QI (2003–…): Season 13, Episode 15 - Mix and Match - full transcript
Host Stephen Fry matches wits with guests Alan Davies, Bill Bailey, Jo Brand and James Acaster, quizzing them on a mixed-up melange of M-themed topics.
Goooooood evening,
good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI,
where, tonight,
we're mixing and matching
a medley of things beginning with M.
Now, let's meet our makers.
The matchless James Acaster.
The match-fit Jo Brand.
The match made in heaven,
Bill Bailey.
And...
match abandoned, Alan Davies.
So, let's hear you mix.
James goes...
That's mixing. Is it?
Yeah, you're beating
an egg, I think.
Beating something.
Now.
You're on your first warning.
Jo goes...
Yes, that's masturbation
as I know it.
I'd love to know what the
machine is, wouldn't you?
Bill goes...
Ah, yeah. I like it, yes.
That's masturbation as I know it.
So, three mixes and Alan goes...
Ah, you see. A match. Yeah.
So, on with the game.
Now our first "M" tonight
is "M" for metals.
Can you see anything on this board
here that does not contain metal?
Oh. You've got a mushroom,
a balloon, a stack of coins,
a monkey, a star, an Alan Davies...
of some kind. An Alan Davies.
Well, bodies do contain metal,
so it can't be...
They do. It can't be you...
Alan, you contain metal.
Yes. You do. I do.
Enough iron to make a nail.
Alan specifically?
Yeah, just Alan.
Just Alan. He can make a nail.
But, no, that's right, isn't it?
The body contains enough
iron to make a nail -
phosphorus, carbon, water...
Magnesium. Lime.
Gold, actually. A person...
You could boil it down to
a half-decent kids' party.
You could get a paddling pool, some
fireworks and a tequila slammer.
All inside us, churning away.
All inside. So, it can't be Alan.
No, it's not me.
And I don't... I'm...
Now, look... Now.
Things that grow probably
have got metal in them... Yes.
..that's my thinking. Yeah.
The fact is, you've
brilliantly avoided everything,
cos all those things contain metals.
When the universe was created...
4,000 years ago...
4,000 years ago, as it
says in the Bible... by our Lord.
..only two elements were
created at that time.
Gold and silver.
Yes.
It was... Frankincense and myrrh.
Cheese and pickle.
They are still the most abundant
elements in the universe. Helium!
99% of the universe is composed of?
Helium and sarcasm.
Helium and...
Hydrogen?
Hydrogen is correct. Yes.
And then the first two
elements to be created,
after hydrogen and helium,
which are both gases,
were both metals.
Imagine God was rather depressed
by having created the universe.
A knife. I should think he
bloody well was. I would be. Yeah.
So, if you're depressed,
what's the metal you'd go for?
Lithium. Lithium.
Lithium was one of them,
and the other was beryllium.
Oh, beryllium. Beryllium,
I love that one. Beryllium.
And how were they created?
What was the process?
It was in the stars.
Fusion? Fusion.
You're on fire. Crikey!
Like the stars, very good.
Yeah.
And in that fusion,
EVERYTHING was made.
And we are, as Carl Sagan famously
said, we are made of star stuff.
We are made of the stuff that was
created in those fusion moments.
Yes, we are.
And astronomers call anything
that isn't the first two,
hydrogen and helium, a metal -
even if it's oxygen.
Are some people made of heavy metal?
Yeah. Lemmy. Lemmy.
Lemmy from Motorhead.
Death metal. That's a good one.
Yeah. Thrash metal.
Nu metal, when I was a teenager.
What's nu metal?
It was rap and metal together.
It went very badly.
Yeah, there was quite a lot of...
Quite a lot of that in it, yeah.
There was one I was told about that
was a mixture of techno and disco...
and it was called Tesco.
Then there was Valium metal,
and Tesco's own-brand metal.
Yeah, the human body contains
a lot of metal, even gold.
How many human beings
would you need to
extract the gold from
before you could make,
of them, a gold coin?
Just Mr T.
Yes, just that, yeah.
Very good, that's true.
Normal humans.
One million humans. No.
One billion humans. No, it's...
47.
Six.
This could take a long time. 40,000.
And how many different
metals have we got inside us?
72.
47.
Very close, it's 48!
Whoa! On fire!
Amazing. On fire!
In your face!
Did you just point at
Alan and say, "Eat it"?
No.
No, I pointed at him
and went, "On fire!"
Oh, "On fire." "On fire!"
It's most impressive.
And you're all right, in many ways.
To astronomers, anything that isn't
hydrogen or helium is a metal.
Even apparently normal metals
can be quite deceptive,
as this trick shows.
I'm going to get a glass of water,
and I'll get a teaspoon.
Right. Oh, I'll just... To prove
that it is water, I'll drink it.
That just proves it might be vodka.
It proves at least that it's not
sulphuric acid or something... Yeah.
..because what I'm going to do
is try and make this
teaspoon disappear.
It may not work.
I'm not a good magician,
I'm a great magician.
And so we stir it here and I...
Oh, don't, Oh, no...
Oh, it might not work,
it might work, I don't know.
I'm, oh...
Yeah, it seems to have worked. Ooh.
Wow!
There you are. Thank you.
That's rather good, isn't it?
Rather good. That's good. That is.
In fact, on this occasion,
it wasn't a magic trick,
and it's something you can do.
I'll give you your water and you'll
notice the water is rather warm.
Oh, it's warm.
It's warm water. Warm water.
And I'll give you
a couple of spoons.
They are metal, they're metal
spoons, but the metal...
Are they made out of Alka-Seltzer?
They might as well be -
they're made out of gallium.
And gallium is a metal...
A very useful metal.
Let's have a look... but it
has the quality that it melts,
as Alan is showing, in water.
Good Lord.
Oh, you wouldn't want that
of your teaspoon, would you?
No, it wouldn't make
a practical teaspoon.
That's lasting less time
than a biscuit. Yeah.
That's it. Look at that.
Now, if you stir it,
it'll happen more quickly.
Oh, good Lord, look at that.
Ah, jeez. That is...
That would be the most
annoying teaspoon in the world.
It really would, wouldn't it?
Now, oh.
But it's, like,
Terminator's teaspoon.
Yeah, exactly. Terminator 2,
it should be said.
Yes. Terminator two-spoon.
Hey!
Well, I hope you're impressed with
that. Wow. I'm very impressed. Yeah.
It's not poisonous, gallium, so
you can drink it again. I shan't.
OK. You can put your glasses away.
There you are, top man.
"Mmm, delicious."
OK, pop away.
Er... gallium.
Gallium was discovered in the 19th
century by a Frenchman... Yes...
..called Lecoq.
Oh...
And he called it gallium
because he was French
and he wanted to be
patriotic. Gaul.
Yeah. Exactly, as in our word
"Gallic."
But also, there's another word
which means "cockerel,"
Oh. Which is "gallus,"
so he called gallium after himself
as well as after his country.
So he was modest.
He was modest, exactly.
Staying with valuable metals,
though, what use did the world's
richest man have for wide trousers?
Yeah?
Did he have very fat ankles?
That would be useful.
Who was the world's richest man?
That's what we have to discover.
Is he alive today?
No. Was he a Greek bloke?
Was it... No... Rockefeller?
Wasn't Croesus, wasn't Rockefeller.
But it has been calculated,
quite recently in fact, that this
man was the richest man by any
standards... Ever?
..of which there has ever been. Oh!
Someone... Aladdin. Aladdin, yes.
I'm going to say, and I don't want
to upset anybody,
I'm going to say it's someone real.
Someone... Ah, someone from Fifa.
Someone from the 14th century.
He is M-M-of M-.
Murmansk. Did he come from Murmansk?
No.
Mesopotamia. No!
No, it's good, though. Margate.
He visited Mesopotamia...
Mick of Margate.
He visited Mesopotamia? Well...
Mu... Mohammed.....Arabia.
Muchti? The Muchti.
He was Muslim, so that's another M.
Ming the Merciless.
Ming the Merciless.
Mansa Musa.
Is the right answer, but... Who?
..you would have got more points...
The audience is very impressive,
isn't it? They are.
You'd only have got more points
if you'd said Mansa Musa I.
Ah.
But, no, Mansa Musa
is the right answer. Ah.
What's the country he's from?
Mess... Er... No.
Muh... Mer... Muk... Mali.
Mali. Mali!
Mali, he comes from, Africa.
Mali. And his riches came from gold.
Oh. He had so much gold,
you would not believe.
He was also a very faithful Muslim,
and he went on the Hajj to Mecca,
and on his Hajj, every Friday,
he stopped and he built a mosque,
but also, everyone he met,
he gave gold to.
Right.
By the time all these people went
to cash their gold in,
it destroyed the market for it.
And they suffered
from hyperinflation.
And he very generously tried to put
right what he'd done wrong,
so he bought the gold back,
but it still destroyed the whole
Mediterranean economy for ten years.
What an idiot.
He was trying to be kind. Well,
there's that saying, isn't there,
"No act of kindness
ever goes unpunished."
Yes! And I think that's very
true in this case. It is very true.
