Hello and welcome to a special Halloween edition of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin,
Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go.
Starting with fact number one and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that in the 1930s the ghost of a swearing mongoose led the BBC to revise its working conditions.
This is quite a story so Settle in.
Right so there was a guy called Rex Lambert and he worked at the BBC.
He was the editor of the BBC magazine The Listener and he got interested in a story of a talking mongoose who lived at that time on the Isle of Man.
So he went to the Isle of Man, investigated this talking mongoose and wrote kind of kind of published a book about it.
Anyway he had a rival, a career rival who sat on the board of the BFI with him which he was also on,
who decided to use this to bring him down so accuse Rex of being a crazy crazy man
because he believed in this talking mongoose and essentially Rex sued this other guy for slander and he won and
that whole case kind of drew into sharp relief the fact
that the BBC wasn't treating its employees very well because the BBC was a little bit unlawed,
Ruth were a little bit like yeah this Rex got you right he does sound like a bit of a loon and so after that then the government got involved and was like look BBC you've got to start treating your staff better even
if they do believe in talking mongoose and sort your act out and they did it changed their rules and policies.
I feel a bit sorry for Rex Lambert because whenever you look him up on the internet all you can find is one
that he believed in talking mongooses and two
that he once said in his magazine The Listener television won't matter in your lifetime or mine.