No Such Thing As A Fish - 41: No Such Thing As Reginald The Red-Nosed Reindeer

Episode Date: December 25, 2014

Episode 41 - In a special Christmas episode recorded live at Tufnell Park, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Charles Dickens' warm-up act, lactose intolerant neanderthals, 19th century copyright pirates, penguins in Christmas jumpers and the patron saint of television.

we run it on qi a few years ago yeah um which was there's no such thing as a fish no seriously it's in the oxford dictionary of underwater life it says it right there first paragraph no such thing as a fish hello and welcome to another episode and no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you this week from the aces and eights bar in top north park my name is dan schreiber i am sitting here with anna chasinski james harkin and annie murray this is our christmas special and once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts in the last seven days and in no particular order here we go we begin with my fact my fact this week is that before

going on stage to read a christmas carol charles dickens had a warm-up routine of drinking a pint of champagne in the morning when he woke up he'd have two tablespoons of rum he would have the pint of champagne at lunch and then just before he went on stage he would have sherry which he would mix raw egg into wow the interesting thing is is that you would think okay charles dickens he probably did one or two readings of a christmas carol if you look into his biography you could almost claim that he was as much a performer as a writer he spent years as a performer he would go on massive tours yeah it's like michael mackentire he was like properly always on one of his tours in america got him two point three million dollars that's how much in today's

money that oh in today's money oh but so another thing he used to do at his tours is hypnotize his wife and also as the warm-up acts i think okay so that was his warm-up routine the warm-up act hypnotize his wife he was really in hypnosis and so he'd bring his wife on stage and show off wow yeah he would what would he make his wife do uh i think he just made a like be able to obey him in every way which maybe she was doing already yeah but it was the 19th century yes so he was really into mesmerism which i mentioned because you like people whose names are directly related to the thing that they created and um anton mesmer came up with mesmerism which is hypnotism you know mesmer had a big tree in his garden that people would come and hug and that's where tree hugging

came from he claimed that he had mesmerized it and made it um given it some of it his hypnotic animal magnetism didn't he yes he did yeah and he also claimed he'd uh he also claimed he had mesmerized the sun again remotely and he just said yeah if you if you get any sunlight you're getting some of my mesmeric power now i mean he was a charlatan wow charles dickens and a christmas carol so he made no money from it in spite of the fact that it was incredibly popular so within maybe six weeks there were five different performances of it on the stage in london all over london at different theaters but they had not very good copyright laws and basically pirates stole pirates wow 19th century is the right time for pirates um no actual um book pirates what am i

saying copyright pirate it was it was pirated that's what i'm looking for and then he sued the pirates are gonna keep using the word pirates um and they declared themselves bankrupt uh so he was left to pay the equivalent of 56 000 pounds in modern day money in his own legal fees because they just folded immediately so it's quite sad for him he did have speaking of pirates cowboy connections pirates and cowboys are kind of connected right in people's minds um so what they're kind of kind of cool murderous figures from history um so butch cassidy's grandfather was the basis for oliver twist it is thought so butch cassidy's great grandfather went into business with charles dickens father and it ended up falling apart they both ended up in prison together um and charles

dickens grew up saying butch cassidy's grandfather being a beggar on the streets and oliver twist it's thought he based he based it on butch cassidy's grandfather that's amazing for a second i thought he said he was the basest for oliver twist not a band no not a band in that do you know who scrooge was based on um one person they thought it might have been based on scrooge was a guy called jemmy wood and he was a very famous miser uh back in the day um he was such a miser that his coffin was said to be stoned when he died they all threw stones at him because they hated him so much um he once went to Gloucester to tukesbury and jumped on the back of a hearse because he didn't want to pay for a uh carriage he chose to die because there was a coffin passing by and he thought now

would be a good time to save money and he also if you're stoning somebody's coffin that's too late stone them up stone them up they're living oh don't stone them at all yeah but yeah that's not advocate yeah but he also would walk down the docks and there would be coal ships going past and he would just grab small bits of coal that came off these ships just so they didn't have to pay for them pay for the coal himself so he's a real miser and they reckon that's and he's quite famous for it at the time as well right okay did dickens actually base scrooge on a person though it might be on him there's a few other people as well right okay there's a good person um called uh jasper packelmerton who's in the old curiosity shop uh and he killed his 14 wives by tickling them to death