He was also quite a warrior,
and he had an army of 100,000, and
if he had a successful general, he
would reward him with wide trousers.
That's... That was the question!
If you had wide trousers it was
proof of your success as a general.
Wide trousers being what?
Oxford bags.
Pretty jolly wide.
Kind of Showaddywaddy. Yeah.
On his way back from Mecca,
he stopped and established this
city that became a great
centre for Islamic scholarship
and world scholarship
for the following century. Hmm.
Do you know what that town
was called?
On the way from Mecca to Mali. Yeah.
Closer to Mali than Mecca
by a long way. Mombasa.
No. There it is!
Good effort, though.
I keep looking at that picture
Iike I'm going to recognise it
or something.
Ah, yeah...
Is it Timbuktu?
Yes! Timbuktu.
Well done.
Yes, Mansa Musa of Mali made
medieval markets melt down.
From one golden age to another,
how did the ancient Britons
celebrate the merry month of May?
Jo. Was it pole dancing?
Oh, ha-ha...
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
That's not...
No, that's not what I said.
She's quite right.
You didn't say "maypole."
Human sacrifice, probably?
Human sacrifice, no, not that.
Mead? Mead is possible.
Cannibalism?
Not that we know of. We don't know
much about the ancient Britons.
If only they'd blogged more.
Murder - they would murder people
for a laugh.
Anyone who really liked April.
They'd murder them really badly.
Yeah.
Well, they would pick flowers.
Ugh.
As far as we know,
they didn't do much
other than the fact that it was
early summer,
Iate spring, and they would put
flowers in the house.
The things we think of -
Morris dancing and maypoles and the
Queen of the May and everything -
were all later inventions.
Morris dancing seems to have arrived
in the 15th century.
Oh, God, what a terrible year.
A bad year. They have
much to answer for. They have.
Do you know why it's called Morris
dancing, where that comes from?
It was just boredom. That's really
what it was, wasn't it?
A combination of boredom,
nothing to do and we might
as well do something.
Do a dance.
Do a dance. Yeah. Let's have
some mead and do a dance.
"What's your name?" "Morris."
"Right, we'll call it after you."
We think they borrowed the name
from the Spaniards,
who had a Morisco dance. Oh!
When they celebrated the expulsion
of the Moors, or Moriscos,
as in the word Morocco, from Spain,
and this dance came to England
by the 15th century, and we did that
sort of dance.
So it's a bit racist, really.
If you like, yeah.
Yeah. Well, maybe we could get it
banned on that account.
Got to try. Poor old Morris dancers.
Yeah. The most traditional way
to celebrate May Day
is to decorate
your house with flowers.
Our next M also grows in the ground.
Now, what sex is this mushroom?
What sex? What sex?
Well, it looks like a penis, so...
..I'm guessing it's female.
You see...
Now... Is it male, then?
Oh!
Is it asexual?
Well... it's not asexual, no.
Is it a stinkhorn?
Just doesn't have a gen...
We're going to come to stinkhorns.
But you can have a look.
I love them.
See if you can spot the organs
of generation on those.
Well, there's a mushroom. Yeah.
Fry it up, lovely.
It's difficult to tell, isn't it?
They're all sort of...
They're all vaguely suggestive
in some way, aren't they?
I mean... Yeah.
Any type of fungus will tell you
the same story -
they don't have genders.
They don't have sexes.
Oh, right. They do reproduce,
but they don't use gender as a...
Spores? Is it spores?
Spores, well, spores have to be...
Inseminated.
They have to be inseminated,
germinated.
But there is no gender, you don't
have a female or a male. Right.
Oh, you've made a whole new one
with a hat. I've made a new one.
It's like a French painter.
"Ah. Ah-ha-ho-ho."
But...
Oh!
"No, I'm a...
"Some people say
I'm a mushroom, but..."
Oh, what the hell.
"I have no gender!"
"I have no gender, I am nothing,
not male nor female."
"Ha-ha! I laugh at you. Ah-ha-ha!"
You mentioned the stinkhorn.
Yes, I did, I love that.
Well, have a look at one.
There you are.
Ohh! Ooh, dirty stinkhorn. Dirty!
It's pretty grim, isn't it?
Is that flies?
Yeah, flies all over it. Its Latin
name is phallus impudicus,
which means... Oh, you wouldn't want
that on your cock, would you?
Not again.
The meaning of its name is
"shameless cock."
Shameless cock.
Is it? Shameless! Yeah.
Phallus impudicus.
And it gives off a sort of mucus...
That's actually given me an idea
for my husband's birthday present.
A little fly willy warmer.
What do you think? Yeah.
He'd love it.
He would love it. Beautiful idea.
There's a mucus that's given off on
the top of it, um...
And it stinks, hence the name
stinkhorn. It does.
It smells of rotting meat,
and it attracts flies.
You can't eat them, either, can you?
Oh, the Chinese do. Do they?
They dry them and they eat them,
because they've discovered this
really important scientific fact.
- They're aphrodisiac.
- Of course they are. Oh, yeah
Er...
So there it is,
that's the stinkhorn.
Is that only because it looks like
a penis, let's be honest? It is.
That's why it's called... "Oh, look,
it looks like an erect penis,
"therefore, ergo, it must be
an aphrodisiac."
Yeah. That's what it is, really.
I'm afraid it is. Effectively.
There's a lot of things that look
like an erect penis that...
don't get used as aphrodisiacs.
Like? Like...
A baguette.
Very good.
Now, let's stay in the garden.
Why would you spread
mustard on your lawn?
So you can... Like, if you
stick roast beef on yourself,
and you slide across the lawn...
Somebody's made a graphic
of a man mowing some custard.
Imagine you wanted to conduct
a worm census of your lawn,
you wanted to find out how many
worms there wah... "There wah"?
..in your lawn. Make them
come up out of the earth
with washing-up liquid.
Is that what you'd use? Yeah.
That really works a treat, actually.
What, do you put the
washing up liquid...?
You just spray washing-up liquid
on the lawn and they all come up,
"Oh", like that, to help
you with the washing up.
And it doesn't harm them?
Oh, it kills them.
This...
This is where your
system and mine differ,
because my system is just about
counting them and not harming them.
Right. Because it does...
But you can still count
them when they're dead.
Easier, really. It is easier.
It's true, you're right.
Dry them out. But they're good for
aerating the lawn, aren't they?
So is a pitchfork. Yeah.
Well, anyway, it
irritates them slightly,
but it doesn't kill them.
And, in fact, they
did this in America,
and discovered that 100% of
North American worms are non-native.
All the worms of North America
were wiped out a long time ago.
Washing-up liquid! Must have been.
10,000 years ago,
before washing-up liquid. Ice age?
Ice age is the right answer.
Yeah, they were wiped out.
He's on fire, you're both on fire!
Yeah, the European worms arrived
in the root balls of plants
that were exported to the Americas.
But what else do we...?
Help me with mustard.
You can spread it on your hands
if you're trying to give up smoking.
Yes, apparently a friend of mine
did that, to try and, you know,
give up smoking. Did it work?
Um... No.
Gas, lethal gas.
Yes, mustard gas.
What was mustard gas?
Did it have mustard in it?
It stank, poisonous.
It didn't actually contain mustard.
Nothing to do with mustard, called
it only because of the colour of it.
Well, the colour and the smell.
And the smell of it.
Sulphur mustard, it was called.
And rather like too much mustard,
it could cause blistering.
And there were mustard baths.
A bath of mustard?
Is that a Comic Relief thing?
No, you'd think it was.
But, funnily enough,
we British have mustard baths
all the time, didn't you know that?
No? No.
According to the
National Museum of Mustard,
which is in Middleton, Wisconsin.
I was going to say,
it's got to be in America.
Yeah. Yeah.
They have a National
Museum of Mustard and I...
Just be careful,
because Norwich has a very famous
mustard museum, as well. Uh-oh.
Mr Coleman? Coleman's, exactly.
This museum in Middleton, Wisconsin,
it asserts that "bathing in mustard
is an English custom
"to this very day."
There you are,
that's what they think.
That's right,
over in England, at night they...
Everyone in England asks their
butler to draw them a mustard bath.
And you spoke of
Coleman's of Norwich...
Norwich... the great
mustard company of Norwich.
They provided quite a lot of
mustard for Robert Falcon Scott
and his Discovery Expedition.
To the South Pole.
As you can see there,
he has pots of Coleman's Mustard.
That's a genuine real photograph...
Yes, of course.
..not in the least bit touched-up.
How much did Coleman's,
of Norwich, give...
to Captain Scott's team
in the 1901-02...?
Two enormous barrels of mustard.
Actually, they gave them one
and a half tonnes... Tiny jar?
One and a half tonnes?!
..of mustard.
Tonnes of mustard.
Excellent.
That's enough for a lot of baths,
as well as a lot of food.
Now, from counting worms
to monkeys that count.
What job can even a monkey do?
Yes, Jo?
Is it quantity surveying?
They might be able to. Apologies
to all quantity surveyors watching.
That includes my brother.
Is your brother...? Oh, is he?
