QI (2003–…): Season 4, Episode 4 - Dictionaries - full transcript
Good evening. Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening, and welcome once again to QI.
Tonight on the panel we have four people who
look uncannily like someone else. Please welcome Tony Blair!
Tommy Cooper!
Ruby Wax!
"I am so pleased to be here. I can't tell you. Really I am. So pleased."
And Alan Davies. . . .
Well, you do. In certain lights you do.
All right, Brian May then.
So, we start this evening with a "dictionary" theme. "D" for "Dictionary".
So the buzzers are in alphabetical order too. Ronni, give us an A.
A B please, Rory.
A C please.
And a D.
Thank you. How nice.
"A", of course, is for "Alan".
So, Alan, where's the best place to start writing a dictionary?
With . . . Er, well, I would say at the As?
How can that be wrong?
Well, it seems in lexicography,
the art of dictionary writing, they like to start with M.
Oh, for . . .
The theory is that they've got their eye in by the time they get to A, so--
So you mean the Ms are probably rubbish.
That means they've started with the "I", then.
Hey! No, no. When I said "eye", I meant E-Y-E, and you thought--
Yeah, yeah . . .
--possibly for comic effect, but if so, disastrously, er, that I was saying "I".
And that wasn't what was happening at all!
It was completely something else.
It was one of those laughable misunderstandings,
and I use the word "laughable" quite wrongly.
So, erm, anyway, from "dictionaries",
we turn and plunge into the heart of darkness.
Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book
whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity".
The career of Phil Collins.
I did a show once with Phil Collins... well, not just me and him;
there were loads of people on... and, er,
he did a song called Where's My Hat?,
and he was wearing his hat throughout!
It was ridiculous. "Do another song. It's rubbish!"
Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous?
How it was beaten by its adjective father?
And... And left on the doorstep, abandoned by his mother,
and then it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs.
But the verbs.. They're always going out doing lovely things,
'cause they're doing-words,
and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma.
And then after school... after school it was surrounded by quotation marks;
it got beaten up terribly, and then one day
it entered into a reality TV show and it became very famous
and it was much in demand and used to describe
all the people that leave Big Brother house.
That's brilliant! Absolutely amazing.
God, I wish that were true, Ronni, I really do, that is...
Is it Chairman Mao?
It's not Chairman Mao, "The Long Years of Obscurity".
This begins with "D"; it's got two Ds in it, in fact. That's your clue.
D . . . Double Diamond. Double Deckers.
It's the sort of thing that railway enthusiasts . . .
They always try and make their steam trains sound more exotic than they are.
Well that's very odd. You're... Railways...
I do actually know this, because it is my local station. Er, it's about Didcot.
It is about Didcot! You're absolutely... How extraordinary you knew that.
Well, Didcot is only a station
'cause the people of Abingdon are so snooty they decided,
"We can't have a station! Don't want a station:
all that noise, all the steam, all that sort of stuff."
So the local Lord, Wantage, said, er,
"No, no, we won't have it. We'll have it up the road in Didcot."
So they built a station next to the power station you see there,
which is the third worst eye-sore in the country; it was a Country Life thing.
Do you know what the first one was?
"People! Public people. The working class.
Poorly-groomed servants. The ill-bred ponies. That Blair fellow."
If I find out you've been intercepting my mail, I shall be...
Erm, so. Let us know what was.
Wind farms. It was wind farms.
Oh, really?
Yeah. But the power station was designed
by the same guy that did Liverpool Cathedral, so...
You must have some points for knowing about Didcot.
So am I... Do I get a little point for the railway?
You get five points for the railway and your astonishingly moving story
about the early abuse suffered by the... the word obscurity.
And you also get the telephone number of a therapist. So, erm, no. Wonderful.
Too little, too late, Stephen.
A didcot, though, is "the small, oddly-shaped bit of card
which a ticket inspector cuts out of a ticket
with his clipper for no apparent reason.
Er, it's a little known fact that the confetti at Princess Margaret's wedding
was made up of thousands of didcots
collected by inspectors on the Royal Train."
That's just lovely.
Princess Margaret just got the second best of bloody everything.
"Just get some didcots together for the girl."
It's not number one on a young girl's wish list:
a big white wedding, lots of didcots.
That particular fact I gave you is not so much a fact as a made-up thing.
- Oh! Porkie pies.
- It comes from the book The Meaning of Liff, which, oddly enough,
was co-written by Douglas Adams
and the producer of this programme,
and he somehow smuggled it onto my card.
Erm, anyway, there you are.
Didcot does have... and this is so typical of Didcot...
the second-oldest ewe tree in the country.
Not the oldest, no. The second oldest.
Sixteen hundred years old, though; that's quite an old ewe.
Third-ugliest, second-oldest... Always the bridesmaid, Didcot.
Anyway, from Didcot, the Gdansk of Oxfordshire, to the Bubi people of Bioko.
What can't the Bubi people of Bioko do in the dark?
"See very well." I would imagine.
I want something that's specific to the Bubis.
Go to the lav.
Can't go to the lavatory in the dark?
No, they're scared of it.
Well, the fact is, yes, the Isle of Bioko used to be called "Fernando Poo":
spellt "poo", but pronounced "poe".
Do you know where Bioko is, the island?
- It's Equatorial New Guinea.
- Equatorial New Guinea is the right answer. Five points, that's very good.
I'd never heard of it. I'm impressed. There it is.
There's Equatorial Guinea and it belongs to it--
it's in that sort of bite there... and the Bubi make up about ten percent.
Er, there are forty thousand of them.
They sound like the sort of tribe
that those old intrepid colonial-type women travellers
that you hear on Desert Island Discs used to stay at.
"Yes, I stayed with the Bubis for three years. Happy, happy days, really.
And you know, they look so wonderful in their bright colours,
and I get so terribly annoyed the way they're patronised
and their attributes dismissed.
It is very hard to wear yellow well, you know."
It's rather bizarre because, oddly enough, er,
the information we have about the Bubis not being able to
do this thing that they can't do at night
comes from one of the great female explorers of our times--
Talk. Eat. Sing. Walk. Climb.
- Fish.
- The first one you said.
- Talk.
- Yes.
- They can't talk at night?
- No, because their talking is mostly gesture.
- Ah.
They can't see what they're saying.
So they could talk about each other behind their backs at night.
Yes. Like that.
"Are you talking about me?"
But the great Mary Kingsley, who was the sister of--
I learnt it all from the Bubis, you know!
But this was . . . It had--
Mary Kingsley, writing in 1897.
The sister of Charles Kinglsey, who gave us the Water Babies.
This is her description of her encounter with a crocodile. Erm . . .
Get Ronni to read it out.
I will get Ronni to read it.
It's the bottom one there. I've highlit it in pink.
Yes, that's right.
"He chose to get his front paws over the stem of my canoe...
over the stern of my canoe, rather,
should I say, I haven't got my glasses, so sorry...
and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance,
and I had to retire to the bows
and fetch him a clip on the snout with the paddle."
That's it. That's the way.
These women, they always have this extraordinary oppressive story.
It always finishes up with,
"Yes, I was interned in some ghastly camp, quite brimming over with typhus;
survived on nothing but an ostrich egg for four years."
If you read the Telegraph obituaries, they're full of those sorts of people.
Oh, aren't they wonderful?
Or retired army officers. "Spent the war underground."
That's right. There was . . . There was an extraordinary Scottish Peer,
who had one of those weird double titles, like "Lord Elgin and Duncan", or...
and he was an extraordinary hero, because he was the only man
apart from General Roberts ever to be a Knight of the Garter
and to have won a VC.
And it described in his obituary how, er,
he dropped the second part of his title in the 1960s or early '70s
when social fashions and acceptability was beginning to change,
and he arrived at a dinner,
and he looked at the place cards to see who was sitting next to him.
And he saw his own place card said "Lord Elgin",
and then to see who was next to him, he just saw "Duncan".
Someone had said, "Who's coming to the...?"
"Well, we've got Lord Elgin and Duncan."
"Where are we going to put Duncan? Oh dear.
We'll put him next to him. He'll be... He'll be happier there."
Talking of those strange women on Desert Island Discs,
did you ever hear Diana Mosley?
Now she liked a bit of Wagner.
- She did like Wagner, I'm very... but she... she liked Hitler and...
and, erm, met him many times.
She said, "Well, what people don't understand is...
is... is how funny he was. He was very funny.
You know, his eyes were quite blue.
- Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they were quite blue."
- It makes it all all right, doesn't it, really?
"Quite blue. Once seen, never forgotten."
Well, that's all right, then!
Diana Mosley was a Mitford girl, of course,
and then married Oswald Mosley, the fascist.
I met her and she said to me,
"Of course, you never knew Hitler, did you?"
An extraordinary . . . extraordinary thing to say.
"I once pleasured a donkey to buy dinner in Belgium.
No reason for saying that."
They are... They're really highly sexed, these women. They're all like,
"I first crossed the Gobi Desert when I was seventy-five
and that's when I met Abdul,
who was fifty years my junior,
but went at it like a rabbit; always on the ball."
"Curved like a scimitar it was." Anyway. Enough. No.
That's right, they can't talk because
their language is so dependent on gestures,
according to Mary Kingsley in 1897,
that they can't communicate meaningfully if they can't see each other,
which is slightly worrying, because the president is actually
from the same tribe, the Bubis, so whether he...
It's great if they get a visit from Margaret Beckett, as Foreign Secretary,
'cause of course, she can't move below the neck!
Whereas, actually, Blair is all gestures, isn't he?
All that sort of stuff. "People of Bubi!"
And George Bush. He does a lot of that.
He does.
You know, he walks as if he's carrying two sheep for some reason.
He does, doesn't he? He has the oddest walk.
And uses the odd word merkin. Do you know what...
You know what a merkin is?
- Pubic wig.
- Well, it's a... it's a chest or pubic wig, yes.
It's a pubic wig. And George Bush uses it all the time in his speeches.
"I'm proud to be A-merkin!"
He also... He also beats the Cornish for his dislike of tourism, doesn't he?
So, "I will not put up with tourists; I do not approve of tourists and tourism.
We have a war against tourism!"
So, erm, from the darkness in which the Bubis cannot communicate,
to Dartmoor.
Who owns Dartmoor prison?
Prince Charles.
You're on sparkling form! He does!
- Oh, bog off!
- Oh! Not bad.
There he is.
Does he really?
Having a visit. Yes. It belongs to the...
- Duchy of Cornwall.
- "Duchy of Cornwall" is the right answer.
Does he have them all making organic yoghurts or garlic bread?
No, no, he's... he's a snout baron down there.
"Norman Stanley Windsor. You are... ?"
"Hello, Grouty, erm... "
As an ex-jailbird, I can tell you that "snout" is very very old-hat.
- Very vieux chapeau.
- What do they call it now?
Very vieux chapeau. "Burn." Just "burn".
- Burn?
- Yeah. Yeah. "Two's up on your burn."
Two's up on your burn?
- "Two's up."
- I swear I'm getting an erection.
I have to say when I first arrived in prison,
I was a little discombobulated by the entire experience,
as you can imagine;
you have to give your finger prints and take your clothes off
and it's all very...
It's just like public school, it's lovely. But the...
the first person who came in; he said, "Two's up."
I said "Is it? What? Where?"
"Two's up. Two's up, mate. Two's up. On your burn."
"Two's up" means when you've finished your cigarette,
you give it to the guy who's first to say "two's up" to you.
And he gets the rights.
It's like saying "bags have your fag end," basically.
And then they collect about six of those
and then they make a new cigarette out of it.
Do you think Prince Charles says that to his mum?
"Two's up on your throne!"
Absolutely. Anyway, yes, Prince Charles,
or strictly speaking, the... the Duchy of Cornwall,
does indeed own Dartmoor.
And while on this subject of royalty and Alan...
Alan, if you were knighted, what would the Queen say to you?
"Arise ... "
No. No, she wouldn't.
Are you sure she doesn't say,
"No, I'm sorry. I have to draw the line somewhere!"
How very dare you.
Well, after his name - for which we'll say "Alan"
after Alan's name is announced, the knight elect,
Alan, kneels on a knighting stool
What are the chances?
- You never know!
- I wouldn't turn it down. I'm not posh.
in front of the Queen, who then lays the sword blade
on the knight's right and then left shoulder.
I'd go like that. "Watch it ..."
After he has been dubbed, the new knight stands up.
Contrary to popular belief, the words "Arise, sir ..." are not used.
The Queen then invests the knight with the insignia of the order
to which he has been appointed, a star or badge, depending on the order.
By tradition, clergy receiving a knighthood...
What's the difference when clergy are knighted, if they happen to be?
They kneel on a corgi.
No, there's no sword.
- No sword. You can't take a sword to a clergyman!
- Exactly.
- Daffodils. Daffodils.
- Baton. Baton.
- You'd take a dagger, wouldn't you? Yeah, exactly.
- A scimitar.
- Or an axe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
The strict meaning of the word "accolade" is the salutation
given on the bestowal of a knighthood,
from the, er, Latin meaning of an embrace around the neck.
Around the col, as in collar.
But do you know about degradation?
And that's when you have your knighthood taken away.
The last public one was in 1621,
when Sir Frances Mitchell
was found guilty of "grievous exactions".
and had his spurs broken and thrown away,
his belt cut and his sword broken over his head,
and was then pronounced to be no longer a knight, but a knave.
All by the King?
Yeah. It would have been James I, wouldn't it? Yes.
When she did Alan Sugar, did he go,"You're fired"?
"You're degraded, you are a knave."
Anyway, now, a cluster of questions about drips, drops and dribbles.
What shape is a raindrop?
I'm doing a shape that I think would be a possible raindrop shape.
You are doing... Oh, dear!
You've been doing so well.
It's not pear-shaped or tear-shaped.
I'm going to do another one.
I don't think we even thought of that one!
No? Should I do a cock and balls?
It will be your coat of arms
if you decide to be knighted, won't it?
It's been so long...
- A perfect circle?
- is the right answer. They are completely spherical.
They used to use this thing that gravity
made liquid completely spherical.
They used to have huge towers.
They were called shot towers.
There was one in Waterloo until they built...
- To make shot.
- Oh, right.
- Lead shot, exactly. Yeah.
A huge one in America, in Baltimore,
which was the tallest building in America
until they built the Washington monument.
And they literally drop molten lead and it hits the water
and it's just completely round by the time it hits the water.
It seems extraordinary.
You'd think when it hit the water it would get flattened, but...
Maybe someone will write in and explain. But not to me!
And, erm, ball bearings and various other things
have utilised this marvellous fact
about liquids turning spherical as they fall.
Er, where might you bump into the world's biggest drip?
Oi! No!
The biggest drip is in a cave?
- It is in a cave, as it goes.
- It would be a stalactite.
- is the right answer. Well done. Absolutely right.
- Oh, well done.
The Gruta Rei do Mato in South America has the biggest of them all.
- How big is it?
- "Vast." Is the answer.
Thanks for that. "How big is it?"
"Oh, very big.
If I was to quantity its bigness would be doing it a disservice!
To say just how bigly big,
the vastly big bigness of the dripping thing..."
I want feet, metres, anything. Throw me a fucking bone, Fry!
- Oh! The answer is actually about twenty metres long.
- Thank you.
And they're between eighteen- and twenty-thousand years old.
- And the ones that go up are called ?
- Stalagmites.
They've got a "G" in 'cause they're in the ground.
Stalactites are in the ceiling.
I was always taught "tights hang down" was the...
was the thing, but anyway.
- Public school again.
- Ah, there you are you see.
I don't really understand about those things, but anyway.
- "Fry, put on the 15 denier and see me in my study."
- Oh, Lordy me.
What does that mean anyway, denier. What's that?
- It's... It's a unit of sheerness of ladies' underparts.
- It's... It's... It's...
- Your stockings are sheer.
- However sheer they are is rated in denier.
- That's right.
- What's the sheerest you can get?
- Bare legs.
- Well, that is very sheer.
- No, 10. You can get 10, er...
- That's sheer.
- That's sheer.
After 30 denier they go into opaque.
- So, I see. The higher the denier, the less sheer they are.
- Yes.
- I understand.
- "Fry, you oaf! Those are fishnets!"
Yeah, the biggest drip is in the cave of the Forest King
in the Gruta Rei do Mato in Brazil.
So can you identify the world's biggest crashing bore?
Is this something to do with the River Severn?
A sort of tidal wave.
It's forced down a narrow inlet against the direction of current.
Yes, absolutely right. It's a bore,
and a crashing bore is the term given
to a very high bore that crests and foams.
- People surf on them.
- They do surf on them, and in fact a man called King from Gloucestershire
He has the world record for surfing seven-point-six miles.
- Oh, seven-point...
- It took him over an hour and a half to go up the Severn.
But it can't be the biggest.
We never have the biggest of anything.
That's not the biggest.
No, the biggest, you're quite right, is in China.
- Yangtze?
- It's not the Yangtze. It's the Qiantang.
The Seine had one; Paris had a very good one.
It was called Le Mascaret, but they dredged it in the 60s,
and the bore stopped happening.
Now, where is the largest floater under the sun?
In the office of the Deputy Prime Minister?
Blue whale. It's always the blue whale;
one day it will be the answer to something!
- It hasn't been yet, has it?
- No. That isn't it, then?
No, you've lost a lot of points.
The largest floater under the sun is... Well, the sun is gaseous...
a gaseous ball.
But under the sun, so not the sun itself.
It might be one of the gas giants.
Jupiter? Uranus?
- What's the other one? Neptune? Saturn.
- "Saturn" is the right answer.
Saturn's density is only seventy percent of that of water,
and therefore would float if you found a large enough amount of water.
Huge amounts of helium and liquid hydrogen and so on.
It really is impossible to distinguish its atmosphere from its surface.
It's just a great gassy thing, Saturn.
Anyway, we'll never go there; at least I won't. Even if I could,
I wouldn't; I'd say, "No, I'm not going to go there. No."
You can't get him into Suffolk.
Now that is true.
Anyway, after that astonishing lack of knowledge,
except on the part of Alan,
for a no lesser thing than the third largest object in the solar system,
we move easily into the orbit of General Ignorance.
So, palms on mushroomoid buzzers.
The current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,
as it happens, lists some 290,000 sparkling words,
and 615,000 word forms.
If you add in all the proper names, which dictionaries omit,
estimates of the total number of words in our language exceed three million.
So bear that in mind when I ask you this.
How many different kinds of plant are there in the world?
Is it more than you think?
Fewer than you think?
Or about as many as you think?
I can't think. Does that rule me out?
One.
- You think there's one type...
- It's going to be... It's going to be one, or it's going to be two billion.
Fewer than I think.
Trees, plants, grass... that's it.
Yes!
Trees, flowers, weeds, and grass.
The answer is certainly fewer than anybody ever thought.
Kew Gardens reckoned there were a million types of plant,
- but when they look back in the records...
- There are four. There are four!
almost every single plant has been named four times.
So there are probably only a quarter
as many plants as we thought there once were.
- Vegetables.
- And there are vegetables.
- Maybe as few as 223,000.
- I've lost interest.
- Yes, I agree.
Erm, now tell us who fought whom in the Battle of Culloden.
The Battle of Culloden is quite complicated, because it was basically
an Italian fop with a Polish accent
with a bunch of Highlanders, some Irish, a few French,
fighting some Scottish low-landers, English,
led by a fat German from Hanover.
is a very good description of the Battle of Culloden indeed!
There were the... the Campbells and the Rosses and the Grants
and the Gunns and many of the lowland families.
There were more Scots there beating Prince Charles,
Edward Stuart, than there were English.
It's so weird that these national heroes are...
are not from the place that they're supposed to be.
William Wallace was from, erm, Kenya.
His mother was Masai. No, not really.
Just for a second, I was going, "Wow!"
David Beckham is definitely from Chingford.
Yes, that is true. Yeah.
But you see, I was educated in Scotland
- and all English history is omitted as a matter of course.
- Yeah. Mm.
The only thing that will be mentioned is Bannockburn.
- Yes.
- "When we beat the bastards!"
And the irony is, of course, that the Tories have never been voted for
in Scotland for the past twenty years,
and the Jacobite was a Tory rebellion.
It was the Tories who were the pro-Stuart,
Catholic, high-church Anglican party,
and it was their fight, and indeed the Tories were out of power
- for the next fifty and sixty years in Britain
- But didn't... It led to...
- because they were Jacobites.
- It led to being... tartan being banned.
- After the first rebellion. Absolutely.
- You weren't allowed to deep fry pizza any more?
You're quite right, and it was...
they were very savage in their reprisals
- and "Butcher" Cumberland earned his name
- "He cut off your tongues if you spoke Gallic, aye."
- All prisoners were killed.
- Yes.
Do you know what the soldiers were called?
- The soldiers were called Tommy Lobsters.
And also it was the first battle they were trained
to use bayonets for the first time.
You couldn't have a war like that in Scotland now.
- Why is that?
- Smoking ban.
Oh, yes! Hey. Very good, indeed.
So, Culloden was really more of a local difficulty;
it was Highland versus Lowland; it was like Celtic and Rangers.
Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight.
- Yes, it was.
- And it goes on to this day.
Will we never learn?
Who knows? Religion. Shit it. Anyway. Erm, so. Erm...
"You're watching The Moral Maze!"
There were more Scots in the force
which finally defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie
than there were in his own army.
It was basically a local derby. That's the point.
And lastly, what do dolphins drink?
- Oh, aren't they beautiful.
- They don't. I bet they don't drink anything.
He's right! They drink nothing. Nothing at all.
Excellent.
As mammals like us, their kidneys can't process sea water,
- so they can't, certainly, drink sea water
- They can't drink seawater.
and they're a bit far away from fresh water,
unless they're two of those rare species in China and South America
that are river dolphins. So they just metabolise everything they eat.
The fat gives them enough water. But when they haven't eaten enough,
then they usually die of dehydration rather than of hunger.
Yeah, I don't know why we haven't realised that before,
because there's that...
"He's trying to say something. Oh, it's a primitive language."
"Put it in the hole, put it in the hole! Put funnel in the hole!"
Funnily enough, in captivity,
if you point a hose of fresh water at them, they will drink it,
but then they won't eat for two days.
They can't distinguish hunger from thirst.
- "Fuck off, I'm full."
- Yeah, exactly.
A lot of people say that they are, in fact, smarter than people,
but if they were, wouldn't they be saying that?
The reason dolphins don't drink is because with these...
they can't get the fridge open in the supermarket.
"Dolphin in aisle 4.
Can we have a mop-up?
There's a dead dolphin in aisle 4.
This keeps happening. He's by the Tizer..."
"Get the nets out. No, mind the tuna! Don't get them as well!"
Anyway, it must be time for the scores,
so let's have a little bit of a look, shall we?
I literally do not know what to say.
Second equal, with minus seven,
are Rory Bremner,
Phill Jupitus,
and Alan Davies.
Which means
that our outright winner is first timer Ronni Ancona with thirteen!
Wow! How brilliant.
I can't believe it.
- Brilliant.
- Well, my fevered thanks go
to Phill, Rory, Ronni, and Alan.
And speaking of what dolphins don't drink,
I'll leave you with this topical photograph.
Good night.
"WATER METER FOR EVERY HOME".
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http://notabenoid.com/book/30290/104146
good evening, good evening, and welcome once again to QI.
Tonight on the panel we have four people who
look uncannily like someone else. Please welcome Tony Blair!
Tommy Cooper!
Ruby Wax!
"I am so pleased to be here. I can't tell you. Really I am. So pleased."
And Alan Davies. . . .
Well, you do. In certain lights you do.
All right, Brian May then.
So, we start this evening with a "dictionary" theme. "D" for "Dictionary".
So the buzzers are in alphabetical order too. Ronni, give us an A.
A B please, Rory.
A C please.
And a D.
Thank you. How nice.
"A", of course, is for "Alan".
So, Alan, where's the best place to start writing a dictionary?
With . . . Er, well, I would say at the As?
How can that be wrong?
Well, it seems in lexicography,
the art of dictionary writing, they like to start with M.
Oh, for . . .
The theory is that they've got their eye in by the time they get to A, so--
So you mean the Ms are probably rubbish.
That means they've started with the "I", then.
Hey! No, no. When I said "eye", I meant E-Y-E, and you thought--
Yeah, yeah . . .
--possibly for comic effect, but if so, disastrously, er, that I was saying "I".
And that wasn't what was happening at all!
It was completely something else.
It was one of those laughable misunderstandings,
and I use the word "laughable" quite wrongly.
So, erm, anyway, from "dictionaries",
we turn and plunge into the heart of darkness.
Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book
whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity".
The career of Phil Collins.
I did a show once with Phil Collins... well, not just me and him;
there were loads of people on... and, er,
he did a song called Where's My Hat?,
and he was wearing his hat throughout!
It was ridiculous. "Do another song. It's rubbish!"
Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous?
How it was beaten by its adjective father?
And... And left on the doorstep, abandoned by his mother,
and then it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs.
But the verbs.. They're always going out doing lovely things,
'cause they're doing-words,
and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma.
And then after school... after school it was surrounded by quotation marks;
it got beaten up terribly, and then one day
it entered into a reality TV show and it became very famous
and it was much in demand and used to describe
all the people that leave Big Brother house.
That's brilliant! Absolutely amazing.
God, I wish that were true, Ronni, I really do, that is...
Is it Chairman Mao?
It's not Chairman Mao, "The Long Years of Obscurity".
This begins with "D"; it's got two Ds in it, in fact. That's your clue.
D . . . Double Diamond. Double Deckers.
It's the sort of thing that railway enthusiasts . . .
They always try and make their steam trains sound more exotic than they are.
Well that's very odd. You're... Railways...
I do actually know this, because it is my local station. Er, it's about Didcot.
It is about Didcot! You're absolutely... How extraordinary you knew that.
Well, Didcot is only a station
'cause the people of Abingdon are so snooty they decided,
"We can't have a station! Don't want a station:
all that noise, all the steam, all that sort of stuff."
So the local Lord, Wantage, said, er,
"No, no, we won't have it. We'll have it up the road in Didcot."
So they built a station next to the power station you see there,
which is the third worst eye-sore in the country; it was a Country Life thing.
Do you know what the first one was?
"People! Public people. The working class.
Poorly-groomed servants. The ill-bred ponies. That Blair fellow."
If I find out you've been intercepting my mail, I shall be...
Erm, so. Let us know what was.
Wind farms. It was wind farms.
Oh, really?
Yeah. But the power station was designed
by the same guy that did Liverpool Cathedral, so...
You must have some points for knowing about Didcot.
So am I... Do I get a little point for the railway?
You get five points for the railway and your astonishingly moving story
about the early abuse suffered by the... the word obscurity.
And you also get the telephone number of a therapist. So, erm, no. Wonderful.
Too little, too late, Stephen.
A didcot, though, is "the small, oddly-shaped bit of card
which a ticket inspector cuts out of a ticket
with his clipper for no apparent reason.
Er, it's a little known fact that the confetti at Princess Margaret's wedding
was made up of thousands of didcots
collected by inspectors on the Royal Train."
That's just lovely.
Princess Margaret just got the second best of bloody everything.
"Just get some didcots together for the girl."
It's not number one on a young girl's wish list:
a big white wedding, lots of didcots.
That particular fact I gave you is not so much a fact as a made-up thing.
- Oh! Porkie pies.
- It comes from the book The Meaning of Liff, which, oddly enough,
was co-written by Douglas Adams
and the producer of this programme,
and he somehow smuggled it onto my card.
Erm, anyway, there you are.
Didcot does have... and this is so typical of Didcot...
the second-oldest ewe tree in the country.
Not the oldest, no. The second oldest.
Sixteen hundred years old, though; that's quite an old ewe.
Third-ugliest, second-oldest... Always the bridesmaid, Didcot.
Anyway, from Didcot, the Gdansk of Oxfordshire, to the Bubi people of Bioko.
What can't the Bubi people of Bioko do in the dark?
"See very well." I would imagine.
I want something that's specific to the Bubis.
Go to the lav.
Can't go to the lavatory in the dark?
No, they're scared of it.
Well, the fact is, yes, the Isle of Bioko used to be called "Fernando Poo":
spellt "poo", but pronounced "poe".
Do you know where Bioko is, the island?
- It's Equatorial New Guinea.
- Equatorial New Guinea is the right answer. Five points, that's very good.
I'd never heard of it. I'm impressed. There it is.
There's Equatorial Guinea and it belongs to it--
it's in that sort of bite there... and the Bubi make up about ten percent.
Er, there are forty thousand of them.
They sound like the sort of tribe
that those old intrepid colonial-type women travellers
that you hear on Desert Island Discs used to stay at.
"Yes, I stayed with the Bubis for three years. Happy, happy days, really.
And you know, they look so wonderful in their bright colours,
and I get so terribly annoyed the way they're patronised
and their attributes dismissed.
It is very hard to wear yellow well, you know."
It's rather bizarre because, oddly enough, er,
the information we have about the Bubis not being able to
do this thing that they can't do at night
comes from one of the great female explorers of our times--
Talk. Eat. Sing. Walk. Climb.
- Fish.
- The first one you said.
- Talk.
- Yes.
- They can't talk at night?
- No, because their talking is mostly gesture.
- Ah.
They can't see what they're saying.
So they could talk about each other behind their backs at night.
Yes. Like that.
"Are you talking about me?"
But the great Mary Kingsley, who was the sister of--
I learnt it all from the Bubis, you know!
But this was . . . It had--
Mary Kingsley, writing in 1897.
The sister of Charles Kinglsey, who gave us the Water Babies.
This is her description of her encounter with a crocodile. Erm . . .
Get Ronni to read it out.
I will get Ronni to read it.
It's the bottom one there. I've highlit it in pink.
Yes, that's right.
"He chose to get his front paws over the stem of my canoe...
over the stern of my canoe, rather,
should I say, I haven't got my glasses, so sorry...
and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance,
and I had to retire to the bows
and fetch him a clip on the snout with the paddle."
That's it. That's the way.
These women, they always have this extraordinary oppressive story.
It always finishes up with,
"Yes, I was interned in some ghastly camp, quite brimming over with typhus;
survived on nothing but an ostrich egg for four years."
If you read the Telegraph obituaries, they're full of those sorts of people.
Oh, aren't they wonderful?
Or retired army officers. "Spent the war underground."
That's right. There was . . . There was an extraordinary Scottish Peer,
who had one of those weird double titles, like "Lord Elgin and Duncan", or...
and he was an extraordinary hero, because he was the only man
apart from General Roberts ever to be a Knight of the Garter
and to have won a VC.
And it described in his obituary how, er,
he dropped the second part of his title in the 1960s or early '70s
when social fashions and acceptability was beginning to change,
and he arrived at a dinner,
and he looked at the place cards to see who was sitting next to him.
And he saw his own place card said "Lord Elgin",
and then to see who was next to him, he just saw "Duncan".
Someone had said, "Who's coming to the...?"
"Well, we've got Lord Elgin and Duncan."
"Where are we going to put Duncan? Oh dear.
We'll put him next to him. He'll be... He'll be happier there."
Talking of those strange women on Desert Island Discs,
did you ever hear Diana Mosley?
Now she liked a bit of Wagner.
- She did like Wagner, I'm very... but she... she liked Hitler and...
and, erm, met him many times.
She said, "Well, what people don't understand is...
is... is how funny he was. He was very funny.
You know, his eyes were quite blue.
- Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they were quite blue."
- It makes it all all right, doesn't it, really?
"Quite blue. Once seen, never forgotten."
Well, that's all right, then!
Diana Mosley was a Mitford girl, of course,
and then married Oswald Mosley, the fascist.
I met her and she said to me,
"Of course, you never knew Hitler, did you?"
An extraordinary . . . extraordinary thing to say.
"I once pleasured a donkey to buy dinner in Belgium.
No reason for saying that."
They are... They're really highly sexed, these women. They're all like,
"I first crossed the Gobi Desert when I was seventy-five
and that's when I met Abdul,
who was fifty years my junior,
but went at it like a rabbit; always on the ball."
"Curved like a scimitar it was." Anyway. Enough. No.
That's right, they can't talk because
their language is so dependent on gestures,
according to Mary Kingsley in 1897,
that they can't communicate meaningfully if they can't see each other,
which is slightly worrying, because the president is actually
from the same tribe, the Bubis, so whether he...
It's great if they get a visit from Margaret Beckett, as Foreign Secretary,
'cause of course, she can't move below the neck!
Whereas, actually, Blair is all gestures, isn't he?
All that sort of stuff. "People of Bubi!"
And George Bush. He does a lot of that.
He does.
You know, he walks as if he's carrying two sheep for some reason.
He does, doesn't he? He has the oddest walk.
And uses the odd word merkin. Do you know what...
You know what a merkin is?
- Pubic wig.
- Well, it's a... it's a chest or pubic wig, yes.
It's a pubic wig. And George Bush uses it all the time in his speeches.
"I'm proud to be A-merkin!"
He also... He also beats the Cornish for his dislike of tourism, doesn't he?
So, "I will not put up with tourists; I do not approve of tourists and tourism.
We have a war against tourism!"
So, erm, from the darkness in which the Bubis cannot communicate,
to Dartmoor.
Who owns Dartmoor prison?
Prince Charles.
You're on sparkling form! He does!
- Oh, bog off!
- Oh! Not bad.
There he is.
Does he really?
Having a visit. Yes. It belongs to the...
- Duchy of Cornwall.
- "Duchy of Cornwall" is the right answer.
Does he have them all making organic yoghurts or garlic bread?
No, no, he's... he's a snout baron down there.
"Norman Stanley Windsor. You are... ?"
"Hello, Grouty, erm... "
As an ex-jailbird, I can tell you that "snout" is very very old-hat.
- Very vieux chapeau.
- What do they call it now?
Very vieux chapeau. "Burn." Just "burn".
- Burn?
- Yeah. Yeah. "Two's up on your burn."
Two's up on your burn?
- "Two's up."
- I swear I'm getting an erection.
I have to say when I first arrived in prison,
I was a little discombobulated by the entire experience,
as you can imagine;
you have to give your finger prints and take your clothes off
and it's all very...
It's just like public school, it's lovely. But the...
the first person who came in; he said, "Two's up."
I said "Is it? What? Where?"
"Two's up. Two's up, mate. Two's up. On your burn."
"Two's up" means when you've finished your cigarette,
you give it to the guy who's first to say "two's up" to you.
And he gets the rights.
It's like saying "bags have your fag end," basically.
And then they collect about six of those
and then they make a new cigarette out of it.
Do you think Prince Charles says that to his mum?
"Two's up on your throne!"
Absolutely. Anyway, yes, Prince Charles,
or strictly speaking, the... the Duchy of Cornwall,
does indeed own Dartmoor.
And while on this subject of royalty and Alan...
Alan, if you were knighted, what would the Queen say to you?
"Arise ... "
No. No, she wouldn't.
Are you sure she doesn't say,
"No, I'm sorry. I have to draw the line somewhere!"
How very dare you.
Well, after his name - for which we'll say "Alan"
after Alan's name is announced, the knight elect,
Alan, kneels on a knighting stool
What are the chances?
- You never know!
- I wouldn't turn it down. I'm not posh.
in front of the Queen, who then lays the sword blade
on the knight's right and then left shoulder.
I'd go like that. "Watch it ..."
After he has been dubbed, the new knight stands up.
Contrary to popular belief, the words "Arise, sir ..." are not used.
The Queen then invests the knight with the insignia of the order
to which he has been appointed, a star or badge, depending on the order.
By tradition, clergy receiving a knighthood...
What's the difference when clergy are knighted, if they happen to be?
They kneel on a corgi.
No, there's no sword.
- No sword. You can't take a sword to a clergyman!
- Exactly.
- Daffodils. Daffodils.
- Baton. Baton.
- You'd take a dagger, wouldn't you? Yeah, exactly.
- A scimitar.
- Or an axe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
The strict meaning of the word "accolade" is the salutation
given on the bestowal of a knighthood,
from the, er, Latin meaning of an embrace around the neck.
Around the col, as in collar.
But do you know about degradation?
And that's when you have your knighthood taken away.
The last public one was in 1621,
when Sir Frances Mitchell
was found guilty of "grievous exactions".
and had his spurs broken and thrown away,
his belt cut and his sword broken over his head,
and was then pronounced to be no longer a knight, but a knave.
All by the King?
Yeah. It would have been James I, wouldn't it? Yes.
When she did Alan Sugar, did he go,"You're fired"?
"You're degraded, you are a knave."
Anyway, now, a cluster of questions about drips, drops and dribbles.
What shape is a raindrop?
I'm doing a shape that I think would be a possible raindrop shape.
You are doing... Oh, dear!
You've been doing so well.
It's not pear-shaped or tear-shaped.
I'm going to do another one.
I don't think we even thought of that one!
No? Should I do a cock and balls?
It will be your coat of arms
if you decide to be knighted, won't it?
It's been so long...
- A perfect circle?
- is the right answer. They are completely spherical.
They used to use this thing that gravity
made liquid completely spherical.
They used to have huge towers.
They were called shot towers.
There was one in Waterloo until they built...
- To make shot.
- Oh, right.
- Lead shot, exactly. Yeah.
A huge one in America, in Baltimore,
which was the tallest building in America
until they built the Washington monument.
And they literally drop molten lead and it hits the water
and it's just completely round by the time it hits the water.
It seems extraordinary.
You'd think when it hit the water it would get flattened, but...
Maybe someone will write in and explain. But not to me!
And, erm, ball bearings and various other things
have utilised this marvellous fact
about liquids turning spherical as they fall.
Er, where might you bump into the world's biggest drip?
Oi! No!
The biggest drip is in a cave?
- It is in a cave, as it goes.
- It would be a stalactite.
- is the right answer. Well done. Absolutely right.
- Oh, well done.
The Gruta Rei do Mato in South America has the biggest of them all.
- How big is it?
- "Vast." Is the answer.
Thanks for that. "How big is it?"
"Oh, very big.
If I was to quantity its bigness would be doing it a disservice!
To say just how bigly big,
the vastly big bigness of the dripping thing..."
I want feet, metres, anything. Throw me a fucking bone, Fry!
- Oh! The answer is actually about twenty metres long.
- Thank you.
And they're between eighteen- and twenty-thousand years old.
- And the ones that go up are called ?
- Stalagmites.
They've got a "G" in 'cause they're in the ground.
Stalactites are in the ceiling.
I was always taught "tights hang down" was the...
was the thing, but anyway.
- Public school again.
- Ah, there you are you see.
I don't really understand about those things, but anyway.
- "Fry, put on the 15 denier and see me in my study."
- Oh, Lordy me.
What does that mean anyway, denier. What's that?
- It's... It's a unit of sheerness of ladies' underparts.
- It's... It's... It's...
- Your stockings are sheer.
- However sheer they are is rated in denier.
- That's right.
- What's the sheerest you can get?
- Bare legs.
- Well, that is very sheer.
- No, 10. You can get 10, er...
- That's sheer.
- That's sheer.
After 30 denier they go into opaque.
- So, I see. The higher the denier, the less sheer they are.
- Yes.
- I understand.
- "Fry, you oaf! Those are fishnets!"
Yeah, the biggest drip is in the cave of the Forest King
in the Gruta Rei do Mato in Brazil.
So can you identify the world's biggest crashing bore?
Is this something to do with the River Severn?
A sort of tidal wave.
It's forced down a narrow inlet against the direction of current.
Yes, absolutely right. It's a bore,
and a crashing bore is the term given
to a very high bore that crests and foams.
- People surf on them.
- They do surf on them, and in fact a man called King from Gloucestershire
He has the world record for surfing seven-point-six miles.
- Oh, seven-point...
- It took him over an hour and a half to go up the Severn.
But it can't be the biggest.
We never have the biggest of anything.
That's not the biggest.
No, the biggest, you're quite right, is in China.
- Yangtze?
- It's not the Yangtze. It's the Qiantang.
The Seine had one; Paris had a very good one.
It was called Le Mascaret, but they dredged it in the 60s,
and the bore stopped happening.
Now, where is the largest floater under the sun?
In the office of the Deputy Prime Minister?
Blue whale. It's always the blue whale;
one day it will be the answer to something!
- It hasn't been yet, has it?
- No. That isn't it, then?
No, you've lost a lot of points.
The largest floater under the sun is... Well, the sun is gaseous...
a gaseous ball.
But under the sun, so not the sun itself.
It might be one of the gas giants.
Jupiter? Uranus?
- What's the other one? Neptune? Saturn.
- "Saturn" is the right answer.
Saturn's density is only seventy percent of that of water,
and therefore would float if you found a large enough amount of water.
Huge amounts of helium and liquid hydrogen and so on.
It really is impossible to distinguish its atmosphere from its surface.
It's just a great gassy thing, Saturn.
Anyway, we'll never go there; at least I won't. Even if I could,
I wouldn't; I'd say, "No, I'm not going to go there. No."
You can't get him into Suffolk.
Now that is true.
Anyway, after that astonishing lack of knowledge,
except on the part of Alan,
for a no lesser thing than the third largest object in the solar system,
we move easily into the orbit of General Ignorance.
So, palms on mushroomoid buzzers.
The current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,
as it happens, lists some 290,000 sparkling words,
and 615,000 word forms.
If you add in all the proper names, which dictionaries omit,
estimates of the total number of words in our language exceed three million.
So bear that in mind when I ask you this.
How many different kinds of plant are there in the world?
Is it more than you think?
Fewer than you think?
Or about as many as you think?
I can't think. Does that rule me out?
One.
- You think there's one type...
- It's going to be... It's going to be one, or it's going to be two billion.
Fewer than I think.
Trees, plants, grass... that's it.
Yes!
Trees, flowers, weeds, and grass.
The answer is certainly fewer than anybody ever thought.
Kew Gardens reckoned there were a million types of plant,
- but when they look back in the records...
- There are four. There are four!
almost every single plant has been named four times.
So there are probably only a quarter
as many plants as we thought there once were.
- Vegetables.
- And there are vegetables.
- Maybe as few as 223,000.
- I've lost interest.
- Yes, I agree.
Erm, now tell us who fought whom in the Battle of Culloden.
The Battle of Culloden is quite complicated, because it was basically
an Italian fop with a Polish accent
with a bunch of Highlanders, some Irish, a few French,
fighting some Scottish low-landers, English,
led by a fat German from Hanover.
is a very good description of the Battle of Culloden indeed!
There were the... the Campbells and the Rosses and the Grants
and the Gunns and many of the lowland families.
There were more Scots there beating Prince Charles,
Edward Stuart, than there were English.
It's so weird that these national heroes are...
are not from the place that they're supposed to be.
William Wallace was from, erm, Kenya.
His mother was Masai. No, not really.
Just for a second, I was going, "Wow!"
David Beckham is definitely from Chingford.
Yes, that is true. Yeah.
But you see, I was educated in Scotland
- and all English history is omitted as a matter of course.
- Yeah. Mm.
The only thing that will be mentioned is Bannockburn.
- Yes.
- "When we beat the bastards!"
And the irony is, of course, that the Tories have never been voted for
in Scotland for the past twenty years,
and the Jacobite was a Tory rebellion.
It was the Tories who were the pro-Stuart,
Catholic, high-church Anglican party,
and it was their fight, and indeed the Tories were out of power
- for the next fifty and sixty years in Britain
- But didn't... It led to...
- because they were Jacobites.
- It led to being... tartan being banned.
- After the first rebellion. Absolutely.
- You weren't allowed to deep fry pizza any more?
You're quite right, and it was...
they were very savage in their reprisals
- and "Butcher" Cumberland earned his name
- "He cut off your tongues if you spoke Gallic, aye."
- All prisoners were killed.
- Yes.
Do you know what the soldiers were called?
- The soldiers were called Tommy Lobsters.
And also it was the first battle they were trained
to use bayonets for the first time.
You couldn't have a war like that in Scotland now.
- Why is that?
- Smoking ban.
Oh, yes! Hey. Very good, indeed.
So, Culloden was really more of a local difficulty;
it was Highland versus Lowland; it was like Celtic and Rangers.
Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight.
- Yes, it was.
- And it goes on to this day.
Will we never learn?
Who knows? Religion. Shit it. Anyway. Erm, so. Erm...
"You're watching The Moral Maze!"
There were more Scots in the force
which finally defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie
than there were in his own army.
It was basically a local derby. That's the point.
And lastly, what do dolphins drink?
- Oh, aren't they beautiful.
- They don't. I bet they don't drink anything.
He's right! They drink nothing. Nothing at all.
Excellent.
As mammals like us, their kidneys can't process sea water,
- so they can't, certainly, drink sea water
- They can't drink seawater.
and they're a bit far away from fresh water,
unless they're two of those rare species in China and South America
that are river dolphins. So they just metabolise everything they eat.
The fat gives them enough water. But when they haven't eaten enough,
then they usually die of dehydration rather than of hunger.
Yeah, I don't know why we haven't realised that before,
because there's that...
"He's trying to say something. Oh, it's a primitive language."
"Put it in the hole, put it in the hole! Put funnel in the hole!"
Funnily enough, in captivity,
if you point a hose of fresh water at them, they will drink it,
but then they won't eat for two days.
They can't distinguish hunger from thirst.
- "Fuck off, I'm full."
- Yeah, exactly.
A lot of people say that they are, in fact, smarter than people,
but if they were, wouldn't they be saying that?
The reason dolphins don't drink is because with these...
they can't get the fridge open in the supermarket.
"Dolphin in aisle 4.
Can we have a mop-up?
There's a dead dolphin in aisle 4.
This keeps happening. He's by the Tizer..."
"Get the nets out. No, mind the tuna! Don't get them as well!"
Anyway, it must be time for the scores,
so let's have a little bit of a look, shall we?
I literally do not know what to say.
Second equal, with minus seven,
are Rory Bremner,
Phill Jupitus,
and Alan Davies.
Which means
that our outright winner is first timer Ronni Ancona with thirteen!
Wow! How brilliant.
I can't believe it.
- Brilliant.
- Well, my fevered thanks go
to Phill, Rory, Ronni, and Alan.
And speaking of what dolphins don't drink,
I'll leave you with this topical photograph.
Good night.
"WATER METER FOR EVERY HOME".
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