you Hi everybody, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we have two exciting announcements to make. The first is about who our special guest is this week. She is a brilliant Canadian writer, screenwriter, showrunner.
also a first time author. She is Monica Heisey and her debut novel Really Good Actually is out within the last few weeks and it is unsurprisingly Really Good Actually. It's all about the life and travails of a woman who has become a surprisingly young divorcee it is extremely funny it's kind of you know accidentally um like snort milk out of your nose funny it's great highly recommended so we hope you enjoy the show monica was great as you will hear shortly
The second announcement we have to make is that we are doing a live show of No Such Thing As A Fish. Very exciting. We are going to be at the Hallowed British Library in London. They are having a season all about animals and as part of that...
we are doing a show called Fantastic Beasts. It's going to be Dan, James, myself, and a special guest to be announced. It's going to be on the 21st of April. And if you don't live anywhere near the British Library, there is also going to be a streamed version of it. So just go to... no such thing as a fish dot com slash live you will see there the tickets are available for our British Library show so check it out okay that's it that's all of the announcements on with the show
Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and Monica Heise. And once again, we have gathered around 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, that is Monica. So my fact is that in ancient Hebrew times, men could get a divorce if their wife had been alone in a room with another man. And I was really interested in this fact because my...
My divorce lawyer told me that this may still be true. I couldn't find anything backing up, but she basically said if he could prove that a man and a woman had been alone together in a room for more than an hour, it could be reasonably... assumed legally that adultery had occurred i think we should just say that we're not all in the same room at the moment i think that's very important so no i think people were a bit desperate because it used to be that you could only
get divorced for five reasons one of which was adultery and so i think people just could stretch it a bit to be really just trying to get out it's really it's the history of What you needed to say or allege or agree that you had been doing to get divorced is absolutely mad. For a long time, it was only adultery or adultery was the only substantial grounds. And then they introduced other ones a bit later on. But there was one rule.
where if one of you had committed adultery, then your partner could divorce you. But if you both had, they might not be able to. Because legally, the divorce was kind of an acknowledgement that one person had committed a wrong and the other was being... Like an eye for an eye and a shag for a shag. Yeah, and if you'd both done it, then...
You weren't allowed to lie saying, oh, I've committed adulterily. Sorry, that's a Ned Flanders version of adultery. You weren't allowed to lie saying you'd committed adultery. That's perjury. So they made it very, very difficult. Well, that's religion for you. And also it was a very specific definition as well. Adultery legally is a married person having...
full sex with someone of the opposite gender. So if your husband had a gay affair and you were a woman, you couldn't sue him for divorce on grounds of adultery, but you could sue him for unreasonable behavior. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow.
This thing in the Jewish law, this is from the Mishnah, which is the oldest written collection of Jewish oral traditions. And the thing is that because if the woman had been in a room with another man, in theory, there can't be any... other witnesses right because it's basically one person's word against another person's word and okay you have the perjury thing but what they would do is they would give you the ordeal of bitter water
and this was to tell if you were telling the truth or not so they give the woman some water with some dust in it And it's not really clear what the dust is. It might be bits of barley. It might be bits of something else. And the idea is if the woman drinks it and the water is so bitter that she has to spit it out, then that proves that she was in the wrong.
God, it's like witch trials. A little bit like that. It's a trial by ordeal, they would call it. I feel like I give myself this test every morning when I try for one sip of the water that's been out by my bedside table all night. I'll tell you, the worst divorce situation I read about in the...
research was to do with if you were divorcing the king of thailand oh yeah the problem is is that if you go to divorce the king of thailand you have to obviously accuse the king of thailand of reasons for the divorce unfortunately by law in Thailand you were not allowed to accuse the king of anything so when the current king's divorce case was going on I think he was the crown prince at the time he went to court and he made all these accusations against the wife and the wife had to just
say uh yeah he was fine couldn't say anything couldn't defend herself yeah so he obviously he obviously won i've got facts about the king of thailand do you remember um the king and i that um The play or musical play? Yeah. It's about someone called Anna Leonowens who went to work for the King of Thailand. And the real life Anna Leonowens was the great aunt of Boris Karloff. who played was it frankenstein or yeah yeah yeah
It's just a fact. It's just two people you would expect to be related to each other, I reckon. Yes, yeah, that's very true. Like Ben Elton and Luke Longley are brothers-in-law. That would mean nothing to no one except Australia. Australians, yeah. I've never heard of Luke. Who's Luke Longley? One of the great Australian basketball players played with the Chicago Bulls in the Michael Jordan period. You know, he's a legend. One of the great Australian basketball players. How big is this cohort?
There's three of them. And one of them is related by marriage, but not blood to Ben Elton. Amazing. Gosh. Why didn't you pick that as your headline fact this week, Darren? I've been pitching it for nine years, you guys. Swatting it away every week. I found a modern divorce story, which I can't believe that this is true, but it was reported in a bunch of places. So this is to do with a... a Bosnian couple, Sana Klarik and her husband Adnan.
And Adnan had not been happy in the marriage and he started looking around for love and he went online. And so he started chatting to someone online. He used a fake name just to make sure that no one could clock on to who he was. He met someone. He said, I suddenly was in love again. It was beautiful. I thought I'd finally found someone who understands me and who's in a similar situation in a bad marriage like I am. So they decided to meet up. And they meet up.
And he sees, sitting in the spot where his online love should be, his wife, who has also gone online, created a pseudonym, looked for love. They found each other. And what's remarkable is that is how they found out that each of them were basically cheating on each other and divorced off the back of it despite falling back in love with each other in this online scenario. They looked at it as negative. Reverse pina colada style.
