RSC hoaxes and theater history

Amazing deals on package holidays. Pay now. I've got tickets to that sold-out show. Message now. Your subscription's been suspended. Update your payment details. Final warning. To receive your package, pay the fee immediately. Mum I've had an accident. Please send money. There's been suspicious activity on your bank account. And I need a few personal details. Fraud is getting more sophisticated. Always stop, think, and check . Stay ahead of scams at gov.uk slash stopthink fraud. Oh dear my small business owning friend. You never grow good business with bad website. I know, but it's really hard. Do not do the despairing. Try Ayonos. Let clever thinking AI build you a smart looking professional website that is optimized for mobile in no time. And use its many tools to get your business growing super quick. Nice. No, my darlings. This is nice, nice, nice. Try Ionos, your digital partner at ayonos.co. uk Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the absolute legend, that is Nina Conti. That's right, Nina Conti, if you're not aware of her, is one of our great stand-up comedians, but she is also one of the UK's only ventriloquists. She's absolutely brilliant, she's so smart, she's so funny. Uh she's been on QI back in the day, uh, but now she's come back to join us, and something very special, she has a movie out. That's right, it's called Sunlight, and it's now out on Prime for free. So if you have a Prime account, you should be watching it straight away. Absolutely. It's such a good film. I've seen it. It's kind of a your classic road trip movie, but with a twist in that one of the characters is like in a giant monkey costume. Sounds weird, but I promise you, I watched it. I absolutely loved it, and I'm sure you will too. That's right. And if you want more monkeying from Nina, she's even got her own podcast, which she co-hosts with her monkey that she does ventriloquism with. It's called Nina and Monkeys Podcast. It's everywhere where you get your podcast. So check that out as well. But really, the movie, and I'm gonna be watching it tonight. I'm so excited. That's the thing to check out. It's called Sunlight, and it's available now on Prime. Yes, uh, one more thing to check out if you so desire is our Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/slash clubfish and you will find all sorts of amazing stuff on there. But this week, damn, there's something very special for everyone, even if you don't pay for it. That's right. So if you remember we had Olga Cock on the show a few weeks ago and as part of it we, were trying to brainstorm the title of a big new movie. So this was about the founder of Grubhub and the fact that he came up with it at school. Olga came up with the name Doughboy. But we asked you, the listeners, to send him what you think the movie should be called, and we made a video going through the process of hearing the pitches from you, the public. Yes, so if you want to watch that incredibly well, quite painful ten minutes uh that we went through, trying to find a good name, it's very funny. I watched it this morning. The fishbusters have done a brilliant edit on it. Uh, you go to patreon.com slash clubfish, and when you go there, there is some stuff for everyone. You don't have to sign up for any of the tiers, you will just see it, and this is one of those things. That's right. So do that now. Check out Nina's movie. But for now, listen to it here. On Fish. Here we go. On with the sho w. Hello 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 Nina Conti, and once again, we have gathered round 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 James. Okay, my fact this week is that one of the most important people in Incan society was the ventriloquist. That's incredible. I mean with that with a puppet with a not moving their mouth, what kind of ventriloquist? So this is something I read in Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was about the Inca religion where they had a priest called the Yakaka, who would tell the future with fire. Um so they would set a fire, they would blow a pipe and the flames would bounce around, and he would take some coca leaves, and then he would supposedly summon the spirits, and when they came in the smoke or whatever or in the fire, he would start to divide the future, say what's gonna happen, say what the leaders should do. And a chronicler called Pedro Chiesa de Leon uh said that they did it by ventriloquism. It sounds like a good act. There was a rumour about the Oracle at Delphi being a ventriloquist thing behind it, but also that they're sometimes a sort of tube or a tunnel leading back from the mouth that somebody is speaking into, like one of those things in the playground where you Yeah. Yeah. I would think Incan society there are a lot of severed heads going begging. You know, so you could you could have the puppets if you want to but that wasn't a thing then, was it? Ventriloquism when it started wasn't to do with puppets. It was projecting the voice to make people think it was coming from somewhere else. So this is what this is it's projecting the voice. Yeah. So it's making you think that the voice is coming from somewhere else. Exactly. But ventri loqui being the stomach speaking. Yes. So um the the Oracle at Delphi, the story was put about that it felt like the voice was coming from either her stomach or sometimes from her genitals. Although it those stories might have been written by uh Christians later who were trying to clever not always different things. But gastromances also is a thing. Yes. I don't know whether any of this is true because I learnt ventriloquism from Ken Campbell who had no respect for the boundary between truth and fiction. But the way he told me was that gastromancers would go into supposedly haunted house and imbibe the spirit up through the genitals and guide into the stomach and there they would soothe the angry spirit with chat. Okay. And then walk away with it. Oh what and expel them outside the house? Yeah, we would take them up. Would you fart them out or think so? Outside. You do that outside. Outside. Well, I mean who doesn't go outside to fart? Yeah. Castro Mancy was a thing, definitely. It's all two thousand years ago. It's all quite hard to to tell now. But that supposedly noises made by the stomach were s thought to be the voices of the dead. And the other word I just really like it, because you said ventur and lockwear is uh stomach talking isn't it ventriloquism the other word uh if you do the Greek it's engastrimyths. Very nice. I do like so I like that all the original ventriloquists probably were just people with IBS. It was just rumbly tumbly going on all the time. Rumbly Tumbly. Yeah, sorry. It's very difficult to imagine it has anything to do with the stomach. I mean, there's definitely my throat where I do my ventriloquism and my mouth, the stomach. There are a few different ways. I mean I I'm not ventriloquist, but I think there's there's one which is your making a noise and not letting your mouth move. And there's another one which you make the sound much quieter or louder so it sounds like it's coming from somewhere else. Yeah, like the little man in the box kind of thing, right? And I think this is more like that kind of ventral closer.. I think Nina, did you ever do