QI (2003–…): Season 2, Episode 3 - Bombs - full transcript
(Applause)
(Whistling, cheering)
Well, a very, very, very,
very good evening to you,
ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Ql,
the BBC's answer to Pop ldol,
otherwise known as Bone ldle.
To educate, inform and entertain.
These are my intentions and paving the
road to hell with them tonight are Rich Hall,
Clive Anderson, Phill Jupitus
and Alan Davies.
The four panellists of the Apocalypse,
may the Lord Reith have mercy
on your souls.
Let's have a round on the buzzers and bells.
Erm, Rich, how do you sound?
(Westminster chimes)
- And Clive goes...
- (Westminster chimes)
(Rich) Hey, wait a minute.
- And Phill goes...
- (Westminster chimes)
- And Alan goes...
- (Cuckoo clock)
Excellent. Right, gentlemen, bombs away.
Alan, have you heard
about the Mexican kamikaze squadron?
(Mexican accent) Kamikazes. ls it like that?
(Laughs) That's right.
Only Mexican and, er...
(Mexican accent) l care not for myself,
only my country.
(Laughs) Very good indeed.
Very good indeed.
(Mexican accent) For the emperor!
(Stephen) Andale, andale.
l just image a bloke in a big hat
riding a donkey into the Alamo.
They eat so many refried beans,
they fart themselves to death
- and they explode in front of the enemy.
- Well it's oddly an interesting thought
because kamikaze is the Japanese
for divine wind.
Divine wind? ls it?
(Stephen) Erm, it is a Japanese word.
(Alan) God's guffs.
Yah.
But these little Mexican critters, er...
- They're not people.
- Exactly, not people,
were deployed by the US Army in the
Second World War, against the Japanese.
They're not like the dolphins they deployed
- in the war against lraq?
- ln the Gulf War. No, they're not.
- They let them out and then they pissed off.
- What they call the Mark 8 MMS,
Marine Mammal System.
What are the odds that the lraqi navy will be
leaning out from a boat with a flaming hoop
like that though?
Well, a critter would be some sort
of a desert fox.
Er, well, very close actually.
lt's gotta be an insect, hasn't it?
Like a bee?
- Between an insect and a fox...
- Between an insect and a fox.
- You might say, you might say.
- ln size or in...?
lt's kind of, in fact, it is more fox-like
- than insect-like, but it flies.
- Scorpio.
- lt's quite fox-like.
- A bat.
- A bat is the answer.
- Yeah, a Mexican bat.
- (Stephen) A Mexican bat.
- Oh!
- (Stephen) There they are.
- How d'you know it's Mexican
- without a sombrero?
- Well it's... (Laughs)
lt's the breed of the bat.
lt's a Mexican free-tailed bat.
- l actually know the answer to this.
- (Stephen) Give it to us.
lt's that the American Navy, in their wisdom,
because they saw these bats
would fly up under the eaves and nest.
And they thought, well if they see,
out at sea, a Japanese aircraft carrier,
or the hangers of the airplanes,
they'll nest.
- (Alan) Oh, yeah?
- And they filled them with explosives, right?
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
But what would happen is,
is where they were sewn up
the bats would go, ''What's that?''
And they'd start nibbling at themselves
and exploding in an untoward fashion.
You're very close, Phill. lt's not actually
the Navy and it's not boats.
- lt's actually worse than that.
- ls it not? l'm very close
- in that l'm nowhere near at all.
- No, you've got the principle,
in aeroplanes, hundreds of these bats
with little waistcoats.
l know, it sounds absurd. They went there
with napalm in them and a detonator
and the idea was to drop them
over Japanese towns around about dawn,
so that as the light came, as all bats will,
to escape the light they would go into the,
into, as you say, the eaves
and the rafters of the houses...
- (Clive) Yes?
- ..and then, at a particular time,
would detonate, causing
these whole towns to burn,
because most Japanese towns
were made of wood and paper.
You've got to set the napalm off,
so somebody has to follow to switch...
- ..ignition device incorporated.
- Yes. What did they send for that?
A bat with a little book of matches.
The, erm, actually,
there is a poetic justice, however.
Sorry, as a friend of our furry creatures,
you will be pleased to know
that poetic justice prevailed
and that before they ever used these bats
against the Japanese,
they were testing and the wind changed
and the bats that had been dropped
on the target wooden city in the desert
were blown back to the headquarters
of the American Army and blew it up.
- l don't find it poetic.
- Do you not find it poetic?
l'm an American.
As l understand it, er, the kamikaze pilots,
they only gave them enough fuel
to go one way, right?
- Yes.
- They do that with all planes, though.
(Rich) Right.
Technically...
(Applause)
So technically all aeroplanes
are kamikaze planes.
Unless you buy a return ticket.
This is why l think that planes
should run on AA batteries.
You wanna go to London, New York.
All right, you have to buy 200 AA batteries.
They only bring enough batteries
to get you there.
- There's no wastage.
- You can always get them at airports.
- (Stephen) That's true.
- And if you run out over the ocean,
somebody's got a Walkman or something,
you could get some more batteries.
What if, under the plane, the bit of ribbon
that you pull the batteries out with hasn't...
- (Stephen) lt's snagged.
- Where's that gone?
You have to get the end of a biro and...
- You're hanging underneath a 747...
- (Alan) 35,000 feet.
..trying to dig out 32 AA batteries with a biro.
But none of this is as mad
as a bat with a napalm waistcoat.
But it's a step because one minute
they're trying to get bats with napalm
to blow it up and then, ''OK, that didn't work,
an atomic bomb then.''
- We'll blow up two cities.
- Clive, l'm glad you said that
because it brings me to my next question,
which l'll address to Rich.
Which comedian went and dropped
an atomic bomb on Japan?
That would mean basically
which comedian bombed in Japan?
- That would have been me.
- Did you bomb in Japan?
l bombed so horribly in Japan that l...
(Stephen) With an
English-speaking audience?
No, Japanese-speaking audience.
l think l've put my finger on what went
wrong. That had a lot to do with it. But, er...
No, a comedian member of, er,
- what you might call a troupe of comedians.
- One of the Stooges.
- (Stephen) Better known than the Stooges.
- Abbott and Costello.
Woo, woo, woo. Why you knuckle-head.
You dropped that atomic bomb on Japan.
What d'you want to do that for?
Why, l oughta, ooh.
They'd never have won the war
if those blokes had had a plane.
- Oliver Hardy?
- No.
He didn't drop the bomb,
he contributed materially
to the technology
behind the dropping of the bomb,
very specifically
behind the dropping of the bomb.
