No Such Thing As A Levis Jury

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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 am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky, 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 when Socrates lost feeling in his penis, he asked his friend to sacrifice a cock. Wow.

When you say sacrifice his cock, does that mean he swaps it over for Socrates' one? Yeah, like a battery swap. Have you rubbed it? Have you put it in the right way around? It's like a literal organ donor. Yeah, this is very... wording of a very serious story about someone who had to commit suicide um so it's 399 bc wow i didn't actually read the story he was executed by himself yeah i think that is a difference it is

so bizarre the state yeah i don't know if we do this anymore in any countries that the state sentenced him to suicide which i don't know if you can call it suicide when the state but they gave him the hemlock and he took it anyway and the effect of it because he was so

hardcore Socrates. And he was so, had his shit together. Hemlock usually had quite violent effects on people, but according to the people who are around him. With him, it just made him go numb gradually from the feet up. It crept up his legs and... As it reached his groin, the numbness of the hemlock as he was killing himself, according to Plato, he spoke his last words, which were, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. We owe a cock to Asclepius. Don't forget to pay that down.

And then he died. And Asclepius was a god. This is not a person he had borrowed a cockle from. Sorry. And we should say we're in 4th century Athens. That's the other thing we should say. BC. Sorry, 4th century BC Athens. was the god of healing yeah the idea is that whenever you were sick and you got better you sacrificed a cockerel to Asclepius yes but he saw his death as a recovery from life almost like he wasn't scared of death was the point it's been cured

Sickness of living. It's very cryptic. And also, you can't ask him, what did you mean by that exactly? Because he's literally just died. So there are a few theories of, or maybe... he's making fun of the pythagoreans because they saw cockerels as being sacred or maybe he was alluding to something else but it seems likely that exactly he was saying actually life is the illness yes Nice. Real chinstroker. He was a funny man, wasn't he? He was a funny guy. There's a big theory that he didn't...

die of hemlock really i mean he died of hemlock but it wasn't hemlock that made him go numb because hemlock doesn't make you go numb no but as i said he's a very special man i think there are other theories the suggestion is that he had a lot of opium mixed in with it To kind of take the edge off a little bit. Because there was a guy in the 18th century described the effects of hemlock.

There was a guy called Fergus Caird and he was living in the village of Talisker and he mistakenly ate some hemlock roots thinking it was carrots. Oh no. And it said his eyes did roll about, his countenance became very pale, his sight had almost failed him. frame of his body was all in a strange convulsion and his pewdender retired so inwardly that there was no discerning whether he had been male or female. But it was quite a fact he would make you convulse and stuff. Was he alright in the end?

This guy actually got better. They basically gave him loads of stuff to make him vomit and make him... shit himself until it all got out of his system and he just about survived. What about his pudenda? Did they reinflate? Not recounted. That's interesting about the opium because that...

kind of suggested it's like the equivalent of a last meal when you're on death row. It's like, you're going to be drinking this. What would you like as your mixer? Yeah. What do you want in there to make it go down nicely at the end? Can I have a hemlock and opium? Oh, he's already got Pepsi. Is that okay? be a max unfortunately we should say what he was sentenced to death for yeah yeah so corrupting the youth corrupting the youth and also impiety oh and he'd been

teaching young people critical thinking, which was frowned on. And he'd also probably not been taking religion completely seriously. And Athens was a very religious society. And also, the other sort of context is, like, Athens had had this really rough time. It was sort of... It was in the golden age of democracy, but they'd just been really walloped in a war by the Persians. And, you know, it was just it was a very rough time.

And there's a theory that people were willing to put up with Socrates, who famously asked provocative questions, didn't accept the established version of things, like he was a provocateur, he was a thinker. And there was a theory that when it was going fine for Athens, people were willing to put up with that. And then when...

Athens was really doing badly, people said, this is subversive now, so you're going to have to knock it off. He was tried for that. He was tried by a jury, and it was a massive jury. It's not like your classic 12 angry people. It is 501 jury members. The Levi's jury. Absolutely. And it was the one extra so that you don't get a tie when it comes to the voting. It would be bad luck to get 250 all, wouldn't it?

Exactly. He ended up with a close margin. 280 voted that he was guilty versus 221. It's not that close. Well, I guess it's... In a modern democracy, that's a resounding mandate. Well, what's even crazier is that he lost it 280 to 221. That was just to find him guilty. Then there was another vote to see what the sentence should be. He said, well, I think you should give me free lunch for life. Like he was a joker, right?

pissed off the members of the jury including jury members who said that he was innocent and even they voted for the death sentence because i was so pissed off by that joke that he made yeah because i think it's a weird thing to ask the newly guilty party

What do you think your punishment should be? It's a bit like asking a toddler, isn't it? Yeah. But maybe that was a little bit like Twist playing your own games to Socrates. You're the one always asking us bloody questions rather than giving us answers. Well, we'll ask you a question. Did anyone vote for...

the free lunches for life. To be fair, he did get free lunches for life, probably. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't imagine he had to pay for the hemlock and opium. Maybe it was his clever way of saying, I think I should be put to death.

couple of days but that i should get the food in the prison in that time like there was this clever way of saying yes put me to death yeah it's got to be a clever way of saying something because that was what he did wasn't it well actually like you know what he was sentenced to death But then his mates bribed the prison guards and said, we'll get you out of here. And he said...

No, you're all right. I'll just take my punishment. And his idea was that the law of Athens had protected him all the way through his life. And so it would be inconsistent to say, well, now I think that because the laws are against me, I shouldn't follow them anymore. Grateful. That is good. And he was 70 as well. So going on the lam would probably...

