Musician Hobbies and Celebrity Scrabble Stories

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. Step into light-filled living at the Express Bifolding Doors Weybridge Showroom and experience products that seamlessly connect your home's interior and exterior. From bifolding and sliding doors to windows, entrance doors, and glass roofs, all built and installed by Express. Whether renovating, extending, or building new, see the quality for yourself at our stunning showroom. Open Monday to Saturday until 5 p.m. Or visit expressbyfolds.co.uk. Hi, everybody, Andy and Dan here. Welcome to this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. We've got a very exciting guest today. We do. We have the brilliant Deliso Chaponda. Deliso, some of you will know from being a finalist on Britain's Got Talent a few years ago. He's an amazingly funny stand-up comedian, and uh we were very excited that he was gonna join us on the show because he's a big old nerd. He's written a sci-fi set of short stories that you can buy on Amazon and other uh online stores, but he's gone on tour as well. He certainly is. His show is called Topical Storm, you see, it ''causes it's about it evolved news and it's about the news. So s so that's a good title, is what you're saying. It's a really good title and it's a really good tour, and he's going all over the place with it. Uh where's he going? Let's see. Stockton on teas, Chipping Norton, London, and various other places of roughly the same size. Yeah, and it's happening now. He's on tour right now. So do get your tickets because you don't want to miss out on it. He's absolutely brilliant. His website is delisotraponder.com. Now you're probably also thinking, God, it'd be great to see Delisa, but damn it, we'd love to see Fish Live as well, but you're not doing any shows. Absolutely. And what about a live show involving Anna? Who? Anna Tajinski, when she's back very soon. Well, have we got a surprise for you? We're gonna be doing a live show this August in Lund at the Lund Comedy Festival in Sweden. Yeah, that's right. We're really excited for it. It's gonna be a live show recording. Uh if you have spare dosh to buy a plane ticket, why don't you come from the UK as well? Because it's going to be a great night and it's the live return of Anna Toshinsky to the stage. Tickets are on sale now. You just need to go to no such thingasaffish.com slash Lund. That's right. Saturday the twenty ninth of August at seven pm. Come and see our impression of the Swedish chef. Live. Oh dear . Alright, yeah. Uh watch us be booted out of the country. Anyway, on with the show. On with the podcast . 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 Deliso Chaponda, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Delisa. So my fact is in 1981, more than one million Bibles were smuggled into China by water. In one go. In one go? It's No. not 'cause normally you smuggle things, you know, bit by bit. Not also usually you're smuggling cocaine or weapons. Not Bibles. Do you know what I mean? Like that's what I love most about it. It's like the way they smuggled it. It didn't go in the in the bum. It didn't go out. Yeah. There would have been major theological chats about what that implied if you did that. You could do it nowadays though, because now they're USB sticks. So you could put the USB stick in my bum I always put it the wrong way around first of all and then very strong. But no, so they they submerged tons of Bibles, literal tons I'm not using the metaphor tons. It was they weighed tons of Bibles and then they submerged them underneath a boat which was called Michael. Which I think is honestly th the least sexy sounding name for your tr clandestine And in fact y Delisa, you say tons, it' as hundred and thirty nine tons in weight. I know. And they I believe they were small Bibles, as in they weren't the huge, you know, big deskworks because obviously when you are smuggling size matters, but uh this and this is because Christianity was suppressed at the time. And owning a Bible was it an offence at the time? And you know religion is the opiate of the masses and um it's very vague exactly what the penalty would be if you had it, but there were no Bibles, so they had to sneak the Well people go to jail. You you still get people who are going to jail and being released back to so they're being smuggled over from Hong Kong and so on and and so they'll be sent back after a few years in jail. So you will get jail time. Right. It kind of depends on on the moment. But this was a huge operation. This was open doors, which is a smuggling industry. This extraordinary thing that was started by one man called Andrew van der Bijle, who used to smuggle all of these Bibles into different countries. And then this was the ultimate project. How do we get all of these Bibles into China? Can you tell me more about exactly how it works? So did they put it underwater and drag it along or what? In a submarine or well, so they they built a special barge in the city of Shantou, which was designed to sink. So you do get submersible ships. Yes. We've talked before about when you need to give a let's say you've got a a an oil carrier that's broken or something, you can get special ships which go which approach, sink beneath, sink underneath and then lift up again. And then I dragged onto the And I'm fairly confident there were loads of believers who were on the beaches and waded in, submerged up to their necks. Wow, retrieving these tons of Bibles and carrying them off. But also, some were believers and others were businessmen because there was a scarcity of Bibles. Bibles were very expensive. So there were other people who were in it because you could sell them to Christians. That doesn't sound very Catholic. And it sort of went wrong on the night that a lot of the authorities saw what they were doing and were arresting people and a bunch of the Bibles swept away into the ocean. So they thought, okay, that's it. But then fishermen, this is the story. There's so many weird stories about this. One of the stories goes that fishermen saw on the surface these Bibles gleaming like fish. So they brought them in and then they realized, oh, we've got all these Bibles because they were watertight. So yeah. So the Bibles found a way. And then even there was like some of the authorities grabbed Bibles and they flung them into like sewage. And then believers climbed in right afterwards and retrieved them. How interesting. And this guy, so he's called Andrew Van der Bijle. Um and he wasn't just China, he did all of um Beyond the Iron Curtain, right? So it was Eastern Europe. And there were a lot of volunteers because I heard about this because I would do a lot of uh