It's like a Richard Curtis film until the last sentence, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Super plot twist at the end there. There was a guy in New York, he was from New York anyway, and he divorced his wife. uh in dominican republic and she didn't find out for 22 years so he filled in the form and got her to sign something which she didn't know what she was signing and he got an official divorce
And then she only found out when she got a letter through about the house that they owned and her name wasn't on the deeds. And she sort of rang her lawyer and said, what's going on? And he said, well, it turns out you're not married and you haven't been for 22 years. But they can't have been living together.
yeah what he just he just didn't tell her that they weren't married anymore and what she said of the case and i couldn't find out what in the end happened but she said that she thought that he'd done it deliberately so that he would own everything. If he left her in the future, she wouldn't have any rights. That's what she said. But then he stayed with her for decades? Yeah, because apparently, I mean, I can't really speak for him, but what she said is that the marriage was kind of happy.
but he just did it as a kind of backup in case he needed it in the future. Oh, my God. Oh, no. That's bad, that, isn't it? Pure evil. i became really obsessed with unreasonable behavior as a category um so they changed the law in um in 2022 and now you could have a no-fault divorce in the uk which means that you don't have to identify a guilty party you can just both agree that you want to dissolve your marriage but prior to that you had to pick one of these five categories
Kind of whether or not there was something going on. And unreasonable behavior is such a very capacious category. And I think 51% of women filing for divorce in this country, that was their grounds. They're only 36% of men. And a lot of it has to do with gaming. People were divorcing because either their husbands were gaming too often, but a lot of them, like a non-negligible portion, were people who were having digital affairs. So you're basically meeting someone via...
Not by Fortnite. Your Sims avatar is having sex with someone else's Sim. So are there limits to this, what was it called again? Unreasonable behavior. Unreasonable behavior. What are you worried about, Dan? Excessive Ben Elton memorabilia purchases from eBay. Is that...
Do I need to watch out? I do think it's a very bendy category. It basically is like a prolonged commitment to behavior that... is a problem to the marriage so that can include like actively building a life separate to your partner if you're if you're developing too many not shared interests or you're really going hard on um
I don't know. You have a new hobby and you're going away and pursuing rock climbing all the time. And your partner is no interest in it whatsoever. Eventually, after a certain amount of rock climbing, I suppose it can become unreasonable. i think uh reckless spending counts as well oh absolutely if you're spending loads of money on ben elton memorabilia damn it i'm done yeah did you guys ever hear of the brighton quickie
No. This is a divorce practice. And I've done a fair bit of reading about it. I can't quite work out how real it was. Basically, in 1923, the law was changed saying you could petition on adultery only. It was the only grounds for divorce. And that led to this thing where it's kind of like... Monica's original fact about being in a room together, you would go down...
As the husband, you would agree to be the adulterer. You'd book a hotel room in Brighton because it's easy on the train from London. You spend the night there with a woman you don't know. You don't have sex or anything, but there's a hotel receipt saying you've booked a room for two the next morning. Maybe you're witnessed by the chambermaid. Two pairs of shoes outside the door.
Exactly, exactly. And there's all this, there's then a small body of evidence that you can use to get your divorce. And then times link back. Yeah, you haven't even got to commit adultery, but you will be divorced in due course. But I just can't tell how much it actually... happened if at all. It's in a few novels and it's written about at the time but it's not.
Also, how important is the chambermaid in this? Like, are all the rooms in this hotel packed with people going for a Brighton quickie? And she's got to sort of be... She's the witness. Yeah, she's the witness for like 40 things a day where she has to...
Was that? Yeah. No, I saw the shoes outside that door. And then was it the pancakes? I took a tea and they were on top of the bed. There was a pillow on the floor. So that's suggestive. Yeah. I read that in Delaware and Colorado, you can get your marriage annulled. if you did it for a dare. But none of the other 48 states is that explicitly in the rules. Like, probably you still could get an annulment if you said that, but it would have to go under something else, but...
In those two states, it explicitly says it is illegal to get married on a dare. I mean, all marriages are kind of a dare. Are they? Yeah. That's what a proposal is. It's a big dare. Yeah, I dare you to stay with me until one or both of us dies. I bet your wife is wishing she shows truth, though. Yeah, every day. I got a thing which is...
One of a really classic Marvin Gaye albums, which was called Here, My Dear, was made within a divorce proceeding whereby Marvin Gaye didn't quite have the alimony that he needed to pay for his child. And so the agreement... was the next album that you do, your wife, who you're now divorcing, is going to get half of the money, royalties and the upfront money from the album itself. And he decided, well, I don't want her making any money, so I'm going to do a quickie album, basically.
I'm just going to not really do anything good. It's going to come out and it's just going to be panned by the critics. No one's going to like it. And then suddenly... He got fascinated by the notion of this album and ended up putting more heart and soul into this album, possibly than any of his other albums. He was really hands on. He wrote the lyrics. He never writes lyrics for his songs, according to the stuff that I was reading. He never...
really was hands-on with playing the piano but in this album he insisted on doing the lyrics the piano and it was panned at the time but it's been it's one of those albums that's been reviewed by everyone since you know the rolling stone has named it one of the best five
albums ever made three times in lists that they've released and it constantly appears on these lists now but it was a it's a pure divorce album pretty cool that's the story of the producers the film the producers dan we've just done you've given us a fact which is the song pina colada and now you've given us the film the producers but you've translated it to being about marvin gaye no no no because we see you we see what you're doing they they made it bad he made this good during the process
The producers was bad. I wonder at what point he decided to start making it good. Like if he's like, I'm going to make it so bad. And then what day did he realize, oh, I'm actually very invested. I'm really trying quite hard now. Yeah, I don't know. I guess if you're an artist. going to be really hard to go i'll just put out a shit album like that's that must be a painful thing to do to make a decision on i don't know some of them manage don't they but i think like
I think if he didn't normally play piano and didn't normally write the lyrics and then he started doing it, he must have not normally done it because he didn't think he was as good as the people who were doing it, right? Originally. And then when he started doing it, he's like, oh, this is pretty good. It's also a little bit self-myth-making. Oh, I tried to make an album which sucked, and instead I made one of the 500 greatest of all time. Oh, that's just me.
Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that the same fingers are responsible for the clicks in the Addams Family theme, the bongos in the Mission Impossible theme, and the xylophone in the Simpsons theme. The same human fingers created three of the great artworks of the 20th century. I think it's unbelievable. I think it's so great. Would you say that you play the Xylothomb with your fingers? I was going to question that, yeah.
His name was Woodfingers Richards, and he was incredible. You know Woodfingers Richards? When he clicked his fingers for the Ellens family, did he set himself on fire? Emil Richards.
Hero of Percussion. I should say where I got this. It was via a brilliant piece published each year by a guy called Tom Whitwell, which is 52 things he learned each year. I think I may have mentioned him before, either one or two or three years ago. But anyway, it's a brilliant list. And this is one of the facts I just couldn't...
believe it and emil richards it turns out uh born 1932 died 2019 in between those two dates had the most amazing musical career yeah he played with frank sinatra he toured with george harrison He was one of the most amazing session musicians ever. The list of people he played with is just... He played with Charlie Mingus, you know. He was proper into the scene of jazz and blues. And then, yeah, as you say, he went on tour and also played on three George...
He was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1994. That's a very hard Hall of Fame to get into. Is it harder to get into than the Australian Basketball Hall of Fame? Yes. I imagine to get in you have... to do a special knock to get into the Picasso Hall of Fame. But no, yeah, what an extraordinary guy. Yeah, it was amazing. Frank Zappa, Doris Day, The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees, Blondie, Ella Fitzgerald.
Marvin Gaye. I don't know if it was on the album. Imagine. I think Marvin did all his finger clicks on that album. Right, okay. He was just incredible. I love this. His autobiography was called My Life Behind Bar. Oh, very nice. Oh, you may have come across this in the course of your research. Can you guess what kind of animal he wanted to come back as in the next life?
Oh, I didn't see that. I did not see that. Something percussive. Woodpecker. Awesome guess. Such a good guess. I wish it was that. Imagine it's just totally unrelated. No, no, no. It is related to his percussionist life. Oh, it is. Oh, so you can have more arms. That's good. Woodpecker is better actually, yeah. Six of them are legs in an octopus. He had the world's largest collection of percussive instruments.
Really? This guy, yeah. He had over 770. I don't know if that's 771, maybe. He had an Ang Klung. a bulbul tarang, a chimta, a flap amber, a jangu, a mbira and a pakhavaj. When I was looking him up, they said he plays the vibraphone, and I went to look up what a vibraphone was, and the first thing that just said, not to be confused with the vibra slap.
And what is that? Always getting them fixed up. A vibra slap is, have you ever seen that instrument? It's like a piece of wire bent into a U and there's a wooden ball on the end and it hits the box. So that's a vibra slap.
Cool. And a vibraphone is more looks like a xylophone. I don't know how you would confuse them. They don't look at all alike. And they're both so obscure that I feel like it's very unlikely you'll be talking about one and not know what the other one is. Like either you're not talking about these at all. or there's no risk of you confusing the two. Such a good point. What a guy.
so he did the mission impossible theme tune uh the bongos on that and i was looking into the mission impossible theme tune generally so there's this fact which is that the the beat of the song was written to the morse code of and i so can you give us the what it goes like for anyone who doesn't handy you're you're a bigger fan i always end up doing bond by accident can you do it quickly do you mean the bit they go yes yeah so it's it's
dash dash dot dot is the thing for it. Oh, that's great. But the guy who wrote it, Shifrin, he wrote that whole song, he says, in three minutes. Wow, really? Yeah. You often hear that with a few musicians where they say, just bang that out. And it just came to me as a fully formed piece. And that happened. And that happened with Mission Impossible. So that's quite cool. And the same with the James Bond theme. That wasn't written in a quick time. But if by a guy called Monty Norman.
And he actually, which is, I really like this. He was hired by the Bond people to come up specifically with this theme. And they took him out to Jamaica on a holiday. And he met Connery out there and Ursula Andress. Because they were filming...
Dr. No. Yeah, they were filming Dr. No, the first one out there. And so he was brought to meet them all and get a vibe of it. And he ended up just using a previous tune that he had written for a completely different adaption that never got used. It was a stage production of VS... Naples novel A House for Mr. Biswas that's the original James Bond theme and it was played on sitar is that the one that goes oh because I know the original lyrics of that are something like
I was born with an unfortunate sneeze. And yes, that's it. My parents said that I was made the wrong way around. Oh my God. This is a bigger repurpose than candle in the wind. This is a big. Big shift. So strange. And I think at the end of the song, he sneezes so much that he falls into a lake or something.
of that tune oh right wow yeah this guy monty norman he also wrote an autobiography so life behind bars very good title do you know andy you look like you might know the title of his autobiography no i don't is it musical and james bond themed no Well, I'm not going to get it. No, it was called A Walking Stick Full of Bagels.
