No Such Thing As A Chocolate Sausage

21:20James Harkin:Wow, how much ink was in that pen? I get like two minutes out of a highlighter. That's pretty impressive. Check this guy out. This is a phenomenal one. There was a prison in America, which was known to be escape-proof. 21st of July, 1971, a guy called Warren George Briggs escapes from it. And four other people help him to get out. Bullets are fired at them, and he manages to escape. He eventually turns himself in, and he says the only reason that he escaped it is because he wanted to get some press, some PR for the fact that while inside jail, he had invented and developed a water desalting process that would enable mankind to purify seawater at a reasonable price.

22:02James Harkin:And he was like, no one's listening to me, so I'm going to escape this inescapable jail and all the headlines are going to say, man escapes but invents water source. And did it work? Did his thing work? There's been no further story about Warren George Briggs. Superb. One of the sort of archetypes, one of the places that is most famous for escapes is Kolditz, the German, the castle during the Second World War, which was where lots of people were put and was supposedly escape-proof, and it's where lots of people who had escaped other places were sent, officers and things. Sorry to interrupt. Like, all these prisons, like, stop calling them escape-proof.

22:39Yeah, that's true. You can't escape. It's like calling boats unsinkable. Like, really, you're tempting fate. You're so right. And Coldest was a terrible place to try and keep prisoners because it had 700 rooms. It was this huge... It was really quite hard to defend, I would say. And it had to have its own escape committee because so many of the men in there were plotting their own escapes. And they had to basically say, you can't escape on Tuesday. Terry's escaping on Tuesday. You can go Thursday, 9.15 to 9.30. But don't go over 9.30 because Barry's getting out. And it just... Some officers, this is really interesting.

23:10see if you can work out why, pretended to escape. They only pretended to escape coldest.

23:16Andy Dawson:To see what would happen, what the punishment would be if they got caught. Not quite. Oh, wait. Nice guess.

23:21James Harkin:So they pretended as in they hid in the jail so that then they thought he's escaped and then they stopped looking for him within the jail and then he could get a highlighter and draw all over. You're close. They escaped and they hid within the jail. Yeah. Within coldest. Rachel, do you want to have a guess? No. All right. So, their reasoning was, they would escape and then hide. More TV quizzes should just have that as an answer. Basically, they escaped and then they hid, so that when a different officer actually did escape, the hiders would pretend to be the actual escapee so that they could delay their discovery.

24:01So no one was looking for the guy who had actually escaped because they thought he was still there. Right, okay. it feels like still only one person's escaped. Well, look, we won the war in the end. That's the main thing.

24:16Andy Dawson:Can I tell you what toilets are used for in American prisons? Apart from the obvious. Is it going to be a contraband thing? It's not. So this is quite a few different facilities in America, especially Union County Jail in New Jersey, which is where I read about it. Some prisoners are flirting with each other using their toilets. Oh, dear. Okay. And what they do is they take all of the water out and they say, this one's not for normal use. And then it's attached to all of the pipes. And so you can yell into it. And then people in another cell can hear what you're saying.

24:51James Harkin:Romeo!

24:53Andy Dawson:And apparently you have like one cell where everyone knows that's the place people go for their flirting. Like if there's, let's say that the men's wing is on one part and the women's wing is somewhere else, but they're attached. so all the men would one man would go in here one woman would go in there and they had like a special knock so you know that it's your particular girlfriend or boyfriend oh wow and yeah this is a thing that's happening in america right now and it's not just they have phone sex through the toilets sorry james how do you do how do you do phone sex through a toilet do you know all the stuff that i said a minute ago about how they're using it like a phone

25:31James Harkin:oh okay yeah yeah yeah i know i thought you were then introducing a phone into as like an extra thing got it is that what you think phone sex is you actually introduce the phone actually prison phones do have to be introduced to get them onto the premises so that's i'm done on this but you mean just spoken sex yeah shouted shouted into it i have no no i do rachel during sex with my wife go honey have you seen the new iphone it's got this new feature okay so they talk yeah Yeah.

25:59Andy Dawson:Talk sex. They talk sexy words with each other. And they also carry out religious conversions. They pass news. What? You don't want a mistake at the phone exchange when that's happening to you.

26:15James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three,

26:18Andy Dawson:and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that one of Britain's greatest living playwrights, Tom Stoppard, wrote the final draft of the movie Beethoven. There you go. So, yeah, this is Tom Stoppard, a great playwright, and he does a lot of work on the side for movies, it turns out, which I didn't know. He has polished scripts for 102 Dalmatians, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And one very exciting thing that I found about when looking through the adventury of his papers in America is that I don't know if he wrote the final script, but he definitely did some work on Stop All My Mom Will Shoot.