show like religious shows and I was doing Green Belt Festival uh in Cheltenham, which is like a religious kind of Glastonbury, and uh in the audience there was one of the people who had volunteered um for one of these project programs. In China or in Eastern Europe in China. In China, wow. Wow. Amazing. So gosh. He I think he was doing a talk about it, but I was like, wow, this is crazy. What story. I read that he would pray to God when he took his Bibles across. And let's say he's going to Eastern Europe, he might take them in his car. Okay, so he's driving through the Iron Curtain and people would check his car and he said he would pray to make seeing eyes blind and the border patrol people would be searching his car and couldn't find the Bibles even though they were just sat there on his backseat. And he said that was because he prayed to God. He's dressed as a Bible because if you dress in there, you it's it's in plain sight. No, but it's also look, it sounds like nonsense, but there's also a level where they're looking for weapons and things. Yeah. So they'll just see a pile of books and they'll go past it. He w do you know what I mean? Like even though they are illegal, I wonder how high up on the border patrol's radar Bibles are. Because they're looking for weapons. In the Cultural Revolution, I think it was, right? And I think in um Soviet Russia it was as well. So do you guys know Vitaly Vitalyev? Yeah. You've met him, you've met him. Uh so he used to work on QI for a little bit and he left Russia during the Soviet Union. Uh but he did cross the border a few times and he said when he was on a train and he would cross the border, people would come down the train shouting, Bible's all pornography, Bible's all pornography. And if you're both the Bible's pages are stuck together. I'm sorry, that's terrible. That's terrible. And that was like you had to hand them in when they said that. Yeah, right. I I really like the sound of this guy. Um, purely just the adventure. So he wrote a book. Andrew Van Devil. Yeah, he wrote a book which was called God Smuggler. And uh it sold over 10 million copies supposedly, translated into thirty-five different languages. And every country seemed to bring in its own new Mr. Beanish moment. In Albania, he used to do sort of drop-offs where he would just sort of put the Bible down and walk off and you know, and then people would find it and chase after him, go, Your Bible! You've left your Bible. And so he was just constantly outed by people returning his lost property. Yeah. But I also think like despite them trying to repress Christianity. It grew in China in these years. And I actually think part of it is if it's forbidden and you're having to smuggle in Bibles, it becomes more alluring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes like oh this is the truth because they don't want us to read the truth. And so places like the UK where you've got dwindling attendance, ban it. Ban it for a while. Exactly the happere have been moments in the UK where people have been arrested for smuggling Bibles, isn't there? So uh William Tyndall uh and his mate who was called Monmouth, but I can't remember his first Humphrey Monmouth. Yeah. So we're talking quite a long time ago. We're talking Henry VIII times. Right. But the thing was that these Bibles were written in English, and so they're in the vernacular. And so that you're allowed Bibles as long as they were in Latin, but if they were in English you were in big, big trouble because the church wanted to control what was in the Bible. They wanted you to only hear what the priest had to say. They didn't want you to read it yourself and make your own ideas. So Tyndall was executed for for for this at the time crime. Um the the man who smuggled the men, the Humphrey Monmouth, who was a cloth draper, he was smuggling the men in his ships, he was briefly imprisoned. But within a few years, every church in the country had one of these. Right. And the King James Bible, which is maybe the most significant English translation ever, is one of the most beautiful, our language is full of phrases from the King James, eighty percent of it is Tyndall's translation. . Oh yeah It's the it's the absolute underpinning of the Bible in English. Um I have recently read a smuggled book. And I wasn't aware of I wasn't aware when I picked it up and looked at it that this was it was illegal. But I I've just finished a book which was punishable by death uh in Italy at a certain point in history. And it was smuggled in. It's called The Moon Is Down, by John Steinbeck, and he wrote it explicitly as propaganda. He was working for the US government. Okay. Early days of American involvement in the Second World War. It's a it's a tale of a a nameless European town where a nameless army invades and takes over their collaborators. And it's a story of the invading army being resisted by the population and and them slowly cracking up under as they realise the awfulness of this war and what they've done will you know, they'll they'll never be forgiven for it, it will never end all of this and the people will throw them out. And in Italy, if you had a copy, you could be punished with that death. I've been to the museum of banned books which is in Tallinn, I think, in Estonia. It's really cool. It's just a s very small place run by one guy. It's basically a bookshop to be honest. And you can buy all these books that have been banned everywhere else in the world. And I think there's one book that he he even doesn't keep on display and he keeps under the counter. Really? Do you remember what it was? If Memory Serves, I think is it oh I've forgotten what it's called now. Is it the Anarchist Handbook or something? The Anarchist Cookbook Cookbook, that's it yeah So I was at home um as last year, I think, maybe the year before, and I was I can't remember now, it's just this has reminded me. You go home all the time though. No, it's once or twice a year. Gotta say hi to the kids. Um I was s going through some boxes and I found a box of books that were given to me by a friend who moved overseas. And I opened it up and in it was the anarchist cookbook. Wow. I didn't know that that was a smuggled book or that it's illegal, because it is still illegal to own it in this country. So that night on Instagram I posted a picture of me reading this book, going sitting down to a nice book in a glass of wine and upholding And I posted it and I went to sleep. I woke up in the morning to about twenty DM saying, Take that down immediately. This is an illegal book. People have gone to jail in the UK for it. Up your bum right now, mister And dive, dive, dive. Yeah. So I I had to get I d didn't know if I had to go to the