and apparently he's based on a real person amazingly uh based on a an article in the illustrated police news of 1869 uh entitled a wife driven insane by a husband tickling her feet and this guy had fooled his wife into thinking that being tied to a plank would help her bad back and then once she was secured she would drive her to insanity with a feather to the feet oh my god you can't hold that twice though no can you well you're insane by the end of the first yeah it's true yeah um i i uh i was looking into rituals because i i just love the idea that that was a thing that as i say dickens did this he would tour like a stand-up comedian and so he would do that every day it's not like this was a random thing he would get up and have the

rum and the champagne and the sherry every single day while he was on tour and i don't know how you can sustain doing that but it turns out that every great writer had some kind of quirk of a ritual that they would stick to uh and i was looking into a few of those uh there's some really fun ones tom wolf we honor tom wolf bonfire the vanities uh his thing was he one day had the most amazing what he said was the most inspired burst of writing that he's had in a very long time he was standing by his window he had this burst of writing and he was he loved it so much that he just thought i need to recreate whatever i did to lead me to this moment of great writing and he couldn't work it out so he kept retracing the steps and then he worked out what it was it

was that night that he did this great burst of writing he was standing by his window looking outside and he was fumbling his genitals and he was like oh my god that was it fumbling my genitals as well as made me come up with these great ideas so that's now how tom wolf writes and we know this as well because it was in a letter to his editor uh where he wrote that his penis remained limp and unaroused like he told his editor i've worked out what makes me a great writer and that's what it is tons of writers relied on have relied on alcohol haven't they throughout throughout the ages so tennessee williams the playwright tennessee williams um entry from his diary in 1957 reads uh two scotches at the bar then three drinks later in the morning um a daiquiri at dirty dicks three

glasses of red wine at lunch three of wine at dinner also a green tranquilizer whose name i do not know and a yellow one i think is called reserving or something like that and the bad thing about that is when he wrote it he was in rehab at the time genuinely jg ballard used to have scotch as well and that was because it said he thought that it changed the micro-climate of his brain people justify it and whatever they need to um they've discovered speaking of alcohol that alcohol so a scientists have recently discovered with paleogenetics which is used as a kind of gene sequencing that humans develop the capacity to uh digest alcohol successfully way before we thought they did so we thought they we did in about 7 000 bc and it turns out was about 10 million years ago

um that's when we got this gene and that's the reason that we've survived so our ability to properly digest alcohol because all the fruit that was falling from the trees at the time that we needed to eat to survive was rotting and fermenting and there was a mutation in our ancestors genes which meant that we could eat it not die that's like that's like with neanderthals and milk apparently milk is a new thing to us apparently we've only been able to that's why i always offer people milk because i'm like uh neanderthal in disguise um and when they pass the test i know um that's and milk intolerance increases as you get closer to the equator what yeah britain is the most lactose tolerant country in the world yeah most lactose tolerant lactose tolerance is a

mutation and it spreads in prevalence as you get towards the pulse of the earth because i think isn't there something to do about milk going off i mean in hot temperatures that sounds stupid but i think it's true so they just don't have fridges they're just leaving their milk to go off well we didn't have fridges until very recently yeah surely i think they've got them at the equator now it's not i know but what i'm saying is that 500 years ago you wouldn't have as it wouldn't be as easy to keep milk cold and there's less of a reason to have the mutation because milk is drunk less and there's less um farming pasture okay yeah um we need to wrap up on this right does anyone else have anything they want to add um all i have to add is that Ernest Hemingway he was an alcoholic

