No Such Thing As A Fish: 487: No Such Thing As A Short Dalek

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of no such thing as a fish where we are joined

by our very good friend Jenny Colgan. Now Jenny Colgan is, well she's done a bit of

stand up but she is mostly well known for being a writer, a writer of romantic comedy

fiction and of science fiction. If you are a fan of Doctor Who then you may well know

her. She's written all sorts of spin offs and audio books and stuff for Doctor Who.

We might get into that in the first fact today, spoiler alert, but what we'd like to

let you know about most of all is that Jenny has a brand new book. It is called The Summer

Skies and if it is anything like Jenny's other work it is going to be absolutely fantastic,

just perfect for a summer holiday and you can get that wherever you buy your books. On top

of that the usual stuff do join club fish if you want a bit of extra fish in your life

and some ad free episodes and if you go to no such thing as a fish.com forward slash

pod fest then you will find that there are one or two really not many at all tickets

left for our show at Kings Place in September. We are on the verge of booking an amazing

guest for that. I promise you you will not want to miss it. If you can't get down to

London then there are streaming tickets available. Okay really hope you enjoy this sweet show

and all that is left to say is on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with

James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Jenny Colgan and once again we have gathered around

the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular

order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Jenny.

There is on.to a Dalek named after Dickens character.

Wow, hi bro. I learned this fact for money, not actually for points really because one

of my kids teachers is a great Dickens fact and he said to the kids if you bring me a

Dickens fact that I haven't heard before there is something in it for you. So I can

put it out to the world which was kind of fun and actually the most Dickens facts that

everybody knows, one he is the first person ever to talk about dinosaurs in fiction.

There is a reference to a dinosaur on page one of Blake House and then the other thing

that most people know is that Hans Christian Andersen came to Stamerton on holiday and

was the worst guest ever and they both wrote about it in their diaries with Hans going

oh I'm feeling so weary and Dickens going how do we get this guy out of our house.

So these obviously the teacher knew these very famous facts but what he did not know

is a friend of mine who is an actor plays a Dalek on.to and they tend to keep the same

people because obviously it's quite skilled and you tend to be in the same Dalek casing

because they are really small and it's not very pleasant to spend 10 hours in a really

small space. So you have your own Dalek and the Dalek is named after you in the props

covered and my friend is called Barnaby and he is named after Barnaby Rudge and so there

is in the BBC Dalek Barnaby.

Dalek Barnaby that's so good.

Go ahead and thank sir I must exterminate you.

Yeah that's amazing so yeah so for anyone that doesn't know Doctor Who James I'm looking

at you.

Yeah I'm afraid I don't.

You know what the Daleks are though?

Yeah they're like little robots have I.

They're a tall villain.

I'm so bad.

They're tall.

Yeah they're tall.

They're not little when we say little they remember if I had to describe a Dalek the

first word I was going was oh they're quite the guy over there what can you describe him?

Yeah he's tall.

No he's got a same plunger coming out of his tall side.

Can you tell me anything about the criminal who came over and tried to exterminate you?

Well yeah first of all he was tall.

I was simply addressing your first point and saying they're small.

I was simply hitting that off as a must of myth straight away.

Okay so there's that Jenny there she knows Doctor Who.

They're tall.

Oh right.

And they're kind of they have a kind of plunger at the front and they are in fact they look

like they're the monsters but they're not they are kind of strange creatures inside.

Used to be people.

So they're like a tank for a monster.

That is exactly what I'm like.

When you say pepper pot I read that when they were designed the person who decided how they

would move use the pepper pot to kind of move around the table and say this is how they'll

move is that true?

Yeah I think I did.

It was Ray Cusick who designed the look of it.

It's a really weird the story of how they were come up with because the creator was Terry

Nation who was involved in working on the very early scripts and he just described them

in the script but he didn't really describe them very much and then Terry Nation was...

He said tall.

He said just some cool ideas.

And then Ray Cusick took the job to design them and he worked with a model maker called

Bill Roberts and they actually they're the ones who built the look as far as I understand

it.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

Yeah and Terry Nation though holds the as it were the copyright.

But they belong to him.

They belong to him too.

Well he became hugely wealthy because he owned the copyright to Daleks and so...

And to the point where when the new series came back all those years ago with Russell

T. Davies the first one with Christopher Eccleston we didn't know if we were going to get the

Daleks back because the Terry Nation estate said well we don't know if this is going to

be...

Really funny but it is.

I would consider that the Daleks would not return with Doctor Who.

And what is the very first thing the Daleks do when they come back?

I know this one.

I actually know this one because that's one of the very little bits of Doctor Who I've

seen.

They go up some stairs.

They fly up the stairs.

Yeah.

It was in such a lovely moment when kind of Rose escapes up the stairs and the whole

country's going ah ha.

The one thing I know about Daleks and then they leave it.

I'd love to know if your friend Barnaby if he's been in the same Dalek for all these

years.

Whether or not it's like when you go into a small biplane and you know the person's

got a picture of their kids up on the some dice you know it's the inside.

Have they got all these little mementos?

It's a little lady Dalek.

This is not the only literary reference that made its way into Doctor Who.

The very first companion of the very first series of Doctor Who was Ian Chesterton.

And Ian Chesterton was named after GK Chesterton because the original script writer for the

show Coburn was a devout Catholic and a massive fan of Chesterton and so gave him that name.

So Chesterton made it in as well.

And Dickens is the first historical figure that turns up in New Year's.

Oh really?

So he's in the second episode I think.

Of the original series.

Of the new series.

Of the new series.

Which of course isn't new anymore.

Yeah yeah yeah.

It's like really old.

As played of course by Simon Cowell who has played Dickens so often I get them very muddled

up in my head.

Yeah.

So the first companion was named after who?

GK Chesterton.

GK Chesterton.

Yeah.

So I thought the first assistant was the Doctor's granddaughter.

Are we confusing companion and assistant?

Oh my god.

I'm sorry.

We're going to get letters.

That's the one who does the inbox.

I just feel like.

I did a Pump Quiz recently and the quiz master she said we had a Doctor Who quiz in here

last week and I barely got out alive.

Famously the quickest way to end a punch up in a Pump Quiz is to ask how many Doctor

Who's there been?

Luckily your inbox is bigger on the inside than ours.

Yeah that might be a technicality because the granddaughter is the granddaughter.

Right.

There she counts.

The brief was really interesting for the casting.

It was she had to be a with it girl of 15 reaching the end of her secondary school career.

Eager for life.

Lower than middle class.

Avoid dialect.

Neutral accent laced with the latest teenage slang.

That was the gig.

K-Cat.

Yeah exactly.

