No Such Thing As A Fish - 61: No Such Thing As Jesus's Magic Wand

Episode Date: May 15, 2015

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Benjamin Franklin's massive bed, knife-wielding referees and the longest movie in the world.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact is that, instead of being one of the founders of the USA, Benjamin Franklin almost stayed in Britain to found a swimming school on the Thames.

This was his big idea in his early 20s. So he lived in London, he was working for a printer, as the printer's apprentice, and he liked to swim, and he, nobleman, used to queue up along the sides of the Thames and be like, what is this guy doing? He's swimming. Which bit of the Thames? Is this sort of London? So he used to swim from Blackfriars to Chelsea, which was three miles, I think, or roughly

three miles. So that bit of the Thames. How long was he here for? He came back and forth, I think. So he was here initially for a few years, and then he considered setting up a swimming school because he was teaching all these nobleman's kids to swim, and he asked a friend for advice as to whether he should, and this friend said, I don't think that's a very good idea, why don't you come and work for me in America again.

So he left Britain in about 1726, I think. He also, one of his lesser spoken about inventions is that he invented basically flippers for the hands. This is how much he loved swimming. He invented hand flippers for while you were swimming. That's a good idea. And I think he was a child, in fact, when he did that, wasn't he? He was about 11, yeah.

Another crazy invention of his, which I just love his lesser ones. Basically he invented a method for getting a book down from a bookshelf, if it was way too high. He invented what's called the, no, it was called a book arm. And it was basically an extended stick that you would reach up and grip onto books and take them down off the shelf. Yeah. Have you heard his pseudonyms?

No. Because he had a load of pseudonyms. Oh, he had female ones, didn't he? Yes, he did. So he, when he was a boy, he wanted to write in his brother's newspaper, and his brother didn't let him. So he wrote, in the guise of a middle-aged widow, silence do good, that was the widow's name.

Well, yeah, I've heard that one. The later one was Polly Baker, who was a fictional woman who had had children out of wedlock and been punished for it. And there was Alice Adatung, who was another widow, Celia Shortface, Martha Careful and Miss Busy Body. He also, one of the women you mentioned, and I can't remember which one, maybe the first one. I hope it's Celia Shortface.

It's not Celia Shortface, was he created her quite ahead of his time in order to show the one who had illegitimate children and stuff. Oh, Polly Baker. Yeah. Polly Baker was created to comment on society's prejudice towards women and their attitudes to women who'd been mistreated. Amazingly forward thinking. I think you have more female pseudonyms than male ones.

I certainly found a lot more female ones than male ones. I don't like Polly Baker because it's not like a funny one like the others, is it? That is a typical man's response. Polly Baker would have been all over that. When it was hot, he said you should sleep in two beds. What? At the same time? He said you should sleep in one until you're uncomfortable, and you just go to the other

one. Obviously not discovered the pillow over to get the cold side. No, it's been attributed to him, but I don't think he invented that. I shouldn't have invented a claw to turn it off. But he also said it's okay if you just have a very large bed and you can just get up and go to a different bit of the bed. I don't know. Sorry, I don't see why you don't.

If you have a large bed, you don't have to get up and go to another part of the bed. How large a bed was he imagining? Really large. You're going to get a taxi to the other part. You get up, you pack a snack and a few toiletries and you head off. Up left corner, please. But he also invented, this isn't really an invention, but he invented a device by which he could unlock and lock his bedroom door from his bed without having to get up.

Really? So maybe that was also a cooling device. Can you tell they invented one of those as well? Did he? Yeah. Well, they're probably having a big fight up in heaven right now. Of a right. Of a right.

To the incredibly successful invention that they both came up with that everyone can't do without these days. Do you know until the 1930s, there were water slides along the Thames? Were there? What? Floating baths, temporary Lidoes, pontoons and water slides all the way along the Thames because people used to swim in it so much. My God.

That's amazing. And now it's illegal. So the first ever swimming book was written in 1539 by a German guy called Nikolaus Weinmann or Wienmann and it recommended various different swimming aids for buoyancy, which included belts made of cork, which they used in life preserves for centuries, bundles of reeds and my favourite, air filled cow bladders. Oh, that's good. Nice.

Yeah. They had, I think people use pigs bladders in England in the 16th century for it. Because the first guy to swimming in Britain, it was written in response to that because it was thought that that didn't really tell you how to swim, it more just sort of described swimming. I mean all I've got is how to float from it. So, you know, I haven't the whole thing, it is in Latin, but. If you don't have bovine bladders, then you're buggered.

So this guy, the first guy to swim was written by a guy called Everard Digby in 1587. He is not to be confused with Everard Digby, who was involved in the gunpowder plot, or in fact the father of Everard Digby of the gunpowder plot, who's also called Everard Digby, but also don't confuse this guy who wrote the swimming book with the guy who replaced him as a clergyman, who was also called Everard Digby. Wait, one of the gunpowder plotters wrote a swimming guide. No, that's why I said don't confuse them. So you're confusing.