police to give it to them. I didn't do that. That's embarrassing. I know, right? That book it's it's cause it's it actually tells you how to make weapons. But a lot of books which are banned it backfires because it makes you want to read it. So I read the satanic verses when I was a teenager, right? It's an extremely difficult book to read. Yeah. It's extremely dense. You need to be a university student. But because it was banned, we read it with our dictionaries and tried to figure it out. And I actually think, you know, the banning of it made it more. Absolutely. I still haven't finished the satanic verses. I've just started it as of last week. Oh how odd. And um Can I just say for anyone listening, I've never read it and do not intend to read it. Well, there's an amazing book called Joseph Anton, which is Salman Rushdie's whole experience of what happened once the fatwa was put on him. And he was saying that the book is known as something called the page fifteen club, because most people can't get past page fifteen of it. So you're part of a club if you've started and you've never gone further than that. But yeah, exactly. More dangerous because of the uh the banning of it. The banning of it. Yeah. Can I tell you my favourite book smuggling incident? Okay. So Cold War, we've mentioned this Eastern bloc. There was a lot of book smuggling into the Soviet Union because there were a lot of banned texts. And the CIA had a program smuggling in works which they saw as spreading, you know, freedom, democracy, that kind of thing. Things like 1984, um, The Guardian Weekly, which I find rather nice. The Guardian did a weekly magazine. And it was all sorts you know, they smuggled in miniature books in tampon boxes and sugar packets. I mean I presume tiny. Yeah. But I just love this wonderful detail of the CIA operation. In one instance, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago was carried onto a plane to Warsaw in a baby's nappy. Oh wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. In our family, whenever my daughter needs to be changed, we say she's done a saltzenitsin. So in twenty thirteen there were people started smuggling books into prisons. Okay. And this is really interesting. So they changed the law in twenty thirteen that meant if you were in prison for like a a white collar crime, let's say, you could get thirty days off your sentence for Thirty days you wrote Wait, wait, wrote. Yes. So if you wrote a book handy like you you knock your books off in two weeks. That's why it's back out. So quickly. But if you wrote a book, then you get a month off your sentence. So a lot of like people who are in for fraud or tycoons or former politicians or something suddenly started knocking out books left, right, and centre. Now, have you writ you've written uh book of short stories, which I have. Uh and it takes a long time. Like that you did those over years and years. Yeah. So what they did is they would get like experts in a subject to write a book, then they would smuggle them into the jail and then they would just copy them out and then put by whoever and then say, written, thirty days off, please. Oh, they copy their homework. So for instance, there was a former politician called um Georgia uh Koppos who wrote about the matrimonial alliances of medieval Romanian rulers. Did no one raise an eyebrow. And then you'd be writing all this from memory, Georgios. That's very impressive. And there was a guy called Riolini Lupsa, who was a pop singer, um who went to prison for fraud, who wrote a book about stem cells in dental medicine. Stop. And he's already in prison for fraud. Yeah. You'd think they would be like, I'm not sure you're under up and up. Isn't that amazing? That's incredible. 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. 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 stop think fra ud. Okay, but it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is: Lake Malawi contains a thousand species of the same kind of f ish. One lake, a thousand different species. Big lake. Big, very big lake. Big lake, they're waves. That is when I first went there I didn't know lakes could have waves. Oh like breakers? Like surfables? They're smaller waves, but I I'm sure there are times of the year when it's larger, but it has wav Wow. And I always thought a lake was like a glorified pond and I was like, oh, this is big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got beaches. It's got yeah. It's huge. And it's got a lot of cichlid fishes. More than a thousand species. So this is absolutely bizarre. I mean they arrived in the lake, y you know, one species arrived in the lake maybe three million years ago. Some millions of years ago. Why are there so many now? How have they got to be? Okay, but here's the thing, like you have a type of mouse, right? Comes into an area, and then some of them are born here, some of them are born here, and then there's a something goes in between them, some kind of barrier, which means that the ones on one side can't mate with the ones on the other and eventually they become new species, right? Right. In a lake, how does that work? Like I know there's waves and everything, but like what is stopping them from mating? Yeah. So there was a study of this and it's a theory, but it's it's reasonably convincing. There are a few different ideas. One of them uh was a team of scientists led by Christopher Schultz who looked at this and found that historically the level of the water in Lake Malawi. It' abouts 700 meters deep, I think at the deepest. Wow. But it has gone up and down and up and down and up and down. And it's plunged by at least 200 meters more than 20 times over its history. And so every time that happens, things change in the lake, the shoreline moves, the pH levels change, and sometimes it even splits into smaller lakes before the waters rise again and it's reunited. So if the lake is split into smaller lakes, those fish in each of those smaller areas will split off from each other, spend time, you know, specializing at breeding in among themselves. Yeah. Then suddenly when the lake is reunited, you've got different species. That makes sense. Like that makes sense, actually. But I envision a kind of reverse tower of Babel kind of situation where the fish were trying to burrow their way down to the Almighty, and the Almighty was like, No and they all speak different languages now in different Well that's not been tested fully by theory, but it's but it's a strong idea. It's strong. Yeah. It's strong. Yeah. It's good. So this we should say it is massive, this lake. Right. It used to be called Lake Nyasa because when the British arrived in Malawi they they called it Nyasa land and then