I mean, just surviving in ancient Greece outside Athens was probably hard. Yeah, he must have been in terrible shape. Ancient Greece, age 70, 71. Tom Cruise is 63. So let's put this in context. Socrates was only a few years older than Tom Cruise is now.

Now, so Socrates' method... was really good you know you'd say so what do you think you just get someone into a conversation say so what do you think about this this matter or another and they'd say their opinion and then he would slowly unravel them oh yeah anytime they said something he said well hang on you said just a moment ago that uh

this other thing was true so how can those both be true and you would end up with both of you in a state of aporia where neither of you can further define the idea that is under discussion and there are lots of anecdotes written about socrates getting into conversations with people who end up just saying to him

Sorry, I have to go. I have nothing more to say. I'm on my way to work. Fuck off! He's basically like a charity mugger outside the station. Sorry, just one minute. What do you think of free speech? Did he get punched much? I don't know. I imagine you're in the groceries and you're behind Socrates and he's questioning the seller. Would you punch someone for that? Try to not engage Dan. You should see him in the 10 items off you line.

What is an item? That's a bunch of grapes. Is that one item? Is that 12 items? He did used to cost people in the gym quite a lot when they were exercising, which maybe isn't a good idea if you want to avoid being punched.

he was in the gym causing ruckus and starting fights, I actually think he would have held up on his own because we do picture Socrates as this older philosopher walking around barefooted. You know how I picture him? Exactly how he is in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. and i also pronounce him socrates yeah exactly um we picture him as this philosopher but actually he was a decorated military hero he went all the way up to 48 he was still going to battles he was still in front line and that

I just didn't know that about him at all. I've just had this old man philosopher in my head. But it does raise some questions because so the three main people in his life he wrote about him were Aristophanes, Xenophon and Plato. So a huge amount from Xenophon. And I hadn't realised he's safe.

Xenophon in the middle of battle. So in the Peloponnesian Wars, Xenophon was dying. It's a little bit like the Two Little Boys story. Xenophon's lying there dying. He trots up, says, do you think I'd leave you dying? Tosses Xenophon over his shoulder and carries him out of battle. one hand while fighting people with the other i thought they both had a wooden horse or something yeah that's the trojan war you're thinking

No way. Did you just make that joke? That's incredible. What is the two little boys story? Yes, they start off with a wooden horse, but you've obviously never made it to verse two, where they go into real battle. Yeah, they grow up. Do they grow apart?

and then they come back together, one of them saves the other's life. Yeah, it does ring a bell now. It's a tearjerker. Anyway, then Xenophon wrote loads of really obsequious shit about him for the next 50 years, but of course he did, he saved his life. And we also get a lot from Plato, because these are all his students.

right and plato writes all the really smart things that socrates thought but actually it kind of starts off like that but then towards the end it's just whatever plato thinks and he's like oh yeah yeah Socrates thought that Travmira, the best team in League Two this season. Yeah. So you just like, you never know where Socrates ends and where Plato starts. Is it right that there's no...

written stuff by Socrates. There's no record of any of that. He hated writing. He was against it. He thought it would ruin people's memories. So it has proved. And well done him. In fact, that's the reason that a lot of historians apparently really love the Bill and Ted movie.

Because in it, you can't understand what he's saying. And that is very on point with the fact that we don't know anything that he actually said. Right. Yeah. So it's a perfect representation of Socrates. Okay. I haven't seen it, but I am going to counter the claim. it's a perfect representation of Socrates nonetheless. Is that fair? No, not fair. It is the most triumphant movie. Was there a Mrs. Socrates? Yes, there was. She was called Xanthippe?

yeah saying it right very useful for us at the moment because we're researching the x series of qi as is xenophon actually yes so they had three boys And they lived in near poverty while Socrates went around the city asking people weird questions. Does this remind you of anyone? Dan Schreiber. Three boys. Yeah, near poverty.

You're always just going around asking people weird questions while Fen is saying, we need to sort out this or that. If Dan's the great philosopher of our time, we are really good. Just another Xanthropy thing. This is a mystery that I got too deeply into, so I'm going to drag you down.

the original shrew. She's, you know, known throughout medieval history. She's the shrewish wife. She's mentioned in The Taming of the Shrew as the archetype. And then a shrew was discovered in the late 19th century and it was named Xanthropes Shrew by the person who discovered it. Obviously after Xanthopy. But get this, its other name is the yellow-footed shrew.

Now, as I'm sure you'll know, xanthos in Greek is yellow, golden yellow, and podies, peh, peh, is like feet. So xanthope sort of means yellow-footed. And it's got yellow feet, but it's named after Xanthipade the woman. What's going on? That's amazing. I got lost halfway through. Has anyone followed? Did anyone know? They named it after Xanthippe, the woman. Because she has yellow feet. No, because she's a shrewish woman. But if you twist the words a bit, it sounds like it's got yellow feet.

yellow feet in Greek. Exactly. That's crazy. Thank you, Andy. Are you the first person to make that link? I think I might be. Wow. Yeah, this is going to blow some stuff open. Let's get in touch with our PR. Let's get that out there. We don't have a beer. Damn it. Daily Express though, if you're listening. I have a favourite Socrates.

sort of thing that he did it's the socrates freeze did you read about this it's written about so plato writes about it in the symposium basically he used to get stuck with ideas in his head that he really needed to think about and when he did he just stopped or moved himself to a convenient out of the way spot and just remain there completely still no matter what he was on his way to so in this he was on his way to a dinner party and he suddenly had an idea he just stands on the porch

and just stays silent. And that's how he lived his life. I have that when I walk into a room and can't remember why I went in. I do the exact same thing. You just stop. Just stand there and look around and go...