I have to confuse them already. There was one thing that they're asking you to do and you just got to get it. I sort of didn't hear the bit where she said don't and I just heard confuse him with. Was Everard Digby just like the John Smith of its day? I think he must have been. What a great world to live in. Everyone's called Everard Digby. Every Tom Dick and Everard Digby has been coming in here.

Can I just say the first person to get a call back to Everard Digby. So Everard Digby, the swimmer, he was a clergyman who wrote a guide to swimming and where he comes out most strongly, as I think BBC history was reporting on this, is in exhibitionist swimming. So he describes what you should do. Is that like synchronized swimming? Well, yeah, I think he's sort of like the grandfather of synchronized swimming, really, because he explains how you can look good in the water.

So he advises things to do while swimming. He shows you how to sit on the water while keeping a float, carry things in both hands across the water, swimming, holding one foot with one hand, useful, he says, useful if you happen to get cramp. Oh, right. So before you ridicule, swimming while dancing with both legs in the air, also maybe useful for cramp. And this is the best one.

He also explains how to swim whilst cutting your toenails in the water by lying on your back, bringing your knee up to your chest and using a knife. So using a knife to cut your toenails in the water while floating on your back. That's really cool. Yeah, it sounds great. I was reading about strokes, because breaststroke seems to be the oldest stroke that we know about. There's in fact, cave paintings in Egypt, where they show people doing breaststroke.

How do you know? Really? Yeah, I read it on. No, not how do you know? How do they know that it's breaststroke? I guess it just looks like it. The motion looked like it. There's no motion in cave paintings.

I think they've got one of those peelable books, but in stone. So you flip the book and you see it moving. Yeah, you flip the rock. You've got to run really fast when one came to the other. And that's very untrue to say there's no flip paintings. Have you seen the documentary by Werner Herzog? Oh, so good. Extraordinary.

Andy, do you know about this? Is it called Cave of Forgotten Dreams? Yeah, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. They have this one drawing of a horse. They would draw horses and they would draw them with like five legs in motion. And you kind of think, why are they doing that? Why does it look like that? And they realized that if you had a fire inside this cave and you were looking at it, the

flames would create the motion. Like a flicker effect. Yeah, exactly. So it would give it like flip book kind of artistic running horse on the inside of a cave. Or breast stroking. Yeah. So anyway, breaststroke, really old thing.

This is a story that I read, which I really like, 1844, breaststroke was the big stroke for swimming in England. Two guys came over, Native Americans, had a race and they used front crawl. Yeah. Totally whipped ass, like they just killed this race, right? But no one liked it because they thought it looked un-European. This is how British, British people are. They did not take on that stroke until 1873.

That was in 1844 that that happened. So it's another generation, isn't it? Yeah. Thousands of hours wasted. Get this, in the 1900 Olympics, there was a 200 meter obstacle swimming course. You were able to swim with the current because it was in moving water, but you had to make it past three obstacles. You had to climb over two of them.

One was a pole and one was a row of boats. And then you had to swim under the other one, which was another row of boats. Sounds great. Why have we not kept this? Yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah. I've got another Olympic one that I just want to flag up, 1896 Summer Olympics. Athens.

Athens. These were all of the sporting events for swimming. Okay. 100 meter freestyle. Yeah. 500 meter freestyle. Yeah. 1200 meter freestyle.

Yeah. Sailors, 100 meter freestyle. In which only sailors from Greece, who happened to be sailors, who could enter the competition. Which country won gold? Yep. So Greece won gold, silver, bronze. Well done. And no one lost because only three people entered the race.

We were talking about races and stuff like that in swimming. In 1791, three men swam from Westminster Bridge to London Bridge for an eight-ginny wager. The winner was carried to a pub to celebrate, where he drank so much gin, he expired. Oh. Presumably the other two just split the four guineas each. I think second place would get it, no? Yeah. The people used to swim loads in the Thames, didn't they?

Yeah. I read that in 1880 there was a man dog race in the Thames, and the dog won. Really? Really? So I think Windsor Baths were, they used to have little bits of the Thames, as James said at the start. I think like Lido's set apart, so you could swim in them, and they had to move Windsor Baths in 1870, because it allowed Queen Victoria a view of the naked men.

No. It was inappropriate. Oh, what? They moved it so that she couldn't see it? Yeah. Sorry. No, the way you said it. It's like in the Olympics, how they moved the end of the marathon, so that the Queen

could see the end. The end of the race. And Victoria's like, I really'd like to see those things. Yeah. I read this in a book called Queen Victoria, the Hidden Pervert. Did you guys see the giant swastika that's been spotted in a swimming pool? So there was a helicopter on a kidnapping mission to retrieve what? That would be terrible.

