Comedy of the Week - What? Seriously??

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

In this episode, Dara and Isy are joined by the astronaut Helen Sharman to learn about how humans learned to survive in space - with some diverting conversations about glitter, cat statues, hibernation, and shell suits.What? Seriously?? is a new podcast which combines comedy with quirky history, hosted by Dara Ó Briain and Isy Suttie, who will unravel an extraordinary real-life tale each week with the help of a celebrity guestDara and Isy unearth stories that are definitely true, but also kind of unbelievable at the same time - the sort of stories that make you go ‘What? Seriously??’ when you hear them, but you resolve to tell them in the pub the first chance you get. The twist is that Dara and Isy have absolutely no idea how these strange-but-true tales will unfold and we’ll all be trying to figure it out together – or Dara and Isy will just go off on funny flights of fancy that are tangentially related to the story. They will be drip-fed the nuggets of narrative by a special guest expert who might just know something about the subject.Across the series they will be joined by I’m A Celeb winner Georgia Toffolo, the Aussie comedian Rhys Nicholson, the broadcaster Stuart Maconie, Master Chef star Louisa Ellis, Miles from The Traitors, the comedian Richard Herring, the astronaut Helen Sharman, and Slow Horses star Chris Chung.‘What? Seriously??’ with Dara Ó Briain and Isy Suttie and special guest Helen Sharman. Format co-developed by Dan Page. Story compiled by Gareth Edwards and Dan Page. Producer: Laura Grimshaw Executive Producer: Jon Holmes An unusual production for BBC Radio 4

BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to What Seriously? on Radio 4 in BBC Sound. I'm Dara O'Brien. And I'm Izzy Suttie. And this is the show where Dara and I explore stories that are out of this world, but also true. The type of tale you first laugh off only for it to turn into a lifelong obsession as you try to seek out ever more delicious details. to a lifelong obsession as you try to seek out ever more delicious details. The twist is that Dara and I know absolutely nothing about each week's story, we'll be given information in tiny chunks so we can try and work out what's going on.

Or we just kind of wander off and make our own stories up as it goes along. And we won't be alone in our quest as each episode we're joined by an expert who may know something about what's going on. This week we're delighted to welcome Britain's first ever astronaut and all-round legend Helen Sharman. Hello Dara, hello Izzy. Hello! Helen, lovely to have you here, but what's the title of this week's story? Okay, it's called Suits, Shells and Survival.

Hmm, that's making me think of shell suits. Did you guys have shell suits? Shell suits or track suits? Yeah, like those shiny track suits that everyone wore for about a year in Matlock, which isn't that far from... Yeah, I come from Sheffield. Did you have shell suits in Sheffield? Oh, there were shell suits.

Yeah, we were slipping into them on the seashore. It's a shell suit she sells. She sells shell suits on the seashore. Is it the 90s version? We've gone through a number of industries in this country. There was obviously initially the seashell industry, which was a huge mainstay. Then there's shell suits. I'm not sure what she's selling now. No, vapes.

She sells vapes by the seashore. Kids have less magic in their lives. We had track suits, yeah. Shell suits specifically shiny though. Weren't they somehow double layered or something? I think the trousers might have been the same. I don't know, but you had to wear the suit. You couldn't mix and match. You couldn't get the top of one shell suit and put it with the bottom of another. That was a faux pas, was it?

You can't have the two same slightly different neon yellow. Because it was that, wasn't it? That was the colour scheme for it. Yeah, they were often really bright colours. I remember there was a girl at my school who had one that I really wanted and it was that thing where when you're a child and you want something you can't get it and I was obsessed I used to ask my mum every day if I could have the same shell suit she'd say no you've got a Mickey Mouse

tracksuit I need a shell suit! When I was a kid I wanted one of those tracksuit bottoms where they you had the little loop and that went underneath your foot that could go inside your shoe I so wanted one of those. That's where they had the little loop that went underneath your foot that could go inside your shoe. I so wanted one of those. That's a jod for it. And then when I actually got to do my astronaut training, we were given these very Russian kind of all-in-one, you might call them a flight suit with a grapes and zip right up the front, but they had this little band underneath your foot. I thought finally I've got what I've always wanted. That's why you did it, wasn't it?

