Got a side hustle? Like making money from a hobby, selling stuff online or doing a bit of dog walking outside your day job? You might need to tell HMRC so you don't get any tax surprises. To take the hassle out of your side hustle, search HMRC Help for Hustles. Hey, everybody. Dan and Andy here. Just wanted to let you know our special guest on this week's fish is none other than... old friend of the podcast, your friend of mine.
Alex Bell. That's right. Alex has returned. I mean, he hasn't been on for ages, but he has been there in the background the whole time. Anytime you hear a song or a noise. Shadowy the Spider Master. But now he's back. He's funnier than ever. We can't wait for you to hear it. He's brilliant. Brilliant. It's going to be great. So now, I guess with no further ado, let's get on with the only podcast any of us has ever made or will ever make. Right, Dan? Ah, actually...
I've got a bit of news. What? Yeah, I don't want this to be a shock, but I've actually launched a new podcast. All right, what's it called? It's called We Can Be Weirdos. Oh, I see. And I guess it's just about solid facts though, right? It's about stuff with a strong evidential base.
Let's ignore that question quickly and focus on what the show is about. So it's a weekly show where I sit down with someone remarkable and I try and find out all the weird stuff that they believe in and all the weird stuff they do in their life. So it features everyone from British Museum.
curators like Irving Finkel who told me stuff about how he sits on buses and stares at the back of people's head trying to make them turn around. It's got Bexie Cameron who used to be a part of the Children of God cult but who escaped and wrote a fascinating memoir about it. Steve Feltham, who is the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous search for the Loch Ness Monster.
Dan Aykroyd is coming on. There's so many amazing guests and it's a weekly show where I ask them to tell me about every single weird belief that they have. That's right. And guys, we, the rest of us know how hard Dan's been working on this. It sounds absolutely great.
called We Can Be Weirdos. Give it a go wherever you get your podcasts now and we should say it's all based on Dan's book The Theory of Everything Else which is out now in the UK in paperback and it's out in North America on the 27th of June. Louis Theroux himself has called
called it totally compelling and utterly bizarre. That's right. So it would mean the world to me if you All Fish listeners would subscribe to it, follow it, give it a listen, and also pick up a copy of my book. And okay, okay, okay, back to the actual good podcast. Here we go. On with the show. On with the podcast.
Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin and Alex Bell. 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 and that is alex
My fact this week is that when the founder of the budget supermarket chain Aldi was kidnapped in the 1970s, he successfully negotiated a discount off his own ransom. Brilliant. Did he claim that he was going off and that the result... he had a yellow sticker on him brilliant that would be such a good idea so this guy is called Theo Albrecht he founded Aldi with his brother Carl and they've got quite an interesting story in how they founded the supermarket
But in the 1970s, when he was one of the richest people in the world, he was kidnapped at gunpoint by a convicted burglar called Paul Cron. Diamond Paul. Nick name was Diamond, yeah. And his crooked lawyer, apparently. who had gambling debts called Heinz Joachim Ollenberg. Joachim. Joachim Diamond Pole. Home Alone wet bandits kind of duo. Yeah. And yeah, they kidnapped him for 17 days and held him in an office. Apparently he's- What, cupboard, wasn't it?
Yeah, he was locked in a cupboard. But his appearance was so nondescript and he sort of wore quite kind of cheap suits because he was as money-pinching as his discount supermarket reputation would suggest. They had to ask him for ID to check.
they definitely kidnapped a billionaire. The thing was that he didn't do any interviews, did he, or anything like that, right? He was really not very well known at the time. I read a US newspaper article from the week when he got kidnapped, and they described him as West Germany's... least known millionaire
Yeah. So, you know, no one knew what he looked like. It's just a name. So he was kept for 17 days. He negotiates a cheaper ransom and they agree to it. A bishop comes and delivers it. The Bishop of Essen, which is the city that they were from. I guess it's where they lived at the time. But I didn't realize that was a bishop's responsibility. He mediated. Yeah. I mean, what a call to get as the bishop. You must never get that. No. But isn't he the one who left the money?
The actual suitcases of cash. And I think Albrecht stayed with him for 24 hours afterwards. Stayed with the bishop. Why? Because the police were kept out of it completely because the family didn't want the police involved because they thought he might be in danger. And the kidnappers said they wanted a 24-hour period to get away. And so they said...
okay, well, he'll stay with the bishop for 24 hours, and then after that time, we'll let him go, and he'll tell the police who he's seen and stuff. Okay, so he gets out, the bishop, they get these 24 hours, and... They catch them as well. And they catch them, yeah, that's right.
you get half the money back and to the dying day of the two guys they never recovered the missing 3.5 million and they died within a month of each other how weird is that because they were about 20 years difference in age that's so romantic six years six yeah oh yep one was 87 the other was 93 yeah but no um so after he gets let out theo uh is goes even more recluse he goes into total lockdown no photographs are going to be taken of him evermore he is
Every time he gets into a car, it's an armored car, a different route every single day when he's going into his office. If he's staying somewhere, he goes and he finds the exits immediately. So it's obviously left huge trauma on him, this experience. Sorry, I know one thing that will make you interested in him, especially Dan, which is that Forbes described the brothers, the Albrecht brothers, Theo and Carl, who co-founded Aldi, described them as more elusive than the Yeti.
