Fascinating Facts and Trivia

When phone lines or electrical cables are cut by builders slicing through with the bucket on a JCB the industry call the effect on the lines 'Backhoe fade'.
And apparently moles like to eat the fibre optic cables.
I can't think why this might be fascinating ATM

Probably one of the cleverest and best newspaper headlines(could have been The Sun) was created when Inverness Caledonian Thistle managed to beat Celtic in a game they weren't supposed to win. It went Super Cali Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious (echoing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins)

Julia Gale featured in quite a few pop videos in the 80's Depeche Mode's See You, ABC Poison Arrow etc but you might know her more famous brother(who had to change his name) the ex-Blue Peter presenter and once Chief Scout, Peter Duncan - he had appeared in a small role in Flash Gordon where to test your manhood you put your arm into a tree stump and avoided the 'green death', some sort of alien snake that would bite you.

Dennis Waterman is known as a hard man but he started off his career(along with a very young Phil Collins) in a few Children's Film Foundation films - the kids arm of the British Film Institute once.

Michael Caine never said "Not a lot of people know that"-that was attributed to an answerphone message set up by the late comic actor Peter Sellers.
Similarly, BBC stalwart commentator of football and athletics, David Coleman never said 'Remarkable!"-that was down to impressionist Rory Bremner who also did Barry Norman, and he never said "And why not!"

There is no specific time zone at the South Pole.

This is because all the longitude lines on the planet meet up there.

The stations on the South Pole use the time zone of the country that owns them, meaning two stations near each other could be using two different time zones.

There was a type of Pterodactyl with a bigger wingspan than a fighter jet.

The remarkable beast’s remains were dug up in Romania.

Standing as tall as a giraffe, it’s believed the flying reptile would have weighed about half a ton.

With a wingspan of 39 foot, it would have been bigger than the roughly 33-foot wingspan of an F16 fighter jet.

The Queen's handbag is a body language communication device.

It is used by her to relay secret and silent messages to her staff.

For example, if she is finished speaking to a guest she will move it from one arm to another and her aides will politely end the conversation, or if she wants to abruptly end a conversation she will put her bag on the ground.

Bowler Hats were designed by London hatters Thomas and William Bowler (hence the name).

The hat was invented to keep horse riders’ heads safe from branches

BBC microphone faders are different to those at other studios.
We've all seen the slide or lever controls on control panels in TV or recording studios. We even might have something like them on our home hifi or whatever.
When you see them you'd expect to see zero nearest you and ten at the top. To increase the volume you push away.
However I read years ago (and saw for myself on a visit to Bush House) that those in BBC studios are arranged so that you push away to decrease the volume.
The thinking is that instinctivly if you experiece something unpleasant you push it away from yourself and therefore if, in a live broadcast, the interviewee utters a profanity the sound would be muted mid ''fu'' more quickly.
I would imagine that this must cause problems in a broadcast industry where for example a person in the gallery is BBC trained and finds himself working in an independant studio. When asked by a presenter to fade up her microphone he might just fade it down and that could lead to the viewer hearing extraneous sound like background music for example

When the Police(Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers) appeared on Jonathan King's BBC2 Entertainment show in late 80's Sting and Copeland stated messing about play fighting which then escalated into a full scale scrap which resulted in Sting breaking some of his ribs -pop stars eh?