What was it I came in here for? Right. Maybe you. Maybe you are the great philosopher of our time. I think we all know that situation. I think that's probably true. But you're saying Socrates is standing on that porch going, who the fuck's house is this? Yeah, that's what I reckon. My favourite Socrates.

Socrates is the... I know who it's going to be. My favourite Socrates. Who is it, Anna, do you think? It's going to be the other famous Socrates in history, the football player. Oh, nice. From Brazil in the 80s. He was known as the smartest... player in the brazilian football team question was he

known as socrates before people thought he was smart or was he called socrates and then he was known as socrates from a very young age people in brazil they'll often get a nickname right but i think i think actually his dad was a self-taught very poor but self-taught guy and he named

tim socrates after the philosopher because i think his brothers were called sophocles and some other very lesser greek person yeah so his dad was a philosopher like he studied philosophy and he had lots of books and basically it was quite sad actually because it was a coup d'etat in brazil and when the army came in they forced everyone to burn all their bucks

And Socrates as a child, the footballer, he watched his dad burning all the books in his library and imagine how painful that was for him because that was what he loved. He loved his books. And did that then set it onto football? He said, well, if I can't read because of this coup, I'm going to...

No, he was just a great footballer, really, because he also had a medical degree. Which he got while he was playing football. Yeah, he was super smart. He was amazing. And then when he got towards the end of his career, he got into politics as well. And he said, if this... military dictatorship doesn't leave and if they don't allow free elections then I'm going to leave and I'm going to go and play in Italy.

And what happened? He went to play in Italy. Oh, what a letdown. I thought you were going to say, and the government backed down. No, in fairness, they did back down eventually. He played one year in Fiorentina, and then the next year they did back down and he came back.

they didn't just abandon the dictatorship because to get him back into the country. No, they didn't, but he was quite instrumental. Yeah. Yeah. He was such a big campaigner for all that. He was such a great guy and he made them all wear shirts saying democracy in their big, this is when he played for the Caribbean. Right. Which is also really cool because obviously the Corinthians...

Great allies of Athens, allies of Socrates. Here we go again. Socrates fought with them in the Philippines' wars. Anna, have you taken Dan's coincidence pills? This is insane. This is insane. I love it. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. We wanted to let you know that this week we're sponsored by Squarespace. Yes, that's right. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform. It's designed to help you stand out, succeed online.

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Okay, there's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that a lot of people in the UK have their heating controlled by BBC Radio 4. That is amazing. Seems unlikely, doesn't it? This is mad. This, I should say, was sent in as an audience effect. It was sent in by Bill Welch. So thank you, Bill. Right, so you all have electricity in your homes, right? Not me with my poverty situation going on. I'm out on the streets anyway, so it doesn't matter. So...

Your electricity is controlled by a meter, and it might be a smart meter if you've had it upgraded, or it might be an old-fashioned one which measures the current going into your home, and you pay for the amount you use, but you also pay maybe a different amount at different times of day. You know, at night, there's more electricity that's going...

unused and like there's more wind turbines going around so there's lots of cheap electricity available some old-fashioned electricity meters can switch between different tariffs different rates they're charging you and The way they do it, switching twice a day, is that they are set up to receive a signal embedded in the BBC Radio 4 longwave radio centre. It's nuts. Twice a day, Radio 4 sends out this message from Droitwich, which is...

It's in the middle of the country and it's a transmitter that can reach the whole country and it just goes blip. And hundreds of thousands of homes across the country switch onto the new tariff that they're paying for their electricity. And this system, it dates back, I think, about 40 years. It's only meant to last another month or so. They're meant to be shutting it down in June 2025. But still, they've got hundreds.

of thousands of homes where they haven't switched over the meters yet. And we don't know what's going to happen. No. Because at the time of recording, they're still going to cut it off. I know!

So good luck. They are trying to switch people over, but they have to accelerate pretty fast, don't they? They're switching people over at like several thousand a day, or they're trying to. But it's hard, isn't it? It's hard, yeah. And there is a petition, just in case anyone's listening and thinks, hang on, I don't want this to happen on change.org. Do check it out.

I think it's going to happen. I think there's time. If you're listening to Radio 4 and you're listening out for this noise, you're not going to hear it. Because it's not a bloop. Not really. It's the signal is sent by the phase information of the wave. So you've got this radio wave sort of pulsing through the country and it's always the same frequency so that you can pick it up on your radio. But if sometimes they put... little changes in where the...

peaks and the troughs are in this wave and those tiny changes are the things that it picks up right and your radio would normally strip away any of those differences any radio that you own you would never hear this now in theory you could build a radio like a ham radio that would pick it up but even if you did that it would just be the tiniest little hum you would have that's interesting so if you are at home and your your radio is off you've turned off radio four

that's it can't get through the the radio right like that's it no that's not how then you pay loads of extra money for heating it's such a stupid system so you have to use their radios on all night your your electricity meter yeah is a radio yeah it contains a tiny little rod with iron in it yeah and that's an antennae and that can receive 198 kilohertz radio waves and any signal that comes in on that radio wave will be picked up by that little rod yeah and so that is kind of active

like a radio but you can't get you can't get test match special through your electricity so okay so if i lean up close i won't hear the archers theme tune okay that's good to know test match special isn't

Played on Radio 4 anyway. No, it's alright. Isn't it? They got rid of it a few years ago. Oh my god. I think that's the saddest part of all this stuff, actually, that Tasman's special isn't on Radio 4 anymore. Right? Not even Longwave. Because the reason they put it, like, we should say Longwave.