I'm pretty sure the Yeti doesn't have a business trail, a paper trail. He's not registered with the company's house. Also, that doesn't make me more interesting. If he was a Yeti... hunter that's interesting just saying the word yeti in a sentence doesn't immediately you've got a higher threshold for interesting i do okay okay i think my favorite bit of this whole story was that after the whole ordeal um albrecht went to court to try
claim the money that was paid as the ransom as a tax-deductible business expense, which is brilliant. I don't think he was successful, but that's so cool. I think you can still do that, certainly in some places. have a good accountant because I think it's in America it's been done in America for sure yeah famously Getty I guess it is a business expense isn't it If the person who is abducted is the CEO of the company, then it's to do with the company.
I think that's the argument. His brother, Carl, stumped up a lot of money for that as well, the ransom. He was part of it. But yeah, I love how much the Ulbricht brothers were really sort of stingy with their cash. They're brilliant.
was the one who they used to approve all the designs for all the shops and there was one where he was given the plans and he said the plans are fine but the paper you've printed on is too thick print it on thinner cheaper paper yeah he used to he used to famously use pencils
right down to the end like when you see people with the pencil meets the rubber he would be using pencils like that and if he walked into the office of the aldi offices and he saw that the lights were on but he could see that you could see in a room without the lights he'd go around turning off all the lights
I did read one article that said he and his brother were the first people to ever turn off the lights in the room because they were worried that they were wasting electricity. What a thing to invent. That's right. I was thinking like the timing. Yeah, exactly.
being a dad. The timing almost works. That's really funny. I think their story is very interesting because they founded it together, didn't they? They founded Ali together. Yeah. Their mother ran a shop, like, I mean, like, so they took over the shop as part of their journey, but she was always really...
started there. I think she does a little bit of credit. You're right, that's a good point. And then actually they were dragooned into helping their mum because their father, he'd been a coal miner and he got emphysema so he couldn't really work so they had to support the family. But anyway, they fell out.
over whether or not they should sell cigarettes in their shops and I think Theo said we should and Carl said we shouldn't. And I think it was for shoplifting reasons. They didn't care about the health reasons. So was it stinginess as well? Despite their father having emphysema, they were... It was more about the deal. That's so interesting. Okay. And then they had this thing, the Aldi equator. Yes. Where they divided Germany.
top to bottom, and north was Theo's territory. Not with any kind of wall, we should say. So many people died crossing the Aldi equator. Very sad. people were desperately trying to get to those because they did so this was in the this was 1961 and they had about 300 aldis all over the country and that's what got split up between them and if you look at the logos they are different colors across the the aldi equator
And so they are definitely two different operations that are going on. Ironically, if you were kidnapped in Germany, you could use that to work out which half of the country you were in. Yes! what a brilliant idea they're still different companies now aren't they Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud yeah that's right and I think which ones do we have we have
Aldi, no. No, we have Aldi Suds, don't we? And in America they have them both, but one of them is called Trader Joe's. Wow. Yeah, that's what Trader Joe's is. And Aldi itself is the name Aldi. We said it's a poor mantra of Albrecht Dis... Discount. I was trying to remember what the German version was. His brother came up with that, didn't he? Distingy cunt. The two businesses will be called Discord and Datbook. Imagine like big billboards with them kind of over the border. I'm with this cunt.
I think they liked each other. I think they got on perfectly well. They just disagreed over this. I think it was amicable. I think the split was amicable, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've never read into Aldi before. I've been to Aldi many times. God damn it, I love it so much. I don't want to treat this as an advert.
an operation just well okay so for example they don't stock as many items as a regular supermarket will and they've never compromised on that it's grown ever so slightly but an average supermarket might have something like 200 000 different items whereas they might have 2 000
It has grown since the earlier days when it came to Britain. But one of the things was everyone who was working there was required to memorize the price of every single item in the shop. So every 2000 item, which meant that there was a thing that's known as Aldi panic, which is when you.
to the checkout the panic is i can't pack my bags as quickly as they're running the stuff through the till so you get a bit worried that's really common now because they're so fast at scanning well here's the thing the reason they're so fast at scanning these days because this is another aldi innovation is if
buy a product from any supermarket you got a barcode you get there the person's looking around for the barcode if you look on aldi products that are specifically aldi they print the barcode all over it so no matter where you turn the product
And it's right through. Yeah, because they also opened, I think in the 50s, the first self-service grocery store in Germany. But in those days, self-service meant you go in and get stuff off the shelves and bring it to the checkout as opposed to giving your list to a clerk who were going to get it for you. So that must have been a huge effort.
Yeah, yeah. And they brought in shopping trolleys. And I think they were the first company to bring in the shopping trolleys where you had to put a coin in. That's what it says. That's what they say, yeah. I read an article with the communications director.
and he said we're always amazed by the pay it forward spirit that happens in our parking lots and apparently they reckon that in germany at least people will pay for the next person's trolley trolley and i just i've never seen that happen in my entire life in the UK I go around checking to see if anyone's left a quid I could lose an hour or two sometimes looking for a single you know I literally only have one quid that I keep in my car for that
thing. Because I don't really use cash these days. Do you keep it on a string? Because you're sounding a bit like Theodore Albrecht. A bit like that country. They got big in Germany because they started looking at the model. of what was happening in America with grocery stores. And so there was a Memphis grocer that was called Piggly Wiggly. So it was Piggly Wiggly, Hoggly Woggly, and Handy Andy.
was the last one these were all of the like the things going on in america at the time and yeah so they became piggly wiggly was famously the first place that would let you take things off the shelves and put them in your trolley and then pay for them afterwards exactly and i'm not sure if we said
it here we might not have done but they're basically people didn't want to do it because they felt like they were shoplifting well i feel like that with the new amazon fresh tools when you walk in and you scan yeah but you go and wearing a motorbike helmet don't you I actually was going to kidnap Jeff Bezos, but he just walked into my house, into my cupboard. Two weeks later, they put lots of money in my account. It was perfect.