Imagine when you're doing a kidnapping mission, but you're like, but we have to tell someone about this pool. Oh, I'm so torn. They're like, I've got this letter from someone saying they've taken my child, and also apparently there's a swastika. He said the unnamed homeowner would not be charged as the swastika is on private land and was not on display to promote Nazism, which you do wonder why it was on display if... It could have been just a Hindu sign of peace, which those clumsy, clumsy tylers put in the

wrong way round. If I wasn't a Hindu and so peaceful, I'd be furious. OK, time for fact number two. That's my fact. My fact this week is that sumo wrestling referees carry a knife on them so that in the event that they make a bad decision during a match, they can kill themselves. How often does that happen? Do you know, it hasn't actually happened traditionally.

The idea is that they always made brilliant decisions or they thought actually it was bad, but it wasn't that bad. Well, OK, sumo wrestler referees is it's a very high ranking. They actually have rankings. You become the sort of the head of sumo wrestling referees. They are the ones who carry the knife traditionally. The idea was that they would kill themselves because it was such an honor to be that height. If they do make a bad decision these days, they'll hand in their papers and say, I'm retiring.

So it's seen as, yeah, but the knife is there to remind them that you should kill yourself. So if like the best football referee like Howard Webb or someone would carry it, but all the others wouldn't. Yes, exactly. I have the idea of a player going, Oh, referee, referee thinking, you're going, No, you're right. You're right. So the reason I found this fact is Anna and I were having a drink with her friend, Meg.

Meg was telling us that sumo wrestlers are incredibly flexible and they can all do the splits. So I went home and Googled that straight away and they can. If you Google sumo, sumo wrestler splits on the internet, have a field day. It's wonderful. I think it's easier because it's the weight of your torso just jams you right down. They're incredibly flexible. I assume they have to be athletic because it's it's a weird double thing, isn't it?

Because they're really, really heavy, but also they're very, very athletic. Yeah. Yeah. It is extremely hardcore. The training isn't in the stables, which is what the schools that they kind of train in. And I think one of the bits of training is you get your tutor, you have to do the splits and then your tutor forces your chest down onto the ground.

It's amazing. So Anna's just said stables. That's what they call it. It's sumos have a kind of Hogwarts where you get, you go, you're like, you're like, you've been picked as a sumo wrestler and you go and you do put on your life, you put on the sorting nappy. When you go in and they, they live their lives in there, they, they have to, they do sit in class wearing nothing except the nappy when you see their lessons, they're just sitting

in a class taking notes from the blackboard and you just got all these huge topless men. What's it called? It has got a proper name. It's an M word. I think it's the Mawashi and if you, if your Mawashi comes off during a fight, then you have to forfeit the fight. There was a thing because obviously people think that it's a bit strange if they haven't seen sumo before that they're wearing what looked like nappies.

So there was a few years ago, they, the, a few years ago, the Japanese Amateur Sumo Association announced this plan to let young players compete in shorts and cause normally you only fight wearing the Mawashi and it was thought it would get more young people involved in it because they have a problem with this. So is it shorts as well as the Mawashi? No, it's just shorts. Like you don't have anything to grab onto, surely that's an issue, like cause they kind of grab onto those.

Yeah. Well, anyway, it didn't happen because the professional body said over our dead body and that nobody in shorts would be allowed into youth tournaments, so it just completely died of death. The idea. They, I mean, it's, it's incredible the respect that they have for all of the traditions, including that. And even the audience, there are no heckles whatsoever.

And this goes back to the referee thing. If the referee makes a call, regardless of what an audience member thinks and regardless what the sumo wrestler thinks, they just accept it. There's no yelling. There's no contending. It's okay. He called it. That's his job.

It must be right. Yeah. It's a total respect. It's extraordinary. And you have to be a good loser, don't you? And yeah, never betray dissatisfaction with the result. Yeah. And yeah, it's like, it's sort of like the polar opposite of a football match, basically.

It really is. The crowd is singing the ref for a reason, an excellent arbiter of the world. Yeah. I've got a knife. The most popular referee in the 19th century was called... Everard Bigby. Damn it. Yeah.

Well, I held that up for you. The most prominent referee in the 19th century was called Seaguar Bastard. And... So that's why referees are basketballs. I think it was a suggestion of that, but that actually came about about 60 years after he died. But yeah, and he became known. He was so good, he became known as Night of the Whistle.

So I like to think they maybe called him Sir Bastard after that. Oh, yeah. Night of the Whistle. Do you want to hear something about the UK sumo scene? Oh, yeah, he is. This is from the UK sumo website, and it's also sad. At present, the sport of sumo in the UK has a very limited following. Regrettably, behind Dover's white cliffs, there are no known organisations or individuals

with any recent training experience at any Japanese sumo clubs or establishments, although one Englishman did once join the sport in Japan. The UK is something of a sumo desert. Oh, that is sad. It is sad, but it's not true for everyone, because loads of top sumo wrestlers are Eastern European. Yeah, Czech Republic is quite popular there, isn't it? That's amazing.