after independence we became Malawi. What's also it's also called the Calendar Lake, which is quite a cool name. It's because roughly it's three hundred and sixty five miles long and fifty two miles wide at its widest. So it's it's calendar. Oh it's a calendar. Yeah. Three hundred and sixty five days, fifty two weeks. And they say, and I couldn't prove this, but twelve main rivers flow into it as well. So it even breaks down into twelve months of the year. But it's probably there's like a few more. They're like, oh that one doesn't go out. And I think there are the main room. And I think there are a few miles that they're shopping off as well. Um when they measure. Swim across Lake Malawi was seven hours, forty two minutes, and forty seven seconds. What do you think was the fastest swim from top to bottom? Okay. So it it looks like an exclamation mark, doesn't it? It's it's fifty miles across, but three hundred and six. Like this country of Chile. Yes. So so seven hours. So some maniac So so maybe it was um forty nine hours. It was sixty-three days. Oh you can't swim for that. I know it was in stages. And it was by Martin Hobbs from South Africa, who I'm sure is not a maniac. He's a maniac. He's a maniac. Like all of these people. Like I've met Eddie Izzard and I was like, You're a madman. Like like who are these people swimming across things for no reason? Doesn't it have crocodiles in it, like Malawi. Does it? It has hippo.. It has hippos Oh that's worse. Neither is good if the crocodile is. Okay, so this is the thing is if you are near a hippo's child, a hippo is worse than a crocodile. But if you leave the hippo alone and there are no children present, hippos are very the ones you really have to look out for is the hungry hungry hippos. Oh yeah. The absolute worst. He I read about him, James, the Martin Hobbes guy. Oh yeah. So six years before he swam from the top to the bottom of Lake Malawi, he had never swam a mile. Six years before. Okay. And just started He started, I think he had an injury. I think he was already a sportsman. Yes. And then he had an injury, which meant he couldn't do his original sport. Right. And then he took to swimming. But isn't that just imagine six years from now, we could all be on the northern shore of Lake Malawi. Race. Race to set up. Um the uh the fish that are in there,. there There are some pretty wild varieties. Yeah. There's one which is called the eye biter. Have you heard of the eye biter? And how does it get that name? So basically they found eyes in its stomach, and they think that it's they don't know if it's eating the eyes as nourishment or if it's taking the eyes out of the the predator or the the one the one that it wants to eat. Yeah, of the other fish. So it eats fish. Eats the eyes, therefore it has a better chance of killing it all together. Right. So you start with the eyes. And this leads to the drug, doesn't it? What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fush. It's what do you call a fish with no eyes? Dimidochromus compressiceps. That's what I call it. There were eyes in that. Yeah, but that behaviour's never been observed in the wild, I read. Exactly. So we're right. It's a theory. They have found the eyes. They've seen the eyes, but they've never seen the Yeah. Exactly. Here's another one. The uh sleeper cyclid, which you get in Lake Malawi, it does a thing called Thanosis. And thanatosis is where you pretend to be dead. Oh yeah. But they do it in a really awesome way. They lie down on the bottom of the sea and they can change the colour to like a blotchy, very sick looking fish. And so the other fish go past and go, oh god, he looks a bit sick. Like he obviously was feeling terrible before he died. And then they go close to him and then it goes, ta-da not dead after all and then probably bites her eyes out as you're I'll tell you I wasn't afraid of Lake Malawi but this episode why do I swim in there? There's also the Malawi squeaker that I found. Um which is a type of upside down catfish. Uh another question. What's what's the what's an upside down? Upside down catfish, they swim upside down so that their mouths are at the top of the water and they can eat bugs that are on the on the surface. Oh okay. I thought upside down catfish is they actually look better than their Facebook And it's called the Malawi squeaker because when you take it out of the water it goes squeak, squeak squeak squeak totally. Oh that's amazing. So I've read that it's very clear in Lake Malawi. So you've swam in it. How far in it have you seen giant fish? No, no, no. You swim like when you go to the ocean, you you only swim in the shallow area. You don't go away out of it. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? So I've I've swam in it, but I've never been more than fifty meters out of it. I read that it gets waves up to six meters high. Okay. But that's huge. No, it gets exactly what I mean. Like it felt like uh if you knocked me out, I would think I'm at the ocean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have special things. It's a something called the Muera winds uh that come every year in November, December, and January that made kit basically fishermen can't go out that time either. Uh, so it's lots of people go fishing there, uh, but you can't go in those times. But like at the start of November or the end of January, you kind of can do a little bit, but it's a bit dangerous. But if you go out fishing them, no one else is doing it so you can sell your fish for way more. So that's kind of taking the risk. 'Cause those were the other names that it was given um David Livingston, who was one of the first people to describe it um for the West only. Uh he called it the Lake of Storms and the Lake of Stars because you would see all the light of the fishermen in the U.S. We have an annual festival called Lake of Stars. Ah where all these musicians come and people smoke weed and it's oh I this is a fact, Malawi has the best weed in Africa. Really? Malawi gold, it's cold. Really? Everyone goes on about Malawi has no minerals, but we always like we've got Malawi go that's the the intro. We should say that you uh you grew up in Malawi then but my dad had to flee Malawi because of our dictator. But when I was an adolescent and the dictator was gone eventually we we went back to Malawi. Um Delisa, you may not know. One of the things I do on this podcast is I find any link I can to the first or second world wars, no matter what we're talking about. Okay. So so there were some Malawi soldiers sent. Well first naval engagement of the first world war, guys. Yeah. Oh Lake Malawi. No way. Wow. So exciting. There were at the time t roughly two Western boats on Lake Malawi. Unfortunately, one