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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'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the... microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that ancient Rome had a secret name.
And no one knows what it was to this very day. To this day. To this very day. It's very cool. It is very cool. It also, when you're looking into it, it also seems like, did they? Was there definitely a secret name? You think they're all making it up?
It seems like it might have been something that was written by historians a bit later. No, no, it was written at the time. So there's a bunch of ancient sources that claim it from about the first century onwards. So it's Pliny and Plutarch are the first. But they quote... Pliny. She's quoting Pliny.
Yeah, yeah. It was about six or seven different writers throughout the ancient Roman period saying this was a thing with like varying different accounts of what exactly it was. But they mostly said it's a name that only very few people know. like just really extreme dignitaries the queen and her corgis basically and then even though they know it they're not allowed to say it even in special ceremonies a couple of the writers said sometimes in ceremonies they say the name but no
What do you reckon it was? There's a few ideas, right? There are some ideas which are bullshit. Amor. Amor is the main one, first mentioned in the 6th century. An anagram of Rome. Indeed. It's Rome backwards. It's a palindrome. And they call... The city of love, don't they? That is Paris, famously. Syrup, I call it. Yeah, there is that theory, which is from a scholar called John the Lydian in the 6th century who said... Just confidently. It was called Amor. That was the secret name.
We don't seem to have evidence for that. And why? For protection, I think. So there's also a lot of stuff alongside it saying there was a secret goddess who protected Rome. And the reason you can't say the goddess's name is that then your enemies will know her. name and then they can use her and they can call upon her and say help me instead she would defect was the idea yeah and go with the enemy that's quite a common thing i think with gods right it's like if you know their name then you can
tell them what to do kind of thing i think that happened in egypt quite a lot like in the book of the dead for instance when you go to the underworld you have to pass through these gates but the only way you can pass through is if you name the gods because you name them and when you've got the name they have to do whatever you do tell them. Is that, I mean, I'm hearing Rumpelstiltskin big time here. That's basically the same story, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah. Except he's going to marry you. If you don't know his name, he'll marry you, which is a more immediate threat. Yeah. There's a lot of people who've come up with ideas about this. So the Roma Amor idea, there was an author called Dolores Prato, and she said that one reason for saying that this could be the case...
is a lot of early Romans used to read and write from right to left. So they were very good at knowing... Palindromes. Palindromes, basically. Wait, did they... Why did they read and write from right... Early Romans, according to Dolores Prato. Maybe Arabic influences? Is that likely? In ancient... I'm not so sure, Andy. I've never heard that. I'll tell you one thing they did do is they used to write like secret squares, right? Where you would write...
loads of five letter words one after the other and then the last one would be the reverse of the first one and then if you read them up and down or left and right or on the diagonals they all said the same thing. Abracadabra is one of those words where you can write it in a triangle. I like one of those, and that's very powerful. There's a famous thing called the Sator Square.
Yes. Sator something, opera something, rotas. In fact, it sounds like Prato is a name that would fit in one of these mystical squares. Dolores Prato. Yeah. What is that? Prato must be an anagram that says gotcha. You know, something like that. Obviously not that.
So there was someone, supposedly, who was executed for saying the name. Yes. Yeah, no, it was terrible punishment if you said it. Sorenus, he was called. Stop it. Well, was he, James? He was called Sorenus. Now, people who listen to the podcast might remember Sorenus. There was a guy called Sorenus of Ephesus who came up with the idea of a midwife putting their fingers up your bum to orient the head of a baby before you give birth. But it's not that Sorenus. It's a different Sorenus.
And this Sarenus is, according to Pliny, he was the first writer to provide a table of contents in a book, ever. Before that, if you wanted to look something up, you just had to read the whole thing. But he invented the idea of putting a table of contents and then he got into a Barney with some other bloke and then he went to court and he said the name of Rome and he got executed. Yeah, right. But the main thing...
is the contents thing. Which is a bigger contribution to history? Which Soranus? Well, I think Soranus, the midwife. You say Soranus, and I say Soranus. I think the midwife guy, because he saved quite a lot of lives with that. Does that work? It does work, yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. If you've got a breech baby, or not like a full breech one, but if you're just trying to move the head in the right place. But if you don't...
If you don't have a table of contents, how can you even read a midwifery book to learn that in the first place? Well, in fairness, anus will be quite near the start of the book. That's true. I wonder, you know, that thing of in ancient Rome, so many things would have been invented. So many amazing characters have been lost.
the footnotes of time and is do we have two sore anuses purely because their name is sore anus you have so misunderstood classical historians there are a lot of these sort of mystery cults weren't there so this is this name of rome was to be used in sacred rituals you know maybe according to some maybe never okay well
If it's never used, what are we all doing here? But there was a place called the Cave of Rome. Did you hear of this? No. This is great. This is buried deep under the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Augustus. It was full. Full of mosaics and seashells. Right. Which is pretty cool. And according to legend, this is where Rome itself came to be. Okay. I.E.
Where Robulus and Remus got suckled. They were found there by the wolf, the twins. I didn't know they were the sons of the god Mars. That gets glossed over a lot in the story. They were Nepo babies, basically. They weren't just random twin babies who were left and then found by...
I don't think they are in all stories, are they? Okay, maybe not. They might be. But there were ceremonies there for hundreds of years, and that's the secret cave of Rome. Do we know where it is? It's under the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Augustus, as I said 30 seconds ago. But it's a real thing. Yes. real right um on these secretive cults i think my favorite
is Mithraism or Mithraism. The thing about secret cults is they were really secret, so no one was allowed to write anything down or say anything. So it was all just rumor about what happened there based on what people said. But they did stuff like there's lots of archaeological sources of Mithraic temples where there's people killing bulls. There's one in London.
