I everybody just before we start this week's show we have an exciting announcement to make and that is that the National Comedy Awards are coming up very soon and the great mother ship that is QI and the mother herself that is Sandy Talkswick. How creepy. I don't know how she'd feel about me calling her my mother but that is Sandy Talkswick are both up for awards. That's absolutely right. QI is nominated for Best Comedy Panel Show and

Sandy or mummy as I call her has been shortlisted for outstanding female comedy entertainment performance. We think that both are deserving winners so if you would like to go and vote for QI or for Sandy in those awards go to qi.com slash of vote so easy to do and so important that you get your vote in and help us destroy all comedy competition which is we all know is the point of comedy. Yes exactly flatten all that comedy and if you do want to remind yourself why they're the best.

All of QI is now available on BBC iPlay go and watch a few episodes and convince yourself that they both deserve to win that's qi.com slash vote do it now.

On with the show. On with the show.

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 sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray Anna Toshinsky and James Harkin 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 fact this week is that the first female composer to become a Dame used to tie herself to trees to improve her posture.

I have a question was her posture originally too bent so she stood next to a toll tree or was it originally too straight as she stood next to like a weeping willow or something to herself.

I tried to self-toward those really droopy branches. I believe it was to the trunk. She didn't specify I think she left it for us to assume this was an amazing woman called Ethel Smith.

She was writing music and conducting and creating you know operas and all sorts of classical music at the time of the 20th century and there's a new book coming out which covers her life.

It's going to be called Quartet. Sounds great coming out in spring by someone called Dr. Lear Broad and she read an account of an interview who went to meet Ethel Smith at one point to interview her about her music making and she found that she was tied to a tree.

Specifically to improve her posture as a conductor. Oh come on no something went wrong some sort of weird sex game went wrong.

The interviewer, what are you doing? Oh no it's for the old conducting. You're so right. Come on. She was actually one of her sex minks so I reckon it was that.

Yeah but you can't admit that to the interviewer first thing can you. And then you have to just carry that on for the rest of your career. You just got to know people are sort of recommending trees. You know you got a big pot plant with a thick trunk there and in the orchestra pit tied to it mid show which is what you should do.

She's amazing. Yeah she is incredible so she was very successful in her time given how unlikely it was for a woman to be successful in composing writing music.

What was her time specifically? She was born in 1858 she died in 1944. Yeah and a lot of her most famous works will have been around the 1880s, 1890s and the early 1900s.

Yeah and she was prolific. She wrote so much. She wrote six operas which operas are a big feat and plus loads of chamber music and orchestral and stuff. She played for Queen Victoria and for Edward VII.

She was so ambitious that we know that she kept a diary throughout her childhood and she wrote in her diary age eight that she intended to be made appear because of her musical prowess.

Oh she was. That's amazing. That's good to have something to aim for isn't it?

Yeah. Because actually when she was a child I read that she was quite good at sports. This was on the Surrey Government website and it said from the beginning when she was a child she won a bet for writing a pig.

And to the end of her long life she was a keen sports woman. Really? So yeah that shows how keen you are in sports. She was. She definitely won lots of contests and in lots of different sports I think she was very vigorous picture like a good mistrunch bull maybe.

So she did like mountaineering tennis hunting cycling golf golf. She was very keen on golf. She did do golf.

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