And then she was made his granddaughter because it was William Hartnell the first one.

It was.

And it was to avoid any suggestion of this is a bit weird isn't it, this whole bloke

travelling around with a 15 year old girl.

What's going on?

You know they were really careful with that for so long in fact right up till I started

writing for it and I started.

Did you change it?

But no when I went to see them they were really because I write romantic comedy and

they were really quite funny like you know we can't have any kissing or anything like

that and I was like fine I promise you I'm a debutee I will not do any of that.

Then the show completely changed and actually Matt Smith spends pretty much his whole time

being naked or getting married to folk by mistake or you know suddenly became a massive

romantic overtones.

There's a kiss which had never happened.

All the time.

Yeah he's that.

He's down spaking interest.

Did he get his heart broken?

Oh that gave me knowledge yes.

I just kind of slip in anything right now.

I did read that there have been Doctor Who top trumps over the years this is interesting

because I do know about top trumps and Pac 6 has a lot of bad guys in including Adolf

Hitler and if you put Pac 6 against Pac 7 you can fight Adolf Hitler against Queen

Elizabeth I so I want you to guess who is the bravest out of Adolf Hitler or Queen

Elizabeth I according to top trumps.

Elizabeth.

Yeah.

Agreed.

Everyone.

I'll say the minority folk.

Are you voting for Hitler?

Just checking.

I just want you to say out loud that you think Hitler is braver, braver, not better.

I'll say Hitler to be right.

In fact Bravery was his lowest possible thing.

He was good in lots of the things but the Bravery was the worst.

Who do you think is the strongest out of Hitler or Queen Elizabeth I?

I got a complete ambush last time.

I'm going to say Elizabeth I.

Strongest.

She's the strongest and Hitler wins on brains and terror.

Okay.

Just a thing.

Rare victory for Hitler.

Thank you Doctor.

He does spend his entire episode locked in the cupboard.

So I could have got you to the Bravery thing but the brains one slightly defeats me.

What was Hitler's episode Doctor Who?

It's called Let's Kill Hitler.

Oh wow.

Really?

Gosh.

One of the first people involved in the BBC side of things.

It was a guy called Sidney Newman who was the head of drama.

He was a really interesting guy.

So there was a play that was broadcast in his career called Underground.

It was about a group of nuclear holocaust survivors living in the London Underground.

I think this was early 60s or late 50s.

It was quite, you know, it sounds very terrifying and dramatic.

But it was a live broadcast and one of the actors in it died of a heart attack halfway

through the television screening off stage.

So he wasn't on camera but it was in between scenes basically.

He was in costume and makeup and you know he died and the play had to improvise its

way through and Newman was kind of in charge of it.

He said just treat it like a football match.

Just play on.

Wow.

Adjust.

Yeah.

Oh so it wasn't like there's been a murder.

Like they didn't shift the whole thing to be.

I don't know.

Like really deathful kid.

Can I just say if someone dies in the middle of a fight they do stop the game.

That's a very good point.

That's a very good point.

Well that's the weird thing.

The character was meant to die of a heart attack later in the play.

The character, not the actor.

Right.

I guess they just had to shift him.

Of course not the actor.

What a gig to agree to.

This will require you dying.

It's just going out on BBC One so you cannot think of your career.

Peter Capaldi I think auditioned for Doctor Who and got the role but he got it 20 years

later.

So he auditioned in 1996 when they were casting for the, they made a film didn't they then.

Yes.

And lots of people auditioned.

Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Rick Mail.

Oh wow.

Rick would have been great.

Although you need to be kind of kind to be the Doctor Who and I think he was a very kind

man in real life but on screen he was terrifying at all times.

Others auditioned, Brian Blessed?

No.

Do you know what?

There's a certain, I think it's about English tolerance for Brian Blessed and I have not

heard it.

Gene, I can't, you know, I get it.

Everybody loves him.

It's one of those English things that I don't get.

Like freaking Tim Henman.

Do you think Andy would make a good Doctor Who?

I think, yes?

Let me see your fingers.

Hold out your fingers.

Yeah?

Okay.

Sorry, what are you looking for though?

They've all got really long fingers.

Oh.

Is that?

A requirement.

A requirement.

Maybe that's why Capaldi got the gig 20 years on.

He was older.

Taller.

Fingers longer fingers.

Actually the very nice thing is Shitty Who is the new Doctor Who is also Scottish so

we've had the most sensational run of it.

One of the most famous things about Doctor Who is the fact that during the 1950s and

60s or even to the 70s about 60 to 70% of all BBC video that had recordings of shows

were deleted.

And so we're missing, it was over 100 episodes of Doctor Who.

It's slowly going a bit slow.

I think it's under the 100 mark now purely because there is a dedicated group of fans

who are out there in the world trying to track down all of these missing episodes.

Fascinating.

Every few years we get a message that comes through from fans online saying, and that's

been found, the BBC will say, nine found in Nigeria in the cupboard of a random TV, local

TV station.

And they just find the reels today?

Yeah.

They find the old.

Yeah.

Because what they used to do is they used to send out all of these reels to different

countries.

But explicitly would say once you've had it for this many months as an expiry date on

it.

Yeah.

Burn them up.

Yeah.

And there's a record of a Goon show episode called Yeti, which says on it, smash this

in three months time.

Here's the expiry date.

Yeah.

And someone just hadn't smashed it.

Is that whether it's an impossible film?

It's got the, this message will self destruct in five seconds or whatever.

Could be.

Could.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know either.

It might be.

But yeah.

But so we still have like 97 episodes that are still missing.

Are they keep getting fans?

If you find one, is it worth like a million quid or something?

That's interesting.

Yeah, I don't know.

Not really.

No.

It kind of belongs to the BBC still.

And also it's such a kind of proper Indiana Jones sleuthathon.

You know, people have dedicated extraordinary amounts of time to this thing.

It would be seen as bad if you put it on eBay straight away.

Yes, it would be seen as bad.

But also I think the kind of glory and honour of finding it.

The missing ones, they're kind of animated.

Ah, do they have the scripts then?

They've got scripts.

Right.

Okay.

Cool.

When you think of Doctor Who, largely it's the villains of the old Doctor Who, the Daleks

so on there.

Cyberman.

Cyberman, thank you.

Well done, James.

But then there's also, James, the weeping angels.

That's right.

So Stephen Moffat, who created that for the show, created a monster that was so iconic

to the new fans of Doctor Who that when there was a poll done in 2012, it came on top as

the best villain of Doctor Who about the Daleks, which is very rare.

It's the first time I think that's ever happened.

So the weeping angels, for anyone that doesn't know, it's basically angels that are effectively

weird aliens or something.