the the I'm talking to someone over there or the the no the the voices coming from your trouser pockets? I'm very bad at that no. I like a nice puppet to distract. Um no, I've never been. I I think people that do that fool me. I went to a ventriloquist convention and the guy was doing that kind of calling Nina, Nina from miles away, and I was looking around and he looked at me like I was mad. Where do you think you are? You're a ventriloquist convention. That's me doing Vent Haven. Vent Haven. Yes, yes. So your documentary, which is it's so good if anyone wants to check out about the world of um ventriloquists. If someone's on the stage at Vent Haven and they do a good act, does the applause come from behind them? This is the right this is the amazing thing, right? The reason ventriloquism works so well is because humans are hardwired to if you see a noise and if you see something moving. If you hear a noise and if you see something moving then your brain just puts them together and that's because that's useful, right? If you see a rustling in the leaves and you hear the rustling, then there's a tiger there who needs to get out there sharpish, right? Um, but the really interesting thing is that that misdirection can persist for about an hour after you've seen a ventriloquist. So if you see a ventriloquist and they've got a puppet to their side, your brain is decided that's where the sound's coming from. And about an hour later, you'll speak to someone and they're speaking to you and you'll get confused about where the sound's coming from because your brain hasn't worked it out yet. Interesting. And no one's really sure why that happens. And it's a bit like if you're on a train for ages and you're moving and you're moving and then you stop moving, then your brain sort of for a few seconds kind of can't work out that you're not moving anymore. Or if you're you know, when you walk onto an escalator and it's not moving and you expect it to Oh there's a good thing all this kind of thing that your brain just gets slightly tricked by the difference in the It feels like a good plot point for a movie where you get someone to watch a ventriloquist but then you deliver some information directly to their face, but it seems as if it's come from the person next to you. So like, oh then you're a dick. And they're like good plot point. Cassandra. Good plot point. They're they're working on Now You See Me Four at the moment, I believe. So very exciting. I'm trying to work out how I can make use of this. Yeah, exactly. Where can you do people Do you ever do signings where people get confused and talk to Monkey instead of talking to you? Well I can't do signings with Monkey because he's on my right hand. And he can't hold the pen. No, it's very e I mean, even I believe the sound comes out of him in some way because I've done it for so many years that if somebody's going to ask what would monkey say, I feel like, well let me go and get him and then I'll be able to tell you. Which really is weird. Nina, in 2010 there was a sort of survey done about full-time professional ventriloquists in the UK and it was shockingly low. Fifteen full-time professionals. Yes. You're one of you're one of the fifteen. And apparently it might not even be as much uh currently in twenty twenty six. Because Nina's got rid of them all. They were all attacked by a monkey But that's pretty phenomenal. What uh the sort of the industry is sort of critically endangered, basically. Like if you decide to get cricket's never gonna die. It's been through worse than this. Right. I mean I, think it's it's here for the long run. For me, it was just like picking up the right pen for making thoughts come out of my head. I and so it's not really I don't know the thought of ventriloquism as being some uh end of the peer thing with a big wooden mannequin, that might be gone. That might be gone. But I think it'll keep coming. Yes. You guys used to run Inc in society. Through blowing up the lungs of a llama, apparently. Oh yeah. Inflating the lungs of a dead Llama and reading the shape of the veins? Nina, you mentioned the convention that you went to before, which was the vent Haven one. And this is probably the most incredible thing about the world of ventriloquism. There is a museum where a lot of the dummies get donated if say the person has passed away or or left the industry. And so there's a big house, the Vent Haven Museum, where it's just stacked. That sounds absolutely terrifying. Well actually, yeah, a lot of the neighbors complain that sometimes they put the dummies looking out the windows down across at them and they ask for them to be can you I'm sorry, that's scary. Um you've been inside, presumably 'cause you've been there. Yeah, and it's a it's a very unique atmosphere 'cause they're very uniquely bereaved and very uniquely quiet 'cause they shouldn't be quiet. They had voices and they're never to talk again. And so they seem really extra still as having been animated. And they've got these the little pictures on them, some of them of them on stage mid-flow. And so it does have a it does have a sort of eerie hand in death, all of that. Some survived a shipwreck. Um and but the ventriloquist went down. Tragically they were shouting over here, over here. And they slept over there over there. That was I think he was called William Wood, the ventrolloquist who died in that shipwreck. I think so, I believe so. And um four of his dummies washed up to shore much later, and there's a lot of mystery about what happened to him, were they killed by pirates, all that sort of stuff? And yeah, so his his dummies either all or just a few are in Vent Haven now. Did they become really big on radio, I think? I remember that. When radio started, you got loads of vents on radio. Yes. And obviously you can't see like people who are listening to this at home, they don't know that actually Nina's lips haven't moved this entire episode so far. But like you wouldn't know, but because the acts were so good, it didn't matter really. Yeah. It's a character and a and a stooge. It doesn't matter that you can't see the lips. They got mad ratings. I read that so Archie Andrews and Peter Bruff in the nineteen forties, they got on the radio, as you say, James, twelve million people tuning in. I mean it's crazy. My podcast doesn't get anywhere near those podcasts. Is that where you would get anyway for a prime time show or was that a hugely marked? I think that was big. I mean there were there was only two channels, weren't there? So you know the population of the UK must have been can't have been much more than 30 or 40 million. You're absolutely right. Yeah. I mean it's crackers. And I I was reading a London Review of Books piece all about ventriloquism. Uh it was from 2000. All I can find is this line that Peter Bruff, the keeper of Archie Andrews, used it to spice up romantic weekends with his wife. Oh no I can find no further details. I don't know what it means. I think sounds very sexy. I think we can tell what it means. I'm not speculating. Um is he the one who I think he made a transfer to TV and then he got cancelled uh because people could see his lips moving. Not cancelled in button. Not the not the yeah, the current sense. Uh yeah. Oh, because he'd never learned to not look he probably did, but maybe he just