I mean, people have different dreams about space, you know, to gaze upon the majesty of the universe, to get a sense of the perspective of the Earth in a great standing, to get a pair of trousers that has an elasticated base. If I have to go to space to get these trousers. The only place they're still in operation. By the way, Izzy, I don't know if you've met many astronauts. Astronauts are great. They're fantastic people. They're really interesting. I don't think she can hear us as I say this, but every anecdote you have, they have a version of it that happened in space.

Honestly, it begins to get a bit... I had a lovely meal last night. Oh, did you? I had a meal once in space. Oh, OK. Everything. They have a version of it, you know, in a zero gravity version of your life. That's just instantaneously more interesting. I mean, you would have said shell suits rather than suits, shells, survivor. Am I right in saying this is not shell suits? It's not shell suits. It would be nice to just take a trip down memory lane on that.

So this is actually the story of how humans learned to survive in space. In 1783, hot air balloons were about to become a thing in France. But King Louis XVI had refused permission for humans to try untethered flight until it was proven safe enough. His initial suggestion of using convicted criminals was quickly rejected by the inventors, who instead elected to use a sheep, a chicken and a duck. Now the sheep was meant to represent humans, the chicken represented a bird that didn't like heights, and the duck one that did and all three survived. Now, fast forward to the end of the Second World War and a battle between four space

programs from the USA, the USSR, the United Kingdom, France, and they also made use of hot air. So much to unpack here. Let's start with how do we know a chicken is afraid of heights? A chicken can fly. I accept that. But it's a huge leap into the chicken's imagination. The reason the chicken can't fly because it doesn't want to be at any kind of altitude. Oh, so it could physically fly, but it decides not to. Equally, chickens never go on roller coasters. You've never seen a chicken on Nemesis. Chicken on a lift, never see a chicken on a lift. I've turned myself around here. I think there's a lot of options that chickens don't like heights. I mean, actually, if you put them on a

bus, they wouldn't go to the top deck. Never go to the top deck in a bus. Even if you go, I'm sorry, the bottom deck is full. They go bop bop bop and then hang on to the pole instead. Yeah, they would. They would. Or they'd sit next to the driver. That'd be so sweet if the driver always had a chicken beside him. Oh, on his shoulder.

Yeah, like a what? Like a like a parrot on a pirate. Yeah, it just feels that among the French aristocracy, there's a lot of we know the mind of a chicken. You don't. You don't. There's other stuff that definitely doesn't like heights. Do you want a second guess? Sheep's attitude towards heights or claustrophobia or any of the other major

human phobias, like whatever? Probably coped with the temperature changes. They were fine. Yeah, I mean, there's a good time and a bad time for them onias, like whatever. Probably coped with the temperature changes. They were fine. Yeah. There's a good time and a bad time for them on that, like whatever. Who knows how the mind machine works in these situations. So there are four space programs. Well, there were many, of course.

But in particular, they were thinking now about the balloons and the space program. The use of hot air in space programs or balloons. Do they want to lift them a bit of the way and then... Oh, a lot of the way! All the way! Is it that they brought them up and then the balloon engine would start and then they'd just unclip?

Exactly, so your rocket would start already way up into the atmosphere rather than having to start on the ground where it's got to go through the thick atmosphere to actually get to a certain height already. So you're relieving that rocket of a whole load of necessary fuel. This seems like a very good idea. This is a really good idea. And also people go to space for longer and longer now, sometimes up to a year.

So they will have their birthday in space. Can you paint things on the balloons? Can they have glitter in them? I think glitter in the International Space Station would be regarded as a bad thing. Can you imagine breathing in glitter? Just constantly having to swim to a sea of glitter because of a poorly thought out party celebration for Yuri the Cosmonaut. All these engineers on the ground trying desperately to reduce the amount of dust

in space and you get Izzy taking up a balloon full of glitter. Sorry, it was my 50th and I deserve a party. Oh, the vibe here is different, isn't it? So tell us, what did they do? The humble hot air balloon remained in service until 1960 carrying fruit flies, so we're back to the animals again, hamsters and even goldfish high into the atmosphere. As more rockets became available in the post-war period in 1963, the French became the first nation to put a cat called Felicette into Earth orbit and return it successfully back home. But as humans looked towards the moon, tortoises were valued for their endurance and resistance

to radiation, which made them excellent test candidates. On the 18th of September 1968, these heroes in a half shell became the first Earth creatures to fly around the Moon, along with some fruit fly eggs, mealworms, plants and other living matter, before successfully returning to Earth. These early missions with animals highlighted many issues of space survival, including the importance of pressurised space suits. Tortoises are exceptional creatures. I have a tortoise myself.