He invented, everyone else
was working on the nuclear explosion,
he invented little doors that went...ch-chuk!
There's a particular clamp,
there's a, you know,
a particular clamp that held the bomb
to Enola Gay, to the aeroplane.
- (Alan) The Bob Hope... The Marx Brothers.
- The Krazy Gang.
The best known of them all,
the Marx Brothers.
(Alan) Groucho...
(Clive) Bombo. Zeppelino.
(Alan) That one.
(Stephen) The ringed one, what's his name?
- Karl.
- (Stephen) No.
You've got, reading from left to right,
Harpo and Groucho,
- and on the right hand side, there's Chico.
- (Phill) Zeppo.
(Stephen) Zeppo is correct.
(Alan) The bomb door designer.
And he joined after Gummo also known
as U-o, who left, left the stage act.
He was in five of the films,
the last one being Duck Soup,
and he left to become an agent
and to set up a company
- that specialised in engineering and design.
- Called Blammo.
Called, l think it should
have been called Blammo,
and he came up with the clamp
that held the bomb,
as well as wrist watch, he came up with,
that detected your pulse and gave an alarm
when you were having a heart attack.
And Groucho said he was a lousy actor and
couldn't wait to get out of the Marx Brothers,
but he also added, and everyone
seems to be in agreement,
that he was far and away,
off-screen, the funniest
- and the wittiest of the Marx Brothers.
- Harpo could actually talk in real life.
- No! Now you've shattered all my illusions.
- l read his autobiography.
He spent the 15 years of his life nicking stuff
- and he's really proud of it.
- (Stephen) They all did.
They were gangsters in New York.
Big hoodlums.
The Three Stooges are flying planes
and they're the gangs of New York?
- He's got the stove pipe hat.
- We're going to kill you
if you don't give me the money.
He had a career as an after-dinner speaker,
Harpo, because he could just stand up
and say, ''Unaccustomed as l am...''
And everyone would laugh.
A lot of early 20th century gangs in New
York were Jewish. Dutch Schultz,
right up to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Segal.
l think that a lot of the Scorsese oeuvre
would be a lot nicer if people had horns...
(lmpersonates comedy horn).
You know, De Niro.
And had a funny hat.
Hey Johnny, what's you gonna gado?
(lmpersonates comedy horn)
You think l'm funny how?
l'm gonna play this...(Bleep)..harp over here.
l amuse you? (lmpersonates comedy horn)
(Stephen) Fantastic.
Now Phill, one for you, l think.
What goes ''Woof, woof, boom''?
A suicide corgi.
The next Norwegian entry
for the Eurovision Song Contest?
d My heart goes woof woof boom d
(Rich) Terrierist.
Oh, excellent. Joy upon joys.
Very, very good.
You must have some points
for that. Excellent.
You've kind of said it. Well, we know
how grotesque the Americans can be,
by sending bats into com-bat.
And now, er, the Russian flag,
as you see waving behind you,
- the Russians could be just as...
- A dog with a bomb on it?
Dogs with bombs tied to them
is what we're looking for.
- (Alan) Oh.
- l know.
- Oh, man.
- What man is capable of, isn't it?
(Alan) There he is.
(Stephen) lt's too grotesque.
- (Clive) Does he know?
- The story is horrible.
They trained them by making them
very, very hungry.
You throw a stick at a tank
and it just goes.
- (Stephen) Well no, not quite.
- (Barking)
Why not just throw a bomb
at the tank, for God's sake,
- instead of making the dog go?
- Because they're armour plated
and the point is, they would keep
the dogs very, very hungry
and then put food under a tank,
which is the vulnerable part,
- which you can't get a bomb at easily.
- Why not just put a bomb there?
While you're there putting the food down,
put a bomb down and run away.
- No, no, this is when they're training them.
- Oh, when they're training them, sorry.
So they become used to looking
under tanks for food.
(Alan) l thought you meant on the battlefield.
Whose job was it to change gear
on that dog?
(Stephen) That's the trigger.
(Alan) lt's the trigger for the bomb.
(Stephen) When it gets under the tank.
(Phill) This is just...
(Alan) l bet you all eat sheep though,
don't you, on a Sunday?
Don't worry, that one didn't blow up.
He lives on a farm now.
He lives on a farm now.
His back's broken, but...
l, erm, have to tell you
that there was again poetic justice.
The dogs just turned round in the battle and
saw the tanks which are Russian shaped,
which they recognised
as having food under them
and so they went
and blew up their own tanks.
So the Russians started to shoot
all the dogs.
They didn't shoot that one,
they didn't shoot that one.
He lives on a farm, they really love him,
they stroke him a lot.
Anyway, on to our next picture question.
Why is this picture a double first?
Are they going to use the penguin
to blow up the Scotsman?
lt's, it's a brilliant plan.
lt's the first time the pipes are played
in the, er, Antarctica.
Yes, it's probably the first time a penguin
was ever subjected to any kind of music.
That penguin, two seconds later,
went like that.
(Applause)
ls this the first ever Edinburgh Festival?
Would that it were. No. Did you know...
- Would that it were, Stephen.
- This is going all Robert Robinson.
(lmpersonates Robinson)
Ah, would that it were. Would that it were.
Oh, shush and tish.
So, erm...
(lmpersonates Robinson)
This one for mother and only son.
Did you know that, erm,
that fifty percent of pipers, erm,
l don't mean newspipers,
l mean, er, bagpipers,
fifty percent of pipers suffer
from repetitive strain injury,
and, er, and also are hard of hearing.
- That is poetic justice.
- That, exactly, very good. Excellent.
- (Applause)
- Oh, how neat.
No, it's the first postcard
ever to be sent from Antarctica.
- Ah.
- You don't bring a lot of stuff to Antarctica.
This guy had to drag his bag.
What if they had hit a crevasse?
Too much weight and it turned out
it was just because he'd brought a...
You never know, it might have saved his life.
lt might have caught in the crack
and he would swing from it.
That did come out oddly
but you know what l mean.
Now, what is the common name
of the species Ursus Arctos?
- Ursus Arctos?
- (Clive) Well, it's the polar bear, is it?
- (Stephen) Polar bear, do you say?
- (Clive) Yes.
- (Alarm)
- You led me onto that one.
No, it's not polar bear.
lt was indeed a bear pit, a bear trap.
Er, no, no, no. The common name is,
there are two common names.
lf you're American there's one name,
if you're European another.
- What's ursus mean?
- Ursus is the Latin for bear.
And arctos is the Greek for bear.
- Oh, so it's a bear bear?
- (Stephen) lt's a bear bear, yeah.