another white alcoholic and his friend george plimpton said that by the time he was dying his liver protruded from his belly like a long fat leech which made me think that if you don't have that you're probably okay um all right let's let's move on to fact number two fact number two is from james okay my fact this week is that crap christmas jumpers date back to the romans um what do you mean by that well i genuinely don't know actually didn't result at all yeah so not christmas because there wasn't a christmas there but they did have a similar festival um called satin alia and part of it was a festival called sigillaria on the 23rd of december and there was a writer called marshall who wrote about the gifts that you would get uh around that time and he said that

you would get fish sauce jars of honey bottles of wine toothpicks a few other things and then one of the things was a shaggy nursing of a weaver on the sane a barbarian garment a thing uncouth but not to be despised in cold december so basically he was saying that in that time of year people would get really horrible jumpers but they would be happy of them because the weather was so bad it's a bit more poetic isn't it yeah oh another shaggy nursing of a weaver guys it's going to be shaggy nursing of a weaver day on friday so do wear your shaggy nursing of a weaver to the office make a donation um and also satin alia aristocrats would wear brightly colored fabrics and not necessarily matching ones they would wear unusual combinations of clothes and

the outfit was called the synthesis which means um things being put together so i think that's the other strand of the christmas jumper theory yeah that's right no that's right this um comes actually from a press release from the university of redding that i read and they've they've gone into all this they also said that people then drank raisin wine wine flavored with pitch honeyd wine which does sound nice and also a special wine for loosening the bowels yum yum that's who who is accepting that at dinner can i get the bowel loosening uh that's that's what were their toilets like back then it's like would you like red white or bowel loosening yeah or brown effectively yeah the toilets were okay were they yeah we found um we i mean i mean the four of us have found a

perfectly preserved roman toilet seat on hadrian's wall oh we haven't but they have they were okay they were shitting off walls they had they had latrines did they go over the edge of the wall because they're barbarians on one side of the wall what so it was like an attack strategy as well as but that's the thing actually about um you know like medieval uh towns yeah the idea is that you would throw boiling oil on the people attacking you but of course they would never do that because oil is a really precious thing that you you know you need to keep and so that what they would throw is urine and feces okay or sometimes boiling water but never oil that's one of the best ever cartoons from private eye there's a castle being attacked and the defenders are pouring a huge

cauldron of oil over the side and there's a guy in chef's white next to them saying drizzle it for god's sake drizzle it maybe you were poor boiling oil to show how rich you were though in the same way that people of you know in uh in elizabethan times they used to blacken their teeth didn't they because it showed if you had really rotting teeth that uh you were eating lots of rich food maybe it was that kind of yeah i think that was why why people did that um mark mark of status there's another weird style that happened in america uh when tv became a massive thing when people started owning their own personal tv in their houses i got this from a bill brison book there used to be a type of clothing called videos this was before videos and you would buy your

video to wear to someone's house to watch tv and everyone would be wearing the same thing because it was such an event to watch tv in a house it looked like a bit like a black rectangular thing with two circular don't you know who the patron saint of television is this is going because a patron saint no who that is um saint claire of a cc who was one of the followers of saint francis of a cc uh and she was sick in bed and there was there was a mass going on in the other room and she could somehow see the mass happening on the wall and that miracle then made her the patron saint of television wow what did she see she saw the mass happening oh that was it yeah it's like songs of praise i changed the channel was it a glass wall there was another

saint from a cc called saint vitalis of a cc and he is the patron saint of genital diseases okay uh and don't you tell me mate and there's a patron saint of std's yes uh not all is it all sd's because i know st george is the patron saint of syphilis that's yeah i wouldn't want to take that away from him no he's like a junior minister in the std saint department obviously has a broader brief as well so george is the patron saint of lepers yeah anyway sorry um oh yeah so saint vitalis was the patron saint of std's and um diseases of the genitals uh in 2011 there was an auction house in island that had his head in a jar supposedly his head a relic and they sold it to a uh an american

movie star and we don't know which movie star it was this is a fun guessing game and a fun libel opportunity too i say julia robert speaking of heads and christmas traditions so there's a welsh christmas tradition that i'm not going to be able to pronounce which i don't think happens as much now is it and it happens still in glomorgan but nowhere else which is called marie lewood which is where a group of drunken revelers would put a horse's skull on a stick and then they'd go around people's houses and bang on their doors at christmas and they'd sing them a carol and then you had to have a sing-off um with the people in the house and it was like a competition and then they had to let you in with your horse's skull and they had to feed you and