wasn't as good as people wanted him to be. It's true. There's there are some sounds which are especially hard, right? The beat anything which is plosive, right. That is on but other I presume there are ways of getting around that. There are ways of getting around it. And but it's best not to fixate on them if you're a young budding ventriloquist out there to try not the numbers. Uh you you your B you can't say because you have to your lips have to meet. So you replace that with a g or b d sound. G or d and the the techniques are the at the back you have your soft palate and you have the back of your tongue and if you hump your tongue towards the soft palate you're making substitute lips in the back of your mouth. Whoa. And then if you sort of hold the air behind that and then expel it, you'll get the buff sound. That's crazy. You're making extra lips at the back of your mouth. That's mad. I didn't I'd never heard that that was how it was done. Well, yeah. And and but the main thing is not to worry about your Bs sounding like Gs 'cause your main focus should be whether your puppets making people laugh. All these things they mean a lot at the beginning, and then you don't I've never enjoyed a ventriloquist less because the bees aren't very good. Do you guys come across Thomas Britton in your research? No. He was an English charcoal merchant and concert promoter, and he was killed by a ventriloquist. Okay. Great. So you're throwing someone's voice to kill them. You're throwing your voice. Shoot me. Shoot me. Yeah, what do you mean to say? That's brilliant. Oh, did he did he play on the idea that he was literally the voice in his head? Um, it wasn't quite that. Basically uh there was a magistrate who was called Justice Robe. Great name for a magistrate. But he was a bit of a practical joker and he knew Britain. And he decided to hire a ventriloquist to throw his voice, pretending to be a spirit, telling him he, you know, your end is not nigh and you're going to heaven. And he dropped to his knees in horror, uh thought it was a spirit, and died from shock two days later. It's a hell of a backfire on a prank, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I have to be very careful with these power. Your powers Stop the Podcast. Stop the podcast. Hello everybody. Just let you know this, episode of Fish is sponsored by TV licensing. Yes, your TV license covers you for over 400 TV channels and everything on BBC iPlayer on any device. So Andy tell, me, what have you been watching recently? I am glad you asked, James. I have been watching a new show called Small Profits. Uh I don't know if you've heard of this. It's on the beep and it's a cool I have. Is it is it about investing in Bitcoin? It's no, you're thinking of massive losses. Completely different show. Um It's really nice. It's uh Mackenzie Crook of uh of uh the office ages ago and uh detectorist and all sorts of other really, really nice shows. And it's him, it's Michael Palin. Well, he's riding the wave of publicity he got from being on Fish, uh, and he's turned that into an appearance on this sitcom. And it's so good. I've been eating it up with a spoon, it's been brilliant. Highly recommended. Amazing. I'm definitely going to check that out because I have a TV license. Ah. So I am covered. And if you would like to know more about television licensing, then get more information by visiting TVL.com That's right. A TV license covers you to watch over 400 TV channels and everything or BBC iPlayer. To find out more, as James says, go to TVL.co.uk slash pod Okay, on with the podcast. On with the sho w. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we're sponsored by Saley. Yep, Salie, the lifesaver, as I call it. The ESIM. It means that when you are overseas, you can save all of the money that would be drained through the internet, through the phone calling, all that stuff, just by getting this wonderful app. Absolutely. Salie is absolutely amazing. They can save you money. They can save you time. You don't have to wait in line at the airport to get a sim card. And you also have 24-7 support. But the most important thing I think, Dan, is when you get your SIM card, you don't have to find a tiny thin little thing to stick in your phone to get your old SIM card out. Oh my god the amount of time I spent. And it's in 200 destinations. I'm going on a few holidays this year. I'm not gonna lie. Half of the excitement is the fact that I'm gonna be able to use Salie while I'm overseas. Just knowing how much I'm saving. Honestly, I've lost so much money to this before in the past. This is a wonderful thing. If you're going overseas this year as well do get yourself the salie e sim and if you download the app and use the code fish at checkout you're gonna get 15 off that's right so download the salie app or go to salie.com. That's S-A-I-L-Y.com slash fish and use the offer code fish at checkout, and you will get an exclusive 15% discount on Salie data plans. On with the show. On with the podc ast. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Nina. Well I was reading Craig Brown's ma'am darling about Princess Margaret, and very surprisingly, we have Princess Margaret's birth to thank for horoscopes in newspapers and the modern day sort of horoscope. What happened was when she was born, John Gordon, who was uh the editor of the Sunday Express, was looking for an angle on the way he would write an article about the her birth. And he tried to get Cairo, who was an astrologer, to write a prediction for her li fe. He wasn't around. Some I don't know what happened. Someone else answered the phone. His name was Naylor. He uh managed to get the job of doing this, and he did a rather good prediction um for her and the article was a big success. So then the the the editor of the Daily Express commissioned him to do another one and he w he he again managed to predict an airplane crashing. It got lots of things wrong. But anyway, these articles went down very, very well. And then other newspapers looked at that and went, well, we should do the same. They hired their own astrologers and then it just exploded globally. And so if he hadn't wanted this article to be about Margaret, we wouldn't have this. And people wouldn't be wondering what my week is gonna be like and reading this little thing. Um we should say Princess Margaret, for any international listeners or or younger ones, maybe. Uh younger sister of the Queen. The true Queen. Yeah. Absolutely. The true Queen. The late Queen. No longer with us, yeah. No longer with us. Queen Elizabeth II had a younger sister whose name was Margaret. Yeah. Very much the Queen's evil twin, I would say. So I would, I would. I don't think she sto a chodance at that live. No one in that family has a chance of being normal or in many cases pleasant, but I like for instance she was told who she was allowed to marry, wasn't she? Yeah. Yeah, so there was a the Royal Marriages Act of seventeen seventy two said that because she was in line to the throne, the queen had to allow her to marry or not marry. Like she had to say can I can I marry this person please? And the Queen had to say yes or no. Up until twenty five, I think then she was allowed to choose. But it was still wasn't okay. She'd fallen in love with a dashing divorcee called Gupro Captain Peter Townsend. Stunning. Yeah, but then he went he ran off with a 14 year old after, so I think she dodged a bullet. Nobody's perfect. That is true. That's true. That's true. It is true. Well they certainly they certainly met when she when she was ball too. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well he so he was when they met, she was maybe sixteen or seventeen, Margaret this is, and and and he was I think about thirty five, thirty six. So he was he was a little bit older, he was divorced, which at the time was, you know, very scandalous, um, and so she was told, you can either give everything up, you can live as a commoner, you give up this you know, gilded life uh in exchange for the true love that you've you've found, or you can keep it all and not marry him and she tried, I think I'll do the latter. Thank you. But as you say, he was probably a bit of a a bit of a cad, there is a fantastic theory. Uh huh. And it's for anyone interested in Princess Margaret, this Craig Brown book really is it's terrific. Like it's it's so interesting. That she had evidence, um, she kept evidence uh about her relationship with Peter Townsend because there's lots of you know, rumour, myth, legend about it. It was only seen to be a relationship because they were together at something and she picked a bit of fluff off his collar or whatever, and that was oh my god, they're an item. You know, that was at the time huge PDA. Yeah. Um like seventy years ago just a different time. Anyway. But she has a license plate, or she had a license plate, um, which she got rid of eventually. And her driver said, Do you want to keep the old plates from this car? And she said, No, that's an incident from my past, best forgotten. And it was PM six four fifty right now. Her driver, John Larkin had, a theory that that six four fifty is the sixth of April nineteen fifty, and PM is either Princess Margaret or Peter and Margaret, and it's potentially when she lost her virginity uh in licence plate form to group caps in V. We've all done that. We've all got like but that's that's Imagine getting plates made. Yeah. If you got them made in advance so you could see too if you were too yes. So random. The thing about her is probably someone to have met, known, and had to work with, she was probably a nightmare to read about her. She's almost the perfect caricature of the opposite of Queen Elizabeth, who was very down the line the rule book. She was, she was more, I guess, like rock and roll. She was hanging out with celebrities of the day. There was all these rumors that she was sleeping with many of them. Pablo Picasso was rumored to have an affair, desperately wanted to marry her. Peter Sellers, when he was at the height of the movie industry in Britain, was supposedly having an affair with her. And these stories came out that she used to have a partner called Colin Tennant when they were in the bedroom during sort of heavy petting as it was called. I don't know if it's pre license plate days, um she she wouldn't allow him to call her by her name. She would say, you'd have to refer to me by my royal title. Your Royal Highness, you had to refer to me as that. And so she was just a total narcissist as well with her power. To me I don't like any of these stories of like royal family being assholes. And I don't know I do because it's interesting reading. As I say, I probably would have hated her if I met her in person. It is it is fascinating hearing things such as dinner didn't start until she arrived. Uh so you'd just be waiting there maybe for hours because she she didn't really keep to other people's timetables. So y you might be sitting there while the food's gone cold. And this is at parties, you mean? Like she's like we were five minutes late to this recording this morning and Oh my god. We had to wait for you. Yeah. We did. I'm are you saying I'm the Princess Margaret of this show? Well I haven't seen your registration plate of your cuts. I'm still still waiting to get them made. I'm really excited. But I feel I I mean I I did find sympathy for her in that book because uh just the uh amount of comment about her appearance and everything, right from the word go. There were such trolls, they were diarists, they were very sort of camp and snippy diarists at the time, but they did not let I and I can't imagine an entire life that sort of you're not really needed. She spent lots of her life living in a flat above or below. She and her mum, the queen mum, who sh as she became, just lived in flats one floor up and down from each other. They mostly communicated by letter. It's so amazing. They just would write these rather curt, snippy notes to each other and then a footman would have to carry them upstairs or downstairs. Like a text fight. It was, yeah, and it's mostly sort of oh I'm sorry I said that earlier, you know Did the footman ever come down with like three dots Wonderful. That's amazing. And then she did get married and then divorced, right? Yes. She married a counter society photographer and the marriage didn't work out. She was like the first person in the royal family to get divorced since Henry VIII or something stupid like that. And then all of the current sort of queen's children who all got divorced, they wouldn't have really been able to do that without her, or at least it would have been a way bigger scandal, but because she'd already done it, it kind of meant that it was a little bit less of a scandal when Prince Charles or King Charles um got divorced and and all the others. Interesting. I think you're right. But she wasn't at all sympathetic to Diana, was she? Was she not? No. No, didn't like it. Didn't like that divorce. The book is a story of her being unpleasant to everyone around her forever. It's amazing. But the thing about her birth is that I think she was the last royal to go through a particular process. So they were not going to become um her parents were not going to become king and queen at the time. Yeah. It was 1930s. So George VI was, as he would become, was the younger brother of Edward, who then abdicated. So they were not expected to be no really significant royals. But even so, the home secretary had to be president. Oh, is that the one? Yeah. Oh my god. And it this is so cool. So her mum was uh the Duchess of York and the home secretary was a guy called J. R. Kleins at the time in nineteen thirty. He wanted to go to Brighton on his summer holidays, it was August, and he was told no, the Duchess of York is heavily pregnant. You've got to stick to her like glue. And and the idea was that the home secretary is this right, the home secretary had to be there so that no one would swap the children. Exactly. It's exactly that. It's amazing. And isn't it? I know. So he wants to go to Brighton. The Duchess of York says, I think I gotta go to Glam's Castle in Scotland, like just the opposite of Brighton. And um, someone said, Well, just pop up on the train when she goes into Labour. And he said, No, I can't do that. I can't. So he had to go up. He went up on the 5th of August with his ceremonial sacrific She wasn't labour for all that time, was she? No, she was just she was just nearly She was late as usual. She began her life inconveniencing someone and she carried on. Wow. Do they not they don't do that anymore, do they? Oh yeah. The the home secretary still