Yeah. And of the Yokozunas, which is a top kind of thing, there's not any Japanese one, at the moment, I think. They're all Mongolian. Really? Wow, really? Something like the last 36 competitions have all been won by Yen on Japanese people, mainly Mongolian.

This is like the England cricket team, isn't it? We invent it. Everyone else beats us at it. It actually is like that, because if you look it up, the articles are exactly like English people writing about cricket. Articles are like, what has happened to Japanese sumo wrestling? We're being thrashed by foreigners, and it's a real problem, I think. And it's because it's really unpopular now amongst the youth, isn't it?

So the average age of like a sumo audience is over 60, and yeah. So not a lot of young people. It feels to me, as a country, the UK, we're never going to get cricket back or football back. We should maybe go into sumo. And the standard sumo diet is 10,000 calories a day, I think, in their schools, and they get force fed in... 10,000 calories a day.

Yeah, it's a lot, isn't it? It's a good amount. That's a lot. I think blue whale can eat a million calories in one mouthful. So that is what... How many more? A thousand times that, is it? It's not a competition between sumo wrestlers and blue whales.

A hundred times more. A hundred times that. So 100 sumo wrestlers equals one blue whale. Wow. Who would miss a day in a mouthful? One blue whale mouthful. So a blue whale could eat 100 sumo wrestlers in one mouthful. In one mouthful.

That's not quite what I said. And they do. They often do. That's why the sport is unpopular in Japan at the moment. It's very hard to get people to sign up, because they know. The Japanese go after the whales all the time. It's revenge. So ex sumo wrestlers, again, we have footballers over here who go into weird and wacky things

after they leave football. One of the most famous ones, Konishiki Yasukichi, became a hip hop artist and hosted a children's TV show. One of my favourites, Yasuyuki Hirose, I got this on an article about ex sumo wrestlers from the Guardian. He drank a two litre bottle of orange fanta in 10 seconds. That's his trick. He's also in a comedy group.

And I quote directly, his obesity-related difficulties are often the topic of the group's jokes. I think an alternative comedy revolution might be required. That's amazing. Yeah. 10 seconds! Two litres of orange fanta. I can't drink two litres in a day.

I think I could drink two litres of water in that much time, but orange fanta is pretty fizzy. Two litres? How many pints is that? It's about four, isn't it? Oh, no, I can't do that. I once drank, I think I had to drink four pints for a bet in ten minutes. And I did that, and I was violently sick, because I was working as a waiter.

Excuse me, we asked for some water ages ago. It hasn't arrived. I can't throw it up in the corner. Speaking of, so they're overweight, as I think you mentioned, they have to eat a lot, and I was looking at overweight people in other sports. And in the 1952 Olympics, there was no weight restriction, so there's usually a weight restriction on the Bobsleigh, and there was no weight restriction, and only the German team, I think it was, realised that the way to go fast in Bobsleigh is obviously to put really heavy

people on. The average weight of a German Bobsleigh entry in the 1952 Olympics was £260, which is almost 20 stone, isn't it? Whoa! I reckon they learnt their lesson from that Olympics, and weight restriction is everywhere now. What a shame. So on referees, I did not know, because I know nothing of sport, that one man invented

yellow cards, and he was called Ken Aston, and he was a really tough referee. He was really good. He was involved in football. He was a football referee. He was British, and he was, I think it was in around the 50s or 60s, but he'd just seen an England-Argentina match, which was so rough that afterwards the Argentinian team tried to break into the English dressing room. That's how bad it got.

And one Argentinian player had been pleading with the ref, and just being very passionate about saying that was not a foul, that wasn't offside, whatever it was. And he got sent off for violence of the tongue, was the phrase that was used. And as Ken Aston was driving home, he thought there must be a way of punishing someone without just sending them off, because there must be an intermediate stage. And he said, as I drove down Kensington High Street, the traffic light turned red. I thought yellow, take it easy, red, stop, you're off. So it's based on traffic lights.

Wow. I mean, it's what you'd assume. It should be an amber card. It should be an amber card. That's why I'm going to call it from now on. Oh, God, you're going to be even less popular at football matches. That was never an amber. On his ideas list was the carrier dagger in order to commit suicide anywhere.

It was in that feature in his brainstorm. I once went to a party where the host of the party employed the yellow card, red card system. Did he? Yeah. The idea was if you got too drunk, too rowdy, you'd get a yellow card. If you then repeated an offense, you'd get a red card. Oh, my God. What happened when you got a red card?