Every winter we put him into the drinks fridge for three months. What's he called? Shelby. They're always called. They're always called Shelby or Sheldon. Or they're called Nippy, Quickie, Fastie, Zippy. There are two directions to go with the tortoise name. Knowing full well he's not going to come anyway. You know, you can call him as much as you want, but you can stick him in the drinks

fridge for three months and then just take them out again. And then, you know, move your champagne back into the drinks fridge. Are you serious? I'm totally serious. Yeah. That's how they hibernate. You put them in the fridge. The perfect temperature for a tortoise is around about, you know, like a Chardonnay like sticking them in the box. It cools down. It just dozes off.

So why were they a good candidate for going up? Is it anything to do with this? Well, I think there is some element of them being relatively easy to secure and keep in one position, but actually these were very particular types of tortoises that went. So I'm afraid Shelby probably wouldn't have been a brilliant candidate. But these steppe tortoises, so they're endemic in Central Asia. I actually saw those just around about when I was doing my quarantine before we launched. And they're lovely little things. They're sort of they're fairly pale yellow, with sort of darker bits of marking also on

their shell. For a long time it wasn't really understood why are they particularly radiation resistant. Quite recently there's been some sort of string of amino acids extracted from the blood of these tortoises. And when you inject those amino acids into other animals, they become radiation resistant too. That's harsh because we keep a lot of radiation within the drinks fridge. The wee... You know, for those cocktails that glow, you know, it's always best to have actual radioactive material. You know, Shelby's cool with that. So he actually could be a candidate. You're training him. Is it a bit like when you, my

husband used to go to football, used to wear his kit in the hope that one of the players would get ill and he'd be called onto the pitch to fill in. You're getting Shelby ready just in case. There's a man from the Russian space program there going, goody, we heard you have Candidates Tortoise. For some reason we are in London and we are looking for Candidates Tortoise for flight. Oh no, like they're patting their pocket at the start of flight going, oh no, we left one of the tortoises in the Rings Bridge in the hotel.

I love the fact that the French cat was called Félicette. Did you say Félicette? They often use strays in these early space programmes and I think she was another stray. And I helped to unveil a statue to her in the United States International Space University. No, really? Because she's been sort of lost, long, sort of forgotten really

because we hear quite a bit about some of the dogs that went into space, maybe the chimps and so on. But we've sort of forgotten almost about Félicette so yes, so she now has her own stature. Oh, and how big is the stature? Cat size, normal size, to the cat? Yeah, I mean, it's on a plinth, so you can sort of, it comes at head height, you don't have to sort of crouch down to, as you would a cat. I'm pretty sure she didn't come back. Yeah, yes, she did, that was the whole point of it, yes, she returned to Earth safely.

And refused to ever speak about it, Refused to give any help at all. Can you tell us anything about the experience of being in space? Not. Not. Oh, I'm delighted I fell a second a statue. Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? Yeah. Because presumably the tortoise went around, so came back as well. They came back too, yes. They didn't quite make an orbit, so they did a flyby around

the moon, which was pretty amazing, and came back and survived along with some fruit fly eggs, mealworms, plants and other living matter. Poor old fruit flies that never get, there's no statue of a fruit fly called Felix. If any animal deserves a statue in science, it's a fruit fly. Everything we know about genetics we know because of fruit flies. They're the single most important creature. The fruit fly, because you can grow them and kill them and grow them and kill them and check them and breed them and breed them and see traits and they're really important. We share so many of our genes with fruit flies.

And are there any statues of fruit flies? No, because either they'd be life size, which would be, no one would stop and pause, or they'd be hideous, they'd be like a massive, and then on the segmented eye, and I'd go, what is that? Like when you pull down the thing and all the kids go, ahhh! Like a giant one. This giant 8 foot fly will kill us all. They tried to put a cape on it to make it more palatable, but it just looks too scary.

But of all the things that have gone up so far, goldfish, hamsters, all that stuff, Foofers in some way are really the most useful, they're the real heroes. The journey that the tortoise did around, around is the same one that Apollo 10 did. Well, yes, but they did it before Apollo 10. Yes, of course. I mean, you don't send a pet tortoise a second. This is What Seriously on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Some of these poor animals didn't come back, right? And they enabled us to understand, therefore, that there is some importance to having spacesuits. Who is the best person

to fix a torn NASA spacesuit? Whoever's nearby will be my first guess, right? Because there's a matter of immediacy about this because your air is coming out. So beggars can't be choosers in many situations. What, with a hotel sewing kit? is your air is coming out. So beggars can't be choosers in many of these situations. What with a hotel sewing kit? I'm just saying if you've ripped your, oh, can we send down for a seamstress? No, I'm your air is gushing out of the suit. They're not going to be like the cuffs must be two inches. Yes, this is very unflattering.