So when you go to Aldi, there's always, and I didn't realize this was a big thing, but in the middle of Aldi, there's always this weird aisle where it's just random stuff. Oh, it's like the Room of Requirement. It's sort of like every time it's different, it's huge. It's so bizarre. So the middle aisle and it's...
It's sort of famous amongst online people. There's Twitter accounts where what random thing have you found in the middle aisle? Yeah, it's massive. Yeah, so everything from motion-activated toilet bowl nightlights, you know, just randomly to... traffic cones. It feels like sort of it fell off the back of the lorry kind of vibe. Yeah, yeah. But which definitely is not the case. Sorry, they definitely did do that, obviously. No, because I remember like...
you would always get like a flyer through the post and it would tell you what was going to be in the middle aisle in the next month or so. And you would know that there was going to be a canoe there and you'd be like, oh shit, we got to get there on the second Tuesday. Well, they have only have a certain amount.
So if it was something really cool, everyone in the town would want to get there as quickly as possible. And they never restock ever. So it's just that. It's like a one flash sale. It gets called the Isle of Shite. That's very good. One other thing on Germany. kidnapping oh yeah i think german um do you know about the pied piper of hamelin uh yeah yes famously kidnapped all the children of hamelin i never thought of it that way ah
I thought he got rid of the rats and then the parents didn't pay him. Yeah. So then he did the same thing. He played his pipe and led them. He basically hypnotized children to come with him. So there's a question of like consent really. Yeah. It does sound like there is. There's no question. There was no consent. Like basically he, he took all the children.
out of the town because they didn't pay his bills. But he was fictional? Well, there was an entry in Hamelin Town Records dating to 1384 that says that it is 100 years since our children left. And that fits in with the date of when people... So this happened, which was in 1284. And it supposedly happened on the 26th of June, the day of St. John and St. Paul. And the 130 children in Hamelin disappeared. And that's what the story's based on. Was there a day of St. George and St. Ringo as well?
But we now have theories as to what the Pied Piper was. So we think that possibly the Pied Piper story is a fictional account of something that actually happened and the children did go missing and did get taken. by someone. Right. Can you guess what the actual job of the real life Pied Piper probably was? Oh, okay. Is this guessable from the story? School bus driver. School bus driver. That's really good. I mean, the dates don't quite work.
The school bus is 1285. I've got it, I've got it. It's called cart driving. Swineherd. Swineherd. Dresses the children up as pigs. Lovely. No, that's not what... Okay, was he one of the Wiggles then? Aldi trolley manager. Load them in with free trolleys. Well, according to most theories at the moment, he could have been a recruitment consultant. Okay. I follow that industry. I find it so beguiling. These children are now working like Deloitte.
There was an economic depression around that time and a lot of the youth of various towns were taken out of... german sort of villages and taken to the bigger areas of western europe and they had locators or recruiters that would go around these towns and try and bring the youth out there to work in different places and so there's one possibility that the
Starry is based on a recruitment consultant. Wow. They all got sort of free mugs. Come back later with those cool wireless phone headsets. Pagers. It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that the world's largest collection of model trains doesn't fit on standard model train tracks. I'm really pleased you added the word standard in there because it was a big discussion. Yeah, we had a big email.
chat about this no but i just gotta say alex has got in front of him actual like this is the weirdest bit of research i've seen i'm not gonna go into it i'm gonna say that Basic fact, and then we'll have the argument. By the way, thank you to Neil Gibson, who sent in this fact, who didn't realise the chaos he was unleashing in our previously happy team.
This is something that's from the National Rail Museum in York. They have a collection of 610 model railway vehicles, all made by the same man, who was called James Peel Richards, 1902 to 99. And...
He was incredibly devoted to detail and accuracy and he thought he could get his models more accurate if you made them to a 33 millimeter gauge So the gauge is the distance between the two train tracks and the normal gauge for model trains 32mm and they're not compatible with the vast majority of model railway lines and even the National Rail Museum don't have a layout where they can
Put these trains on a train track. Yeah. I just think it's a very sweet fact, I think. I don't want to make this fact even more contentious, but I have a feeling it was 612, not 610. What did you guys read? Could you maybe forgive me for a fraction of rounding?
The idea is a lot of these model trains, you take anything that's one foot long and you make it seven millimeters long. And you do the same for everything else in all the trains, right? Now, if you do that, then you get your gauge to be exactly 33 millimeters. to 0.01 of a millimeter so it's pretty much 33 millimeters
But historically, they've always had 32mm gauges. And so all the other trains that you would have are slightly not exact. So that's like the Hornby standard, for example. The Hornby standard, yeah. Nearly all the track you'll find is that width. A lot of them is called the O gauge. But basically...
