No Such Thing As Lily Allen In The Hellespont

0:00Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish, Dan and Andy here. Hello. And we just want to quickly let you know before we launch into this week's episode about this week's guest guest. Yes, it's our friend and yours, Cariad Lloyd. Yeah. She's brilliant. She's been on loads of times before. She's always fantastic. Her fact this week is a really good one. And it's a brilliantly entertaining show. I've just listened to it and I've written it up for our archive. Have you? So you're in for a treat. I can tell you that much. Oh, well, there we go. Yeah. And also, you should know that Cariad is not only a comedian, not only a podcaster, she's also an author.

0:34That's right. Her new book is called Lydia Marmalade and the Christmas Wish. so it's a children's book it's really funny it's charming it's got a little jane osteney flavor to it a little uh regency tinge that's a terrible phrase but it's it's really funny it's charming it's about a girl called lydia marmalade obviously uh there's an amusing sausage dog it's basically everything you could want for a kind of fun classic christmasy romp yeah lydia marmalade and the christmas wish perfect christmas book it's out now and if you love books generally and you like being part of book clubs, Sarah Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd have a podcast.

1:11It's brilliant. It's called Sarah and Cariad's Weirdos Book Club. Weirdos, good name for a podcast. Yep, shown us up in news before. And there's plenty of episodes. One of your favorite authors, Mick Herron Andy, was a guest recently talking about his Slow Horses series. It's great. Check it out, but get Cariad's book. And one final bit of business before we start. You can get ad-free episodes of this show, No Such Thing As A Fish you can get bonus material you can get extra mad crazy fun stuff like shout outs on the show and video things and longer versions of the main show all of that is available at our secret super fantastic members club Club Fish you can join it by going to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish it's been so much fun we've been making so much extra stuff for it over the last month it's been great and we're really enjoying it and if you would like to support the show it is a fantastic way of doing so that's right so just head to patreon.com slash No Such Thing As A Fish.

2:03You can find all the details there. But for now, on with the show. On with the show.

2:20Hello 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 Cariad Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Cariad. My fact is that Joseph Bazalgette, the famous engineer who designed London sewers, who was inspired by the great Stink, his great, great grandson was the lead guitarist of the band, The Vapors.

3:00who were most famous for their single turning japanese yes brilliant brilliant now this is it's a very famous song a lot of people might know we've just discovered someone in the qi office does not know it who's in their late 20s i think it's an age thing because i recently was telling people this fact and a lot of people were like what song and i was like come on turning japanese and they just stare at you really yeah i do think it's an age thing because it came out in 1980 Yeah, it's an oldie. It's an oldie. But a goodie. It's a effing classic. It's a banger. It's a banger. It's a brilliant song.

3:31The reason I know this is I know Ed Basildjian. No. Clang. Yes, Clang. Wow. Clang, because he is now, he left The Vapours and became a TV director. And he has directed Doctor Who, loads of different things. And I worked with him very recently on excellent Channel 5 police drama, Ellis, starring Sharon D. Clark and Andrew Gower. Wow, cool. At what stage in your relationship did the great-great-grandfather come out? So I am of a mind like yourself. I managed to keep it together for five days filming in Belfast. But the whole time I was like, I'm a Bazzle Jet. Must be a Bazzle Jet. Must be related.

4:06That's such an unusual surname. Can't be. And then we went for a drink in Belfast. Beautiful, beautiful Belfast after we'd finished our episode. And I think he was probably two pints of Guinness down. I was probably one rum and ginger. And I was like, so are you related to the Bazzle Jets? and he was like oh yeah and then some young actors near me were like who didn't know and they're classic sewers they're from the 1860s but i think anyone should know them it's like the song turning japanese you just think imagine being basil jet and you don't know my song you don't know my family sewers yeah this is ed is now a very successful television director um and yeah so then he said oh yes i am related to that basil jet and then someone else must he must or maybe he just came out with it i can't remember now because we were in a pub in belfast um just said oh yeah and i was in the band the vapors and i initially didn't recognize the name until he said turning deaf right i was like oh my god and it's curious as well as the vapors the name you would think might have been ed's suggestion but it's not they all smoke tea cigarettes that's exactly right it was yeah before it's time yeah head of the game yeah because ed was the guitarist yeah and the main songwriter was someone else wasn't it i think felton felton yeah if it had been ed basiljet who came up with the name he probably would have come up with the cholera epidemics yes of the 1850s yeah and they're still going she said you know this the vapors are still they reformed ed was in it for a bit and now he's gone off to tv directing how often do you think they play the song turning japanese in an average set i think it's quite a lot yeah i once went to watched Junior Senior just after their song Move Your Feet had come out and been a big hit.

5:50Oh, yeah. And they played it four times. Right. Yeah. They could have played it five and I would have loved it. Yeah. And it is a bit being your own tribute act, isn't it? Turning Japanese was like a global hit as well. It was huge. And it was their biggest hit. I like that they knew it at the time as well. So they had it ready and they went, we should hold this back. This is going to be a big song. And so they released it as a second single As opposed to a first single from their album Because they didn't want to be one hit wonders Yeah But then, yeah, sort of They are And that's no bad thing Sorry, yeah, there's no bad thing That's no bad thing And the former drummer, Howard Smith Was recently elected Mayor of Guildford No That's pretty cool I thought that was another Clang, clang I met the Mayor of Guildford No, I haven't met the Mayor of Guildford Sorry One other thing about Ed Bazalgette is As you say, he was a TV director But one of the things he directed on his IMDb is Seven Wonders of the Industrial World in 2003, where Robert Lindsay looked at London's sewers.

6:48What a compelling combination. That's great. When do you think he bought, did you think he went to the production company with it or do you think they said, hang on, Ed? Do you want to? You know what? There are like eight episodes in that series and he only directed one of them and it was about the sewers. They thought, let's get him in. We'd like you to do one about the phone network, please. No, I'm sure. And that's good because Robert Lindsay, star of My Family, has been in a lot of old shit. Wow. I love my family. I just couldn't resist. I saw the opening. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you've got to throw your heroes under the bus for the joke.

7:24It's really interesting because it's normally Dan who says, I love my family. I love my family. He's such a wife guy. I do. Let's go into sewers. Yes. I said to Andy, I kind of thought that you guys would have sewers sewn up. So I thought I'd leave with more vapors stuff. because I thought that somebody who's literally exploding next to me to talk about Baseljet. Have you ever been in the sewers, Andy? No, I never have. I've been to the church where the Baseljet mausoleum is, but I didn't know at the time that the mausoleum's there and I'm absolutely gutted. I'm going to have to go back. Oh, you're going to have to go back.

7:54You should go soon because it's in trouble. Is it? Yeah. It's being refurbished. It's being refurbished. They've got a heritage grant. I'm all over this. Ironically, water is destroying it. It's not as well contained. It would be more ironic if shit was destroying it. I think the water very good point it is underground you know and he was responsible for a lot of underground stuff not just the sewers also a bit of the district line was part of the tunnel let's get into it let's get into it let's get into Baselgette he was a bit forgotten for a while I think he's not now but I think I think there's one Baselgette family because it's such an odd surname there's one tiny place in France called La Baselgette and the Baselgette family came from France weirdly they came via America it was a strange route but they migrated to Britain in I think the early 19th century and one person who was a few generations above Joseph was the tailor of Prince of Wales, George.

8:44Oh, wow. And he was the first British Basildred. He was the one who... Would you like a new suit? Would you like a new suit? I really think so. That's what it was. I can imagine it now. Yeah, yeah. He was the grandfather of Joseph, Basildred. What a family. What a family. It's a stunning family. And then there was Joseph William, who we think might have been in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It's amazing. It's just like nepotism has been going through the ages of the UK. Well, it's like England is built on a feudal system. Stop it. That's weird, isn't it? If your grandfather was talented, somehow you managed to still be fine.

9:17It's amazing how they're all so talented. Yeah. Just despite everything. French immigrants. I will say that. Yeah, but when? Their new arrivals. Yeah, 300 years ago. Anyway, look. Anyway, I think Joseph was a stunning man. Mr. Sewers is great. Yeah, basically what he did, Joseph Basilege, at this he was born in 1819 he is responsible more than most other people or maybe the biggest individual contribution to london turning from a medieval city yeah into a modern one christopher wren is the other one i guess yeah but what basiljet was doing was so before basiljet the the city was open sewers cesspools in people's back gardens you would have night soil men turning up to take away the poo i mean just right and that led to cholera cholera cholera like it was just It was cholera city.

10:03The Thames was disgusting. The Thames was basically just put all the poo in the Thames. It's healthier now, isn't it, than it was then? So unimaginably healthier. So basically you put all the poo in the Thames. The Thames obviously flows out to sea. That broadly, broadly worked as a solution. It's a tidal river. But it's a tidal river. And so there would just be this mass in the water of poo that broadly is making its way out to sea, but sometimes the tide would come back in. And that normally is okay because it's normally in the water. Obviously it stinks and obviously you cannot drink from the river.

10:32But the main problem comes when the river level goes down a bit. So in the summer? Summer of 1858 was unbelievably hot and dry, and the water level dropped, and there were piles of this matter on the banks of the Thames that were about six feet deep. Anyone who smelt it at the time just wrote these accounts saying, I cannot describe the smell. I will never forget the smell as long as I live. It was awful, and people were dying and dying and dying of cholera. Yeah. So he then he then set in motion the building of the sewers, did a did a little thing where he sort of calculated that they should be double the size that they were planning on building, which means that we're largely using a lot of them 150 years later.

11:12Right. We're still using them. But also, I mean, just as a on a tourist level, if you're walking around London, you're kind of walking largely in Baselgett's London. All of the embankment. The embankment's amazing that it just wasn't the Thames was so much wider. Yeah, but those are basically to be described as sewer caps. They are where the sewers are underneath. That was never there. So if you ever walk along the Thames, that's Baseljet, basically. It's like 50 acres of new London that he created. And that thing about him doubling the capacity, some sources say he worked out the pooage of an average Londoner generously and then doubled it.

11:46And then some sources say he doubled it again because he said, look, we're only going to do this. I know Londoners. They're going to be pooing more than this, I tell you. we'll need to dribble this. Exactly. And he basically said, look, we cannot do this a second time. We have to do it once. And that meant that as the population rose, you had either double or quadruple the capacity, which meant that when high-rise buildings started being built and the pooage, overall pooage, did increase massively. There is an alternate world in which he didn't double the capacity and in which 1960s London was overflowing with raw sewage.

12:19Swinging London would have just smelt. It would have been the worst it would have been a nightmare but because of his solution it lasted until today and now we've just built this huge new sewer the Thames Tideway Tunnel which is designed to sort of solve the creaking of the system which we built he's buried in Wimbledon I think in St. Mary's Church yes and the mausoleum is stunning sorry most people won't know what St. Mary's Church you're like yeah like everyone knows what St. Mary's Church is sorry I've lived in London for 15 years I don't know where that is I used to live in Wimbledon sorry yeah yeah It's where they do the overflow parking for the tennis tournament Right, right Sorry to give you Oh, you mean opposite the co-op Right, okay There's no co-op in Wimbledon Village, James It's near the second waitrose But that church is The mausoleum is really interesting because it wasn't built for him Did you see this?

13:11I did, yeah It was built for a slave owner called John Anthony Rucker Oh no Who died in 1804 And then his family did not want to be in the mausoleum with him for whatever reason. So it's just... Figured out he was a terrible slave owner. Yeah. Mother Rucker. And then his family didn't want to be in there. So there was just almost empty, just one grave filled. So the Basil Jets bought the mausoleum. Wow. But he is still in there. Oh, Rucker's still in there? Yeah, yeah. So it's Rucker and then half a dozen Basil Jets around him. Wow. Yeah, there's main Basil Jet and then I think five children of his.

13:42And Mrs. Basil Jet. And Mrs. Basil Jet. So it can fit nine, I read. So what are we up to? Seven, eight, one more space. Ed could go in that mausoleum, couldn't he? Let's warn him now. but then there's also peter who's his other yeah the other famous basiljet who's a television producer yeah also has a tv and made big brother or something yeah yeah he was the creative head i believe of endemol and so he's the one who they brought in big brother because that was an international format but really the british one is what made it go global and deal or no deal as well he's got his name sorry just what i'm thinking is obviously he works in formatting they've got one space in the Baseljet mausoleum and all these Baseljets who might go in you decide it's like reverse deal or no deal because it's who goes in the box this is Davina I'm going into the big Baseljet mausoleum I'm coming in oh my god that's so good let's ask Ed if he wants to direct it and Robert Lindsay wants to host it I think that works I should just say Robert Lindsay's great actor you can call it my family and friend or no and Rucker and yeah

14:51okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that this year 26 new bacteria species were discovered in a room specifically designed to not have any bacteria in them brilliant so i got this story off a pop science writer he's one of my favorite pop science writers dr robin george andrews he wrote it for national geographic and this is a story about the clean rooms that they have at NASA so we build all of these rocket instruments that are going to Mars all the rovers and so forth in these specific rooms because you don't want to bring any life to Mars I just love the way he said we involved in it I was like wow did we I feel great is that like you're talking about the podcast yeah yeah okay me sorry I am heavily involved yeah be proud uh so basically the idea of the clean rooms is that humans can't allow any form of life onto Mars because if we're looking for life there and we bring it there, we won't be able to tell if it was there or if it was from us.

15:47So these rooms are made very specifically to make sure that the smallest of bacteria gets killed off. And they have various different ways that they do that. They fill the room with ultraviolet lights. They have radioactive beams going through. They have prolonged periods of dry heating. And they get it to above water's boiling point. So it would kill anything that would be on the surface. They do basically everything they can to make sure nothing goes up. Vinegar, that's quite good. yeah um detto yeah that's good that only kills 99.9 percent of the bacteria so that's the opening you need to use another brand and if you just pour them into a bucket together i'm gonna set up a bleach company that kills 0.001

16:35yeah so um and a while ago they found a bacteria that did survive and did possibly go into space on various missions. So it is possible that right now on Mars, there is a bacteria there that they didn't detect. So life might be on Mars right now. That'd be good. But what I loved was when they're saying that it's not that these bacteria are extremely good at, like, they're not like so small they couldn't find them. This bacteria was playing dead. That's the thing. This is what's nuts. This bacteria knew to hide. Come on. You know, like when the Velociraptor figures out the door, like that's what we've got, right?

17:08The bacteria was like, guys, guys, shh, shh, shh. Shh, they're just passing, they're passing. Everyone lie down, everyone lie down. Yeah, it's basically... They've gone, they've gone, they've gone, go, go. Like the Thais in Thai style. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, he's gone, he's gone, he's gone. Go, go, go. It's learnt to sort of camouflage itself. It goes into a hibernation that makes it seem as if it's dead. Because normally they're bright red, aren't they? And you say, oh. Guys, put a camo on, put a camo on, get down, get down. Behind the bush, behind the bush. Okay, we'll be in Mars in 14 years.

17:35We've just got to keep quiet. What I find really interesting is that because the rooms are clean so much, the microbes that are found there, it's almost like we are putting them through an accelerated breeding program to make sure they can withstand cleaning, drying, UV treatment and lack of food. And all the sterilization methods we're using, actually we're creating super bacteria. But what, do they like swab the surfaces to see if it's there? I guess they must do, right? Yes, I think the ones they find, the really weird thing is sometimes they're found only in clean rooms. So in 2013, scientists found a new microbe which had only been found in spacecraft clean rooms, one in Florida and one in French Guiana.

18:15Was that the one where they found that they were actually eating the cleaning products that they were using? This Dettol is delicious! Yum yum! Isn't that bad that they found them in two different places? That's proof that it's us doing this then. It's certainly a heavy implication, isn't it? But that's why they swab James saying about swabbing They do swab certain places And then they put them into solutions And test them And they're like Oh my god yeah This thing is still alive That's how they've been discovering them Yeah Bacteria Oh yeah And being discovered And so on Yeah They've recently found We've spoken a bit about The largest single celled organisms Which is kind of algae I think And they get really big But in 2022 The world's largest bacterium Was found And it's the size of an eyelash It's 5 ,000 times bigger than the previous largest known bacterium.

19:06You can pick it up with a pair of tweezers. What? It's crazy. It's called Theomargarita magnifica. I've ordered that from Pizza Express. Disappointingly small. Disappointingly small. Very big for a bacterium. Tiny pizza. Tiny, yeah. Waiter, there's a hair in my pizza. Actually. Don't tell everyone. Apparently it's the equivalent of us meeting a human being who's as tall as Mount Everest. What? That's how big it is in comparison to a normal bacteria. To a normal bacteria. Right. Isn't that, I mean, crazy. That's funny in the clean room when you go hide and Mount Everest is leaning against the walls in awkward ways.

19:47Let me give you one more story about bacteria. Oh, okay. Okay. This starts off very bad, but it does have a happy ending. Okay. So there was a woman in 1984. She was in America and she was studying gonorrhea. and she was driving home from work and she picked up her son on the way who was like three years old and then left the son in the car while she went to the shops to buy some stuff oh no the gonorrhea was in a petri dish that contained something called chocolate agar which is like a type of jelly that you use to grow it's not sweet but you grow bacteria on it but it looks a bit like chocolate.

20:27Oh no. Anyway the child ate the agar. Oh no. Yummy gonorrhea, mum! And tested positive for gonorrhea two days later. Oh my god. And so they took them to the centres of disease control and told them what had happened. And the happy ending is that the child was cured because they gave them antibiotics mixed in with ice cream. So he got some ice cream in the end. Chocolate and ice cream? What a win for this kid. Oh good lord Imagine being that When they get much older And being like Trying to like You know STD chat And being like Oh yeah No I have had gonorrhea It was a long time ago I just think Don't make your Agar jelly Look like ice cream There are a few Different barriers That have been That have been Gone through there On the In the Like It's a real Get me Henamore situation Now Henamore I've left I've left the gonorrhea In this thing Labelled chocolate it's very 80s parenting as well it's very like left in the car with all the chemicals well it's like the marshmallow test except um it's really interesting just this weirdly sort of ties back a bit to the previous fact because bacteria were first discovered in the 17th century and we think maybe in the 1640s athanasius kircher uh he just he wrote that vinegar and milk abound with an innumerable multitude of worms.

21:52So that might have been him observing with a primitive microscope, the microscopic life. But basically in 1900, so even 200 years after bacteria were discovered, the leading causes of death were influenza, tuberculosis and gastroenteritis, right? These are all microorganism based. In 2000, 100 years later, the main causes of death were heart disease, cancer and stroke. It's just a massive shift in what does eventually end our lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was so bacterial before. Back in the day, yeah. Yeah, and before things like penicillin as well. Yeah, exactly. Penicillin, I always think, is one of those moments that we're so lucky happened because there was a real sliding doors moment there because Alexander Fleming would come back from holiday, so he was sitting inside his lab, and he was going over all the Petri dishes that he had left before going off on a holiday.

22:40Chocolate. He had the chocolate.

22:45And out of nowhere, sort of as he's looking, a man called Merlin pops his head around the door and they used to be colleagues together and he was looking for a new job I believe and he he sort of said hey Fleming and had he'd said let's go to the pub which is why he was kind of coming in to have to have a chat with him and take him away from the work he would have not have seen what he saw in the petri dish in that moment so Merlin said no no you keep looking and that was the moment when he went that's funny and he saw what would become the bacteria had disappeared and that some mould had presumably killed it and that was penicillin.

23:21How much do we believe that Andy? Well then the other thing he hasn't said is that Merlin handed him a sword which he pulled out of stone and he became the rightful king of England and I think that's a pretty big part of the penicillin journey. I don't know why I left that out. My grandpa was called Herbert Mervyn but he told me as a child that his middle name was Merlin that's because we were descended as Welsh people from Merlin and I was about 25. You know when you say a fact out loud to someone? It's so funny. And I was like, oh yeah, because we're descended from Merlin. Oh no, he lied. So do we think that that's questionable if Merlin came in or not?

23:58Well, obviously Fleming was already a bacteriologist. And he had made this discovery of lysozyme, which was a thing which did inhibit bacterial growth, but against a few small numbers of bacteria. So it wasn't a game changer. He found that in about 1921 or two. And then several years later, he left some Staphylococcus bacteria, a culture in the lab. And then he got back and he saw they'd been contaminated by a fungus, which had destroyed the colonies of staff around it. So that was an accident. But obviously, he was very well placed to discover it. There is this story that it's only because he was in a rifle club at his local medical school.

24:33He was in medical school just doing general medicine. And the team captain really wanted to keep him in the team and said, well, you'll stay in the team if you join the research department at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School. in Paddington and that's why he became a bacteriologist he's also written up on collegiate waterpolo.org as the most significant water polo player of all time get out it's because who are the others isn't it just him he played water polo at age 16 for the london scottish regiment because he was in the army as a young man and he's this is a great website collegiate waterpolo.org which basically re-centers the universe around water polo i love it that's very good and even after he discovered it it wasn't rolled out until 15 years later well because yeah so there was that thing where it didn't yield as much penicillin as they need that particular mold that they were so that became a global hunt in order to try and find a different mold that produced penicillin and i guess it's part you know there's a lot of legendary tales about this stuff but the story of Moldy Mary, who's the person who often gets attributed to being the person.

25:36I think I've heard that like you are. There was a lab in Illinois that was trying to find a new mold. And they sent basically a calling out to soldiers around the world who were in the field trying to find mold and send it back to this lab. She, Moldy Mary, the story of her, was a lab assistant working there. And one day when she was coming into work, she passed a grocery store outside and she was buying a melon. and she saw an interesting melon in the batch that had some mold on it. And she thought, that looks like the mold we might be looking for. I still remember the day in QI when someone came into the office, I think it was probably Justin Pollard, and told us about Moldy Mary's melons.

26:12And we were just like, okay, well that's 20 minutes of material right there. The episode writes itself. Also, isn't it funny, there's the other Mary, TB Mary, Moldy Mary. Typhoid Mary. Typhoid Mary, Typhoid Mary. I'm like, don't call your kid Mary is the thing I'm getting, the part I'm getting here. One thing about the olden days is a lot of people called their kids married. We all have relatively young kids, so know how hard it is to get them to brush their teeth. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Bribery, begging, crying. Just open, just let me. Yeah, awful. Well, here's something we can say to them that might help them to do it.

26:47If you brush your teeth properly, your mouth becomes full of nice bacteria, whereas if you don't, it's full of evil bacteria. Don't get rid of bacteria. James, come out to my house, please. Engage my five-year-old son with that argument. Let's see how far you can get there. Yeah, I think you're raising your child a bit differently to have maybe carried an eye on it. That's not going to do much for mine. They do not give a shit about the good bacteria and nice bacteria. Here's what I do. If you clean your teeth, I'm going to give you five pounds. I say, if everyone's brushed their teeth, we put the telly on.

27:16That's the deal. That's the deal. No one gets telly until the teeth are brushed. I brush my teeth with Yakult to get the friendly bacteria on there. Am I doing the right thing? Yeah, that's right. So the idea is that if you put a load of bacteria together in a petri dish and some are nice and some are nasty. You've got to party. And the nasty ones, they love a party and they're going to kill all the nice ones. Right. And that works in pretty much all situations. But if you keep cleaning somewhere, then everyone's energy is used up by the fact that they keep getting killed by the fact that they're being cleaned.