You had to go home. Yeah, I had to go home. I got red carded. I'm a qualified referee, do you know? Oh, you do? Football referee. What level are you qualified? Could you do a premiership match?

I did, yeah. I did Arsenal versus Swansea this week. That explains it. But he's not allowed on the pitch anymore because of his new amber card system, which is met some resistance. James was actually a very successful referee for a long time, but he was fired after drinking all the halftime water. Four players died of thirst.

OK, time for fact number three, and that is Harkin. My fact this week is a trailer for the longest movie ever made has just been released, and it's 72 minutes long. Wow. I like to think that the film is just 73 minutes and they had a terrible editor. Is that the game? There's a lot of spoilers in this trailer. No, sadly, the movie is 30 days long.

Is it? The guy who's making this film, I looked him up a bit. He's called Anders Weber. Is that right? That's right, yeah. And he said it would be an abstract, nonlinear narrative summary of the artist's time spent with the moving image. Sounds great.

And that it will show how space and time is intertwined into a surreal, dreamlike journey beyond places. Are there any action scenes? I don't know if there's a chase. Isn't it going to be screened just once? Yeah. I think that's the plan, yeah. Although, you know, due to popular demand, they might roll it out.

DVD sales might be huge. You get 10 DVDs in the post. Supposedly it's going to be screened just once on every continent from the 31st of December 2020 onward, so it's not hit out for a while. And then it's going to be destroyed. By the audiences. Sounds terrible. Has anyone watched the trailer?

No. Basically, there's not enough time to watch a 72 minute trailer. Really? You can imagine going into the cinema to watch another film, and this trailer comes on. And for the first couple of minutes, you're really into it. By 45 minutes in, you're thinking, God, the trailers, they've gone for ages these days, don't they? I really like, in trailers now, they do this.

They've been doing it for a long time, actually. They show bits of movie that never make it to the final movie. Really? Yeah. So many movies, because they'll release a trailer while they're still cutting the movie. And then a decision will be made when the final movie edit is happening. We don't need that scene. And then they just go, that's fine.

It doesn't matter that it's in the trailer. So, famously, a lot of people know this about this particular movie, but there's a movie called The Transporter, or Transporter. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, Jason Statham. That's right. In the movie, they did not include a classic scene in the trailer, and it is a classic scene in the trailer where a missile is launched to Jason Statham, and he deflects it using

a tea tray. Using a tennis... Oh, a tea tray? I was going to say something. He deflects it out of the way, like, not interested. That's amazing. Why was that not put in the final film? Because Jason Statham, I think, said, no one's going to believe this.

But they filmed it. Like, he didn't point that out before shooting it. He saw it in the script, and went, that's fantastic. But I continued reading. I found this on IMDb. I continued reading just movie trivia for that particular movie. Can I give you a couple? Yes, please.

One of them is that, in the garage scene, what was thought to be transmission oil was, in fact, molasses syrup. Oh, yeah. Jason Statham reported to be a very sticky situation. Oh, my God. And then, underneath the tea tray, knocking the missiles away, two facts below, it says that Jason Statham did most of his own stunts. Isn't that great?

Weirdly, there was an inventor of trailers. He didn't know that. Is that? Yeah, very famously, a guy called Nils Grandland. And he made the first trailer, and it was for a play called The Pleasure Seekers. And it was in 1913. So he wanted people to come see the play. So he thought he would shoot incidents from the play, and they showed it.

And then they realized that this was a fantastic idea. So they applied it to movies. And he then made the first-ever trailer for a movie, which was for a Charlie Chaplin movie. Really? Yeah, so Chaplin had the first-ever trailer. Is it right that they're called trailers because they used to go after the movie? Yes. Exactly.

They would trail the movie and get you excited about the next thing you could go and see. And then, presumably, they stopped doing that because people just left. One of the things they find weird is that the director who's doing the film you're talking about, Wayberg, is, he's only ever done short films. So this is quite a big step, isn't it? And for my next film. They stout that in between steps. He really has.

I have attached all the short films to each other to make a mega-film. But the run-and-run. So the longest film ever until... Well, the current longest film ever, because this one hasn't been released yet. Yeah, this one will be in the future one. Yeah. It's Modern Times Forever. And it's a Finnish film.

It's 240 hours long. And IMDb describes its plot line as the ever-slow decay of Helsinki's Stora Enzo Headquarters building. So that's what Modern Times Forever is about. It sounds a really good film. Get a 6.4 on IMDb. Just a second. It's how the headquarters are going to decay over the next few thousand years. I think they projected it onto the building itself, didn't they?

How did they? So you could kind of watch it happen as if it's happened. Oh, wow. That's harsh as well. That's harsh for the building. Well, the building didn't mind. Yeah, like someone projecting their own gruesome death onto you or something. Yeah.

