.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  What? Sorry, this is a normal thing in the thespian community.

• 17:14Dan Schreiber?

  I don't think we can say normal.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Eating your mother's ashes.

• 17:16Dan Schreiber?

  No, but more than one person does it, is what she's saying.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 17:20Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not unheard of for you to read in the news that a rock star or a celebrity has, like famously Tupac's friends after his funeral when he was cremated. They rolled him up into a joint and they all smoked him. And his mum was there as part of that. Keith Richards snorted his dad.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  He, I, he claims.

• 17:41Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, he, he, it was claimed that he did it with cocaine, and he wrote in his book.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  It was not cocaine.

• 17:47Dan Schreiber?

  It was not cocaine.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  It was my late father's ashes.

• 17:49Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, he mixed it in with cocaine, was the idea.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I thought...

• 17:53Dan Schreiber?

  He later said, "I didn't use cocaine, I just snorted it outright." And, and he scouted it in his garden, and the trees growing in his garden now are in the spots where his dad's ashes were. So it's not uncommon.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  It is uncommon.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  If it wasn't common, all these people in this room wouldn't be looking at you as if to say, "What the fuck are you talking about, Dan?"

• 18:13Dan Schreiber?

  But it's not uncommon when you say a lot of examples really closely, you know?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  All right, here's a thing that you can have done with yourself after you die.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And just see if you would like this. Would you like to become a mug?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  There was, a few years ago, there was a New Mexico artist who put you into a glaze, mixed a bit of you, your own ash into a glaze after you die, and then that's made into a mug for your relatives. I quite like that.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Dishwasher safe or...?

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Hand wash only, I think. Why take the risk? You can get turned into a bit of a coral reef. I love this, being turned into an artificial reef.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  I'm not big enough to be an artificial reef.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  You will be part of it. It's mostly concrete, I'm going to tell you the truth. But there is this thing where instead of being cremated, you can be aquamated, which is a new method that's all the cool kids are doing. And it's, it's lower in, it's lower in carbon emissions, and it's a bit more, it's, the temperatures are lower, and you're just kind of chemically chug-alled down.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  And they put it underwater and coal grows on it.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it gets mixed into a sort of artificial reef block, and that's really good for fish, obviously. Or, how about this? This is my pitch. There was an archaeologist called Juan Angulo, who was looking in a crypt that had been uncovered in southern Mexico, and found 400 urns in there containing ashes, coal, rubber, and plant roots. And the Mayan people at the time had the game, you might remember they had a ball game?

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Where you played a big rubber ball, and it might have been a religious thing, it might have been something else. The theory is that the ancient Mayan kings were turned into balls for the ball game.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Their ashes were turned into...

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Wait, because in their, you said in their graves, they found...

• 19:54Speaker 03

  These, these urns containing all the ingredients for a ball and the ash.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  So they just hadn't got around to making the ball?

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  This is like the ingredients, the pantry?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  I see, wow.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  You would, you would feel a lot of pressure not to accidentally kick that ball onto the roof, wouldn't you?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I think it sounds to me like you can put ashes into anything that's made out of concrete, right?

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It seems like it.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Well, it's a very, very unromantic way of...

• 20:19Speaker 02

  But what I'm thinking is like those big stanchions that hold up water flumes, Dan, maybe, when you die. You can put it into that one and then just make it slightly steeper so people don't have your issue.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Here's Dan Treiber still stuck on this water flume.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  For eternity.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  That's so nice. I couldn't save myself, but I will save future generations. Love it. In China, they're doing a big push for these sea burials, I think. Sea burials and tree burials is the big thing in Chinese government pushes at the moment because there's not enough room left for full-body burials. And so they're mainly doing a really big push for cremations. And I think to make it sound jazzy, they're saying, what about a tree burial? Which is not sadly where you get left up a tree, which would be cool and really terrify the kids who tried to climb it. It's where like they bury your ashes at the bottom of a tree and then a tree grows or a potential tree.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  We keep saying that ashes, it's not ashes that you get in those urns and that people sprinkle around.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Really?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Because what happens is when the body goes through the crematorium, the heat is so, so high that any part of your body really just turns into vapor. And what's left is your bones and they are processed to resemble ashes. So it's not like the ashes at the end of a fire. It's basically burnt bones that are crushed down by something called a cremulator. And it pulverizes the bones down, that's what you get in the end.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  You've said that in such a cheerful and positive way.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  I just thought the word cremulator was quite...