He is a quantity surveyor, yes.
Does he survey quantities all day?
Yeah, sadly for him. Do you get
tired of surveying quantities?
I mean, how many quantities
can you survey in one day?
He can survey 47 quantities
in a day. 47 quantities?
That's a lot of quantities.
Wow. Well, no, I don't think
monkeys can survey quantities.
They can count. Yes.
The person who counts how
many people are on the plane
before you take off,
that could be a monkey.
That would instil us all
with confidence, wouldn't it?
Just before takeoff,
a small primate comes down
the aisle with a clicker.
And he also does the duty-frees
because no-one ever buys anything.
Yes.
In Thailand, there is a school.
A monkey school? Yep.
They have between three and six
months of training -
the pig-tailed macaques -
and they end up
working on a plantation,
where they can pick
between 800 and 1,000 whats a day?
Bananas. Not bananas cos they'd eat
those, wouldn't they? They would.
Coconuts. Coconuts!
Between 800 and 1,000
coconuts a day, they can pick.
There they are.
But it's very useful.
So, a lot more than a
human could, probably.
But they do they count them,
as well?
Well, I don't... Those don't, no.
Clicker in one hand.
In the US, they use capuchin monkeys
for a charity called Helping Hands,
which assists people
with disabilities,
and they help with feeding,
retrieving dropped items,
changing compact discs,
turning lights on and off. Wow.
And in Tokyo,
there's a tavern where...
A traditional sake house,
where macaques are employed
to bring customers hot towels.
I don't want a hot towel off
that fella, I'll tell you that.
That is horrible.
Imagine that at the end
of your bed at night.
Oh, God!
"Hot towel, sir?" Oh, fuck off!
The late, great Rik Mayall had a
joke that he always told if you ever
went to a Japanese restaurant, sushi
house or something, like that,
and he'd go, "Waiter!"
"Bring me several types of Japanese
wine, and don't get all sake!"
Yay!
Couldn't help saying it every time.
It somehow...
From him, it was funny.
Now, from smart monkeys
to smart aleck kids.
Which of these would
an ancient Mexican use
to teach children manners?
You've got chocolate,
chilli...
The monkey with a baseball bat
seems pretty effective.
You've got to say "please" or
you get the monkey with the bat.
I, personally, would use a cactus.
Yeah. What would you do with it?
Throw the child at it.
Then you are pretty much on a par
with those ancient Mexicans.
Oh, am I?
Yeah. The Aztec or the...
..Mexica.
The Mexica, as
they were called... Yeah.
..from which, we
get our word Mexico,
did have a firm, but fair,
way of treating their children.
That means "very cruel".
Yeah, I know.
And the Codex Mendoza
was written by someone
observing the practices
of the Aztecs,
and this is what he found.
Basically, they were taught to be
humble, hard-working and polite,
just like British...
Oh, no, what am I talking about?
So this is how it went.
It begins with an eight-year-old boy
being threatened with
the spines of a cactus. Wow.
The following year, he's
stripped, bound and pierced
in his neck, side and thigh.
Next year, he's bound and
beaten with a pine stick.
The year after that, aged 11,
his father holds his son,
bound and weeping over
a fire of burning chillies -
as you can see, top right, there.
All practices carried on in
English boarding schools. Yes.
Finally, a stroppy 12-year-old
is bound and dumped
in a damp vegetable patch for a day
to reflect on his conduct.
By the time he's 13, he's dutifully
gathering reeds, as you can see.
Yeah, bearing a terrible grudge.
Which he will take out
on HIS child. Yes.
Unfortunately,
that's the way it works.
So, it's a sort of
a meme of cruelty. It is, yeah.
But the Huichol Mexicans -
and you'll like this, I think, Jo -
they had an interesting practice,
which was, when a woman
was pregnant,
she would lie, and,
in the room above,
her husband would lie,
and he would have strings
attached to his testicles,
which would drop down
into the room below -
where his wife was pregnant.
I'm loving this so far.
She would have...
She would hold the strings and,
when she had a contraction,
she would pull...
..so that he was forced
to share her pain...
He, cunningly, slipped the
string off, tied it onto the...
boards of the bed
and went to the pub.
Tied it to the dog.
"Tied it to the dog"!
Or his 12-year-old son.
"Argh!"
It's possible.
Oh, we're... Sorry, go on.
No, carry on.
No, I was going to say a terrible
and very embarrassing story
about testicles, but you carry on.
Oh, I want your testicle story.
All right, then.
Well, we had this dog,
and it got into the bed
and it started to lick...
the wrong set of testicles.
That's all I'm saying.
Surely everybody wins?
Everyone's a winner.
Not everyone, Stephen.
I haven't been back.
Yeah, the Mexica people of Mexico
used a very hands-on variety
of tough love.
And speaking of hands, what's
this man doing with his other hand?
Oh, Lord! It's M, it's M...
It begins with M.
It begins with M.
He could be doing anything, Stephen.
Is it something beginning with M?
If that was me, it would be me
trying to work out how the...
Scratching?
..bloody thing works with a printer.
Well, it does begin with M.
Massaging something?
If I tell you that he's a professor.
He's got a massive mouse on his leg.
Milking, mousing. "Massive mouse."
You're right to think of an
animal, cos he's a scientist -
a professor at the
University of Kentucky.
Has he got his finger
stuck in a moose?
He's a Mexican, he's a Mexican man,
and he's pressing a child
against a cactus under the desk.
He's a cruel man.
He is Professor Grayson Brown,
and he's an entomologist
of a particular kind.
A culicidologist,
if that makes any sense to you.
Molluscs? Not molluscs.
Oh. An entomologist. Mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes is the right answer.
Wow! On fire.
Sorry.
That's brilliant.
He's very serious in
his study of mosquitoes,
and he was allowing
1,000 mosquitoes -
as he does every morning,
while he carries on
doing his e-mails -
to feast on his arm.
His body is so used to it they no
longer leave a mark, apparently.
It's most bizarre.
Asian mosquitoes are very picky,
they only, ONLY, feast on humans...
They won't eat the blood
of any other animal.
..and, in order to keep them happy,
obviously they need
a big supply of blood.
So, he and his fellow workers...
And some animals, it has
to be said, in his lab,
also supply the blood for
other breeds of mosquito -
but, for the Asian ones,
it's just humans.
And, of course, they
have to keep them breeding.
Now, they're odd,
these Asian mosquitoes,
cos they're really a bit lazy.
I suppose they produce
so many thousands...
What's he trying to find out?
I mean, what is there left
to know about these creatures?
Well, given how many millions
of people they kill every year,
it's kind of...
You can't know enough.
Cos they kill more,
as you know, than wars.
But in order to get them
to mate, to force-mate them.
Play some Barry White,
give them some wine.
Well, that's what I thought,
but in this case,
they decapitate the male...
Oh, that's different.
No, no, that wouldn't work.
Good so far.
..they anaesthetise the female.
They then insert the male's genitals
into his unconscious partner.
Despite the lack of the male's head,
and the lack of the
female's consciousness,
the insects lock together,
sperm is transferred,
and the female becomes pregnant.
Does that happen with humans?
Yes? Well, if you've
had enough Jagermeister,
I suppose it will, yeah.
And a skilled entomologist
can do this without a microscope.
That's nothing to brag
about, though, is it?
No, it probably isn't!
"Oh, I can make mosquitoes
bang without a microscope."
We had a pair of preying mantis
once in the kitchen,
In a... You know, in
the tank, obviously.
And I came home one night
and the male praying mantis
was on the kitchen floor
walking across, like,
towards the door.
And I went, "Oh, no, he's got
out of the t... Oh, what a shame."
And I carefully scooped him up,
and I placed him back in
the tank, very gently,
and the female pounced
and bit his head off and...
..he was clearly
making a break for it.
Oh, because they do. The whole time,
"No, don't put me back there. Oh."
The females do eat the males,
don't they? Yes, they do.
So, they must have just mated. They
must have just... And he was off.
Yeah. Oh, dear, oh, dear.
Now, then, what's the world's oldest
complaint?
"I'm dying."
Er...
We're after the first recorded
complaint. Oh.
A medical complaint?
Not a medical complaint, actually.
Oh, right.
Complaint as in a moan, as in a...
Oh, I see, so the...
Where were the earliest pieces of
writing that we have?
In hieroglyphs?
Not hieroglyphs, actually -
they're made with reeds...
poked into wet clay onto tablets,
so the edge of the reed
is like a wedge shape,
and Latin for "wedge," cuneus...
Cuneiform?
Cuneiform, yes. Oh, right.
Which was where -
where did they do that?
It's... Babylon.
Babylon, yeah, Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia!
Mesopotamia!
Knew it'd come up!
Keep saying it.
"Keep saying it, it'll be right
in a minute."
And they have an enormous number
of these in the British Museum,
a fantastic collection. Stolen!
Well...
Sorry - saved.
Saved! Salvaged.
What, so it's a complaint,
you're saying? It's a complaint.
It's from a merchant, and it's
nearly 4,000 years old.
It's an ancient Babylonian
copper merchant.