There's a Mithraeum in London. Yes. They found it when they were excavating. I can't remember what they were digging up. I think it was near the Museum of London, weirdly, it was found. They've reconstructed what it would have looked like. At the end, there's the classic image of Mithraeum. slaughtering a bull. That was the big image of him wearing...
A Phrygian cap and Anatolian trousers. Oh, lovely. That was his... I can picture it now. That was his look. I think a Phrygian cap is what the Smurfs wear. Yeah, yeah, they do. Anatolian trousers, I don't know what they are. They're just trousers from modern day Turkey. I imagined like pirate pants. I remember, yeah, like whirling dervish pants. So quite wide around the thighs and then tight around the knees. Yeah. Like MC Hammer.
Yes, exactly. It was a primitive MC Hammer cult, basically. That's what he's based on. My favourite place in Rome is Amethraic Temple. It is...
By far the coolest site. Forget everything else. Forget the Colosseum. About five minutes from the Colosseum, there's the Basilica of San Clement. Have you guys been to it? No. I think I might have been. Maybe. It's an 11th century church. You go in, 11th century church. And there was a... cleric who worked in the church in 1867, the friar who worked in the church, who just found that underneath it was hollow.
And so they excavated underneath and they found a fourth century church. And now you can go descend down into that. So that's, you know, in the olden days, things were lower down because the ground hadn't accumulated on top of it yet. And that's incredible. And you're looking at fourth century stuff, artwork preserved. Wow. And then, here it comes.
A layer below, they discover, not one but two things, an ancient Roman house, which you can now wander through deep underground, and the Mithraic temple, which you can sit in. It's the coolest thing ever. And you can sit there and pretend to be... taking, you know, sermons from the bull killer. Wow, that's very cool. Yeah, that's really cool. We don't know much about these places because you weren't supposed to.
You weren't supposed to go there if you weren't allowed and you often didn't write about them, right? Yes, exactly. It was only for initiates. But there was one. There was a festival of the goddess of fertility who's called Bonadilla. It was only women who were allowed to go.
And since men were the people who write stuff down, we didn't really know anything about it. But there was a huge scandal because a guy called Publius Claudius Pulcher, or Pulcher, he disguised himself as a woman in 62 BC and went to the festival. And when people found out about it, oh my days. Pissed off? This is bad news. Oh boy. I think that story is in one of Cicero's speeches. I think I've read the prosecution's speech from that.
trial i think it exists wow but the um well the interesting thing is that um he was prosecuted for incest oh clodius was one of the sort of chief gang gang dudes in ancient Rome and he had a very very attractive sister That's no excuse, Andy. Absolutely not. Your honour, but your honour. Just look at her, your honour. Yeah, and that was...
And that was his big, one of his big rivalries. But can I say for the listener, even though he was done for incest, he hadn't had sex with his sister. It was like a technical thing because there was a thing about if you had sex with a vestal virgin. then that was counted as incest because they were kind of the children of the city kind of thing who looked after the city and all that kind of stuff. And this was like an extension of this because he defiled this cult of women.
It counted technically as incest, even though none of them was related to him. Hang on, why do we know his sister so hot? He also had, in his speech, I'm pretty sure I remember Cicero says, look at the sister on him though. He was very much implying that he had also, I think, slept with his... that was a sort of low trick from sister it wasn't is that is James what you said is that unbiased history or is that the defense lawyers speech that you read I don't know like I got it from Wikipedia
No, I did read some of the... I read the Cicero thing. I don't think it's biased. I think this is stuff that actually happened. No, that's just he got in trouble for invading the woman's space, as people shouldn't. But did he find out anything good? What were they doing? Were they all teaching how to insert tampons and stuff? They were all...
reading scary stories and kissing each other. I'm going to fight. Knew it. Knew it. Hey, can I tell you very quickly, this is not ancient Rome, but it's ancient China. It's a pretty astonishing thing. I was just looking into general secrets that we still...
don't know much about. For a good 3,000 years, there was a secret women's language called Nushu, which is... lady writing basically and it was for women who needed to pass on information to each other that they didn't want men to have any idea about and they created an entire script it's only in the 1980s that we even found out it existed it lasted yeah for close to 3 000 years
So in the United States, you guys found out it existed. If you've ever watched live TV, the show Loose Women is actually broadcast in that language. And this language that women only speak is called New Shoes. Sex in the City is based on a lot of its writing. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? That is amazing. And it's coming back. The last writers of it died a couple of decades ago. Yeah. But they've worked it out and they're teaching it again.
becoming a language again. It's beautiful to look at. It's actually, as someone pointed out, very sexy to look at. If writing could be sexy, this is it. Have you guys heard of boob slang? Oh, Jesus. This is not related to new shoe, by the way. This is a modern thing. This is New Zealand we're in now. Okay. And we're... What's an environment where you get a lot of slang? Sailors. Not far off? It's an enclosed space workshop. Prisons. Prisons.
Not far off. Just want to say to any sailors listening. Yeah, we know what you did. And you're very lucky that you haven't been banged up yet. What are they going to do, James? They're at sea. I can just hear it right now. a course for London. Right now ships are turning. I just need to stay. I just need to stay in central Leicestershire and I'll be fine. Grand Union Canal!