Basically, he decided, well, I want mine to be exactly right, so I'm going to get this one millimeter difference. Even though I won't be able to go on hardly any tracks, I'm going to make it because I want it to be perfect. Yeah, he's a hero. Did he make his own tracks? He must have, right? I don't know.
I went there and I had an amazing two days. I stayed every night. Did you? Seriously? It's so sad. Was there a sleeper train in the museum? That would have been so great. Alex cramming one finger into the sleeper train.
um because they have actual other stuff they don't just have models they have actual trains there and all sorts there um no it's an amazing i remember seeing them they've got this fantastic i think it's called an open archive where um they've got all this stuff that they can't they don't really have room to
sort of display in proper museum just like thrown on the shelves and sort of display so you can see it and i remember also seeing they've got scale models of queen victoria's royal train which is all sort of entirely um plush inside with a with a velvet upholstered toilet
and things like that. In miniature? Yeah, yeah, this is all miniature. When they were designing and building the trains, the actual full-on steam trains, they used to make scale models of the steam trains that are about, I'd say, like a foot wide and several feet long, that were full-on working models to check that they worked and they were all quite...
the right size so they have these really stonking great models of like working steam trains they've also got you've mentioned it before on the podcast there's a massive train set that was used to train signal operators um so it's a train set but the fun of the train set was like
all about the signals and not the trains. So can I ask Alex, did you see the entire collection of J.P. Richards' trains when you were there? I don't know because there's loads on the wall. I remember that they're all stacked up on the wall. You've seen them because they're all there. But I don't know if I saw 610.
What's really interesting is that JP Richards never saw the entire collection himself, we think. And that's because he always kept them in his home where most of them were in boxes. So they were never all out at the same time. And when he donated...
them to the museum. He was really, really sick. It was just before he died. He was too ill to travel. So when it was on display, he never got to see it. So he actually never saw his entire collection on display. I'm really sad about that. Because what a hero. What a great guy. I love it.
collection is still growing but actually I should quickly say thank you to my friend Chris Valcoinen who is the associate archivist at the National Rail Museum who sent me loads of stuff for this absolutely brilliant but yeah the collection is still growing because a lot of his
wagons weren't quite finished when he got there so he left them to other people to finish them because he wanted the entirety of the train system of the London and North Western trains. That's what we all want to see. Between 1902 and 1940.
so he wanted everything and they weren't all exactly done at that time so some people are still doing them now they're still kind of making them better and better it is the most impressive thing when you see the detail that someone goes into to recreating an area because you make it's not these aren't things
you buy from the shop you create the buildings and you create and this is like when you're making a whole landscape so the tracks the trees the buildings around it um i've only ever played with two model train sets before oh yeah and they belonged to eddie izzard
So... Clang. No, no, no. I trust you to have a celebrity train set anecdote. This is not... It's not what it sounds like. So every time I go to Bexhill-on-Sea, which is... My family goes there a lot. I always take my boys to the Bexhill Museum. And inside is...
Eddie Izzard's childhood model train set that her father had built when Eddie's brother was born started building it then and then Eddie's mother got a bit ill and eventually she passed away and part of the project of keeping themselves busy
from the sort of, you know, the horrible depression of it all was to continue building this train set. So you can go and press buttons and it sends two trains around and it's where Eddie's dad worked. You can see the train he used to get into London and it shows all the buildings around.
And they've commissioned all of Beck's Hill on Sea as a train set as well. Eddie's kind of put money into that. And you press buttons and it goes around and it snows. I love that. It's incredible. Did you guys read about Simon George?
Simon George is a model railway fan currently modelling and making huge sets so in 2021 he had just made a model railway which was really big it was 61 metres and it was a model of a specific line from where he'd grown up in the 80s it was the Calder Valley lots of coal-fired trains and it's one of Britain's biggest if not the biggest model train set really impressive spent eight years working on it and he he met someone he met his girlfriend while he was making it
Wow. Yeah. That is amazing. This is the thing. Okay, come on. So he was interviewed about it and he said, when I first met her, she didn't know I was building this. And what had happened was, it wasn't in his home, this train that he was building. He'd leased a mill because it had this enormous base. right so and he's okay she knew i leased a mill with a huge basement simon said but i kind of led her to believe i was a wine merchant
Because that sounded cooler than building a model railway. I'm just imagining the discussion that he had when he said, now, we've been getting on very well. I think there could be something here. I need to tell you that the basement's in the mill. I've not let you go in. It's not a wine collection. What must she have thought? She turned up unannounced at his work one day. She wanted to surprise him, and she turned up to his wine merchant business. What did he do? Don't come in, I'm wanking!
There are loads of bodies down here, don't there? This is where I keep a family locked up. Come on. He said she wondered where all the wine was, but actually she really appreciated the detail and the artistic element. Very, very cool. Herman Goering. nazi it's also who's who's home and going not the nazi just in case there are any others out there um he was an enthusiastic no yeah nazis love trains they love models obviously you know that famous big third reich one but um
Alex, you spent two days at the National Royal Museum. It's nothing to do with the train model. No, no, sorry. That's a totally, totally off topic. Did they have a big model? Hitler commissioned a huge model of what the centre of Berlin was going to look like. And it's a really horrible, scary model that still exists. You can go see it.