was English and one was German. Right. So this was it it was a it was a colonial time, so there were and and l the borders of Lake Malawi it's it's a few different countries around it, aren't they? So So basically uh a British steamer named HMS Gwendolyn, which is named after the daughter of the Marquis of Salisbury. Lovely name for a ship. Very nice. It had one gun on it, I think. And uh there was a German steamer, uh, which the captains were friends, they were drinking buddies, but the English found out the war was happening slightly before the Germans, so the English just sailed up, opened fire, one shot. The German captain yells, Rhodes, are you drunk? at his friend who's just overfire on him. One shot battle roads then just confiscates the gun Rhodes the English captain confiscates the German gun and the and no more is said about it. And that was the first naval battle of the first world war. Wow. I know. No more was said about it. You've shot. This is the first time anyone else is hearing about it on this on this podcast. That's like finding out if you were just sitting in a cafe with your friend and he happened to be German and you read the news before but you just punched him at the beard. Battle over It's amazing. So Lisa, what's the the name that keeps coming up as names of uh towns and so on in Malawi is David Livingston. Yes, he was the missionary. Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of place names that were colonially named have been changed, but the Livingston ones seem to remain it's because Livingston is remembered positively. Yeah, right. So he came, he brought Bibles and stuff. He was how did he bring them in? But honestly the the tales of him is education and medicine, so he's there was not a hurry to rename his stuff but like the road stuff where it's associated with yeah uh you know us being oppressed and being that's all been renamed. So a lot of the Livingston names. Yeah, because he's fondly remembered. Blantyre, which is known as the New York of Malawi. That's where Livingston was born in Scotland. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Are they twinned or they're not really Weirdly. I mean on their Wikipedia, which is where I had a brief look, it said that it's twinned with many places, but not with that town. Oh interesting. But there but there is a statue in Blantyre in Scotland of Livingston fending off a lion attack. And it's designed by Ray Harryhausen. So we should say he designed the special effects for all the amazing old films like what was it the Jason and Yada Jason Yards. Yeah, those were fantastic. So s apparently he was married to a descendant of Livingston. Wow. Yeah. And so he did the statue. That's amazing. There's also Livingstonia in Malawi. There's uh he's got quite a few places named after him. Speaking of old sci-fi films, I was reading about someone called the Terminator, uh, who is responsible for the annulment of three thousand five hundred marriages in Malawi. Oh yeah. So this apparently is someone called Teresa Cachin Daman. This is the child child marriage. Yeah. No, no, she's actually absolutely amazing. Isn't that an amazing story? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so so essentially there was a a a practice of marrying very underage people and so she campaigned against it her whole life and annulled them and rescued these women. It was amazing. And then educated people in the area about what to do in the future and That's great. And whenever she terminated a marriage, she'd be like, I'll be back . Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first ever British spacesuit designed included a cape and a walking stick. A cape. Yes. Wow. This was for floating in space. This yes, how else are you gonna fly in space? Um it's an extraordinary design uh that was showcased initially in the forties in nineteen forty nine. There's a replica that you can go and visit. I've got a picture here. Delisa, do you want to sort of describe for the listener what it looks like? It looks like a cylon from Battlestar Galactica. It's it's absolutely glorious. And for younger listeners perhaps I think it looks like Space Shredder from the Ninja Turtles. But for listeners even younger than that, maybe. Okay, the the the helmet looks like a knight's helmet. And then uh the actual baggy suit it's a cross between a space suit and a washing machine. Yeah. Yes. And there's a glorious silver cape over the shoulder. It's like a it's a sort of steampunky. But also the walking stick is very short. Yes, but because it's a practical walking stick. Now here's the extraordinary thing. If you saw a picture of this, you would think, my god, this looks so ridiculous. What were they doing? Everything that was designed for this suit was incredibly practical. So to give the background of it very quickly, this was designed by a group called the British Interplanetary Society, the BIS. It was founded in 1933 by Philip Cleater in Liverpool, and it is still to this day the oldest existing organization devoted to the promotion of space flight. So there's been older ones, but they're no longer uh around. So this is the longest lasting. But it it's an amazing sounding the British Interplanetary Society. It sounds insane 'cause we're not used to Britain being a major part of the space race, as indeed it turns out we weren't. We may yet. We may yet. Um but this spacesuit was really fabulous. It so the suit has an airlock inside the chest. So you can pick up a moon rock or whatever it might be, pop it into the airlock. Then inside your suit, kind of take an arm out of the space suit, reach in and open the airlock once it's pressurized correctly. So then you've got it inside for whatever reason inside your suit. It's just such a cool idea. It sounds a bit awkward. It was a bit awkward probably. That that did not make it to the spacesuit design. But I think some of these elements were useful and they were established way before most other space exploration outfits. You know, they were thinking about how we do this in a practical way. Well, that's what's so exciting about this. Every single part of this suit dealt with what was the hypothetical situation of what you would have on the moon. On the moon. Yeah, so it was designed by two guys, Harry Ross and Ralph Smith. And for example, the moon has very different temperatures when it's dark and when it's light. So either you design a day and night suit that you can change into, which is so British. Yeah, well you need something for cocktail arrows. Yeah, yeah. But what this suit is, what they went for is the all-in-one. So the cape is not some, you know, silly British superhero. Yeah. What that was is is to help with the temperature