No, boob slang is a New Zealand prison language. And it has 3,000 separate words. So obviously, let's get into it. What is boob? It's the name of the language. Yeah. Well, boob slang is the language. Oh, it's the name of a person. It's prison. Prison. We're in the boob. We're in boob. Okay. So what's a boob story? It's a story that you tell when you're in prison. Yeah.
are they all hang on this is how they all work what are boob handcuffs if I said has anyone eaten boob lunch today what am I asking I think I think boob story is how you ended up in the big house basically um all right what's a double yoker oh a double yoker yeah is it two black eyes is it is it a bit of great luck it's just an idiot
Oh, he's a double yokel. I don't know why. I would think a double yokel would be brainier than the average. Is it like a yokel, but then they're doubly as yokely as a yokel? It might be. It doesn't have an L on it. Let's have one more. What's a goodnight kiss? One of those shower things that we don't think we should get into. Knockout punch. Get your hands off my boob boobs. Dan's right. It's a knockout punch. So be very careful if you ask someone.
in prison to give you a goodbye kiss. Do you think you would? I don't know. I think it would make you feel happier, wouldn't it? It would reassure you a bit. To the guards. Answer to the guards on night number one. Excuse me. My mummy always. Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast! Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Monzo. Yes, that's right. So it's like any high street bank, but unlike many other banks, Monzo has pots.
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I've got three. Look, I'm a fan of personal admin. It makes it fun, all right? Well, here's the thing as well, is that I'm someone who's terrible at that kind of stuff. So they've thought of this. As soon as money hits your account, whatever you have assigned to go percentage-wise from that cash that...
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 2010, Jaguar made a car that sounded like an actual Jaguar. Give us an idea of what that sounds like. Roar! Yeah, okay. That's very good. I have to do the hand gesture when I do that as well. Yeah, yeah. I sort of think casts sound a bit like...
Yeah, they do. Roaring animals. It was easier than making it sound like a laughing hyena, for instance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there wasn't much to tweak. But I did listen because you can hear a sample online and it does start with the regular car sound. And in your head, you're going...
oh that doesn't sound and then out of nowhere a jaguar sound and yeah so it does it is distinctly different yeah so this was debuted at the 2010 paris motor show and it was the jaguar cx 75 And it was designed by a guy called Ian Callum. And then last year, he's started his own business now called Callum that makes cars. And he is making his own version, which is the original one was a concept one. I think it was in the movie Spectre. Yeah. But he's making ones that are streetly.
So they've got the basic safety that you need and the right emissions and stuff like that. So if you want to give him a load of dosh, he'll make you one. So Spectre, they were provided supposedly with about five of these cars, five to seven. No one actually...
knows how many of these have been produced as of yet because it's not on the road. Another one of those secrets. It's another secret, yeah. And if anyone watches it, it's a chase scene. Bond is in an Aston Martin and he's being chased by someone who is in this Jaguar. Don't watch Spectre just for that. chase though.
Are there other reasons to watch it? No. Right, OK. Well, so if you're going to watch it, it should be just for that chase, it sounds like. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Can I just say one more thing about Ian Callum? Oh, yeah. By the way, when he was 14 years old, he submitted a car design to Jaguar.
hope of getting a job um and then later on he went on to work for them yeah that's very cool i just want to see that car that he designed because i'm sure i mean he's one of the great car designers For 14-year-olds, it's going to look like Homer Simpson's car, isn't it? Have you seen a cyber truck? So on car sound, something that is added by manufacturers is the noise of car doors closing.
by manufacturers yeah okay because they think that um so cars used to be you know heavier made of different materials so they made that really satisfying deep clunk and now car manufacturers don't actually need to use such heavy materials they're a bit more efficient but they think if people hear a lighter tinny clunk they'll think it's not as expensive so then they alter the design to make the car
door thudding clunk sound. And they go to huge lengths. So what was it? Cadillac was saying that they listen to dozens and dozens of different cars and make notes on their sounds and then investigate all the cars to work out what's making that sound the way it is. sounds and then combine them. I don't know if you've heard Anna, car's a big business. I've never seen one. What would you add to your car sonically if you could? One of those...
Horns. A clown horn. A clown horn, a clown horn. Yeah, that's nice. Like someone grabbing a boob in the 1970s. Yeah, I do have a favourite car sound now as a result of looking up this fact, which is pink noise. You heard a pink noise? This is a really fascinating innovation. So this noise is something you would only ever hear if you're about to get into a crash. And they're anticipating... oh you have heard it
Yeah, pink noise. It's really interesting. So one of the things that happens to a lot of people who get into big crashes, the sound is incredibly loud and it damages their hearing. So when it detects a potential collision, it puts out this sound, which is at 80 decibels, which basically prepares you.
your ear for this even louder 165 decibels that it's about to receive and so it's it's a way of getting your ears into a place where they're not going to get damaged what yeah it's really interesting because my car has a thing which beeps when it thinks i'm about to hit something
But that's not this, right? And it's going off all the time. I've actually had to rip it out. That's incredible. And that protects your ears by warming your ears up to that. I don't think your ears could be tricked out of mechanical death. No, it's so okay. This is what it says. It says it triggers muscles in the ear to contract by reflex automatically Bracing the inner ear and the eardrum for extremely loud noise by the crash. Um, you've all heard of Hans Zimmer
Of course. Yeah, invented the Zimmer frame. That's right. So we're talking Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lion King, Gladiator, Dunkirk, Dune. He did the music for them. Sound. He did the music for all of these. Dune 2. He also designed the sound of the BMW. So electric cars, they don't have an internal combustion engine. They do not need to sound like a car. No.
