No Such Thing As Laser Club

14:50James Harkin:Oh my god! So you got the exciting, did you get the exciting membership card? Yeah Which is a jigsaw Oh no

14:57Andy Dawson:You know what, I thought buying my wife a jigsaw and a jigsaw, Matt, was a really bad gift But this is awful, Andy

15:05Anna Ptaszynski:We remain married You can't even rip up your membership card in protest Because you're then just creating a fun puzzle

15:15Andy Dawson:Do you know why jigsaws are called jigsaws? Because they use a jigsaw to cut them, presumably Well, that is it Apart from when they were invented The jigsaw hadn't been invented yet And now they don't use jigsaws anymore like they use lasers and stuff. So for a very short amount of time they did use jigsaws and that was when they named it. But for most of the start of their life and most of the end of their life you never used jigsaws.

15:40Anna Ptaszynski:That's so funny. The jigsaw is the one that goes up and down and up and down, isn't it? And you push a bit of wood around in a shape and that.

15:47Andy Dawson:And it's named after the fact that it looks like the saw is doing a little jig. Right. That's good.

15:53Anna Ptaszynski:I didn't know that. Do you propose... That's very weird. They should change their name now to lasers. Oh yeah. I think more people would buy them. In your sunglasses with your leather jacket. Yeah, yeah. Front of the queue. With my Laser Club membership. Go down to Laser Quest, then go down to the Laser Club.

16:11James Harkin:All right, well, we need to wrap up. Ian, you're going to be up in Edinburgh, right? With a new show. Yeah, I'm doing a show. It's called Foot Spa Half Empty, which is partly because you've got to name the show in January before you've written any of it. but yeah it's on at 12 30 in the afternoon at monkey barrel um yeah i feel very excited about it it's 20 minutes too long at the minute but i've got got a bit of time to um get rid of that but yeah um i'd love it if people could come along otherwise it would be it's sad if no one else comes

16:50okay it's time for fact number two and that is abby howells my fact is in 1386 a pig was put on trial for murders. Okay.

17:04Andy Dawson:What? Okay. Yes. Yes. The pig was a bit naughty. It did maul a child to death. Oh, wow. This got done quite quickly. Yes. But I have one fun fact that will hopefully lighten it up. It was executed via hanging, but they dressed the pig in human clothes to kill it. Good stuff.

17:30James Harkin:You're right, there's not enough fun in execution, is there? And that really, that sends a message that it can be done. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty grim, eh? Dressing a pig up in a waistcoat and then hanging it. Oh, come on, it's a funny image.

17:43Dan Schreiber:Until they're hanging it, it's a funny image. Can I make it even more grim?

17:47Andy Dawson:So she had six piglets and they were all put on trial as accessories to murder. What? That's really unfair. And they were found guilty. They were found guilty, but they were acquitted on grounds of youth. and that the mother had been a bad example to them. Okay.

18:03James Harkin:Did they get a better lawyer for that bit of the trial? Because clearly the first one didn't do a great job. Yeah, the pig represented themselves and it was a mess. You're crazy! Get a lawyer! No, this is fine. This is my moment. I can do this.

18:19Andy Dawson:And then all else I found about it is the actual hanging as well. They had to give the hangman a new pair of gloves. afterwards part of his pay was that he would get a new pair of gloves for doing the hanging

18:31Dan Schreiber:this is crazy yeah although there was an article on jstor that said uh and as they put it the hang man in this case in it was in a place called filets i think in france the hangman is still owed both for the execution and the new gloves still so what yeah i know he's turning in his grave waiting to be paid for this gruesome task because it's not easy to dress a pig up

18:53Andy Dawson:It wasn't easy to be a hangman, to be honest, in those days. Like, you would get your own house and you'd get fed and you'd get loads of stuff, but no one was allowed to come near you. No one was allowed to touch you. No one was allowed to talk to you. You'd be like a special person in the town, but you'd be completely away from everyone. Do you think that the dressing the pig up, who was ordering that? Was that the hangman who was like, listen, I've got an idea. It sounds a little bit crazy. I think maybe the local tailor local tailors advertising yeah then the local glove makers were like I'm getting in on this as well yeah because a lot of people went to watch so you've

19:34Dan Schreiber:got a big audience there look how well tailored that is I read one account that they put a human

19:39James Harkin:face mask on the pig as well but there's many accounts so it's hard to know which one necessarily to trust but I was reading a long article in the medievalist uh which is a site that talks about all the stuff that was happening back then, they said that in the 12th and 13th century, that the reason a lot of animals went on trial in this period, so something like 85 examples that we know of, the reason they were happening was law suddenly became a bigger thing in more places around Europe. And so there were way more lawyers than they had cases to deal with.

20:11Dan Schreiber:And so they needed to get practice.

