This is the Technical Difficulties, we’re playing Citation Needed.
Joining me today: he reads books, y'know, it’s Chris Joel.
“Hello!”
Everybody’s favourite Gary Brannan, Gary Brannan.
♫ I-i-if women like that like men like those, then why don’t women like me? ♫
Singing(!)
And the bounciest man on the internet, Matt Gray.
Howdy, YouTube!
- Oh! - Satire.
- Oh! - Nice. Nice.
In front of me I’ve got an article from Wikipedia and these folks can’t see it.
Every fact they get right is a point and a ding
and there's a special prize for particularly good answers which is...
And today we are talking about John Stonehouse.
Did he live in a greenhouse?
Completely against type.
Now's when you ding, Tom(!)
No. I can’t give you that.
Am I close?
No...
In any way?
No.
Was he... a bricklayer?
Stone House? No. No he wasn’t.
He did go to work in a House, and there’s a capital H in that.
A House of something.
Cards.
Fun.
Ill repute.
I mean, you’re pretty close with House of Cards.
Parliament.
Yes, have a point.
- Oh! - Yay.
Born in Southampton, educated there and at the London School of Economics.
So was he not a politiciser?
And then he went into politics, as the Labour Cooperative Member of Parliament.
So he owned some small supermarkets(?)
Erm, sort of...
Did you hear that? Clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk!
“Archivist gear engaged.
“Everybody else shut up, I know the answer.”
I don’t! But you do still have Cooperative Labour MPs.
In what sense?
They don’t sit at the back going, “F*** no.
“It’s bollocks, we’re not doing it.”.
Pretty much.
He worked very closely to the Foreign Office.
There was the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the India Office and then another one.
Commonwealth.
Ooh, no…
No, it’s pre-Commonwealth. Empire?
Halfway between the two.
Com-pire.
Places We Stole Office.
Yes, it’s the Colonial Office, so yes, I will give you the point for that, absolutely right.
Yes, he became Minister for State for Technology and then took a role…
Was he going around people’s houses trying to sell cable?
You never had that?
Not from the Colonies Office, no!
He moved on from there, this was...
You said technology, I don't for...
I know nothing about politics or other countries! I've got to go somewhere.
I’ve just realised that...
Would you like some Colonial Cable?
I’ve just realised, we’ve not actually touched on telegraphs yet
and we have to do that at least once or twice a seas…
Oh, f*** off!
Yes, he became Minister for State for Technology, but that meant he then transitioned into what?
And this was in charge of telecommunications as well as telegraphy, everything like that.
- Post Office. - Postmaster General.
You’re both getting the point. He was the Postmaster General of the United Kingdom.
Hell of a title, that.
Yes. He was also the last Postmaster General of the United Kingdom.
Oh God, what did he do?
Nothing, they’ve just all been really specific since.
(Yes!)
Sorry, Matt!
Specific...
Oh…
Anything that has General on the end sounds great, anyway.
He oversaw the jamming of something.
A marmalade factory.
There’s this sort-of jam war going on where they just…
He’s holding toast at the other end.
That’s Wallace and Gromit, isn’t it, actually?
We must stop this terrible conflict...
to preserve life.
Ohhh!
Even the audience was half-hearted on that one.
Wouldn’t want people to end up marmalised.
1970, he oversaw the jamming of something.
’70?
1970.
- Is it pirate... - Pirate radio!
Yes. I’ll give you the point there, specifically what, where’s it coming from?
- Luxembourg? - North Sea?
You’re thinking Radio Luxembourg but no, you’re absolutely right, it’s off in the North Sea.
This was one of the Radio Carolines.
- Oh! - Was it?
You see I didn’t say that because I thought it was a leading question
and it would be wrong.
Yes, but this isn’t QI! You’re allowed to go for that answer here.
Awooga!
So he jammed Radio Caroline and part of the response to that
was that Radio Caroline did what?
Jammed them right back.
No, that actually would be... not illegal, but it certainly would be, I think,
a declaration of war if you do that to a country.
And when it comes to boats we’ve probably got the bigger shooty ones in town.
We might have slightly more.
Because Caroline was on and off for a bit. So was it off for a bit?
It was, they tried to overcome the jamming, obviously,
what were they sending back over the airwaves?
Swear words. Filthy streams of invective…
They could have done, they were offshore.
Don’t forget Radio Caroline wasn’t illegal,
they just made it so that any British person associating with it was breaking the law.
“Vote for the other ones.”
Yes, absolutely right, they went political
and they started broadcasting pro-Conservative propaganda back at them.
Sorry! Pirate radio station broadcasting pro-Conservative messages?
Let that sink in for a minute.
“Vote Tory!”
Yeah, you wouldn’t get that these days would you? Blimey.
No, there’s no pirate radio stations!