Like most people listen to FM or probably now digital, right? But longwave was because there are about 90,000 homes in the country which couldn't get FM radio. And you would have to carpet the country with transmitters to make that signal available absolutely everywhere. So for those homes, they just had the longwave signal.

which can get anywhere and also if you then have a program that lasts for five days like test matter special you just shove it on long wave so you don't have to stop all other radio 4 for a week but this is this is why the heating has had to be stopped right it's not about the heating systems changing over it's about radio 4 saying

No one's using longwave anymore. So also, this will be probably news to maybe five people left in the country. They're stopping broadcasting over longwave. And this is just the knock-on effect where these guys are going, hang on, that's going to stop my heating. Although it doesn't really affect that many people.

For instance, if you go to Curry's and try and buy a radio, I think of all the radios they sell in the entire country, there's only one of them that will pick up long wave signals these days. Really? Is that true? We're shooting ourselves in the foot by turning off long wave. Sorry?

When the internet stops, when it breaks, we're going to need a good, reliable backup system, and that can be longwave. Yeah, well, that's probably there, right? For us to still use. No, it's not. This is the weird thing. The whole point of it is that... they can't get these handmade glass valves there are these big glass valves which make the long wave signal work and um

The BBC bought the entire global supply some years ago, which was 10. And you need two of them to make the transmitter work, right? How long do they last? Well, between one and 10 years. So, you know, so... They're down to their last two now. They've got no spares in the cupboard. They're using their last two valves. When one of those goes, the system goes. One interesting thing about the long wave, especially this thing in Droitwich, is you have to send out a free...

frequency and it has to be exactly 198 kilohertz, right? But how do you make sure that the frequency is always the same when you're sending this signal out? Yeah. I don't know. Well, they used to have a thing called an Essen ring. And it was made of quartz. And if you apply voltage to quartz, it vibrates at a very precise frequency. And it had to be in a perfect ring. And you had to sort of hang it up by nylon threads. It's so cool.

cool the technology i know used to have and one of these existed inside the droid witch thing so that you would always have the exact frequency and now they do it with rubidium so they get some rubidium atoms like a gas and Rubidium atoms, rubidium 87, the isotope, they always transition between two energy levels. This is quantum physics now, which are exactly 6.834682610 gigahertz apart.

And that's basically an atomic clock. That's what that is. Yeah, because this is how we used to keep time in Paris, wasn't it? With the quartz before they came up with the better version. That's how my Casio works.

Yes. Actually, I'm not even joking. It has a small piece of quartz in. That's how a digital watch works. So yours works in the same way that the Essen ring would work. Obviously, you don't have rubidium atoms in there. I didn't spring for that. I saw it on Amazon as an option. It's like,

But it was three quid more, and I thought, no, stuff that. But the Atomic Clock inside Droitwich not lose more than one second every 3,000 years if it was a watch. Wow. Which is pretty good. Although we're now up to, with Atomic Clocks, ones that won't lose a second.

in 30 billion years. Yeah, we've got too perfectionist-y, haven't we? It's like having to find the next digit of pi. Who cares? We've gone far enough. A secondary 3,000 years is still, if you'd started that when we invented farming... and came to now it would still be within three seconds which I think is good I just think that's good Socrates would be almost a second late if you had a meeting with him It doesn't matter he's frozen half a mile down the road anyway

I had to refresh my memory from the old GCSE of physics of how on earth all these waves bloody work. And so in case you need it, long wave hugs the ground, which I just like the idea that that's why it can get to all of those places.

is that like some sort of weird cartoon character just clings just above the ground so it can gallop over mountains and humps and everything whereas so if you're in a valley you still get it exactly so is it bouncing off the sky sometimes it is but more important with the bounce of the sky and i think this is the very cool thing is shortwave reception so shortwave relies on the ionosphere which is the ring in our atmosphere of charged ions

And the reason they're charged is because the sunlight bashes into atoms in the daytime in our atmosphere. And it causes them all to react with each other and lose electrons and they become ions. So it's all very electrically charged. And we use that ionosphere shortwave to bounce radio. signal up and then back down to us.

What I quite like about that is that that means that you'd get much better reception at night on the radio just because of how the ionosphere works. So basically, in the daytime, the ionosphere has been all charged up by the sun, so it's lots of... like free electrons, wandering around looking for a partner. And so the radio wave goes up like someone going into a ballroom full of dancers looking for partners. The sexy stuff, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And it's harder in the daytime to get through that ballroom because the dancers keep on trying to dance with you. They're these free ions being like, hey, pair up with me, pair up with me. But in the nighttime, they all chill out. They recombine with their normal partners because the sunlight's gone away and stopped stirring them up. so the radio signal of your shortwave radio can just go straight through the dance floor without anyone, you know.

assaulting them which is all well and good but you can't play cricket at the night time so the terrible irony is you can never listen to test that special with a good signal that is the ultimate point is it's pointless what good radios on at three in the morning Droit Witch played part in D-Day. Did it? Yes, it did. The D in D-Day stands for Droit Witch. Droit Witch Day. The Day to the Landings was broadcast.

from the Droitwich transmitter because there were people in France, the resistance, they were getting signals from Britain. And how do you send a signal all the way to France? Well, it's pretty difficult unless you have a big old tower that can send long wave.

And so they did. And they could pick up the BBC French service from there. And they played like a poem by Paul Villan, I think. And when they heard that poem, they knew that this was the time to... Basically, what they did was they would kind of cause...

us with the germans and like you know just be a pain in the ass if you're gonna blow up the railways blow them up now yeah exactly yeah yeah just keep them occupied in various oh ironically you're the one who's occupied but keep them keep them occupied while we're going on

to the beaches so the signal was like create a distraction yeah yeah cool can we say what the line was it's so cool so as you say james it was a poem by paul verlaine who was a 19th century quite avant-garde gay poet like he was was he the one who had an affair with rambo i think

I think he did. Not Rambo the... No. Dad's looking interested. Tell me more. Who's Rambo? Arthur Rambo is the poet as well. Yeah. They were like the romantic poets of France. Yeah, they were terrific. That's a disappointing movie night. when I rented that movie. Rambo First Blood. Actually, Total Eclipse starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rambo is a great film, Dan. Wow. Yeah, there you go. So the poem stars...