• 21:53Speaker 03

  No, again, they've made it as fun as they can.

• 21:57Dan Schreiber?

  It sounds like it should be an offshoot movie series of Terminator, Cremulator.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  What about recycling, guys? Which is what happens if you have, a lot of us have metal in our body, like your fillings or any part of, it might be pacemakers or something like that. And well, what do you do? You can't really put those through the, you can't put a pacemaker through the crematorium for sure, they have to be removed.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  That's like metal in the microwave, isn't it? In that it's bad and it breaks the thing, you know?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  It is, basically.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Wouldn't want to damage the cremulator.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  But there's a company called Orthometals which will recycle any metals out of the body and then they give the money to charities. And more than £24 million in about 20 years were given to charities in the UK through metals that were saved from bodies.

• 22:51Dan Schreiber?

  And they often recycle those metals into things that go into like airplanes and buses and stuff. So you might be on a flight one day and without knowing it, grandma's with you because the metal from her hip replacement was reused and turned into a tiny little...

• 23:04Speaker 03

  That's actually, that is actually very nice.

• 23:06Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. You can also be turned into fish bait, which is something that, so there was two...

• 23:16Speaker 03

  That's what the mob do to you, isn't it? I think I've heard of this.

• 23:19Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. Well, no, what it was is, this was a very specific case. It was two friends who were meant to be going on a fishing trip with their third friend called Ron, but Ron passed away. And they thought, well, let's not cancel the trip, let's still go on it and we'll bring a bit of Ron with us. So they had his ashes or his ground bones into a fishbowl and they went fishing with it and they called it the Purple Ronnie and they threw it into the lake where they were at. Anyway, this shouldn't be a notable story, except for the fact that that bit of bait caught a Siamese carp that is the biggest ever caught on record, 180 pounds. The current record as it stands in the books is 134 pounds.

• 24:02Dan Schreiber?

  And to be fair, they have just stopped counting, so it could be that people have caught much larger ones, but that's technically the record. So they're in the papers because their dead mate Ronnie was the bait for the biggest carp ever caught.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Wow. Is it a cheek? Because it's a Siamese carp, so it's actually two carp but joined at the hip.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I know that. We call them conjoined carp these days.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Just on actors and dead bodies.

• 24:25Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  There's a very famous actor who has held a dead body on stage. Many of you might have seen him do it. And that's David Tennant.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  And he's in tonight.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  We're all fans, but this was actually the skull of a Polish composer and pianist called Andrei Tchaikovsky. No relation, but Andrei Tchaikovsky, famous composer but always wanted to be an actor.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Genuinely, no relation.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  No relation. I think it's quite a common name, common enough in, you know, Russia. He died in 1982. He was 46. Very sadly died. He left his body to science, but he said, I'm going to leave my head to the theatre. I'm going to offer my skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performance. I actually don't think he specified what use, but I think everyone assumed, well, you've got to be the Alas Paul Yorick Hamlet scene where famously a skull is held up. Anyway, he did this in 1982 and all actors whooshed out of it from then onwards. And people kept saying, so does anyone want to use Andre's skull? And they said, I'll just use the prop, please. And then in 2008, David Tennant played Hamlet and said, yes, I will use it.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  And then they needed to do, like jump through lots of hoops, so he couldn't use it until the first night because they needed government clearance from the Human Tissue Authority, who regulate tissues and organs. And then he had it in, it was in Stratford. Every night he would hold up this real skull. And then he moved to the West End doing it. And the paper said, they're not using the skull anymore, it's too distracting, the audience keep on kind of pointing and whooping and going, all right, Andre. And then when...