But if you haven't gone into space yet. Oh, OK. You've had a bit of an accident with your suit in terms of tearing part of it. People who make balloons. People who make parachutes. Is it definitely a person? Could it be a tortoise who can fix it? So somebody put some other related fabric-based industry.

So throughout the space race, NASA relied upon the almost entirely female cutters, seamstresses, and assemblers of the International Latex Company, where the likes of Hazel Fellows, Iona Allen and Francine Boris and many others pioneered spacesuit manufacture. So in December 1972, the Apollo 17 lunar mission was halted hours before launch after a spacesuit was torn and critically damaged. Regarded as the best stitcher in the company, Roberta Pelkinton was flown to the Kennedy Space Center with a repair kit in a briefcase handcuffed to her wrist,

saving the mission after a 20-hour race against the clock. I think she arrived at four in the morning and she finished at midnight without a break. That is remarkable. So I think they were specialized in different areas., so of course the loads of them worked on these spacesuits and they, of course, from this latex company that had been producing a lot of materials for heavy industry but also the commercial arm of it where they were using latex in bras, girdles, that kind of stuff. So they

seemed to be really skilled at making things fit very, very well but also really complicated kind of garments made of lots of different layers and hence the spacesuits really difficult to make, but they were brought in for these. And so I think this particular person was really skilled in the leg bit or the boots or something, but it was that part, I think it was the leg that was torn and so she was the leg specialist. That is a level of specialise, I'm saying this, doctors presumably also specialise in I am the leg person. This was just one of many, so I think all of these people were in such a

high-pressured environment trying to make so many of these different spacesuits for the Apollo mission. When they're normally used to making the bras and the girdles and things, they were used to working from patterns. Where if you're making a spacesuit, you're working from blueprints, you're liaising with engineers and other technicians. So it was a whole step up for them and they rose to it, you know, absolutely amazing. And without them, there would not have been an Apollo space program. They've gone from doing something that's aesthetic really to doing something that's a life or death situation. Imagine that dexterity to be able to make these spacesuits and to stitch through multiple layers.

An EVA suit has got bits of the thermal insulation, the radiation resistance, so you've got lots of very fragile layers and you're stitching through all of this. Tiny stitches, every stitch was checked. Also, and it's not said enough, but Armstrong looked amazing. His cups were too interesting. In the old days, the astronauts used to do whale bone, obviously. That was famously the first astronauts did a whale bone. But then it became latex girdles and they said, they felt good and they looked good. And that

was allowed them to do what they wanted to do. It improved their performance. Absolutely. Because they knew that they were being filmed all over the world. They knew every angle. They looked amazing. Absolutely incredible. Have you ever put your spacesuit on again? Like on a Sunday. Just a fancy dress. It's in this science museum in London, so it's now unwearable. It's now touched, I have to wear white gloves. It's not in your wardrobe, in your spare room. You have a wedding dress.

So in the 1970s and 80s, humans moved on from lunar missions to space stations with NASA's Skylab, the Soviet Salyut stations before the famous Soviet Mir space station. The Soyuz TM-12 mission, which included Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoly Artsabarsky and British astronaut me, Helen Sharman, was launched on the 18th of May 1991. I spent eight days orbiting Earth, two days on Soyuz and six days on Mir. Then with another crew of fellow cosmonauts, I returned to Earth on the 26th May 1991, leaving Mir operated by Sergei Krikulov and Tolya Artsabarsky. That summer, the Soviet Union was starting to disintegrate and the following mission was then changed to include

a Kazakh cosmonaut in place of the flight engineer, which meant there was going to be no engineer to replace Sergei in October. So Sergei remained in space along with the new commander Alexander Volkov. When they returned to Earth the following March, Sergei had amassed a record 311 days in space. 311 days in space. 311 days. It's a long old time though, you know, it's like a 10 months of one trip. I mean, anywhere at some point. Oh yeah, the earth, yeah, I've seen it. Oh yeah, yeah, it does that every 90 minutes.

Did you get much time, by the way, to look out? Enough. So, you know, six days on board the space station, so and actually more the two days getting there. So it's Soyuz, that's the transport spacecraft. I mean, it still goes to ISS now, but it was on there where, you know, our work hadn't started. So I took experiments to do on Mir, on the space station. But actually in Soyuz, we were just really existing, operating the spacecraft, staying safe,

talking to mission control, time when we could. So then we could only talk with mission control when we were over the third of the orbit where we were over the Soviet Union and when we were around the other side of the world really. So for two-thirds of the orbit we couldn't talk to mission control at all. So we had about 30 minutes of communication and 60 or so minutes of radio silence, which of course is quite nice if you're an astronaut. You know, you don't want mission control blabbering all the time reminding you to do this, change your mind, can you just do this as well? So, actually, that was a nice time. But yeah, we had two days on Soyuz where there was quite a lot of time to look out of the window and

get oriented and just sort of start to feel weightless. Because that's the other thing, of course, is your body adapts. And it's just, I mean, although it feels very natural and relaxing, I think, floating around feeling weightless, but internally your body fluids tend to migrate more towards your upper chest and your head and then your body adapts to that and your blood plasma volume reduces, but still you tend to lose some fluids as urine as well and so everything sort of shifts around a little bit. It takes a few days before you stop that puffiness looking in your face. Do you like chat about your home life and stuff? If there's spare time on mirrors, often they try in the evenings when the working day was

done and so on, we would just all gather around the biggest window we had. So there was a very large sapphire window on the floor of the space station. There's sapphire because it lets in ultraviolet light, so you can get some really good UV pictures of the Earth, so you get sort of slightly different images than you might with the full sort of normal visuals part of the spectrum. But because it was so precious, it was usually covered by a hatch.

So we were a bit naughty really, but Sergei said it was all right. And so we opened that hatch, which meant that it was large enough for all of us to gather around. So when I got to the space station, there were three of us on the Soyuz, plus the two that were already there, so there were five of us all together. So you can imagine five little heads all the way around this circular window and we would just look out and, but yes, talk about our families and friends who we knew on Earth, in the parts of the Earth that we were orbiting over at the time. And of course, it's that that then, when I got back from space, I realised

what I had not thought about. And when you look back at Earth, you don't think, oh, you know, that was the bit of electronics or the clothing or any of those material items that you want to own or that you had a problem with at home, those are completely irrelevant. It's your family, it's your friends, it's your colleagues, it's those individual relationships that are so important. It's those people that we miss in space. Oh, I want to do it now. Isn't it? Didn't I tell you? Look, I mean, basically that was, it's beautiful, it's very beautiful, but also, oh, have you looked through a window? Yeah, I looked through a window in space. I still want to do it actually, Dara.

I think you're absolutely right. Is it a day's travel back, by the way? Is it like a full day of travelling? Although I took two days to get there, and nowadays, because they can line up the orbits much better and so on, you can get there in just a few hours. So that's really nice. For us, it was like, well, I'd say half an orbit to get back because when you fire, from firing your engines to slow you down, which then brings you back towards the atmosphere. So we're talking 30, 40 minutes, something like

that between firing the engines and actually getting back. Now it takes a while, of course, you've got to separate from the space station and you've got to make sure everything's working as it should. Our re-entry total time is a few hours, but yeah. But the actual journey from that point down, 30 minutes? 30 minutes or so, yeah. That's mad, isn't it? Like that's less than the train trip I did in here.

It's really important to fire your retro rockets at exactly the right time and for the required duration. Because of course, if you don't get it quite right, then you're not going to end up back on Earth where you want to. And there was a time way back where one of the astronauts who was sitting in my seat, it was his job to actually fire the rockets and somebody sneezed at the wrong time and his finger came off the button, right? And then the engine wouldn't reactivate immediately. So they had to remain in orbit for another day before they could then activate the engines to be in the right place to come back, which normally wouldn't be a problem and now wouldn't

be a problem because now we don't get rid of our, what we call the sort of the habitation module in Soyuz. We don't get rid of that until after this activation has been pressed. Then they'd already gotten rid of that and in that is their toilets. So they were relying on emergency toilets only for their entire day. So small changes in operations mean that we have slightly more less pressurized return to earth. What does emergency toilets mean? For men, just imagine a sort of a tube with a bottle that's kind of all sealed. For women, imagine a sort of like a little metal tank, I suppose, a small sort of tank shaped, a sort of body shaped, filled with loads of