Right. And it's really bizarre and interesting. But like, I think that whole element of control from afar, like, you know, the kind of... You're saying Goering did the trains. Anyway, Goering had two, he had two train sets, just like Eddie Izzard. One in the... No, just like, sorry, you've seen... Wait, you've seen...
two train sets in your life? No, I played with it twice. You played with it twice. Both of them were Eddie's, yeah. Right, so, okay, so he had, Hummer Goering had one train set in his attic and one in his basement. Oh, yeah. Okay. And there are pictures of it and they're really... It's pretty extensive. He lived in a big old Nazi house and had a huge attic. And there's a rumor that you can sort of maybe see evidence for in the pictures that there were wires that went over the one in the attic.
went across and you could drop little bombs out of the planes okay right which is wow good fun wow they originated in Germany didn't they model railways basically there was a company called Marklin and they'd be making toys and stuff but
They mostly made dolls houses. The idea is you make a dolls house and you sell them the house and then they have to buy the dolls to go inside and they have to buy the cookers and they have to buy the chairs and they have to buy all the bits and pieces. And they wanted something.
that boys would like. How are the dolls going to get to work? Yeah. And they just thought, well, by doing the railways, then we can sell the railway tracks, but then we can sell the stock and we can sell the little bushes that go on. I don't know. I've never played. There's another German connection, which is maybe the earliest ever model train belonged to the poet Goethe. Did it? Clang yourself, mate. This is from 1829. It's six years before Germany had even...
a railway, a steam railway of its own. Some English well-wishers gave him a tiny, tiny model of Stevenson's rocket. The earliest steam railway engine. I think the earliest steam railway engine. And it came with a set of wagons and rails, and Goethe put it on his desk. I think he might have given it to his grandchildren at the time, because he was an old man by that point. Yeah, cool. Wow. Do you want to hear an incredibly...
Well, so, okay, here's a fact about model railways. I'm just going to tell you what. Okay. That's what we're all here for. What a change of topic. I know what's about to happen. So, you know how you use different things to represent? So you might use a coffee stirrer as a piece of fencing. Yeah. Like things from our world. I see you could use a marble as a boulder for instance you paint it or whatever exactly so do you know
what they use to make coal. Okay, so it's got to be something that looks like coal, but is much smaller. Yeah. But maybe it's not the same colour, but you could paint it black. Right. Is it not just... Small bits of coal. They used coal. Oh, my God. They hit it with a hammer and grind it up small. What? No. Well, it's definitely a fact. It's just by any chance the fact that you...
I just told my wife a fact and she said that's the dullest thing you've ever said in your life. That's the fact. She just said, stop talking. I found it so interesting and it's so boring. I'm with this good t-shirt. Amazing, Andy. Great fact. Great fact. Thank you. Do you know the really tragic thing? We last talked about Model Railways four years ago. I looked through my notes for that show. It was in there. So probably the most famous model railways in the world have to be...
The ones that we see in Thomas the Tank Engine. Thomas the Tank Engine. I mean, that's globally the biggest, most famous. And just a cool connection. So... There is famously the Fat Controller, who's now been renamed Sir Topham Hatt. He was always called... That was always his real name. Yeah, but they kind of phased out the Fat Controller. He's in the cartoons. He's back to Sir Topham Hatt. And we know someone who...
who was the real-life Sir Topham Hatt. Stop it. What do you mean, that's in the voice? No, so they used to have offices for Thomas the Tank Engine. When children wrote in, they had an official Sir Topham Hatt who would write letters back. to the children and we know that person and they've been on fish they've been on mitch is it craig glenday yes craig glenday editor-in-chief for the guinness world records wow okay that's bizarre yeah when i was tiny
I wrote to Sir Topham Hatt. No. And I got a letter back. Did you? It's just small coal. You're a really annoying child. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1760, a book was publicly burned in Switzerland because it claimed that William Tell did not exist. Fair game. Yeah. Because...
I sort of think he did. I sort of think he did. Well, publicly burn me then. Is it like the Pied Piper and he was just like a management consultant? No. He's less historical than the Pied Piper, I would say. He was part of the foundation myth of the country of Switzerland, basically. He's kind of Robin Hood-esque, right? Yeah, he is. You're spot on, you know, shot an apple off his son's head. That's the only thing I know.
shot an apple off his son's head i don't i didn't know any of the context i just knew yeah i never questioned it it was quite contrived like for some reason he ended up in a situation where they were like shoot it or we'll kill you and your son and then he did it and then they were like well hang on a second why how come you've got two
then and he was like well if i accidentally killed my son i was going to shoot you it was quite cool wasn't it because the reason this whole thing started was he was going through this town um uh which was called altdorf And he was there's a guy there who was a bailiff called Gessler and Gessler had had this thing where he put a hat on a pole and it was in the center of the town. And if you walked past the pole and you had a hat on, you had to sort of take your hat off and be like, hello, pole.