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Are you any relation to the Russian guy?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Just two composers with the name Tchaikovsky. It just seems like there would have been some connection.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Right, people saying that kind of thing.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Did they stop using it?

• 26:17Speaker 04

  No. They just said they did.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  And then, end of the run, they said, in your face, puncture West End audiences.

• 26:25Dan Schreiber?

  What did they do, like put a fake moustache on it? It is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  My fact this week is that in Spanish, "much ado about nothing" is translated as "a lot of noise, not many nuts."

• 26:46Speaker 02

  I would watch that play, wouldn't you?

• 26:52Speaker 04

  They should rename it here, yes. To any Spanish-speaking people, I think this will be quite a familiar term. It literally just means "much ado about nothing" or it figuratively means "much ado about nothing." Mucho vido y pocas noises.

• 27:05Dan Schreiber?

  It's their version of the same phrase.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's like, so it's basically, this tree's making lots and lots of noise, but I'm not getting many walnuts. Specifically walnuts.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  But hang on, "much ado about nothing," I presume that wasn't a phrase before Shakespeare made it into a phrase. Or was it? Was it a phrase in existence?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  I suppose we never sort of know, but I assume, no, I mean, not to us, no. No, I imagine it wasn't.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  But that's interesting because they have a phrase. So there it's more like they've called it a mountain out of a molehill.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  And if Shakespeare had called it that after the phrase, a mountain out of a molehill had existed.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  But we don't know whether "much ado about nothing" was a phrase already.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  And we never will.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  But the thing about the "much ado about nothing" is it's got jokes in it, isn't it? That we don't understand because we're not from Elizabethan England. So "nothing" in those days sounded a bit like "noting," which meant eavesdropping on someone. And there's quite a lot of that in the play.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And also, "nothing" was a euphemism for the vagina in Elizabethan...

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Wasn't "everything" in Shakespeare's time?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Well, no, "everything" was a euphemism for the penis. Usually "something" actually. So "something" would be the penis and "nothing" would be the vagina.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Really?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, "much ado about nothing" has got all sorts of layers that only English teachers understand now.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  So they're actually reintroducing those layers by saying "not many nuts," aren't they? They're adding a little more euphemism than we have.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Very strong.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  It's been like all talk and no trousers, I would say, is our equivalent.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  All fur coats and no knickers, I would say.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  All fur coats and no knickers.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Which I have never understood as a phrase. Why? What's not to like? What's the...

• 28:42Speaker 02

  What's the downside? That's two good things.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Maybe it's the fur coats is the bad thing because we don't wear fur anymore.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  That'll be it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:57Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, Anna, so you got this fact from a book that was called If This Be Magic by Daniel Hahn. And it's an amazing book because he basically looks at the world of translation and he talks to multiple people who are translators globally. And how do you do it if you're translating him? You know, how do you do the puns, for example? And unanimously, it seems, they all come back to say, we have to just write new jokes because we can't translate the puns. In Maori, when he spoke to the translator that, the one thing she really got stuck on was the question, are you a man? She just couldn't work out how you would translate, are you a man?

• 29:30Speaker 04

  This was Lady Macbeth, it says it to Macbeth. Are you a man?

• 29:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, and something the-

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Got any nuts? I guess would be the, yeah.

• 29:40Dan Schreiber?