As you just hang out in the street. That's true. Okay, so have you heard of Don Lafontaine? No. Okay, he is the man. He's dead now, unfortunately, but he was the one who is very famous for doing trailer voices. Oh. He's done more than 5,000 film trailers and his famous catchphrase is

In a World. In a World. Yes. Because there was a film that satirized that, wasn't there? Oh, yeah, yeah. With Lake Bell. Yes. In a World.

That's so cool. Yeah, he was a really, really amazing guy. His voice cracked at the age of 13 mid-sentence. The final role on television was in the Phineas and Thurb episode, The Chronicles of Meep. And he says, the final line he ever said, which was In a World. There. I said it.

Happy. Oh, really? That was his last thing. This is really cool. This is a thing that almost predates. In fact, it definitely predates film. It's a kind of early version of a movie. Okay.

This is so fantastic. It was a 19th century showman, right? His name was John Banford. And he invented this show, which consisted of a 1,320-foot-long painting of the Mississippi. Right? It was a mural. And it was on two spindles, like a VHS cassette, right? So at the start of the show, it was all on one spindle.

And then you pull it across to the other spindle, and you start winding the other one around. And it pulls it across like a tape, like a videotape. But it shows this moving panorama of the river. And he would do a show for about, you know, for two hours telling stories about what was on the river and his wife played music as it went. And he was telling, you know, adventure stories and all the things that were happening. Was there stuff on the river, like pictures of boats and fish? I think so.

Yeah, exactly. I think it wasn't just muddy. I think it wasn't just water for two hours and 1,000 feet. But isn't that amazing? It was this incredible long panorama. And it was basically a very, very early proto film. When was that, did you say? That was in the mid-19th century.

So, you know, 50 years before Lumiere and Maddie. I remember reading about him in a book called Banvard's Folly. Have you heard of that? No. Not much more to say about it, apart from everyone should read it, because it is a brilliant book. It's just about famous people from history who were famous at the time, but then have been completely forgotten. Oh, wow. That's brilliant.

Yeah, that sounds awesome. Such a great book. That's really cool. Who was Banford? He was this guy. I've been talking about him for a minute. Have you? How'd it go?

Not great. Okay, so before they had the talkies, they had the silent films. And there was one patent that I found for the idea of getting the dialogue across without being able to have the sound. Yep. And that was to have speech bubbles that came out of actors' mouths like a party blower. Wow. If you wanted to say, good evening, Mr. Shriver, then I would blow this party bubble and you'd be able to see the words and then it would come back. And then you'd say, oh, nice to meet you, Ms. Dargan.

That is so great. I've never heard of that. That's fantastic. That's amazing. They never did it, but it was a patent. I love that. In some alternative universe, that is still how we're doing it. That's the only difference between this universe and that one.

Because it was tried and it was just so good. It's so much fun to watch. That's how all news reading is done. Because it lightens bad news, doesn't it? So no one took it seriously. Absolutely. So the actors would have to pause, pull it out of their pocket, put it in them. Make sure they get the right one.

And also, you'd run out of puff very fast. Yeah. After a while, you'd be, yeah, for a monologue. Now is the winter of our discontent. One of the great silent film directors of the 1920s was this guy called Eric von Stroheim. And I really like him because have you guys seen Sunset Boulevard? Yes. You have.

Love it. Me too. So he is the main character in that. He wasn't really an actor, but he was a director in the silent film generation. And Sunset Boulevard is all about the decline of silent films about this woman who's, you know, was big in the silent film age and her downfall. And her servant is played by this huge director. And it always feels really poignant when you watch it because it's actually about his decline

and his demise. But what I also quite like about Eric von Stroheim is that he created the best film ever made, apparently, in 1924. Really? In 1924. But it's called Greed and it was another long one. So it was eight hours long and it was only watched by 12 people in the end. And most of those 12 people.

This is the best movie ever. Yeah. Because it was watched by 12 people and then people decided people aren't going to go and see this. So it was edited down by his producers and he was really angry about that. And they've lost the original eight hour film reel. But apparently this is the holy grail of like movie reels. Really?

This is the greatest film ever made, according to those 12 people. Wow. Right. So where has it gone? Like literally no one knows. If we knew that then it wouldn't be the holy grail. So where is the holy grail at? I have a weird sort of, this isn't really related, but it's to do with missing film as well,

which is a holy grail of missing film as well. When Mallory was found on Everest because they found his body, the big hope was that they were going to find on him his camera. Yeah. Because that would prove whether he'd been to the top or not. The idea is if they made it there, they would have just taken a photo. That was the hope. And they could have seen on the camera.