I think we should say the pole represented the immensely powerful Habsburg Empire. It's still weird. It's still weird. So he goes past, doesn't take his hat off. I guess Gessler, who just happens to be monitoring every person passing by, sees that, says, hey, take your hat off.
he says no and then that's where this thing happens where he says you need to now shoot your son or rather shoot the apple he says you got to put your son you got to put an apple on his head and you got to shoot through it and if you get it then you guys can go free if you miss then i'm going to kill you as well so it was a kind of big challenge perfectly fair
challenge punishment that fits the crime it doesn't make any sense of course it makes sense for someone who's put a hat on a pole and made it to it could he choose the apple though could he choose a very large apple like a pink lady like the one i saw in mebuyanycar.com that time Honestly, I could have hit that for 200 yards. I know you've stopped listening, Alex, but James has an anecdote about this very, very big apple he once saw.
It's actually, it's really weird to get bored on a podcast that you're on that you're not even listening to. No, but if it had been that Apple, yeah, you're right. Yeah, it'd be easy. Anyway, look. Like Dan said, and Alex said, this is the story. And then because he did the Apple thing, they said, okay, fine, Switzerland could exist. And he became like the foundation myth of this country. So everyone believed it and thought that he was a real character. And then there was a historian called...
Egidius Tschudi and he found out that actually the earliest writing of it was 250 years after the events and then they found the original Oath of Rutli which was for the foundation of Switzerland for the early cantons all getting together and it named the three representatives and none of them was called Tell. None of them was called William Tell. And so, and actually they got the date wrong as well in the original sort of, the original story. And so there's...
A guy called De Halle wrote a book called William Tell a Danish Fable. And everyone in Switzerland thought this was outrageous that he could put this in writing. And the book was publicly burned in Altdorf Square. Was he a Swiss author himself?
Yeah. And I, because I sort of vaguely thought of William Teller as a bit Robin Hood-ish as in someone who might have existed, but not really. Yeah. I didn't really think, oh, that doesn't seem like a very significant thing to me. But I read a piece about, it's from The Atlantic, but it's from 1890. And it's...
just this line to understand the commotion produced in switzerland by cops expose we must try to imagine what would be the result in the united states if george washington was suddenly declared to be a legendary character yeah huge yeah huge moment to find out
It was a bit of that. And then what happened was everyone was like, Dehala, what are you doing? This is ridiculous. And so he said, oh, no, no, no. This was a literary exercise. I was just, it was just an essay I was writing to see if I could. It was like, you know, it's like.
coming up with two reasons whether we should leave the eu or not leave the eu and this was the one i decided to go with it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously the first like dude it's a social experiment like it sounds like he was petrified like it sounds yeah it sounds like had he not renounced that it could have been like
Salman Rushdie kind of situation where he might have gone into hiding in a cupboard. They were absolutely furious. But then obviously he'd opened the floodgates and suddenly all the skeptics came in like skeptics do and said, well, actually there was no organized uprising after all.
and there's no evidence that anyone called William Tell had lived, let alone shot an apple off anyone's head and they concluded that he was probably a fictional character, possibly based on a little bit of real life stuff. And then someone found this old story.
from the um danish sagas which is basically the entire story and that was written you know hundreds and hundreds of years before william tell was supposed to have even existed and so it seems like they've taken an old story from the sagas and they've kind of appropriated it. It was a story of Harold Bluetooth. A inventor of wireless technology. That's certainly the namesake of it. Danish king of the 10th century. I looked at it and it's identical. It is. The same story. Yeah. There was a play.
Schiller. Schiller's play. Yeah. And then the play became an opera by Rossini, and it's such an international thing. So it's an opera about a Swiss hero by an Italian composer, Rossini, based on a play by a German writer, Schiller.
which premiered in Paris. Brilliant. As in it's all of Europe is involved in this. And you know, but you know the famous William Tell Overture, the... Rossini didn't actually write that for the William Tell Opera. Get out. He was... like running out of time when he was writing the williamson opera that's not how it works when you're running out of time writing music when it speeds up um no he uh he was running out of time to finish the entire opera um and didn't
have an overture ready so he went and borrowed a pre-existing uh piece from one of his uh earlier operas which was called elizabeth queen of england so that was written almost 15 years beforehand how interesting because everything i can think of about elizabeth the queen of england none of the events in her life fit in with that no it doesn't really work does it yeah like you can't imagine sir walter rally laying down his cloak and her going the opera was only performed in full three times
Because it was five hours long. Five hours? Is that average time for an opera? No. Really? That's very long. Definitely more than a few hours is fine, but five hours is pretty long. Even three is. I've never been to one. I just always know that they're long. Especially given that some of the music was so fast. You would have thought the music would be slower if he was going to drive down. There's a Herman Goering link.
I can't believe there's another Herman Goering in this podcast. Which Herman Goering, by the way? Sorry. The Nazi one. Okay, sorry, good. Just got to clarify. The Nazi regime made a movie of William Tell. And they treated the tell story as a kind of Nazi myth. Because at that point, I think it was before the war, they claimed they were liberating ethnic Germans living in other countries who had been oppressed by those countries. And Hermann Göring's mistress was cast in a leading role.