regulation. I actually think England just needs this to start being reissued because on any particular day we have all the weather. It needs to make a comeback. That's a great idea.. Yes Yeah, exactly. So Delisa, you'll see here there's this sort of aerial that's up here. That's for radio. For radio. So that's how you could radio back to the ship when you're on the moon. Stunning. It's got like a 1.5 kilometer, I think, distance. Brilliant, actually. They were solving all sorts of they design so they designed a lunar spaceship as well in nineteen thirty eight and they proposed a crew of three, a multi-stage rocket, like lots of things that ended up happening in nineteen sixty nine. I think it's like a big what if, isn't it? Of like basically what happened is they were gonna start doing experiments of rockets but there was a thing called the Explosives Act of eighteen seventy five that meant that private individuals were not allowed to test rocket fuel and because that was in they weren't allowed to do their experiments. But if the government had said, Okay, you can do it, there's every reason to suggest that we could have gotten into space before anyone. Well, I mean at least they had practical plans. Zambia, which is the country next to Malawi, uh, they had a misguided attempt to join the space race. Uh very bonkers guy. I'd have to uh find his name, but he started training astronauts by putting them in barrels and rolling them to get them used to being weightless. And it was this really hilarious event where he believed that Zambia could beat America and Russia with the So we're talking fifties, sixties that this sort of happened. Wow. Yeah, and I should just quickly explain that the um the walking stick when I said it was Yeah, if you were needing to sit down, the suit's not very practical for it. So that is one of those you turn into a a sort of sti Yeah. A little seat. Uh Arthur C. Clarke was a member of this society. Yes. You know why we have capes in comic books, like superheroes? No. Because you don't need a cape to fly, do you? It's like doesn't make sense at all. Like you need wings. Yes. Uh basically the reason is a comic book is just a drawing and you need to show movements of someone flying through the air. And what's the best way of doing that? Having something flapping. Brilliant. That's great. Um the first real spacesuits like that were actually used were the Soviet ones, I think. So um CH one or Chit One or Chit Edian, I suppose it would be. So this was used in the 1930s, and it was because they were going to very, very high altitude. So they weren't going into space per se, but they were getting balloons really, really high. Uh and this suit made by a guy called Chertofsky, it had no hinges in the elbows or the knees. And it was basically just it was almost a barrel, really. It was a barrel with a helmet on, and you would just sort of open a door and walk inside it, and you wouldn't be able to really move or do anything. Stole the idea from Zambia, obviously. Uh and then the first actual spacesuit, so the ones that the Soviets used in space or what Gagarin might have used, for instance, or actually this was a bit before him because it was a design. It was known as the Scafander Kosmiceski which meant a diving suit for space and again you were just it was mostly to protect the space person it wasn't really that useful for doing stuff uh but one of the groups of people who were really against the spacesuit were the people who designed the spacecraft because they said that our spacecraft is so good that actually you don't need a space suit. Garan will be absolutely fine. And for anybody who wants to find out more about what I mentioned, it was nineteen sixty four, Edward Makukan Colosa was the one who formed the Zambian space program and would train astronauts by rolling them. Okay.. Gosh Was it the Faroe Islands had a space I think it might still have a space agency, but they they expressly say we are not trying to get into space. We're gonna maybe like try and at like talk to some satellites or we're gonna like they expressly say we are not trying to get to the moon, we're not trying to get to Mars, but it's useful to have this funding because you never know what technology is gonna come from it and stuff like that. Well that makes sense. Um the Smithsonian, you know, they uh Washington-based, well they're they're all over America. They've got a lot of incredible collections. Shoe space museum. And in Maryland, they have a facility which contains a spacesuit morgue. Successful ones. So these but just the spacesuits are not being used anymore. Yes. And they have I read a write up of it which sounds so creepy. It's got 150 spacesuits in there. They're all sort of lying on bunks face up. They all contain soft dummies. And oh really. And the I read about uh this should be the setting of some horror. It's fantastic. Absolutely. And th there's a woman who looks after them, or she did certainly ten years ago. She was called Amanda Young and says she plays mummy to them. And she says, you know, there's Neil and there's John. And you know, like last week we had Nina Conte on the show. I don't know if you know Nina. Um but she told us about or actually Dan told us, but she knew about this place where they had all their old ventriloquist dummies. I think there's definitely something where you go and visit all these different really, really creepy places. There's gotta be a show for that. Deliso Chaponda's creepy ass places. Good. Okay, cool. Twenty percent. There are still developments happening in spacesuit worlds. Oh yeah. So right now something is being worked on which is very sci-fi based. It's um it's to solve the problem that at the moment if you do a spacewalk, you wear what's called a maximum absorbency garment, which is a fancy way of saying a nappy. It can take two liters of urine, which is a lot. But how much saltsenitsin can it take? But it's really uncomfortable to wear one of those, especially if you're out there all day working on something on the outside of a s a space ship, you know. Um so and it you give it can give you a rash, it can leak. Astronauts say that at a certain point they can no longer tell if it's urine or sweat in their suits. It's really unclear. It's so uncomfortable being out there. It's it's incredibly harsh. It's not as glamorous as you think, is it? It's not as glamorous as you think. And you we loads in space because the gravity difference means that the fluid moves differently in your body and it's physically very demanding and you're sweating and we are just it's oh it's awful. Okay. Wait, though they're working on a suit now which is going to be drinkable water from urine in practically real