- There are. - Oh, there are.
I was going to say, presumably you have deal with those, Matt.
Yes, they interfere over the broadcasts that we are trying to make at work.
And then we report them to OFCOM and then they find them
and say no, you’re being naughty, please don’t do that.
When you said deal with them, that suggested you somehow
went round at night and dealt with them.
With a baseball bat.
Matt Gray does have a black ski-mask and an awful lot of black turtlenecks.
A van just comes out of the OFCOM offices with you guys in.
John Stonehouse, still in charge of post and telecommunications in the 1970s, introduced what?
It’s not stamps or anything because they’re already there...
Oh, it is.
- Is it stamps? - Second-class...!
Is it second-class stamps?
Absolutely right, first and second-class stamps. These all seem…
(You f***er!)
...fairly normal. In 1970 he was setting up various companies, having things on the side.
By 1974 most of these were in financial trouble.
What did he decide to do?
Print himself a whole book of stamps as legal tender
and pay off his debts with a massive box full of stamps.
That would have been a better plan than the one he actually had.
Issue a single £150,000 stamp on the quiet to a collector.
Also a better plan than what he did.
Jesus Christ! Rob a bank.
With stamps.
Hang on, did he invent selfie stamps,
where you could send in a selfie and you’d have your own stamp?
He didn’t set up his pirate radio station did he, playing pro-Tory propaganda?
He’s in deep financial trouble here,
he’s doing creative accounting so he’s going to be going to jail.
Did he disappear?
Oh, a little bit more than that.
Is he…?
Did he fake his death?
Yes, he did. He faked his…
Is he one of these clothes on the beach guys and disappears?
Spot on. Exactly right, he faked his death, November 1974,
leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach.
Whose clothes?
His clothes.
Where was he actually going?
Cuba!
Australia.
That’s a long swim.
You’re one better than me, I was going to say a long walk
which would have been quite stupid.
Well, swimming it naked, he’s going to get cold.
He is. Maybe he slathered himself in goose fat beforehand.
And, hell, he’s going the wrong way round, he should have gone from LA.
Yeah, the man’s a fool.
Goose fat is what you use, I’m right aren’t I?
That’s what you use for cross-channel swimming.
Yes, when you’re swimming from Miami to Australia, that’s what you use.
Goose fat, yes.
Most people use their arms and legs. Gary, goose fat.
-“It’ll be fine!” - Just bobs around...
“Gary, there’s a breaker.”
“It’s fine, the goose fat'll save me!”
Ejecting it from behind, like propulsive goose fat.
Hey, a goose gives out a lot of fat, you know.
He’s just leaving this greasy trail on the ocean as he goes.
“Gary Brannan’s greasy ocean trail.”
Hell of a series.
I once did a goose at Christmas and it put out...
A single goose-- now in all fairness I got it from a budget supermarket
so it may not have been the very best of geese, let’s be honest.
Budget supermarkets sell geese?
For a tenner!
Yes, they just get them from the local pond, and you know…
Ask no questions, tell no lies. That’s the way I looked at it.
But I did, and it pumped half a litre of fat.
It didn’t even drip out, it literally just leaked fat.
You know those things when you get oil wells and there’s a gusher…
“Goose fat, we’re rich! Ah, I'm greasy...”
“Quick take me to the Channel! This is my only chance!”
“White gold!”, he cried.
Did it deep fry itself? Half a litre?
It just... you put it on an angle to let it all drain out
and it just kept coming and coming and coming.
It was a whole big mincemeat jar that big was nearly full of goose fat.
No man in the world can eat that much roast potatoes, is what I’ve found.
Sorry, can I just point out:
mincemeat jar full of goose fat, that’s quite a northern thing to say…
So yes, Stonehouse, meanwhile. Stonehouse was... I’m just trying to pull this back.
It was in my fridge for months!
I remember, you sent me a picture of it!
You actually sound closer to tears than laughter, Gary.
Because, just after we’d had this massive Christmas dinner where I’d done the goose.
I got all this goose fat, the holy grail of Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes...
Went on a f***ing diet and I never touched the stuff.
AUDIENCE: Aww.
And in this jar was…
John Stonehouse…
Seamless(!)
John Stonehouse was en-route to Australia
setting up a new life with his mistress and secretary.
Are they two separate people?
Was he just being a real arse and taking his mistress and his secretary?
Well, who was his new identity? Whose identity had he taken on?
Did he nick a dead person's?
Yes, he did. Deceased husband of a constituent.
So he deposited cash at one bank, picked it up at another and the teller was suspicious
and reported him to local police.
The police, when they interviewed him,
asked him to drop his trousers. Why?
Normal.
Was the person he was pretending to be a eunuch?
No, just his trousers, just his trousers.