That was based on Schiller's play, wasn't it? But then Hitler banned it. later on because there was an assassination attempt on him by a guy called maurice bavo who was known as the new william tell yeah and he thought well i better get rid of all of the william tells people swiss as well I've been in Switzerland for Swiss Independence Day on the 1st of August which is when they have a lot of fireworks and stuff like that
It's relatively low key. Lots of chocolate, probably cheese. Yeah, lots of chocolate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where did you go? Like specifically? A few different places. Oh. They sound great. Did you go to Burn? I've been to Burn. I don't think I did go to Burn. I was very young. Is that where they got rid of all the books? Oh my God. Brilliant. Brilliant. That was worth it. In the Burn, there's lots of like...
bears, because a bear is the symbol of the city of Bern. And the Appenzell Canton flag, so the area of Switzerland called Appenzell, has a flag which is a bear with an erection. Crikey. Yeah. So if you look at it, it's only a tiny little red triangle. If you can imagine a bear rampant, and then you've got a little red triangle where his penis would be. And there was a... A time when St. Gallen
This was in 1579. So the canton of St. Gallen had a printer, and he did a calendar of all the Swiss cantons, and he did the Appenzel canton flag, but he didn't put the erection in the bear. oh and this was it kicked off it really really kicked off they almost went to war because they didn't have the penis on the bear
And then it was only averted when the printer offered abject apologies and St. Gallen agreed to destroy every single copy of the calendar they could find. Again, lots of rounding things up and destroying them. Yeah. It's very spicy.
No wonder Switzerland is so determinedly neutral and calm today. They've been through all of their stuff. For a very organized country, they've got a really chaotic origin story. I think they've got it all out of their system. They must have decided, I think, at a certain point. We cannot stop rounding up a... destroying calendars and things like that.
Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that to make sure that no one leaked the answer to who shot JR on the TV show Dallas. The production team had every main character film a scene of them shooting JR, including JR.
It's an amazing thing. So this is... We need to explain what Dallas is. Exactly. So Dallas was a soap opera in America. Went on for a very long time. In the 1980s it began. And it was a show that kind of really... transformed the idea of soap having these dramatic
plot twists and also cliffhangers and so on and it created the greatest cliffhanger probably in tv history certainly american tv history and it's about like a it follows like the escapades of like a wealthy oil tycoon's family in dallas texas
cheesy Succession really it is it's about squillionaires and the main character is an anti-hero just like Logan Roy I do think that Succession is a very original idea and they definitely didn't rip off Dallas in any way whatsoever just as an ultimate opinion I'm not so sure
So yeah, it's at the end of this third series. It's the finale. And JR, who is the character played by Larry Hagman, is shot. We don't know who's pulled the trigger. And then... there's a big break in the season and in that time america goes slightly ballistic we're trying to work out the world almost yeah yeah yeah who shot jr was basically the big question that everyone with t-shirts next to the i'm with this cunt who shot jr politicians were referencing it yeah everyone
and just spoiler alert it was Kristen there we go what but the thing is they the shooting of JR this this huge event maybe the biggest event in fictional TV history yeah was not meant to be the end of the series
They had already filmed an ending of the series and they'd had a load of events. They'd had a deathbed murder confession. They'd had the sectioning. They had all sorts of crazy drama. They'd written themselves into a corner kind of thing. And then they got told, hey, great news. You've got four more episodes. And they had to write four more episodes.
And then there was a big head-scratching thing in the writers' room. And someone said, why don't we just shoot the bastard? Because apparently a lot of the writers were comedians. Or funny people, at least. I read this in an interview with...
lorraine despres who was one of the main writers and yeah she said that these were really funny guys who were trying to come up with ideas and almost let's shoot jr was one person going wouldn't it be funny if we did that wouldn't it fuck things up if we did that and then they always
Oh, actually, that would be good. Well, that's... I mean, a lot of the writers of Succession are very funny comic writers. Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Preble. So, you know, it's another link between the two, I'd say. But, no, I mean, the world went... crackers didn't it it did if you were on a plane going from europe to america at the time if it was an air france plane they said that they would tell anyone over the intercom who'd shot jr because if you couldn't watch the show yeah yeah
Someone would radio up from the ground, say it was Kristen, and then they'd go... were flying at 40,000 feet and it was Kristen who shot JR. Oh my god. Isn't that amazing? That is a huge spoiler. There's no way of avoiding a Dwayne Tannoy spoiler. That's true, although in those days you couldn't...
watch things on demand. Like you could have VHSed it or maybe. So you actually kind of wanted to have things spoiled more. Actually, even in 1980, I guess you would have had VHSes, but only just. Yeah. Right. So, you know, you had to watch it live. If you didn't watch it live, you were not going to watch it. Exactly. You weren't going to know. Parliament suspended a session so that the legislators would be able to tune in and wouldn't miss it. There was a really fantastic piece in Texas Monthly.
Which if anyone's going to cover who shot JR, you're on. Front page, surely. Absolutely. But no, there is an amazing piece which is all about the madness that happened. So they shot at a real run. You know, they shot some scenes at a real run.
shot in interior sets in Hollywood but the son of the guy who lived at the ranch they shot at is called Joe Duncan and he says that they had people turning up to take chips of the fence take pieces of rock You know, they could have taken the chip of the fence and used it as a tiny fence in another railway.
That's like relics. That's mad. He said, listen to this quote. He said, I was once 20 feet away from a guy who jumped to the fence and went out into the pasture to pick up a piece of horse manure to take home as a souvenir.