And if you turn your gaze away from them or you blink, they get closer to you and they

get closer to you and get closer to you until they capture you.

What grandmother's footsteps?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

What time is it, Mr. Wolf?

Yeah.

And if they capture you, they don't kill you, but they send you to another time on earth

and you're just stuck there and there's no way of getting back.

So it's basically a death to some extent.

Also, if you're playing top trumps, then they have the same terror as Adolf Hitler.

Wow.

There we go.

Well, that puts them in context.

Thank you.

I think it's a dangerous as a monster because I think if we had them now, they'd just be

a queue of people closing their eyes in front of them saying, could you send me back to

when I could buy a house?

1981.

Manhattan is fine.

Yeah, exactly.

But so Stephen Moffat was actually inspired by an original statue that he saw that looks

so scary.

And he had this idea of what if that kept encroaching on me.

So years later, he decided, having told his son about the story, to go back and show him

the weeping angel that had inspired this.

And they went there to the exact spot and it was gone.

Was it an old slave trader or something?

Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

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Okay.

On with the podcast.

On with the show.

Okay.

It is time for fact number two and that is James.

Okay.

My fact this week is when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, George Bernard Shaw

wrote to the Times in disgust.

He was upset that there was an unnecessary B at the end of the word bomb.

Thank you, George for your contribution on this horrific day.

I know.

It's like Churchill said it was going to save a million lives.

Gandhi said it was a potential suicide of mankind.

But George Bernard Shaw wrote, I can scribble the word bomb barely legible 18 times in a

minute and bomb without the B 24 times in a minute saving 25 percent by dropping this

superfluous B. And he reckoned that it would save 131,400 seconds per year in the entire

English speaking world.

How soon after the bomb was dropped did he send this?

It was a few weeks after.

Oh, okay.

So he waited for the initial.

I think that was more the post.

Right.

I mean, yeah, talk about missing the point.

Yeah, it was.

Well, he was one of these people who really wanted to improve the language, so to speak

by making spelling simpler.

Pick your moments though, mate.

What the hell?

Has anyone ever written B-O-M for bomb?

Was he was he trying to call back to something or was he trying to evolve the language?

It feels like it's an Italian-ish word.

I think it goes from the Latin bombus, meaning it's on a matipaiic.

It's just like a nice bomb.

But anyway, I thought we might talk about the Manhattan Project.

Because Jenny, you are something of an expert.

Is that fair to say or not?

I would say it's not really fair to say that it's a hostage to question.

However, I did mastermind and I picked it as my specialist subject.

Wow.

And I don't really get nervous very often.

I have never been so nervous.

And I wasn't nervous about the subject, which I thought I knew.

And I wasn't nervous about being on...

I'd already lost Pointless and I'd already lost, you know, whatever that other cheesy

one is.

I wasn't nervous about that.

I was really nervous.

You know how every year there's one person that gets zero points and it goes on YouTube?

And you know, and I just, that was just right in front of my eyes.

In particular, I was like, oh, they're looking at me and they go, oh my God, there's a girl

on, you know, she thought she'd pick this stupid topic.

Oh, and the headline would have been Corgan Bombs.

Oh, right.

And I would have written to the newspaper, it's going, how are you spelling the word

bomb?

You could have saved this much, hadn't you?

Who was your host?

It was one of the tall white-haired pointy guys.

Humphries.

Yes.

Because everyone who watches Doctor Who has their doctor, don't they?

Who they grew up with.

For me, it's a Magnus Magnuson, it's my mastermind.

Well, you did eat me, you know, you did a bit of chit chat.

Yeah, right.

And he said, you're right about cakes.

And I was like, occasionally.

And he said, why aren't you fat?

And I was like, what kind of a question, where are we going with this?

So I think...

That's the today program training, kicking in, just brutalise the guest before you ask

the question.

I can't help Andy, but notice that Jenny's description of tall there to describe the

host was very useful.

Actually, no, you're right, Dan.

I don't think it was.

Sorry, Jenny.

You want to describe the Humphries.

He's sitting down.

Great point.

So the Manhattan Project.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oppenheimer.

And Oppenheimer.

Justin Cookie wasn't a Oppenheimer.

He was.

He's someone who was a bit of a troubling kid.

He's running into stories where his dad kind of has to bail him out at various different

times to sort of save the career that he's hoping to have.

He, at one point, was at Cambridge University.

He was studying there.

And he was furious with one of his teachers, who was called Patrick Blackit.

And Blackit, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize himself.

And Blackit was forcing him to do things that weren't theoretical physics.

He was taking them away from his interests.

Not applied physics, fuck, you know.

So in a bit of fury, in a bit of rage, Oppenheimer.

And this is the story.

There's lots of different stories, but roughly this is it.

He poisoned an apple and left it on Blackit's desk for him to eat.

Like proper will kill you.

Proper poison.

Yeah.

There's a lot of murky sort of territory to the story.

What we do know is definitely the dad stepped in and said, if we promise to send him to

a psychiatrist, can we keep him going on?

And if he keeps his meetings, can he stay?

And they said, yeah, sure.

And so that's the only reason that he's leaning in those days, wasn't it?

You know.

And they will go like people who go to these posh schools, grow up.

Yeah, absolutely.

So big mental rules don't apply to them.

Yeah.

It is crackers.

Wasn't that the way that Alan Turing killed himself as well with the poisoned apple?

It was, yeah.

Supposedly that's the story.

Cyanide into the side of an apple.

A lot of poisoned apples around, yeah.

No, Oppenheimer was very odd.

So Oppenheimer is the person who, when they were setting up the Manhattan Project, they

came to him and they said, we want you to head this up.

And the location, Los Alamos itself, was picked by Oppenheimer when he was on horseback going

off around and he went, this would be perfect.

But even though he was given all of this high clearance and he was the head of this very

secret operation, he was under constant surveillance because they also thought that he was a communist

because he was very pro-communist.

He was never card carrying, but he'd said enough stuff that they thought this guy's going to

be stealing our secrets and sending them out.

Well, the guy that did, there was a guy called Fuchs who was there who ended up and is possibly

depending on how you look at it, guilty of one of the worst crimes that has ever been

done, who did go and sell the stuff to the Soviets, or he took it to the Soviets.

How would you compare against Hitler and the top trumps, please?

That's an excellent question, James, when you want to get back to this.

Sorry.

And nobody suspected him.

Not only that, they all really liked him because he had a car and he used to give them a lift

into town all the time because obviously they'd chit chat.

They'd be like, yeah, come on, I'll give you a lift to the airport.

Oh, wow.

And he caught all of them, not a single one.

Super nice guy.

Would he say, oh, just throw your briefcase in the back of the car while we drive.