But you can't just have them sounding like anything because if you're driving close to someone, they need to know there's a car passing by. And they need to know it's a car. You can't do a horse noise or like a crazy bird noise. Exactly. That's a temptation. Yeah. But Hans Zimmer was given the brief to define. what was it to compose the sound of e-mobility for um for bmw
And I listen to it, and it just sounds like a car. Well, that's the idea, Andy. No, but it sounds too much like a car. As in, if I was getting Zimmer on the case, I'd want something revolutionised. Yeah, but when you watched Dune, did you think, oh, that just sounds like a giant worm?
He's just brilliant at making things sound like they're supposed to sound. Weirdly, the worm sounds like a BMW. It's very confusing. Yeah, no, and they have an in-house person, don't they, BMW, who is doing this? So Zimmer was sort of brought in to collaborate with a guy called Renzo Vitale, who's already...
ready there creating these sounds because as we know and we've spoken about on this podcast before it is a time where the electric car is knocking out sounds and people are finding that incredibly scary in fact Jaguar are saying that they're going to go entirely electric
by this year. And who knows if that's going to happen, but that certainly was said a while ago. And so things like the British Library are starting to archive car sounds. So the Jaguar car sound, which is a notably famous car sound amongst car connoisseurs, is now part of the audio.
library in there because my children might never know that sound god i can imagine the bore if you see someone listening to that audio in the british library of all the things you could be looking at you're not talking to them are you imagine you see an attractive person on the other side of the train and They've got their headphones in. Sidel over. Hey, what are you listening to? Oh, I love Hanson.
One thing where this is important is in Formula E, which is like Formula One, but for electric cars. I read an article in the Washington Post that was talking about this and they said that the cars were going round and they sounded like electric toothbrushes going round, which when you think about the Formula One, it's like...
But then I read another article that said that the old F1 engines, they had a volume that would peak between 500 and 2,500 hertz, which is about the same frequency as a human scream. And that's the reason people like it so much because it really puts you on edge.
Right. You're watching the cars, but you're kind of on edge the whole time. You're really excited about it because your brain is thinking, is someone screaming there or something? Yeah, yeah. The drivers, it's always their first time. And they're very, very scared. Fire! Oh, they got pink noise in there. But even petrol car noises are fake. That's what I find so weird. Even these days, like the car door thing.
It's this thing, skeuomorphism. Maybe we mentioned this before. It's where you have a new technology, but you keep an element from the old technology for aesthetic reasons, like an app which has a picture of a bookshelf to trick you into thinking you're reading an ancient tome. You know, it's just that skeuomorphism.
And all these modern cars, even petrol ones, still, they play fake engine noises. Some of them literally have speakers in the cabin. They do, wasn't it? I think a car journalist found this out. It was in the Ford Mustang, which has apparently an incredibly famous sound. He broke his speakers or something.
pulled a fuse that took his speaker out and he was like oh my god the engine's gone off yeah and it turns out that's just um great i think so many sounds must be manufactured in a way that we don't realize like it's like secret sounds everywhere i was someone was telling me that they have an an old mouse which
when you click you hear a noise and apparently it's a little speaker in there that is playing that yeah it's a little tiny speaker that when you click it it's playing a sound it's not the click itself that's happening because people found it quite disorientating to have a mouse that wasn't clicking anymore.
And so they created a little... I have like a little speaker that I keep in my trousers because I can only do silent but deadly farts. It really puts people off. So whenever I know one's coming, I press the button and it makes the noise. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Is it Bose? Because yours are very basic. Basic. Yeah. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Queen Elizabeth I never visited Shakespeare's globe. However...
She did visit a venue down the road to watch bears fighting a dog and monkey. Oh. It does depend on the Shakespeare play, I would say. Right, yeah. Some Shakespeare plays, way better than a dog fighting a monkey. Others. Yeah. I read this, by the way, in a book called London, A Travel Guide Through Time by Dr. Matthew Green.
i love this book and my wife actually was the editor on the book and um yeah that is this cool this is spawned is it it's like eight ten years old now this book she's still getting royalties anyway if you could all buy it with three children to feed uh no it's a fantastic book where
Matthew Green takes the reader as if they were a time traveler through different periods of London the first one you start in is walking along the South Bank and you're heading towards Shakespeare's Globe but he makes the point that surprisingly Queen Elizabeth I never went to the globe, but she did go to a venue that was very near to it to watch this extraordinary thing where bears would be brought into an arena.
And they would have dogs that were let loose on them and they would just fight until either it looked like the dogs have had way too much and we're going to die or that the bear looked a bit injured because these bears were kind of like professional wrestlers. They were famous in their day. People knew. their names. One's even named in a Shakespeare play itself. So this is a big deal.
So yeah, it's a... Which is the famous one, can you remember? Yeah, it's... He was called... He was called Sackerson, I believe. He was a real celebrity bear. Yeah, there was Ned Whitting, there was Harry Hunks, there was Blind Bess, and then...
Sackerson, yeah, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Incidentally, the worst play. The worst of Shakespeare's plays. Arguably, maybe the worst of all plays ever written. It's really bad, The Merry Wives of Windsor. So did they throw Sackerson in just to sort of boost up its interest? I get this rating. There's a theory that he... Shakespeare wrote it in nine days. It was a very, very rushed job play. They had to quickly come up with something.