  That was basically it. The question had to become, have you got balls? That was, that was it. Because it just, she couldn't find the right way to do it that would make sense in the language.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's actually an advantage sometimes, listening to Shakespeare in another language, supposedly. I mean, not that I ever have done, but the point is that so much Shakespeare is so well-known in English. There was a Shakespeare scholar, Dennis Kennedy, who was interviewed, I think in context of this book, who said, in English, Hamlet is a series of well-known quotations. In Chinese, it is a new play. You know, so you don't have, you don't have all the freight of all the, you know, you don't have the audience going, oh, this is a good bit, you know, or whatever. They're just, they're engrossed in the story.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  That's exactly, in fact, I happened to be messaging my mother last night about a fact I learned in this. And she said, the problem with Shakespeare is it's so full of cliches.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  Which is exactly that point, isn't it? There are some other quite fun translations in foreign languages where they've adapted them. I really like Taming of the Shrew in Finnish, which is how a temper bag is tamed. And I just like the fact that akapusi in Finnish is a temper bag. Stop saying such a temper bag, you akapusi. It's a good word.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  I think that's why he's called that, yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  There's in Japan in 1885, the merchant of Venice was cherry blossom time, a world of money.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  Okay. Which is odd. And then the Chinese seem to be incredibly literal. So they just literally just describe the basics of the plot. And this is the early Chinese translations in Shakespeare.

• 31:15Dan Schreiber?

  Too long.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  They called Merchant of Venice was borrowing money by cutting flesh.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Okay. Which is a spoiler. And King Lear was, and I think this is probably more catchy in Chinese, but lip service, filial piety, and heart filial piety.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  It's no load of old nuts, is it?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Here's a question that everyone really wants your opinion on. Who really wrote Shakespeare?

• 31:45Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Rob.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Like, who wrote, who really wrote Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III?

• 31:51Dan Schreiber?

  Well, there's lots of theories, isn't there?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  There's lots of theories.

• 31:53Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  But do you agree with them?

• 31:57Speaker 03

  No, I don't. I think it was a guy called William Shakespeare.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Well, the-

• 32:02Speaker 03

  But not the same William Shakespeare that you're thinking of.

• 32:06Dan Schreiber?

  Billy Shakespeare.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Was it the first person to get the Covid vaccine?

• 32:10Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah, yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Well, according to the Oxford Book of Shakespeare, that's not exactly what it's called, but it's the main Shakespearean collection done by Oxford University. Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III were written by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. And actually, they found recently that quite a lot of his works have been collaborative.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And the way that they've done it is they look at things called Shakespeare plus words and Shakespeare minus words. So there are certain words that Shakespeare uses way more than any other writer. So gentle answer beseech spoke tonight. Shakespeare used tonight way more than any other. I don't know what the others say when it's something that's happening that evening.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  But then there are also Shakespeare minus words that are less likely to be used by him. And Marlowe wrote lots of plays and stories with the words familiar spirit, forsake me, droopeth to, miscreant, change my shape, enchantress. And Shakespeare didn't really use those that much. And so they use that kind of analysis. It's like mathematical analysis to say, actually, we think that this was written by two people in various parts.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  That's great. I do, I do buy that because people have such distinctive ways of speaking and writing.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Do you know something Shakespeare did write? We're pretty sure. And collaboratively, like you said, James, this was a thing, was part of the play Sir Thomas More. So this is a play that was mostly written by a couple of other playwrights, but Shakespeare is the only handwritten playwriting we have from him. He wrote three pages. It's known as the stranger's case speech. The whole play was banned at the time because it was about the people of England being very anti-migration and anti-refugees. And it was thought to be too controversial a topic at the time. But because it's not now, I thought I would just quote some of it. Because it is truly fantastic. So it's this speech Shakespeare wrote in his own hand. Thomas More goes to quell these rioters who are rioting against refugees in England.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  And Thomas More basically says, is this really how you think human beings should behave towards each other? As if anyone has any more right to this land than anyone else. And, you know, he says, if you were in their position, would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that breaking out in hideous violence would not afford you an abode on earth? Would you spurn them like dogs? This is the stranger's case, and this is your mountainish inhumanity. And I just thought, wow, in the week, and I'm not making a point because we're not a political podcast, but it's very strange to read about protests in Portsmouth and elsewhere whilst reading this 400 years ago.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Thinking, well, we haven't come very far, have we?

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Can I tell you something about the theories?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  So obviously, Hamlet has been done in Klingon.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Obviously. There was an outfit called the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project. It was, it was all a thing to do with some people who were very into Star Trek, obviously, and that is obvious. And, and they managed, there's a line in one of the films who say, a character says, you have not experienced Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  The argument runs, there's just no way Shakespeare could have been human. These plays are so good.