What's a hare bear in Latin?
- We shall have to find out.
- They were great, The Hare Bear Bunch.
You can join in at some level, l find.
- Exactly.
- (Alan) There's always a way in.
- There's a grizzly.
- There's a grizzly bear, yes.
Ursus Arctos or the brown bear.
The point is that the Arctic itself, the Arctic
and, therefore, of course, the Antarctic,
is named after the bear,
not the other way round.
lt was the region of the bear,
where you see Ursa Major, the great bear,
the constellation in the sky
is always over the north.
- So if the Arctic's named after the bear.
- Yeah.
The Antarctic is named
after the ant and the bear.
- Yes, that's it.
- (Clive) Well why would that be?
- The Adventures of Ant and Bear.
- (Clive) Like Ant and Dec.
- Ant and Dec, exactly.
- Only easier to tell apart, obviously.
And easier to tolerate.
(Applause)
- l love...
- They won't come on the show
- now you've said that.
(Stephen) Oh bother. Bother, bother, bother.
How am l going to live with myself?
No, they're good. Anthony and December
you should address them as, though.
They could be walking up
and down under here as we speak.
- But they're not in fact.
- Ant is always on the left.
- (Stephen) ls that how you tell? Thank you.
- Always on the left.
Reading from left to right,
they're in alphabetical order.
- Ant and Dec. Ant and Dec.
- (Stephen) Excellent.
And it's weird, even when you
go round them, and go from behind,
they still, somehow it works.
lt's like the eyes following you
round the room,
it's like the moon going with you up the M1 .
Ant and Dec, always.
No, the polar bear is actually
ursus maritimus, as if you cared.
Erm, how do polar bears
disguise themselves?
Like that.
They stand in front of anything white.
That's probably the right answer, l suspect.
What, do they dress up in something?
No, there is apparently a misconception
that they cover their nose with their left paw.
- (Clive) Yes.
- ln an ostrich burying its head
in the sand sort of way,
thinking that it disguises themselves.
Like that, like our model,
our demonstrator is showing us now.
- Where's Alan? Where's Alan gone?
- (Stephen) Where's Alan gone?
- Where has he gone?
- (Clive) Are they not just checking
if they've got bad breath?
l don't understand if you're
a 12 foot, 800 pound bear,
why you have to disguise yourself at all.
- (Stephen) Absolutely, spot on.
- Bear tax.
(Stephen) Who is gonna bear tax?
- No bears here.
- l haven't seen him.
Or they stand like that with...
and they put three bits of coal there
and a carrot in their mouth.
Delicious. Now, well there we are.
This brings us neatly
to our General lgnorance round,
in which we ask Alan,
is this a rhetorical question?
No.
Quite right.
So...
- Fingers on buzzers.
- Cor, l got a headache after that.
What's the point of rhetorical questions?
(Laughs) So, fingers on the buzzers.
Er, how many States are there
in the United States of America?
- (Cuckoo clock)
- Alan?
- 50.
- Oh, dear.
- (Alarm)
- Oh dear, oh dear.
lt's 46, technically
because four of them are not states.
There they are. That's Kentucky, Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
- (Both) They're commonwealths.
- Exactly.
They are actually commonwealths,
rather than States,
What that constitutionally means, is their
governance any different from the others?
They have governors and they have the
same sort of way of conducting business.
And so many straight lines.
lsn't God odd, you know?
- What are the odds against that?
- They've all got straight lines,
apart from one. There's only one state
that hasn't got a straight line in it.
Oh, that's a good question.
Erm, l should imagine that would be Hawaii.
lt is. Well done, l knew that, yes.
No, well there you are. No, it was just
a guess. Anyway, gosh, how interesting.
Now, staying with America,
in the whole of the Second World War,
only six Americans were killed
by enemy action on US soil.
- Right.
- All of them at a church picnic, right?
The cause of death was a Japanese fugo.
- My question is, what is a fugo?
- He's the seventh Marx Brother.
We were hoping you might say
it was a poisonous fish,
because there is a poisonous fish
called the fugu.
But it's not that.
No, fugo is a paper balloon.
There were atomic bombs in one direction
and ''OK, let leash the paper balloons, then.''
They sent thousands of them
over the Pacific.
- With a bomb hanging off it?
- With bombs on them, yeah.
But the odds against them landing
on a city in mainland United States
are drastically against
because most of it's kind of wasteland.
lt's farm land to the west and desert to the...
- (Bell chimes)
- Whoops. Hello.
- lt's not wasteland.
- Well, no.
All right, but the chances are
that if you send a random balloon
into mainland United States, the chance
is more likely it will hit something
- which is not going to kill people.
- Wasteland.
lt's a clever weapon
because radar wouldn't detect it
because only the little bits of metal
in the bomb would be even...
- But the paper wouldn't show up on radar.
- (Stephen) No.
lt was made of a paper called washi,
which is from mulberry.
- Wahi!
- Washi or wahi, if you prefer.
(Alan) Balloon!
(Stephen) Very good. Fugo...
Barroon! l'm no good at,
l can't do a Japanese...
They did know about the jet stream,
which no one else in the world did,
which allowed it to travel
at hundreds of miles an hour.
But actually they were made by schoolgirls
who didn't know what they were making.
- They stuck, pasted...
- (Bell chimes)
Birmingham is a wasteland.
(Applause)
That's, er,
(Stephen) That's in Alabama,
l believe, is that right?
- Birmingham, Alabama.
- (Stephen) Birmingham, Alabama.
That's a wasteland, they should team up
with each other.
(Stephen) They should.
Anyway, those are fugo bombs,
but fugu, which you neatly avoided
the trap of...
- (Phill) lt's blow fish.
- That puffer fish,
- where there's a bit that...
- The big one. Oh, yeah.
ls it about six people a year die in Japan?
Actually a bit more than that.
lt's between 30 and a hundred
suffer from the poisoning
and half of those die.
So it's anything between 15 and 50.
800 Americans die
in a McDonalds every year.
- Do they?
- (Rich) Which one?
- Best to avoid that one.
- We certainly will.
The blowfish McMuffin.
You're right, this is a fish which has inner
parts, organs, which are deadly poisonous.
They just love the daring of it.
That's what l thought, Alan,
but it turns out that, in fact,
there are traces of the poison always left
and if they're small enough...
- They get you high.
- You're quite right.
lt's tetrodotoxin which is very,
very poisonous,
and you have to be specially trained
in the art of filleting this particular fish
and all the restaurants in Japan where
you can eat it have little lanterns
hanging outside made of the skin
of this fish with a little symbol
to show that it's a trained...