Okay. Without knowing the context, that is not a good title. I think that must have been a classic phrase back in the day. You're like a walking stick full of bagels. And what does that mean? How would a stick be full of anything? There we go. So many questions. I bet they were all answered in the unpublished autobiography. and we are yet to find out. I think the best autobiography title I've ever heard was Tori Spelling's autobiography.
Storytelling by Tori Spelling. Genius. Really good. Really strong title. I've got it. I got it off that title. But that doesn't go down well in the divorce case. Tori Spelling's autobiography. Have you guys heard of the village of Kong Thong in northeast India? No. This is a village where every child is given a theme tune. Oh, cool. It's a little village. It's really cut off from the rest of India. I don't think you can get there by car. I think you can get there by boat.
but it's in the middle of a jungle and people would forage for broom grass which they would sell on and so a lot of the time you would spend in the jungle sort of walking around probably alone and the thing is in the jungle is quite hard to hear people for long distances because it all gets soaked in by the trees and so they came up with this different way of telling people you're around by having a different tune that you would whistle or you would shout or whatever
And so when you're born, you get your theme tune. And then for the rest of your life, whenever you're in the jungle, people will make this little do-do-do-do-do-do. You'll be like, oh, that's me. That was The Simpsons. I think lawyers will be in touch with that kid. He was from the Simpson family of Kong Thung.
That is so cool. Isn't it? That's awesome. Unfortunately, it's kind of dying out because people now will connect with each other using mobile phones, so they don't need these theme tunes so much. yet again the internet's ruined it all i'm having a quick think about songs that use the old handaroos as a kind of iconic bit of it and obviously if you're thinking theme tunes the friends theme tune
I'll Be There For You by the Rembrandts. There's like a clapping bit, right? Yeah, so it's four claps. Apparently there's a bit of controversy because Courtney Cox did five claps on a TV show once and it sent the writers of the song mad. But...
The song, I'll Be There For You, it was actually a song composed specifically for the TV show, and the Rembrandts had very minimal input into the writing itself. It was the actual creators of Friends who wrote the song, and it proved to be such a... iconic theme tune that everyone was begging for it to be released in the yeah i bought it in the chance when it came out so what yeah what that was was they had to go into a studio and write a whole song because there wasn't a whole song
It was only the theme tune bit of the song. They needed two more verses to be added in. Yeah, so it was a backwards constructed full song that ended up coming out. That's so interesting. So it was 40 seconds long. There was like a time in the 90s when all the... theme shoes used to come out and you could buy them for the charts like the x-files did around that time as well and they all did quite well in the charts just because people thought oh
I like that song. Yeah, I love it. I mean, the X-Files is my favorite theme tune of all time. And it turns out, so the guy who composed that is called... Mark Snow? Yeah, Mark Snow. And David Duchovny claims, I think this is tongue-in-cheek. I mean, it completely is tongue-in-cheek, but he says there are lyrics to the...
X-Files theme tune by Mark Snow. And these are the lyrics. The X-Files is a show, show, show, show, show. With music by Mark Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow. Those are the only two lyrics.
that we know of according to the company um do you guys know what composers of tv theme tunes hate um i guess oh when they when on tv shows when the continuity announcer goes next up on bbc3 yeah that's a really good point um i'm specifically talking about the skip intro button okay which is very controversial of course they get furious those guys and gals about the uh skip intro because netflix found out that users were frequently
fast-forwarding a bit because that you know if you're watching three episodes in a night you don't want to see the theme tune three times so netflix claims i can't quite believe this skip intro is pressed 136 million times a day which cumulatively saves 130 years of human in time we never especially the shows where they've put some proper effort into the into the intros
I think you lose quite a lot from not having those intros. Can you imagine watching Game of Thrones and not having that amazing theme tune with all the stuff happening and then just going straight into the shagging? That's... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it really sets the vibe. I think grooving to the Sopranos theme is like...
Maybe 30% of what I like about watching the show. Obviously, the other 70% is that it's groundbreaking, beautiful human drama. But the theme tune is also up there. It's a bop. I agree. We stand up in our house. We stand in silence. Every theme tune. It's a huge respect in this household. Monica, aren't you showrunning on a show at the moment? I just finished showrunning on a show, yes.
Are you going to get to pick the theme tune? I think we're going to have like proper opening titles. So we're going to have to do a whole, we're going to have to figure out a whole thing. Yeah. I've really been shown my own limitations in this area because my description is like, I want it to sound cool. Well, I got some advice for you, Monica. If you're working with the sound person, do a secret thing here, which is...
Do actually write lyrics to whatever the theme tune is, but don't put them out because you could then claim 50% royalties on the song. This is what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek. He wrote lyrics for the Star Trek song. use them And any time a royalty check came in, he was a co-writer of the song. So he got 50% of everything. And the song Suicide is Painless, the MASH theme tune, it was used in the Robert Altman movie, commissioned specifically for that movie by Robert Altman.
and he tried to write the lyrics for it couldn't crack it and so he asked his son Michael who was 15 years old at the time to write the lyrics so Michael did that and as a result of that song not only being used in the movie but then the long-running TV show with Alan Alda he says Altman says that he made $70,000 for directing that movie and his son has earned more than a million dollars over the years just from that being sold. Those lyrics are good though aren't they?
suicide is painless. But Gene Roddenberry, is he not just stealing half of the credit? It feels like it, doesn't it? It feels like the workers and the musicians who have done all this work and he's just like, well, I'll pretend that I've written some lyrics and take half the money. That's quite cheeky. It's very cheeky. Hey, that's the business we're in, guys. And Monica. That's Hollywood, baby. Business is business. Just quickly.