26:57Andy Dawson:No. Friend of the podcast. Our white whale of a film. Absolutely, yeah. But he basically says that he finds the work frustrating, burdensome, and time-wasting. But at the end of the day, you have to earn money somehow. And when you're doing it for a very big movie, so he worked on Indiana Jones, for instance, he earns an awful lot of money for it, so much that you can't really turn it down.

27:22James Harkin:Yeah, and it's not even just polishing scripts. Like, for example, he was in the shower one day, and his phone was ringing, and he jumped out, and it was Steven Spielberg, and Spielberg was like, I'm filming Schindler's List right now, and this scene doesn't work. What would you do in this situation? And he would go, you know, so he's, like, standing naked in his shower room, solving problems while they're on set, and that was part of the gig as well, that they would just go to him as a brain. Is he the only person to have worked on both Schindler's List and Stop All My Mom Will Shoot? because it can't be a long list.

27:55James Harkin:That's not going to be a huge list, no. But we should say, so Beethoven is a classic of the 90s. I'm sure some of you have seen it. The dog is a real comic character, full of pratfalls, making life hell for the dad of the family.

28:09Andy Dawson:He's like a big, what would you call that?

28:10James Harkin:St. Bernard. St. Bernard dog. Yeah, he's a St. Bernard dog, and he's always, like, if he runs, he ruins the whole house. The dog that was used was a descendant of Buster Keaton's own dog. So Busted Keaton had a dog, and his wife Eleanor started breeding them, and these St. Bernard dogs then became the stars and stunt doubles of Beethoven the movie.

28:31Andy Dawson:Beethoven won Best Picture, of course. What? At the American Humane Society Awards for Outstanding Works, which raised public awareness of animal issues. Other winners include Babe, Black Beauty, Free Willy, and Chicken Run. Do you know what? Those are all good films. They are. In 2011, this best picture to raise awareness of animal issues was won by How to Train Your Dragon.

29:01A thin year, a thin year.

29:03Andy Dawson:And 2012 it was won by Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Oh, which I think is a documentary about the Earl of Sandwich, isn't it? But actually Beethoven's second, so there have been five, actually there have been, I think, eight Beethoven movies. But there's Beethoven, Beethoven's second, Beethoven's third, Beethoven's fourth, Beethoven's fifth. Okay. And you kind of got the feeling that they had to do that to get the Beethoven's fifth joke. That's why they did all those. But Beethoven's second was nominated for an Academy Award. In what? In the category. Best dog. No, it was best song, best original song.

29:39Andy Dawson:Oh, okay. Or a Dolly Parton song that's in that.

29:41James Harkin:Wow, that's very exciting. Back to Tom Stoppard for a second. Yeah. He wrote a play which was called The Real Thing and in 2014 there was a revival of The Real Thing put on stage, which he was part of, and Ewan McGregor was the lead role in it. And during an interview someone said, wow, what's it like working with Ewan McGregor again? And he said, I've never worked with Ewan McGregor before. And he said, no, you have. You did a rewrite of Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, and you would have written some Jedi dialogue for Ewan McGregor. I did look up some of the lines from that film to see if any of them have the Stoppard magic.

30:22What about the droid attack on the Wookiees? Feels like him. I have seen a security hologram of him killing younglings. Clearly Stoppard.

30:34Andy Dawson:Stoppardian is in the OED, but I've never read any Tom Stoppard. So what is his genre? It's kind of witty. Yeah, they're brilliantly sort of funny and clever. And for a long time, people accused him of being, as it were, the tin man of British theatre because he was writing plays that were intellectually stimulating but didn't kind of captivate the emotions. I've been in the same room as him once. And it was really genuinely exciting. It was the day my first ever book had come out. And my publisher took me to dinner after the launch party. And it was so exciting. And Tom Stomper was at a nearby table hanging out with other famous people.

31:09And I thought, this is my life from now on. I haven't seen him since. I just haven't seen him since. Did you read out those lines from Revenge of the Sith to him? His head snapped round. his eyes light up yeah no no no the practice of someone taking a pass at a film script is quite common in Hollywood isn't it and I know there have been lots of comedy films in Hollywood where they've actually been offered up to like every British comedian I know has taken a crack at a few modern film scripts really I've done I've had a crack oh yeah which ones I'll tell you afterwards oh come on I don't think I got any I don't think I got any lines in but I know there was like there was one that was made Beethoven 7 recently there was a Christmas film that I know at least 10 comedians who had a crack at it.