The long sobs of autumn violins wound my heart with a monotonous languor. Very poetic. So when they broadcast the first half, that was a signal to the French resistance, invasion is going to be within two minutes. Two weeks, you've got two weeks to get ready. And then they broadcast the second half of that line, which was, you've got 48 hours. The French service broadcast all of these phrases, some of which were meaningful, like...

Molas's tomorrow will bring forth cognac. That just went into France. It might have been done in Morse code. And then John has a long moustache. And some of these phrases were meaningful to the resistance, and a lot of them were nonsense, just to confuse the Germans, basically. And the Germans knew the significance of the Verlaine poem. There was an officer, a German intelligence officer, who said...

okay, the invasion's coming within 48 hours. And he passed the message on, but it did not get through to the army who were actually in charge of Normandy and trying to man the beaches. Did he go shortwave? Screwed it up. Yeah, the warning wasn't passed on.

That's mad, really. It's huge. That's a big counterfactual. Well, the amazing thing is also the Germans sent some signals from Dreightwitsch as well. Didn't they? They had someone on the inside. And so they could use the Dreightwitsch transmitter to send their...

own signals to people in france right there was a german spy in droidwich yeah they don't know who it was but they assume it was someone working at the bbc or something that's crazy that's cool i like the long wave can go through water as well and that was submarines would use long wave

to get their radio, their Radio 4, they would literally use to get it. I think they still do. Yeah, they still do. But obviously, at the end of this month, they won't, right? What are they going to do? I don't know. They've obviously got a new thing. They're going to swap two. But that was the thing, I'm sure we've said it, where in war...

time, you would make sure that England was still there, basically, while you were underwater, if Radio 4 was still going. They've probably gone BBC Sounds now. That's true. They probably pre-download before they go. I do love codes. I feel like we should do this at some point. There's a whole period of an American radio where they would put a code for the listener at the end of a radio.

show so it would be like a little bit of morse code and you had a decoder at home as part of the fan club so we'd give little teasers for what's happening in the episode that you were going to hear the next day or the next week that's a really good idea because we know that you listening to this almost certainly stop listening before we say art.

email addresses at the end because we've seen the figures we know when the drop-off comes yeah are you saying we should put them in morse code at the start of the podcast no i'm saying we put something special at the very end so people are forced to listen to us saying yeah i'm on instagram Yeah. All right, we're going to do it. We can just tell people we'll put something special there. What should we put? Crossword? That's the most fun I think. What about Sudoku? So I'll do the first box.

Blank. You're gonna listen next week. In just 81 episodes time, you've made your own Sudoku grid. This is great. This'll get people listening.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Andy Warhol would regularly have his wig cut by a barber and then return the following month wearing a new, longer wig.

Very annoying for that barber. Yeah, how did the barber react? Well, this is Andy Warhol we're talking about. He, as well as being an artist, was an art piece in himself. And the barber would have known and would have enjoyed what they were doing. And actually, you know, like at the moment, if you're a...

barber you have to sit there waiting for your customers to grow hair but if they just come in and buy some hair for you to cut it's giving you more work yeah that's a good point yeah was it so that his friends would kind of slowly see his wig get longer and shorter so it looked more realistic

Yeah, well, I think as well like this is one of the most photographed socialites in America at a time He wanted to make sure that his look was ever-changing. It was sort of in fashion The wig was a huge part of his life by the way because his wig is a very obvious way

of Gundy Warhol's, isn't it? It's silvery, isn't it? I know you had hundreds of wigs. But iconic. So he basically started going... bold when he was in his 20s and he really didn't want this and there's a lot of early art pieces where it clearly is playing on his mind there's there's a piece that he did called

bold question mark where uh he just showed someone gradually becoming bold and sketches and so he took it very seriously and uh there's a huge collection of andy warhol wigs that are out there now they were all very nicely made by a man who was called Paul Bociccio. They were iconic wigs. Yeah. You could buy one in 2006 at auction for $10,800, at which time it was the most expensive wig ever sold. Oh, yeah. Has it been overtaken? Three times. Do you want to guess? Oh, yeah.

Who's Big Wigs? You can get them all. Big Wigs. Marge Simpson? Oh my god. Let's try some real life people. Okay. But Big Wigs is a good... name for when I turn this into a Channel 5 format. Yeah, absolutely. I'll take my usual 10% fee. Yeah, I feel like we might struggle after the first episode. In fact, after the first question. I'm struggling now. I'm thinking of people...

iconic weird artists like Salvador Dali. Think of more famous, very famous. Edna Everage. Edna Everage. Really good call. Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson in at one. $75,000. Did you wear a wig? Was his a wig? He did wear wigs later on, so he was in a... commercial for pepsi yeah and there was a fire or he burnt his hair basically and he had to wear wigs for a while after that it was pyrotechnics that went wrong during the advert recording and his head lit up he didn't even notice you can see the footage where he's still dancing and his head is

Oh, so that's number one. Other famous wig wearers, so... Go for more famous people who might have happened to have worn wigs at a certain time. Dolly Parton. close, but no. Give us one clue that's sort of like... The most famous woman of the 20th century. marilyn monroe and elizabeth taylor oh double yeah you kind of spoiled the format by getting them so quickly fill another 24 minutes of this show but it was elizabeth taylor's Right.

