No Such Thing As The Gordon Ramsay Songbook

0:01Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things A Fish, where we decided that we would help a new up and coming comedian who is our guest today. Andy, can you remember their name? I can't quite recall. Is he called Michael Paulin? Michael Paulin. Yeah, that's what I'm reading here. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, it's Michael Palin. It's Michael Palin. It's only bloody Michael Palin. From everything from Monty Python onwards, we are so excited to have Michael on the show. We hope you'll enjoy this one. We certainly did recording as you're about to hear. He's amazing. It was such a fun episode.

0:35He has a new book out. A lot of the facts that you hear at the start of this podcast will be recounted in that book. But there is so much more besides. And that book is called simply Michael Palin in Venezuela. Michael Palin in Venezuela. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a brilliant book. Dan has read it from cover to cover multiple times. And he tells us that it's an incredible book. So you should definitely go out and get that. And if you want to know anything more about Michael, then go to his website. It's michaelpalin.com. And there's so much on there. like you just can't you'll be on there for weeks absolutely and we have Clubfish which is our super secret private exclusive extraordinary members club you can get ad free episodes of Fish you can get bonus bits of Fish there is a longer version of the episode with Michael Palin as with every other one you can get Fish XL there's so much other stuff and goodies on there go and check it out it's at patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish but in the meantime please do enjoy this episode of No Such Thing As A Fish with Michael Palin.

1:40And why not check out some of the other stuff he's done? I've heard it's quite good. I think so. I think so. On with the podcast. On with the show.

2:03Hello 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 Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin, and Michael Palin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Michael. In the Venezuelan Andes, there's a town called Merida, and it has two entries in the Guinness Book of Records. One is the tallest cable car in the world And the other is the Eladaria Kolomoto Which is an ice cream parlor Which has the record number of ice cream varieties on sale 860 Including avocado, garlic and trout Can you imagine that?

2:56A trout ice cream please? Trout ice cream Oh daddy can I have a trout ice cream parlor? Mushroom and wine, gherkin, chilli yeah shellfishes of some time do you went to venezuela you have you been to this town and to this specific ice cream parlor well i haven't been to the ice cream parlor um we were doing various other things i haven't been up on the amazing cable car which takes you right up into the mountains but um i know where it was the the aladera coromoto and it's obviously fallen on hard times i think it may have been superseded now by some other probably in china there's another place It's got more.

3:33I really like the sound of, is it, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, pabellon crillo, which is a traditional food, but it's five different kinds of ice cream, beef, rice, plantain, cheese, and black beans. So five little scoops with a scoop of chili on top. Well, on the flip side, they've got Viagra Hope, which is blue like the pills. So maybe those two are tied in. Does it have any sort of natural ingredients, perhaps? It's only got honey and something else natural they don't use. We know that everything is an aphrodisiac, really, isn't it? That's why they claim honey's an aphrodisiac for sure.

4:06Kippers are the only thing I know that aren't an aphrodisiac. Are they not? Right. I don't think so. I've had a lot of kippers in my time. You know, my legs remain crossed. I think you're right, Michael, that it's now not selling 800 flavours anymore. This was the glory days, but when the original owner was still trading. I think, and it's also been overtaken, not by somewhere in China, it's actually MIG and MUTZ craft creamery in Colorado. Really? Gosh. Well, how many do they do, and do they do garlic? I think it's something, they must have more than 860, so I can't imagine garlic isn't in there.

4:45Imagine if you walked in and you said, do you have Raspberry Ripple, and they go, oh, damn it! Yes, exactly. Chocolate, ooh! But you did do the cable car. Yeah. Which sounds, I mean, it looks, I mean, I don't really like cable cars where you're floating over a big world. It looks terrifying. I don't really. And they're big gondolers. And they take about 40 people. So not only are you hanging from these very slim cables, you've got 40 very large Venezuelans also traveling with you. But the thing is, it's not a continuous ride. You have to stop at various places and get into another one. And so there are four stages.

5:23But it is, I mean, it's amazing. if you imagine if you were some geography teacher take a class up there and they could see all the different environments from the river valley with all its agriculture and all that and the city itself to the very top where it's all completely bleak and there's a you you end up alongside the highest peak in the venezuela and andes it's pretty amazing i was i read that chapter in your i read your book but in that chapter you talk about it and you say that it's an hour journey basically to get to the top but in that time you're traveling basically half the height of everest yeah so when you get to the top the oxygen level has changed vastly and you're all giddy and there's all these signs in the gondola that are sort of talking about you know yeah how you feeling you know how's the how's the old ticker doing is it feeling okay yeah i mean it's quite extraordinary that people get in downtown you know you you it seems like getting on a bus or something and it's quite warm in merida and you see these some people like party goers and tiny little girls and slim dresses you know with sleeveless dresses and all that and short skirts and they're going up to half the height of everest i read that it was there because originally there was a ski track there oh yeah ski slopes because there was a big old glacier there which you could see from the city but now it's gone the dassey is gone in the last two years wow and they thought well it may return But it's now gone for good.