Exactly.

And there was someone in the back of the car under a blanket who would then read through

the stuff.

Can someone go and pick up Enrico Fermi?

I'll do it.

God.

That was another dad rescue moment for old Oppenheimer.

He once got in a car crash because he tried to race a train and failed.

What do you mean by racing a train?

They're going alongside each other.

It feels like he was trying to outrun it.

As opposed to sometimes it would be like you're trying to cross the track.

I think he was just racing.

I think he was just trying to get ahead of it and it left his girlfriend unconscious.

And in order to make up for this and turning into a big story, the father had to go over

to the family of the young woman's house and gave a painting and an original Cezanne

drawing as well.

I do that, by the way, that racing after the train on the M1.

You know the last bit of the M1?

The train goes alongside the road.

I didn't know that.

OK.

But my car, it's an electric car so if I go up of 70 miles an hour I lose all my batteries

so I tend to lose the race quite quickly.

So funny.

I really think that this film should probably be about his dad.

Yeah.

The new Oppenheimer film.

Yeah.

It's a comedy if it's about his dad, isn't it?

It's like, oh Robert.

It's like Dennis the Menace movie then.

Yeah, in this flat when he was growing up there were three Van Gogh paintings and some

Picasso's too and clearly some Cezanne's as well.

I mean there were very, very, very wealthy people when he was growing up.

But his, Dan, you mentioned that he was suspected of being a communist or of being suspect.

He was approached by Soviet intelligence in 1943 and he said no.

He said, no, I'm not going to show you the secrets but it still wrecked his career anyway

because he didn't tell anyone.

So he lost his clearance, his security clearance in 1954.

Feels like his cat's out of the bag then.

I mean, they've got the bomb.

Anyway, but it was over ties to communism.

It was in the whole McCarthy witch trial period.

But the US Department of Energy did reverse their decision in 2022.

Just 55 years after he died they said, you know what?

You can have your security clearance back.

Very helpful.

I mean it was a gesture obviously.

Maybe he's still alive.

You don't know what these atomic bombs are going to do to you.

I would say that there was a movement on to stop people smoking on film because it wasn't very nice.

Oh yeah.

And it was kind of poo pooed down.

And then I watched Casablanca because I'd never seen it.

And everyone is chugging on fags 100% of the time and it's disgusting.

It was so disgusting.

And Oppenheimer never, ever took a breath that didn't have a cigarette on it.

So I'm feeling quite sorry for the actor.

Killian Murphy who's playing down the movie.

Yeah, because he never, he was a chain smoker.

He never took a breath without a cigarette.

That's what he says part of the prep of trying to become Oppenheimer was basically cigarettes and cocktails with the, yeah, cigarettes and martinis.

Oh no, I'm going to have to go method.

It's really weird because when I think about the atomic bomb and I think most people obviously we see it as one of the worst moments in history.

And there's obviously the arguments that people make that it may have saved more lives like Churchill and so on.

But to sort of actively celebrate it feels quite an odd thing to me.

And if you do go to Los Alamos now, that is very much what they do.

Like it's their tourism trade, isn't it?

So there's a supermarket there with an atomic bar.

You can get atomic salsa that you can buy and purchase.

There's atomic bumper stickers.

There's a, you can buy clothing for babies where there's a mushroom cloud on it.

That says the words, I've been dropping bombs since day one.

You know, there's all these merch things and it feels a bit out of taste except I guess it's not to them.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, I grew up in a world where we went to a big room on Sunday and there was a guy with nails in his hands.

That's true.

I went to Hiroshima.

Yeah.

If I've said this before, but you, if you go to Hiroshima, you can go where the bomb was dropped to the exact spot.

And there's a sign on the wall and it says the first nuclear bomb was detonated something like 100 feet above this point.

And then you sort of look upwards and you can imagine the exact spot where the bomb would have gone off and then detonated and killed all those people.

It's really amazing.

Do you know about Trinitite?

Trinitite?

I think it's Trinitite because it was the Trinity test.

The Trinity test.

Oh.

Okay.

So it's not got three nitrogen atoms.

That's why it's called Trinitite.

No, sorry.

No, I just said it wrong.

Yeah.

Trinitite, I'm sure.

Is it a type of stone?

It's a type of glass made when the sand turned to glass when they tested the first bomb.

Wow.

And it's called, it's also called atom sight.

It's light green glass and it was just left there.

Is it radioactive?

I think it is not very anymore, but it's still a little radioactive.

So most of it was bulldozed by the US atomic energy commission and buried, you know, but some of it's still there because ants will bring it to the surface.

These tiny beads of glass because some of it's under the soil and they're digging their tunnels and so it just gets pushed up.

It's crazy and it's illegal to take it away now.

But for a while it was just thought, oh, it's just, you know, sand.

It's just sand turned to glass.

And so there was a period in 1945 and 46 where it was marketed in jewellery.

You could get Trinitite jewellery.

There was a designer who made some earrings and a hairpin from it and there was an actress called Merle Oberon.

She wore some of it to a fundraiser.

Supposedly, this is quite dark, to discredit Japanese claims about radiation injury.

What?

I mean, she's wearing some of the sand fused glass, so it can't be that dangerous, but obviously...

That's terrible.

Yeah.

Supposedly, just because you've mentioned this, I haven't gone this room down, but using one of these bombs is one of the methods that they've been thinking about it to try and get deeper and deeper and boring into the ground.

It can get something like 18 miles really quickly just through an explosion.

But because of the...

What?

I don't know.

As I say, I sort of like...

For instance, the Soviets were going to use nuclear bombs to open up waterways in the north of Russia, for instance.

So that has been thought of in the past, used nuclear for surveillance.

Oh, no one tell one of those stupid billionaires.

They're just going to...

Yeah.

And what would happen, though, is that the surrounding casing of the hole would have fused into this glass like substance as well.

It would be like a really amazing slide, like almost immediately.

You've been spending too much time in soft places, so...

Not coming to your soft places, though.

We'll six both at Los Alamos.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the actor John Candy was born on Halloween.

Okay, it's time for fact number four, and his name's Candy.

His name's Candy.

And what do you get of Halloween?

There you go.

This week was he called John Skeleton Candy.

Terrifying.

I wish.

Yeah, so John Candy, most of you should know him.

The Candyman.

Well, no.

John Candyman.

The man, John Candy.

Yeah.

He was in Cool Runnings.

He was in Cool Runnings.

He was in plane trains and automobiles.

He was in Uncle Buck.

He was one of the greatest comedy actors that Canada has ever produced.

And I found this, by the way, in a really great book I'm reading at the moment

called Wild and Crazy Guys, which is all about that period

of when SNL in America exploded.