31:53James Harkin:Really? So just adding extra lines to it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, submitting them and they see if they like them or not. Yeah, yeah. But I wanted to tell you about one not related to Stoppard that is close to my heart because my book is all about Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice and Emma Thompson famously wrote the amazing screenplay of Sense and Sensibility but she took a pass at the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and the line that became a meme that charlotte lucas says uh she says i'm 27 years old i've no money and no prospects i'm already a burden to my parents and i'm frightened and emma thompson wrote those lines joe wright the director said he went to emma thompson said can you help she said get a notebook out write this down and she just improvised those lines and yeah that apparently among gen z and millennials has become a massive meme for like very hard relate I'm 27 years old I've no money and no prospects I'm already a burden to my parents and I'm frightened that's so good can I tell you one of the greatest script doctors of all time yeah because lots of people Carrie Fisher was a great she worked on loads Roald Dahl did a little bit on You Only Live Twice which I find interesting L.

33:05Ron Hubbard of the Church of Scientology founder of oh that one

33:14thanks for clarifying so there's this really bad film called Battlefield Earth yes John Travolta John Travolta now Hubbard had written a book called Battlefield Earth and it's about aliens it's a saga of the year 3000 it's 1000 pages long it's lightweight for real SF fans but he really wanted it to be a movie Travolta loved it was a Scientologist Now, Travolta really wanted to make it, and a writer called J.D. Shapiro got attached to the project, and he wrote a script, and he got a load of script notes, and he said these come right from the top, i.e. they come from L. Ron Hubbard. The interesting thing about it is Hubbard had died about 10 years before.

34:01So he's, as far as I can tell, the only posthumous script doctor that I've found.

34:07James Harkin:Do you know the script doctoring work of M. Night Shyamalan? So he wrote The Sixth Sense, that incredible movie, and then that kind of plot twist reveal became kind of his signature move, right? So Signs was another movie of his. The Village. The Village, exactly. But he was also trying to make it as a writer and so had to do a lot of different projects at the same time while he was doing The Sixth Sense. So in the same year, he then had a movie come out in December, his follow-up movie with his name on the credits. And that movie was Stuart Little. Can you believe that? About the cartoon mouse?

34:44James Harkin:Well, it's not a cartoon. Well, I guess it's a normal movie with an animated mouse as the other lead character. And all the humans are dead at the end. Sorry? And all the humans were dead all that time. Yeah, it was. Well, he also, he did the script doctoring for She's All That. Do you remember Rachel Leigh Cook? She's an incredibly hideous woman. because she wears glasses. But if you spend half an hour with her, that wears off. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the charm begins to come through. But classic M. Night Shyamalan plot twist, she takes the glasses off, and suddenly she's really beautiful. Have you ever tried that, Dan?

35:24You need to wear a red dress as well.

35:26Andy Dawson:Yeah, yeah. I think, do we have to move on? We do have to move on, yeah. Just going back to Tom Stuppard very briefly. He became massive when he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. It's basically two characters from Hamlet and it's their story. And I didn't know this. It premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966. It was absolutely massive there. And then it went to London and it was absolutely massive there. And then it went to New York. And at the New York premiere, a journalist asked him, what is it about? And he said, it's about to make me a lot of money. Sorry, I'm just going to go to those lines.

36:01and he was a journalist at the Bristol Evening Post when it debuted that's how he'd be making his living and again this is an example of his amazing lines an editor tried to catch him out his news editor tried to catch him out because he said he was interested in current affairs and the editor said alright well who's the current home secretary and Stoppard said I said I was interested in politics not obsessed by them that's very good advice

36:30James Harkin:let's move on to our final fact okay it is time for our final fact and that is my fact my fact this week is all jobs in the uk that you used to be able to do included butt woman baller boner and bottomstainer. Now, this is from the back end of a book that is called Craftland by James Fox, who was actually here at the festival earlier today doing a talk. He did a 12 p.m. today. He's released this book where he's looking into craft jobs that are either endangered in the modern world or people that are just carrying on with it and that we might not know about. But it includes an index of all of these jobs that he says are on the brink of extinction, or endangered.

37:17James Harkin:I think in the case of the ones I just read, they must be basically extinct.

37:20Andy Dawson:Can you tell us what they do? Like, what's a boner?

37:23James Harkin:A boner? Okay, so a boner used to be someone who would be the inserter of whale bones into a corset. So when you were building a corset, yeah, that used to be used to help give it its...

37:34Andy Dawson:And butt woman? That sounds like it's the female version of butt man.

37:39James Harkin:Yeah, well, it's the seller of flatfish on a quayside. Butt woman. Okay. What's a baller? The baller is someone who would check, let's say if you were working in textiles, you would check the balls of wool in advance of spinning. So you would go around and go, yep, nice ball. Dan, as you're explaining that, you're doing like really egregious hand gestures that don't match up with what your words are saying.