6:47So a lot of things in the cable car saying this is how the planet is changing everywhere you go. And Venezuela has no snow anymore. Michael, did you see, because I was reading about some of the amazing creatures that live. I mean, it's a huge country. It's equatorial. It's got a lot of amazing wild spaces. So there is the Merida cable car frog, which you might have seen. What? What? Lives in the cable car. He takes your tickets. Yes. Hello. Are you going to be frog, please? It just lives very near the stations of the cable car, and it's been found nowhere else. So it's now called... That's very interesting.

7:28Sorry to say, is it found at the top and the bottom? So you can imagine that, like, it travels from one place to the other to mate, maybe, or to migrate. That's it. 15 ,000 feet to mate. You've got to really love somebody. They've all got their kippers ready. Honestly, the Assenborough, the great migration of the cable car frog. They're just all of them in one gondola. Just hanging up. Okay. The oil bird. Oh, I don't know if you saw this. Yes. Actually, I did hear about the oil birds. I hope it's not because in the olden days, they used to take oily birds and then use them as candles. I hope it's not that.

8:04Yeah. I'm really sorry to say it, James. It is. They did use them as. Yeah. They had a very high fat content, and I'm afraid it's especially the baby oil birds. Oh, no. And they basically were burnt down to make oil. But they're an amazing animal. They're the only bird, or one of very, very few birds, which uses echolocation. Yeah. So we're used to that in bats, but they make a stream of high-pitched calls to navigate because they live in very dark caves, and that's how they get around. Another animal they had in Venezuela was a guinea pig the size of a Fiat 500. Just one? Did you see that when you were there, Michael?

8:40I saw lots of Fiat 500s. None of them looked like a gibby bird. Did you check for whiskers? Yeah, they didn't have fur all over them at all. I'm afraid it was many hundreds of thousands of years ago. We only know about them because of their teeth, and we've extrapolated the size. Wow. But they were ten times the mass of the largest living rodent today. God. Which is the largest living rodent also in Venezuela is the capybara, which is apparently the largest living rodent. Have you seen one? Yeah, yes. You don't look very impressed. No, they're a bit sort of sad, really. Like they were supposed to be a model for another kind of creature, but they didn't get the fitting.

9:19So it's just very basic. Four legs and a sort of back and a nose. But there's nothing very distinguished about them. When you went to Peru, did you eat guinea pig? Because that's like a big delicacy over there. In every market, they sell guinea pig and stuff. Yeah, not knowingly. No, I mean, seriously, you never know half the time what you're eating Are you one when you go to all these different countries that you like to try different foods that they have and stuff Or are you not really, you'd rather have your kidneys? No, I like to, because it's part of getting to know people and meeting people Is, you know, hospitality offered has to be taken Otherwise people get a bit offended And also there's this feeling, oh, you know, you're going abroad with the food

10:05and yet the people in these countries don't want to poison themselves they're not making bad food um and we're wishing there we had mcdonald's or something like that they make strange strange ingredients sometimes but always very very well well cooked yeah i so wish you were the opposite that you would go to the ice cream shop and just go uh vanilla please yes yeah yeah i think i might I might have said this before on this show. One of my favourite Beatles facts is that when the Beatles went to India for their great spiritual awakening and all of this, Ringo Starr took a suitcase of baked beans with him, full chock-a-block, just so he didn't run out of baked beans.

10:44I love that. When we did Around the World in 80 Days, I remember that. The sound man, Ron, he didn't like foreign food, and we'd got all these tins of canned food. We end up on a dhow, you know, which is very basic. There's no cabins or anything like that. You all sleep on deck together. It's a boat, sorry, a dhow. A boat, yes, a dhow. So it's a big, the old sailing boat they use around the African coast and on the Persian Gulf and all that. So we got on the thing, and, you know, it comes to the evening, and the guys are all fishermen from India, very, you know, not wealthy at all. And so we get our food out, and they get their food out.