And he just sort of said, oh, I'll pull this out. Chuck a bear in there. People will rock up. And it was a fair fight. I think you said that it was bears fighting a dog and a monkey. But I think they would usually give him a few dogs. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of dogs. Sometimes the monkey. The monkey was usually on horseback. Like it was. So it has.
an advantage there, doesn't it? Yeah. Wait, who's fighting who? The monkey's on a horse. Who's the monkey on a horse fighting? No, I think in that case, I think the monkey is just riding around on a horse as a bit of entertainment. Oh wait, so the bears didn't fight the monkey? I think monkeys did fight bears. But I don't think you could incentivise a bear to repeatedly attack.
a horse can you who's the horse fighting the horses are having a good time yeah it's just a day out horse is confused it's just hanging out well it was confusing wasn't it because this is gruesome entertainment yet when you read people writing about it it was like a great day out i read a lot of articles about it for this. One thing I really liked about it is they sometimes did it in pubs and they do seem to have had bear gardens.
Which is where they did the fighting. Which is just like... Is that where we get Beer Garden? Well... I think. But yeah, lots of places. There's a troll. I think the Way We Live Now has the Bear Garden as the gentleman's club they go to. The name stayed on. And Bear Garden was anywhere the Bears fought. And there is a road called Bear Garden now. Yes. And Bear Lane. Yeah. Near the spots where this happened.
It's one of those sports which makes you think, oh, people in the past were just, I owe nothing to them. I don't care about their civilization. I don't think their values are at all interesting. to me. Well, let's not get into the cultural relativism. Is it better to tear the foxes to shreds? Who knows? Who are we to judge? Yeah, like you do every day. I've seen you on the hunt. Yeah, but it's... it's so
It's very grim. But the Puritans didn't like it. They're boars, though, weren't they? The Puritans carried out plenty of atrocious things in other spaces and times. Sorry, who were the boars fighting? The Puritans banned it. I think part of their objection... was that it happened on Sundays. Not that it's a bit grim. One of these arenas collapsed on the South Bank and the Puritans all said that this was because God was displeasured.
uh about what was going on but actually they weren't that bothered about birds getting hurt they just thought everyone was having too much fun yeah that's the thing it was encouraging odd ideas some of them cared about the animals but majority the puritans didn't and one of the places that collapsed
where Queen Elizabeth went to the venue itself when it was rebuilt and had a French ambassador come and see a show. So it was a private showing. I asked Dr. Matthew Green about the Globe thing and he said, to be fair, Queen Elizabeth didn't need to go to the Globe.
Shakespeare came to her. So it's not as if she was against Shakespearean plays. But she did go to one of the bear garden places. Because the bears wouldn't go to her. They were drunk in the pub. All Republicans. Yeah. And the other thing is, is that this whole point of...
trying to ban it on the Sundays, Queen Elizabeth herself actually overturned a parliamentary motion to have it banned on Sundays because she was like, no, this is great entertainment. The bears, we should say, as you sort of did.
They weren't killed that often. It was just a lot of dogs they got through. The bears actually had quite a good time. Did you see what they were wearing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the Mastiffs, my God, they went through a lot. And there was actually... What, the dogs? Yeah, the dogs. There was a master of the king's bears.
who was deployed from about the 1400s, I think, who was the person who was responsible for looking after the royal bears, basically looking after bear fights. And they were constantly having to restock mastiffs. So I think in Queen Elizabeth's time and King James's time, it was a guy called Alain, who was an actor.
so he acted in plays and stuff but also he had to be always going around the country and he had the right to take people's dogs I think if he needed spare ones or constantly negotiate and if anyone was doing a bear fight or a bear dog fight around the country then he
got a cut which is pretty sweet it is wild and apparently bears were literally walked past you in the streets you know they weren't like in cages they're just on like a leash like a dog just sort of from the pub heading over to say oh watch out for the bear
It's a wild time. Step aside, darling. Yeah. I'm with Andy that this is a bad thing. Yeah, actually. Guys, James and I are. We're not putting you two against us two on this one. Look, I'm just saying, like, if anyone at home agrees with me and Andy,
then you know thanks James I'm really thank you for the support there and I'm so glad that we're always very brave of you well done there was other stuff that was like peripheral to the bear baiting which was actually quite fun so I was reading a an account by I think a foreign
who came to watch one of these, obviously, barbaric displays, but also... Anna's on board now. Feeling a bit cold now, Dan? Phew! It's nice that I slipped that in. So there were dogs chasing horses around as one of the rounds.
So this is in between the bear baiting. You know, you use the arena for other things. Dogs chasing horses. Men and women were brought out in boxes to fight, dance and converse with each other for entertainment. There was another quite fun thing where a man threw some white...
bread among the crowd the crowd all scrambled for it and then over the middle of the arena a giant rose was fixed and then set on fire by a rocket lots of apples and pears fell down from this rocket while all the people were scrambling for the bread and scared shit out of them.
That sounds like Heligabalus, doesn't it? Yes, it does. The Roman emperor who used to do weird things like that, like drown people in rose petals and stuff. Yes. I think none of these people even drowned in the raining apples and pears and bread. They just got a nice bit of white bread.
It's just quite weird to imagine that a crowd goes that mad for some crumbs of white bread. I might have said this before, but I was in a cricket crowd once where people were throwing out bits of saurine malt loaf and everyone went absolutely mental. I don't blame you. I would too. That's nice. Elizabethan sort of hobbies in general? Yeah. Sort of that kind of thing. I got a bit distracted by things that Queen Elizabeth liked doing. All right. She liked going to parties.