20:14James Harkin:And so quite often, a lot of lawyers would defend a pig and try and get it off using new methods and like, oh, I tried this new thing out and the judge didn't like it though. Damn it. Okay, won't do that with humans. So it's just like a testing ground.

20:27Dan Schreiber:Because they did. They found cool ways of exonerating their clients, I guess. There was a 1500s French lawyer called Chastanet who built his whole legal reputation on being the counsel for rats that were on trial for destroying a field of barley. And first of all, so they didn't turn up to court when they were summoned. and he found this thing in the law that said that if you could plausibly have not seen the notice, then you don't need to turn up. And he was like, these rats live in loads of different places. So then every single parish council, like within a 50 mile radius, had to put like a big announcement out saying, okay, all rats need to come to court on this date.

21:07Dan Schreiber:And then when they still didn't appear, the lawyer said, actually, there's a thing in the law that says if a person cited to appear at a court, but they can't come safely, they are allowed to refuse to obey. And of course these rats can't come safely because of the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats, who are always waiting. I was just wondering, like, you know, in terms of practising law techniques and stuff, was it all that showmanship, you know, the razzle-dazzle that we see? Like, I've got a surprise witness. It's like, a dog!

21:44and the dog's up there with like a cigarette like you'll never crack me

21:50James Harkin:everyone's going where did he get his suit it's stunning that tailor is good in this town i think

21:56Andy Dawson:one other theory is that if you were a landowner and let's say someone at all your barley some rats did then you would want some money back for it but you couldn't do that unless there'd been some legal process and someone had been found guilty and so that's why these rats were put on

22:12James Harkin:trial so that the owners would get something right abby is this a personal interest of yours do you did you study animal law at uni well kind of no well i do okay here's you know here we go i have a phd and my phd is on uh women in prison and the way they're portrayed in television film and theater wow it's not a good phd i don't treat anyone to find it it's i barely scraped in like when i handed it in they were like you serious and i was like please um i beg it and they're like all right it's embarrassing for us if you don't pass but um basically a big chunk of my thesis was on public executions and like the the spectacle of them because they were like you know that was the entertainment like you'd be like oh friday night what are we gonna do should we pop down

23:08Dan Schreiber:see a lovely execution someone's been treasonous well and if it's an animal being executed like that's even better that's more of a pull isn't it because it's still a bit more rare and you can all have a barbecue afterwards yeah i did wonder about that did they eat it it feels like in those

23:23Andy Dawson:days you wouldn't want to waste a pig even a naughty one yeah and one dressed so dashingly yeah and one of the theory as to why they did all this stuff is because it just showed that the authorities were doing something right so all bad stuff's happening people have been you know lost their barley or their animals have killed people and they're like okay well we have to show that we're not just sitting back and letting this happen so we're gonna put something on trial and quite often like if your barley got eaten or whatever it would be like all the mice are in trouble but they would just pick one mouse and then put like a show trial on for that one mouse

24:00Dan Schreiber:that's a fiddly job for the tailor isn't it that's a challenging one and probably a carpenter presumably has to build a tiny dock for it to go into what a gig yeah and i think people think maybe it didn't happen in in england and scotland and wales it was just western europe like switzerland france italy because we had jury trials this is what um a bbc documentary said we had jury trials and it would be harder to with a straight face present a full jury well these cases your

24:30Andy Dawson:jury is supposed to be 12 equals right so you'd have to get yeah 12 pigs that's a chaotic courtroom

24:39James Harkin:isn't it yeah i'd love to know more about the hangman who as uh was being mentioned before is so isolated from the rest of the community that they presumably are just told you've got a job today you've got to kill someone and they just keep rocking up and he's like what the fuck is this it's a mouse it's like yeah it's um we've sort of expanded uh your brief recently all right jesus how am i gonna get the noose run no one prepared me for this there's actually this hangman in uh new zealand like we had a murderer called minnie dean and she's one of our most um famous murderers here that we have here in new zealand and she murdered children and put them in hat boxes when when was this um i think like maybe i want to say like late 1800s early 1900s oh it was a long time ago long time ago yeah yes and she was found guilty and sentenced to execution and they could find no one to hang her no one wanted to do it but they had this guy that basically had hung up his noose a long time ago and then he'd gone to like live in the bush and they were like, we've got to get this guy.

25:45He's the only one. And then they found him and he's like, I'll do it. But with one condition, I want to spend 30 minutes with her in the room. And so he went and like spent 30 minutes with her and then he was like, I'll do it. So she must have been a punishing hang.

26:02Dan Schreiber:What happened in that 30 minutes? No one knows what they talked about. That's a film.

26:08James Harkin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure some very mediocre play scripts have been read about that moment. I hope so. Pigs are still getting in trouble these days. Are they? Lots of naughty pigs around. Well, I just remember that great story of how Peppa Pig had an episode banned in Australia because she makes friends with a spider and they couldn't play that over there because it taught young kids to go and walk up to...