11:23and the first thing that gets out is a tuna from Sainsbury's. And it sort of comes out of the can like a sort of oily mass that goes boing-oing onto the plate and sort of wobbles there a bit. And it's sweating slightly. I said, right, we're going to have that. And these guys, these wonderful guys, the fishermen, said, you know, please, I could see that some of us didn't really like this. We're making a curry. We'll share it with you. And they did. and from then on we always ate what they ate. The tins were put to one side. Did Ron stay with the tins? Yeah, Ron, we threw him overboard with the tins strapped to him and he sank immediately.

12:10I noticed, Michael, in your book that Venezuela is your 100th country that you have visited. Yeah, yeah. More or less, or you think that's... No, I think that's right. I'm a bit of a list nerd and I kept a list. So you've kept it up because that's what I was going to ask. You can now do a top 100 of countries of the world that you visited. Yeah. So where does Venezuela just off the top of your head, where does that rank? I was thinking about 93 really. I'm full of positive thoughts about Venezuela at the moment. Oh, sorry. I see what you mean. Sorry. Yeah. No, sorry. Three. Three? Wow. Wow. Okay.

12:46Yeah. Sorry. Maths is not my strong point. Yeah, so there was an interesting point about the airport when you arrived, which is, I wondered if you were aware of this. This might have stopped now, but you were paying tax in the airport. And one of the taxes that you would pay were for the air you were literally breathing. Because they tax the air. It's a ventilation system that they have, and they say we're providing clean air. Wow, just for foreigners, I guess. Yeah, I'm guessing so. Must be. Just in the airport. It's not the whole country. No, just in the airport. And you go, breathe in. And don't breathe out for three weeks, OK?

13:19You save a lot of money. Because they did have the world record for the lowest petrol price in 2016. Wow. I was trying to look at some other records that Venezuela have had. It was one cent per litre. And at the time, the price in the UK was 110.7 pence per litre. I was trying to work out if I could do some kind of business where, you know, it offset the price of the flight. It feels like you're going to run into some legal difficulties, I think. You can try and bring it back in hand luggage or whatever. Well, they've got a lot of oil. We need to brush this episode out basically before America invades.

13:56So one of the things that Venezuela has is a lot of oil. But it's not really. It used to supply a lot more to the global market. I think it provides less now due to sanctions and politics. Also, oil price sort of fell. So other countries were producing a lot more oil. But I mean there is more oil still in the ground in Venezuela than any other country They're not just ringing out oil birds The oil birds are very pleased They're not needed I found a couple of records that are held as well in Venezuela This is Guinness World Records The living person with the largest feet Oh really? Yes The right foot measures at 40.55cm And the left foot at 40.47cm Now Dan did you google bigfoot venezuela are these their own feet it's not someone just has two extraordinarily large feet that he's managed it yeah no it's one person with one foot i read an interview with this guy yeah he said that he realized he had big feet when he and his friends would often compare their foot sizes and he would come out on top each time it's like what are his mates doing surely it's always going to be him the winner unless they're clowns and they're just naturally in oversized shoes that's you can't tell but does he do something for a living that's foot i don't know what advantage yeah what is it what would you do if you've got very very large feet i suppose real life monty python opening credits yeah yeah that's true

15:33okay it is now time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that in 1949 the BBC issued a company-wide ban on making any rude jokes about solicitors, chambermaids, and one very specific Irishman called Mr. McGillicuddy. Wow. This one guy. What was so funny about him? There was people who continued to make jokes about this man, Ross McGillicuddy, of the Reeks. Of the Reeks, yes. McGillicuddy's Reeks. I've heard of that. Well, there you go. And I imagine that was fun to be had. It is quite a funny name, isn't it? You can't even be a comedian. So what had happened was there was a comic called Leonard Henry, not Lenny Henry, Leonard Henry, and he'd found the name of McGillicuddy of the Reeks in an atlas and thought it was a place and then turned it into a comedy person.

16:22And then this person who really existed said, well, I never gave you permission to use my name, and the BBC had to apologise. Yeah. And there's still a McGillicuddy of the Reeks to this day. Yeah. There's a title, and the Reeks is, I think, a range of, it's an ancestral territory in County Kerry. So there's a range of mountains, which is called the Reeks. And the last evidence I have found of the current McGillicuddy of the Reeks is him writing to the Daily Telegraph in 2017 about the price of stamps. He's about 85 now, and I believe he looks after the Earnham herd of cattle. That's the latest news on McGillicuddy of the Reeks.