38:03Andy Dawson:It's just for the room. For all of us. Could you give us some gestures for bottom stainer?

38:11James Harkin:Bottom stainer. That would be putting stain on the bottom of a boot or a shoe. I also had... So this isn't to do with craft exactly, but bummery. Oh, what's bummery? I think bummery. So with a double E at the end, which I just think sounds delightful. Described in 1875, it says, Great burly fellows with bluff faces, deep chests and still deeper voices with a smack of the waterman about them and a faculty for mental arithmetic, which is perfectly surprising. those are the words of James Greenwood. It was a middleman on a fish market. Usually, I think it was, I think the term was attached to Billingsgate fish market particularly.

38:50So it was like a commerce, but it was like a retail position basically, but in fish specifically. But they obviously had this reputation for being big burly bluff men.

38:58James Harkin:Yeah, nice. Very cool. I mean, it's such an interesting world, the world of Craftland. This book, by the way, I just would give a shout out to Francesca at the Margate Bookshop who told me about this amazing bookshop if you're ever in that bit of the country. She showed it to me and basically it covers 280 crafts that are still practiced in Britain, but what was noticed by James Fox is that half of them or more are endangered. So we're sort of losing, we're getting down to the final person who is able to do certain things. And there's an example that he gives of one person who is able to tune English church bells.

39:31James Harkin:He's called Gida Vadhuka, and while he's doing it, he writes little things on each bell, almost like little mottos on it to sort of give it something extra. Yeah, so like he'll write om, for example, on one of the bells. Dong? He should write dong. Ding? Absolutely. I've run out. Bong and bing. Oh, my God, idiot. Yeah, yeah, go on.

39:54Andy Dawson:There's a list, isn't there, of heritage crafts that are endangered. There's a list of ones that have gone completely now, and there's a list of ones that are endangered, which means there's only one or maybe two people in the country who do it. so in the UK there are only one or two people who make arrows, bells, musical bows, clogs, fans, gloves, pianos, ballet shoes, saws, scissors, clay pipes, glass eyes, watches and horse whips so if we get cut off from the rest of the world which of those can we not do without? Scissors. Scissors it's gonna be tough. Ballet shoes probably fine. Yeah horse whips we'll improvise but scissors are fiddly.

40:38Glass eyes? Well, you do want access. You never know when you need one.

40:43Andy Dawson:Well, it's scary, scary stuff. I went today to see a guy called Andy Peters who is the only person in the UK who makes the wooden figureheads for boats. Oh. Which feels like something we could probably do without. No, we can't. Strong disagree. Did you tell that to his face? I did, yeah. I said, well, my thought is like people were doing this in the olden days, right? And it takes him, like, five months to make one of these things. How do you make money like that? Because it's not like everyone needs one. Pirates will pay a fortune. An arm and a leg. Thank you. I haven't seen the new aircraft carriers that we've got.

41:24Have they got some of Andy Peters' work up front?

41:27Andy Dawson:No, they haven't. He makes them for yachts, like super yachts sometimes. I have genuinely seen some of his work within the last fortnight. Really? On your super yachts. That's right. I don't want super yachts to have them. Fair enough. This is a better one. You know Cutty Sark in Greenwich? Cutty Sark in Greenwich has a figurehead at the front, and I'm sure it's an Andy Peters thing. I think I read a thing about... Yeah, it is. He did the... Basically, there was a restoration that was done, and then they found some old pictures and realised that what they'd restored looked nothing like what it originally looked like, so they asked him to make a new one.

42:01That's so cool. And they have a massive collection of ships' figureheads around the prow of the Cutty Sark. It's an awesome display.

42:08Andy Dawson:Actually, now there are definitely more figureheads in museums than there are on ships.

42:13James Harkin:Right. I think that's sad. But it's interesting becoming the last person who makes something. So James Fox was talking about a watchmaker who only produces five watches a year, but he does them entirely on his own. And the difference is watchmakers generally don't make an entire watch on their own. Usually, if you were making a really well-crafted one, it would involve probably 20 different people doing different bits. It's different disciplines coming together. He trained himself as a kid to make watches entirely on his own. He was obsessed with this guy who was a master watchmaker, and he brought him his first watch after a year and showed it to him, and he said, rubbish, after spending a whole year on it.