• 35:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, right.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Which is basically taking the mickey out of the Earl of Oxford.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  You know, there's no way a sort of middle-class guy from Warwickshire can have done this.

• 35:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  I just love it.

• 35:34Dan Schreiber?

  That's very fun.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Can I tell you a fact about Shakespeare in Love as well?

• 35:37Dan Schreiber?

  The movie?

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Well, well, what a quick mind you have, Dan, because no.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  Quick and wrong.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Quick and wrong. You're wrong faster than anyone else.

• 35:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  So this is just so interesting. I like it so much. So Shakespeare in Love, we know as a film starring the other Fiennes brother, Joseph.

• 35:58Dan Schreiber?

  Joseph.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Who I'm sure is more successful than we'll ever be, but it's just fun, isn't it? It's just a bit of fun, Joseph, if you're listening.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  And he's got nothing else to do. That is lovely.

• 36:13Dan Schreiber?

  He happens to be at the house of the 98-year-old bikini lady going, apparently we're both mentioned in this week's episode. Just give it a quick go.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Basically, I just like the fact that there is a play called Shakespeare in Love, which is 200 years old. So Shakespeare Amoureux is a play that was written in 1804 for Napoleon's birthday, bizarrely, by a playwright called Alexandre Duval. And Shakespeare falls for an actress who is playing Richard III.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Really?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Yep. And I just think that's kind of bizarre that that's a 200-year-old. But it's, so it's a different plot to the modern one.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  I don't know new things.

• 36:55Dan Schreiber?

  Pretty similar.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Is, is, so he falls in love with an actress in the film? I haven't seen the film.

• 36:59Dan Schreiber?

  They sneak Gwyneth Paltrow in under the guise of being a man, and they fall in love as it's going along.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  It's the same plot.

• 37:05Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Oh, it's the same plot?

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Same thing. Same idea.

• 37:09Dan Schreiber?

  Probably had a copyright if it's 200 years. They're probably fine.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  They can't sue.

• 37:13Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  You know, Henry V?

• 37:15Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, man.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  How, just going back to translations, actually, for a moment. Hal, he was Prince Hal when he was younger, is what he's called. And hal means fish in Hungarian. And so in Hungarian, they had to change Prince Hal's name to Ricky all the way through. Ricky! And they say it, Ricky, all the way through. And that, and that, of course, is in the play.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Henry, Henry V?

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Nope. Obviously it's not Henry V, Andy. He's called Hal in Henry IV, Part I and II, isn't he?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  He's just called Henry in Henry V. So that was just like if, you know, if I were Jeremy Paxman, that's where I could make you feel stupid by asking that question.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  You really, you really shut the door on my head there.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  I did, I did.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Hey, what about Macbeth? We talked about superstitions earlier, didn't we?

• 38:04Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  You're not really supposed to say Macbeth on stage.

• 38:08Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Macbeth is a very bad thing to say on stage. And in fact, if you say Macbeth on stage, then something could go terribly wrong.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  You're looking at me all the time when you say it.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Well, the idea of like this ancient curse of Macbeth, we think it was invented by a theatre critic called Max Beerbohm, who was mentioned on the show before, actually. And he really didn't enjoy Shakespeare that much. And he was reviewing Macbeth. And he was just, was a little bit bored by it and thought, oh, he'll just make up this story of a guy called Hal Beridge, who died over on the first performance in 1606. But we don't think that actually happened. But then, of course, once he gets a reputation as being unlucky, as soon as anything dodgy happens, like if this light falls on my head now, everyone's going to be like, it's because he said Macbeth.

• 38:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  But it was probably because one of you guys did it earlier.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:56Dan Schreiber?