They might have found there were no photos, but the idea is maybe it was. He didn't have the camera on him, which means that Irvin, who's the other missing one of the two of Mallory and Irvin was up there. He must have the camera on him. And Kodak have said because of the way and the nature of the height and the coldness that's going on, that if that film is still out there, it can still be developed, but only for a few more years. So they're desperately trying to find it because it may hold the answer to whether or not they

got up there. We've got to get out there. But it's an amazing because that's from the 20s, like that's really built in obsolescence in technology these days where they say it'll definitely run out after 90 years. I'm really sick of it. Yeah. If anyone's ever been up to the top of Everest and not taken a photo. I bet it's so cold and uncomfortable and you've got to take your gloves off.

I would take a photo of my thumb. That's what I'd do. Oh, yeah. My thumb at the top of Everest. Nice. Yeah. Thumbs down. Not what it's cracked up to be guys.

Trip advisor, two stars. Hilary when he got up there, he took a piss. So I'm just saying he got something out straight away. Okay. Despite the cold. Oh, yeah. He didn't take a photo of it. It wasn't a sort of trip.

Okay time for a final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact, actually this comes from, we did a live show in Brussels a while ago and someone from the audience volunteered this fact and it was so fantastic that I wrote it in my files and have only just rediscovered it. So this is the fact. It's that in the middle ages, lots of churches had statues of Jesus which had moving arms so that he could be taken down from the cross and carried around the church. And there were other statues which had the Virgin Mary with a working belly and you could

take out a model of the infant Christ. So these were for these were for ceremonies in churches. Also things like Easter, Good Friday, you'd have the model of the Christ on the cross and you'd take it down and you'd carry it to a version of his tomb, for example. So the arms had to be fold downable so that you could move him and carry him. And there is an incredible, I think it's a book on this, it's about 300 pages long, it's huge. It's called Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ.

It's incredible scholarly work which denotes every single one all across the world. There are 126 which exist still. The vast majority were made between 1490 and 1530. It's as though they became huge and then immediately disappeared. Most of Wood, like Pogs, like when Pogs are used in Easter to represent the Crucified Christ, yes. There's that really gruesome statue in Mexico, isn't there? Which is a statue of Jesus and he's covered in blood and stuff and it's when he's just

been crucified. And they recently did an X-ray of it and they realised that his teeth are real human teeth. And we don't know why. It's really disgusting. Wow. Is it like human size? Or does he have a massive mouth? What do you mean?

Is he like a tiny doll, Jesus? With life-size humans, it probably is life-size. He's life-size, yeah. He's normal human size and he's, yeah, it's a grotesque statue but why are there human incisors in his mouth? What? I read about that and supposedly it was a custom a few centuries ago to donate body parts of yours, not for science but for religion.

Ah. You donate them to the church for religious purpose. You could have like a statue of Jesus with lots of different body parts from different people. I don't think that was ever done because that's incredibly gruesome, although this teeth one is real. Yeah. And it was, yeah, it was 18th century and I think they were donated by people as a way

of showing their gratitude to Christ. So what other ways could you give your body to? So people would give their own hair and that could be used as sort of wigs and things like that. Another statue of the baby Jesus has rabbit's teeth in it. It's really peculiar. So Jesus has got these two buck tooth teeth on the front. Yeah.

What's up God? So some of these other ones that were in churches in the middle ages, some of them have movable arms as I say. Some of them had mechanisms to open and close Christ's eyes. Wow. Yeah. And they were, some of them were quite detailed and sort of advanced in terms of modeling and puppetry.

Just out of curiosity, is this like an early action man? Like is that, would that have inspired how toys move? Well, okay, it's not as silly as it sounds because early marionettes were based on the Virgin Mary. Is that why they're called marionettes? Yes. The marionette comes from Little Mary because it was a model of the Virgin Mary which was used in devotional plays to show, to teach children about religion basically and some

grown-ups. Yeah. So depictions of Jesus, early depictions of Jesus, quite interesting because in the very early days people were very iffy about depicting him as a person because it was thought of being idolatrous and that was a no-no. So he was shown as a fifth, he was shown as a fish. As a sith. He was shown as a fish because, you know, ichthus was the acronym that they used, is that right?

Yeah, it was an old way of Catholics talking to each other about Catholicism. Yeah. Supposedly you draw a fish and that was the sign that you were Christian and someone else dotted the eye. That was the sign they were a Christian and then you could talk properly, you know. In some depictions of Jesus, these are about 5th century AD, he has a magic wand. Oh wow. Which he uses to do all his miracles.

No, no, no, it's not. He uses it to turn the water to wine and to raise Lazarus from the dead and to create the loaves and the fishes. Wow. That's so cool. Incredible. Do you know, years ago James was telling me that there were lost gospels and within those one of them, Jesus fights a dragon.

Yeah, they're called the infancy gospels and they're like gospels which were written around the time of today's gospels but they were never used in the official Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, Luke and John kind of thing and there is one where he kills dragons, another one where he explodes snakes and another one where he kills a boy who accidentally brushed against him. Wow. Whoa. Yeah.

