Dan Snow, host of the History Hit podcast, shared the audio recording of the 84-year-old broadcast by Lieutenant Commander Thomas “Tommy” Woodrooffe and it has now been listened to more than 186,000 times.

Woodrooffe had been in the U.K.’s Royal Navy before becoming a broadcaster. He was tasked with covering a fleet review at Spithead, off Hampshire, England, on BBC radio on May 5, 1937. His clearly inebriated performance soon became a famous gaffe- but it was not to be his last.

Woodrooffe reportedly went drinking with some navy friends before the broadcast, according to a report from The Guardian newspaper in 2009.

Though some BBC staff expressed concern about Woodrooffe’s state, their bosses were positioned so far from the radio control rooms that he was not prevented from going on air at 10.45 p.m. local time to offer “commentary on the illuminations” of the fleet.

“At the present moment, the whole fleet is lit up. When I say ’lit up’, I mean lit up by fairy lamps,” Woodrooffe said, speaking from the HMS Nelson.

“We’ve forgotten the whole Royal Review…we’ve forgotten the Royal Review…the whole thing is lit up by fairy lamps. It’s fantastic, it isn’t the fleet at all. It’s just…it’s fairyland, the whole fleet is in fairyland.”

“Now, if you’ll follow me through…if you don’t mind…the next few moments…you’ll find the fleet doing odd things,” Woodrooffe said. “At the present moment, the New York, obviously, is lit out…and when I say the fleet is lit up…in lamps… I mean, she’s outlined. The whole ship’s outlined. In little lamps.”

Woodrooffe paused for a moment, and the told listeners: “I’m sorry, I was telling some people to shut up talking.”

At one point, a ship apparently turned, causing Woodrooffe to react with some alarm.

“It’s gone! It’s gone! There’s no fleet!” Woodrooffe said. “It’s disappeared! No magician who ever could have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared.”

“I’m trying to give you, ladies and gentlemen…the fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared” he went on “I was talking to you…in the middle of this damn…in the middle of this fleet…and what’s happened is the fleet’s gone, disappeared and gone. We had a hundred, two hundred warships all round us a second ago, and now they’ve gone, at a signal by the Morse code, at a signal by the fleet flagship which I’m in now, they’ve gone, they’ve disappeared.

“There’s nothing between us and heaven. There’s nothing at all,” he said.

At that point, the broadcast faded out as his bosses had made it to the control room. The BBC subsequently explained that Woodrooffe had been “tired and emotional” during the broadcast, which appears to have been the first use of the euphemism.

Woodrooffe was suspended for just a week and went on to make another famous gaffe during coverage of the Football Association (FA) Cup final in 1938, telling listeners in 119th minute of a scoreless match that he’d eat his hat if either team scored a goal.

When Preston North End scored the winning goal against Huddersfield Town seconds later, Woodrooffe fulfilled his promise by eating a hat-shaped cake on a BBC TV show. Woodrooffe died in 1978.