does. Jabanama Mood is is on speed dial. I'm actually really impressed that you could remember the name of the home secretary at time of recording. Um the place where she could let her hair down and sort of wear a caftan and everything was must be. Then you can see that property. You can rent that property for thirty five thousand pounds a week, dollars a week. Oh. And I've looked it up and it's really good. Can we all pitch in? True. What is it? Is it like a Caribbean island or is that the one up in Can I just say that I'm not really up for pitching in for a Caribbean island at the moment 'cause I think they're a little bit tainted Yeah. I mean that I it's uh it's an extremely fancy artist. Is it yeah and that was did she build that up? As in was that her getaway or did she arrive on something you might remember. Someone else owned it. But when she arrived at the island, someone said, If you would you like a gift for your wedding or maybe a plot of land? She said, Yeah, plot of land, thank you. Very swiftly. Oh. And then she built a house on that. But this is where she met uh was someone who I think she was involved with, which was a chap called John Binden. And I only mentioned him because he was a really dubious figure. He was he's just a sort of footnote here, but he was a kind of English underworld figure, like very dodgy, knew a lot of gangster, pr I think was a gangster in in many ways, living in the Caribbean. Anyway, his party trick was that he could hang five half pint beer tankards from his penis . No hands. No hands. Wow. He must have been popular at Oktoberf est. I wonder as the most nineteen seventies fact. I think you can possibly come up with. Yeah. The ones with handle. Yeah, the ones with the handle. Through the handle. Yeah, half pint. Half pint. But with the handle. Yeah, yeah. Right. And that was his party trick. Yeah, it wasn't his day to day. Right. No. But you'd see it coming, wouldn't you? Sort of Oh he's brought he's brought the he's brought the mugs, he's brought the big cuffs. This week our Brit has got talent Oh anyway. Yeah, I don't know what to say about that. We could do that on like because like the ventriloquists on the radio, no one could see them. But you can for all the people at home know you could be doing that right now. We're all doing it right now. Even me. Most of my stuff's about astrology. Let's do it, let's do it. Okay. Um have you heard of William Parron? No. He was um the astrologer to Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth. Because it used to be that you would have royal astrologers. He prophesies that Henry the Seventh's wife, Elizabeth of York, would live until she was 80 years old and she died when she was thirty-seven. Uh he forecasts that Henry VIII would have a happy marriage, a long marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and that he would sire many sons, and that he would become a devoted servant to the Catholic Church. Right. It's a tough, isn't it being an astrologer? Everything up. He got everything wrong. But the reason basically that he did it is because in those days, as an astrologer to the king, you basically had to say really good stuff. Yeah. It's like being an advisor to Donald Trump. He basically had to say how, oh, your hair's looking great today, Donald, kind of thing. And will tomorrow. Yeah. Because the um two astrologers to Henry the Sixth uh had been executed on grounds of treason when they forecast that he would have a violent death. So you you really couldn't forecast bad things, otherwise you get Yeah. There was someone even H Henry VIII's time, Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent. Oh yeah. She was predicting the king's death. She wasn't like an official person, was she? No, no, no. She was just sort of m mist wandering mystic, and I think she was executed for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's a horrible thing to say something's gonna happen to anyone with or without the stars. I mean, just too invasive a thought. It's true. Mystic Meg though. Like she She never said you're gonna die to someone in the audience though. Imagine came on. I don't know what the lottery numbers are this week, but I got some bad news for Susan in Kent . Time for fact number three, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that when Caucasian tourists started visiting the mountain gorillas of Congo, local guides went around wearing envelopes as masks so as to help the gorillas get used to the idea of white people. Yeah. This is all to do with guerrilla tourism, which is a huge help to many countries. It helps the gorillas themselves because it relaxes anyone wanting to poach them because I'll make more money by protecting them. Not like an egg, Andy is the poach word. Is that what you thought I was saying? No? Right. You'd need a very big pan to poke the gorilla. Sorry you gave me a look as I said the word poach and I thought he thinks I mean eggs. No, no and he's reading the newspaper going, Why are they arresting all these people and just making eggs. I gave you a look down because you said it relaxes the people who would otherwise pose the gorillas, and I just thought that was a funny way of putting it. That's all. Um I saw a video um which had this story in it and it was at the Cahusi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the gorillas that they have there are the largest gorillas in the world, the Eastern Lowland Gorilla. So the basically when guerrilla tourism happens, um a lot of white people start arriving from overseas, and largely the gorillas there haven't seen white people before. So there's this one instance where the locals got all these envelopes and they cut holes for eyes, two little nostrils and a mouth, and put a little bit of rope and tied it up. And they spent two or three times going back to meet the gorilla because every time it kept running away it was very scared. And eventually it got used to the look and they thought we think we've got this right. So they asked the local authorities to provide a white man to test it out on. And so he came along and it didn't run away. And then they're like, Great, the gorilla's ready. Oh, I thought like he would have run away until he put a little stamp on the top of his head. Yeah. Yeah, so uh yeah, it's just a a thing that happens because guerrilla tourism from Europeans, uh from people coming over from America and Canada provide huge amounts of money uh for a lot of different countries in a lot of local areas. Yeah. It was controversial, wasn't it? Because obviously the the dream is for the gorillas to be living without human without any tourism really, but it d as you say it brings in so much money. And that money also gets they've innovated so it's definitely put back into the local community. So everyone who lives nearby is also on board and that's helping with living standards there and like all the just it's it's helping build up those communities and things. Well in places like Rwanda where you know you had these huge outbreaks of war, guerrillas were almost completely made extinct off the back of it or was certainly heading that way. So anyone who wanted to protect them was risking their life, but they weren't And so yeah, it's uh I've never done it myself. I've never gone Nina just purely because of your connection to monkey. Have