He's called Nanni.
He's complaining to a supplier
called Ea-nasir
that he's received a shipment
of copper ore which was late,
and it was damaged and of an
inferior grade.
"You have put ingots which were not
good enough before my messenger,
"and said, 'If you want to take
them, take them.
"'If you do not want to take them,
go away.'
"What do you take me for,
"that you treat me
with such contempt?
"You alone treat my messenger
with contempt.
"You have withheld my money bag
from me in enemy territory.
"It's now up to you to restore
my money to me in full."
I was thinking that earlier
and I should have said it.
You...!
Would there be a series of these
complaints going back and forth?
We don't have...
"I refer you to the tablet
of the 14th."
"I still have not received redress
on the copper."
On and on, like, piles and piles
of these things.
"Stick your ingots where the sun
don't shine."
"I will be speaking to you now
through my lawyers."
I mean, the things that survived
most in terms of writing
are nearly always things to do
with money and trade. Mmm.
Cos that's what people
cared about most,
and that's how writing
seemed to develop.
So, the world's first complaint was
composed on a tablet.
But now it's time to move on
to the low-hanging fruit
of General Ignorance.
What kind of animal is a musk ox?
Is it an ox?
Oh!
How could you think such a thing?
What kind of animal is a musk ox?
Musk.
Not a musk.
That's...
You did say musk! Is it a deer?
Is it a banana, Stephen?
Not a banana!
Have a look at one.
Have a look at one?
Yeah, have a look at some musk oxen.
Cow. Bison.
Not a bison, no. Is it a sheep?
A snake?
Sheep is the right answer-ish.
A goat?
A goat!
It's a goat, well done.
It's a goat. Got its horns
right down the side, low down -
that's very difficult
for rutting, isn't it?
Got to go up next to someone
and hook them.
And they have enormous coats of fur.
Thought you might have said
something else there.
Really huge, and they are very...
very good at surviving cold
temperatures.
So good that they survived
the cold temperature
that many of their fellow animals
at the time didn't -
the sabre-toothed
tiger, for example.
Ice age!
The ice age - they survived
the ice age.
And they're a hardy, hardy beast.
They have this wonderful butting
contest where they butt heads.
Males, don't they - they have these
tremendous battles, male...
Man on man... Mano a mano.
"Mano a mano" means "hand to hand."
Yeah.
OK, what's the head, then?
Well, yeah, despite its name,
the musk ox is a member
of the goat family.
What do magpies like to steal?
Shiny things.
Everyone knows that!
Oh, Alany, Alany, Alany-walany,
Alany-walany-woo. Come on!
No. We think they do,
but they don't. Oh.
We've done tests. Well, WE haven't,
people have. Have you?
Out of 64 of them, magpies picked
up a shiny object only twice,
and then immediately dropped it.
They're not interested
in shiny things.
Like all animals, they're interested
in things that look like food or...
that they can shag.
The... It's folklore surrounding
them, seems to be just that -
folklore, anecdotes.
But the Italian for magpie...
..Ieads to an interesting thing.
Magpie-o.
Awfully nice thought.
Do you know the Rossini opera,
The Thieving Magpie?
Called "La Gazza Ladra."
"Gazza" is a magpie,
and a little magpie, "gazzetta."
Oh, it's the newspaper.
Called the "gazzetta".
A newspaper - gazette.
And that's it, the gossipy chatter,
Iike a magpie. Ah!
That's where we get that word,
"gazette".
I like... I quite like that one.
Yeah, me too. Yeah. Yeah, certainly.
Also, if I were to say that
the magpie's real name is a pie,
it's a pie.
Then where does the "mag" come from?
Margaret. Yeah.
Margaret. Was it? Yeah.
Where did that come from?
"Margaret Pie."
In medieval England, it was common
to give birds a Christian name,
sometimes, and the ones that have
survived have included magpie.
Which other ones can you...?
Robin. Robin.
Robin redbreast.
Robin redbreast.
Robin's the only one where the
first name is the one that's kept...
Dave Starling. Sorry?
Joseph Starling?
No, big Dave Starling.
Joseph would have been funny.
Joseph Starling is good, yeah.
I like that. I prefer that.
Not as funny as Dave,
but it's better. Yeah.
Tomtit.
Jenny Wren. Tomtit, yeah.
Charlie Crow.
Jackdaw. Jackdaw.
Oh, jackdaw. Yeah, yeah.
So there are a few of them.
Christopher Chaffinch.
We had an injured bird
in the garden yesterday... Oh.
..and it looked like a magpie,
and it couldn't take off,
and I was watching it for ages.
I didn't know what to do with it,
so I opened the back gate
and shooed it out.
Oh, dear. What do you think it was,
then? What make? "The back gate."
I think it was a young crow... Yeah.
..that was having a bit
of trouble with flight,
because it flew into a bush...
Oh, dear.
..and I presume it's dead by now.
That's it, you...? And that's the
end of tonight's Springwatch. Yes.
What could you have done with it?
I don't know, what are you going to
do with a bird? Shoot it, shoot it.
Take it out. Shoot the...
Sniper's rifle, through the brain.
I could have gone after it,
because it was in the garden
and couldn't get out.
I could have easily got it with a
tennis racket. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Just scoop it up
with a tennis racket
and hit it with a frying pan...
..and chuck it over the wall.
That's what I'd do.
And then its parents would have
come and ate it, wouldn't they?
Yeah, that's right. Let's face it,
it is the wild. Yeah. Exactly, yes.
Even if it is Hampstead.
It's wild for them, though.
They'd have had it in a coulis.
A crow couscous.
With some quinoa.
I wonder what its name was.
Clive, I expect.
No, I think it was Vel.
Vel? Vel-crow. "Velcro."
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
So, magpies aren't particularly
interested in shiny objects.
How many paintings
did Vincent Van Gogh -
or "Goch," or "Gough," or "Go"...
How many did he sell
while he was alive?
Don't say none.
None! I'm going to say none.
D'oh! D'oh!
Really, I'm afraid...
One. A few, maybe?
"A few".
It was lots. He sold
hundreds of paintings.
Hundreds?! Yeah, when he was 15,
he used to work in an art gallery.
Oh, shut up!
It's true.
I just asked you
how many paintings...
This is the closest I've come
to walking out of this show!
I'd like a recount on those two.
It was a horribly mean question,
but the fact is,
he did sell hundreds,
they just weren't his own.
He was very good
at selling them, too -
he did extremely well, and
it was a big French company,
and his brother, Theo,
ran the Montmartre branch,
and Vincent relocated, after
a while, to the London branch.
And he spent two years in London,
living in Brixton,
and he called it the
happiest time of his life.
Yeah, he did really well,
and he loved it.
Good fun in Brixton. It's great.
It was good fun, it's a good place.
Brixton Village. Brixton Village.
He would have gone and got
some chicken from Chickenliquor,
that's real nice.
Yeah. Is that your manor?
I used to live in Brixton and...
Do you know what I nearly did then?
I nearly called you "man,"
and then I stopped
myself. Thank you.
I just want you to appreciate that.
I really do. Thank you.
Anyway, perhaps the most surprising
thing we'll all learn today... Yes.
..is that, after Brixton,
he came back to the UK in 1876,
and Vincent Van Gogh...
worked...
as a supply teacher in Ramsgate.
Oh! Isn't that wonderful?
Wow. That's a big surprise,
isn't it? It is. It is, yeah.
I wonder if the children remembered
him for years afterwards...
Mr Van Gogh?..as a
flame-haired figure. Moody sod.
Yeah. Yeah. Then he became a
painter, supported financially,
and, indeed, emotionally
by his brother, Theo.
He suffered from tinnitus, vertigo
and, of course, depression,
and he killed himself aged 37.
Only one of his 900 paintings
was sold in his lifetime.
Sold to a remarkable
woman called Anna Boch,
who was, herself, a painter. One.
You said one! I said one.
You said one.
I asked how many paintings, not
how many of HIS OWN paintings.
I know, I'm sorry, but, look,
I did say...
Chairman of the
Pedantic Association.
"It's actually the Society of
Pedantics, but I'll let that go."
Yes, exactly, in fact.
Anna Boch paid 400 francs
for a painting of his
called The Red Vineyard,
which is rather beautiful.
About £1,000 today, that would be.
Bet he had a big night that night.
Well, it was only four months
before his death,
so it obviously didn't cheer him up
enormously.
Five out of the 30 most valuable
paintings ever sold at auction
are Van Goghs.
Four of them raising
over 100 million each.
That, er... That was his life, a
very unfortunate one in that sense.
But his work lives on for ever,
of course.
And with that, the final
whistle has blown and...
..the match has come to an end.
It's actually a very extraordinary
series of scores.
Um...
In first place, with plus eight -
yes, she WAS on fire - Jo Brand!
In second place...
with minus seven, it's James.
In third place...
with minus 32, is Bill Bailey.
Minus, how...?
In fourth place...
with minus 41, Alan Davies.
So, all that remains for me
is to pull up the corner flags,
thank James, Bill, Jo and Alan,
and to leave you with this
classic piece of Ron Atkinson
when asked about what made
the perfect match.