then you had to sing a goodbye carol and then you would leave with your horse's skull and go to the next house it just sounds like a really weird version of carol singing another tradition is uh this is an old english tradition cake tossing do you know that one no it's not much to it you just get a perfectly good cake and throw it against a wall against a wall not even seeing how far you can no no you stand next to the wall throw it and it's supposed to like give you a year without any hunger oh really yeah there's another sorry go on well the oh just wanted to share this which is the theory of when the sweater began because it's quite a vague thing you know did it begin with the romans or did it be before that one website i found says it began with 19th century british

fishermen because they needed something chunky and heavy to repel water and keep them warm and that is from a website called dances with walls nice they they would make our christmas jumpers for penguins didn't they for a while do you remember that really yeah there was like an oil spill in new zealand yeah do you remember and then they what they wanted was little jumpers to pot in the penguins so they wouldn't preen themselves and and like get the oil and they get the oil in their mouth if they preen themselves they thought they might get about a hundred but they ended up getting 15 000 and actually they're no good at anyway like if you put a sweater on a on a penguin it's not really the best thing to do best thing to do is just put it in cold water or warm water i guess that's

about how they've evolved over millions of years to be able to deal with cold weather yeah exactly so now whenever you send them a jumper for a penguin they just put it on like a toy penguin and they sell it in this shop great thanks this is semi unrelated but they've done an experiment in the last few months where they've put lingerie on rats and it's to see how they always do it to rats and it's to see how why men are attracted to women but it wasn't no they put like kind of sexy underwear on rats and then they got them to go and have have sex with male rats and then if the same woman came back later then the guy didn't want to have sex with the female without her wearing the sexy lingerie so it's like as soon as your program to believe that the sex is going to be good

with the lingerie wearing women then you don't enjoy it as much or you don't want to do it with the non lingerie wearing women apparently this proves why men are attracted to women that is a terrible terrible slogan for a christmas jumper i rat experiments to find that stuff out is because we had a we had a fact in a previous podcast which was uh what was it they were in polyester pants yeah yeah rats in polyester pants um don't god what was it they can't get it up they can't get direction if they're wearing little transit sex lives wow yeah male rats like no honestly you look really beautiful with the lingerie i just i don't know what's going on down there i'll complain to the polyester company yeah okay uh time for fact number three and that is anna yeah my fact is

that uh male turkeys blush when they see female turkeys uh i really like that sweet uh especially if they were in lingerie why why do they blush uh so turkeys generally have a weird anatomy anyway but um some people think it's because uh when turkeys gobble it actually takes up a lot of energy and they gobble as part of their strutting ritual to attract women because it's a sexy thing to do and when they gobble it causes the blood to rise up and up into their face and they turn bright red and they really do go bright red but it's only business for their snood you know the turkeys snood which i find the like the weird no what is it a snoot the snood is that floppy bit of skin that dangles really far off a turkeys face and it's a secondary sexual organ because um so when

a turkey is aroused it gets engorged with blood and it gets longer and female turkeys fancy male turkeys with longer snoods and so that snood goes bright red when it's trying to seduce wait so they have a thing on their face that when they're aroused it extends yeah and it's got no purpose nobody knows why it's there you also have a thing on your face that extends when you get aroused if you think it's actually do you have a rectile tissue inside your nose oh yes yeah yeah yeah i yeah does it does it increase in size when you are it can do sometimes and there's a thing called honeymoon rhinitis which you can get um which apparently when you get aroused it makes you sneeze and some people get that start sneezing when they're aroused well this puts a new perspective

on the story of pinocchio well this is right your nose does get longer when you lie doesn't it because you get tense and so they say your nose does expand well so wait what else what else people gets 10 times bigger when you're aroused as well 10 times yeah because it's only small like no hang on my people's aren't that small yeah you're right that doesn't sound right maybe they're bigger no it does it under the surface i think you're thinking of cartoons when their eyes go they get bigger but not by 10 times obviously right okay but so i could be able to tell if someone i don't know if it's noticeable the nose but then if you're a turkey you can't really play it cool with your snoot can you that's true and if you blush as well yeah it's very awkward for them