  Or you were so committed to the bit, you rigged it yourself.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  And then the other thing is because Macbeth is such like a banker of a play, like it's the one you go to if you really need a play that's going to do really well. So often theatres are already going downhill and they think, what are we going to do? Oh, let's put Macbeth on. And so Macbeth ends up being like the last thing that plays, or is being played in the theatre where all the people who do all the work have already been fired. And so things go wrong. So that seems to be why Macbeth is now seen to be unlucky.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  I think that makes sense. No theatre in its right mind that's on the skid says, let's do the Merry Wives of Windsor.

• 39:38Dan Schreiber?

  All right, let's get to our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  My fact is, Rome's hot priest calendar was busted this year because it turned out the men in it were neither Roman nor priests.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  But were they hot?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  They were so hot, they were so hot. This is a great thing that I hadn't heard of, called the calendario romano, also known as the Roman beefcake calendar. And it features a lot of unbelievably handsome young men in dog collars, that kind of dog collar, not the other kind of dog collar. It's been going about 20 years, and the weird thing is, this came up in the news this year. They have actually been busted once or twice before.

• 40:20Dan Schreiber?

  Have they?

• 40:21Speaker 04

  What do you mean, police kicked their doors down?

• 40:23Speaker 03

  That's right, a lot of people doing jail time now. No, the guy behind it is a photographer called Piero Pazzi, and he would, he's actually a cat photographer mostly, but he's opened cat museums in two separate cities, which is quite extraordinary. But he would go to Rome and Seville and he'd snap fit young men, and, you know, he would say, "Look, can you, can you, can you sort of look a bit priesty?" And, you know, they're not all priests. One of them was a Spanish estate agent. But it sells in huge numbers, this calendar, it sells, I mean, I've read between 8,000 and 75,000 copies a year. All the little kind of newsagents, tobacconists, that kind of thing in Rome stock it.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think if you're in the Vatican and you go just outside the Vatican, there's loads of little sort of souvenir shops and stuff, right?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  They all sell it, and like, an individual shop will sell hundreds of these in a year.

• 41:16Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because what, there's nothing wrong with it.

• 41:19Dan Schreiber?

  No?

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Well, I've been lied to, and I'll be getting a refund, and there's nothing wrong with it.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  They're all going to hell.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  And there was a, there was a big interview this year with one of the cover priests, actually, for many editions, a guy called Giovanni Galizia, who is now a Viennese flight attendant.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  And he did this great interview, because he, he's never seen any royalties from it. He was maybe 20 or 18 when the, when the shot was taken, and he looked, he does look quite priesty in it, he's, I think he's just wearing all black. But this guy has seen multiple theories about himself online, because it's been 20 years since the photo was taken. So he's seen a rumor that he was a priest, but he gave up the habit for love. And another says he's now 80 and living a quiet retired life. He's 39 in nine.

• 42:05Dan Schreiber?

  One says he wrote Shakespeare's work. Yeah, these, there's a few of them, and they do tend to make the news and get in trouble when they're connected to a religion. So there was one that was in the news a while back, which was a similar hot Mormons calendar. The men on a mission calendar did not go down well with the community, and these were all former Mormons who had left.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Why did they call it missionary position? That's the stupidest.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  I've actually found this the worst fact we've ever had to research publicly in a cafe, researching naughty sexy calendars and looking for facts about them. I looked over my shoulder every half minute, did you guys find that?

• 42:44Speaker 03

  I was researching it on a train, and it was, like, it was bad.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  So many boobs, too many boobs.

• 42:50Dan Schreiber?

  What was, what was the one that you were most embarrassed?

• 42:52Speaker 04

  I was most embarrassed that people thought I was genuinely Googling the film Calendar Girls out of curiosity, because, come on.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Well, they were kind of the ones that started the modern sort of idea of people doing a charity calendar, right?

• 43:06Speaker 04

  The real Calendar Girls.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  It was the Women's Institute.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  And then eventually got turned, oh, quite soon afterwards, actually, it got turned into the movie Calendar Girls. But it wasn't actually a Women's Institute calendar, it was done outside of the Women's Institute, because it's illegal for one charity to raise money for another charity, and the money was going to leukemia research, so they had to do it kind of outside of the rules a little bit.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Just on Calendar Girls, the movie.