Part of the training
is that you have to eat the fish
that you've just cut.
- Have you had fugu?
- No, l've never been to Japan.
You're so tall, you'd be like Godzilla,
they'd be, ''Aaeee! Stephen Fryu!''
''Mr Fly, Mr Fly! Mr Fly!''
You'd be rampaging
through downtown Tokyo, ''Baaah.''
Go in museum.
Why is it that Jap...
lt's always a 50-50 ball, isn't it,
whether it's an R or an L
and they always get it wrong.
- The Japanese...
- l won't generalise about a race of people.
All right. Fair enough.
l heard Mike Myers do an American name,
Rory Templeton
and he called him Roroory Tempereton.
lf you want the Japanese
to virtually commit suicide,
just ask them to say, Orange tip fritillary.
(Japanese impression)
Ah, l won't do it! lt's too bad!
For you, Mr Fry, the interview is over.
You build bridge now!
So much for the Geneva Convention.
Erm, oh yes.
So you're all absolutely correct, yes.
Whatever the question was.
- Er...?
- (Stephen) Fugus. Fugus, that's right, yeah.
- Fugus.
- (Stephen) Fugus and Fugos.
Right, so when are penguins found
near the magnetic north pole?
- (Cuckoo clock)
- When they're wearing a suit of armour.
- (Bell chimes)
- Er, they're going to be soon
because the magnetic north and south
is going to switch any minute now.
- Oh, give the man five points.
- (Applause)
Absolutely spot on.
Er, the trap was to say, ''Penguins
only live near the south pole,
''so they'll never be near the north pole.''
But the fact is, the north
and the south flip in magnetic...
l think penguins might be
my favourite animal.
- They are wonderful, aren't they?
- l like the one in the bottom left.
(Rich) lt looks like security.
(Stephen) He does, doesn't he?
Yes, the actual root of the question, though
penguins are, l suppose, more interesting
was that the north pole
becomes the south pole
and vice versa every million
or so years. The...
- (Alan) Really?
- Yeah.
So any minute now, everyone's fridge
magnets are just going to fall on the floor?
And loads of people will start believing
in bloody God again, won't they?
That's not how fridge magnets work.
What will happen
is compasses will point to the south,
rather than the north.
- That'll be great for orienteering, won't it?
- l think people will get used to it quickly.
- No, they won't.
- l think they will.
North, not south? l don't live
in South London, l don't care what you say.
l'm with you there. Oh, dear. (Laughs)
And do we know why it happens?
What's going on?
No, l don't think we do.
lt's a very mysterious process.
- Just somebody flicks a switch.
- lf the earth were not magnetic,
we wouldn't have, there would be no life
on it, at least no life like us.
- because...
- (Phill) Oh, what a loss.
Yeah, the magnetism deflects
the solar rays and...
l want you to imagine
that the penguin is a malicious
and dangerous conqueror of peoples.
And now look at that picture.
They don't have many predators.
Obviously, in the Antarctic they don't.
- Polar bears eat them.
- They don't live in the same continent.
- No? They've never met?
- Polar bears are in the north.
Polar bear in the north
and penguins in the south?
- They've never seen one another?
- Except in zoos.
ln my mind, it's like lions and tigers.
ln my head, they're all hanging out together
- and they've never met.
- Lions and tigers don't, either.
Lions, Africa. Tigers, Asia.
lmagine if it was like that
with men and women.
Here's a thought, right.
Do you think it would be better
if it was harder to conceive
but easier to give birth?
lf l was a woman, l would certainly
think that, l should imagine.
- l mean who cooked that up?
- (Stephen) lt's pretty mean, isn't it.
- lt's all backwards, isn't it.
- Yeah, you're right.
Mind you, you wouldn't want gasping agony
for 36 hours to conceive.
Well, that's usually what it sounds like.
Let's move on, then.
What is wrong with this picture?
- (Bell chimes)
- Yes?
No Starship Enterprise.
- (Cuckoo clock)
- lt should be the other way up.
You're absolutely right.
Have some points. Quite right.
lt's upside down, according to our,
you know, usual convention
of putting north at the top
and south at the bottom.
Ah, so in 200,000 years time, this is going
to be completely wrong, isn't it, yes?
At the moment that's its north pole at the top
and its south pole at the bottom.
- What l meant was, it should be vertical.
- Oh, l see.
- How very honest you are, Davies.
- l can't help it.
You've taken those points off yourself.
And lastly on poles, how are boy scouts
connected to poles?
- (Stephen) Don't look at me like that.
- (Bell chimes)
lt's part of their uniform. They used to have
a hat and a pole and a neckerchief
and a special pole which was used
for erecting their tents, for example.
- Something to do with Poland.
- lt is to do with Poland.
Erm, name things that are particular
about boy scouts.
- Dib, dib, dib. Dob, dob, dob.
- That's one.
- (Phill) That's Polish.
- The salute...
- The salute. You got there.
- ..is Polish.
lt's very, very close to the Polish salute.
Let's have a look at a Polish salute
and a boy scout's salute together, shall we?
There you are, on your screens now.
(Alan) Which one's the Pole?
(Stephen) Oh, let me think. Let me think.
(Clive) They use two fingers.
(Alan) What a weedy, nerdy scout.
(Stephen) lt's the Milky Bar Kid,
l think, isn't it?
(Alan) We need hard scouts.
l loved the boy scouts. We went to 'nam.
lt's said to be an American invention,
the boy scout movement,
more than really a British, although
it's said to be Baden Powell by many,
there was a man called Seaton who founded
a movement called the Woodcraft lndians.
Did you go in a helicopter gun-ship?
(lmitates helicopter)
He had a little waistcoat
with napalm strapped to him.
And the Doors playing really loudly.
(US accent) Now boys, if you see anybody
wearing black pyjamas,
you run towards them and you press
that button there.
(Alan in US accent) Dib, dib, dib.
Kaboom.
(US accent) You got your woodcraft,
you got your killing gooks
(US accent) You got
your napalm waistcoat, too.
(Normal accent) Well, there you are.
Poles are the only army, l think,
where they have that salute with two fingers,
supposedly after some Polish war hero
who had three fingers blown off.
- Do l look Polish?
- You look very Polish, yeah.
(Phill) Ooh, do a Polish polar bear.
Fantastic, thank you.
Well, on that bombshell,
that's it for another week, l'm sorry to say.
And the final scores are poles apart.
Phill scored a piping hot four.
Rich barely scraped in ahead
of Clive with two and one, respectively,
but Alan bombed with minus four.
(Applause)
Two fingers to Alan and to you all.
lt's do widzenia. Good night.