you ever thought to do something like that? Um Well I don't think I I'd need more than an envelope on my face to relax a gorilla. I think if I met a gorilla, I'd send out so many signals to it to kill me. I'd just dare put myself in that thing. I it would all be fear and need and the air would be electric with this sort of nosedive I'd be doing mentally. I love gorillas, I love orangutans, I love them. I want them to be safe. But I can't even imagine a gorilla particularly cares about a face or the colour of face. I feel like they would size you up your weight, your y you know, your edibility I think the important thing if you're near a gorilla and if you're listening and you're near a gorilla right now, this might this might save your life, is just re go low status. Don't go in, you know, big swinging dicks thinking you're all that. Just look at the pint glasses banned. No pint glasses. He died showing his party trick. But is it like because there's quite a lot of different animals that half of them, it seems, you have to like make yourself big and scary, and the other half you have to either run away or make yourself very small and absolutely don't run away because they can run at twenty-five miles an hour. Um don't don't make yourself big and scary, don't make eye contact, and they might sort of passive aggressively brush past you in that way of you know they're they're a commuter who's like did you spill my pint a little bit and you and you just sort of say okay yeah fair enough that's yeah yeah that's on me. Yeah and if they're if they if they're charging at you. Yeah. Don't do anything. Don't run away. Yeah. Because most charges are a bluff. If anything, make yourself a bit smaller, go on the ground slightly so it doesn't look like it's being intimidated by your size either. There's this whole uh sort of FAQ page on the Varunga National Park, which is in Congo, and it tells you all these details. So if it does get to you and it's angry and you're down on the ground, let it attack you. It says it's a the attack may include severe biting and pounding or tearing with the gorilla's hands. Um but it will eventually stop if it sees you as not a threat. Uh it might then just fold you into its arms and just sit with you. Let it do that. Don't try and take its arm off, because its arm how strong you think I am. Don't try and lift it It's like you know if like you're in the cinema and you're on your first date and they put their arm round you and you like take it off them and they say don't do that basically. Don't do that with the gorilla. Remain quiet and passive until it loses interest and goes. It has all of this on its website and right underneath all of this is a button that says, Book online now. Diane Fossey, by the way, who was one of the great primate um professionals. I don't know which Jane Goodall. Yeah, her and Jane Goodall. There was there was one other as well, the three of them roughly at the same time under the sort of mentorship of a man called Lewis Leakey all went out into different bits of the world and studied primates and um she was not a fan of this guerrilla tourism. But I think it was different then. We didn't know quite enough and we didn't know what good it does for them now in the world and the money wasn't like we didn't know they existed until like the mid nineteenth century. Really? Yeah. That's incredible. In the West, obviously, like in Europe. So there was an American missionary called Dr. Thomas Savage, quite a good name for someone who likes to find gorillas, but he went to Congo in eighteen forty seven uh and managed to be told by the locals where to see those gorillas and he brought back some bones and stuff and then brought them to scientists in Europe and they then described gorillas for the first time. And then there became like this big sort of thing of everyone love gorillas. So you had gorilla ballets in London. Oh no, sorry, no, it was people it wasn't actual gorillas. It was like not like the bear bait thing or costume for that show is a very, very high risk job. It just became fashionable to do like gorilla themed things. The curtain opens and the costume designers sat there with a gorilla in Zormo right. The ballerina who normally gets thrown a couple of feet in the air just goes right through the ceiling. Uh no, there was also a gorilla quadrille for piano that was very popular, the sheet music was very popular. So yeah, it became like a little bit of a a meme. That's great. I love a a micromania, which always happens whenever there's anything new. Um the really impressive people who work in these two national parks where you get uh mountain gorillas, which is the one of the rarest kinds. That the there are lots of other kinds of gorillas, but the mountain ones are the rarest. The really impressive people are the vets who are patching them up after they've had fights with other gorillas. Wow. So they they go in to the gorilla's territory every day in small teams. Um they're checking their health and they're stitching up the gorilla inflicted wounds, and you can't put a plaster cast on them if they've got a fracture. No. Um or we they do they do put cast on, sorry, but it's not plaster 'cause they're just they rip it off. So you have to put on a fiberglass one and then paint it to match their fur. Wow. They paint the cast. It's just it's so interesting. This is amazing. It's really hard to play fights each other a lot. I think a reasonable amount, yeah. Because you get male groups, don't you? You get family groups and then you get all male groups. Oh yeah. And I think there's a bit of a there's a sort of lad pad area and then they'll occasionally leave the lad pad and try and found a family and things like this. As do we. Yeah, these doctors, by the way, Andy, they're amazing because not only have they been patching them up and supposedly this has been uh responsible for the survival rates are going much higher, the fact that they've got dedicated doctors now. But also there's been a lot of mysterious gorilla deaths that they don't understand. So if a gorilla dies, it kind of dies on its own, and then by the time anyone finds it, it's half gone, the body's disintegrated somewhat, and they can't really work out what it is. Doctors have managed to get to gorillas that have recently died and worked out that one of the biggest killers is ventriloquists. Ventriloquists. No, but it is vent so sad. It is ventilation because it's humans passing on the common cold and flu. And they're really susceptible. So people, tourists, when they go there and they probably go, God, I'm gonna just hide the fact that I'm feeling a bit ill so that I can see the gorillas, they're passing on really dangerous disease. I think you had to wear face masks, didn't you? Even before COVID, it was one of the places that you know, you would see people in Asia wearing them and you would see people on Safari wearing them. Yep, exactly. Yeah. I think you have to stay a s several, seven or ten meters away from the gorillas now because just you know, don't give 'em a cold. Yeah. That's the reason. Yeah. That I'm not gonna stand right next to a gorilla. No, no, I would, I totally would, I totally would. But take their arm off but make sure then you wash it for ten seconds while singing happy birthday. I remember there was this