time. Oh okay. I would argue still not that glamorous. Your brain has to go around that hurdle. Oh yeah, it does. But this is basically like they have in Dune. You know in Dune they have a still suit and you and it it keeps all sorry, good point. They were it's like in Battlestar Galactica. No, okay. Urine everything and instantly turns into s something that you drink. Yeah. So you can walk and be in the desert for a very long time or in the exactly. And this is they've now got it so that half a liter of urine can become water in as little as five minutes. Do they add some I would put a little bit of cordial in there at least just to take the edge off. And then you're like that's why it's yellow. I'm excited. Yes, that sounds very good. Well that was one of the just to bring it back to this original suit again, um it did everything. It had extra mittens that you would put on. Uh they they thought of everything. The one thing they did not think of was to add anything that dealt with feces or urine. And so there was absolutely nothing as part of the disign. In Britain we don't need to worry about those kind of things. Yes, the the Dune novels are very silent on what happens to the feces in your still suit. No one needs that chapter. No one was reading and like that's what's missing. Well I I'm just amazed they did any editing at all when I look at those books. The other thing about spacesuits is they often don't fit, right? Because they have to make them and they don't necessarily or certainly in the olden days, they didn't make them for each person 'cause you didn't know who was going to do the trip. So, you know, Neil Armstrong's spacesuit was made for someone Neil Armstrong-ish. Yeah. This is why Vin Diesel never became a successful astronaut. Sure. You wanted to be one. Did he? Oh no, I'm saying I'm this is a joke. I thought this was like a little thing we didn't. Is he is he particularly differently shaped? He must be quite muscly, mustn't he? Is he? Yeah, I'm thinking of the rock. I meant to say the rock. The rock it would work. He's a muscular type. He's no the he's no the rock though, isn't you? He's no 21, so this is really interesting, a thing called the jaggedness principle. And basically if you take like okay, I gotta work out how big my head is, right? Okay, it's this many inches and my nose is this long and my shoulders are this big and my little fingers this big and my big toes this big. When you put all those different things together, no one is average. Oh, because everyone's unique. Okay, I've got you. Yeah, exactly. And so they did a thing in the nineteen forties where they were looking at the cockpits of pilots uh and they took ten body measurements from a population of four thousand pilots and found that zero of them were in the average range for absolutely everything. Interesting. And so some of them would have been like, Oh, this this seat's a little bit tight on my bun and then some of them were like, Oh this cockpit's a little bit low, I can't really fit my thing in. Uh and that's something you have to deal with all the time. Yeah. That's interesting. Roll Dahl writes about being a pilot of very elderly maybe biplanes. I think it was Gloucester Gladiator he was flying. And he was six foot four. Wow. And you were meant to be about five foot ten to fly these things. And he just had he was just like an accordion folded up in the cockpit. He's just writes about being so uncomfortable in that you say about you, Andy? You've got a is it a long torso or a No, I keep my height in my legs. You keep your height in your legs. I tell these guys every week to Lisa and they never listen, they never remember. This is what you have in common with the rock. He's too muscly for airplanes. And you keep the height where do you keep it? I keep my height in my legs. In your legs, sorry. For some reason he's not written back about uh my double act uh buddy comedy idea yet. One guy's really strong, one guy's got big legs. Not big legs, just long legs really. Um what a crime fighting team we would make. Dwayne if you are listening, please do get in touch. I need to lift up this car from this baby on the floor. Oh well I need to step over that gate. 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. rece Toive your pay package, 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 is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the last Queen album released while Freddie Mercury was alive was named after his favourite words to play at Scrabble. Amazing. Fantastic Bohemian Rhapsody. No, that's wasn't an album, was it? Probably. Uh so uh I was looking for Scrabble facts because DeLiso I read an interview where you say that you rarely lose at Scrabble. I'm very good at Scrabble. I'm I'm I'm a Scrabble maniac. They were like, Oh, you're African. We should have a big African background for you, you know what I mean? Like and and we'll design like I was like, No, no, no Scrabble. So I literally have a Scrabble board with my name on it as as as my background because that's I am such a scrabble And also in Scrabble there's only one letter X, so you can't get the three X's. Ah, very smart. Thank you. So rarely said on this podcast, Philly, so thank you. So I was looking for Scrabble facts and I found that Queen liked to play it when or liked to play it when they were on tour and also that the games used to get quite heated. And not not quite as rock and roll as you imagine. You know what I mean? Like backstage activity, playing Scrabble even heated is But you've got to do something after the cocaine wears off and after the the orgy has wound down. It's true. Yeah, once the the or odgydgi'ess of wound down? Um so I was reading a biography of Freddie Mercury called A Kind of Magic by Mark Blake. Uh and in that he said that innuendo was one of Freddie's favourite words to use, presumably 'cause it has lots of vowels in it.. Yes And that was what gave him anything. I can't imagine it comes up a lot. In UNDO. As it were. Well, you know what? Actually, Deliso, before we came on out, we were talking about our different Scrabble techniques. But you said that you have a special rule for your scrabble. Oh yes. If you put in a dirty word, uh any sexual word or any word that can be used in a dirty context, you get double points. Right. Okay. And so but how do you do you have a dictionary of dirty words? No, no, no. You just have to explain to the other person that it's dirty because most of them are but if you put in a word which is debatable whether it's dirty, you have to use it in a sentence to explain why it's actually dirty. Do you guys know um as your scrabbleheads what you would get numbers wise, points wise, within your wendo if you didn't land on any triples or just those points, I feel like it'd be quite low scoring. Yeah. I think the D must be worth two, is it? It is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine is correct. Now, Innuendo isn't the only Scrabble word that is aen Que album that you can use. Oh. Because there's two other Queen albums. There's Queen, their self-titled first album. That would be a lot of points. That is a lot of points. 