a bit like tampons that you just pressed here on. It's so annoying that you have to still go to the toilet when it's... Do you think it would just be not, you're given a pass. Yeah, just 24 hours, press the button, we won't feel like we need to go, nothing will leave our bodies for 24 hours. And it is annoying wearing a spacesuit, right, and trying to use a toilet. So we actively don't drink much before we put on our spacesuits. So we're a bit dehydrated really when we get back for lots of reasons. We're sort of sweaty in the

spacesuit as well. When you get back to Earth you stand up, your body fluids go towards your feet again, so you're going to feel even more thirsty anyways for all those reasons. When you see people, astronauts being handed a bottle of water or cup of tea or something like that when they land this because they really are thirsty. I don't want to do it anymore. The mood the mood's passed on it. Yeah. It's a lot of hassle right there. And also, you just come back and tell people stories about space. Look, I'm teasing about the astronaut stories, right? I once booked Helen when I was a children's television presenter,

like in the 90s. I once booked Helen onto a kids TV show in Ireland. And I think the guy said, well, what else has she done? I said, well, in many ways, she's the greatest guest you could have in a children's television show because she's an astronaut who before she was an astronaut designed ice creams from Mars ice cream. And so God fear we would run out of anecdotes about space. We can get the kids to ask questions about ice cream.

This woman has lived the dream, many dreams, has lived all of the dreams. It's like finding a firefighter who's rescued a thousand cats from trees, but also invented the soda stream. It's everything you need. Yeah, transferable skills, you know. So experiments on ice cream, and before that it was in electronics, but experiments on ice cream, experiments in space. You're still doing experiments. You're still thinking creatively, but technically, right?

You're still able to understand the operations, the makeup of this spacecraft, how to fix things if things go wrong, working teams, that's really important. So actually, although it's kind of, it does sound a bit weird, it's really, really important that you know, I say to young people, you can do your science in so many different ways in the future. And we just can't imagine yet all the different ways that somebody's science can be used. But wow, it's so creative. And there's so many opportunities. And keeps evolving. It's not like, not like history. Yeah, that's done. I mean, that's done. There's nothing new happening there.

There's nothing new. We don't need to know anything now. I know you want to classify it as, yes, it's experiments and... but it's ice cream in space. There has been some ice cream and nobody thinks about all that dried ice cream that you can get in the science films, which never went into space and it's just been made for the people going to museums. But there has been some real, real ice cream. Not very often because you need to keep it pretty cold and there's not much freezer capacity on these cargo ships that go up to the space station. So it's only if there's a bit of spare capacity with all the experiments and then you can transport some food safely along with all the experiments as well. There isn't

a freezer on board the space station that's big enough to cope with food, so it's only in really special occasions, but if there is a special occasion, yeah, they do get some ice cream. But do you mean a special occasion like someone's birthday? It could be. You know, obviously the space itself is very, very cold. Like it's freezing, so what they do, they put it on their own window, so. And then they go, it's the time for ice cream, and they really, really, and this is very important, really quickly open the window. They really quickly open the window and they reach in, they grab the ice cream

and they close it again and then, whoo, and then they have the ice cream. Yeah, then the bullies, then the glitter. Then the glitter and then they all put on their girdles and they go, this is amazing. It's so much more camp than it's traditionally seen as. Okay, I do want to do it. So what have we learnt about surviving in space so much? We've learnt that the French were the first nation to send animals up really high. We've learnt that seamstresses are key to spacesuit manufacture.

And we've learnt that Helen Sharman is not only the first British person in space, she was also instrumental in revolutionary ice cream development. You've been listening to What's Seriously with Dara Breen and Izzy Suttie. Our guest was Helen Sharman. The story was compiled by Gareth Edwards and Dan Page. The producer was Laura Grimshaw, and it's an unusual production for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. I'm Andrew Hunter Murray, host of The Naked Week, a brand new Friday night comedy for Radio 4. Nigel Farage, bit the head off a clanger. and BBC Sounds. Complete words are steely done far longer than the lifespan of a Kyr star-mock policy.

And this sort of thing. The first time a bullet catcher's ever been performed on the radio. And when we got a magician to fire a bullet through a popular current affairs magazine to test the strength of its opinions. Three, two, one. The Naked Week from BBC Radio 4.

Listen now on BBC Sounds.