thing about they gave you like glasses which it looked like your eyes were looking in a different direction because of the eye contact thing. Cool, really. Yeah. You could print them out and it'd be a tiny hole in them so you could see the gorillas, but the gorilla would think you weren't looking directly at them. Yeah, that's true. You're staring at a baby gorilla meanwhile mama standing there. Exactly. You're staring right at the one on the left. Yeah. And there was also a thing in Toronto Zoo where they asked visitors to stop showing gorillas videos on their phones. Uh and they the people in the zoo just said we'd rather you didn't do that. I took monkey to the zoo once and they really did react the capuchins or little ones. They were little ones. And they went jumping around, they went crazy and it was yeah, that was really extreme. Are we all gonna get this treatment? Yeah. They really didn't like my material Stop the Podcast. Stop the podcast. Hello everybody, just to let you know, this episode of Fish is sponsored by TV licensing. Yes, your TV license covers you for over 400 TV channels and everything on BBC iPlayer on any device. So Andy, tell me, what have you been watching recently? I am glad you asked, James. I have been watching a new show called Small Profits. Uh I don't know if you've heard of this. It's on the beep and it's a common.in. Um it's really nice. It's uh Mackenzie Crook of uh of uh the office ages ago and uh Detectorist and all sorts of other really, really nice shows. And it it's's him, Michael Palin. Well, he's riding the wave of publicity he got from being on Fish, uh, and he's turned that into an appearance on this sitcom. And it's so good. I've been eating it up with a spoon, it's been brilliant. Highly recommended. Amazing. I'm definitely gonna check that out because I have a TV license. Ah so I am covered. And if you would like to know more about television licensing, then get more information by visiting tv.co.uk forward slash pod. That's right. A TV license covers you to watch over four hundred TV channels and everything or BBC iPlayer. To find out more, as James says, go to TVL.co.uk slash pod. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the sho w. Amazing deals on package holidays. Pay now. I've got tickets to that sold out show. Message now. Your subscription's been suspended. Update your payment details. Final warning. To receive your package, pay the fee immediately. Mum have had an accident. Please send money. There's been suspicious activity on your bank account. And I need a few personal details. Fraud is getting more sophisticated. Always stop, think, and check. Stay ahead of scams at gov.uk slash stopthink fraud . Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is, the greatest Shakespeare editor of all time is also the worst Shakespeare editor of all time. This is about a guy called uh John Payne Collier. Okay. Who was an academic in the nineteenth century and a really well known Shakespeare scholar. And the only thing you need to know for this is that basically there's no original Shakespeare manuscript. So So when they say like first folios, what are they? So first folio was a is uh the first collection of plays and we have a few that were printed in what's called quarto, which is where you fold the sheet of paper twice, as sort of a cheap early edition. We have a few first quarters. We don't have him actually writ,ing it up. Exactly. We've got no manuscript. And so the search has always been to find the most original possible version of Shakespeare's plays. And most plays that you get these days are a combination of like quartos or first or second folios, the folios are the collections where they were first bound up, right? Right. So you need to find something as early as possible to get more authentic Shakespeare. That's the thing. And so this scholar, John Pencollier, 19th century, he found a book in Great Newport Street in London, and it was a copy of the second folio, which was printed less than twenty years after Shakespeare's death, right? So relatively contemporaneous. And he noticed, when he properly looked at it, that there were 20,000 handwritten corrections in the margins of this text. There were extra bits, there were observations. So this was extraordinary because this would make the book he had found the most authoritative uh version in existence of Shakespeare's work. This would make it super significant. Cool. Yeah, really exciting. People went nuts. He had moved Shakespeare's studies forward massively and he'd faked it all. Really the punchline. That's why he's the worst of all time. They were his annotations. They were his annotations. People noticed, didn't they, that the handwriting looked suspiciously similar to his actual handwriting. So his own hand writing exists somewhere, does it? I think we've got his Shakespeare's signatures. We've got like six signatures, but that's about it. But he spells the word Shakespeare, the surname Shakespeare, different every single time.. Yeah So yeah. So so this John Pencollier had had become the talk of the town, it was a huge deal. This g this mysterious figure, the old corrector who had made these twenty thousand annotations, it was all just complete nonsense. Why did he do it, Andy? I don't know. I mean why does anyone forge things like professional glory? He was. He was the guy. So to do that was maybe for the lulls. It was for the lulls. And I th I th I this book was very successful financially when he printed, you know, here's my version of the volume. So it did make him a lot of money at first. And I guess he weirdly was collaborating with Shakespeare because he was suggesting edits to certain lines and rewrites, wasn't he? Which would have then been taken up as the new version, possibly. Yeah. Or at least certain texts would do that. So I I should say this all came from a fantastic Financial Times article about about it, which is really, really What was the period, Andy? This was uh the mid nineteenth century that he was Okay, so Shakespeare at this stage is becoming like he's dead a big stage. He's his plays are becoming a big deal, right? Yes. They went up and down, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, there's there's big interest at the time in Shakespeare for sure. Yeah. Interest. I'm really curious what these notes were that he had a thousand and twenty thousand. Twenty twenty thousand improvements he wanted to make. And were there were they alternative line readings or what were they? I think some of them were, yeah. And others were just skipping or amendments or I j I mean it was I think a bit of everything. It was a lot of changes. Yeah. But it's he's putting it on a very old manuscript as well, like on top of anything else. That's desecrating this this very important it was old, presumably. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because they I think they worked out, but the ink that he had used clearly was not ink that was from the time. Like it went to that kind of forensic level. He really hadn't thought it through. No, he just we probably just sort of get away with this. I mean, yeah. There were quite a lot of people who are making changes around that time and even before that time weren't they? So Boddler is the famous one. Like Boddlerising means to sort of change something because um you make it less rude, I suppose. Um but it wasn't just him. Alexander Pope, who's a friend of the podcast, he was changing Shakespeare and rewriting bits that he thought weren't good enough. Mm-hmm and he thought I could make it better. Lewis Carroll, he made some version of Shakespeare plays where he cut out all the obscene bits. So it was like quite a trend of people thinking, Oh, this is very lowbrow, we're gonna remove that stuff. And some people thought that the reason that Shakespeare put those rude bits in was just because the audience liked it, and really if he if Shakespeare had his way, he would have made it all very highbrow. Oh that's how I feel. But actually I always think about w when it comes to the funny bits in Shakespeare, which aren't always very funny and the the fool is often the real low point. That that's what that guy did, the guy who did it first. That's what he did. It was his bit and he knew how to make that funny and then some it's that it's almost like doing somebody else's material. I don't know if that's true, but I mean that's what it feels like. I know what you mean because Shakespeare would have had his favourite He would have had a real funny guy who was hilarious with the skull or whatever. In four hundred years the Michael McIntyre routine won't have the same punch that it does today. Untrue. Untrue. I can imagine Dan getting some old Michael McIntyre scripts and just rewriting them a little bit. Mandraw. Nahum Tate was another one in the seventeenth century, this is only about sixty years after Shakespeare died, rewrote King Lear to make both the king and Cordelia survive, which spoil spoil it, they don't in the original. For a hundred and fifty years, the character of the fool, who's a big deal in King Lear, and he's not very funny, but he's very integral to the plot, you know, making King Lear realize he's he's been mad, you know. The Fool didn't exist in the play for a hundred and fifty years, 'cause Naeam Tate wrote him out. Wow. And this is why people need original Shakespeare's is because it's very hard to tell what is in the original text if you're going off even something slightly later. Yes, right. And this the um the Royal Shakespeare Company, um which you were part of, Nina. I was. I was I was there for years. That's been a hugely important thing in getting Shakespeare back onto the stages in the West End in Stratford upon Avon, uh has become uh the place that people now go to see. I mean that's where you were based, weren't you? That's where I was based. Yeah, for those years. What were you d what were you doing were you like were you did you start as a spear carrier and then work your way up? And I never managed to work my way up. I was uh furniture really. I I was what's called players cast, which means you just sort of get in you get the odd bit to do. I did play Audrey in As You Like It, made a lot of it, I think. It's not many lines. And I was the cursor's an in um Comedy of Errors. And it was really uh they worked you very hard. You never had a day off and you often had to go to a voice coach or you you were just working all the time. But I didn't have very much to do on stage and that did make me mischievous and it did make me want to do something more and that's when I became a ventriloquist actually. Oh wow interestingly William Shakespeare was an amateur ventriloquist. Was he? He could throw his voice behind an ar ras. That's a specific Hamlet based joke. James, you can plug a laugh in there, can't you? I I I can try. It'll be hard to find a realistic one for that joke. No, um so Polonius is hiding behind the curtain and Hamlet says a rat and stabs him. Well the way you all reacted, I thought you didn't. I didn't know Aris. I didn't know Aris. I thought it's Aris was too hack. I was too obvious. MacInter would have done it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, um uh He was a ventriloquist. Well, not really. Vent Haven Museum, the one that houses all of the dummies, was founded by William Shakespeare Burger. Oh. That's also something you could buy in Stratford upon, eh? Yeah. How would you like your burger? I love it as you like it. Super. Very nice. Um and also the list of the R S C, the Royal Shakespeare Company, it's pretty amazing the alumni that you're part of, Nina. I don't know who was in your year, but you know, obviously people like Ian McKellen and Judy Dench and Brian Blessard, you know, all these people were were part of it. David David Tennant. You had Tennant Tennant was um Wow Yes, he was in Comedy of Eris with me, was his courtesan. Because it's very serious. They take it very seriously. Did you ever get to do any more fun productions? Did you ever get to do something like Bouncy Castle Hamlet or whatever it might be? As fun as it got was a five hour play called Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw. That that was that was light entertainment. I was nude in that and I got birthed from an egg. Oh, poached? Or Very coached. Yeah. Um you will I think Nina know about this story. There was a very big hoax that was pulled off with the RSC. That's a good one. Yeah, whereby it became for a moment the Royal Dickens company as opposed to Shakespeare. Um do you wanna do you wanna tell this story if you know you might know it's uh the best I mean the best I can remember it's Ken Campbell, who was the guy who sent me on the ventriloquist path. He wrote letters with a fake headed note paper from the Royal Shakespeare Company saying that we are now moving on to Dickens. Very good. We're moving on from the bard. And he wrote to all the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and actors offering them roles in Dickens plays. And every single letter he signed Love Trev as Trevor Nunn. Trevor Burrus at the time and I think I'm right in saying that he was away overseas on holiday at the time. So he had no idea. And he wouldn't be in contact because it's not like you're on your emails because this must have been a while ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so good. Um so he came back to all this chaos and no one knew who did it, and finally Ken uh revealed that he'd done it to News Night, I think it was, who finally tracked down that it was him. But yeah, yeah, and they gave him criminal lighting, he said, as he was interviewed. But he got hoaxes blues after he posted all these letters 'cause no nobody answered for a very long time. Really? Normally if you write to an actor saying, I'm offering you work, you'll get a reply by return of post. Oh, I would like to have seen this more Dickens Society. Yeah. I think the weirdest production I've ever seen was in Konigsberg Castle in Denmark, when we were on tour in Denmark and the castle is the original Elsinore or it's the one that inspired Elsinore? Yeah. I think it's the it's the one. And they were doing kind of walking Hamlet around the place. So, you know, you'd see one scene in this room and then you'd you'd wander off and you'd see another scene happening in this room and these actors are kind of running up between each bit. But there were some tourists who did not really respect the boundary between art and and audience, and there were some who were just wandering up to Hamlet in the middle of quite an emotional scene just to have their picture taken next to him.