(Applause)
(Whistling, cheering)
Well, a very, very, very,
very good evening to you,
ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Ql,
the BBC's answer to Pop ldol,
otherwise known as Bone ldle.
To educate, inform and entertain.
These are my intentions and paving the
road to hell with them tonight are Rich Hall,
Clive Anderson, Phill Jupitus
and Alan Davies.
The four panellists of the Apocalypse,
may the Lord Reith have mercy
on your souls.
Let's have a round on the buzzers and bells.
Erm, Rich, how do you sound?
(Westminster chimes)
- And Clive goes...
- (Westminster chimes)
(Rich) Hey, wait a minute.
- And Phill goes...
- (Westminster chimes)
- And Alan goes...
- (Cuckoo clock)
Excellent. Right, gentlemen, bombs away.
Alan, have you heard
about the Mexican kamikaze squadron?
(Mexican accent) Kamikazes. ls it like that?
(Laughs) That's right.
Only Mexican and, er...
(Mexican accent) l care not for myself,
only my country.
(Laughs) Very good indeed.
Very good indeed.
(Mexican accent) For the emperor!
(Stephen) Andale, andale.
l just image a bloke in a big hat
riding a donkey into the Alamo.
They eat so many refried beans,
they fart themselves to death
- and they explode in front of the enemy.
- Well it's oddly an interesting thought
because kamikaze is the Japanese
for divine wind.
Divine wind? ls it?
(Stephen) Erm, it is a Japanese word.
(Alan) God's guffs.
Yah.
But these little Mexican critters, er...
- They're not people.
- Exactly, not people,
were deployed by the US Army in the
Second World War, against the Japanese.
They're not like the dolphins they deployed
- in the war against lraq?
- ln the Gulf War. No, they're not.
- They let them out and then they pissed off.
- What they call the Mark 8 MMS,
Marine Mammal System.
What are the odds that the lraqi navy will be
leaning out from a boat with a flaming hoop
like that though?
Well, a critter would be some sort
of a desert fox.
Er, well, very close actually.
lt's gotta be an insect, hasn't it?
Like a bee?
- Between an insect and a fox...
- Between an insect and a fox.
- You might say, you might say.
- ln size or in...?
lt's kind of, in fact, it is more fox-like
- than insect-like, but it flies.
- Scorpio.
- lt's quite fox-like.
- A bat.
- A bat is the answer.
- Yeah, a Mexican bat.
- (Stephen) A Mexican bat.
- Oh!
- (Stephen) There they are.
- How d'you know it's Mexican
- without a sombrero?
- Well it's... (Laughs)
lt's the breed of the bat.
lt's a Mexican free-tailed bat.
- l actually know the answer to this.
- (Stephen) Give it to us.
lt's that the American Navy, in their wisdom,
because they saw these bats
would fly up under the eaves and nest.
And they thought, well if they see,
out at sea, a Japanese aircraft carrier,
or the hangers of the airplanes,
they'll nest.
- (Alan) Oh, yeah?
- And they filled them with explosives, right?
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
But what would happen is,
is where they were sewn up
the bats would go, ''What's that?''
And they'd start nibbling at themselves
and exploding in an untoward fashion.
You're very close, Phill. lt's not actually
the Navy and it's not boats.
- lt's actually worse than that.
- ls it not? l'm very close
- in that l'm nowhere near at all.
- No, you've got the principle,
in aeroplanes, hundreds of these bats
with little waistcoats.
l know, it sounds absurd. They went there
with napalm in them and a detonator
and the idea was to drop them
over Japanese towns around about dawn,
so that as the light came, as all bats will,
to escape the light they would go into the,
into, as you say, the eaves
and the rafters of the houses...
- (Clive) Yes?
- ..and then, at a particular time,
would detonate, causing
these whole towns to burn,
because most Japanese towns
were made of wood and paper.
You've got to set the napalm off,
so somebody has to follow to switch...
- ..ignition device incorporated.
- Yes. What did they send for that?
A bat with a little book of matches.
The, erm, actually,
there is a poetic justice, however.
Sorry, as a friend of our furry creatures,
you will be pleased to know
that poetic justice prevailed
and that before they ever used these bats
against the Japanese,
they were testing and the wind changed
and the bats that had been dropped
on the target wooden city in the desert
were blown back to the headquarters
of the American Army and blew it up.
- l don't find it poetic.
- Do you not find it poetic?
l'm an American.
As l understand it, er, the kamikaze pilots,
they only gave them enough fuel
to go one way, right?
- Yes.
- They do that with all planes, though.
(Rich) Right.
Technically...
(Applause)
So technically all aeroplanes
are kamikaze planes.
Unless you buy a return ticket.
This is why l think that planes
should run on AA batteries.
You wanna go to London, New York.
All right, you have to buy 200 AA batteries.
They only bring enough batteries
to get you there.
- There's no wastage.
- You can always get them at airports.
- (Stephen) That's true.
- And if you run out over the ocean,
somebody's got a Walkman or something,
you could get some more batteries.
What if, under the plane, the bit of ribbon
that you pull the batteries out with hasn't...
- (Stephen) lt's snagged.
- Where's that gone?
You have to get the end of a biro and...
- You're hanging underneath a 747...
- (Alan) 35,000 feet.
..trying to dig out 32 AA batteries with a biro.
But none of this is as mad
as a bat with a napalm waistcoat.
But it's a step because one minute
they're trying to get bats with napalm
to blow it up and then, ''OK, that didn't work,
an atomic bomb then.''
- We'll blow up two cities.
- Clive, l'm glad you said that
because it brings me to my next question,
which l'll address to Rich.
Which comedian went and dropped
an atomic bomb on Japan?
That would mean basically
which comedian bombed in Japan?
- That would have been me.
- Did you bomb in Japan?
l bombed so horribly in Japan that l...
(Stephen) With an
English-speaking audience?
No, Japanese-speaking audience.
l think l've put my finger on what went
wrong. That had a lot to do with it. But, er...
No, a comedian member of, er,
- what you might call a troupe of comedians.
- One of the Stooges.
- (Stephen) Better known than the Stooges.
- Abbott and Costello.
Woo, woo, woo. Why you knuckle-head.
You dropped that atomic bomb on Japan.
What d'you want to do that for?
Why, l oughta, ooh.
They'd never have won the war
if those blokes had had a plane.
- Oliver Hardy?
- No.
He didn't drop the bomb,
he contributed materially
to the technology
behind the dropping of the bomb,
very specifically
behind the dropping of the bomb.
He invented, everyone else
was working on the nuclear explosion,
he invented little doors that went...ch-chuk!
