Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray,
and today's special guest, it's author of a new book called Male Obsession, it's Mark Mason.
And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, Andy Murray.
My fact is that for the Queen's coronation, people dressed up as television sets.
It's past the giggle test, Andy.
So this is, I read this in an article by the historian Kate Williams in the Observer,
and it seems to come from a book of policemen's memoirs,
one of the first female beat police officers wrote a book of memoirs about her experiences,
and she describes it, and I think a couple of other sources say it as well.
So this is because it was such a huge thing for it to be televised.
Televisions were bought in huge numbers across the country for the coronation,
I think 20 million people watched, and on average, there were 17 people watching each TV set.
And I think of TVs at the time, they were tiny, you know, screens a few inches from corner to corner.
So you would just go to the person in your street who had a TV and you know.
Do you know what went up in sales as well?
So TVs went up massively in sales, and so did massive magnifying glasses,