17:00How could you ever laugh at someone like that? He's a serious man. Does he have any administrative powers? I mean, is he like a sheriff or something like that? He might do, because it's sort of... Honorary. It's an honorary thing. You're sort of a chief of family. Chief of the name is the term that gets used. And this senior McGillicuddy of the 1930s and 40s was a big deal. You know, he was an officer of the British Army. He was an Irish senator. He was, you know, all sorts of serious. And he just objected very strongly to being joked about. And he did try. He complained. The BBC said, come on, it's an overplace joke.

17:34Come on. It's a joke. Just reeks of envy for me. But then he said that he'd never appeared or contemplated appearing before the public for their amusement. So you must apologize immediately. The BBC caved. They did. And they produced this thing called The Green Book, unofficially called The Green Book. It was a pamphlet that was sent internally. And it was largely sent to people kind of like Spike Milligan and comedians of that ilk who were writing topical, not topical shows necessarily, but shows that were going out live weekly. And so it came with a long list of things, jokes about lavatories, immorality of any kind.

18:10You couldn't make any suggestive references to honeymoon couples, fig leaves, ladies' underwear, baskets, because baskets could be used as innuendo in sexual relation. A nicely placed basket in a sentence could suggest sex. Yeah, it was used as a replacement word, let's say. I'm sure Shakespeare used baskets in a vagina. he must have seen you. Sainsbury's must have been a hotbed.

18:38Did you ever come across the censors yourselves, Michael? Yeah, we had some censorship on Python. What did they object to? Were they objected to the word masturbation? Oh, yeah. I'll give you the context. You can just come out and say, we love the latest sketch, Michael. We're not sure it's... It was cut out of the parrot sketch. I'm not interested in masturbation. No, the context was we did a sort of northern quiz show, an on-stage thing where people came on stage. And it was a very nice item. People had to sum up Proust. It was officially called the All England Summarise Proust Competition. Summarise Proust Competition.

19:23So they had 15 seconds to summarise Proust. Anyway, the ones who comes up and they get a little bit cheery, Wilfred Pickles said, hello, how are you? What are your hobbies? And this man's hobbies are strangling animals, golf and masturbating. It was a huge laugh. And anyway, very quickly, the sketch itself is one of my favourite bits because, all right, you've got 15 seconds now. Summarise Proust in his masterwork. And all the various volumes of Proust were on a sort of thermometer. So he goes, oh, yeah, oh, ah, did it, that ob-m-burb. Swan, Swan. Swan. Swan comes along, and bing. But the BBC said you can't, they reviewed the tape and said you can't say masturbating, and so you'll have to cut it out.

20:15And in those days, we recorded on tape, so you had to physically cut the tape. So our director said he cut the thing out, the word masturbating, but he left the gap, which is brilliant. So you hear, what are your hobbies? Strangling animals Golf Huge laugh Never was golf but a laugh Absolutely colossal laugh And that's a good summary of the life of Proust From what I remember He was in his bedroom for a lot of time Very true With oil birds possibly I think he was putting pins in mice or something Wasn't he when he was a kid? I think so I've never heard of him playing golf and I would know if Bruce played golf, I would know that.

20:59That's a shame. I love that there's a great story in your diaries, the Python years, the first diaries, which is that you had obviously the most famous story of censorship and banning in comedy history, Life of Brian, and all the things that you guys had to do in order to say that this wasn't an attack on religion. It was, you know, Jesus is not being mocked and it was the big thing, right? And you got banned in places like Norway And in the diary, you point out that in Sweden, the posters read, so funny, it was banned in Norway. Yes. I just think that's fantastic. Yeah. And you, because it was a great moment, because it did get banned in a lot of places from cinema altogether.

21:41And one of those places was in Wales. And that was overturned by the mayor, Sue Jones Davies, who happened to be in the life of Brian. She was Brian's girlfriend, skipping around naked. Oh, yeah. She was the revolutionary leader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she suddenly becomes mayor of Aberystwyth. And for one night, she says, I'm going to overturn the ban. That's so funny. And Terry and myself and her went to the local Odeon in Aberystwyth with arms linked, like, you know, we were on the sort of Thelma March or something like that. And we saw one night of Life of Brian. I think it was banned the night after that.

22:16Yeah. I was looking at a few songs that maybe should have been banned because the BBC had a lot of rules about songs as well. Yeah. So they banned things like My Generation by The Who. Really? 60s classic. That was banned, not because of any profanity. It was banned because it has a stammer in it. I was, ah. Very interesting. People put, you know, instead of just fade away. Yeah, and that was just like people with a stammer will find that offensive. Space Oddity by David Bowie was banned because it was, I think it was banned until Neil Armstrong had safely got back to Earth. Oh, really? At Al, Armstrong and Collins, because they thought, Oh, it's a bit sensationalist.