14. 15? 14? 14. But you're the one that's gonna get you most is their album Jazz. Yes. Very nice. But you'd have to use a blank for the 'cause there's only one Zed. Oh is there? So but Jay is eight, is it? Oh yeah, that'd be nine what, nineteen? Yeah. Pretty good. And it would be twenty-nine if you but you can't, as you say, use a second one. Now, interestingly as well. Also, actually, jazz mags have sexy people in them, so it's double points. Double points? I don't know if that would work. Jizz would work. But jazz, we it wouldn't wouldn't be double. Very big. Here's another thing, for a band that loves Scrabble. Now if the four of us were playing Scrabble right now, not a single one of us has a name that is a Scrabble word. However, three of the four Queen members were Scrabble words. Were they? Ah Freddie Mercury. What Merc Mercury. Mercury' is a word. Youve got Brian May. May works. And then the bass player Deacon. Oh yes. A deacon. A deacon in church. In church, yeah. Dan is a word. D-A-N. Belt in in martial arts. Oh very much. I think it's in our dictionary. Okay. Well that's the other thing about Scrabble is actually in the official rules it says before you start you have to decide what dictionary you're using. Yes. So you can use any dictionary you want if you want. You could use Green's dictionary of slime to just have rude words. Yes. Yes. Yeah, my Schreiber would be in a German game of Scrabble would be applicable. Hunter in a British uh middle name. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So anyway, Mercury is fourteen, you've got Deakin at nine, and then you've got May at eight. And then unfortunately Taylor, who is Roger Taylor, doesn't apply because it's not spelt uh spelled with a Y instead of an I unless you accept place names. In which case there is an American town called Taylor and then that could apply. But again, it depends on your rules. There is a um there is an extra Queen album that you haven't mentioned, Dan. Oh yeah. Freddie Mercury's stamp album, which was another of his hobbies. Oh he collected stamps. He collected stamps. It was bought by the British Postal Museum in nineteen ninety three. Yeah, he was a big stamp collector, as was John Lennon. I mean wait a minute, isn't there a fact about them being on a stamp? Yes, there is. Brian May was the only living person. It's Roger Taylor, the drummer, is the only living person to appear on a stamp because you have to be dead in order to be on a stamp So Freddie is in the front of it and there's yeah No, no, no, but when the Queen was alive wasn't sure. Sorry, other than a Ralph or something. Sorry. Sorry I was being pedantic, but yes, I see okay. So in a very vague, misty way you can see Roger Taylor in the back and so he's the only living personage to make an ultimate stand. Nothits like it used to be. Um I read an interview with Mark Nyman who was the first British player to ever win the World Scrabble Championships. He was speaking to the observer. And he said that every every week he hears about some other celebrity who plays Scrabble. So Robbie Williams, Sting, Christina Araguilera, Avril Levine, uh, and Martin Iman said there should be a celebrity scrabble. So I'm thinking the Lisa Chaponda's celebrity scrabble. I I lost it. I'm I'm in. I'm in, but I'd want to play. I'll tell you this is the problem is you get invited on all these shows and you think you're there to play and they just want you to do silly stuff. And I'm like, I wanna play. I wanna play I was invited on the countdown and I was ready. I've spent the whole week training myself and getting better. Like no no no we just want you on library corner and I was like nerdy rock stars all right yeah once you get very famous let's say if you're a rock star yeah. You have a lot of money. You often have a lot of space. You have a lot of time because you're on you deal on stage at eight. And also because you've spent your childhood in your bedroom on your own learning how to play guitar, you're often quite nerdy, I think. Like quite a lot of the musicians that I know, for instance, are kind of on the nerdy side. Absolutely. Exactly. Well, um Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, who you're familiar with, James. Yeah, yeah. You know him, Fences. I know he does. Was once ranked, and that's fences in the fences. It isn't necessarily nerdy, it's a weapon. No, and also Bruce likes to fence with um a lightsaber. That's nerdy. That is really and you're gonna get hurry. Yeah so there's four official swords that you can use in modern fencing and it's the epay, the sabre, foil, the foil, and the lightsaber. The lightsaber's now of officificialal. It's, yeah. And Bruce got one. I need to start watching this. Bruce got one of the first like official lightsabers that you used to do. I watched this whole aside, but I watched combat juggling. If you ever have a chance to see this, see this. It's two jugglers facing off. They have to constantly juggle, but they can knock each other's batons out with another batons. And they can distract. It was amazing. And it's a whole big sport. It was in like a little it was like in a high school arena kind of thing and I was just like their sports, you didn't know exist. Okay, what am I talking about here? Rod Stewart's is enormous. Neil Young has a special name for his. Pete Waterman has displayed his in Chester Cathedral. His ordinary And Jules Holland's stretches from London to Berlin. I think I know because very famously Yeah they have enormous penis as well. Yeah I know the first one I got it as well I think Model Railway. Oh model Yes. Wait, but how can you have a model railway which stretches from one place to another? Well the model is a model of the journey from London Bellet. But Pete Waterman is the producer behind Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley and Steps. Steps. Yeah, the biggies. Um recently built a twenty meter model railway for Chester Cathedral. Wow. I just find it so he spends hours making fake trees. He has a massive model of Lemmington railway station, which is where he train spotted as a boy. I just think it's so charming. I love it. Speaking of Pete Waterman, you just mentioned, do you know who is an absolute scrabble fiend? Oh. Kylie Minogue. Really? Yes. And this is according to Salman Rushdie.