These sound much more exciting. Why weren't these the guys that were being published? I bet they were disappointed. Yeah. They sound a bit like young Jesus adventures. Yeah. You know you get young Indiana Jones and young James Bond things. Yeah.

They sound a bit like the adventures of young- Like fan fiction. Yeah. The idea I think is that he does like slightly, with the child brushing against him, I think the idea is that he started and he was quite angry but then eventually turned into a good, peaceful person. I think that's the transformation. God.

But you can see why those were not sort of turned into proper gospel doctrines. I can see why they left the dragon ones out. Yeah. Censorship is what that was, really, wasn't it? I think this is cool, speaking of statues, the statue of David, Michelangelo's statue of David, three of the four turtles were involved in the making of it. Leonardo Michelangelo, Donatello. Yes.

So Raphael wasn't. Raphael wasn't involved. Where was Splinter for all of this? It's such a good question. He was masterminding the whole thing. So the statue of David was commissioned about 100 years before it was actually built and Donatello was one on the sort of committee that decided it had to be built and his students had some attempts and they cocked it up and eventually there was a sort of people applied

to be the one who got to design the statue of David and Leonardo da Vinci was considered but rejected and Michelangelo was accepted and he made it in two years and everyone agreed it was this masterpiece but I quite enjoy that. That is totally awesome. Except Leonardo wasn't like that because there was a committee that had to decide where to put it. So at the moment it's outside the huge entrance of the Duomo Cathedral in Florence, really prominent place and the committee decided to put it there but Leonardo da Vinci was

on that committee and he suggested that they put it in a little niche on the side of a much less well-known building where it would be completely obscured because I'm guessing a little bit of professional jealousy. Yeah, it must be, right? Yeah. That's great. I was looking into a statue that I've known since childhood which has been a famous one for me.

When Michael Jackson released his His Story album and he made those huge giant statues of himself, do you remember? Right. I don't know. But okay, yeah, yeah. So they made 10 massive statues of Michael Jackson which became the cover and it was on the Thames. They floated it through the Thames and it was, I mean it was, anyone except you knows it.

Well, I hope they got permission from the Port of London Authority. People are going down water slides. I was just looking into it like where, because those are huge. I think they were like 30 feet high. Where have they gone? And nine of them, we don't know where they've gone, which is really interesting. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. We do know where one is. It's at the Best McDonald's, which is... Is that a personal opinion? No, it's actually a town called Best that bought it. Excellent. The nearby town of Worst. Yeah.

And in between the two, second best. Yeah. So it stands currently at McDonald's Best parking lot and it's become a big gathering place for Michael Jackson fans. And actually I've got it slightly wrong. There are two that are known of that still exist. The other one, the pedestal that they made to put Michael Jackson on, was using all of the statue stones from a very famous Stalin monument called the Cue from Meat.

Do you remember that? That extraordinary famous Stalin monument. I think that's another one you mean. Yeah. If you Google Stalin monument, it's incredibly famous and they use that to make a thing for Michael Jackson stand on. Did you guys read about the Ottoman statue taking a selfie? What?

Who was... There was a statue that was recently erected. It was in the city of Amasya. Amasya. I don't know how to pronounce that anyway, it's on the Black Sea. And it was a statue of an old Ottoman prince and he's taking a selfie of himself with a smartphone. And I guess it's supposed to represent the glory of Ottoman princes and also meant to

be a bit hip and down with the times. It's not that great because people were really angry about it and thought that it kind of demeaned... iPhones. ...the Ottoman... Yeah. So within 24 hours of the statue being put up, they've broken off his smartphone and most of his sword.

It's been destroyed. No. There was a thing though. There was a trend of taking photos because you know how ancient statues are often stretching out a hand. Oh yeah. There's a trend for taking photos in that position to show what the selfie of the statue looks like.

Yeah, great. That's a good trend. That's a great trend. Well done, the people. Did you guys read about the 45 foot statue of Pope John Paul that was commissioned by this guy called Lezek Lysen and basically this guy saved the life of his own son who was who fell into a lake when they were on holiday in Croatia, I think, or fell into the sea.

So he decided that that was thanks to the Pope and so he commissioned and paid for a 45 foot tall fiberglass bright white statue of Pope John Paul II to be erected and it's disgusting. Why did he think it was thanks to the Pope? Because I guess it's God and the Pope is the God's spokesman. The Pope sort of came to him in his hour of need and gave him the courage to save his son. Yeah, I guess so.

Cool. I mean I think he should give himself more credit. But I like it so another... Yeah, but you can imagine the headlines. Local dickhead builds statue of himself after saving son from drowning. Local dickhead. They should do that more in local papers. Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, you can get us on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. I'm Andrew Hunter M. James at Everard Digby and Chazinsky. You can email EverardDigby at qi.com.

We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. 00:44:48,520 --> 00:44:49,520 Bye.