Specifically, large parties held for her around the country. Didn't you just have to go to those? Do we know that you're like...
Far from. No, no. So you know the thing of royal progresses? No. It's where the monarch would go around the whole country. And it dates back to a time when there wasn't a proper... caught in a proper castle you might have a bit of a fortress but basically to subdue your territory and show you're still the boss man you have to go around quite a lot and the court is always on the move and that still survived even when queen elizabeth was on the throne you would
progress to various different stately homes around the country, and they would go into a huge tiz because the queen or king was coming. Is that the same thing as certain stately homes still have laws that if the monarch goes there, then they have to give them a bed? It's that. It's exactly that. New toilet seats and all that. And there was one party which was hosted by the Earl of Leicester, who was Robert Dudley. Yep. Her fave. Her fave.
He was constantly proposing to her. That was her other hobby, was turning down the proposals of Dudley. And he threw this huge party, the Kenilworth Spectacle, in 1575. 19 days of partying. He built her her own micro palace on his grounds.
And then she complained, I can't see the garden you've commissioned from my bedroom. So he had his gardeners build her a new version of the garden overnight under her window. Crazy. There was a water pageant with an 18 foot long mermaid. There was a moving island. There were fireworks. There was hunting. There were plays.
He was the least popular man in England, we should say. Really? He was incredibly unpopular because his wife he'd married when he was a teenager had mysteriously died two years after Elizabeth became the queen. Right. And there was a lot of talk that maybe he was responsible. I guess back then as well, you don't know so many people. Like, there's like six celebrities back then, right? So he would have been one.
And one's got to be the most hated. It's not like you could have, like, some people hate Piers Morgan and some people hate Elon Musk. Like, you basically, everyone's going for the same one. I got six people to pick from. That's it. Yeah. Well, he was so unpopular. Probably because...
everyone knew that he fancied Elizabeth, right? Everyone always hates the person who's trying to have the affair with the monarch. And might have killed his first wife. I don't like the first wife thing. She definitely died two years after she became queen. So an old lady from Brentwood told her neighbours that my lord Robert hath killed...
given Her Majesty a red petticoat, implying that they've slept together. New Zealand jail slang. It's boob slang, yeah. She was jailed for even telling her neighbours that. Really? So they were cracking down on it. That's interesting. The Kenilwa display he put on, that was where they accidentally burned a town to the ground, right?
That can only have not helped his popularity. I don't know that. It was 1572. It was one of the things that he put on for Elizabeth and he staged this huge mock battle for her and they had these amazing... fireworks and then they had cannons that they just fired randomly into the air and they all landed on the adjacent town and burned down a bunch of houses and killed at least one person.
upper-class English sentence ever. Is that the town I accidentally burnt down? Jeez. Just very quickly, Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth I, also loved bear baiting, and he used to go around the country as well and one thing that he always brought with him was a locksmith who always put a new lock on the door that he was sleeping in of the room that he was in really yeah because he was so worried about assassination and then when they left the next day
however many days later, he would take the lock off the door again. So you just have this messed up door as a result of the stay and he would bring it to the next house and he would lock it onto the new door. Oh, so it's one lock. I'm sure he had multiple, but he would always put it on and take it off.
So you left with the lock. That's quite good. That's a good plot device. I'm sorry. Like, the lock man is the assassin, you know? He's going to be the first person everyone suspects when suddenly the lock has been opened. Yeah, that's a good point. Could have done this.
It feels like someone who's got something to hide, doesn't it? If they rock up at your sleepover and they say, I've brought my own lock, don't mind me. What are you doing in there? What are you doing in there that you're so paranoid about? Is the lock going on the sleeping bag here?
Wait, why would it? What? Sorry, you just said someone turns up at your sleepover and they've brought their own lock. Yeah, because Anna's sleepover, everyone gets their own room. We're all going to go to bed in our separate rooms now. Oh, we're all going to a different wing. Yeah, for the scary stories, yes. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by TV Licensing. That's right. Your TV licence covers you to watch over 400...
TV channels. I don't know about you, Dan. I normally pinwheel back and forth between about three. So this is huge news. It's amazing. Yeah, it is awesome. And it gets you everything on the BBC iPlayer as well. Now, I don't know about you, but that's a major destination.
for me and my family when we are sitting in front of the TV and putting on a good old hot rockin' episode of Bluey or Hey Dougie. I can't get enough. They're so moorish. Yes, there's loads of stuff up there. I know that James and Anna will be glued.
to the live sport that you do need a TV license if you're going to watch. That's a little fun fact there. Your TV license gets you access to watching live sport on TV. Yeah, like Champions League and so on, yeah. I personally am more of a sitcom guy. There's a new show out called Amanda Land.
which is a spinoff of Motherland, if you know that. That's one of my favourite sitcoms, Motherland. It's incredible. And I've seen Amanda Land and it's as funny. It's so good. It's a fantastic thing to have a TV licence. I keep mine about my person at all times. Just in case you want to prove... how good you are at watching TVs.
Or in case I just want to pop on some Bluey, you know? It's good for all circumstances. Yeah. Well, listen, you should get your TV license and you can do that and get access to over 400 TV channels plus everything on the BBC iPlayer by heading to tvl.co.uk. slash pod that is right to find out more that's just as dan says tvl.co.uk forward slash pod okay on with the podcast on with the show
Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that in Edwardian times, you could order a barrel of seawater to be delivered to your inland home so you could keep on enjoying the health benefits of your holiday. After it ended. Do you have to get some sailors to come from their boats? Oh, no. I crack open my nice fresh barrel of seawater to have my bath. It's full of jacktars. Yes, was it to have your bath? Or was it to drink? It was to have your bath.