42:49James Harkin:So he went away for five years and made another watch, brought it back, and he went, yes, you are a watchmaker. So he now makes five a year, and each one sells for roughly£300 ,000 per watch. Does he write tick or tock on them as he finishes? Because he should. So the Heritage Crafts website is really interesting, well worth a look, because it's got this huge list. I've just joined. You can join and kind of sign up to support some of the crafts. It's very cool. So extinct ones are things like mouth-blown sheet glass making, which survived until 1992, which I'm quite surprised by, to be honest.

43:23But there is one of the very oldest... In fact, sorry, the oldest thing anyone's done professionally is still going strong because they list heritage crafts, some of which are currently viable. Flint napping. Oh, yeah.

43:37Andy Dawson:I met a flint napper like two weeks ago. Did you? Yeah. I wish I hadn't said it because there's no anecdote that goes with it. It's good. Yeah. What is it?

43:45James Harkin:What's flint napping?

43:46Andy Dawson:It's like you get a piece of stone and you hit it with a harder piece of stone and you get tiny bits of flint and you can use them for cutting things and for shaving. You can either do it to sort of repair a wall, a flint wall, or you can, like in the old times, people would be making arrowheads or sharp instruments or tools like that. And this, I find this absolutely unbelievable. There are still a few people doing it these days to make replicas of prehistoric objects and maybe 10 more doing it to shape flint for masonry. So it is currently viable, although small. But it is 3.3 million years old as a trade.

44:18Wow. It is more than 10 times as old as our species.

44:21Andy Dawson:Wow. It's 11 times as old as Homo sapiens as a thing.

44:25James Harkin:Is it still the same family running it? It's the same family. Closed shop, mate. Closed shop. They won't let you in. I just find that bizarre. Like the oldest shaped flint tools would date back that far. Yeah, that's very cool. Well, interestingly, one of the old jobs that you used to be able to be was a caveman. That's not a craft. No, it was because you were responsible for the removal of clinkers and ashes from the caver tunnel beneath a furnace. You were called a caveman as a result.

44:56Andy Dawson:Here's another thing. two things that have a different meaning today. A mugger. Do you know what a mugger was? It was a job that you could... Mug maker? Yeah. For the first hundred years of that word, the word mugger meant someone who sold mugs. Was there an amusing crossover period where someone said, I'm a mugger. I'm sorry, I've got plenty of mugs at home, thank you. No, no, no, you misunderstand, sir. Give me your mugs. Yeah. And a badger. Badger. A badger was someone who, it was a bit like Rachel's fish person. It was someone who got some food from one place and then took it to someone to sell it from another place.

45:36Andy Dawson:But they often got in trouble because they would hoard food, hoard grain and hoard bread. I read also about Badgies, which was like, it was young boys who played like a bugle or trumpet or something and that call was used to like call men to war. Badgies? Wow. Sources needed for this. but badgies was definitely, yeah, badgies was like a sort of slang term for that job. Nice. There was also a bodger as well as a badger. Right. I'm serious. Really? Yeah, bodger would have made chair legs.

46:06James Harkin:That's very funny. But badly. But badly. Do any of us have a craft? I can't think of... How dare you? What do you mean you... This is our craft. Stage craft. Yeah, but a real one. You know, like a proper one. Yeah. No, I don't have a craft. No, you make like chocolate sausages or something. You've got like a weird... What? That's what he calls it when he's come back from the bathroom, I've made a chocolate sausage. I don't want to talk about my time in the American prison system, all right, Dan, but... God, this guy's flirting, it's really weird. Dan is referring to a private incident where I made a tasty...

46:43What was it? Like, what's it called? That sausage that you... What is it called? A chocolate salami. Has anyone ever made a chocolate salami? That sounds even worse. It's a delicious pudding, but it's also an amusing trick. Because, you know, you bring out, oh, it's pudding time, everyone. You bring out what looks like a salami. It's covered in icing sugar. You put netting around it. You put string around it, yeah. I put string around it like a proper salami. Surprise, it's a turd.

47:11Wow. Okay, Dan. Well, you're off the pudding list for life now. Okay.

47:21James Harkin:That is it, unfortunately. 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 have said over the course of this podcast we can all be found online I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram James my Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin Andy and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel and Rachel's book is out now introducing Mrs. Collins it is give a quick blurb on it Rachel it follows Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice after she marries Mr Collins and all that happens in the next few years.

47:55James Harkin:Super cool. Very exciting. And yeah, if you want to get in contact with us as a group, podcast at qi.com, send us an email and we'll put it onto our very exciting secret show called Jewel, Drop Us a Line, which is part of our Club Fish world, which is our secret members club. It's kind of like the Hellfire Club, but with less orgies. For just$3.99 a month, we will release a baboon into your home. Yeah, or hey, just come back again next week because we'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye!