Okay, all right, let's do this.

Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the

Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My name is Dan Shriver. Please welcome to the stage the other three elves. It's Aniches Insky, James Harkin and Andy Murray.

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 this week is that the first man to swim the English Channel later had a show where he floated in a tank for two hours.

That was his show. His name was Matthew Webb and to get extra funding he would do a special endurance show where he floated in a tank for 128 hours.

Wow, that's one hour better than the guy stuck in the rock. Yeah. Probably as interesting as well in terms of a feature length movie. Yeah.

I mean without a flotation device. Without a flotation device. Yeah. And that's really impressive. It's very impressive. Yeah. In a boat it's not quite as impressive.

It's just basically a big swimming pool right where he's just paddling around. Yeah, I'm trading water I guess is what it was doing. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

So he wasn't lying on his back. That's not floating. I think that's just swimming. Like a child.

I got very philosophical very early on. The first time he ever did this kind of floating for as long as possible it was against a newfoundland dog.

He had a bet that he'd be able to float for longer than a dog and he won his bet. Did the dog die?

As they fish the dog out. Victory for Webb. I mean did the dog even know it was taking part in a bet?

Captain Webb won a year's supply of Pettigree Chum. So this is Captain Webb. This is who we're talking about British hero.

Yeah. And he was amazing. This was 1875 when he did this and when he swam the channel that is. And after that he didn't really stay famous.

He tried to keep himself famous by doing these endurance events and things like that. But he found it quite hard.

But I read that he was so famous that when he came back from the channel swimming and he went back to his hometown with a band procession going on he was so loved that even a pig got up on his trotters to look at him as he went by.

The pig know that it was taking part in a procession.

In 1883 just eight years after he was the hero of the nation. He tried to swim across a particular bit of the river down from Niagara Falls and it was extremely dangerous.

And more than 10,000 people turned up to watch him and he drowned there. He was dragged under a current and his body was found a few days later.

And he was doing it to try and provide for his family.

So I was going through the newspaper archives and before he did it every single headline about what he was about to do said you know where the engages in suicidal endeavor.

...