Well they’re looking for an identifying mark, are they not? So tattoo or birthmark.
Yes... neither. This is 1974.
Lord Lucan!
Yes. They suspected that he was Lord Lucan who had very famously disappeared,
there’s a whole separate story there.
Someone suspiciously turning up with an English accent in Australia,
depositing large sums of money.
Who is obviously on the run...
Lord Lucan had a large scar down his leg.
So the police were going, well, drop your trousers,
we want to see if you’re Lord Lucan. He wasn't...
Did he debag himself in aid of the…
Because if he did, and he dropped his trousers and there’s no scar,
he should surely be let go.
Yes, and then they’re not going to be suspicious of him ever again.
Yes, he was still arrested, they just knew he wasn’t Lord Lucan.
Oh.
“We know you’re somebody but we don’t know who.
“Standard procedure, drop the trousers.”
That was essentially... yeah, that would have been 1974.
“What do we do second?” “I don’t know, it’s never failed.”
“Every arse tells a story.”
“All right, we’re going to need to get your arse print here,
“please just sit in this ink for a little while, and then on this paper...”
“Just reverse onto this paper.”
“It’s thumbprint. Thumbprint!”
He’s arrested, six months later he’s deported to the UK.
He’s remanded in Brixton prison. What has he not done at any point during this?
Pulled his trousers up.
Walked really waddly all the way.
“They haven’t said I could,” he said.
Changed his name back?
Bear in mind his job.
As Postmaster General, ex…
Sorry, what was that?
Postmaster General, ex-Postmaster General.
Was he still in the same job? Had he not been sacked?
- Yes. - Oh, s***!
He did not resign as an MP.
Oh, boy!
So did he come back to massive fines for not having done his job properly?
- No, he was an MP. - You don’t get fined for not doing your job.
He just kept being an MP and getting his salary.
Were they still paying him throughout the entire time he buggered off?
Well, at this point, he had to have his trousers down
because of the sheer size of his balls.
He was put on trial on 21 charges of fraud, theft, forgery, conspiracy to defraud,
causing a false police investigation and wasting police time.
He sounds right for an MP.
Trial was 68 days long. He conducted his own defence.
That’s brave.
Yeah, it didn’t work all that well.
Did he just drop his trousers when he could?
And say repeatedly, “not Lord Lucan” because it worked the first time.
After his release he worked as a fundraiser,
joined what became the Liberal Democrats,
wrote some novels, started a small business that sold hotel safes.
I'm speeding through all this…
- Hotel safes? - Hotel safes.
Because he’s used to embezzling money…
They had a funnel that went directly to his bank account.
“Put money in my safe!” “No, f*** you!”
- “You put money in your safe!” - “Invest in my company…”
It hasn’t got a back on it!
More than 20 years after his death, something was revealed about him.
He was Lord Lucan?
He just had a lot of bio-oil.
I thought he was going for the button to say yes then!
No, no, way, way back in his political career,
he’d negotiated an agreement of technological cooperation
between Britain and Czechoslovakia, as was.
Uh oh. Is he a spy?
Oh, he's sp-- in fact--
The minute you say 'information sharing' and 'Czechoslovakia' which is in the former Soviet bloc,
he’s not going to just be going and eating their fine pastries, is he?
Yes, it turned out that he’d been an agent
for the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic military intelligence.
S***, he’s Postmaster General!
Yes.
That’s why it takes so long for your post to arrive!
I’m going to give you a point for twigging that before I made the connection there.
It goes via Czechoslovakia!
He was Minister in Charge of Post and Technology.
And that includes things like the Post Office Tower and things like that,
that are transmitting signals around the world.
Yes.
This is pretty bad s*** isn’t it, let’s face it. This is bad news bears.
Somehow the embezzling and taking someone else’s identity
is yet not the worst thing about this man.
- No. - Because he’s used to it!
That’s true, that.
At the point where the government found out about this,
Margaret Thatcher was in power. What did she decide to do?
- Nothing? - Privatise him.
Yes, he will work with more efficiency as a privately owned scumbag.
British politics jokes there.
Well, either nothing or something, is what I’m going for there.
Chris, choose one of those options.
I’m going with something.
You’re wrong. It’s nothing.
Oh…
It was easier to cover it up and never let the public know
that there had been a Czech spy in government.
Because they’d obviously done no Czechs on him!
Oh…
Yes.
At the end of the show...
Congratulations, Matt, you win this one.
How?
Genuinely, you got a lot of dings in there.
You win breakfast food prepared by the star of Sherlock.
It’s Eggs Benedict Cumberbatch.
F***ing...
Do enjoy that.
With that, we say thank you to Chris Joel.
It’s over!
To Gary Brannan.
To Matt Gray.
Bye-bye YouTube.
I’ve been Tom Scott, we’ll see you next time.