• 43:33Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  I was reading an interview with the director, and it sounds like so much fun to make.

• 43:37Dan Schreiber?

  Helen Mirren.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, like, all the great women of that, were female actors of that age. Celia Emery, I think it was made in the early 2000s, because the real WI people who they were based on was 1999. But the director just said, "They loved being naked, these women." So they were, they were quite nervous at first, but then, he said, "They, like Helen Mirren, Celia Emery, Julie Walters, they all insisted on being naked at all times filming the calendar scenes, even when they didn't need to be." And I don't mean in scenes where they had to be wearing clothes, they didn't have to Photoshop clothes on them.

• 44:09Dan Schreiber?

  It's the first use of CGI, isn't it? To put a top on Helen Mirren, yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, you speak truer than you know.

• 44:16Dan Schreiber?

  What?

• 44:16Speaker 03

  The director, Nigel Cole, said, "Even after we'd finished and cut the film, there were things popping out that shouldn't have been." And a young man from digital remastering had to spend four weeks removing all the private parts.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  So when this Calendar Girls thing all kicked off, it was around 2004, and I read an article in the Sunday Telegraph from November 28th that year, and it was naturists complaining that naked calendars were giving nudity a bad name.

• 44:44Dan Schreiber?

  Interesting.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  And they said that basically, when you get a comical depiction of a woman from the WI sort of, like, leaning over to put some toast in the toaster, and a cat jumps in front of her and tastefully covers her breasts, then what you're saying is that nudity is something that we should be ashamed of. And the commercial manager of British naturism, Andrew Welch, said, "The whole market has been flooded with nude calendars, and really, they are not nude, they still cover themselves with cider presses or whatever."

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Quite right.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Such a specific, cider presses or, or, or whatever, whatever.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  They were really annoyed about it. And can I just read a quote from this article? So, this from the Telegraph in 2004, "There are now approximately 100 naked calendars published every year. Recent examples include a calendar celebrating Scotland's first gay-friendly rugby club, and an 'Embrace Men in Wellies' calendar, sponsored by a Wellington boot manufacturer that features Alan Duncan, the Labour MP for Runtland and Melton, dressed as Father Christmas, preserving his modesty with a cutout of Margaret Thatcher."

• 45:56Speaker 02

  That sentence just goes where you absolutely have no idea where it's gonna go.

• 46:00Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Was that, was the Wellies one called Wellie Wanging?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  No, it's called Embrace Men in Wellies.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  I'm sorry.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  But it should have been.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Was the rugby one called Tackle Out?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  I think you have a job just naming these.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  I missed a call in, haven't I? Yeah, yeah. Well, this is, the weird thing was that there was this period in British life, and it was from Calendar Girls coming out until I'd say 2012 or 13, when austerity put an end to it, where basically, almost like, half the national life seems to have been producing and starring in nude calendars, and they all had to be for charity, that was a very strict rule.

• 46:37Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  But you couldn't just say, "I am an exhibitionist and I desperately want to get my kiss off and be in a calendar." So, the saucy Cumbrian young farmer's calendar, where they're posing in a silage clamp.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  There was a lot of farming, wasn't there?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  A lot of farming. Riot Air, of course, their cabin crew stunners led to 8,000 complaints, which is impressive. The Greg's, what Greg's, the Greg's nude calendar.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Really? And you're covered by a sausage roll on.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  There were casualties, we should say, of this movement.

• 47:08Dan Schreiber?

  What do you mean?

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Well, in 2011, Doncaster Rovers sacked their mascot, Tracey Chandler, aka Donny Dog, after she stripped off for a tasteful photo shoot. And it was especially cruel, because Doncaster Rovers had just done their own charity calendar, where all the players were stripping off.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  What?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  And they sacked the mascot.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Why?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  For taking off her dog costume.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Did she still have the big fluffy head on?

• 47:31Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  Was it in her contract she had to keep the dog costume on all year round?