Come back next week. We'll desperately be hoping for some big news in the wig world. And he kept hundreds, didn't he? Andy Warhol in boxes. Yeah, he was a huge hoarder. He collected everything in his life. There's a weird massive, I think there's an Andy Warhol museum somewhere. Maybe, is it in Pittsburgh, which is where he was from? Yeah. But it's got wherever it is.

He's got 50,000 of his things or 100,000, you know, sort of many floors of ticket stubs and old. He basically, at the end of every day, he would get a big cardboard box and anything that he had left over, like half a sandwich or a smoked cigarette or something. He would just pour it all into that box and he would mark it time capsule.

and then just put it to one side. And the Andy Warhol Museum has hundreds of these and I don't think they've all been opened. No, so back in 2007 there was a journalist who was invited to see some of the boxes being opened so they had 600 boxes of these things.

I think only like 80 of them had been opened at that point. And they had just no idea what you'd find in it. So he was there as they opened it and they found an unopened Lionel Richie CD. But then they found things like a mummified foot that he bought. a sort of sale you know like a garage sale and that he kept in

This is a format, James. I'm sorry, but when the wig show comes to the end of its natural life after many seasons, I think Andy Warhol's big box open is a good... Yeah. It's like Storage Wars, where you bid against each other for what's in a box, and you might... get a half-eaten sandwich or you might get millions of flies. That's a fun concept. Are any of them moving or ticking?

It's very much something you can get away with if you're a very famous artist. But if I did that as an ordinary human being, my friends would think I'd gone completely mad. It's unsustainable for all eight billion of us to do this with all of our things. but also the wig became its own thing in his life where it could act as him so there was a whole tour

in colleges and instead of going he sent an actor i think the guy had his own hair but he cut it and he colored it to exactly andy what it was so iconic that look and he wore dark glasses can we can we say what he was called yeah absolutely he was called alan midget yeah

I'm so sorry for mispronouncing something for Comic Effect. Alan Midgett. It had an E at the end, but he put that E on. It didn't have the E originally. Yeah, thank you very much. And basically, people were very annoyed with that.

Andy Warhol when they found out that he'd sent Alan Minget in his place just in sunglasses in a way. Did they know straight away when he came up or would they see the whole talk? Basically, they screened an incredibly boring film that Andy Warhol had shot and then Andy Warhol... was that he didn't answer any questions so you'd have a question and answer session where he'd say like two word answers yeah i think people did

get pretty quickly they eventually did get it and it was a bit it was a bit confusing and the people around andy would say isn't it fascinating some people who'd even met andy would then meet paul maget and say wow andy lovely to see you again and he was like if enough people around

a person believe it is the person then they get confused into thinking it is and that was the case and he said they got a better deal because actually maget gave more answers at the talks than andy would have he was more personable he was more likable supposedly he was caught when he ran out of silver hairspray.

And people were so annoyed about this when it was discovered that one Oregon College made Andy Warhol swear on a Bible that he was Andy Warhol before they let him do the event. Because it was to students, these talks, basically. And I think people had paid.

It feels better to see the double because you're seeing an Andy Warhol work of art. As Dan says, Andy Warhol made himself a work of art, didn't he? It was like everything he did you had to appreciate. And some people didn't get it. This guy is the Socrates of the 20th century. I'm sorry.

He's going around irritating people. Not answering any questions, only asking them. He was a weird guy. He did a lot of art which was about replication and... uniformity and so one of his most famous things is the paintings of Campbell's soup can yeah that's what made him famous really yeah but This was 1962, and it was his first big solo show, so it was his debut to the art world. It was not a success. He sold five? Really? Yeah.

in fact i don't even know if he sold five like a few of the two were sold and a few more someone said yeah keep that back for me you know it was a failure and the gallery owner then said actually i'm not going to sell any of these i want to keep the series together But I think it's interesting that Campbell's didn't know about it because obviously he wouldn't have worn them or anything. But then people started wearing Campbell's soup.

clothing because this work of art had become popular. And then Campbell Soup gave him a commission to paint a can because their chairman was retiring. So they've got this weird relationship. Then they threatened to sue him later on. Then... they made their own dress out of soup can labels. If you sent them one dollar and two labels, they would send you a dress that looks like Campbell's soup can labels. So it was for anyone, it wasn't like high fashion.

No, no, no. It was just a sort of an offer. But it was based on... That's a great value dress. And two labels. It's still a great value dress. But he just sort of dragged this... perfectly innocent soup company into the world of high art and then they started engaging with it off the back of it can i ask you might not know this but if that was such a failure at what stage did

he'd become not a failure. Do you know what I mean? I think it was very soon after that. I think it was almost the day after that. A lot of people thought, oh, the soup thing, don't know. And then a few critics said, actually, this is great. Which I'm still on the fence about.

some other people who don't appreciate his art people from his original village because as you say I think he was born in somewhere like Pittsburgh but ethnically he was Russian not Russian Russin, which is this really tiny ethnicity from the Carpatho-Russian mountains. And it's between Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. And that's where both his parents were born before they emigrated to America. It actually...

So he's from a place called Ruthenia, which existed as a nation for one day in 1939. What? Yeah. It declared independence and then immediately was invaded by Hungary. Oh, that's bad luck. Or was there a connection? There was a connection. Sorry. It wasn't that they were thinking, when should we do it? Let's wait. No, we'll wait. We'll wait. Should we do it today? No, no, let's wait. Okay, finally. Let's declare our independence. Oh, fuck. Go on, forward.