To massage yourself with. A bit of everything. A bit of everything. There's nothing that seawater couldn't do. Right. And this is from a great, it's from a sub stack I subscribe to called Reading on Trains by Andrew Martin, which is all about trains. And it's mostly about.
trains that I got interested in this. This isn't about trains though, is it? No, it's about seawater. But it was seawater delivered by the Great Eastern Railway. Oh my god. So this was in Abordian times, so early 20th century. You would get a barrel of seawater from...
Lower Stoft to Liverpool Street and they would pump it into these massive wagons at one end and then they'd decant it. They'd have a little spigot at the other end, they'd just decant it into a barrel and then they'd send the barrels all around...
you know, everywhere, and you would order a massive barrel of seawater and have a bath in the sea in your house. Were there any poor kids who said, can we go on a beach holiday this year, Mum? I'll do you almost as good. We have the sea at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was basically that.
And this was all because people were obsessed with seawater being a really good thing for your health. Yeah, so I now live in Margate, and there's still a ginormous hospital there, which was built as a royal bathing house, basically using sea therapy as a way of fixing people.
But ironically, at the moment, the trains don't really go from here to Margate, do they, Dad? Yes. That's why you're half an hour late. It's all right, because once you get there, the sea's full of poo anyway. So it's fine. I know. This is the problem with sea these days. But this is a big deal. that kind of actually weirdly transformed...
the way that we visit beaches now because it was like a paupers thing and it was never part of holidays. And then suddenly when this hydrotherapy thing came in, suddenly everyone was going back to the beach. And that actually started much earlier, didn't it? Like 1750s, I think. Yeah, like 1700s. Yeah, exactly. It was a guy called Richard Russell. And he's basically responsible for Brighton existing. He thought that seawater was great for you.
And much better than like getting the water from Bath or from an inland spa or Buxton or something. And he got a big old house in Brighton, the biggest house at the time, because Brighton wasn't really a thing. And he got a lot of people there and he cured them. Supposedly. Of anything as well. It was the usual cures in the olden days. You could cure scurvy or jaundice or TB. A lot of TB cured by just drinking or bathing in. I think Richard Russell advised his patients to drink seawater.
and he said that a pint of it was sufficient to give three or four sharp stools, which I think he meant as a good thing. No, you don't want it sharp, do you? It seems not today, but maybe it was sought after in those days. You dilute it with...
milk or honey. Either way. I mean, I did read that he variously included a few extra things, like he'd sprinkle in some... I read Crab's Eyes, which I can't believe was a cost-effective thing, because sea water is quite cheap to get. Crab's Eyes feels like quite labour-intensive.
Yeah, it feels like they've got a little bit of grit in the bottom of the seawater. No, that's crab's ice. Is it because basically medicine wasn't very good at the time and seawater is at least relatively benign? Is that it?
Is it fresh air? They just didn't know about evidence-based medicine, did they? Oh, but I imagine the fresh air. I think people just sometimes get better. Yeah. Like from some things. Sometimes people will say, oh, you've got... you know tuberculosis and actually you've got a terrible awful cough right and eventually it gets a bit better and you're like oh i'm cured of my tb but yeah they didn't do an actual test to see if you had tb
Right, I see that, yeah. This guy, anyway, he sold his house to George III and then George III invited the Prince of Wales to visit him. the big Prince Regent, and it was originally called the Bright Helmstone, and they decided to change its name to Brighton because the royals had started going there. So it literally was him that started Brighton. Brighton wasn't a thing. Bright Helmstone is such a cool name.
When I look at it, I bet the locals pronounced it Brighton anyway. Yeah. It's one of those English names. I did read that it was from about the 1600s. Most people have been calling it Brighton, but it was still officially Brighamstone until about 1810, I think, which is bang in the...
period you'll talk about this this was the same with Margate so in 1791 this big hospital was called Margate Infirmary for the relief of the poor whose diseases require sea bathing but then it got a royal patronage and became the royal sea bathing infirmary and
If you go down to Margate these days, most of the houses have very randomly just a little porch on the first floor. And the idea was you would push out your elderly relative onto the balcony of your house and you just leave them outside and then you'd come and get them out.
after hours and hours just to see how it affected their... So you see them all over these random balconies on all the houses there. Fresh air is good for you, right? And cold water is good for you, right? A lot of things about going to the beach are very good too. You get away from the stresses of daily life, the pollution of London.
dunked, being dunked in cold water is definitely good for your health. It sort of triggers all sorts of adrenaline-y responses. If you've got pneumonia, it's not really bad for you. I don't think there's a huge, I mean, I'm a huge fan, as you know, big cold water bather, but I don't think there's a huge amount of scientific studies have been...
done that definitively proved okay there are a few things like because you have this weird sort of um reflex don't you like a diving reflex yeah so i think it's something to do with your vagus nerve Yeah, and that was the idea at the time, that it shocks you out of something. So this is why women were dipped, right? And dippers were celebrities. Again, there were fewer famous people at the time. This is a Robert Dudley problem.
Dudley and the Dippers. Dudley and the Dippers is a great 1960s part. Yeah. Yeah. And the Dippers were great. So they were men and women. And if you were a male bather who'd gone to Brighton and often you'd be someone who couldn't swim because most people couldn't, then you'd need a dipper.