Ed Sheeran has written a theme tune to James Bond, despite no one having requested that he do that, which I think is quite sweet. I think that's a very Ed Sheeran thing to do. But that's, isn't that, I would say that when a new Bond comes out, people submit songs. That's how that's always worked. No, it's not. You don't send in. There are so many songs that are out that are rejected Bond songs by bands that submitted a song that didn't get used, which they then use.
Is there a process? Is there an open process by which, I mean, could we submit one? Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Do they accept anything? That can be true. I thought that they would commission a cool art. It can't be like a bake-off. The last film, they asked Billie Eilish to do... No, she just got lucky. She just happened to have the best one. They sent in a million. Wow. And hers just happened to be the best one.
They listen to them blind as well. They don't prejudice themselves. It's like the voice. It's like the voice. It could be anyone.
That can't be true, Dan. Because they always pick the trendiest person in the world at the time, don't they? No, I mean, and Ed Sheeran has consistently been the second trendiest person in the world, and he's just... just keeps missing it the reason i say it is i know that radiohead had a rejected bond song so i'm trying to i'm trying to work back from from there and i'm pretty sure johnny cash had one as well and i think this is a thing yeah but i can't i can't say for sure
Maybe they ask people to tender for it, rather than anyone being able to send stuff in. Oh yeah, I think they ask a group of people. I don't think it is open. It's not quite as open as that. Open season. Because you'd see, there'd be a thing every three years, wouldn't there? Yeah, exactly. Have you guys heard of Doosan Sestich? uh he's a composer of the bosnian national anthem we spoke about bosnia earlier he entered the competition to um to do the bosnia national anthem
He didn't really want to win. He just wanted to get like second or third place. There was money for it. He like was quite into the old Yugoslavia. He didn't really care about the new Bosnia. But he thought I'll get some money out of it because I'm a decent composer. anyway he won and he wrote the national anthem for bosnia and then in 2009 someone noticed that it was remarkably similar to the theme tune of national lampoon's animal house uh the 1978 movie
And when you listen to them both, they are almost identical. Like, there's no difference whatsoever. But bless him, he went on TV and they were all like, well, how come you made our National Anthem the theme tune to National Anthem's Animal House? And he said, oh, maybe as a young man I heard it and it kind of stuck in my head, but I didn't deliberately plagiarise it. It just so happened. That is brilliant. This is the problem with, I think, national policies being decided by a write-in contest.
This is why Canadian legal tender is called the loonie and the toonie. The $1 coin has a loon on it, so it's called a loonie. And then they had a contest to name the $2 coin, which has a polar bear on it, and the winning end. was the toonie and now that is actually what we call it and it just makes us sound like a joke country without knowing the other options monica i do think toonie is quite good
I think there's a bit of Bodie McBoat face to it. Yeah, yeah. We can't speak. Haven't they also... yeah it works haven't they recently just while we're talking about money and and having mentioned star trek there was the thing where you would spockify your
canadian dollar right the guy who was on the picture looks so similar to leonard nimoy from star trek that you would draw spock ears on him and you would draw the hair basically yes it was called spocking and the bank of canada uh you a statement saying that it was legal to do but inappropriate.
And I think they've, from what I read, they've changed his image now on the bill. Is that right? There's a new version of the same guy just so it's less spockable. I think if you draw that spock on any note, then she... Roddenberry owns half your money. Yeah, and then a spokesperson for another agency in Canada, an angel agency said to the Bank of Canada, this is fine. As you say, it's perfectly legal. And I'm sure Sir Wilfred Laurier would get it.
Who's the man pictured off the mill who died in 1919. I've just got one more theme tune I'll quickly want to bring up, which is The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. So we all know that theme tune. It's a Kraken song by Will Smith. And it was a song that he wrote despite not being necessarily asked to write.
at the time he kind of just did it and he showed it to i believe it was quincy jones who was doing the music for the for the show and they said yeah you can go and do it obviously it's a massive hit and when it was released in 1992 as a single but here's the thing i don't know if james you bought single as you were saying back in the day in 1992
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme tune was only released exclusively in the Netherlands and Spain. And that's where it charted. That's it. That's really interesting. Because when you said that, I thought to myself, how come I didn't buy that? Like, I was so sure that I was around. time i would have bought it because i bought yeah wiki wiki wild wild west or whenever it was by will smith so great song yeah i bought all his other crap so i was really surprised james james did you buy willennium
That was a great album. Oh, an album. No, I was more of a singles buyer, really. Yeah. It's not a good album, Dan. I'm sorry. I think enough time has passed that I'm able to have a pop-up millennium. Keep the name of that album out of your nash. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 2024, the first ever theater production of Dracula will celebrate its 100th anniversary.
Unfortunately, fans can't celebrate it in the venue it was performed in because it's currently occupied by an over-18s adult-themed crazy golf course called the House of Holes. Filthy. So this is in Derby, a city in the UK. And I was there recently on the weekend. For a game of Bibigolf. How was your quick round?