"Well, Clive, it's all
about the two M's -
"movement and positioning."
Good night.
good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI,
where, tonight,
we're mixing and matching
a medley of things beginning with M.
Now, let's meet our makers.
The matchless James Acaster.
The match-fit Jo Brand.
The match made in heaven,
Bill Bailey.
And...
match abandoned, Alan Davies.
So, let's hear you mix.
James goes...
That's mixing. Is it?
Yeah, you're beating
an egg, I think.
Beating something.
Now.
You're on your first warning.
Jo goes...
Yes, that's masturbation
as I know it.
I'd love to know what the
machine is, wouldn't you?
Bill goes...
Ah, yeah. I like it, yes.
That's masturbation as I know it.
So, three mixes and Alan goes...
Ah, you see. A match. Yeah.
So, on with the game.
Now our first "M" tonight
is "M" for metals.
Can you see anything on this board
here that does not contain metal?
Oh. You've got a mushroom,
a balloon, a stack of coins,
a monkey, a star, an Alan Davies...
of some kind. An Alan Davies.
Well, bodies do contain metal,
so it can't be...
They do. It can't be you...
Alan, you contain metal.
Yes. You do. I do.
Enough iron to make a nail.
Alan specifically?
Yeah, just Alan.
Just Alan. He can make a nail.
But, no, that's right, isn't it?
The body contains enough
iron to make a nail -
phosphorus, carbon, water...
Magnesium. Lime.
Gold, actually. A person...
You could boil it down to
a half-decent kids' party.
You could get a paddling pool, some
fireworks and a tequila slammer.
All inside us, churning away.
All inside. So, it can't be Alan.
No, it's not me.
And I don't... I'm...
Now, look... Now.
Things that grow probably
have got metal in them... Yes.
..that's my thinking. Yeah.
The fact is, you've
brilliantly avoided everything,
cos all those things contain metals.
When the universe was created...
4,000 years ago...
4,000 years ago, as it
says in the Bible... by our Lord.
..only two elements were
created at that time.
Gold and silver.
Yes.
It was... Frankincense and myrrh.
Cheese and pickle.
They are still the most abundant
elements in the universe. Helium!
99% of the universe is composed of?
Helium and sarcasm.
Helium and...
Hydrogen?
Hydrogen is correct. Yes.
And then the first two
elements to be created,
after hydrogen and helium,
which are both gases,
were both metals.
Imagine God was rather depressed
by having created the universe.
A knife. I should think he
bloody well was. I would be. Yeah.
So, if you're depressed,
what's the metal you'd go for?
Lithium. Lithium.
Lithium was one of them,
and the other was beryllium.
Oh, beryllium. Beryllium,
I love that one. Beryllium.
And how were they created?
What was the process?
It was in the stars.
Fusion? Fusion.
You're on fire. Crikey!
Like the stars, very good.
Yeah.
And in that fusion,
EVERYTHING was made.
And we are, as Carl Sagan famously
said, we are made of star stuff.
We are made of the stuff that was
created in those fusion moments.
Yes, we are.
And astronomers call anything
that isn't the first two,
hydrogen and helium, a metal -
even if it's oxygen.
Are some people made of heavy metal?
Yeah. Lemmy. Lemmy.
Lemmy from Motorhead.
Death metal. That's a good one.
Yeah. Thrash metal.
Nu metal, when I was a teenager.
What's nu metal?
It was rap and metal together.
It went very badly.
Yeah, there was quite a lot of...
Quite a lot of that in it, yeah.
There was one I was told about that
was a mixture of techno and disco...
and it was called Tesco.
Then there was Valium metal,
and Tesco's own-brand metal.
Yeah, the human body contains
a lot of metal, even gold.
How many human beings
would you need to
extract the gold from
before you could make,
of them, a gold coin?
Just Mr T.
Yes, just that, yeah.
Very good, that's true.
Normal humans.
One million humans. No.
One billion humans. No, it's...
47.
Six.
This could take a long time. 40,000.
And how many different
metals have we got inside us?
72.
47.
Very close, it's 48!
Whoa! On fire!
Amazing. On fire!
In your face!
Did you just point at
Alan and say, "Eat it"?
No.
No, I pointed at him
and went, "On fire!"
Oh, "On fire." "On fire!"
It's most impressive.
And you're all right, in many ways.
To astronomers, anything that isn't
hydrogen or helium is a metal.
Even apparently normal metals
can be quite deceptive,
as this trick shows.
I'm going to get a glass of water,
and I'll get a teaspoon.
Right. Oh, I'll just... To prove
that it is water, I'll drink it.
That just proves it might be vodka.
It proves at least that it's not
sulphuric acid or something... Yeah.
..because what I'm going to do
is try and make this
teaspoon disappear.
It may not work.
I'm not a good magician,
I'm a great magician.
And so we stir it here and I...
Oh, don't, Oh, no...
Oh, it might not work,
it might work, I don't know.
I'm, oh...
Yeah, it seems to have worked. Ooh.
Wow!
There you are. Thank you.
That's rather good, isn't it?
Rather good. That's good. That is.
In fact, on this occasion,
it wasn't a magic trick,
and it's something you can do.
I'll give you your water and you'll
notice the water is rather warm.
Oh, it's warm.
It's warm water. Warm water.
And I'll give you
a couple of spoons.
They are metal, they're metal
spoons, but the metal...
Are they made out of Alka-Seltzer?
They might as well be -
they're made out of gallium.
And gallium is a metal...
A very useful metal.
Let's have a look... but it
has the quality that it melts,
as Alan is showing, in water.
Good Lord.
Oh, you wouldn't want that
of your teaspoon, would you?
No, it wouldn't make
a practical teaspoon.
That's lasting less time
than a biscuit. Yeah.
That's it. Look at that.
Now, if you stir it,
it'll happen more quickly.
Oh, good Lord, look at that.
Ah, jeez. That is...
That would be the most
annoying teaspoon in the world.
It really would, wouldn't it?
Now, oh.
But it's, like,
Terminator's teaspoon.
Yeah, exactly. Terminator 2,
it should be said.
Yes. Terminator two-spoon.
Hey!
Well, I hope you're impressed with
that. Wow. I'm very impressed. Yeah.
It's not poisonous, gallium, so
you can drink it again. I shan't.
OK. You can put your glasses away.
There you are, top man.
"Mmm, delicious."
OK, pop away.
Er... gallium.
Gallium was discovered in the 19th
century by a Frenchman... Yes...
..called Lecoq.
Oh...
And he called it gallium
because he was French
and he wanted to be
patriotic. Gaul.
Yeah. Exactly, as in our word
"Gallic."
But also, there's another word
which means "cockerel,"
Oh. Which is "gallus,"
so he called gallium after himself
as well as after his country.
So he was modest.
He was modest, exactly.
Staying with valuable metals,
though, what use did the world's
richest man have for wide trousers?
Yeah?
Did he have very fat ankles?
That would be useful.
Who was the world's richest man?
That's what we have to discover.
Is he alive today?
No. Was he a Greek bloke?
Was it... No... Rockefeller?
Wasn't Croesus, wasn't Rockefeller.
But it has been calculated,
quite recently in fact, that this
man was the richest man by any
standards... Ever?
..of which there has ever been. Oh!
Someone... Aladdin. Aladdin, yes.
I'm going to say, and I don't want
to upset anybody,
I'm going to say it's someone real.
Someone... Ah, someone from Fifa.
Someone from the 14th century.
He is M-M-of M-.
Murmansk. Did he come from Murmansk?
No.
Mesopotamia. No!
No, it's good, though. Margate.
He visited Mesopotamia...
Mick of Margate.
He visited Mesopotamia? Well...
Mu... Mohammed.....Arabia.
Muchti? The Muchti.
He was Muslim, so that's another M.
Ming the Merciless.
Ming the Merciless.
Mansa Musa.
Is the right answer, but... Who?
..you would have got more points...
The audience is very impressive,
isn't it? They are.
You'd only have got more points
if you'd said Mansa Musa I.
Ah.
But, no, Mansa Musa
is the right answer. Ah.
What's the country he's from?
Mess... Er... No.
Muh... Mer... Muk... Mali.
Mali. Mali!
Mali, he comes from, Africa.
Mali. And his riches came from gold.
Oh. He had so much gold,
you would not believe.
He was also a very faithful Muslim,
and he went on the Hajj to Mecca,
and on his Hajj, every Friday,
he stopped and he built a mosque,
but also, everyone he met,
he gave gold to.
Right.
By the time all these people went
to cash their gold in,
it destroyed the market for it.
And they suffered
from hyperinflation.
And he very generously tried to put
right what he'd done wrong,
so he bought the gold back,
but it still destroyed the whole
Mediterranean economy for ten years.
What an idiot.
He was trying to be kind. Well,
there's that saying, isn't there,
"No act of kindness
ever goes unpunished."
Yes! And I think that's very
true in this case. It is very true.
He was also quite a warrior,
and he had an army of 100,000, and
if he had a successful general, he
would reward him with wide trousers.