26:32Andy Dawson:Because didn't she say like spiders are our friends and they can't harm us or something like that?

26:38James Harkin:Yeah. Yeah, but I don't think Peppa's met a funnel web, so it's sort of a big, big problem over in Oz. And I think in Korea, she was banned for, it was like gangster related stuff.

26:52Dan Schreiber:What? I haven't seen that episode.

26:54Andy Dawson:I know, I've just pulled that from somewhere in my head. Is it because she has a different number of digits? Yes. Who was that that was banned?

27:01James Harkin:Was that Postman Pat or someone like that who got banned because they were like the Yakuza with four fingers?

27:06Andy Dawson:I know there's one episode of Bluey you can't watch in America. Oh, yeah. Why? Can you guess why, in fact? Okay. So we all know Bluey is the amazing kids show, and it's about two dog parents and two dog kids. Yeah. Anti-gun. Bluey wants a gun, and they say, no, Bluey, no tea, no guns. It's close, in fairness. Oh, what else do Americans do?

27:34Dan Schreiber:The death penalty. Was it the death penalty one where they execute?

27:37Andy Dawson:Yeah, Bandit was executed.

27:39Dan Schreiber:Yeah.

27:41Andy Dawson:No, it's not that. What it is, is there's an episode where Bandit, who's the dad, gives birth, or it looks like he's giving birth to a baby. Oh, yeah. And it's not really happening, but he kind of finds himself in this position where he's laid down in a paddling pool and it looks like he's giving birth. And I think in America, they thought that this wasn't evidence of like a typical family because the man was giving birth.

28:08Dan Schreiber:But he wasn't giving birth.

28:09Andy Dawson:No, he wasn't. But like, it's not always in the plot of Bluey. I guess when people complain about these things, they're not always completely using excellent logic. Their brains. Putting in their head. So animals are still, oh, go on, Abby. Well, with public executions, they were initially done to sort of demonstrate the power of the crown, right? They were quite theatrical, quite dramatic. They would do stuff like someone receiving a pardon at the 11th hour, and people were brought in a carriage, all extremely performative. And one of the reasons that public executions was phased out, there were many of them, but um because people were given the ability to say last words um people started really liking the criminals so like they'd either be like oh oh no i'm so sorry and they'd be like oh bloody hell this this seems bad i wouldn't want to be executed or they'd be sort of cavalier and be like i did it and i'd do it again and then they sort of became like um folk heroes so um well and it just leads me to think like was the pig given an opportunity to give some last words i'm trying to think what

29:24Dan Schreiber:noise a pig could make to make the crowd go oh hang on hang on that's all folks

29:31Andy Dawson:you're right so animals are still getting arrested all around the world oh yeah uh in mumbai last year there was a pigeon who was arrested because they had some chinese words written on their body and they thought it must be a spy yeah what were the words was it just it was this side up or something no it was more like sort of um belonging to taiwan pigeon racing society right but the people who captured it couldn't read it so they assumed it was what kind of planes were making in india or something like that google translate guys just take a photo google translate just make sure here's another one a few years ago there were 14 squirrels arrested in iran who were accused of espionage for the united states oh yeah and apparently what was what was said was that they've had little sort of electronic devices on them perhaps they were listening in or something like that and then we never really heard anything else about it a few journalists asked the head of police and he said oh i don't know anything about that and basically experts have said that it would be a pretty stupid idea to use squirrels as spies because they're extremely unreliable and they tend to just run off wherever they want

30:45Dan Schreiber:that is one of the many many problems with using them as spies i would say yeah they have terrible

30:50James Harkin:memories don't they don't they bury their nuts and forget where they've buried them and that's how trees grow basically that's how we have trees on our planet is just because squirrels don't know

30:58Dan Schreiber:where dinner has been buried come on they bury a lot of nuts if you buried a thousand nuts would

31:04James Harkin:you remember every single one's location dan i'd probably pick one location to put all my nuts in Well, that's your problem, Dan, isn't it?

31:11Andy Dawson:That's why the Dan Schreiber squirrel would have died out because it just takes one person to find that cache of nuts and you have no nuts left.

31:19James Harkin:Or they wouldn't find it and I would have a mega tree. The biggest tree ever.

31:24Anna Ptaszynski:Or my nuts combined.

31:26James Harkin:Hey, I read just while I was reading up on pigs and seeing the trouble they get into and so on, I came across something I've never heard of before, which is the pig toilet. You guys heard of a pig toilet? Don't know if I want to know, but go on. I'll tell you, you don't, but I've got to say it anyway. This is done in farms in China and other bits of Asia where pigs basically eat everything, including human feces. And so what it is, is it's a toilet whereby a tube is attached where the feces goes down and it lands in a big bowl for the pigs to eat. It's their food bowl, basically, is the end of a human toilet.

32:03James Harkin:It's a real thing. The pig toilet. if that was me I would maul a child to death yeah that's what I'm saying if I was the defense lawyer I'd open with that maybe stop shooting and it's food ball maybe maybe that's the start of the problem who's the real animals here yeah we need to wrap up Abby tell us about your Edinburgh show where are you going to be hello yes I'm coming to Edinburgh all the way from New Zealand what the heck and I'm doing a show called Welcome to My Dream and I'm at Assembly in Studio 4 at 6.40 every single day and my show is about mainly, honestly, my enemies and people that have crossed me and I'm really brave and don't confront them to their face but talk about it in a comedy show.

32:55On the other side of the world.

32:56Dan Schreiber:Yes, my enemies include a local improv troupe and a museum of optical illusions that I'm in a public feud with.

33:11Dan Schreiber:Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Uruj Ashfak. Hi, my fact is that emotional tears have more protein in them, so they fall slower, and it's by design so that our tribe can see us, cry, and comfort us. Very clever.

33:29Anna Ptaszynski:I didn't know, sort of, I'm vaguely aware that there are different kinds of tears, but I didn't think they were made of different things. So there are three different types of tears. There is basil, which is just the oily layer that we have on our eyelids to keep it from drying out. There's reflex, which is when we're like cutting onions or there's some dust in our eyes. So those fall really quickly to like flush away any irritants. And then there are emotional tears and they have the highest amount of protein level. so they fall slower and they look more dramatic in sound.

34:03Andy Dawson:So good. I think it's amazing. And when you know this, you can see it, I think. Like if you see someone and there are tears coming down their face, the difference between, oh, I've got something in my eye and, oh, I'm really upset and I need to be comforted, you can actually see them going slower down their face. They seem more viscous. I'm really going to look out for that.

34:24Dan Schreiber:So actually we shouldn't say when people are upset that tears were streaming down his face. We just say the tears were crawling slowly down his face. Although I think with onions, I kind of want sympathy when I'm cutting onions. You know, I could do it with some slow tears to draw more attention to it. It doesn't say anywhere that you have to pick one. You could just try them all at the same time. All three.

34:47Anna Ptaszynski:I was looking at the origins of why we cry due to emotion. And there's a theory, and I love this so much, It's by a Dutch psychologist. He's called Advingerhuts. And he spent 20 years working on tears. So he does. He knows his onions. Sorry. OK. What he thinks is that it's an accident. I'm sorry. He thinks it's an accident that we associate tears with emotion. Right. So when infants are wailing, because infants do naturally wail if they're in distress. They will squeeze the muscles around their eyes as part of the wailing. And that puts pressure on the eyeball. so tears happened originally as a kind of reflex and then that became a signal of neediness by children and we don't really control those muscles which is why it's relatively hard to fake crying

35:35Dan Schreiber:and then it evolved naturally because it turned out it was useful evolutionarily because people

35:39Andy Dawson:can see you cry and they comfort you i think that's it yeah that's interesting wouldn't it be nice if babies cried in like harmonies but they always cry in this really annoying discordant sound and of course that is also an evolutionary thing because if they made a nice tune when they cried no one would ever come to their help but the interesting thing is like that this sound that they make is actually very similar to loads of different animals and loads of different animals make very similar crying sounds it's why when the foxes are having sex in my back garden i think My baby's upset. Well, she doesn't like that sort of thing.

36:21Dan Schreiber:No. And you do make her sleep in the garden, so it's fully exposed all the time.

36:26Andy Dawson:But the really interesting thing is if you get the sound of a baby seal crying, for instance, and you play that to a mother deer, then the deer will react as if it's one of her children who's sick. I wonder what would happen if you played me crying to a baby seal or a mother deer. I think it's the same because it's a very similar sound. So they would think, and there's one theory that actually the reason that all, everyone evolved the same way is because then animals can help each other. But I don't, I think that's it.

36:57Anna Ptaszynski:What, who did that study? Disney? Is that the Snow White Institute? Arooj, are you familiar with sad bait? I was reading about the specifically Indian phenomenon of crying videos where lots of influencers will lip sync and cry along to audio from movies. And in about 2017, this was a huge deal. I think you know more than me at this point. But I think it's like an acting showreel almost, right?

37:25Dan Schreiber:Is it a sad scene or is it like, you know, the song Prince Ali in Aladdin, but they're sobbing their way through it. Okay, it's like Bambi's mum dying.

37:32Anna Ptaszynski:But people got famous. I mean, there was a kid called Sagar Goswami who set up a TikTok in 2017 and basically became wealthy and famous off the back of crying along to images. Yeah, until the government banned it. Yes. They banned TikTok.

37:47Dan Schreiber:Did they ban it because of the crying videos? They just thought this is a real downer. This is bumming the whole country out.

37:54Andy Dawson:Are you thinking this could be something where you could make your fortune, Andy? Is that why you're...

37:59Anna Ptaszynski:I'm always on the lookout for content. You know me. I'm content, content, content. And I cry a lot. So let's marry these.

38:06Dan Schreiber:One of the problems with studying crying and its effect and tears in their effect is that it's quite hard to make study participants cry on demand. So do you guys think you could cry on demand? I could. Could you? Really? What would it take? If they showed you a sad film, you'd be up for it? Yes. Or just let me be by myself for a bit. I think I could get into it. Usually, always on the verge of tears anyway. Now that's... Now that she makes me quite tense here now.

38:33Andy Dawson:Have you ever done any acting, Garouj, where you have to cry? In my stand-up bits. I have a whole bit about crying actually so I almost pretend to cry on stage and everyone was like oh my god is she really going to cry and I said no this is just years and years of practice and what is your trick it's like you think of a sad thing or yes if I have to really make myself cry I think of a sad thing but otherwise I just make my crying face which I have a lot of practice because I'll be honest when you cry as much as I do you do end up looking in the mirror every once in a while You're like, what am I looking like right now?

39:11Have you ever done that?

39:13Anna Ptaszynski:Looked in the mirror and cried. James is a blubber. James lets on that he's one of the strong and silent types, actually. He's incredibly in touch with his feelings. I am.

39:22Andy Dawson:As soon as this zoom goes off, I'm going to be in the garden. The foxes won't know what's going on.

39:28Dan Schreiber:I am interested by how people make other people cry, though, because there was quite a famous study about how female tears make men less aggressive, which is quite interesting. they got 25 men to smell vials of tears that women had cried out. But, and they found that they were 44 % less aggressive in video games afterwards, whatever they were playing, GoldenEye or Diddy Kong Racing or whatever. And they got 100 women to come and donate tears and only six of them could produce the necessary amount. Yeah. So I really, you know, you could volunteer yourself for science, Arouge. That would be great.

40:03And I'm always crying because of men anyway. So it's like a full circle.

40:09Anna Ptaszynski:I was looking into what makes Americans cry and the circumstances under which they cry. Have you ever cried at home, at a funeral, in your car, that kind of stuff? I mean, all of it, in every single category, women say they cry more than men or have cried more than men in that circumstance. But the top five reasons that Americans say would make them cry would be the death of a loved one, the death of a pet, feeling extremely sad, saying goodbye to a loved one before a long separation and chopping onions and that chopping onions came before speaking about an emotional subject watching a sad movie and witnessing injustice or cruelty um it could be that they just really like onions what about uh spotting events that's the only time when i

40:55Dan Schreiber:feel emotional really oh yeah actually the wimbledon women's tennis final i was almost

40:59Andy Dawson:crying along in sympathy this year that was tough tough watch yeah um i read that in 17th century America. If the bride didn't cry, like furiously cry when she was getting married, they would accuse her of being a witch because they believe that a witch could only shed three tears at a time through her left eye. Oh, wow.

41:24Dan Schreiber:So not only do you have to cry, you've got to make sure that right eye cries. Yes. I mean, a wedding is a happy occasion. Should you be sobbing your heart out? Tears of happiness, Anna.

41:33Andy Dawson:Tears of happiness.

41:34Dan Schreiber:yeah i think to be safe you'd have to make sure you married an absolute bastard so you could guarantee crying on your wedding day have you guys heard of tear catchers these are really cool

41:44Andy Dawson:no no so they're a little bit of glass that you put underneath your eyes uh they first made in ancient persia but they've had them the romans had them as well and the idea was let's say i went um away on a trip that we were touring australia or something i would give my wife one of these and she would keep it underneath her eyes and then when i came back i'd be able to see how many tears she'd made because she was so upset that i was on tour come on how many wives desperately filling it up with a tap that was a real thing and even the victorians had them so you know we're quite unusual that we don't have them so i was looking at like you know crying behaviors around the world

42:24Dan Schreiber:and different cultures and the bow people of the andaman islands who i think um do not exist anymore but they used to until the early 20th century. In the late 1800s, if you were separated from your beau friend or family member for a long time, when you were reunited, the way that you celebrated that is you sat apart and completely ignored each other for like a full day, hours and hours, a full day. And then as soon as dusk fell, you turned around and you flung your arms around each other and you cried for an hour. Wow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Why? Very choreographed reunion.

43:02Anna Ptaszynski:It's a bit like coming home to a dog, though, isn't it? Which you've not seen for a while. They will pretend for a while. They hate that.

43:10Andy Dawson:Anna, can I ask, after about 56 minutes of you crying, is it a faux pas to be checking your watch?

43:21Andy Dawson:Yeah, I think you're in serious trouble. I think you're kicked off the island. Do you know that tears are like fingerprints? so everyone has completely different tears but that's very rarely useful in a burglary

43:33Anna Ptaszynski:investigation that's why i always leave bambi on when i leave the house i just make sure that

43:39Andy Dawson:any burglars had a bit of a week but yeah because um they all have different organic substances different molecular makeup you could just plant evidence then you just make somebody cry collect their tears and then leave it at the scene of the crime really good idea yeah i think Could you edit this so I can actually use it in real life and they can't trace it back to me?

44:03Dan Schreiber:Mouse tears are erotic.

44:05Andy Dawson:Oh, yeah. I always said it.

44:07Dan Schreiber:Yeah, look, we all knew it. It's to other mice. But it is quite cool. It's male mouse tears. So they cry and they lubricate their eyebrows. Their eyebrows? No. Their eyeballs. Everyone loves a wet eyebrow. and then they spread their tears around their body and they groom themselves with them and they found out that if a male mouse is crying and spreading its tears around its body and the female mouse comes into contact with it she will engage in lordosis which has always been one of my favourite words which is where a female mouse or animal raises their rump up to say do come in so that's

44:49Andy Dawson:you have that on a little mat outside your front door don't you Anna?

44:52Dan Schreiber:the picture of me just bending over my bum out. That's so refreshing because men have the opposite reaction to my tears. They leave. They're like, bye, this is good. No, that's them showing you their bottom. You've just misinterpreted. That's what they're saying. All right, we should wrap up. But before you go, Aruj, I believe you're going to be in Edinburgh and not just hanging out there, doing a show, correct? Yes, I'm doing my solo show. It's called How to Be a Baddie. From 30th July to 24th August, 6.25pm at the Monkey Barrel. I will be a bad girl at the Fringe this August. Thank you so much for coming on.

45:37Dan Schreiber:Great to talk crying. We're all sobbing now, obviously.

45:46James Harkin:Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Nish Kumar. In 1967, for eight dates, Jimi Hendrix supported the Monkees on tour in the United States of America.

46:00Dan Schreiber:What a privilege for him.

46:03Anna Ptaszynski:I was trying to come up with an analogy of who it's like supporting whom these days. Is it like Leonard Cohen supporting Sabrina Carpenter or something? Well, maybe it's like Kendrick Lamar opening for the Wiggles or something. Maybe we're being a tad unkind to the Monkees. who did, you know, in spite of the fact that they were sort of a confected band for a television show, definitely had sort of some musical talent. Not that I'm denigrating the musicianship of The Wiggles. Thank you.

46:32James Harkin:I was biting my tongue there. But yeah, Tendrick and The Wiggles, are you kidding me? That's my dream gig.

46:38Anna Ptaszynski:So who is this Jimi Hendrix guy? I think we should get into that. Who the hell is this Jimi Hendrix man?

46:45Dan Schreiber:And actually, he wasn't the biggest thing in the world then, was he? No. Was it 67? Yeah, he did this famous performance at the Monterey Festival of Pop because he is American, had been in America for years and years. Then in 66, he's performing on his own after having spent a couple of years as a kind of sideman playing in clubs across the south. He's then in Greenwich Village performing kind of with backup musicians, but on his own at the Café Wire in New York. Chas Chandler, the recently ex-bassist of The Animals, sees Hendrix and thinks, right, I'm taking this guy to England. I'm going to find two British musicians to back him up in London.

47:23And then we're going to put together a band. That happens. And then from total obscurity, he becomes the hottest thing in London. McCartney recommends him to the Monterey Festival of Pop. He then goes to Monterey Festival of Pop and sort of gives one of the kind of seminal performances in the development of popular music. because he, you know, his fusion of psychedelic rock and a lot of that was accelerated by new guitar pedal effects that were coming through that he was often the first person to actually have access to. But he creates this kind of sound that fuses psychedelic rock with some very, very traditional orthodox blues music.

48:01And, you know, he's dressed in a way that no rock star is dressed. And then at the end of this performance, he does a cover of Wild Thing by the Trogs and then he sets fire to and destroys his guitar on stage. Oh, it was that moment. Oh, wow. The performance is extraordinary because also, you know, it's a hippie crowd. They sort of, when he sings, he's got a very beautiful, delicate song called The Wind Cries Mary and the hippie crowd is very enchanted. And then people are just very quickly horrified as he, let's not be around the bush, simulates sex with his guitar for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

48:36and then sets it on fire and smashes it on the stage.

48:40Anna Ptaszynski:And the monkeys are watching and they think, this is the support act we've been looking for for when we played Last Train to Clarksville.

48:48James Harkin:Well, Mickey Delence, who's in the monkeys, that was the second time he saw him. So he actually saw Hendrix in America, Greenwich Village, I think, and he saw him playing with his teeth and he was like, this guy's amazing, but he didn't get his name. So when they were at the gig, they were like, he was like, that's the teeth guy. We've got to get him. And to be fair to the monkeys, They knew their place in rock music and they knew what his emerging place might be. They thought, wouldn't it be awesome to get to watch Jimi Hendrix every night on tour? That's what they wanted.

49:15Anna Ptaszynski:You said it was the seven or eight nights. So presumably this was not one of the great marriages of history. No, so it sort of became quite quickly apparent that this was a mismatch, even though, as you say, Dan, the Monkees were real Hendrix fans and so would often sneak into the audience just so that they could watch him perform. to an audience of Monkees fans who were increasingly frustrated.

49:43James Harkin:Well, apparently, one of the things that is said about the concert is that when he tried to get them to sing Foxy Lady, they would yell back Foxy Davey after Davey Jones, one of the members of the Monkees. Yeah, it was not a solid artistic match. But also, Hendrix had some experience of doing this kind of thing because he had opened for Engelbert Humperdinck in England the year before. Because, you know, I guess like, I guess at various points you're sort of, you know, especially at that time where the kind of touring circuit was just starting, there just weren't that many musicians that fit into the category of popular music.

50:22We hadn't yet managed to silo everything off by genre. But I think the issue is almost that the Monkees' audience was children and their parents. And I think that is the thing that kind of, that's the thing that creates the issue.

50:39James Harkin:And he wasn't a big fan. Apparently, he referred to their music as dishwater. So that's not the best compliment, if true.

50:47Dan Schreiber:So he's looking down. He disdains this audience so much who disdain him in return. And then they basically shout each other off the stage, don't they? He just eventually said, sod this. These guys hate me. I hate them. Really? Yeah. Listen, I'll say this from personal experience. I know what it's like to have a bad gig. I've had a few bad gigs in my time, and I know what it looks like when an audience turns on a performer. And let me tell you, it's not pretty when it's 30 people, but I imagine when it's 10 ,000 people.

51:21James Harkin:Those Wiggles crowds are tough, man. They are hard to win over.

51:26Dan Schreiber:You know you mentioned the wing cries Mary, which I agree is a really lovely song. I didn't realise what that was about. And it's just about lumpy mashed potato. Is it?

51:36James Harkin:Stop it.

51:37Dan Schreiber:Yeah, it's just about he had a fight with his girlfriend, Kathy Mary Etchingham. Apparently they had fights a lot. And again, you always picture someone like Jimi Hendrix. They've got to be having these really passionate fights about huge issues. No, the thing they always thought about was her shit cooking. And in 1967, he had a big bitch about her lumpy mashed potato. So she stormed out, smashed some plates. And The Wind Cries Mary is the song he wrote that night. It has the lyric about picking up broken pieces on the floor, him sweeping up the bits of plate. There we go. That's all it is. Wow.

52:10Anna Ptaszynski:That's great. Nish, I'm taking it you're a mega fan, right? From everything you've said so far. Yeah, I'm a big Jimi Hendrix fan. So the first album I ever bought was a Jimi Hendrix album, which was great. That's a great first album to have bought. The first singer was Bewitched. so i sort of wow it's a mixed grill monkeys kind of influence yeah yeah but the thing i love the thing i never knew and i find this really interesting because it's my it's of my other area of interest is that he was a paratrooper he was signed into the u.s army the 101st airborne division of the u.s army it's because there was a minor misdemeanor and the judge said well you've got to join the army and if you want to avoid prison so theoretically if the tv series band of brothers had been set not in 1944 but in the early 60s jimmy hendrix could have been a character

53:05Dan Schreiber:in that series a fantasy world you can both inhabit you know the plot line to that would then involve the truth which is that he then pretends to be gay to get out of it yes he was Dishonourably discharged, yeah

53:18Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, but there's room for a comic subplot in Band of Brothers Which gets a bit heavy at times, I would say

53:23James Harkin:Here's the thing that I was surprised about with Jimi Hendrix He's obviously the epitome of cool, of psychedelia, of that whole period But when you read into him, actually quite sort of a mundane, boring character He loved playing Risk Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash said that he was amazing at Risk Particularly when he was on LSD

53:42Anna Ptaszynski:That's his military experience coming in It is, it literally is that No, I wouldn't go that way

53:46James Harkin:yeah but he was he was also a massive fan of coronation street like a huge fan yeah so according to his um girlfriend who you mentioned anna kathy kathy yeah yeah she says that he just absolutely binged coronation street and there's a theory that the theme tune found its way into one of his songs and if you listen and i've had a listen just before we came on on Axis Bold as Love, there is a song called Third Stone from the Sun. Have a listen, 42 seconds into it, there's a little riff and no question it is Corrie.

54:22Dan Schreiber:It is Coronation Street. That's amazing. Fantastic.

54:27Anna Ptaszynski:All of these amazing artists, they do have the reputation for the drink. There was lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll in Hendrix's life, but also they just have to work incredibly hard for years. Hendrix just did hundreds of hours of recordings, all of this. He was worked so hard all the way through. And also, he was living in England in the kind of era of, what, was it been two television channels or three television channels? He was not spoiled for choice. So he's like, well, I guess Corrie's on. I've got another Corrie link, I think. Because I read that he didn't like anyone seeing him with his hair curlers in when his hair was being got ready.

55:01Anna Ptaszynski:And that's a Corrie thing, isn't it? They've always got their curlers in.

55:06Dan Schreiber:It's a tenuous link, but we'll accept it. I think he was a bit paranoid about his coolness status because I read, and I think I verified this, maybe you'll know, Nish, but in the song If Six Was Nine, there's a bit where he plays the recorder and he bought it apparently off a street vendor as kind of a joke and he plays the recorder at the end. It's a weird sound. There's often chat online saying, what's that weird instrument at the end? But it's listed on the original album. It's credited as a flute. It's credited as a flute. Yeah, it is, yeah. Apparently he was embarrassed. He didn't want to go down with that flute.

55:37The problem with it is that as soon as you hear it, you go, that's a fucking recorder. It doesn't even vaguely sound like a flute. What's he playing?

55:48Anna Ptaszynski:Is it London's Burning that comes in? Okay, Nish, have you heard the Morgan Freeman thing? What? No. It's a theory that Hendrix didn't die in 1970. He faked his own death. And since then, he's been living as Morgan Freeman. It's a big theory online. Yeah. Okay. Freeman owns a blues bar in Mississippi. He loves the music of the blues. Spooky. They don't look completely dissimilar.

56:14Dan Schreiber:And no one's ever seen Morgan Freeman young.

56:16Anna Ptaszynski:Well, Morgan Freeman's first film credit was in 1964, which is six years before Hendrix died. But if Hendrix had been doing the groundwork, he could have created the character and just been slowly starring in movies throughout the 60s. I mean, it's a pretty...

56:29James Harkin:Maybe Morgan Freeman is... You know when Bowie became Ziggy Stardust, sort of exclusively in real life for a period? Maybe Morgan Freeman is his Ziggy, but he just hasn't broken out of character yet. He's just become too immersed. Hey, here's a cool thing that connects Jimmy to the world of British comedy. The cover of Axis Bold as Love, you might remember it. It's a very, it has Hindu gods in the background and very colourful. That was designed by Roger Law, who created Spitting Image and all the parts. Yeah. That's great.

57:02Dan Schreiber:Oh my God, that's so good. Are you guys familiar with Cynthia Plastercaster? Oh, yes. No, I'm not. How familiar? Be honest. Can you explain what he did? Well, I believe Cynthia Plastercaster used to make Plastercasts of the genitals of famous people in the 60s. That is correct, except the thing is, everyone always says that. When you look up the list of people she made them for, I think most famous people said, I'd rather you didn't make a plaster cast of my penis. Yeah. One of the only people who did it.

57:40Anna Ptaszynski:There's no easy way of avoiding someone making a plaster cast of your penis.

57:43Dan Schreiber:Well, yes, but Jimmy didn't. He's got the whole plaster cast. Isn't that an amazing thing to do? Yeah. To just say to this random weird lady, kind of groupie, yeah, I'll shove my erect penis into your plaster. No one wants flaccid plaster cast. You're right. You're right. and there's no details on how it was made erect whether it was a little bit like when you give a sperm donation I don't know if they send you into a room with a bunch of magazines there was a heavy inference that she was part of the there was no magazine in the waiting room she was the magazine she was the magazine

58:16Anna Ptaszynski:where is this plaster cast now?

58:18Dan Schreiber:it's in the Iceland Phallological Museum actually get out is it really? yeah I think so have you seen Anish? I have not not that big a fan then My Hendrix fandom has not extended to visit the plaster cast of his penis. Listen, if I'm in the area, of course I'm taking a look at it. Of course I'm taking a look at it. Have I seen it on Google Images? Yes. But that's not this. Move on. Move on.

58:52James Harkin:Is it my phone wallpaper? Yes. Move on. All right, look, we need to wrap up. Nish, you're going to be in Edinburgh, right? Yes, I'm going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I am very excited about it. And this is not me stalling for time whilst I Google what time my show is. My show, which I know the time and location of, is at 10 past five in the afternoon at the Assembly Theatre in George Square. Do come along. I will be there. I cannot deliver performance dynamics on a level of Jimi Hendrix but what I can promise is I will be there on time

59:31Andy Dawson:what a sell

59:37James Harkin:okay that's it that is all of our guest facts come back again next week because we got another show with four more comedians who are all going to be going up to the Edinburgh Fringe this year so we'll see you then goodbye

59:54Thank you.