I was there doing a ghost story festival. And afterwards, I was hanging out with this really cool guy called Chris Horton. And he said, I've got a fish fact for you. And he told me he'd passed the house of holes and made him laugh. And so, yeah, so it is a very...
well-known theater as well it was called the grand theater then it just got repurposed over the years to be something new and there was you know restaurants in its place and so on and now there is this uh this amazing crazy golf the house of holes yeah
Can I just... I'm sure we'll talk more about Crazy Oil. Can I talk specifically about the House of Holes and Derby? Yeah, sure. I don't mean to... cast any expressions on it I don't think it's terribly erotic it doesn't seem to be from the website it seems like a lot of it just seems to be novelty because I think that people at home some people at home will have an image in their heads of what it is yeah but let's let's let's sort of get
text then through images one of the holes uh you have to hit the ball through a bunch of standing dildos for example yes i'm not saying it's totally uneurotic there's another one where for some reason there's a lot of uh blow-up dolls uninflated hanging on washing lines just hanging in the vicinity of the hole itself um yeah the the area where you play pool because you know these places indoor places have like you can play arcades and stuff the bit where you play pool uh is called
anal butt. What? Yeah, and anal has a four instead of the second A in anal. So A-N-4-L butt. What's that got to do with Paul? What does that mean? Not quite sure. I couldn't get to the bottom of that one. But it's there. Surely the phrase anal and butt are sort of achieving the same. It's feeling a little redundant to me personally. It's definitely a redundant adjective, isn't it? How's your butt? Well, it's very anal.
I don't know what's in the water in Derby, but there was a newspaper piece a couple of months ago. Derby is now about to get its second... erotic mini golf venue. It's really popular. The new Glory Holes golf venue. will apparently include risque items and decor and some derby themed holes as well. So that's nice. That's cool. That's good. Can I quickly, just because let's give this fact just a tiny bit of substance before we get into erotic golf.
want to quickly say that the production just for context uh was the first ever dracula production and it was put on in the early 1920s and it was a show that was sanctioned and approved by florence stoker who was the widow of and this was the production that became the sort of official theater production that as it traveled around the UK and then went international cast in its lead Bela Lugosi who became as we all know the iconic Dracula in film
And weirdly, the final performance that Bela Lugosi ever did as Dracula on stage was back in Derby at another theater just around the corner from The Grand some 20 odd years later. So Derby does have a real... dracula connection as a result of this very interesting and lugosi so he got the role in 1927 when the play moved to the usa that's when lugosi entered the scene and then in the 50s it was when he toured again and came back to
derby and did a big english tour of this show and he got really upset because apparently the audiences were laughing sometimes because dracula was no longer the big scary thing it had been uh it was the early 50s you know people have been through a bit since the 20s they um they're not as scared and uh yeah it seems to have prompted the end of his career which is very sad and it was also this play was also very important for the image of dracula the guy
who wrote it, a guy called Hamilton Dean, he made Dracula appear as that more modern suave sort of coat wearing cocktail drinking kind of character rather than Bram's just all out vampire chaos energy zombie.
like stuff does it he drink cocktails doesn't he passion fruit martini sorry he does yeah there was actually one earlier theater production of dracula which came out eight days before the novel came out this was if you did a novel someone else could make a play of it and there's not much you can do about it unless you put on your own play And so what Bram Stoker did was he had a dramatic reading of his book on stage.
They had to have it open for the paying public, so they would put bills up half an hour before it started, saying Dracula on in half an hour. And two people bought tickets for it and sat in the audience. while a couple of actors sort of just read through the book.
And from them doing that, it meant that no one else could put a play on because he held copyright on the theater production. How amazing. Yeah. Monica, have you done that with Really Good Actually? I should do. Just stop someone doing a bootleg play. That was basically what my experience of doing the Edinburgh Fringe was. It was going out half an hour before the show being like, anybody? Somebody?
And then, you know, mildly entertaining two people. Chills. Actual chills remembering that. That's everyone's Edinburgh. Yeah. Okay, Dan, we've done the Dracula thing. Can we go back to the erotic? Mini golf. Let's do it. I just remembered when you were talking about that, that I have played, not played golf, but I've used a golf club shaped like a penis at the penis museum in Reykjavik. They have one.
and you can sort of pick it up and play with it. And yeah, it's just the head part of the golf club is shaped like a penis. But it's not for a serious golfer, right? As in it's not built for proper play, you know, master's conditions. I don't think it adheres to the official USPGA rules. It's like a walking stick full of bagels. You're not going to use it as an actual assist as a walking stick.
I think there's a link between the original boom in crazy golf and the current Derby-based boom in erotic golf. Okay. So when was the original boom? 20s and 30s. Lots of sources say that it completely went out when the Great Depression happened, but actually... It didn't really. It actually boomed during the early 30s. During that period, apparently the USA built 25,000 mini golf courses. It was described as a devastating craze in the times in 1930.
I think the theory behind it is that property value had collapsed and the value of lots of things have collapsed and people started their own tiny businesses to generate small amounts of income you know it doesn't have to be anything huge but it's it's a small local thing on whatever kind of waste ground or land you've got You know some restaurants turned it.
Half the restaurant became a mini golf course and the rest of it stayed a restaurant. So maybe times of financial hardship are when you get a lot more mini golf because you get shops that are closed or empty. So the new Glory Hole Golf is the site of the old Gap store in Derby.
got retail space available what is a glory hole if not a gap so anyway that's my economic theory no it's a really yeah it's a really good theory it's almost a thesis rather than a podcast isn't it but yeah minigolf doesn't use golf balls Yes, I do. No. There are special mini golf balls.
They're kind of more rubbery. They're more rubbery. They bounce more. And there's a... I find this mad. There's the World Crazy Golf Championships. I mean, there are a few World Crazy Golf Championships. One is in Hastings. And normally, apparently, they only get about three overseas players each year. So... the extent to which is world is a bit debatable, but they don't tell you.
at the World Crazy Golf Championships what the ball is until the day before it starts. Okay, but it's always going to be spherical. It's always going to be spherical. I'm pretty sure about that. And then other championships, they'll let you play a different ball on every hole. And the only rule is that once you've started a hole, you have to play the same ball all the way through. Like normal golf. Is that true? How about local? If I was playing mini golf, like we play in Narrabeen in Australia.
They're using special balls? I think there'll be more rubbery for sure if you check them. Who would have thought this would be the fact that blew my mind most in this whole run of nine years? Golf again. Go on. This is... I'm afraid it's back to the...
It's back to a tangent from the original erotic mini golf thing. Oh, yeah. Just that it was on, you know, this new place opening up is going to be called Glory Holes Golf. And we got an email in the fish inbox recently, subject line, Gibbon Glory Hole Action. Oh, my God. I know this story. This is incredible. This is a gibbon in a zoo or a sanctuary. This is a female gibbon and she was living on her own and she got pregnant.
And it was basically a virgin birth, and it was so exciting for the scientists. They thought, I can't believe this. Anyway, they did a bit of an investigation, and it turned out, obviously, it was not a... virgin birth in between her enclosure and the next door neighbor male gibbons enclosure was a nine millimeter hole through which they had managed to successfully breed
I've become parents. Nine millimeters. They were just sort of both mushing up against the wall? I'm afraid so. Life finds a way. Life. Wow. That's a scene I don't want to see in Jurassic Park. I would like to hear David Attenborough do one of his little jokes. You know when he sort of makes the animals a fool? Where he's like, a nest is as good a place as any. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is...
James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 2009, an aide to the Canadian Prime Minister called 10 Downing Street to offer condolences for the death of Margaret Thatcher. In fact, she wasn't dead. It was a misunderstanding due to the death of the Canadian Transport Minister's cat, who was also called Thatcher.
not a Maggie oh brilliant brilliant was that you Dan no no no that's the headline of the Guardian article that's from amazing so yeah this was a black tie dinner in Toronto 2000 Canadian Conservatives were there and many of them got a text message saying simply thatcher has died And Dimitri Soudas, who was the aide to the Prime Minister, who was Stephen Harper at the time, he was sent to write a letter of condolence, and he rang Buckingham Palace and 10 Downey Street to kind of work out.
what they should say and, you know, offer condolences as well. And then he found out that they hadn't died. And it turned out that Transport Minister John Baird had a 16-year-old grey cat called Thatcher. uh and sadly that cat had died um but he denied sending the text later on but there definitely was a text that was sent to all these people about the cat
This is like international incident version of David's dead on Big Brother. Yes. The greatest TV moment ever. There was a famous David who died. David Bowie. Yeah. Bowie. Does someone in the building know who... I don't know why I'm telling this story. Everyone knows it better than me. Monica, you can tell it. No, no, yo, please, you tell it. I've actually only seen the clip. Okay, so in the Big Brother household that year was Angie Bowie, the first wife of David Bowie.
And also in the house that year was David Guest, who was Liza Minnelli's ex-husband. Angie gets called in while David Guest is having a sleep in his bed. Everyone knows he's having a sleep, so he's not around. And she gets told that...
david bowie has died so she is uh obviously uh she didn't like her ex-husband but she's also very distressed because he was a huge part of her life she comes out she's trying to keep it secret and one of the other americans who's staying in the house comes up and says you okay And she says, you can't tell anyone, but.
David's dead. And this other woman immediately freaks out because she thinks it's David Guest who's died. But Angie hasn't made the connection. So Angie's kind of going, God, I didn't think you were that big a Bowie fan. I can't see how this has erupted. And it causes chaos.
in the house for five minutes it's it's tv at its finest well imagine that but with 2 000 canadian conservatives yeah what a scene it must have been the true patriot love tribute dinner how is that what it was military families thing but Canadian politics moniker is is fabulous is it well I feel like there is I feel like there is a list of political scandals in Canada on Wikipedia and you know some of them are pretty dry
like the usual grift, you know, or bribery or slightly dodgy dealings. But there are some fun ones. To negate might be my favourite. Tunagate. Were you involved in Tunagate, Monica? Not to my knowledge, but I'll never admit it if so. You'll never catch me.
Tunagate, actually, think about it now. Tunagate is way too long ago. You're clear, you're clear, you're clear. Basically, there were a million cans of decomposing tuna. That was the central problem, right? And it wasn't really, really, really unsafe, but it had started to go off.
before it was put in the cans. The firm involved was called Starkist and they said, no, you just, these inspectors, they just don't like fish. That's their problem. And they said, and we'll close down our plant and you'll lose all these jobs. And you know, and that's when it becomes a political thing because then the fisheries minister...
said oh yeah it's probably it's fine yeah all this stuff it's great it's actually good and he got a panel together uh look can you just assess this tuna please and they said yeah this this is rotting tuna in these cans and he says okay i think we need a different panel And he got a different panel together who eventually said, yes, these million tens of rotting tuna are fine. And then he resigned. Yeah. And I don't think much of the tuna was eaten in the end. And then the phone went bust anyway.
So that's a very classic Canadian scandal where it's like it threatened to really kick off. And ultimately they just, nobody really consumed the tuna and it was sort of fine. That's like the other great Canadian political scandal, the Fuddle Duddle Incident. What's this? The Fuddle Duddle Incident in 1971.
happened to the first Prime Minister Trudeau, our current Prime Minister's father, who was accused of having spoken or at least mouthed unparliamentary language of the House of Commons. He seemed to have been caught mouthing the words fuck off but when pressed by television reporters would only admit having moved his lips so they were like what were you thinking when you moved your lips and his response was what is the nature of your thoughts when you say
fuddle duddle or something like that implying that he had said fuddle duddle instead of fuck off right that's good if no one's heard you yeah you'd you know you're across the room from them well then in 2015 his son actually stated on the record that his dad had not said this is a big scandal minor scandal but that's sort of the scale it's like someone some that's always the scale it's always a little bit funny like someone uh
threw a pie in jean chretien's face in the 90s and that was quite a big deal the pies were actually a coordinated ongoing assault antartiste sewer canadian satirical political group and they even released a hit list of people they wanted to get with pies including Celine Dion and Conrad Black and Chrétien and then they were successful in pying Chrétien.
twice right oh that's gonna stink the pies were they were they the kind of clown pies where it's like just custard or is it actual like apple pie cream pies like oh it's just cream pies it may even have been shaving cream or just like what you guys would unfortunately call squirty cream. It's not a nice thing to say, and I'm sorry to say it. Speaking of shaving cream.
I can't believe we managed to get onto shaving cream. William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was Prime Minister of Canada for 22 years. My favourite. Well, I'm not surprised because he did seances and stuff, right, Dan? Yeah. But he also used to see symbols in his shaving cream in the morning, which he thought would predict the future. Yeah. What an extraordinary guy. I mean, he was prime minister for 21 years.
which possibly is still the record length for anyone to do it. He had quite a tragic family life. He'd lost all of his family during the war, and so as a result... turned like many people did to spirituality as a thing but what many people didn't realize at the time was he was taking that spirituality into the into the office with him as a prime minister and getting guidance from the spirits of
Leonardo da Vinci and his deceased dogs. The shaving foam thing. He would shave and then the shaving foam would go into the water in the sink kind of thing. And at one stage he saw a polar bear and an eagle. the bell was supposed to represent like russia or the soviet union i should say and the eagle supposed to represent america
And they were kind of fighting in shaving cream. And then a dog appeared in the shaving cream, which he thought symbolized Canada. And then it came and helped to push the bear off the eagle. And that was kind of him thinking what side he needs to be in the Cold War. As if he didn't know what side he should probably be on in the Cold War. That probably just confirmed his suspicions. I do feel like a polar...
bear would be fairly easy to see in shaving cream. I'm wondering if the shapes he was seeing were sort of like, you know, I saw a vision in my shaving cream of a cloud meeting sort of a fog. Yeah. Oh, my God. What a character. Yeah, amazing guy. I was having a look through the old fish inbox, podcast.qi.com. Really good fact that we got in from John Ford. So thank you, John. This is something maybe you've done at Monica.
It's that Canada flies a new flag over its parliament every single day. Every single day there's a new flag. And they give the used one to a Canadian. And you could apply to get your own flag. And you think I have done this. Well, I guess it's possible. I feel like you haven't anymore. I haven't quite, no, but it's nice to know that I have the option. Well, you have the option, but unfortunately, you won't get the flag.
So this is a mad thing. The current waiting time is 100 years. It's more than a century because so many people have applied. And they mention this on the website. It's a totally normal thing. They say the current waiting time is more than 100 years. And so you can either log... on and make a request why would you or you can change your details if you made a request you know five years ago and you're moving house now just to keep it updated but why would you do that either
Are you allowed to do it for your next generation? Exactly. Can it go to the descendants? I don't think I'll know any of my hundred year from now descendants well enough to care whether or not they get a flag. It's also not hard to get. It's not very special. It's only been up over Parliament for one day. Yep. You could just get your own flag. This is the kind of shit I buy on eBay. Don't knock it. This is...
This is all part of my divorce. That's giving unreasonable behavior to me, actually. Have you been reading about William Amos from the Liberal Party in the last few months? Very recently, he was on a Zoom call, parliamentary Zoom call, and he had to apologize because he said, I urinated without realizing I was on camera.
The amazing thing was, is that the month earlier, he'd also been recorded in the nude during the virtual session of the Canadian Parliament. So twice in two months, the first time he'd been out for a jog. And he was kind of getting changed while the session was going on. And they could see. See it all. Yeah. See the right honourable member. See his loony and his toony. So yeah. I can see myself not falling for that. I can see myself doing that. Twice in a row? Maybe not twice in a row.
I think what's better than this case, right? Yeah, I would definitely get a post-it for the camera after the first time. Would I? I don't know. No, you would think I couldn't possibly do that again. That's what you think. That's what you think.
Oh my God, that was the stupidest day of my life. No more mistakes on that front. And then you just go along and, you know, did you say he was urinating into a cup or something? I don't, I don't know. As far as I... can tell because this kind of thing has now happened you know we're pretty deep in the pandemic has now happened a number of times fairly high profile people and it has as far as i'm aware never happened to a woman it's just men yeah who i
I don't know, I haven't thought it through or aren't worried enough. I can't even believe that you're saying that you think this could happen to you. This would never happen to me. There's no world in which I would be like, okay. I'm doing work Zoom. I'm going to quickly get fully nude. No one has to know.
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Monica. At Monica Hisey.
Yep. Or if you'd like to book a round of golf at the House of Holes, you can head to at House of Holes UK. It genuinely has amazing reviews. Do check it out. Everyone loved it there. Everyone loved it. Or you can go to at no such thing, which is R. No such thing as a fish. All of the previous episodes are up there. But the main, main thing that you need to do is get.
to a bookshop or an online bookshop and get Really Good Actually by Monica Heisey. It is storming the charts here. As we speak, it's been in the Sunday Times bestsellers list for four weeks. It is an absolute rocking book. It's incredibly... funny so um do get it now and otherwise come back because we're going to be back with another episode next week and we'll see you then goodbye