That's... That was the question!
If you had wide trousers it was
proof of your success as a general.
Wide trousers being what?
Oxford bags.
Pretty jolly wide.
Kind of Showaddywaddy. Yeah.
On his way back from Mecca,
he stopped and established this
city that became a great
centre for Islamic scholarship
and world scholarship
for the following century. Hmm.
Do you know what that town
was called?
On the way from Mecca to Mali. Yeah.
Closer to Mali than Mecca
by a long way. Mombasa.
No. There it is!
Good effort, though.
I keep looking at that picture
Iike I'm going to recognise it
or something.
Ah, yeah...
Is it Timbuktu?
Yes! Timbuktu.
Well done.
Yes, Mansa Musa of Mali made
medieval markets melt down.
From one golden age to another,
how did the ancient Britons
celebrate the merry month of May?
Jo. Was it pole dancing?
Oh, ha-ha...
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
That's not...
No, that's not what I said.
She's quite right.
You didn't say "maypole."
Human sacrifice, probably?
Human sacrifice, no, not that.
Mead? Mead is possible.
Cannibalism?
Not that we know of. We don't know
much about the ancient Britons.
If only they'd blogged more.
Murder - they would murder people
for a laugh.
Anyone who really liked April.
They'd murder them really badly.
Yeah.
Well, they would pick flowers.
Ugh.
As far as we know,
they didn't do much
other than the fact that it was
early summer,
Iate spring, and they would put
flowers in the house.
The things we think of -
Morris dancing and maypoles and the
Queen of the May and everything -
were all later inventions.
Morris dancing seems to have arrived
in the 15th century.
Oh, God, what a terrible year.
A bad year. They have
much to answer for. They have.
Do you know why it's called Morris
dancing, where that comes from?
It was just boredom. That's really
what it was, wasn't it?
A combination of boredom,
nothing to do and we might
as well do something.
Do a dance.
Do a dance. Yeah. Let's have
some mead and do a dance.
"What's your name?" "Morris."
"Right, we'll call it after you."
We think they borrowed the name
from the Spaniards,
who had a Morisco dance. Oh!
When they celebrated the expulsion
of the Moors, or Moriscos,
as in the word Morocco, from Spain,
and this dance came to England
by the 15th century, and we did that
sort of dance.
So it's a bit racist, really.
If you like, yeah.
Yeah. Well, maybe we could get it
banned on that account.
Got to try. Poor old Morris dancers.
Yeah. The most traditional way
to celebrate May Day
is to decorate
your house with flowers.
Our next M also grows in the ground.
Now, what sex is this mushroom?
What sex? What sex?
Well, it looks like a penis, so...
..I'm guessing it's female.
You see...
Now... Is it male, then?
Oh!
Is it asexual?
Well... it's not asexual, no.
Is it a stinkhorn?
Just doesn't have a gen...
We're going to come to stinkhorns.
But you can have a look.
I love them.
See if you can spot the organs
of generation on those.
Well, there's a mushroom. Yeah.
Fry it up, lovely.
It's difficult to tell, isn't it?
They're all sort of...
They're all vaguely suggestive
in some way, aren't they?
I mean... Yeah.
Any type of fungus will tell you
the same story -
they don't have genders.
They don't have sexes.
Oh, right. They do reproduce,
but they don't use gender as a...
Spores? Is it spores?
Spores, well, spores have to be...
Inseminated.
They have to be inseminated,
germinated.
But there is no gender, you don't
have a female or a male. Right.
Oh, you've made a whole new one
with a hat. I've made a new one.
It's like a French painter.
"Ah. Ah-ha-ho-ho."
But...
Oh!
"No, I'm a...
"Some people say
I'm a mushroom, but..."
Oh, what the hell.
"I have no gender!"
"I have no gender, I am nothing,
not male nor female."
"Ha-ha! I laugh at you. Ah-ha-ha!"
You mentioned the stinkhorn.
Yes, I did, I love that.
Well, have a look at one.
There you are.
Ohh! Ooh, dirty stinkhorn. Dirty!
It's pretty grim, isn't it?
Is that flies?
Yeah, flies all over it. Its Latin
name is phallus impudicus,
which means... Oh, you wouldn't want
that on your cock, would you?
Not again.
The meaning of its name is
"shameless cock."
Shameless cock.
Is it? Shameless! Yeah.
Phallus impudicus.
And it gives off a sort of mucus...
That's actually given me an idea
for my husband's birthday present.
A little fly willy warmer.
What do you think? Yeah.
He'd love it.
He would love it. Beautiful idea.
There's a mucus that's given off on
the top of it, um...
And it stinks, hence the name
stinkhorn. It does.
It smells of rotting meat,
and it attracts flies.
You can't eat them, either, can you?
Oh, the Chinese do. Do they?
They dry them and they eat them,
because they've discovered this
really important scientific fact.
- They're aphrodisiac.
- Of course they are. Oh, yeah
Er...
So there it is,
that's the stinkhorn.
Is that only because it looks like
a penis, let's be honest? It is.
That's why it's called... "Oh, look,
it looks like an erect penis,
"therefore, ergo, it must be
an aphrodisiac."
Yeah. That's what it is, really.
I'm afraid it is. Effectively.
There's a lot of things that look
like an erect penis that...
don't get used as aphrodisiacs.
Like? Like...
A baguette.
Very good.
Now, let's stay in the garden.
Why would you spread
mustard on your lawn?
So you can... Like, if you
stick roast beef on yourself,
and you slide across the lawn...
Somebody's made a graphic
of a man mowing some custard.
Imagine you wanted to conduct
a worm census of your lawn,
you wanted to find out how many
worms there wah... "There wah"?
..in your lawn. Make them
come up out of the earth
with washing-up liquid.
Is that what you'd use? Yeah.
That really works a treat, actually.
What, do you put the
washing up liquid...?
You just spray washing-up liquid
on the lawn and they all come up,
"Oh", like that, to help
you with the washing up.
And it doesn't harm them?
Oh, it kills them.
This...
This is where your
system and mine differ,
because my system is just about
counting them and not harming them.
Right. Because it does...
But you can still count
them when they're dead.
Easier, really. It is easier.
It's true, you're right.
Dry them out. But they're good for
aerating the lawn, aren't they?
So is a pitchfork. Yeah.
Well, anyway, it
irritates them slightly,
but it doesn't kill them.
And, in fact, they
did this in America,
and discovered that 100% of
North American worms are non-native.
All the worms of North America
were wiped out a long time ago.
Washing-up liquid! Must have been.
10,000 years ago,
before washing-up liquid. Ice age?
Ice age is the right answer.
Yeah, they were wiped out.
He's on fire, you're both on fire!
Yeah, the European worms arrived
in the root balls of plants
that were exported to the Americas.
But what else do we...?
Help me with mustard.
You can spread it on your hands
if you're trying to give up smoking.
Yes, apparently a friend of mine
did that, to try and, you know,
give up smoking. Did it work?
Um... No.
Gas, lethal gas.
Yes, mustard gas.
What was mustard gas?
Did it have mustard in it?
It stank, poisonous.
It didn't actually contain mustard.
Nothing to do with mustard, called
it only because of the colour of it.
Well, the colour and the smell.
And the smell of it.
Sulphur mustard, it was called.
And rather like too much mustard,
it could cause blistering.
And there were mustard baths.
A bath of mustard?
Is that a Comic Relief thing?
No, you'd think it was.
But, funnily enough,
we British have mustard baths
all the time, didn't you know that?
No? No.
According to the
National Museum of Mustard,
which is in Middleton, Wisconsin.
I was going to say,
it's got to be in America.
Yeah. Yeah.
They have a National
Museum of Mustard and I...
Just be careful,
because Norwich has a very famous
mustard museum, as well. Uh-oh.
Mr Coleman? Coleman's, exactly.
This museum in Middleton, Wisconsin,
it asserts that "bathing in mustard
is an English custom
"to this very day."
There you are,
that's what they think.
That's right,
over in England, at night they...
Everyone in England asks their
butler to draw them a mustard bath.
And you spoke of
Coleman's of Norwich...
Norwich... the great
mustard company of Norwich.
They provided quite a lot of
mustard for Robert Falcon Scott
and his Discovery Expedition.
To the South Pole.
As you can see there,
he has pots of Coleman's Mustard.
That's a genuine real photograph...
Yes, of course.
..not in the least bit touched-up.
How much did Coleman's,
of Norwich, give...
to Captain Scott's team
in the 1901-02...?
Two enormous barrels of mustard.
Actually, they gave them one
and a half tonnes... Tiny jar?
One and a half tonnes?!
..of mustard.
Tonnes of mustard.
Excellent.
That's enough for a lot of baths,
as well as a lot of food.
Now, from counting worms
to monkeys that count.
What job can even a monkey do?
Yes, Jo?
Is it quantity surveying?
They might be able to. Apologies
to all quantity surveyors watching.
That includes my brother.
Is your brother...? Oh, is he?
He is a quantity surveyor, yes.
Does he survey quantities all day?
Yeah, sadly for him. Do you get
tired of surveying quantities?