So he had Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray

and Eddie Murphy and John Belushi and Chevy Chase and so on.

And John Candy, obviously a big player in that area.

And yeah, so it's just a little detail in that book.

And I thought I'd love to talk about John Candy.

Great.

Well, we're not going to.

We're going to talk about the types of candy.

Also born on Halloween, John Keats.

Yes.

So we know.

In that episode, I think I might have mentioned,

was possibly a grave robber, John Keats,

because he was a medical student.

And at that time they needed bodies to do their experiments on.

And possibly he could have been one of the body stealers.

Add Rock of the Beastie Boys.

Oh, yay.

Beastie Boys.

Nice.

Yeah.

He's Anthony Park, who's an actor from The Walking Dead.

Born on Halloween.

Born on Halloween.

And Kirk Noble Bloodsworth,

who was the first American census to death

to be exonerated post-conviction.

So was supposed to be executed.

And then turned out DNA testing meant that he hadn't done it.

So he got off.

And the Halloween link is that he's got blood, isn't he?

Death.

Oh yeah, blood.

Yeah.

Come on, that was really stretching.

Yeah, I felt the stretch.

That's an afternoon twerk.

But it's unusual, because fewer people are born on Halloween

than on other days around the year.

Is that so?

Do people kind of hang on or push through?

Is this really miserable in February?

It seemed obvious.

It's January and I'm really miserable.

Do I not have sex?

That's not really nice.

Oh, so good.

He doesn't know when Halloween is.

Well, actually, in February,

that is one of the most common days.

Valentine's Day is a very common day for births,

which is when my daughter was born actually on Valentine's Day.

But there's a 3.6% increase on births in Valentine's Day

and a 5.3% decrease of spontaneous births on Halloween.

Is that like the Christmas thing,

where it's just that hospitals are a bit quieter and therefore...

I think it's a bit of that, perhaps.

The other thing is that Caesareans is a big difference.

You wouldn't not book a Caesarean for Halloween, would you?

Well, you might not.

If you were given three dates to choose,

you might decide not to go for Halloween.

They'd have to do emergency ones, obviously.

Oh, so don't forget that in some places,

not necessarily here,

but in some places that's quite a big drinking night.

So you may not possibly want a bunch of student meds.

Thanks, good.

So, yeah, that's a big...

Wow.

That's very cool.

I love it.

Can we talk about Candy?

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Now, Dan, you've got a lot of stuff on junk.

No, I just want to quickly just say,

because he died very young.

He was 43 when he died of a heart attack.

And he was in home alone.

He was in so many seminal movies of the 90s that he was in.

He was known as Sweet Tooth when he was a kid,

so he did love Candy as well as he was growing up.

All kids love Candy.

All kids love Candy,

but he was called John Candy,

and he was called Sweet Tooth.

Are they all called Candy or Sweet Tooth?

No.

He wanted to be a sports star.

That was his big thing.

Oh, yeah.

And so he had an injury,

which meant that he couldn't do that.

He played American football, right?

Yeah, he played American football.

So he had the physique, which was trained

to be someone who was going to play that game.

So all the cast members of Saturday Night Live

and all the other things he did always used to say that

if you saw John Candy and you approached him,

people like Dan Aykroyd say this,

he would lift you up with one hand vertically

and spin you around like a pizza,

like with being prepared.

What?

Yeah.

He used to, every one said that if you saw John Candy,

he would lift you up with one hand,

hold you above his head,

and spin you around.

First of all, American footballers don't do that.

No.

True.

But the point is, is that he had a physique whereby

lots of other people say that one of their favorite things

to do was to act like an NFL ball,

and if John Candy came into the room,

he'd throw it.

300 yards.

No, they would run at him, jump at him, tuck,

and he would catch them as if they were an NFL ball.

Come on.

And these are grown adults.

You know, Aykroyd's six foot three.

He was an offensive linesman in American football, I read.

Right.

So that means that he's basically a blocker.

You get the ball to your quarterback who's trying to do something

and he's trying to stop everyone from coming towards him.

So he must have been big.

He was.

Yeah, he was tall.

I mean, he was six foot three himself.

He was a big guy, but he was also just,

he was physically ready to catch humans.

Yeah.

I just don't think any of that stuff happened.

It did?

Multiple people said it.

Like, it's not like, it's a, yeah, like a fan saying it.

To be fair, I was looking a little bit at John Candy.

I did read that if, like, if you ran at him,

he would put you on a big wooden pallet

and he'd slide you into an oven.

Horrible.

It's just like, I think they're exaggerating the stories.

These are the stories.

These are the stories they say.

Maybe it was gingerbread.

Should we talk about Candy?

Yeah, yeah, John Candy.

Oh my God.

Well, I'll just say one really sweet thing is that when he died,

again, he was very young.

He had a heart attack while he was making a movie in New Mexico.

Did he die from the atomic bomb?

Oh, was he in that movie that Andy was talking about

where people had a heart attack?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Wow, lots to chew on.

But he had a funeral at Sunset Boulevard

and then they went down to the cemetery and they took the 405 three-way

and it was completely clear.

They had no idea why it was completely clear

and what it turned out was that the highway patrol

had stopped all road access to anything but this

and it was their choice to do that

and it was then tipping their hat to say

we loved you and we miss you and it's because in 10 of his movies

and you know, he didn't live that long

so it's a short time he made these movies,

he played a law enforcement officer in 10 of these movies

and so they felt like there was a friend that they'd lost,

you know, one of them.

Yeah, anyway, I'll repeat John Candy.

I know I'm a bit late in saying it,

but yeah, condolences to the family.

All right, do your Candy now.

Andy, give us some Candy.

I was just thinking,

Jenny, you're from a great confectionary nation.

I am, yes.

We have some tunics on the table.

We have some tunics in front, it's very exciting.

We've made you do not diving in, I feel.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm opening one now.

Yeah, I might do as well.

Okay, when everyone's finished.

Okay, so get this.

This is a sort of scientific thing about sugar.

People who are from Northern Europe

are some of the most sugar sensitive people in the world

and there might be a proper, an evolutionary reason for this.

What do you mean by sensitive?

Do you mean as in it's bad for us?

No, as in it can detect it, can detect it more easily.

So this is really interesting.

There are particular variations in a sugar sensing gene

and people from Northern latitudes

have that more than people who live in tropical areas

and the theory is, one theory is,

there's not certain obviously,

but in higher latitudes,

really sweet fruit and veg are a bit less common

and they're necessary to survive.

It's not like in tropical regions

where you have really sugary sweet things

and it's easy to find them and survive.

So maybe if you move north,

you will benefit from having that sensitivity.

Like carrots and parsnips are quite sweet,

but if you can't detect that,

then you might not realise

and you might not grow those foods

or you might not seek them out

and you'll be less likely to survive.

So Jenny, you're from further north

and the rest of us are on this table.

Do you feel that that's true?

I'm very wary of things that feel true,

but that does actually kind of feel true

and whilst it's kind of touching in a way,

it's also horrendous that the number one operation

performed in children in Scotland is tooth extraction.

I read that, you know,

like how dogs are good at detecting things.

We might come on to that later.

But everyone thinks that, you know,

dogs have got amazing smell compared to humans.

We say do, but it's for certain chemicals

and for certain chemicals, humans are better.

And I think, like, for instance,

if you were to put a bar of chocolate

in the middle of a field

and train the human to look for it

and train the dog to look for it,

the human might come out on top.

Because we're really good at looking for sugar

and looking for fats and stuff like that.

That's so cool.

I don't know if that's true.

We might come on to that later.

Do you know I was looking for

what's the most popular candy?

I hate that word.

Do you say sweets?

Sweets, or my husband says lollies

because he's from New Zealand

and my children say bombo because they're from France.

Sorry, can I just stop

and just...

I think the way that you're eating

this tonics tea cake, Jenny,

How do you do it upside down too?

That's how I have it.

This is basically what my only fan says.

So Jenny has taken,

if you know what a tea cake is,

it's marshmallow with a bit of biscuit

on the bottom of cake covered in chocolate.

Jenny has sort of separated the cake

and the marshmallow

and is starting to...

I'm now terribly self-conscious.

You're like turning it into a naked burger

where you just take the buns off

and leave them on the side.

Well, just shoving it all in my go up

doesn't work very well.

Jenny, I'll do the same thing.

There we go.

The same method.

You've just been into it.

No, I haven't.

I've done it carefully.

I know what I'm doing.

I debase it.

And by the way,

I had this family here from Scotland as well.

Exactly.

The old skills they kick in.

Genetic.

Yeah.

You were speaking about tea stuff, Jenny.

This is an interesting thing.

Candy floss was popularised by a dentist.

Interesting.

Actually, you know when you were talking about John Candy,

you know nominative determinism,

how tedious it is

because it makes us all look like

really boring humans.

Literally made us a fortune on this podcast.

We get a lot of correspondence about it,

so please be careful.

The inbox will just be recovering

from the Doctor Who onslaught.

Well, I was only going to say,

and I think, I hope this is not too controversial

because it is true,

that dentists, first names are vastly over-represented

by for women, Denise, and for men, Dennis.

That's so good.

That's so nice.

It's just such a kind of...

You're a big meat sack.

It takes the easiest route out of it

that you can possibly think of, human.

It was called fairy floss at the time.

I just wanted to say it was William J. Morrison

teamed up with a Nashville confectioner in 1897.

And despite being president

of the Tennessee State Dental Association.

Right.

No small thing.

Once he tried to drill up more business,

drill up.

Very good, James.

Nice.

Sometimes you've got to...

You've got to be the one to acknowledge.

Who's ever really drilled up in that sense?

Nobody.

Oh, God.

I don't know what came up and be there.

You didn't even give us time not to laugh.

Drill up, James.

Do you know what candy floss is in Greek?

Oh, no, I don't, actually.

Well, it translates as old woman's hair.

Oh.

Because it's wispy.

Yes.

And in Afrikaans, I love this.

It's ghost breath.

Lovely.

Yeah.

Do you know what the Mexican term for eye candy is,

if you say a little bit about eye candy?

No.

Eye taco.

Stop it.

It is.

It's eye taco.

That sounds like a new Apple product, doesn't it?

The revolutionary eye taco.

After just six hours of charging,

you can enjoy the taco for 10 minutes.

I was reading about my favorite confectionery,

which is popping candy,

which I genuinely think is completely underused in the world.

And I think you should really pretty much put it on everything.

And it was invented by a guy who was trying to make an instant soft drink.

This is amazing.

So he's trying to make something like, let's say Coca-Cola.

And what his idea was, he wanted something like cordial.

You would have something and you would pour the water on it.

And then when the water comes in,

it turns automatically into a fizzy drink.

And so he got some sugar and he heated it up really, really high,

put it under a load of pressure,

added a load of gas into it and then cooled it down.

And in theory, what a great idea.

As soon as you put the water in, the gas will get released

and it'll be really fizzy.

It didn't work.

That's so cool though.

But he started eating it and it gave him these sort of explosions in his mouth.

So his experiments went wrong and he went,

I'll just stick it in my mouth.

No, no, no, no.

Good sign.

That's so cool.

And then everyone, all of the other people in his office

saw this was happening.

They used to have competitions to see how much they could put in their mouth

of this stuff.

They'd get bigger and bigger rocks of it and see how much they could do.

But immediately, as soon as they went on sale, Pop Rocks,

they called it America,

there was rumours that children's stomachs were exploding.

I was going to say the first fatality was...

Yeah, it was all over the place.

And the Pop Rocks company had to take out full page advertisements

in more than 40 publications around the country to say,

these will not make your child explode, honestly.

And the head of the company wrote 50,000 letters to school principals

saying, can you please stop banning these things?

That's marketing genius.

That's amazing.

Almost certainly won't kill your kids.

Bring it!

Does anybody want to hear my worst Japanese Kit Kat flavour?

Oh, yeah.

You know, there's now over 300.

Yeah.

Okay, wow.

And I was looking down the list and there's some pretty bad ones in there.

I think European cheese.

What is European cheese?

There's no such thing as European cheese.

I believe the Dutch would like a word with you.

Sorry, there are European cheeses,

but there is not one archetypal European cheese.

I guess in Japan you might lump a sort of yellow,

pungent cheese as a European cheese, right?

Yeah, because American cheese.

There is not that big in Japan, right?

Yeah.

Or China.

Well, American cheese comes in single shrink-wrapped slice form.

Yes, but it's different types of cheese.

But that's...

No, sorry.

No, I'm not having it.

Here's the thing.

This is something interesting, I think.

And I might butcher this, but I'll try my best.

So, when cheese first came to Japan,

because it wasn't traditionally eaten over there,

they called it something like dairy tofu.

Okay.

Something like that.

And when tofu first came to France,

they called it soya cheese.

Brilliant.

I think that's right.

That's really good.

That's distracted me from my anger about the lovely cheese.

Thank you.

James always manages to find a fact to calm you down.

It's really romantic.

Get two on top of it.

Well done, James.

Have you guys ever had an aniseed ball?

Yeah.

No, what's that?

What's that tiny bit in the middle?

Right.

Is that what you're going to tell us?

No.

That's an aniseed seed.

I think it is.

Can you describe it to me?

So, it's a small round purple ball, very, very hard,

and it's layer after layer of slightly flavored licorice.

It's horrible.

Boiled.

Yeah, they're very unpopular with lots.

They're quite 1930s.

Not gobstoppers.

No, it's like a very small gobstopper,

but it's quite strong tasting and aniseed, right?

So, okay, this is very cool.

They slightly helped to win the Second World War, aniseed balls.

Brilliant.

In 1939, the War Office, they wanted to build a limpid mind

that you could stick to the hull of the ship,

swim away from, and it detonates later, right?

Yeah.

And the War Office, they contacted a science magazine editor

called Stuart McRae, and he contacted someone he knew,

an inventor called Cecil Clark,

who was also a caravan maker.

Detail.

They started working together, right?

They had the details of the mine, and they had the explosive,

and they had the way to attach it to the ship,

so they were doing really well.

But what they needed was something to keep apart the hammer

and the detonator, right?

So that when you're swimming up, when you're a frogman

swimming up, you attach the mine, and you prime it,

it doesn't go off immediately.

So you need something that slowly dissolves

and separates the hammer and the detonator.

And Clark's kids were eating aniseed balls,

and they tried them out, and they found they'd dissolve

in about half an hour in water.

But you didn't have to suck the grenade.

Yeah, it's a mouth activated.

So Clark and McRae, they bought every aniseed ball

in Bedford, right?

Because they're for their experiments.

But the problem was they also needed something to keep

the aniseed ball dry until the mine was in place, right?

So they also went around buying all the condoms in Bedford.

Imagine getting to the supermarket checkout.

You've just got a Charlie full of condoms and aniseed balls.

Clark said we got a completely undeserved reputation

as sexual athletes because we were...

But they worked.

The aniseed balls worked in this mine.

And the MAD commissioned them, the War Office commissioned them,

and they started buying aniseed balls directly

from the manufacturer.

And I love this.

Clark also commissioned some miniature condoms

from a rubber factory to cover the firing mechanism.

Imagine the pharmacist to begin with going,

do you have any smaller condoms?

I have smaller.

I love how we've gone from like the biggest bomb

the world has ever known.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show,

and that is Andy.

My fact is that there are only three

newt-detecting dogs on the planet.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

This is a woman named Andy.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

This is a woman called Nicola Jane Glover.

She's a dog owner.

All right.

And she's got a spaniel called Freya,

and another dog called Nuki.

And this was in an article in The Guardian recently,

but it's actually been going on for a few years.

So I think at least in 2018, Freya was detecting newts.

And the reason you need to detect newts is that

there's a species called the great crested newt,

which is protected.

And if you're developing land,

you have to show that there are no newts there,

because they don't want to endanger them.

And it's really hard to find them,

because they spend a lot of their time underground

and in the water, because they're amphibious.

So Nicola Glover, she and her colleagues,

they trained Freya, the spaniel,

to detect live newts.

And Freya can do it really, really well now.

90% detection rate.

Wow.

And it's a good method of...

Saving the newt.

Saving the newt and saving a lot of time and fuss

and newt-detection work.

And the other thing about the story,

although there's a third one, who's Rocky from Flintshire,

who was also trained separately in 2020,

there was a correction in the Guardian article about the dogs,

which I think you saw, Jenny.

This article was amended.

An earlier version said that great crested newts

reached an adult overall length of 17 metres.

I thought that's the one I read,

and I thought, well, I need a dog.

It should have been 17 centimetres.

Yeah, I read an article from 2011

that said that they were starting to do this

with the crested newts,

but also desert tortoises, kiwis, cacopos, bats, cheetahs.

I'm not sure why.

Ground tree snakes, seals and bedbugs.

So dogs were being taught to look for all these things

for various different reasons.

The cheetahs, I think, they're looking for the scat for the poo.

Not actual.

Oh, one went past about five minutes ago.

Who's a dog person? Who's a cat person?

I'm a dog.

You're a cat person?

Yeah.

It's not a bit embarrassing when someone goes,

oh, my dog just discovered the ancient caves at Lasso,

and you're like, yeah, my cat ate a curtain.

Yeah, my cat doesn't give a fuck.

Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm probably not really either,

but I've had cats forced upon me, so...

But I went following the story in terms of things

dogs do.

Unbelievable stuff all the time.

Yeah.

You're a dog person, aren't you?

Yeah, but my dogs are crap.

They're absolutely rubbish.

You've got dogs.

I've got two dogs, each idiot.

Fight seals on a regular basis.

Fight seals.

There's a lot of seals where we live.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, it's not cool, because the seals just go,

see you later, and swim off,

and then you have to go and rescue your dog,

who's the moron.

But they're constantly...

But maybe you've not given them the chance to work out

if they're, like, semen sniffing dogs,

or if they are...

Jesus.

That's on my list.

That's on my list.

That's on my list.

Why would you...

That's the first on your list to say.

That just was fast.

Can you guys cut for a little?

Is that what you say to anyone

who's walking a dog in the park?

You're like,

have you ever given it a chance

to be a semen sniffing dog?

I've got a pocket full of amacy balls.

I've got another pocket full of mini condoms.

You've got a semen sniffing dog.

Let's talk.

Is that with an A?

Are you spelling that with an A?

No, I don't think that is.

No, no, no.

Jenny, you write romantic novels, don't you?

Have you ever had a semen sniffing...

That's right.

I was just here for the inspiration.

Hang on.

Tight, tight.

She was a girl from the city

with a semen sniffing dog

and a heart of gold.

So, okay.

I'm telling you.

It's used for, you know,

I mean, unfortunately,

it's used for...

Terrible, terrible presence.

Yeah, for crimes and so on.

But that's an important thing.

They need to sometimes have a dog

detect whether or not someone

might have recently

have left some semen out

because it can find the traces on it.

And it can detect as little as 0.016 milliliters

of seminal fluid.

So, they're very good at it.

And so, you're...

What I'm saying is you're a dog.

Might not have been given the chance

to show that it could smell semen

or find whale poo

because they do that as well.

They sit on boats and they can find whale.

I see clever dogs like spaniels.

Spaniels are like real teacher pleasers.

Oh, yeah, right.

Pairms and they're kind of...

One-year-old dogs.

Kind of just terrifying half-cougar things

that have been found in a laba.

But they're mutts.

No, they're terriers.

Oh, okay, okay.

But they're kind of...

They're theoretically ratters.

But they're kind of...

They're just a bit rubbish.

What does that fit in your...

I'd need to see a photo.

There's a game called Hound Pooch or Mutt.

Almost any dog fits into those categories.

Oh, Hounds.

They're Hounds.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When Malvis sang You Ain't Nothing but a Hound Dog,

he was playing that game, wasn't he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He'd already recorded a version called

You Ain't Nothing but a Pooch Dog.

I don't think it's rubbish.

There was an interesting story about...

A man I'd never heard of, really amazing.

He was a German diplomat.

He was sort of sided on the side of the Nazis at the time.

And he was an attaché for the Nazis.

He's called George Ferdinand Duckwitz.

Duckwitz.

That's not a rough time at school.

Ferdinand Duckwitz is asking for a spoonerism, isn't it?

Yeah.

He's an amazing character.

He sits in the world of Oscar Schindler.

He was someone who helped to save a lot of refugees

who were stuck in Denmark.

And supposedly 95% of their Jewish population

was successfully taken out of the country

to a safe place in Sweden because of this guy.

And he risked his life to do it.

So he's an amazing character.

Oh, and you called him a fuckwit, James.

Oh.

Okay.

Sorry, Duckwitz.

Yeah.

I'm not going to trivialise his memory.

Not well done, James.

Okay, so where's the dog coming in here?

The dog comes in here because when they were taking them out

on all the boats and they were hiding them in the cargo,

a lot of dogs had been trained up in order to sniff out

any humans that were on board.

So this is a problem that they had.

So what they did was they came up with an idea

that they could deceive the sniffer dogs by placing seamen

in there.

You're giving me that look like it was heading there.

They created what was a mixture of dried rabbit blood

and cocaine, and they gave it to the fishermen.

They gave it to the fishermen.

Who would coat it in handkerchiefs.

Right.

And then they would hold the handkerchiefs

and the dogs would race towards the handkerchief.

They would ignore any of the other smells

that were on the boat.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so as a result, they would have no other interest

in what was going on here, and that would become

the main focus.

Why the cocaine?

I mean, rabbit blood, I guess, dogs.

Yeah.

Look, dogs have rabbit blood.

Well, the rabbit blood is to attract them,

and the cocaine is to...

Does it just blast them?

Not interested.

Yeah.

They're talking about themselves.

They're talking about themselves.

All right.

I can tell you about some rabbits.

Like, oh, come on, rabbit.

Do you want a big rabbit?

Do you want a big rabbit?

Do you want a big rabbit?

They supposedly temporarily would not have their smell.

Wow.

So that would...

God, that's so clever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so he's a huge hero.

He saved 7,200 Jewish refugees.

Wow.

Yeah.

Can I say something about the great crested mute?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

So they have a very colorful belly.

Okay.

No one really knows why they've got a colorful belly.

If you're a mute and you're colorful,

then it's because you want people to know you're toxic.

And it turns out they are toxic.

Their warts contain chemicals.

And there was a naturalist called Eleanor Ormerod

who tested it by biting a live mute's tail.

Oh, my God.

Just the tail.

And the tails will grow back and stuff.

And then she recorded all of her symptoms.

So she was foaming at the mouth.

She had shivering fits.

And so she proved that they were toxic.

There's a lot of scientists putting stuff in their mouths.

So we found out that they are toxic.

But the weird thing is they're nutes.

So they walk around a lot with their belly pointing to the ground.

And so no predators can see their bellies anyway.

And so no one knows still to this day why they have a colorful belly.

That is so strange.

Are you sure?

Wouldn't moles and stuff come up and eat them?

The moles?

Yeah.

They swim.

They swim.

So maybe fish for the predators.

But you're right.

Normally you'd feel like birds would be descending on you.

Eleanor Ormerod anyway.

She's really famous.

She was an agricultural entomologist.

Because she was living in Victorian times.

So couldn't really be a professional scientist in those days

if you're a woman.

But she found a kind of a role where she could use her skills

and apply them to agriculture.

So you know like if people's crops are dying

she could say well you should get rid of these nutes.

So you should get rid of these moles or whatever.

Stuff like that.

And she was so famous that Virginia Woolf wrote a story about her

called Miss Ormerod which is named after her.

Just a pretty cool person.

That's very cool.

Things women had to do to be scientists in those days.

I know, I know.

She's going to bite this nute.

We know it's poisonous but we don't know how poisonous.

So Eleanor if you could...

I'm going to mention one last thing before we wrap up.

I don't know if it's useful but just in case you're wondering

we've been talking a lot about dogs sniffing humans.

And I discovered that there's a job whereby you as a human can sniff a dog.

Are we looking for the dog or is that the idea?

No.

Is it a chocolate lamp?

This is for people who work in factories that are making dog food.

Because one of the things that owners hate about dog food

is the breath that it can leave on their dog.

And if they make a very concerted effort not to make food

where chemicals are altering the smell of a mouth of a dog

so that it's very pongy.

So one of the jobs that if you work in one of these factories

is to go up and sniff dog's mouths

who are experimenting with new tastes and new formulas and so on.

And then if a dog has ejaculated recently you can...

No, not that.

I just love how excited the dogs were to get their jobs.

I'm a deester at a dog food factory.

The other dog's like, oh, wow, that's insane.

That's cool.

So they sniff you?

God, that's so...

That's not a lovely job, I think.

Can I ask another question?

You won't know the answer to this, but you might.

It's not just important, presumably, that their breath doesn't smell.

You don't want their farts to smell bad.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, you have a really good point.

You don't want that on the other side.

So do you not have someone whose job is to smell all the dog farts?

Do you say you must?

You must, right?

It's probably...

You must.

It's probably...

I think he's right.

It's probably the unspoken Astro.

That's what they tell you once you've got the gig.

That's by the way.

There's a second hatch over there.

I'll put that one up.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over

the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shrybland, James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Jenny.

At Jenny Colgan.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website,

nosuchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

And just a quick reminder, Jenny, your latest book is out now.

It is.

It's called The Summer Sky.

The Summer Skies.

And of course, all of Jenny's other books are available to buy as well.

And so do check them out and also check out her Doctor Who stuff as well.

There's numerous Jenny Colgan books that are out there and audio adventures.

Jenny M. Colgan is the...

Jenny T. Colgan.

Jenny T.

Is the pseudonym, if you want to look for those.

So yeah, also we are playing a live show for Fish on the 14th of September at Kings Place,

part of the London Podcast Festival, and we're going to be live streaming it.

So you're able to buy live stream tickets for that by going to nosuchthingasafish.com

slash podfest.

Check out tickets there.

And of course, check out Club Fish.

It's our secret members club, where we do all sort of bonus extras, compilations, drop

us a line, which Andy does, which is a show where we go through all the correspondence

that you've sent in.

It's a really fun place.

It's a really fun place.

But that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.