22:54Oh, okay. Lyrically, he's stuck in a tin can, of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But there's this whole genre of songs called Dirty Blues from the 20s and 30s, which are all sort of, they're all black singers, many women, but the lyrics and the song titles are so extraordinarily rude that I can't believe the songs are released, basically. So I just want to give you a few of them. Go for it. Please warm my wiener. I mean they're single entendres basically they were really popular but get them from the peanut man hot nuts Lil Johnson was one of the women singing these let me roll your lemon just about a double entendre my stove is in good condition any news of her basket anybody want to buy my cabbage that's not rude well the way she sings it You sound like sort of Gordon Ramsay songbook, really.

23:55Margaret Carter. There were actually loads of cooking ones. So Margaret Carter had, I want plenty grease in my frying pan. Yeah. And Memphis Mini had, I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away. Oh, right. Which has lost me completely. Is that like my milkshake brings other boys to the yard? I think it is, but with more pork. I think it's sort of, yeah. More sex took place in the kitchen than anywhere else. It sounds like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know whose was the first song banned from the BBC? It's someone you've all heard of. So, okay. 1933. 1930. Adolf Hitler. With his...

24:30With his seventh. Chancellor's Waltz. 33. Someone we've all heard of. Someone you've all heard of. Someone from my part of the world. George Foreman. I was about to say George Foreman. George Foreman. George Foreman, yeah. Yeah, yeah. His song, With My Little Ukulele Hand, was banned. But he was a real double entendre merchant, wasn't he? Like one of his songs, My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock, goes, it may be sticky, but I never complain. It's nice to have a nibble on it now and again. Oh, is that? Again, it's sort of, yeah. They're all double entendres all the way through. Very interesting.

25:05There was a number one hit in the UK, which was a very famous song, Je T 'aime. Oh, yeah. Serge Gainsbourg, Jamie Birkin. That was banned as well. I read this in the Monkey Diaries, Jane Birkin's diaries. Other diaries are available. And the problem that they had was it got too popular. It got so popular that it made it to number one. And so in order to be able to play it within the charts, they had to get an orchestral version of it and just play it completely without any voice at all. Because it wasn't even the lyrics, it was the moaning. That was the big problem of the song. It was the breathing, wasn't it?

25:42Yeah. And all these, my generation, all this, this is why Radio Caroline became a big thing. Was that pirate? Offshore pirate radio, because no one was playing any of these songs. Yeah. I've got one last one, which I find pretty amazing, which is King Charles. I didn't realize he was part of the reviews in Cambridge when he was there. He did Footlight Smokers, and he was part of them. What does that mean, sorry? So people... You get up on stage and you do sort of funny things, don't you? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so like comedy stuff. It's comedy stuff. It's comedy, yeah. It's a smoking room. You and Terry Jones were in Oxford, but Eric Idle and John Cleese and Graham Chapman would have been part of the Cambridge Footlights, you know, Beyond the Fringe, all that.

26:25And so he was part of the Cambridge Footlights. And there's a story that goes that they were not allowed to make fun of him or his family while he was part of the Footlights, which is pretty amazing. And he did a few reviews. He was on stage quite a lot. He was in the Magic Circle as well, wasn't he? Was he? When he was Prince Charles. Yeah. Were you guys with me when I did a tour of the Magic Circle? I can't remember who was there. No, we weren't allowed. Well, we went there and they told us about when, because you have to do a trick to get into the Magic Circle, and he did the balls trick, like the cups and balls.

27:00Apparently not the best person who's ever done it, but they decided that it was good enough for him to join them. It was the edge of the throne. So you don't say, sorry, come again next week. Yeah, yeah. I can make your head disappear, actually. So he took part in two reviews. One was called Revolution, with a U instead of the O in the middle, and Quietly Flows the Don. And so you weren't allowed to make any jokes about him or royalty, but also the first play got in a bit of trouble in 1969 because they were putting it on a Sunday, and the Lord's Day Observance Society got in touch and said, absolutely not.

27:38So it's basically a society looking out for anything going on on a Sunday that shouldn't be. And the ironic thing about them is they can only work on Sundays. Can't do anything on a Saturday, right? Yes, exactly. But yeah, apparently it was quite odd because when he was on stage, they would sell tickets to the smokers, as they were called, the performances that you could go to. And they were fielding calls from Japan saying, how many tickets are available? We have a full plane load of tourists who are ready to fly over to see the Prince in performance. Well, there we are. He's still performing, isn't he, really?