I mean, how many quantities
can you survey in one day?
He can survey 47 quantities
in a day. 47 quantities?
That's a lot of quantities.
Wow. Well, no, I don't think
monkeys can survey quantities.
They can count. Yes.
The person who counts how
many people are on the plane
before you take off,
that could be a monkey.
That would instil us all
with confidence, wouldn't it?
Just before takeoff,
a small primate comes down
the aisle with a clicker.
And he also does the duty-frees
because no-one ever buys anything.
Yes.
In Thailand, there is a school.
A monkey school? Yep.
They have between three and six
months of training -
the pig-tailed macaques -
and they end up
working on a plantation,
where they can pick
between 800 and 1,000 whats a day?
Bananas. Not bananas cos they'd eat
those, wouldn't they? They would.
Coconuts. Coconuts!
Between 800 and 1,000
coconuts a day, they can pick.
There they are.
But it's very useful.
So, a lot more than a
human could, probably.
But they do they count them,
as well?
Well, I don't... Those don't, no.
Clicker in one hand.
In the US, they use capuchin monkeys
for a charity called Helping Hands,
which assists people
with disabilities,
and they help with feeding,
retrieving dropped items,
changing compact discs,
turning lights on and off. Wow.
And in Tokyo,
there's a tavern where...
A traditional sake house,
where macaques are employed
to bring customers hot towels.
I don't want a hot towel off
that fella, I'll tell you that.
That is horrible.
Imagine that at the end
of your bed at night.
Oh, God!
"Hot towel, sir?" Oh, fuck off!
The late, great Rik Mayall had a
joke that he always told if you ever
went to a Japanese restaurant, sushi
house or something, like that,
and he'd go, "Waiter!"
"Bring me several types of Japanese
wine, and don't get all sake!"
Yay!
Couldn't help saying it every time.
It somehow...
From him, it was funny.
Now, from smart monkeys
to smart aleck kids.
Which of these would
an ancient Mexican use
to teach children manners?
You've got chocolate,
chilli...
The monkey with a baseball bat
seems pretty effective.
You've got to say "please" or
you get the monkey with the bat.
I, personally, would use a cactus.
Yeah. What would you do with it?
Throw the child at it.
Then you are pretty much on a par
with those ancient Mexicans.
Oh, am I?
Yeah. The Aztec or the...
..Mexica.
The Mexica, as
they were called... Yeah.
..from which, we
get our word Mexico,
did have a firm, but fair,
way of treating their children.
That means "very cruel".
Yeah, I know.
And the Codex Mendoza
was written by someone
observing the practices
of the Aztecs,
and this is what he found.
Basically, they were taught to be
humble, hard-working and polite,
just like British...
Oh, no, what am I talking about?
So this is how it went.
It begins with an eight-year-old boy
being threatened with
the spines of a cactus. Wow.
The following year, he's
stripped, bound and pierced
in his neck, side and thigh.
Next year, he's bound and
beaten with a pine stick.
The year after that, aged 11,
his father holds his son,
bound and weeping over
a fire of burning chillies -
as you can see, top right, there.
All practices carried on in
English boarding schools. Yes.
Finally, a stroppy 12-year-old
is bound and dumped
in a damp vegetable patch for a day
to reflect on his conduct.
By the time he's 13, he's dutifully
gathering reeds, as you can see.
Yeah, bearing a terrible grudge.
Which he will take out
on HIS child. Yes.
Unfortunately,
that's the way it works.
So, it's a sort of
a meme of cruelty. It is, yeah.
But the Huichol Mexicans -
and you'll like this, I think, Jo -
they had an interesting practice,
which was, when a woman
was pregnant,
she would lie, and,
in the room above,
her husband would lie,
and he would have strings
attached to his testicles,
which would drop down
into the room below -
where his wife was pregnant.
I'm loving this so far.
She would have...
She would hold the strings and,
when she had a contraction,
she would pull...
..so that he was forced
to share her pain...
He, cunningly, slipped the
string off, tied it onto the...
boards of the bed
and went to the pub.
Tied it to the dog.
"Tied it to the dog"!
Or his 12-year-old son.
"Argh!"
It's possible.
Oh, we're... Sorry, go on.
No, carry on.
No, I was going to say a terrible
and very embarrassing story
about testicles, but you carry on.
Oh, I want your testicle story.
All right, then.
Well, we had this dog,
and it got into the bed
and it started to lick...
the wrong set of testicles.
That's all I'm saying.
Surely everybody wins?
Everyone's a winner.
Not everyone, Stephen.
I haven't been back.
Yeah, the Mexica people of Mexico
used a very hands-on variety
of tough love.
And speaking of hands, what's
this man doing with his other hand?
Oh, Lord! It's M, it's M...
It begins with M.
It begins with M.
He could be doing anything, Stephen.
Is it something beginning with M?
If that was me, it would be me
trying to work out how the...
Scratching?
..bloody thing works with a printer.
Well, it does begin with M.
Massaging something?
If I tell you that he's a professor.
He's got a massive mouse on his leg.
Milking, mousing. "Massive mouse."
You're right to think of an
animal, cos he's a scientist -
a professor at the
University of Kentucky.
Has he got his finger
stuck in a moose?
He's a Mexican, he's a Mexican man,
and he's pressing a child
against a cactus under the desk.
He's a cruel man.
He is Professor Grayson Brown,
and he's an entomologist
of a particular kind.
A culicidologist,
if that makes any sense to you.
Molluscs? Not molluscs.
Oh. An entomologist. Mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes is the right answer.
Wow! On fire.
Sorry.
That's brilliant.
He's very serious in
his study of mosquitoes,
and he was allowing
1,000 mosquitoes -
as he does every morning,
while he carries on
doing his e-mails -
to feast on his arm.
His body is so used to it they no
longer leave a mark, apparently.
It's most bizarre.
Asian mosquitoes are very picky,
they only, ONLY, feast on humans...
They won't eat the blood
of any other animal.
..and, in order to keep them happy,
obviously they need
a big supply of blood.
So, he and his fellow workers...
And some animals, it has
to be said, in his lab,
also supply the blood for
other breeds of mosquito -
but, for the Asian ones,
it's just humans.
And, of course, they
have to keep them breeding.
Now, they're odd,
these Asian mosquitoes,
cos they're really a bit lazy.
I suppose they produce
so many thousands...
What's he trying to find out?
I mean, what is there left
to know about these creatures?
Well, given how many millions
of people they kill every year,
it's kind of...
You can't know enough.
Cos they kill more,
as you know, than wars.
But in order to get them
to mate, to force-mate them.
Play some Barry White,
give them some wine.
Well, that's what I thought,
but in this case,
they decapitate the male...
Oh, that's different.
No, no, that wouldn't work.
Good so far.
..they anaesthetise the female.
They then insert the male's genitals
into his unconscious partner.
Despite the lack of the male's head,
and the lack of the
female's consciousness,
the insects lock together,
sperm is transferred,
and the female becomes pregnant.
Does that happen with humans?
Yes? Well, if you've
had enough Jagermeister,
I suppose it will, yeah.
And a skilled entomologist
can do this without a microscope.
That's nothing to brag
about, though, is it?
No, it probably isn't!
"Oh, I can make mosquitoes
bang without a microscope."
We had a pair of preying mantis
once in the kitchen,
In a... You know, in
the tank, obviously.
And I came home one night
and the male praying mantis
was on the kitchen floor
walking across, like,
towards the door.
And I went, "Oh, no, he's got
out of the t... Oh, what a shame."
And I carefully scooped him up,
and I placed him back in
the tank, very gently,
and the female pounced
and bit his head off and...
..he was clearly
making a break for it.
Oh, because they do. The whole time,
"No, don't put me back there. Oh."
The females do eat the males,
don't they? Yes, they do.
So, they must have just mated. They
must have just... And he was off.
Yeah. Oh, dear, oh, dear.
Now, then, what's the world's oldest
complaint?
"I'm dying."
Er...
We're after the first recorded
complaint. Oh.
A medical complaint?
Not a medical complaint, actually.
Oh, right.
Complaint as in a moan, as in a...
Oh, I see, so the...
Where were the earliest pieces of
writing that we have?
In hieroglyphs?
Not hieroglyphs, actually -
they're made with reeds...
poked into wet clay onto tablets,
so the edge of the reed
is like a wedge shape,
and Latin for "wedge," cuneus...
Cuneiform?
Cuneiform, yes. Oh, right.
Which was where -
where did they do that?
It's... Babylon.
Babylon, yeah, Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia!
Mesopotamia!
Knew it'd come up!
Keep saying it.
"Keep saying it, it'll be right
in a minute."
And they have an enormous number
of these in the British Museum,
a fantastic collection. Stolen!
Well...
Sorry - saved.
Saved! Salvaged.
What, so it's a complaint,
you're saying? It's a complaint.
It's from a merchant, and it's
nearly 4,000 years old.
It's an ancient Babylonian
copper merchant.
He's called Nanni.
He's complaining to a supplier
called Ea-nasir
that he's received a shipment
of copper ore which was late,
and it was damaged and of an
inferior grade.