That was a time before eBay. Yeah, his name was Dan Schreiber. I read an article from, this was the day before they were about to show the Who Shot JR, and this was in the Minneapolis Star, and they asked some local... celebs who they thought had shot JR and like the head of the coach of one of the local sports teams said I don't know who shot JR but there's a lot of agents of players who I'd like to shoot
The police chief, who's called Anthony Bouza, he said, I'm happy to report that I've never seen a single minute of that goddamn program. And they asked the mayor, Don Fraser, this is the mayor of Minneapolis, and he said, I haven't the foggiest who shot him. Are you serious? I've only seen one episode of that show and it was quite by accident. Wow. Sounds like a lifelong fan. I just can't believe they asked him.
they asked someone and they got these answers and they thought well it might as well print the thing that i knew dallas for because i'd never really seen it yeah but i i know it as a famous like a famous example of retconning uh where you retroactively
change what happened so um they wrote filmed and shot and broadcast an entire season in which a character bobby ewing died but this character was really popular and they decided they wanted to bring him back so in order to do that they retconned it by at the beginning of the next series
they made the whole previous series of dream sequence which is hailed as one of the like the cheesiest most rubbish ways of like retconning um but one of the weird continuity things was that um dallas had a spin-off show called knots landing that existed in the same
universe okay but when they brought back bobby ewing and was like oh this character never died in knots landing they had referenced the fact that bobby had died so at that point it's like a universe splintering moment it's like spider-verse into the multiverse But they were simultaneously taking into a... They were keeping track of the different universes while simultaneously wiping entire series off the faces. Because you would think it would be easier to say...
oh, he didn't die, he faked his own death. Yes, exactly. As in, unless they showed on camera the funeral, the open casket. I think it was the main part of a lot of the story of that season. They literally were like, forget that series happened. it's weird yeah there was um there was a real life bobby ewing who lived in texas and who owned an oil and cattle company oh really yeah and so when this big sort of who shot jr thing was happening they really kind of cashed in and you could buy jr
J.R. Cologne, J.R. Playing Cards. And you could also buy fake certificates for Ewing Land Oil and Cattle Company, which was signed by Bobby Ewing, the fake Bobby Ewing. But then the real Bobby Ewing, who lived in Texas, sued them. and said well you can't do this because like it makes it look like you're selling my company and i found out that it was settled in the end and the real bobby ewing wasn't allowed to sell any novelty items uh and it didn't say but i assume he got massive
you know, payout. He must have done, right? Yeah. Larry Hagman, who played JR. So obviously there's a big break for the, you know, when they're not shooting. Yeah. He hadn't signed his contract when they started shooting the next series and he held out for a long time. And he...
Because he knows he's a star now, right? Everyone's talking about him. He wanted a huge pay rise. He dispatched his agents to negotiate wearing white Stetson hats with the management of the show. And that was his kind of look, right? Sorry, yeah, that was his thing, yeah.
I'd feel really stupid if I was as Asian and I was told to do that. They were all like, you're overreaching with this negotiation and you want us to go in fancy dress. It was worse when Mr. Blobby asked for a pay rise. He'd come in and be like... When they were trying to shoot the next series, they had to start shooting, but without JR being present and having signed off his contract. So what they started doing, they shot a couple of different versions.
One, they just shot JR from behind. They just shot someone with the same hair, which they could just fill in later. And then they also shot scenes with a guy bandaged up like he'd be a legend. And they said, if we have to...
bring in another actor to play JR, we can claim you had to have reconstructive surgery and now you look like a different guy. The problem is JR was shot in the stomach. There's no reason. That's great. Hagman, what an interesting... kind of personality he was generally he used to do a thing for many many years um called silent sundays
He just didn't talk on Sundays. So funny. Yeah. So what happened was is that... Religious? No, no. It was part of... He used to be on a different show called I Dream a Genie. Brilliant show. And during it, he had vocal problems. And so he went to a doctor and the doctor said, why don't you try...
not talking for a few days and he thought not only did it work nicely but he really enjoyed the experience so every sunday he thought i'm just going to do this and didn't speak for decades so good yeah yeah he claimed that for 25 years he never spoke on a Sunday.
I think it's not 100% true. I think he kind of cheated a fair amount. Because it's Sunday's your birthday or tread on some Lego. Yeah. Sometimes he would go like four days in a row without talking, wouldn't he? And his family would hate him.
for it and really he kicked it because he uh he says that he started realizing he was missing a lot of opportunities because he says in la a lot of business is done on the weekends and so he said he couldn't call his agent he couldn't talk to them to say hey get on the case of doing this
it's incredibly good negotiating to stay silent he probably should have done all his business on a sunday just sit there in silence while they just keep upping the offer until like the clock goes over to monday and he's like yeah great that's so funny a nazi who's a fan of dallas great Rudolf Hess Rudolf Hess is a Nazi Did we cover another person? There was genuinely another Rudolf Hess Really?
Oh, he was called Rudolf Haas, the avocado man. Oh, the avocado guy, yes. The guy behind the Haas avocado was called Rudolf Haas. Wow. This one was the Nazi and presumably train enthusiast. Was he still alive? he watched Spandau Prison he used to watch it in Dallas and Dynasty were his two favourite TV shows that he watched okay They weren't all bad. That is retconning, Alex.
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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I am on at Schreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Alex. Oh, I've quit Twitter
Are you on Insta? No. Are you on anything? Are you on B-Real? B-Real? No. That's good, that one. I'm still on Bebo. Are you on Mastodon? No. Don't be disgusting. That sounds horrible. What is that? Mafia-based porn site. Yeah, or you can email us at podcast at QI.com or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye.