No Such Thing As Teletubby TikTok Tummies

25:53They produced 250 ,000 of them to give out to all the soldiers. Yeah. And someone said, we can't give them pikes. What are you doing? They've got machine guns out there. Are you serious? Well, I want to know the providence of this fact. I've read an awful lot of books on World War II. I've never come across that one. Well, it was discussed by Godfrey Nicholson, the MP, known as Crofts Pike. We all know how much sense and how much truth. Godfrey Nicholson, though, he was a man of honor, wasn't he? It was known as Crofts Pike because he was someone... Are you sure you're not thinking of Lance Corporal Pike?

26:26I get all my facts from British sitcoms, yes. Sounds to me like Nicholson was a very stupid boy. That's all I... Can I tell you about Mrs. Hertha Ayrton? Go on, then. I love her. She was a citizen scientist, and she was aware that there was a problem with gas. You know, First World War, first big use of poison gas on the Western Front. So she invented the anti-gas fan. And it's just a large fan. It's a handheld fan. It's one of those where you can't snap it out and flirt with it. It's just like an open fan. It's like a paddle. Oh, so it wasn't an electric fan. It was a paddle. No, no. This was the First World War.

27:06This was just like, it was just a handheld and they made 100 ,000 of these and distributed them along the west of France. Isn't that a weird idea, though? Like soldiers with their fans? Do we call it an invention? I mean, surely she just, she came up with a good use for something which already existed. I mean, she said, why don't we fan gas away? Nobody said, my goodness, what should we use to fan the gas away? Ben, I like to acknowledge female inventors, actually. And so... Well, I'm with you on that. As we all know, Mrs Orwell wrote 1984, apparently, according to a new biography. So yes, let's...

27:38She wrote another thing called 1984, didn't she? Which he might have based his slightly on. Well, just the title. Just the title, right. It was a poem. Anyway, let's not start debunking history debunkers. It's a very good thing to find the influences of women in history. So we certainly don't want to be poo-pooing that. It's like a children's entertainer on a chest. On a chest. Just looping back.

28:08Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1962, a baby was successfully conceived thanks to a new fertility drug that contained Pope-approved nun's urine. Pope-approved. Yeah. Yeah, this is the story of pergonol. Pergonol is a drug that has been used for decades and decades to help people who have got fertility problems. And back in the 1940s, there was a guy called Piero Donini. He was a scientist who was working on extracting and purifying FSH and LH. So these are hormones that we produce in our body to stimulate production of sperm and produce testosterone in men.

28:48They're used for women to grow and function their ovaries to produce a trigger ovulation. They're really important. And he's the person who isolated them and tried to work out what to do with them. So another guy comes along who is studying the exact same thing and finds out about Donini's discovery and says, we could change the whole system of people trying to get pregnant. And this was Bruno Lunenfeld. Yeah, exactly. Bruno Lunenfeld. And so they approached this company, Serrano, where Donini worked. And they said, could we try this out? In order to try this out, we need gallons and gallons of urine.

29:20And we need to find out where to get that from. and they said it's a great idea but we don't want to put our stuff into this we can't do this there was a guy on the board who happened to be the nephew of the current pope okay and he said the pope has approved that the nuns that the pope has access to will be the providers not that he has access to not direct access it's not a tantric bazaar sort of situation no um he has access to Well, influence. He has influence. And he's approved the fact that if you ask them, the Pope says he's okay with it. Because it's post-menopausal, large groups of older women would certainly be able to, you know.

30:01And they can't be pregnant either. And they can't be pregnant. That would spoil it. Medieval nuns wouldn't have done it. No naughty nuns. No naughty nuns. In the modern day. Well, that is very interesting. You say Pope approved as if that's kind of the big fact. is like, you know, a Pope-approved nun's urine, whereas actually I think nun's urine is probably the more interesting part of that sentence, because it really is, what a sort of interesting way they arrived at finding the stuff they needed. But, I mean, did he have to approve it like wee by wee, or was it just a general, is it a Pope-al bull that he said you can, anyone can use nun's wee, it's fine by me?

30:42I don't think he was project manager, no. I think he allowed them to just get on with it. Bless each trickle. Okay. It took 10 nuns 10 days to produce enough urine for one treatment. If 10 nuns spend 10 days to get a gallon of urine, how long does it take five nuns? GCSE Italian math. It took nuns 10 days to produce it. I mean, they weren't obviously spending all day. They basically, when they had a wee, they kept it. And, you know, they needed that much of it. Yeah. I think it's less dramatic when you unpack that sentence. He's coming for yours too. He's coming for yours too. I saw it covered, so don't worry.

31:18It's 100 none days. It's 100 none ways. It's not a day. It's got nothing to do with a day. You don't even have one wee a day, though. Well, you're right. No, you're right. You're probably five. Actually, you're absolutely right. Well, well done. I probably have these days. I'm 66. I have one wee a minute, so you're right. I have to knot it just to get through lunch. You know. but one part of this that you're missing out yeah is that the vatican owned 25 of serrano yeah this company so that was the reason they were so interested in going for this the pope had a dog in the game it's a stunning so the the collection is insane i mean just because that was one treatment was 10 nuns 10 days worth of urine for 10 nuns so but that's one treatment and then the drug took off and it became successful and they started off with 100 nuns all donating their urine and that gave them 30 ,000 litres a year.

32:12So that was enough for 450 treatments, right? And then that took off. But they had to fit special loos in the convents, obviously. Well, keep the weed. You flush it away, it's no use at all. And so the first baby girl was born in 1962 thanks to this treatment. There was specifically this one. and it took off and by the 1980s they needed 30 ,000 litres of urine a day. That's mad. So they had to expand beyond nuns. Yeah, they had to synthesise it basically. Yeah, they had to. Well, no, that took them a while to synthesise it. So they looked for other groups of older non-pregnant menopausal women.

32:45Where did they find them? They did. Prisons? They didn't do prisons, I don't think. There were urine collectors working for this company who did door-to-door door-knocking campaigns saying, Wow. Hello, can we bring out your piss basically? And they had hundreds of that. They had 100 ,000 donors by the mid 90s. You would certainly, because of course, religion is kind of shrinking. I mean, I think I'll bet there's a lot less less nuns around now than there were 50 years ago. Yeah, that's true. Peaked with the sound of music. And I think it's down ever since. So, gosh. But they did eventually learn how to like man-made nun piss or person.

33:20Human. Synthetic. Yeah. Synthetic. But it was 1995 when they came up with that. That's stunning. It was called Go Null F. I just think it's crazily late. And actually pergonal is a similar word, and they both come from the word for gonad. Do you know gonad? Well, I did two, yes. Well, I did two, my wife and I, we had our infertility journey, and we did three cycles before we wonderfully got our beautiful twins. And no one ever mentioned nun's piss, synthetic or real. There was literally, I don't know whether they were trying to slip it past us. Maybe they thought I'm sort of relatively publicly known as an atheist.

33:57Maybe they would have thought I wouldn't have wanted none's piss involved. Would you have minded? No, I wouldn't have minded, actually. Of course I wouldn't. We were what's called non-specifically infertile, which is medical jargon for we do not have a clue. And I think a lot of people are. And, you know, everything seemed fine. They couldn't find a reason. and yet they say in terms of facts, they do say if you're a couple trying to conceive, in the first year, 9 out of 10 will conceive and by the second year, 9 out of 10 of the 10 % who didn't will have conceived. So by the time you get to the third year, you really are either infertile or fantastically unlucky and we never found out and it turned out we were fertile because our third and last child came as a very big surprise, not born off the wrist but in the conventional sense.

34:51Sired. Sired. You're absolutely right. There's a really cool fact, which is, so you wrote this into a book, Inconceivable, which I absolutely love. And then made that into a movie called Maybe Baby. In Maybe Baby, Hugh Laurie, who's the lead role, is a TV maker. And he's in charge of this children's program. And it's at the BBC. and there's a lead character who's a children's entertainer who wears a costume who's called Mr. Fur Blob in it. Guess who was inside that? Dave Thompson. Come on, Dave Thompson. Dave Thompson is in my movie, but he's a very funny physical comedian and a very good comic.

35:30Yeah, I got a lot of good material out of that because that's what I do. I like to create comedy from what I know and what I feel and what I think. And obviously that was a massive part of our lives. And we, over the years, made many lovely letters saying, you know, it was all very grim in our house and your book or your movie was helpful because it is funny. People are funny. And the nun's wee story is enough to prove that a thousandfold. Yeah, I always thought, because, you know, in the movie, the two people are constantly, I'm ovulating, come home now. There's always like a rush. And I always thought, oh, that's just a good comic conceit.

36:05cut to us on tour in Europe where I'm finding myself on my day off flying back to the UK to shag your missus exactly it is a part of it you know there are certain times when you're more fertile and honestly it's not easy you need a bit of tantric to get you going because you know like to order I mean I'm sure there are some but you know you suddenly oh no you know anyway we did it long before any Viagra so you know Anyway, look, we're going into TFI territory, aren't we? Can I talk about the Vatican for a second? Yes, of course. So the Vatican owned 25 % of this company. I was looking into the Vatican's finances because I'm a former accountant.

36:47And in World War II, they had a bank called the... Nazi Helping Bank? Effectively, yes. It was the Institute for Religious Works, and they brought it in as like a national bank, which wouldn't have to be overseen by any authority. And they were known as the world's best offshore bank. And indeed, they are alleged to have hidden billions of pounds from Nazi sources. They were investigated by the Bank of Italy in 2010 and found that they were non-compliant in seven of the 16 core standards of the Italian banking industry. But is that related to the Second World War? That's how it began. It actually began pre-Second World War.

37:28But the investigation, it wasn't like a very cold case. The location is current. Oh, wow. I say current. It's 2010, so it's 15 years ago. Are they going to have to give some of the way back?

37:42We've all not made a taking the piss joke there, and I think that's very good of us. And the other thing they have in Rome is they have a tax break for any chapel. So if they own a chapel in Rome, they don't have to pay tax on it. And a chapel counts as any building that has a three-meter square place where you can pray. and so they own all these buildings in Rome and they just put a tiny little corner and put a little statue of the Virgin Mary or something call it a chapel if they don't have to pay tax on it it's all according to a book called God's Bankers by Gerald Posner very well you know it doesn't surprise us that you know money and religion can produce corruption there's no doubt about that but the Pope in question on this one was Pius XII so he's a friend of the podcast We mentioned him A couple of weeks ago So he had this doctor, this really strange doctor Called Paul Nihans Who was a Swiss surgeon And he offered this rejuvenation treatment So we're kind of in the realm of that already With the fertility and the essence And all this stuff But Nihans injected the buttocks Of his famous patients Like supposedly King George VI With the cells of fetal lambs and calves And it was a kind of Jujup, buck you up post treatment yeah and this is the pope whose embalming went disastrously wrong and who ended up yeah yeah being you know his his other he was very unlucky with his doctors the other doctor embalmed him supposedly in the traditional aramaic style and it went awfully awfully wrong and the other reason he's a friend of the podcast is he was the one who ruled in 1954 that anyone mentioning jesus's foreskin will be automatically excommunicated oh wow which is why i've been technically as communicated.

39:25Jesus was Jewish, so is this some reason, is he thought to have had one or not? Well, he was thought to have had it removed as a child. As Jews often do. Absolutely. And there are relics around the world of this supposed holy boskin. Just get back this embalming. I didn't know about Pope embalming. Do they keep all the popes? Yeah, yeah. Because there's been thousands. I mean, well, I don't know about thousands, but an awful lot of popes. Where are they then? They're backed up. They're on a hard drive. Is there a big old cabinet? I mean, is there a big place full of dead popes? If you go to the Vatican, there's like the catacombs underneath and they have loads of...

40:01They're not all on display, I have to say, so I don't know if they're all still there, but definitely you can walk past loads of popes. How many popes do you think there have been? Ooh, that's a good question. Can't be triple figures. What? Yeah. What, you mean more than a hundred? Yeah. I think so. I mean, there have been popes for 2 ,000 years. Since 30 AD? Yeah, and I think they've... Yeah, let's have a... Let somebody have a go. Okay, I'll start. St. Peter, right? I mean, I think it's pious. There's about a hundred piouses. I mean, there's certainly a lot of X's and ones after him. He was pious the 12th.

40:32I'm saying double figures. I'm saying it. I've got the answer. I've got one, two, three. This is according to the Pontifical Yearbook. That's a cool yearbook. 365. There's 266. Oh, wow. According to this. Do you think they've got them all? I mean, obviously, they haven't got the really early ones. I mean, how many Pope, Kimbalmed Popes are there? How many Popes are still in physical... We don't fully know, apparently. There's lots of bits of Popes that we have. We've got lots of hearts. Horskins and heads out about the place. But don't mention them. Don't bring up the horskins.

41:14Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, Ben, you've had a go at the other facts. so far, but I think you'll be fine with this one. My fact this week is that Shakespeare's parents and his children were probably illiterate. Well, that's not a fact, is it? He strikes again. Three out of three. Right out the gates. The word probably does a lot of work there, doesn't it? Well, it does a lot of damage. I mean, the fact that someone was probably something is about as far from being a fact as you can get. Okay, let me give you... It's a Trump-level fact. So let me give you a little bit of evidence But it is scant because what we know about them is very little But Shakespeare's father and mother couldn't sign their names Like when they signed, they signed with images So his father John Well that means that's how they signed their names Absolutely That may have been how they chose to sign their names That's absolutely And actually now if you want to sign something now with an image rather than your name You are allowed to do that by law So you are allowed to And actually in those days it was relatively common So crafts people, trades people, guild members would often draw things So John, his father, drew a picture of a pair of Glover's compasses instead of his name.

42:24And so some people point to this as evidence that he couldn't write. And William Shakespeare had three kids, I think, but one of them, Hamnet, his son, died very young. But then he had two daughters. And in those days, girls would typically not be taught how to read and write or not how to write anyway. and we have one sort of very quite scruffy signature of one of his daughters. So it seems like she could write her name, but the implication is maybe not much else. But again, like the evidence is really, really scary. It's really, so there's a, actually we know more about Shakespeare than we do about any of the other great English poets of the English Reformation, considerably more.

43:07There are a lot of known facts, which is why it's particularly galling that idiot conspiracy theorists do to say, well, maybe it wasn't him. Because they think a grammar school boy. Oh, Dan's looking at his notes now. But let's just look at the issue rather than go to the Shakespeare conspiracies. Firstly, Shakespeare's own signatures are generally varied. He spelled his name differently. The whole idea of what a signature was and what it meant, and indeed what correct spelling was, was viewed very differently in those days. Think about the evidence. Mary was a daughter of the aristocracy. This is his mother.

43:42Absolutely. Now, her husband, there's no doubt about it, John Shakespeare came up. He was lower class to her. But he eventually was in court for cooking books, for various bits of dodgy accounting. So clearly, he certainly was mathematically literate. There's no doubt about that. He became mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. It seems unlikely that he wasn't able to read. Don't forget, reading and writing were separate in those days. I think that's another thing, isn't it? It's like in those days, a lot of people could read but couldn't write. Susanna Shakespeare, the elder daughter, was married to a very learned apothecary.

44:19She unquestionably worked in his business. She was a very considerable herbalist and a gardener. It just seems unlikely that human curiosity, particularly if your father is the greatest dramatist of the age, they didn't realize he would become the greatest dramatist in English letters, It seems unlikely to me that they wouldn't have taught themselves to read, been taught to read. I know women were treated entirely differently. I personally think it more likely that they could read and probably write to a certain extent. It seems unlikely that little Hamlet, 11 years old, running home from school, his twin sister didn't take some interest in what he'd learned.

44:56I think they could read, but neither is a fact. What's this kid called Hamlet? Hamnut. Hamnut. Yeah, I know. But this is all, I mean, irrelevant anyway, because it was all Francis Bacon, so it doesn't... Exactly, exactly. Or some other posh geezer. To me, Shakespeare denied. Do you want to know what is a fact? Go on. Because, of course, it's a popular conspiracy, particularly amongst lovies and posh boys, that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. My father had a good joke on that. He'd say, of course Shakespeare didn't write his plays. It was another fellow with the same name. Because, obviously, in a way, does it really matter?

45:28But of course, it is evidence of a corrosive snobbery in British culture, because of course, Shakespeare was famously the only poet of the English Renaissance who didn't go to either Oxford or Cambridge. I mean, the grip those institutions had on British arts, as indeed politics and sciences, was as strong then as it is now. So I think it's a very unfortunate thing to say, well, he was educated, he was chucked out of school when he was 13. would he really well you know mccartney was a working class ladders with george harrison you know lennon slightly lesser the idea that you if you come from rough and ready roots mean you can't have the finest brain in the country is i think i gotta say ben coming from bolton myself i do agree yeah but anyway just to get to my fact because i'm waffling on and i can see you all want to get your facts no one questioned shakespeare's provenance his his his reality the reality of Shakespeare, starting with Ben Johnson, who wrote his obituary as his friend, Stan Hemmings, who put together the first folio.

46:27Nobody mentioned, there is no recorded mention of doubt about Shakespeare until the middle of the 19th century. So 300 years passed before anybody decided, wouldn't it be interesting if I could start this? To me, they're just like moon landing denialists, which is one step from QAnon. I think conspiracy theories are anti-science, anti-facts, and Shakespeare definitely wrote Shakespeare. I find it so interesting how this arose more than 200 years later. So Delia Bacon was one of the... The name, the clue. I think no relation. She was an American woman. She was the first person to raise the possibility.

47:05She was clearly very intelligent in a lot of ways, but I think she was also quite unstable in other ways. And she travelled to England to do research on the fact that... Francis Bacon, who was a scientist and a very learned guy, and, you know, very gifted in lots of ways. Probably quite busy, though. Probably, like, too busy to write 37 plays as well. Anyway. And so lacking in any ego, as all, you know, boss boys from Cambridge are, that he didn't want any credit for them. How strange it was. Or indeed, any of the cash. And he allowed this bloke from Stratford to buy a lot of houses on the proceeds.

47:37But I think she travelled to England, and she didn't really... She mostly stayed in her room when she was here, though, just sort of reading... Her padded room. She absorbed the atmospheres of the country And then she wrote this 700 page book Arguing the case Anyway, I think it was Bill Bryson He wrote a lovely short biography, Bill Bryson Finding various anti-Stratfordians Who've included J. Thomas Looney Sherwood E. Sillyman And George Batty And foe of the podcast, Mark Twain Oh, was it? Really? That makes me sad He said, so far as anybody actually knows and can prove Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life all the rest of his history is built up course upon course of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures.

48:20Classic Twain. Classic Twain, I'm afraid. I find it genuinely mad that otherwise intelligent people continue to love. And of course, it's because people love a conspiracy theory. But sadly, conspiracy theories are the enemy of the Enlightenment. You know, we're already moving into a post-truth age where we're coming back to an age of faith and superstition. and anti-empirical evidence. And I think it's really dangerous. And it might seem harmless for a bunch of old lobbies to assemble every now and then and say, well, I think it was the Duke of Buckingham, you know. But I actually think it's the thin end of an anti-science, anti-evidence wedge, which leads to, you know, vaccination, conspiracy theories, and a whole world where the president can say, we like to choose alternative facts.

49:07Well, you might like this then, Ben. Have you read the Shakespeare play that he wrote in the year 1853. That he collaborated with another famous writer, which is Victor Hugo. Once he was exiled from France to Jersey, he lived in Jersey for a while, someone came around to the house and showed him table tapping about the spirit world. He became obsessed with it. He spent a couple of years talking to, amongst others, Lord Byron, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Mozart, Plato. Victor Hugo, oh my God. Two years. And Mozart was using the table to make original compositions that they wrote down. And one of the things that happened in those two years is that Victor Hugo and his son sat and channeled through Shakespeare a brand new Shakespeare play.