• 47:36Speaker 03

  I don't think that's how it was.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Never be seen without.

• 47:39Dan Schreiber?

  I think I read about the most naked naked calendar.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:42Dan Schreiber?

  That's been produced. So this was a Japanese company, and they did it purely to promote a new bit of tech, they wanted to get out there. So they got a bunch of female models, they got naked, except for high heels, and they took X-ray shots of them, and so every shot is a naked model, but so naked that you can only see her bones and high heels, and the photos look amazing.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Do they?

• 48:04Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  We're going into very strange territory, aren't we?

• 48:09Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, you can see all the creminators, you know, look at those bones. No, it's very cool, it's, look, I recommend looking at images online.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  It does feel like it's gonna be a letdown if you say, "Darling, do you want to see me the most naked you've ever seen me?" And what, you get someone's skeleton?

• 48:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Works for some people. Oh, actually, speaking of skeletons, do you know the Linda calendar in Poland?

• 48:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  That's, a lot of these naughty calendars are kind of promotional things by random companies, you know, a tire company, an insurance company, at the end of the year, they'll put out a calendar, and this is put out by a family-owned Polish coffin and casket manufacturing company, and it's a calendar of naked people lying in coffins.

• 48:47Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  It's good to know what you'll look like in the coffin if they forget to put clothes on you.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  No, the Catholic Church says it's not appropriate.

• 48:59Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Once I agree with the Catholic Church.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  And they don't like the hot priest calendar, just to bring us back to that either.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Do they not?

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Oh, because they're not priests. And also because even if they were priests, they wouldn't be approving a, a hot priest calendar. There is, there is apparently a gym over the road from the Vatican where you do get actual hot priests working out. The gym owner said, "We had one American bishop who was more muscular than a bodybuilder." Now, correct me if I'm wrong, the current pope was at some point an American bishop, right?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Right. Oh, he was, yeah, Robert Provost.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Right, so he's an American pope.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  So you reckon he's the ripped one?

• 49:30Speaker 03

  I'm not saying he's definitely the ripped one, but we could have our first shredded pope, and we might not know.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Wait a minute, wasn't Francis was a bouncer in Buenos Aires, wasn't he?

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yes, he was.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  He must be pretty buff.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true, that's true. So it's possible there have been two shredded popes.

• 49:47Dan Schreiber?

  How do you, how do you get more muscly than a bodybuilder?

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Isn't that exciting? There's another, like, there's another layer above bodybuilder.

• 49:55Dan Schreiber?

  It's like a muscle halo that's over you, that's.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Just a ring of biceps around your head.

• 50:01Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Can I tell you a brief thing about the calendar? Just, just to get us off all the naughty stuff?

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:08Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  This is really exciting. This is about the invention of the page-a-day desk calendar.

• 50:12Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  This is really exciting, you said at the start of that sentence, just to remind you.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Strap in, guys.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  It was invented by a guy of Paul, sorry, I've got so excited, I've laughed.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  It was a, you could hear.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  I feel like if we got one word a day of this fact, we might get there a bit quicker.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Now I'm crying, so thanks a lot. For context, I'll start again. The page-a-day desk calendar was invented by a guy called Paul Hanson, who worked at a company called Workman Publishing in 1979. You know the cool thing about it?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  The company, Workman Publishing, was run and owned by a man called Peter Workman.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  So that's, that's the incident.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  You knew where it was going.

• 51:17Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, well, I think the entire fucking room knew where that was.

• 51:25Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, that is 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've said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. If you want to send us any facts, podcast at qi.com, send it there, because we're gonna pick out the best facts and take it to Little Fish, our Monday show, which is really fun, or if you've got little bits of feedback, experiences, we'll take them, put it on Drop Us A Line, which is our secret behind-the-scenes Club Fish episode that you get if you're a member of that, that's patreon.com/clubfish, check it out. Otherwise, come back here next week, because we're gonna be back with another episode. But for now, thank you everyone around the world watching us, thank you everyone here in the room with us at London Podcast Festival, and we'll see you again, goodbye.