And as a man, you'd have a male dipper. As a woman, you'd have a female dipper. These were beefy, muscly people. I think one of the most famous ones was Martha Gunn in Brighton, who did it from 1750 to the early 1800s. And the idea was... that you have your client. Wow, she would have been quite old by the time. Yeah, she did it from, you know, 20 to 80 or whatever. She lived until she was 90. She just was constantly dunking. Just standing in the water all the time.
Yeah. Rain or shine. Yeah. She must have had very wrinkly toes. She's 90 year old to start off with. And then she's in the water all day. You wouldn't be able to tell where it was natural wrinkle versus ocean wrinkle. Yeah.
But you did a lot more than just dunk, of course. You tailored your treatment to your client. So if like Dan came to me and was like, I want to be dunked, I'd say, why? What's wrong with you? I'd work out how long you want to be dunked for, how many times, how deep, which bit of seawater, whether you want a mask.
with it we all know he wants to be dunked in lockdown until he's found the monster it's not seawater though it's gonna do nothing there's a cool uh invention that came off the back of people wanting to bring the sea to them As Andy was mentioning you could use normal water as well for this But there was an item that was invented in the 1890s called the rocking bathtub
and what it was is it's a bathtub which is shaped in a sort of like crescent moon sort of shape so like a as if like a rocking chair and uh you would sit inside you would put three barrels of water inside with you and then you would start So the idea was to create the ocean to...
The waves to make it feel as if you were in the ocean. So not only do you have your salt water with you, you have the vibe of an ocean. I quite like doing that. I think that's good to do in the bath anyway. It's just my bath is not a rocker. Whose mum has to come in and clear up the bathroom afterwards?
It supposedly didn't leak, but it did. But supposedly it didn't, but it absolutely did. I just, Andy's bathroom, after every time he has a bath, water all over the floor, isn't there? It's pretty bad. A lot of rubber ducks, a lot of accurate models of World War II battleships. strewn about the place.
Do you know, it's still, so Andy, I know that sometimes you read these things and you think you want to have that in your own home. That's often how you are. You can get seawater delivered to your house still to this day. Yeah. I found a place if you want the... details i'll forward them on you can get 20 liters uh sent to your house for 19 pounds and um it's sourced it's seawater that's sourced off the the dorset coastline uh from a deep water supply
And so this is largely for aquariums and so on that need to have water delivered to them. I'm still interested. It's such a shame because I literally just watched Andy write down all those details he gave him. And now he's still going to have to get a fish. I've written 20 litres, 90 pounds.
and source dorset it sounds great yeah but yeah it happens like deep sea water i think is like a trendy thing that's supposed to be good for you right because the minerals go down to the very deep part of the water and all the carbon goes down there and it can't
really get anywhere out so there's a lot the minerals in there are really really awesome apparently and it's supposed to be good for you i think like some sports people use it to rehydrate because it's supposed to have more chemicals in it but where's the evidence of they're any healthier than the rest of us
No, I've heard that. I think that's plausible. And also, but shallow seawater, genuinely, there is a problem in the UK with lots of sewage. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah, but you would fish the turds out, wouldn't you, before you drink it? And there's our slogan. We fish the turds out. May contain turtles. Prepared in a facility which contains turtles. We've made our best efforts. I found some cool waters that exist out there. Melted water. Would you drink melted water? So melted, so it was frozen?
I've had water that comes from icebergs. Yeah, so this is Lithuania. But what's interesting is they grow and create the iceberg, and then they melt them. So it's not natural icebergs. And then they put that melted ice into a bottle. And so, yeah, apparently it tastes like puddle water. But it won the Lithuanian product of the year 2013. It won gold for that. They don't have a lot going on in Lithuania, do they? That must have been a thin year. That's winning. A thin year in Lithuania.
Yeah. Also, interestingly mentioned just a few minutes ago, Loch Ness Water. is now bottled. It's taken, it's put through filtration systems, and they sell it. For example, the AIG Women's Open Golf Championship in 2024. It was the official sponsor, so all of their players were drinking Loch Ness water. Okay, now I wasn't interested in that until the very end. Now I am. Finally, the crossover of interest between you and Dan. Sliver.
Yeah, the most famous person who would have done the sea bathing thing down in Margate is T.S. Eliot. Yeah, T.S. Eliot came down and he did it. And he took time off from his bank job. He moved down there and his wife came with him. And that's where he started properly writing The Wasteland again.
and is that based on margot yeah my house gets a shout out it's quite cool um yeah and so in the wasteland there's only one moment where you see through the eyes of t.s elliot as in like as in he's sitting in a spot looking up and that's by a bus stop down on Margate Beach as he was there using the sea air to recover. Has it got a plaque?
It did, and that's down now, unfortunately. And what's even more annoying for T.S. Eliot, we did a great fact that his name is an anagram of toilets. It is literally right next to the public toilets. People see the plaque saying T.S. Eliot and they just think it's a massive typo. LAUGHTER No, right next to his plaque is in block words, toilets. They put underneath in brackets, wasteland, but that didn't help anyone.
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 all be found on our social media accounts. I'm on Instagram under the name Schreiberland. Andy? I'm on...
blue sky at andrew hunter m james i'm on linkedin under my real name nice what's your real name uh and anna You can email podcast at qi.com or you can tweet at no such thing or Instagram at no such thing as a fish. Yep. Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. Do check it out because you'll find there all of our previous episodes. You will also find a link to our awesome private members club, Club Fish, where we put lots of bonus episodes and fun things happen there. Do check.
that out otherwise just come back next week because we will be back with another episode and we'll see you then goodbye