There's a particular clamp,
there's a, you know,
a particular clamp that held the bomb
to Enola Gay, to the aeroplane.
- (Alan) The Bob Hope... The Marx Brothers.
- The Krazy Gang.
The best known of them all,
the Marx Brothers.
(Alan) Groucho...
(Clive) Bombo. Zeppelino.
(Alan) That one.
(Stephen) The ringed one, what's his name?
- Karl.
- (Stephen) No.
You've got, reading from left to right,
Harpo and Groucho,
- and on the right hand side, there's Chico.
- (Phill) Zeppo.
(Stephen) Zeppo is correct.
(Alan) The bomb door designer.
And he joined after Gummo also known
as U-o, who left, left the stage act.
He was in five of the films,
the last one being Duck Soup,
and he left to become an agent
and to set up a company
- that specialised in engineering and design.
- Called Blammo.
Called, l think it should
have been called Blammo,
and he came up with the clamp
that held the bomb,
as well as wrist watch, he came up with,
that detected your pulse and gave an alarm
when you were having a heart attack.
And Groucho said he was a lousy actor and
couldn't wait to get out of the Marx Brothers,
but he also added, and everyone
seems to be in agreement,
that he was far and away,
off-screen, the funniest
- and the wittiest of the Marx Brothers.
- Harpo could actually talk in real life.
- No! Now you've shattered all my illusions.
- l read his autobiography.
He spent the 15 years of his life nicking stuff
- and he's really proud of it.
- (Stephen) They all did.
They were gangsters in New York.
Big hoodlums.
The Three Stooges are flying planes
and they're the gangs of New York?
- He's got the stove pipe hat.
- We're going to kill you
if you don't give me the money.
He had a career as an after-dinner speaker,
Harpo, because he could just stand up
and say, ''Unaccustomed as l am...''
And everyone would laugh.
A lot of early 20th century gangs in New
York were Jewish. Dutch Schultz,
right up to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Segal.
l think that a lot of the Scorsese oeuvre
would be a lot nicer if people had horns...
(lmpersonates comedy horn).
You know, De Niro.
And had a funny hat.
Hey Johnny, what's you gonna gado?
(lmpersonates comedy horn)
You think l'm funny how?
l'm gonna play this...(Bleep)..harp over here.
l amuse you? (lmpersonates comedy horn)
(Stephen) Fantastic.
Now Phill, one for you, l think.
What goes ''Woof, woof, boom''?
A suicide corgi.
The next Norwegian entry
for the Eurovision Song Contest?
d My heart goes woof woof boom d
(Rich) Terrierist.
Oh, excellent. Joy upon joys.
Very, very good.
You must have some points
for that. Excellent.
You've kind of said it. Well, we know
how grotesque the Americans can be,
by sending bats into com-bat.
And now, er, the Russian flag,
as you see waving behind you,
- the Russians could be just as...
- A dog with a bomb on it?
Dogs with bombs tied to them
is what we're looking for.
- (Alan) Oh.
- l know.
- Oh, man.
- What man is capable of, isn't it?
(Alan) There he is.
(Stephen) lt's too grotesque.
- (Clive) Does he know?
- The story is horrible.
They trained them by making them
very, very hungry.
You throw a stick at a tank
and it just goes.
- (Stephen) Well no, not quite.
- (Barking)
Why not just throw a bomb
at the tank, for God's sake,
- instead of making the dog go?
- Because they're armour plated
and the point is, they would keep
the dogs very, very hungry
and then put food under a tank,
which is the vulnerable part,
- which you can't get a bomb at easily.
- Why not just put a bomb there?
While you're there putting the food down,
put a bomb down and run away.
- No, no, this is when they're training them.
- Oh, when they're training them, sorry.
So they become used to looking
under tanks for food.
(Alan) l thought you meant on the battlefield.
Whose job was it to change gear
on that dog?
(Stephen) That's the trigger.
(Alan) lt's the trigger for the bomb.
(Stephen) When it gets under the tank.
(Phill) This is just...
(Alan) l bet you all eat sheep though,
don't you, on a Sunday?
Don't worry, that one didn't blow up.
He lives on a farm now.
He lives on a farm now.
His back's broken, but...
l, erm, have to tell you
that there was again poetic justice.
The dogs just turned round in the battle and
saw the tanks which are Russian shaped,
which they recognised
as having food under them
and so they went
and blew up their own tanks.
So the Russians started to shoot
all the dogs.
They didn't shoot that one,
they didn't shoot that one.
He lives on a farm, they really love him,
they stroke him a lot.
Anyway, on to our next picture question.
Why is this picture a double first?
Are they going to use the penguin
to blow up the Scotsman?
lt's, it's a brilliant plan.
lt's the first time the pipes are played
in the, er, Antarctica.
Yes, it's probably the first time a penguin
was ever subjected to any kind of music.
That penguin, two seconds later,
went like that.
(Applause)
ls this the first ever Edinburgh Festival?
Would that it were. No. Did you know...
- Would that it were, Stephen.
- This is going all Robert Robinson.
(lmpersonates Robinson)
Ah, would that it were. Would that it were.
Oh, shush and tish.
So, erm...
(lmpersonates Robinson)
This one for mother and only son.
Did you know that, erm,
that fifty percent of pipers, erm,
l don't mean newspipers,
l mean, er, bagpipers,
fifty percent of pipers suffer
from repetitive strain injury,
and, er, and also are hard of hearing.
- That is poetic justice.
- That, exactly, very good. Excellent.
- (Applause)
- Oh, how neat.
No, it's the first postcard
ever to be sent from Antarctica.
- Ah.
- You don't bring a lot of stuff to Antarctica.
This guy had to drag his bag.
What if they had hit a crevasse?
Too much weight and it turned out
it was just because he'd brought a...
You never know, it might have saved his life.
lt might have caught in the crack
and he would swing from it.
That did come out oddly
but you know what l mean.
Now, what is the common name
of the species Ursus Arctos?
- Ursus Arctos?
- (Clive) Well, it's the polar bear, is it?
- (Stephen) Polar bear, do you say?
- (Clive) Yes.
- (Alarm)
- You led me onto that one.
No, it's not polar bear.
lt was indeed a bear pit, a bear trap.
Er, no, no, no. The common name is,
there are two common names.
lf you're American there's one name,
if you're European another.
- What's ursus mean?
- Ursus is the Latin for bear.
And arctos is the Greek for bear.
- Oh, so it's a bear bear?
- (Stephen) lt's a bear bear, yeah.
What's a hare bear in Latin?
