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.

My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Annotishinsky, and Andrew Hunt

to Murray. And once again we have gathered around 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 Anna. My fan 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 said Lynne. Right so there was this

guy called Rex Lambert and he watched 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 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 accused Rex of being a 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, re-threaded a

little bit like yeah this Rex got hurt, you're 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 mongies and sought you racked out. And they did

had 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.

Two that he once said in his magazine The Listener television won't matter in your lifetime or mine.

That's the only two things he's remembered for. He did die two weeks after saying that and he was

...