49:50They got the first act of a new comedy. It's in French because Shakespeare said to them, that is the superior language. Because Peter Huber didn't speak English that well. Yeah, exactly. And so that's out there. I don't think it's ever been performed. There's a one-act playing. Because obviously he was a great, you know, he wrote Les Misra. Isn't it sad when you discover the feat of clay that everyone has concealed? You know, like apparently Newton dabbled in alchemy and went kind of mad. He wrote more alchemy than physics. Yeah. He was very into it, but from the off. Just quickly, you mentioned anti-vax theories as a result of this thin end of the wedge.

50:25Riddle me this, Ben. The second man who ever got the Pfizer jab in the UK against COVID was called Bill Shakespeare. No. Yes. That's a loop. You've brought us all the way back, haven't you? What the hell? You've stitched together so much. That's the famous image of what's it called? Matt Hancock sort of pretending to cry was when someone told him that. How is that so? Well, there were a lot of unbelievably good jokes as a result. Two gentlemen of Corona. Taming of the flu. Is this a jabber I see before me? I mean, there was some very good things. Yeah, but one of the most amazing things is that that Bill Shakespeare eventually died, not of COVID, of something else, not long after.

51:04And in Argentina, when the news announced his death, they said we have lost one of the most important writers in the english language yeah for me he is the master is what she said on tv and she had to come back on and apologize and say oh no no that's not what i know well linking vaccination back i bet that newsreader felt a bit of a prick one really good fact about shakespeare i like because we talked about his daughters before is he had four grandchildren unfortunately none of them had children afterwards so that's where the died out but one of his grandchildren was called Shakespeare as in the first name was Shakespeare oh really isn't that cool yeah it wasn't a surname no surname was Quinney or Quiney so obviously they wanted to pay tribute to the famous grandfather who sired them and wrote the canon of Shakespeare but his his lineage died outright with the granddaughter except there were a few peoples who claim that it went on including an American footballer who's called William Shakespeare.

52:02Oh, yeah. Died in 1974. Also known as the Merchant of Menace. Brilliant. Super. Yeah, he was part of the Notre Dame fighting Irish football team. And they claimed lineage, direct lineage from Shakespeare, despite having no evidence. It was pointed out that he failed at English at college. It must be. Yeah, yeah. But there is a descent from, I think, Shakespeare's father or grandfather. I think these days there is a baronet of, I think he's called Thomas, maybe, Shakespeare. so the line the Shakespeare family do have direct is that a claim that he's connected well I think it's not a claim I think he's descended from the dad or the grandfather I mean it is a surname I mean there are other Shakespeare well we know from the bloke who got the second Pfizer vaccine there are other Shakespeare's and they're obviously always cursed with that name you know and like poor weird cows and get letters from Black Adders who hate Richard and me forever and the other thing about Shakespeare the surname is we don't know what it means but it might have been someone who uses a lance oh yes honestly the degrees of separation are shrinking we're literally we're huddling around these subjects wait a second stratford is warwickshire right yeah yeah do you know what else was filmed in warwickshire teletubbies the teletubbies and and and isn't a needle a very small lance I mean really Dan wrap it up we can't count we do actually need to wrap up

53:34okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast we can all be found on our online accounts I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland James my Instagram is no six fingers James Harkin Andy I'm at Andrew Hunter M Ben I am not on any social media whatsoever so you can't get me and say I ruined No Such Thing As Fish. But if you want to send your furious letters to us, you can get us at podcast.qi.com. We'll forward them on to Ben, or Andy will use them as part of our mailbag episode, which is called Drop Us A Line.

54:09If you want to get access to Drop Us A Line, that's part of Club Fish. That's our secret members club. So go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. Check it out there. What's the book called? The book is called What Have I Done? And it's my autobiography. and it says it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's about what I've done. That's brilliant. I've read it. I've read the whole thing. And it's out now, right? The book is, I don't know when this podcast goes out. Yeah, it will be. Yeah, in that case it is. Otherwise, just come back next week. We'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then.

54:38Goodbye.