- We shall have to find out.
- They were great, The Hare Bear Bunch.
You can join in at some level, l find.
- Exactly.
- (Alan) There's always a way in.
- There's a grizzly.
- There's a grizzly bear, yes.
Ursus Arctos or the brown bear.
The point is that the Arctic itself, the Arctic
and, therefore, of course, the Antarctic,
is named after the bear,
not the other way round.
lt was the region of the bear,
where you see Ursa Major, the great bear,
the constellation in the sky
is always over the north.
- So if the Arctic's named after the bear.
- Yeah.
The Antarctic is named
after the ant and the bear.
- Yes, that's it.
- (Clive) Well why would that be?
- The Adventures of Ant and Bear.
- (Clive) Like Ant and Dec.
- Ant and Dec, exactly.
- Only easier to tell apart, obviously.
And easier to tolerate.
(Applause)
- l love...
- They won't come on the show
- now you've said that.
(Stephen) Oh bother. Bother, bother, bother.
How am l going to live with myself?
No, they're good. Anthony and December
you should address them as, though.
They could be walking up
and down under here as we speak.
- But they're not in fact.
- Ant is always on the left.
- (Stephen) ls that how you tell? Thank you.
- Always on the left.
Reading from left to right,
they're in alphabetical order.
- Ant and Dec. Ant and Dec.
- (Stephen) Excellent.
And it's weird, even when you
go round them, and go from behind,
they still, somehow it works.
lt's like the eyes following you
round the room,
it's like the moon going with you up the M1 .
Ant and Dec, always.
No, the polar bear is actually
ursus maritimus, as if you cared.
Erm, how do polar bears
disguise themselves?
Like that.
They stand in front of anything white.
That's probably the right answer, l suspect.
What, do they dress up in something?
No, there is apparently a misconception
that they cover their nose with their left paw.
- (Clive) Yes.
- ln an ostrich burying its head
in the sand sort of way,
thinking that it disguises themselves.
Like that, like our model,
our demonstrator is showing us now.
- Where's Alan? Where's Alan gone?
- (Stephen) Where's Alan gone?
- Where has he gone?
- (Clive) Are they not just checking
if they've got bad breath?
l don't understand if you're
a 12 foot, 800 pound bear,
why you have to disguise yourself at all.
- (Stephen) Absolutely, spot on.
- Bear tax.
(Stephen) Who is gonna bear tax?
- No bears here.
- l haven't seen him.
Or they stand like that with...
and they put three bits of coal there
and a carrot in their mouth.
Delicious. Now, well there we are.
This brings us neatly
to our General lgnorance round,
in which we ask Alan,
is this a rhetorical question?
No.
Quite right.
So...
- Fingers on buzzers.
- Cor, l got a headache after that.
What's the point of rhetorical questions?
(Laughs) So, fingers on the buzzers.
Er, how many States are there
in the United States of America?
- (Cuckoo clock)
- Alan?
- 50.
- Oh, dear.
- (Alarm)
- Oh dear, oh dear.
lt's 46, technically
because four of them are not states.
There they are. That's Kentucky, Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
- (Both) They're commonwealths.
- Exactly.
They are actually commonwealths,
rather than States,
What that constitutionally means, is their
governance any different from the others?
They have governors and they have the
same sort of way of conducting business.
And so many straight lines.
lsn't God odd, you know?
- What are the odds against that?
- They've all got straight lines,
apart from one. There's only one state
that hasn't got a straight line in it.
Oh, that's a good question.
Erm, l should imagine that would be Hawaii.
lt is. Well done, l knew that, yes.
No, well there you are. No, it was just
a guess. Anyway, gosh, how interesting.
Now, staying with America,
in the whole of the Second World War,
only six Americans were killed
by enemy action on US soil.
- Right.
- All of them at a church picnic, right?
The cause of death was a Japanese fugo.
- My question is, what is a fugo?
- He's the seventh Marx Brother.
We were hoping you might say
it was a poisonous fish,
because there is a poisonous fish
called the fugu.
But it's not that.
No, fugo is a paper balloon.
There were atomic bombs in one direction
and ''OK, let leash the paper balloons, then.''
They sent thousands of them
over the Pacific.
- With a bomb hanging off it?
- With bombs on them, yeah.
But the odds against them landing
on a city in mainland United States
are drastically against
because most of it's kind of wasteland.
lt's farm land to the west and desert to the...
- (Bell chimes)
- Whoops. Hello.
- lt's not wasteland.
- Well, no.
All right, but the chances are
that if you send a random balloon
into mainland United States, the chance
is more likely it will hit something
- which is not going to kill people.
- Wasteland.
lt's a clever weapon
because radar wouldn't detect it
because only the little bits of metal
in the bomb would be even...
- But the paper wouldn't show up on radar.
- (Stephen) No.
lt was made of a paper called washi,
which is from mulberry.
- Wahi!
- Washi or wahi, if you prefer.
(Alan) Balloon!
(Stephen) Very good. Fugo...
Barroon! l'm no good at,
l can't do a Japanese...
They did know about the jet stream,
which no one else in the world did,
which allowed it to travel
at hundreds of miles an hour.
But actually they were made by schoolgirls
who didn't know what they were making.
- They stuck, pasted...
- (Bell chimes)
Birmingham is a wasteland.
(Applause)
That's, er,
(Stephen) That's in Alabama,
l believe, is that right?
- Birmingham, Alabama.
- (Stephen) Birmingham, Alabama.
That's a wasteland, they should team up
with each other.
(Stephen) They should.
Anyway, those are fugo bombs,
but fugu, which you neatly avoided
the trap of...
- (Phill) lt's blow fish.
- That puffer fish,
- where there's a bit that...
- The big one. Oh, yeah.
ls it about six people a year die in Japan?
Actually a bit more than that.
lt's between 30 and a hundred
suffer from the poisoning
and half of those die.
So it's anything between 15 and 50.
800 Americans die
in a McDonalds every year.
- Do they?
- (Rich) Which one?
- Best to avoid that one.
- We certainly will.
The blowfish McMuffin.
You're right, this is a fish which has inner
parts, organs, which are deadly poisonous.
They just love the daring of it.
That's what l thought, Alan,
but it turns out that, in fact,
there are traces of the poison always left
and if they're small enough...
- They get you high.
- You're quite right.
lt's tetrodotoxin which is very,
very poisonous,
and you have to be specially trained
in the art of filleting this particular fish
and all the restaurants in Japan where
you can eat it have little lanterns
hanging outside made of the skin
of this fish with a little symbol
to show that it's a trained...
Part of the training
is that you have to eat the fish
that you've just cut.
- Have you had fugu?
- No, l've never been to Japan.
You're so tall, you'd be like Godzilla,
they'd be, ''Aaeee! Stephen Fryu!''
''Mr Fly, Mr Fly! Mr Fly!''
You'd be rampaging
through downtown Tokyo, ''Baaah.''
Go in museum.
Why is it that Jap...
lt's always a 50-50 ball, isn't it,
whether it's an R or an L
and they always get it wrong.
- The Japanese...
- l won't generalise about a race of people.
All right. Fair enough.
l heard Mike Myers do an American name,
Rory Templeton
and he called him Roroory Tempereton.
lf you want the Japanese
to virtually commit suicide,
just ask them to say, Orange tip fritillary.
(Japanese impression)
Ah, l won't do it! lt's too bad!
For you, Mr Fry, the interview is over.
You build bridge now!
So much for the Geneva Convention.
Erm, oh yes.
So you're all absolutely correct, yes.
Whatever the question was.
- Er...?
- (Stephen) Fugus. Fugus, that's right, yeah.
- Fugus.
- (Stephen) Fugus and Fugos.
Right, so when are penguins found
near the magnetic north pole?
- (Cuckoo clock)
- When they're wearing a suit of armour.
- (Bell chimes)
- Er, they're going to be soon
because the magnetic north and south
is going to switch any minute now.
- Oh, give the man five points.
- (Applause)
Absolutely spot on.
Er, the trap was to say, ''Penguins
only live near the south pole,
''so they'll never be near the north pole.''
But the fact is, the north
and the south flip in magnetic...
l think penguins might be
my favourite animal.
- They are wonderful, aren't they?
- l like the one in the bottom left.
(Rich) lt looks like security.
(Stephen) He does, doesn't he?
Yes, the actual root of the question, though
penguins are, l suppose, more interesting
was that the north pole
becomes the south pole
and vice versa every million
or so years. The...
- (Alan) Really?
- Yeah.
So any minute now, everyone's fridge
magnets are just going to fall on the floor?
And loads of people will start believing
in bloody God again, won't they?
That's not how fridge magnets work.
What will happen
is compasses will point to the south,
rather than the north.
- That'll be great for orienteering, won't it?
- l think people will get used to it quickly.
- No, they won't.
- l think they will.
North, not south? l don't live
in South London, l don't care what you say.
l'm with you there. Oh, dear. (Laughs)
And do we know why it happens?
What's going on?
No, l don't think we do.
lt's a very mysterious process.
- Just somebody flicks a switch.
- lf the earth were not magnetic,
we wouldn't have, there would be no life
on it, at least no life like us.
- because...
- (Phill) Oh, what a loss.
Yeah, the magnetism deflects
the solar rays and...
l want you to imagine
that the penguin is a malicious
and dangerous conqueror of peoples.
And now look at that picture.
They don't have many predators.
Obviously, in the Antarctic they don't.
- Polar bears eat them.
- They don't live in the same continent.
- No? They've never met?
- Polar bears are in the north.
Polar bear in the north
and penguins in the south?
- They've never seen one another?
- Except in zoos.
ln my mind, it's like lions and tigers.
ln my head, they're all hanging out together
- and they've never met.
- Lions and tigers don't, either.
Lions, Africa. Tigers, Asia.
lmagine if it was like that
with men and women.
Here's a thought, right.
Do you think it would be better
if it was harder to conceive
but easier to give birth?
lf l was a woman, l would certainly
think that, l should imagine.
- l mean who cooked that up?
- (Stephen) lt's pretty mean, isn't it.
- lt's all backwards, isn't it.
- Yeah, you're right.
Mind you, you wouldn't want gasping agony
for 36 hours to conceive.
Well, that's usually what it sounds like.
Let's move on, then.
What is wrong with this picture?
- (Bell chimes)
- Yes?
No Starship Enterprise.
- (Cuckoo clock)
- lt should be the other way up.
You're absolutely right.
Have some points. Quite right.
lt's upside down, according to our,
you know, usual convention
of putting north at the top
and south at the bottom.
Ah, so in 200,000 years time, this is going
to be completely wrong, isn't it, yes?
At the moment that's its north pole at the top
and its south pole at the bottom.
- What l meant was, it should be vertical.
- Oh, l see.
- How very honest you are, Davies.
- l can't help it.
You've taken those points off yourself.
And lastly on poles, how are boy scouts
connected to poles?
- (Stephen) Don't look at me like that.
- (Bell chimes)
lt's part of their uniform. They used to have
a hat and a pole and a neckerchief
and a special pole which was used
for erecting their tents, for example.
- Something to do with Poland.
- lt is to do with Poland.
Erm, name things that are particular
about boy scouts.
- Dib, dib, dib. Dob, dob, dob.
- That's one.
- (Phill) That's Polish.
- The salute...
- The salute. You got there.
- ..is Polish.
lt's very, very close to the Polish salute.
Let's have a look at a Polish salute
and a boy scout's salute together, shall we?
There you are, on your screens now.
(Alan) Which one's the Pole?
(Stephen) Oh, let me think. Let me think.
(Clive) They use two fingers.
(Alan) What a weedy, nerdy scout.
(Stephen) lt's the Milky Bar Kid,
l think, isn't it?
(Alan) We need hard scouts.
l loved the boy scouts. We went to 'nam.
lt's said to be an American invention,
the boy scout movement,
more than really a British, although
it's said to be Baden Powell by many,
there was a man called Seaton who founded
a movement called the Woodcraft lndians.
Did you go in a helicopter gun-ship?
(lmitates helicopter)
He had a little waistcoat
with napalm strapped to him.
And the Doors playing really loudly.
(US accent) Now boys, if you see anybody
wearing black pyjamas,
you run towards them and you press
that button there.
(Alan in US accent) Dib, dib, dib.
Kaboom.
(US accent) You got your woodcraft,
you got your killing gooks
(US accent) You got
your napalm waistcoat, too.
(Normal accent) Well, there you are.
Poles are the only army, l think,
where they have that salute with two fingers,
supposedly after some Polish war hero
who had three fingers blown off.
- Do l look Polish?
- You look very Polish, yeah.
(Phill) Ooh, do a Polish polar bear.
Fantastic, thank you.
Well, on that bombshell,
that's it for another week, l'm sorry to say.
And the final scores are poles apart.
Phill scored a piping hot four.
Rich barely scraped in ahead
of Clive with two and one, respectively,
but Alan bombed with minus four.
(Applause)
Two fingers to Alan and to you all.
lt's do widzenia. Good night.
(Applause)