and that because they've got uh so the top of the head turns bright blue also when when they're aroused or excited um their head turns bright turn their turn their head blue so it is actually quite obvious to a woman when they hang on sorry i've what so they've got like you if you know can picture what a turkey looks like and they're kind of grayish gray yeah they're like turkey head yeah yeah and it goes like they go bright their head goes bright blue yeah like my jumper bright blue it's more paler than that oh okay yeah this is what so turkeys are great right and turkeys were do we think they were nearly the official animal emblem of america or not this is a myth apparently but i think it's basically true the idea is that benjamin franklin liked them so much and he thought

they were noble animals and he wanted them to be the official mass bird of the usa i don't i don't know if it's true so when it was decided that they were going to make a bald eagle the emblem of the usa then um franklin was outraged and he said it couldn't be a bald eagle because they have bad moral character uh he said you may he wrote his daughter saying you may have seen them perched in some dead tree where too lazy to fish for himself he watches the labor of the fishing hawk when that diligent bird has taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for his young the bald eagle pursues him and steals it so he wrote that and he said a much more respectable bird and a true native of america is the turkey so i don't know why people keep debunking this franklin wanted the

bird to be franklin wanted it to be yeah i have a thing about electrocuting them right yeah he wanted to he not only wanted to he did electrocute turkeys um and on one occasion he got a crowd together to watch him doing it and then ended up electrocuting himself which is amazing um he wrote to a friend uh turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock and roasted by the electrical jack and he practiced it lots and then got a crowd together and he just he was numb for the rest of the evening after he gave himself a huge shock and he wrote to his brother saying two nights ago being about to kill a turkey by the shock from two large glass jars i inadvertently took the hole through my own arms and body do not make this more public for i am ashamed to have

been guilty of so notorious a blunder so sorry franklin your secrets out now the other thing though is that turkeys aren't that noble are they really i mean if you put if you put a male turkey apparently in a room with a model of a female turkey uh he'll mate with it just as eagerly as he would with the real thing okay oh yeah but he will also do it if you put a turkey head on a stick he'll also try and mate with that really yeah uh and they did an experiment with all the different bits of a turkey that what which will work and which won't work um a freshly severed head on a stick was the most effective that's what it liked the most the most effective well i like you but i don't know could you maybe lose everything below your neck yeah well yeah you've got that

that one's the most effective followed by a dried male head on a stick followed by a two-year-old withered female head on a stick is turkey porn just heads it's like breasts just cut out the body and then last place but still eliciting a sexual response was a plain balsa wood model of a head they're randy this this nude just got very slightly bigger wow so that's your emblem of the usa turkeys never ask you a leg or a breast man they just say you're a head or a head man i'm a head man yeah i love it when was this done do you know uh it was done in the late fifties uh by some people at the university of pennsylvania oh my god perverts in the university of pennsylvania you know when they

say they're cutting science budgets around the world you just go but we need to put these rats in in braziers and we've got trying to find out if he wants to shag that head it looks like i kind of get it now i've had this head decomposing for two years in my office we all think it's going to the moon in bars and it's no this is where the real budget's going wow turkeys are very breasty now aren't they much more than they're supposed to be well i mean i have noticed yeah we were chatting about this yeah no i saw i saw your computer screens uh they've increased it was the weight trunk's website look at the head on that one go on so turkeys have gone much bigger they've increased by 57 percent in size since 1980

i think um because i know since 1965 sorry um because we're we're obviously breeding them to have huge breasts because we like the taste of turkey breasts and this is why so wild turkeys are laughing in the face of domestic turkeys because they can fly they can fly 55 miles an hour i think wow and and most domesticated turkeys can't fly at all because they're so top heavy they can they can run 25 miles yeah unbelievable wild turkeys yeah wild turkeys turkeys can't uh farm turkeys can't have sex with each other anymore is quite sad they're too heavy and they're sort of um a bit distorted and they have to be um they have to be masturbated and then artificially inseminated and the people who is it not because they're all dubious now going that's it's probably just

a head on a stick mate but the people who do it call it milking and it's not milking it's not milking um don't dress it up they then they then all right they they sort of can i read you a brief account of it it won't take long but the effects will last forever in your minds so this is according to a journalist who went around and visited a turkey farm he said i was complaining about the impossibility of a journalist getting to see the process when i heard a rustle of feathers beside me the turkey was already upside down in paul's hands he swiftly uncovered a hole amidst the feathers gave it a couple of tweaks and there was the turkey semen looking at like a bit of crumbly old toothpaste we take this said paul and suck it into a rubber tube it's then blown

into the vagina so you have to suck it up with a rubber tube and then blow it up another turkey whoa that's a job i hope that that's a job that people have so what what makes you think you're qualified yeah well i've always been interested in sucking animal semen up through tubes they didn't say the crumbly old toothpaste thing to its face did they because that can be quite effective in my experience so do you have any aqua fresh hey i wrote of that turkey poo let's say you had two turkeys and you were like oh tell me the gender of these two turkeys you can tell which one is a male and which one is female by their poo

because the poo of a male turkey comes out spiral like a mr whippy ice cream it comes out just like but it does that's the kind of way that it comes out and then a female poo comes out in the shape of a j so that's that's how you know because they have different uh is this right james they've got different anal clarkers yeah they have different shaped clarkers another good turkey thing which i actually discovered last year and is in our fact book one for one one facts two knocky sideways um this is if you want to buy it uh is that so in turkey the word for turkey means indian bird in indian the word for turkey means peruvian bird in greece the word for turkey means french bird and in malaysia the word for turkey means dutch chicken so no one had a clue

where it was coming from but it was definitely foreign yeah there's a theory that they were called turkeys here because the merchants who sold them across europe were turkish but of course then all native to mexico what is i was going to say the native americans apparently uh the real origin of the name is furky so they should be furkeys not turkeys okay i didn't know that let's go as well start calling them that hashtag facts um we should move on time to move on to our final fact of the evening and that is andy my fact is that the composer of the song jingle bells also wrote the yuletide classic we conquer or die that was a genuine song written by the same man his name was james lord pierpont and he was an american composer he was also the uncle of jp

morgan incidentally the banker and um yeah and he wrote this he wrote this song and a number of others the lyrics to we conquer or die go uh the war drum is beating prepare for the fight the stern bigot northman exalts in his might gird on your bright weapons your foe man and i and this be our watchword we conquer or die so there you go you can see where it led on was that was that his difficult second song is that like which one came first do we know i think jingle bells came first some of them we don't know the dates for i don't know who's like someone who wanted to be taken more seriously on those cases did he write anything else is that it yeah he wrote a lot of songs um i have uh are they all in the christmas theme or the aggressive military theme a lot of them are in

the aggressive military theme we wrote our battle flag and strike for the south and oh let me not neglected die um because he was he was on the side of the south in the civil war and he he lived in boston massachusetts originally and then he moved down to savannah georgia which is where he spent the civil war and he wrote a load of these songs um on behalf of the south as a kind of adjut prop thing jingle bells was the first time he played from space wasn't it was it yeah yeah it was really it was when tom stafford and walley shearer were in space it was in 1965 i think and it was a prank so they said they'd seen a kind of a floating asteroid or something they were talking to you know mission control or whatever on the ground float or something floating and they were gonna

get it and see what it was and it turned out to be this tiny harmonica it was three eighths of an inch wide and then they launched into a rendition of jingle bells all right on christmas time from space they had originally planned to play we conquer or die they couldn't get the right so they pretended that they pretended that they saw santa claus is that right did you say that no so that's what happened they they kind of went down to mission control and said we can see this this one guy with 12 other figures flying into the earth's atmosphere and they pretend in that they could see further christmas was that what it was supposed to be i just saw them saying they thought it's or a satellite no he said uh i see a command module with eight smaller

modules in front the pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit there's a lot of there's a lot of uh sort of christmasy elements to space travel that's really nice you're lying and lying from up there that makes me wonder about the whole moon landing's conspiracy theory if they're claiming santa claus was there so some other carols um they saw three ships you know that song oh yeah saw three ships there's an extra verse about that we don't really sing anymore which talks about carrying the dead bodies of the three wise men on the ships how did they die oh and let's say natural causes okay and yeah so the idea was that these um three wise men were on the boats and they'd sailed all the way from Bethlehem now the problem is that Bethlehem isn't on the

coast um but people in britain didn't really know where Bethlehem was or in europe they didn't know they just assumed it was like a seaside resort and so the part of the song goes it it sailed from Bethlehem to uh cologne i think it was but how could it do that just the each on one yes yeah one in each ship let it snow let it snow let it snow was written by sammy karnan joules stein and they claimed they came up with the idea to cool themselves during a heat wave by writing the song i don't really see how that works so do you like i'm dreaming of a white christmas was written i think next to a swimming pool in LA i think so yeah so people find it was so urving bullen wrote white christmas didn't he and uh he was jewish and he wrote it as a sort of an ironic song um and

they recently did a poll in america of people's top 25 favorite christmas songs and more than half of them are written by jewish people and um these are the these are the guys who are writing all the christmas songs you know that last year it was the last year the year before costa coffee did a poll amongst their customers of what they think is the worst christmas song that's ever been written okay you know what came out on top oh i don't know is cliff richards um it's a tone white tone wine and they've now banned it but yeah worldwide they've not allowed any of their uh or their coffee shops to play cliff richard's song anymore well urving bullen tried to get radio stations to ban elvis presi's version of white christmas because i thought it was uh i think

his exact words were it's a profane parody of his cherished yuletide standard he ordered staff in new york uh to uh he's he ordered his own staff to phone radio stations and say don't play this because he thought it was so outrageously gross um why was it why was it gross was it too much i think he just thought it was a bit too sexy i don't know elvis presley a lot of radio stations refuse to play elvis presley's songs when he first became popular because they assumed that he was black and it was that the time when uh yeah well they also banned him um i don't know if this is a myth but and it might be a myth is it a myth no i think it's not a myth they could only film him um sort of torso above they couldn't show his legs because his legs were too sexy in the dance moves

yeah they was just shaking too much mostly his hips yeah mostly his hips their legs are not the problem is yeah he's got to cut out that like having one line yeah you can you can do below the knees guys or you can do above the waist yeah whereas on on turkey top of the pops they cut off the head to see the body that's all you get um rudolf red nose reindeer was nearly called reginald reginald it doesn't scan as well but it wasn't it wasn't a song originally it was a it was a coloring book for children and an advertising guy came up with it and um he very nearly called reginald but then he crucially didn't and uh it sold two and a half million copies in its first year this little coloring book which is huge which is quite nice about rudolf red nose reindeer it

was written by just a copywriter who worked for uh montgomery reward huge department store and they just been told they didn't want to spend those money buying in christmas gifts to sell so they told their staff to write a christmas song uh so this guy robert may wrote rudolf red nose reindeer and um it sold incredibly well made loads of money um i think you know it was remade into a song and the montgomery reward people in charge of montgomery reward gave him all the rights to he had no rights to it at all and he was in trouble his wife had a terminal illness um he was in massive debt and as soon as it was released as a song they sold him all the rights to 100 and he loved off the proceeds of that until i think 1970s when he died wow that's quite nice that is nice that's

great um hark the herald angel sing uh the tune is written by mendelson which possibly you know and mendelson originally wrote the tune as a tribute to uh guldenberg's guldenberg's printing press it was uh how awesome is the printing press song which does how awesome is the printing press scans the same as hark the herald angel sing there you go that's the original lyrics it actually went guttenberg the deutsche man zundeter difficult um or the faculty um i have no idea i did so the weirdest thing for me about this fact is when you hear someone who's famous for something and then they've produced another bit of work that is just so you know jingle bells we conquer or die it's just so different it's like it's like when i when i found out that barbara cartland invented a glider

that the military started using so what barbara cartland the romance novelist who wrote a billion romance novels also invented a glider that you could fly in that the military was like that is so good we're using it and that's one of her and and yeah that's that's a thing that and and michael jackson invented um invented the fax machine and no michael jackson i this i actually i don't know if most people know this but he he wrote the song do the bart man the michael jackson's the everyone does know that but he wrote the simpson song do the bart really and he invented those shoes that let you kind of stand on a slant as well then yeah he did actually he was a part of the that when he slants forward there's a patent taken out where it's weighted boots and he was

he was one of the don't act like this is a kind of shoe that's really caught on since then we're all wearing them we're all wearing them now so i'm gonna walk over like that i this is connected because i wanted to mention this earlier the person who made christmas carols cool again was st francis of assisi also i believe uh yes so it was at a time when it was in the 13th century at a time when it was all like uh very serious and very somber and he tried to make christmas celebrations fun again and he uh uh made it so that for instance drinking songs that were sung in taverns like fun drinking songs he he made them be rewritten with christ christmas lyrics and and actually um a few years ago the pope said that he was a playboy francis of assisi what do you

mean well he started off his life he was a drinker and he was a partier and then he gave away all his stuff to a leper and the pope actually said that he was one of the original playboys fun guy created the nativity i think he turned nativity into a fun theatrical event so decided that the birth of jesus should be something that we all go and enjoy watching you know the vatican didn't have a christmas tree until 1982 did he not no i think they associated it still with being the old heathen thing wow yeah there's a thing in america where you call them holiday trees i just went i read this really random report where there was a guy who he was a politician who died he had a previous career i can't quite remember what his previous career was and when he died apparently it

was just such a big thing in his life that he hated the idea that things were called holiday trees and he wanted to be called christmas trees that when arnold swatzenegger spoke at his funeral he said i swear i will make the christmas tree return it was the report that came out wow arnold swatzenegger promises christmas trees to return in funeral eulogy um we need to wrap up do you guys have any more yeah jinglebell was originally a bit of a saucy song i just wanted to tell you that um the second verse um it goes a day or two ago i thought i'd take a ride and soon miss fanny bright was seated by my side the horse was lean and lank uh misfortune seemed his lot he got into a drifted bank and then we got upsot which uh no one knows what it means but it sounds like it should

be upset but it didn't quite right i think that's exactly what it means actually yeah and then i end like now the ground is white go it while you're young take the girls tonight and sing this slaying song basically a sleigh was like having a sweet ride in the fifties and you'd go and sleigh everywhere and you know you'd go up into the hills up to going to sleigh everywhere sounds a bit like some kind of gory uh hot film you don't want to be involved with but you go sleigh riding and you you know that was that was very impressive to a young lady you've got a sleigh for i have a just one more thing to ask yes which is more of a like a feminist mission statement about the holly in the ivy and the holly in the ivy the song and so it's always kind of bugged me how you know how

that ends saying of all the trees that are in there with the holly bears the crown so in the holly in the ivy the holly's one and the holly's a bit of a dick because it's all spiky and nasty and actually this dates back to medieval times when the holly represented the masculinity of the male form and the ivy was a woman the ivy was this weak gentle woman and the holly was this strong and it's very resilient and it represented a man and in medieval villages they would sing the women would sing uh have competitions against the men and they would be the ivy and the men would be the holly so every time women you sing the holly in the ivy and you finish saying the holly bears the crown you're saying the men have won that's that's what that means so we need to change it

don't we we need to change it get Arnold Schwarzenegger on the phone i swear to you anna the ivy will rise again okay that's it that's all of our facts for this evening thanks so much for listening at home thanks so much for being here this evening uh if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said during the course of this podcast you can get us on twitter i'm on at shribeland andy at andrew hunter m james at egg shaped anna can email podcast at qi.com you can also go to at qi podcast on twitter as well and we are going to be back again next week with another episode no such thing as a fish thanks so much for listening we'll catch you later goodbye and thanks to you guys