"You have put ingots which were not
good enough before my messenger,
"and said, 'If you want to take
them, take them.
"'If you do not want to take them,
go away.'
"What do you take me for,
"that you treat me
with such contempt?
"You alone treat my messenger
with contempt.
"You have withheld my money bag
from me in enemy territory.
"It's now up to you to restore
my money to me in full."
I was thinking that earlier
and I should have said it.
You...!
Would there be a series of these
complaints going back and forth?
We don't have...
"I refer you to the tablet
of the 14th."
"I still have not received redress
on the copper."
On and on, like, piles and piles
of these things.
"Stick your ingots where the sun
don't shine."
"I will be speaking to you now
through my lawyers."
I mean, the things that survived
most in terms of writing
are nearly always things to do
with money and trade. Mmm.
Cos that's what people
cared about most,
and that's how writing
seemed to develop.
So, the world's first complaint was
composed on a tablet.
But now it's time to move on
to the low-hanging fruit
of General Ignorance.
What kind of animal is a musk ox?
Is it an ox?
Oh!
How could you think such a thing?
What kind of animal is a musk ox?
Musk.
Not a musk.
That's...
You did say musk! Is it a deer?
Is it a banana, Stephen?
Not a banana!
Have a look at one.
Have a look at one?
Yeah, have a look at some musk oxen.
Cow. Bison.
Not a bison, no. Is it a sheep?
A snake?
Sheep is the right answer-ish.
A goat?
A goat!
It's a goat, well done.
It's a goat. Got its horns
right down the side, low down -
that's very difficult
for rutting, isn't it?
Got to go up next to someone
and hook them.
And they have enormous coats of fur.
Thought you might have said
something else there.
Really huge, and they are very...
very good at surviving cold
temperatures.
So good that they survived
the cold temperature
that many of their fellow animals
at the time didn't -
the sabre-toothed
tiger, for example.
Ice age!
The ice age - they survived
the ice age.
And they're a hardy, hardy beast.
They have this wonderful butting
contest where they butt heads.
Males, don't they - they have these
tremendous battles, male...
Man on man... Mano a mano.
"Mano a mano" means "hand to hand."
Yeah.
OK, what's the head, then?
Well, yeah, despite its name,
the musk ox is a member
of the goat family.
What do magpies like to steal?
Shiny things.
Everyone knows that!
Oh, Alany, Alany, Alany-walany,
Alany-walany-woo. Come on!
No. We think they do,
but they don't. Oh.
We've done tests. Well, WE haven't,
people have. Have you?
Out of 64 of them, magpies picked
up a shiny object only twice,
and then immediately dropped it.
They're not interested
in shiny things.
Like all animals, they're interested
in things that look like food or...
that they can shag.
The... It's folklore surrounding
them, seems to be just that -
folklore, anecdotes.
But the Italian for magpie...
..Ieads to an interesting thing.
Magpie-o.
Awfully nice thought.
Do you know the Rossini opera,
The Thieving Magpie?
Called "La Gazza Ladra."
"Gazza" is a magpie,
and a little magpie, "gazzetta."
Oh, it's the newspaper.
Called the "gazzetta".
A newspaper - gazette.
And that's it, the gossipy chatter,
Iike a magpie. Ah!
That's where we get that word,
"gazette".
I like... I quite like that one.
Yeah, me too. Yeah. Yeah, certainly.
Also, if I were to say that
the magpie's real name is a pie,
it's a pie.
Then where does the "mag" come from?
Margaret. Yeah.
Margaret. Was it? Yeah.
Where did that come from?
"Margaret Pie."
In medieval England, it was common
to give birds a Christian name,
sometimes, and the ones that have
survived have included magpie.
Which other ones can you...?
Robin. Robin.
Robin redbreast.
Robin redbreast.
Robin's the only one where the
first name is the one that's kept...
Dave Starling. Sorry?
Joseph Starling?
No, big Dave Starling.
Joseph would have been funny.
Joseph Starling is good, yeah.
I like that. I prefer that.
Not as funny as Dave,
but it's better. Yeah.
Tomtit.
Jenny Wren. Tomtit, yeah.
Charlie Crow.
Jackdaw. Jackdaw.
Oh, jackdaw. Yeah, yeah.
So there are a few of them.
Christopher Chaffinch.
We had an injured bird
in the garden yesterday... Oh.
..and it looked like a magpie,
and it couldn't take off,
and I was watching it for ages.
I didn't know what to do with it,
so I opened the back gate
and shooed it out.
Oh, dear. What do you think it was,
then? What make? "The back gate."
I think it was a young crow... Yeah.
..that was having a bit
of trouble with flight,
because it flew into a bush...
Oh, dear.
..and I presume it's dead by now.
That's it, you...? And that's the
end of tonight's Springwatch. Yes.
What could you have done with it?
I don't know, what are you going to
do with a bird? Shoot it, shoot it.
Take it out. Shoot the...
Sniper's rifle, through the brain.
I could have gone after it,
because it was in the garden
and couldn't get out.
I could have easily got it with a
tennis racket. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Just scoop it up
with a tennis racket
and hit it with a frying pan...
..and chuck it over the wall.
That's what I'd do.
And then its parents would have
come and ate it, wouldn't they?
Yeah, that's right. Let's face it,
it is the wild. Yeah. Exactly, yes.
Even if it is Hampstead.
It's wild for them, though.
They'd have had it in a coulis.
A crow couscous.
With some quinoa.
I wonder what its name was.
Clive, I expect.
No, I think it was Vel.
Vel? Vel-crow. "Velcro."
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
So, magpies aren't particularly
interested in shiny objects.
How many paintings
did Vincent Van Gogh -
or "Goch," or "Gough," or "Go"...
How many did he sell
while he was alive?
Don't say none.
None! I'm going to say none.
D'oh! D'oh!
Really, I'm afraid...
One. A few, maybe?
"A few".
It was lots. He sold
hundreds of paintings.
Hundreds?! Yeah, when he was 15,
he used to work in an art gallery.
Oh, shut up!
It's true.
I just asked you
how many paintings...
This is the closest I've come
to walking out of this show!
I'd like a recount on those two.
It was a horribly mean question,
but the fact is,
he did sell hundreds,
they just weren't his own.
He was very good
at selling them, too -
he did extremely well, and
it was a big French company,
and his brother, Theo,
ran the Montmartre branch,
and Vincent relocated, after
a while, to the London branch.
And he spent two years in London,
living in Brixton,
and he called it the
happiest time of his life.
Yeah, he did really well,
and he loved it.
Good fun in Brixton. It's great.
It was good fun, it's a good place.
Brixton Village. Brixton Village.
He would have gone and got
some chicken from Chickenliquor,
that's real nice.
Yeah. Is that your manor?
I used to live in Brixton and...
Do you know what I nearly did then?
I nearly called you "man,"
and then I stopped
myself. Thank you.
I just want you to appreciate that.
I really do. Thank you.
Anyway, perhaps the most surprising
thing we'll all learn today... Yes.
..is that, after Brixton,
he came back to the UK in 1876,
and Vincent Van Gogh...
worked...
as a supply teacher in Ramsgate.
Oh! Isn't that wonderful?
Wow. That's a big surprise,
isn't it? It is. It is, yeah.
I wonder if the children remembered
him for years afterwards...
Mr Van Gogh?..as a
flame-haired figure. Moody sod.
Yeah. Yeah. Then he became a
painter, supported financially,
and, indeed, emotionally
by his brother, Theo.
He suffered from tinnitus, vertigo
and, of course, depression,
and he killed himself aged 37.
Only one of his 900 paintings
was sold in his lifetime.
Sold to a remarkable
woman called Anna Boch,
who was, herself, a painter. One.
You said one! I said one.
You said one.
I asked how many paintings, not
how many of HIS OWN paintings.
I know, I'm sorry, but, look,
I did say...
Chairman of the
Pedantic Association.
"It's actually the Society of
Pedantics, but I'll let that go."
Yes, exactly, in fact.
Anna Boch paid 400 francs
for a painting of his
called The Red Vineyard,
which is rather beautiful.
About £1,000 today, that would be.
Bet he had a big night that night.
Well, it was only four months
before his death,
so it obviously didn't cheer him up
enormously.
Five out of the 30 most valuable
paintings ever sold at auction
are Van Goghs.
Four of them raising
over 100 million each.
That, er... That was his life, a
very unfortunate one in that sense.
But his work lives on for ever,
of course.
And with that, the final
whistle has blown and...
..the match has come to an end.
It's actually a very extraordinary
series of scores.
Um...
In first place, with plus eight -
yes, she WAS on fire - Jo Brand!
In second place...
with minus seven, it's James.
In third place...
with minus 32, is Bill Bailey.
Minus, how...?
In fourth place...
with minus 41, Alan Davies.
So, all that remains for me
is to pull up the corner flags,
thank James, Bill, Jo and Alan,
and to leave you with this
classic piece of Ron Atkinson
when asked about what made
the perfect match.
"Well, Clive, it's all
about the two M's -
"movement and positioning."
Good night.