There was stuff happening in 1939. I'm not sure if you're aware of that. I understand. But anyway, he's got all these cousins still there in the area. And they kept in touch with Andy Warhol's parents when they were in America. And the parents...

wrote back to their cousins in Slovakia saying he's a painter. And people were interviewed saying until the late 70s, they all thought he just painted houses. They were like, oh, those guys are a house painter. And then there were some good interviews. Like, he's got...

cousin i think her first cousin called julia varsoliver who's from there still lives there and she said um semi-recently in america you don't really need to be good at something you just need to be different uh warhol was just really good being different wasn't he

So he's called Warholar. It was an A originally. But isn't it, I think it's in Slovakia that they have the second largest collection of Andy Warhol art now and memorabilia. So there's an actual museum there that's outside of Pittsburgh. But how are you going to compete with...

600 boxes of mummified feet right like you're not going to come first but yeah so they've obviously embraced it uh now a little bit the person who set up the museum embraced it but he did go around trying to tell everyone to get into him and a lot of his family and people there were like we don't get it we don't like

Right. Whatever. And then he was shot. And then he was shot. By Valerie Solanas, who he put in a few movies. She thought she should have been in more of his movies. He shot me and then I shot him. Yes, I guess so. I think she had a few issues. But basically, she was a member of a feminist organisation called the Society for Cutting Up Men or SCUM.

and she walked into his factory because the place where he worked was called the factory and she just walked in shot him and walked out again and then a few hours later she kind of went to a policeman saying I think the police are looking for me I am a flower child, harass me immediately. And they arrested her. And he survived. Just because if you don't know his story, that sounds like he died. But yeah. It was 1968. This all happened. I thought that the reason she shot him was because...

Because he had lost the script of a play that she had written called Up Your Ass. Or is that where he lost it? But she went to jail either way. Probably for a few years. Yeah, she was declared. She was declared. But the episode of his shooting is insane. It's the kind of shooting you'd imagine in Andy Warhol's mad life. Two friends there. His friend Mario Amaya was also shot and the bullet went all the way through from...

back to front um didn't get any organs but then they called an ambulance and it took half an hour to arrive and in that time more mates turned up found this blood-soaked scene mario was running around going is there a bullet in my back so bullet in my back.

And then Andy Warhol's lying dead. And he was literally declared dead in one of those. You hear that as a fact and you think, no, surely not. But he was taken to hospital. He had no signs of life. And there was a vascular surgeon in the room who said,

hang on, I quite like the soup cans thing. I'm going to really try and sew this guy up. Not true. The doctor didn't know who it was. They thought he was a random tramp. Oh, they thought he was a tramp at first and then they were told he was Warhol when they were operating. Although I'm not saying he wouldn't have operated on the random tramp. No.

Giuseppe Rossi was the name of the surgeon. What a guy. This is an artist, okay? What he did. I'm serious. Warhol's been shot, I think, twice. And really badly. He's in very, very bad nick. He's dead. He's dead. But Rossi opens Andy Warhol's chest, massaged his heart, took out his spleen, and he puts it in order for 12 pints of blood. Right. He's like, we can do this. And he did it. And Andrew Warhol thanked him by giving him 10 posters of Campbell's Soup. Well...

Hang on, that's going to be worth so much. Yes, they were sold after Rossi eventually died. I think his widow then sold it, because I imagine they kept them for life. If I gave a doctor ten posters, that's an insult. What would you pick? Posters of what? Fish tour posters? Yeah, fish tour posters. This is Piniella's dream. We've got to give away ten of our posters. Brilliant. I've got them ready, Dan. Poor surgeons at home after a very hard day's work. There's a life-size model of Groucho.

It's outside.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when Stansted Airport was being planned, locals campaigning to maintain the area's natural beauty... often met in a village called Ugly. Lovely. So initially, this was a fact that I found about the Ugly Women's Institute. We were going to do an Ugly Women's Institute fact, but that's kind of on the internet a fair bit. And when I was researching that...

I found this campaign about Stansted and they were deciding where to put London's third airport. And it turns out that quite a few of the meetings to stop the airport from going around there. took place in Ugly Church Hall. Because Ugly is a village in Essex. And we should say Stansted is...

An airport. It's an airport for international listeners who've not been. It is not a great place to spend time. It's not a beautiful place. It's one of the big three. Gatwick, Heathrow, Stanston. But yeah, they had lots of meetings at this ugly church hall. Some of the ugly residents were pro. So the Ugly Youth Club wrote a letter to the Preservation Society saying that it will bring some life into the area that, according to them, had little around but farming.

said that a lot of young people are moving out of the area. And if you brought in this big airport with all the jobs it created, then maybe it will keep the ugly youth around. And Councillor Jay Lukies responded saying, it is a feeling that the youth has that they're being brought. Brought up among squares. Oh. So, yeah. So it was, you know, it wasn't.

Everyone was against it, but it is quite a beautiful part of the world, actually, around Stansted. Ugly is really nice. I've been looking at photos. It's lovely. As they are, they will tell you. Understandably, they'll get defensive. It's very beautiful.

Ugly church is not ugly. Yeah, ugly green, ugly village hall. There's an ugly farmer's market that happens every now and then. I went on to company's house. There's an ugly coach house. And until 2023, there was a company called the Ugly Indian. And it was based in ugly.

And I can't find out what it was. I assume it's a restaurant. It's not going to be a single person. That would be insane. There's a group called the Ugly Indians in India that kind of clean up potholes and stuff. Really? But it's not that. that's cool no that would be a terrible base from which to clean up bottles yeah i really like the uh the very first mention that we have of ugly written down is in 1041 and it had a different name it wasn't called ugly then oh yeah it was called

Ugly. Are you spelling that? U-double-G-E-L-E. Nice. Ugly. And actually the locals there, the locals there don't call it... ugly the posh ones who were living there they like to call it This was told to a reporter called Laura Fiddler who was down there trying to find out all the most interesting things about ugly. Laura Fiddler's misunderstood the jokes on her.

kilometers north of Stansted Airport so Stansted is named after a town called Stansted Mount Fitchett which is just outside where the airport is so it's not inconceivable they could have called it ugly airport

That would have been terrific. Other nearby villages include Little London, Mole Hill, Maggots End, and Hope End. So Hope End Airport would have been a good one, wouldn't it? That's good. There is a nearby village called Nasty, which is 12 miles away. It's a long-running... I think it's just a joke reputedly there was a newspaper headline once nasty man marries ugly woman I suspect it never happened sadly quite near to another little village called Matching Thai

Which is a great name. It's such a good name. It's TYE. Have you guys, Dan or Andy, heard of Matching Thai? No. No. I'm really surprised you haven't, because Rick Mayall lived there until he was three years old. That is a real gap in our knowledge, Dan. We're gonna have to send in our badge and our gun back to Rick Mayall, so I think they shouldn't let us have a gun. I thought you had a badge and a big frying pan.

More Essex place names, just as we're on those. There's Shallow Bowles. Shallow, not shallow. Shallow Bowles, Wigglybush Lane. Burnt Dick Hill, Dancing Dick's Lane, and the best of all, Fingering Ho. Come on. Fingering Ho. Oh. Fingering Ho. Yeah, you've said it three times now. We've heard it. I think we understand why it's funny. That's great. Speaking of Dick's related names, there is an Ugly Women's Institute and there was...

It was certainly reported in the late 50s that they decided to change to Women's Institute Brackets Ugly. But then by the 80s, they were back to being the Ugly Women's Institute. And their president in the late 70s was Mrs. Dix. Mrs. Dix was president of the Ugly Women's Institute. Yes. You know the most famous person to visit Ugly ever, I think? Oh, just like passing visit. Yeah. Daphne and Celeste. No. I think more... German. Daphne und Celeste. Tomorrow's German. Well, A hits.

Adolf Hitler. You know what? Right period. Right cabinet, in fact. Okay. Hitler. Can we just pause on the fact that James has a nickname for Hitler? They go way back. A hit? You're just reading it off his tattoo, though. I couldn't fit the full name on my penis. Oh, my God. Wow. Oh, dear. It was Joachim von Ribbentrop. Oh, is it? Yeah. Try putting that on your feet. Of packed fame.

Oh, Pactfay, what? Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop was Russia and Germany. He was the foreign minister. I think this was before his time as German foreign minister. He visited Orford House, which is just outside of it, I think, but it's still in the sort of...

Parish boundaries. And of course, later, he was the first man hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg trials. He was, yeah. I think he might have been the only person who's been to Ugly who was hanged as part of the Nuremberg trials. I believe. And what was that? Like, why was he... He's staying at a hotel the night before a flight from Stansted.

It was a beautiful house that I think was owned by a local toff who invited him over. And he loved England. I think it was Ribbentrop who kept on trying to get Hitler to invade England because he thought it was so beautiful, loved Cornwall. Right. Yeah, probably loved Ugly.

So there was a big argument about Stansted Airport when it came in. So we had two airports in London. We had Gatwick and Heathrow, and they thought we're definitely going to have to build a third one.

And the decision that we were going to need one started about the 50s and 60s. And they didn't actually build Stansted Airport until the 80s. I think it finished in 85, something like that. Because actually, Stansted in the end was... they just did up an old airfield like rather than building like a whole big massive new airport like is what they were planning they kind of rolled back on that idea a little bit and went for the smaller version which was what Stansted was

But everyone obviously got really upset about it. People don't like airports near them, do they? Understandably. And it wasn't even... During the Second World War, it was the ninth largest American airbase in East Anglia. It might not have been the obvious choice, actually. There were bigger ones. the war it was used as a base for german prisoners of war who were going to be sent back to germany and actually well if you go to stansted now they've they've really preserved that sense

Of what it must have been like, yeah. They nearly built the third airport in a place called Wing.

in buckinghamshire yeah the um there was locals there weren't happy about it either and formed the wing airport resistance association but that was going to be a really big airport and it was after the oil crisis in the 70s they decided that actually we should do a smaller one and that's when they went to Stansted so we could have had a wing airport and actually where the airport was going to be there's now they put some trees there and you can go and visit that sort of

patch of forest of where there should have been an airport Is that a big tourist hot spot in Buckinghamshire? Just NIMBYism in general. You know, there's NIMBY not in my backyard. This is what people say when they don't want to think. The alternatives are the banana people.

And that is build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. Which is good. That's brilliant. And there's an idea in, I think it's more of an American thing, but it's cave, which is citizens against virtually everything, which is another good. Nice. That's really good.

paradigm example of this. This was something that happened in Medway in Kent, so not far from Essex, three years ago. Medway Council, they really wanted to add solar panels to their headquarters. It's kind of a post-war modernish block. It's not sort of...

It's not incredibly exciting to look at. They thought, let's stick some solar panels on there. So the Medway Council put in an application to Medway Council to put solar panels on their own headquarters. And they were shocked when Medway Council turned down the request by Medway Council. saying no this is not appropriate at all the weird thing is it already had solar panels on it and they were just like can we put some more on it

Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our social media accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. Andy? I've joined Instagram. Oh, I'm at Andrew Hunter M. James? Well, I might leave Instagram then if Andy's there. I'll go for TikTok. Knows each thing as James Harkin. Yep. And if they want to get to us as a group.

we're on instagram on at no such thing as a fish or at no such thing on twitter or you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of the previous episodes are up there so do check them out there's also links to

our upcoming live shows. We've got one in Belgium in a couple of weeks, and then we're going to be in Sheffield as part of the Crossed Wires Festival. We've also got a link to Clubfish, our secret club, where there are bonus episodes and lots of fun things going on. So check that out. Or you can... just come back next week because we'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.