QI (2003–…): Season 6, Episode 1 - Families - full transcript
APPLAUSE
Goooood evening, and welcome to QI,
which tonight is a
veritable Liblabble.
This is a newly minted
and completely useless word,
coined by my Elves.
It's the collective
noun for a group of Ls.
And here are some. El Salvador,
the Reverend Richard Coles.
APPLAUSE
El-egant, Sara Pascoe.
APPLAUSE
One L of a guy, Bill Bailey.
APPLAUSE
And a snowball's
chance in L, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Now, let's hear their L-ish buzzers.
Sara goes...
MUSIC: Crocodile Rock
by Elton John
Aah. Bill goes...
MUSIC: Saturday's Kids
by The Jam
Richard goes...
MUSIC: Y Brawd Houdini
By Meic Stevens
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Speedy Gonzales
by Pat Boone
♪ You better come home,
Speedy Gonzales... ♪
- Well, let's not do a show,
let's just listen to that all
day. - Listen to that.
All right, well, let's leap in with
some laughter.
What has four legs
and a sense of humour?
BILL'S SONG
Bill?
Ant and Dec.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- It covers the facts. - It does.
- I can't really take anything away
from you. - It's technically correct.
- It is. I'm going to give you...
- I deserve points. - You will get them.
- Ooh!
RICHARD'S SONG
- Richard?
- Lester Piggott's tax return?
Whoa, very good, very good,
very good.
Not very topical,
so some of the younger members
of the audience won't
know what that is.
A laughing hyena.
Yeah, hyenas have four legs
and they do laugh, that's true, but
do they have a sense of humour?
Or is it just the sound they
mimic, or at least to our...
I don't think it's
laughing, is it, more...
- IMPRESSION
- It's a call, it's a call, yeah.
- Impressive, that was very good.
- Well, yeah. - Yeah. Anyway.
- A pantomime horse.
- Well, no, it's not a
pantomime horse. - A pig.
- Pig. - Er, no... - Is it a mammal?
- Yes. - OK, so what's a sense of
humour...? - Cow.
We know this because it's an animal
that has been much observed.
OK, is this, I know that they
can make rats laugh.
- Yeah, ah. - Is that what it is?
- Yes.
- OK, so rats. They tickle rats.
- They tickle rats!
And they, and the rats make tiny
little laughs. And it's so
interesting.
In fact they're so high,
human ears can't hear them,
and we have film of it, it's
an Estonian/American researcher,
and there he is. He rejoices in the
name of Dr Jaak Panksepp.
Now it may at first look as
if he's actually torturing,
but it is, you will see it returns
to his hand, it likes this.
- Are you sure? - Yeah.
It's going, "Help me!"
"The others are in cages!"
"Can you hear me, anyone?!"
- Yes? - So I read, I read quite a lot
about this, because actually it's
all to do with how they have sex
as well, so it's really interesting
that if a woman has a bad,
not a woman, a female rat, sorry...
I really anthropomorphized...
- A lady rat. - A lady rat. - A lady rat.
- Could be a lady, yes. - A lady rat.
If a lady rat has a bad sexual
experience with a male rat,
she will never have
sex with him again,
and even if he's the only
available male, she won't.
And if she has a good sexual
experience with a fake rat,
she will keep going
back to that one.
And it's really interesting,
and that's a whole thing with all
the tickling and the play, there's
quite a lot of interplay with
- the male and female rats to do with
love-making. - You're absolutely
right.
Did you know, Stephen,
that there's a research that shows
that bees are pessimists?
STEPHEN LAUGHS
I'm not making this up,
I read this in the New Scientist.
They would do some
sort of stimulus to a bee
when a good thing happened,
so it would know that something
nice was happening, and then another
thing when a bad thing was
happening, so it'd know that
something bad was happening.
And then they did
a sort of neutral stimulus
and the bees all behaved as if it
were the bad thing about to happen,
they opted for the glass
being half empty.
- Goodness me. - Rather than half full.
So bees are pessimists.
- That is...
- That's right, when you see bees,
a lot of the time, when they're
buzzing round a plant, they're
actually, what they're actually
saying is, "What's the point?"
"Whatever." I could get the nectar,
I could go back to the hive, but
really, where am I going with this?
- Exactly. - But even worse than that,
because this is all, I always think
that
bees, it's weird for them, because
flowers really are using them
- for a three-way, because flowers
can't have sex with each other.
- Absolutely right.
- Oh, so it's like the bee comes in...
- So they need the bee to do it with
- both of them, and the bee is like,
I'm not even in a relationship,
I'm just the person you bring in.
- You get off, you get off.
- I'm just a, I'm just a, I'm just a
gimp for you. Yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah, exactly, "I'm a toy."
- "I'm a go-bee-tween."
- A go-bee-tween! - Yeah. - Oh, I like what
you've done there.
APPLAUSE
The queen bee, who you'd think might
be the one who's having
the good life, lays 3,500 eggs a day
- for two years and then dies in
excruciating pain, I presume. - Yeah.
- This is why... - She doesn't even have
any Sudocrem or anything.
I know, exactly, and it's just the
luck of the draw as to
- which female bee is going to be
chosen as the queen.
- Yes. - Me? Oh. Sash.
Tiara.
All of this, it proves that that
saying, you know, we have to,
when you explain to kids about,
you know, sexual reproduction,
you tell them about the birds and the
bees, it's
- just not fit for purpose at
all, is it really? - It really isn't.
- The birds, yeah, just about. Bees,
no. - No. - You know. - A horrible life.
We're going to be sexless
lackeys for a monstrous
sugar-giant, you know.
APPLAUSE
That isn't...
I'm not telling that to any kids.
They'll go, "OK."
But in terms of human and animal
senses of humour, there is
Koko, a gorilla
born in San Francisco Zoo you may
know about, who knows supposedly
2,000 words and 1,000
sign language words, and is said to
comprehend both puns and slapstick.
The puns, and you believe it or
don't, she was once asked,
"What can you
think of that is hard?"
And she replied "a rock" and "work."
Which is extraordinary.
Excellent, yeah. It
is amazing, yeah.
- That that's a category slip, you
know, it's a genuine sort of pun.
- That's a zeugma isn't it?
- It's like a zeugma, yeah. - A
zeugma. - She only needs a couple
- more and she could do a...
- You get, that's a good word, so
that's it, zeugma or zeugma, yeah.
- zeugma.
Slapstick, she once tied her
trainer's shoelaces together
and then signed the words,
"chase me."
Brilliant.
And the brilliant Miriam Rothschild,
of whom you may have heard, she did
much work on pond life of various
animals, and the extraordinary
life cycles of incredible species,
but she also had a parrot
that could imitate her calling
the dog and whistling and saying
for a walk, and the dog would arrive
and then the parrot would laugh.
Extraordinary thing.
You know this joke, you must know
it, it's a friend who has a parrot,
and the sports results are going and
he goes, "Norwich one, Ipswich two."
And the parrot goes, "Oh, no! Ooh!"
And you're thinking
"What's going on there?"
"Well, every time Norwich lose, the
parrot cries and bursts into tears."
And he says, "Well, what happens
when Norwich win?"
"I don't know, I've only had it four
years!"
That came from the heart, ladies and
gentlemen. There you are, anyway.
There are all kinds of different
human laughter,
which have been
categorised by a Dr Dirk Wildgruber,
of the University of Tubingen,
in Deutschland.
There are,
some types are joyful laughter...
ONE PERSON IN AUDIENCE LAUGHS
Thank you, audience!
That was sarcastic joyful laughter,
which is slightly different.
Terrifying.
- Joyful laughter...
- BILL AND SARA LAUGH
- Social laughter.
- LAUGHS POLITELY
- Taunting laughter.
- LAUGHS OBNOXIOUSLY
Aaah. Oh, dear.
- Schadenfreude laughter.
- LAUGHS SMUGLY
Any other kinds that are
in your head?
Laughter when people, you tell them
something and then they laugh,
like they've got it and then
they realise they don't, and they go,
"Ha-ha! What?"
And there's also of course, the
Sid James type of sexual laughter.
CACKLES
When we were doing Jonathon Creek,
we had these two prop boys
and they used lots of rhyming slang.
And there was another one who
didn't know any of it.
All the time he'd say.
"What do they mean?"
One morning, they said,
"We had a lovely bit of Sinatra
on in the van this morning."
And he went, "Ha-ha,"
the other fella.
"Ha-ha."
And they looked at him like,
"We were just playing some
Frank Sinatra!"
LAUGHTER
He said, "Oh, sorry. I thought
it was a slang thing."
That doesn't mean you laugh.
"Well, I just thought it was going
to be funny cos it was
a slang thing.
"Normally it's a slang thing
and then we all laugh.
"I never understand it."
There's a very particular kind of
laughter you get
when people occasionally listen to
your sermon.
It's a sort of polite laugh, like
what you get in a Shakespeare play.
Oh, yeah - teachers at Shakespeare.
LAUGHS POLITELY
You are a card!
Because even I...sin.
How do and when do rats get sad?
CROWD AWS
When they stop tickling them?
When you stop tickling them.
Might be slightly disappointed.
Aw!
When they're cold. In the sewers,
they all sleep together,
when the frost comes
they all freeze to death...
A few found sleeping in a circle,
and the reason they're all connected
is cos the urine that comes
out of them constantly is frozen,
and it's just a solid urine disc
with rats in it.
Sad, sad - think of the word sad.
Seasonal affective disorder.
- Seasonal affective disorder.
- In the winter. - No!
They get sad in the summer?
The winter is for people like us
who are diurnal,
who live by day.
Rats are nocturnal.
So we have circadian rhythms,
and they have...?
For an extra point.
Circu...
Circanoctium.
Oh, circanoctia!
They have around-the-night rhythms,
we have around-the-day rhythms.
In Scandiwegian countries,
where in winter it's very
dark for a very long time,
they use things
almost like usherette trays,
with ultra-violet tubes,
and they get about an hour or
two of that and it cheers them up,
cos melatonin is produced
in the brain that cheers them up.
It's one of the things that
cheers you up.
But they found, with rats,
somatostatin,
which is a depressive, was caused
in those that had too much sunlight.
So what do they provide?
Sunglasses for the rats?
There you are.
Rats get sad in summer,
not in winter.
Here's something that sounds
ludicrous, but is no laughing
matter.
What's a really ostentatious way to
turn off a gas fire?
RICHARD'S SONG
Send a flood.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You and your God!
Yes, rats...
It's trying to use, in a benign way,
the most powerful force that man
has ever harnessed.
Sarcasm!
LAUGHTER
Call yourself a gas fire?!
Where would we be without sarcasm,
eh?!
Sarcasm needs a pipe.
You need a pipe with sarcasm?
Yeah, great(!)
It's the sarcasm...
It's the sarcasm slammer.
Yeah.
Fusion power.
Fission power is the one we've
yet to harness.
We hope not, but fission is the one
we have harnessed.
For nuclear bombs.
Yeah.
The first one was the A-bomb.
And the father
of the H-bomb was...
Penn and Teller.
Edward Teller,
you're absolutely right.
Teller, like a lot of scientists,
was an idealist
and he felt that we had this
enormous source of power, surely we
can't only use it for weapons!
And he quoted the Bible -
he quoted Isaiah, saying,
"We've got these weapons, let's
use them for something peaceful."
What's the Isaiah quotation.
You would beat your sword
into a ploughshare.
That's right! We'll
beat your swords into ploughshares.
And he dreamt up all kinds of weird
plans to use H-bombs,
like for example,
widening the Panama Canal.
Yeah, I know, it seems a little bit
speculative.
Crossrail.
Yeah, Crossrail!
What's that one? H2N2?
HS2.
HS2, yeah.
Through Buckinghamshire,
just basically a huge...
HE MIMICS EXPLOSIONS
Finished!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Yeah, and they thought not just
the Panama Canal,
we'll get one through...
Well anywhere really!
Using 22 nuclear bombs to build
a massive road
and railway path through the Bristol
Mountains in California -
Project Carryall.
There was another one,
using 1,000 nukes to blast
a city-sized airship into space.
They spent money on all these -
Operation Plowshare, it was called.
And the Russians did the same.
What's the smallest nuclear
bomb you could have,
like to just knock out
a bit of a building
if you were doing an extension?
Two things were actually tried,
cos the rest were just shelved
and the money stopped coming in.
One was detonating nukes underground
to create steam to generate
electricity.
This was abandoned
when it turned out to be impossible
to contain the explosions.
Using nukes for fracking
natural gas.
Which worked,
but the gas was radioactive.
Bit of a PR disaster
in your kitchen...
Light the oven. My hair! My hair!
It's going to play very
well in the Tory home counties.
Not only are we going to frack you,
we're going to blow
you up with a nuclear device.
Exactly. But there was one very
successful one the Russians did,
they used five times,
four of them completely successful,
but none of them with any fallout
that was destructive,
and that was putting out huge
gas field fires.
And so successful it was, that the
Americans considered
using it in the deep water...
The BP thing.
The BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yeah.
In the deep water horizon, as it was
called.
They were going to nuke it?
- Well, they were, yeah.
- A lot of spin in that.
Look away now.
India's first nuclear device -
do you know what it was
called and when it might have been?
It was a curry.
LAUGHTER
It was so strong...
..that it literally
blew your head off.
The vindaloo bomb...
People's eyes were
watering for 1,000 square miles!
God, that's so strong!
Oh, the smell of it!
Aah!
It was actually called
the Smiling Buddha.
It was set off in 1974.
Now for something
a little more local.
Name some domestic appliances that
really nobody wants.
RICHARD'S SONG
- Richard?
- In a vicarage, a tie rack.
LAUGHTER
That is good.
Very good, yes.
I can't take that away from you.
BILL'S SONG
I appeal, I'm appealing, sir,
that, just a very...
It's an act of great pedantry -
that's not technically an appliance
Unless it's an electronic tie rack.
RICHARD'S SONG
An auto steam tie rack.
There are electric tie racks, yeah,
there are tie racks that go, bzzzzz.
- Really? - Yeah, there are, I promise
you, electric ones. - Such a thing
exists?
- I promise you. - Wow.
- And that actually takes us
to what the right answer is,
when you said steam. Yeah?
Those Corby trouser presses that you
have in hotel rooms,
- I've never heard of anyone using
them. - Brilliant.
Do you mean others don't?
Am I the only one?
- You've used one? - I use them. I use
them. I've used them.
- Oh, OK, well, I've got that wrong.
- But not necessarily for trousers.
Anyway, there's a whole
load of appliances that were
made in the 1920s and '30s,
when a lot of British people were
starting to get a little bit more
prosperous, just before the Crash.
And they thought about going
"On the electric", as it
used to be said.
"We're going on the electric."
And what would be the main,
the killer app that would put them
on the electric?
- The thing they wanted to have most.
- Electric light? - Heat.
That would be one.
- Plug-in radio? - The wireless set.
Yeah. - Yeah.
And who were the other main
suppliers, other than electricity?
That had already been there.
- Gas. - Gas.
They thought, well, what we'll do is
provide gas-powered radios,
to stop people from going
on the electric.
And there's an example of one.
And they put them out and they said,
"Not only will you get the BBC,
"but you will warm the room
slightly."
Slightly.
Through the glow
of your contentment.
Increase the chances
of your house exploding.
And not only did
they produce wirelesses,
they produced trouser presses,
oddly enough, washing machines,
washing-up machines,
everything that you can think
of that is a household appliance,
a white good, as we would now say.
There were gas-powered fridges,
weren't there?
Yes, there were indeed. Very much
so. But they just didn't catch on,
because electricity was just
more reliable.
It's not that the gas
actually powered the radio
so much as that the gas created
the current that powered the radio.
So it was still electric, it's just
you used your existing gas main.
How does that work?
How can gas create electricity?
Get heat,
and then you put it in a machine...
A special machine with
a magnet in it.
Well,
they burn coal for power stations.
That's turning a turbo -
you haven't got a turbo.
It's the difference between cold
and heat -
it's the thermoelectric effect.
Russians used it with kerosene,
way out in Siberia
and places that were
incredibly cold.
They actually recommended -
God bless communism -
people open the window to hear
the radio better.
So that the distinction
between the cold outside
and the hot inside was even greater,
which created this current.
Talking of radio, in the 1930s,
there was a magnificent programme
that I would have loved.
There was a fellow called
FH Wallace,
who was the Phil "The Power" Taylor
of his day.
By which I mean...
Darts professional.
Yes, a great darts player.
And he played in The Alexander Arms
in Eastbourne,
and he, on the radio, would throw
three darts, from 301 down,
and his score would be announced,
then there would be a pause while
people at home could throw three
darts and write down their score
And if they beat him,
they didn't get a prize,
they could say, "Pat yourself on the
back when you go to work tomorrow."
That was a whole radio series.
I'm not saying people were easily
pleased in those days but...
Why didn't they just fast
forward to the internet
and people on those
kind of Gala Bingo sites,
like, "You get a free £5."
They're just doing
that on their own -
pat on the back, you lost 56 quid!
Anyway, moving on...
Now for some uneasy listening.
What's the most depressing radio
programme of all time?
Oh, Simon Bates, by miles.
"But that's, surely that's the story
of people who fell in love."
"She did die
of the cancer. But..."
"He battled through the cancer
and then here's their song.
"Too Drunk To Fuck by the great..."
STEPHEN LAUGHS
For those who are not familiar with
what we're talking about,
Simon Bates used to run a
series called Our Song.
- Our Tune. - Our Tune. - Our Tune.
HE SINGS TUNE
And people wrote in basically with
the most depressing story of how
- they were in love with someone who
then died of some appalling disease.
- Oh, God, it was nauseating. Christ!
And he'd read out the,
"We met and we fell in love," and
all that. "She was then..."
- It was a series of awful disasters,
accidents.
- Diagnosed with this or run over.
She was run over by a vehicle, she
lost all the use of her limbs and...
- I'm sure people sent them in and
just made it up. - I think so. - They
must have done.
"Sadly she did die, but to this day,
you know, Knock Three Times is our
song and always will be."
She was caught up in a nuclear
explosion
that was used to put out a fire.
Then a rat burrowed its way
through her leg
and wee'd in her eye.
And she struggled on,
with a gas radio for a companion.
This was Radio One,
- this was supposed to be the hip
young station. - Yeah. This was hip.
I have to say I have several
correspondents who would say
- that Saturday Live was the most
depressing radio station. - Really?
Yeah.
KLAXON
- We don't think your radio show...
- No, I like it. - Well, we have to, you
know of this thing now
that you're interactive with your
audience, so actually, as you're
broadcasting live
you have a screen in front of you,
with a Twitter feed on.
Not advisable, ladies and gentlemen,
I have to say. No.
It's a very good moral and spiritual
discipline, as everything you
say is immediately commented
on by some regular Twitter...
With #SaturdayLive,
or #RichardColes is a...
I remember one time...
#Smug-Maester twat vicar.
Oh, crumbs!
I swear there is someone
who does #smug-maester
and another one #twatvicar.
- Oh, that's horrible.
- Oh, Richard, that's so unfair.
- And it's my mother.
LAUGHTER
I did a thing once, I wrote
an article in which the joke was,
in the article was on me,
but I did call Frank Lampard a twat.
And it was a joke.
Anyway, he complained about it
and I thought, "Oh, I'd better find
the article, because I can't even
"remember what I wrote,"
So I Googled Frank Lampard
twat, nothing came up,
and then I Googled my own name with
twat, and so much stuff came up.
- That's dangerous.
- That was really dangerous.
- And then I started Googling my name
with any other term of abuse. - Ooh!
And I had really one of the worst
evenings of my life.
Never ever do that.
Never Google yourself.
And that should be like one of the,
that should be, you know,
a commandment.
- You know.
"Thou shalt not Google thyself."
- "Thou shalt not Google thyself."
There was an awful time,
which I think has passed,
- when if you put in the C word
into Google, the first return...
- Your name would come up!
No.
Thank you! Virtually...
Excuse me?! Virtually that.
- If you typed in the C word,
the first thing that came up was
"Englishman." - Oh.
If you want to learn some
new words, you could always do
the Guardian Easter piece,
on the online edition,
and then read the below the line
comments afterwards.
- Oh, it's like looking into a sewer,
isn't it? - That's quite fun. - Let's
not go there.
I don't know, sometimes it's good
though, I have to say.
There was Ronan Keating doing
a version of Fairy Tale Of New York,
by The Pogues.
- He didn't, did he? - Yes, he did.
- It is as horrific as it sounds. He
has to... - McGowan he is not.
He has to Irish himself up a bit
to be in the Pogues.
But there's a tsunami of hate
which of course accompanies
it on the YouTube comments.
But my favourite YouTube
comment of all time, it just says:
"This is the worst
thing that ever happened."
And it sort of is!
I used to do this listener complaint
programme for Radio 5, when that
first started,
there used to be live people calling
in, and there was a woman who phoned
up once,
and I saw her name, it was Margery
from Hemel Hempstead.
And I took the call and I said,
"Margery, from Hemel Hempstead,
what's your complaint?"
And she said, "I'm absolutely
disgusted with everything."
and put the phone down.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Oh, bless her, bless her.
Well, the most depressing
radio of all time may have been
Simon Bates, it certainly isn't
Saturday Live, which I urge
you to listen to every Saturday,
with Richard at the microphone.
Drahtfunk. Drahtfunk.
Drahtfunk.
Yeah. Wire radio. And what happened
is, the Swiss and the Norwegians
and the Swedish
discovered that they could use,
first of all electricity, which they
had bored holes through
the mountains for, they could use
electricity to transmit radio,
and then, when phone lines were
installed, phone.
And the Germans used
this in the war.
And they used it for very depressing
broadcasts about bomber raids
that were coming over,
because it couldn't be scrambled.
And nor would the bombers be able to
use live radio that the
Germans had, to fix their position,
so they could
close their radio stations down,
during the night, and use these.
And German people would listen
and they'd get grid references,
you know, there's a bomber wave
coming and it's on F14 and
the people of Stuttgart or wherever
it might be would go, "Oh, God,
it's coming towards us."
And they'd be able to get into the
shelters. So, it was depressing.
It was depressing radio,
it was always bad news.
- Did they play songs in-between?
- No, they didn't.
- Missing a trick there.
- The Beach Boys.
Have you ever heard Radio Pyongyang?
- Never have.
- You've got to listen to it.
It's mostly songs about the Great
Leader and how marvellous he is,
interspersed with incredibly
terrifying
broadcasts by the lady who
read the news,
who's got that rather
dramatic sort of thing.
The awful thing is,
if you buy a radio in North Korea,
- it's pre-tuned. - Of course.
You can only get Radio Pyongyang.
That's the only thing you can get.
But people try to smuggle in sets
from China for a bit of variety.
You'll get Gardener's Question Time.
Anyway, moving on.
Alan, would I enjoy kissing
any of the gunner's daughters?
Yes, you would. No, you wouldn't.
- There are no daughters. - Well...
- By kissing, do you mean...?
Yes. In all those cases,
you're right.
You're right to be cagey. Of course
it's nothing to do with The Arsenal.
Isn't there a band,
there's a band from Seattle called
Kissing The Gunner's Daughter.
- Is there really? - Yes, there is,
yeah. - Well, do you know what it
refers to?
I do actually, yes. It's a
naval term, isn't it?
- Yes, it is naval.
- It's a rather unpleasant term.
Describe.
For being strapped to a
cannon and then being beaten?
- Yes, whipped with the famous...
- The cat o' nine tails.
- With the cat o' nine tails.
Absolutely right. - Yes. - It was
horrific.
What's extraordinary is
that it's still in use.
Not in the British Navy,
or not in Britain.
Did you know that the victim had
to make their own cat?
- Often they did, not always, but
often they did. - Yeah.
Sometimes it was their best friend,
which was miserable.
That's right,
you'd make out of blancmange.
Oh, this, yes, it's all I had.
There's another naval punishment,
you can get "firked."
I'm sorry?
You can get firked.
- Explain? - You get firked...
- If you're... This is true, I'm not
making it up. - Yeah, don't keep
saying it, explain it.
It was the punishment,
if you were a cook in the galley and
you ruined the meal, you got firked.
I'm not making that up.
You really like saying it
though, don't you?
Just keep saying it, man.
I just can't,
I don't know what you mean, Stephen.
But they would take the staves from
a firkin and beat you with that,
and it was called being firked.
Oh, a firkin being a large barrel.
A firkin being,
well, not a very large barrel,
but they, you were beaten with
the staves from a firkin,
firked. That's true.
Wow, that's brilliant. Well, also,
apart from the gunner's daughter,
at the time the Royal Navy enlisted
boys as young as nine,
who were running errands and so on,
helped with the cooking.
And these cabin boys were
punished in a marginally more humane
way, by being bent over a gun
and lashed on the bare bottom.
This was called
"Kissing the gunner's daughter".
And the lash itself was known as the
"boy's pussy".
Which sounds all wrong.
Or it was called the
"boy's cat" or just "pussy".
It had only five strands of whip
cord, with no knots in it.
It was sort of um,
Sony's My First Cat 'O Nine Tails.
Isn't it?
Yeah, its true level.
It was the innocent version. And
that was kissing the gunner's
daughter. Pretty nasty.
From lashings to lese-majeste.
Why was George III very nearly,
literally, toast is 1776?
1776, you say?
It's a rather important year...
RICHARD'S SONG
Was it the firing of the colonies?
Very good.
Well, it is the year of course
of American independence.
But the fact is,
there's a rather marvellous MP,
who dies in 1813,
and was well ahead of his time and
about whom more should be known.
His name was Hartley, David Hartley,
and he was a scientist, a friend of
Benjamin Franklin
and was the first MP to present a
bill opposing slavery.
Decades ahead of anyone else.
But his main claim to fame, was him
work on fireproofing of houses,
which he achieved by placing metal
sheets under the floorboards,
so the joists wouldn't catch fire.
And they were so successful that he
invited George III
to his house in Putney,
which was a special
fire-proof house.
Breakfast was
served in one of the rooms,
the kettle was boiled on a fire
made on the bare floorboards
Hartley went upstairs,
set fire to a bed,
which set fire to the curtains,
while Hartley lit two more
fires on the stairs,
so it's like a sort of stuntman,
one under the stairs -
all burn merrily.
And they all died of smoke
inhalation.
He put fires under the rooms,
on the floor below the royal family,
with tar, pitch and kindling,
and set fire to it.
And everyone survived,
it was all fine.
And he was made
somewhat of a local hero...
Local fire officer.
It all, as it were, caught on,
cos a lot of people thought, well,
this is the way to avoid fires.
It was a most impressive thing.
It would be an
amazing assassination attempt,
to say,
"Hey, I've made a fire-proof house.
"Why don't you come round
and I'll show you?"
Ah, Guy Fawkes number two.
See you later!
- True. - Teething issues.
Fortunately, they trusted him.
But his major and lasting
achievement is the he invented
the fire curtain for theatres.
So in the interval, when you see a
fire curtain drop down rather dully,
or something that just says
"fire curtain"...
So he's the real Mr Sands.
Exactly. Explain about Mr Sands.
Sometimes it's Dr Sands.
They do this in the tube
and in theatres,
if you hear an announcement
asking for Dr Sands,
it means there's a fire
somewhere in the building.
So if your name is actually Mr Sands
and you want to go to the theatre,
and you go there
and ask for your tickets,
people will start running away.
Theatre's burnt down all the time,
didn't they?
- Extraordinarily so. - There was a
lovely story of, was it Sheridan,
his theatre
caught fire and he was outside and
he was sitting there having a drink.
Someone said, "Mr Sheridan,
surely you should be throwing
buckets of water on this."
He said, "Can't a man take
sack by his own fireside?"
The only difference
now in the Globe in Southbank,
the only difference between that
and the original is that
you're not allowed to have a
thatched roof in London any more.
It's the only difference
from the Elizabethan one.
Yes, Shakespeare's Globe caught fire
and was put out by beer.
- Was it? - Yeah, in his day.
Which is rather pleasing -
I don't know why, but it is.
Now, let's get a little lachrymose.
What are Dutch tears?
I don't know.
Dutch courage is when you drink
booze, it's a euphemism for
something.
Well, because we went to war with
Holland so many times,
at least three Dutch wars, that we
tended to use the word Dutch,
Dutch wife, Dutch uncle,
Dutch, you know, courage.
- So it'll be some sort of tear drop
thing. - It is a tear shaped thing.
Actually, from Mecklenburg, or at
least it was introduced to...
Britain from Mecklenburg, by
Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Does that mean anything to you?
I don't know.
Why are you saying that in that way?
Prince Rupert of the Rhine,
played by Timothy Dalton,
- in the film Cromwell, you may
remember, a very dashing figure.
- Of course.
Probably was responsible
for Charles I losing the civil war.
- Is it some sort of ammunition?
- It's not.
- In fact I'm going to show you what
it is... - Is it a decorative thing?
It's very extraordinary, I'm going
to pick up this object here.
It's a light box.
And I'm going to turn it on.
I'm going to get my little
camera here.
And maybe you can see, there we are.
It's a sort of tadpole-y like thing.
What it is, is a...
If I turn it you can see this is
actually a polarised filter,
so what you're seeing is this moire
effect in the middle.
Because if you take an ordinary
drop of molten glass
and you drop it into cold water it
instantly solidifies, of course.
The outer part, the part that hits
the water solidifies first.
The inner part doesn't have time to
get as hard as the outer part,
tries to contract,
there's no space for it to contract,
so there is a kind of tension
built into it.
This a kind of time bomb
waiting to happen,
but it's held together by the hard
outer casing.
And if I were to clip off the tail,
it would
release all the energy inside it.
And it would explode.
And not only would it explode,
it would
explode at a speed three times
greater than a sniper's bullet.
Incredibly fast. In fact so fast...
So that's how much kind of energy is
stuffed inside it.
So fast I'm going to have to do
it in a little bowl.
So I'm going to put
the camera aside here.
But firstly, I'll show you that
it's really solid,
because I can smack it with a hammer
and it won't even vaguely be hurt.
Look.
Maybe you can start being a
cameraman now, young Alan.
That's it, put those on just in case
it breaks. There you are.
- Ready, sir.
- Yeah. Now can you see that there?
- I don't know, it hasn't got any
kind of view-finder.
- No, no, look at, there.
- It's like the Chuckle Brothers.
- Oh, look, there.
APPLAUSE
That's horrific!
Oh, no.
That's glass and I'm
absolutely hammering it...
- All right? Mind your finger.
- That is so bloody solid.
This looks like one of the weirdest
court scenes I've ever seen.
Order!
- I will have order! - Order!
So, you have to believe me
that you hammer it and hammer it
and hammer it and hammer it, and
we've now got one, I'm going to put
these gloves on, because health and
safety above all is my watch word.
There we are.
But also they look good.
And, oh, Alan, you old queen.
I'm just filling in,
I'm just filling in.
So here we are. Now...
Oh, that's, that's making me
feel giddy.
I don't know if you can see here.
But I've got one in here.
Now you have to try and be...
Oh, don't.
That's awful.
What you have to try and be now is
try and be a good cameraman, Alan.
Can you, let's see, can you see...?
Can you see that one in there?
And all I have to do is
try and clip the tail.
Oh, Lord.
Oh, God. I'm quite scared.
If I clip the tail, it should
release the energy of this...
Whoa!
There you are, the whole thing
exploded. So having hit it there...
- APPLAUSE
- Dutch tears. Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you to my glamorous assistant.
We can probably see a little
slowed down version of that.
- Wow. - It's pretty amazing.
And that's just clipping
the absolute end of the tail.
Even though you can smash
the head of it and it won't be hurt.
We have, in the audience, Stephen
Ramsey, from Imperial College,
who's kindly leant us these Rupert's
Tears. Stephen, are you there?
- Hi, Steven. - Thank you very much.
When was this effect discovered?
I think, when you had the glass
blowers working from the hot furnace,
they gathered the glass on their
irons, and to get rid of the excess
glass on their iron,
they would stand them into the hot
water, and some of these droplets
would drop off and get
the super-hardened toughened glass,
and I think someone,
probably by accident thought,
"I'll snap the end off that."
And suddenly had an explosion.
I believe that super-hard toughened
effect is what we all
- rely on for windscreens in cars.
- Yes. That's how toughened glass
was first made, by pulling the glass
and blowing cold air onto the surface
to super-cool it. Theoretically,
could it put out a gas fire?
When Will Byrne approached me to
make these Rupert Drops for the show,
and in my lifetime as a glass blower,
I've made them many times,
and I always have a two-litre glass
vessel that I put on my bench
and drop the hot glass in.
And I dropped one in and thought,
"Oh, good."
And as I watched, it exploded and
the shockwave blew a two-inch hole
- in the glass vessel. - Wow.
Thank you for introducing
Will Byrne, who is our Science Elf.
And thank you, Stephen Ramsay.
That was very exciting,
I love a laboratory lark.
Now it's time to tweak
the tail of General Ignorance.
So fingers on buzzers, please.
Here's a question about Lent.
Whom should you
visit on Mothering Sunday?
RICHARD'S SONG
Yes?
Your vicar.
- Explain. - Well, Mothering Sunday was
the return of usually
children in service to the mother
church of where they lived.
- That's correct. - So it wasn't going
to see your mother, you'd go to the
mother church,
- and they'd pick primroses to take to
their nearest and dearest. - Correct.
- That's what I think.
- You're absolutely right.
And as a churchman
I suppose you should know that.
Most of us believe, of course, it is
just a greeting card
opportunity or a flower opportunity
to be nice to your mother,
which is what it's become.
But it's actually nothing to do
with your biological mother,
it's to do with your mother church,
as you rightly say.
Do you think that excuse is going to
hold up next year for any of us?
But I think I knew
when I was young that it was called
Mothering Sunday,
rather than Mother's Day.
Mothering, yes.
It's always been Mothering Sunday.
They tend to call it
Mother's Day now, don't they?
- It's just another chance to sell
another card. - Oh, totally.
Do you know sometimes, a greetings
card is the most marked-up thing on
general sale.
But I said, what about cinema
popcorn?
- Ooh, very good. - Oh, no. The mark-up.
- Oh, it must be enormous.
- I thought it was eggs.
Eggs?
- Because an omelette costs so much
more than an egg. - That's true.
LAUGHTER
Your mind works in mysterious ways,
its wonders to perform.
On Mothering Sunday you
visited your mother church,
not necessarily your mother.
Now, what colour
are the flags on the moon?
Do they look different when you're
there? Are there no flags?
- There's no moon. Oh, God.
- There are flags.
I just feel about 100
klaxons waiting for me.
Five times bitten, five times shy.
Yeah?
RICHARD'S SONG
Are they grey?
Grey is probably
a reasonable answer.
One thing you can be absolutely
certain is they're not red, white
and blue.
The temperature extremes are really
remarkable on the moon.
From 100 degrees Celsius
heat for 14 days
and then 14 days of 150 degrees
minus Celsius.
And so it's going through all that.
Plus, there's no atmosphere, and
so no protection
from ultraviolet light.
And we know enough what a set
of curtains or a sofa that's in,
you know, daylight,
in a couple of years can get faded,
so you can imagine what
a flag would be like.
And they're made of nylon,
so bleached white probably powdered
nothingness by now.
This came up at Mother's Union
the other day, the space...
- The Voyager...
- That's my favourite...
- So much does.
- The Voyager space craft, yes.
- Yes. - Still going. - The furthest
man-made object from earth. - Yeah.
It's 1977. Would it look scruffy?
That's a really good question.
I mean, would the paint have gone,
in, I don't know, solar...?
I imagine when it went through the
Kuiper belt and things like that,
- it probably would have got a bit of
bashing. - It would have had a few
knocks and dents.
My favourite thing about the Voyager
that I like is that
they think that it's left our solar
system, they're not sure.
And they've estimated that the
time it will take to reach
the next solar system is
40,000 years.
I know. It's phenomenal, isn't it?
And it's going to go out of
radio transaction in about ten
year's time and then it's just gone.
And I thought West Anglian Trains
were bad, but there you are.
Anyway, all the stars and stripes
on the moon are now plain white,
or possibly grey,
if they've survived at all.
What was the first
man-made sonic boom?
RICHARD'S SONG
Whip crack.
Whip crack. Whip crack-away.
Whip crack-away.
KLAXON
You're right -
whip cracks are sonic booms.
There's been recent development
in the field of sonic booms,
or in the field of a strange thing
called food physics.
Oh, dear.
You wouldn't think there was such
a thing as food physics.
- Is it popcorn? - It might be popcorn.
It's basically crunchy food.
It's a bizarre idea that
someone might think,
"Hang on, do we really
understand crunchy food?"
Dr van Vliet,
a Dutch food physicist,
spent the last seven years figuring
out how crunch works.
And he basically said crispiness
and crunchiness appeal to us
because they signal freshness.
The staler the chip,
obviously the quieter it is,
or any fruit that gets soft
and mushy.
For food to go "crunch"
when it's bitten, there has to be
what's called a brittle fracture.
A sudden high-speed crack
which actually
travels at at least 300 metres per
second.
Which is the speed of sound.
So you're getting a sonic
boom from...
- CRUNCHING NOISE
- Yeah.
So in a sense we eat by our ears,
cos a lot of our interest
and appetite is engendered
by the fact we know food is crunchy.
But you wouldn't want any
crunchy hummus.
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the way
to go - crunchy hummus.
It's a good name for a band anyway.
Each crunch in crunchy foods is
a teeny-weeny sonic boom.
And with that, it's the scores.
I simply don't know what to say.
Despite his superior knowledge
and his holiness,
in last place with minus eight,
it's the Reverend Richard Coles.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Third place,
with minus six is Bill Bailey.
APPLAUSE
Third again.
I just don't know
how I'm going to say this,
in second place with minus one...
is Sara Pascoe.
APPLAUSE
I can't believe Alan's the winner.
Yeah. You've got there before me,
because in first place, and this may
be a first for first place,
with plus four is Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It only remains for me to thank
Sara, Bill, Richard and Alan.
I leave you with the last
words of someone who was not
so much scraping
the barrel as draining it.
Dylan Thomas's last triumphant
uttering...
"I've had 18 straight whiskies,
I think that's the record."
And then he died. Good night.
APPLAUSE
Goooood evening, and welcome to QI,
which tonight is a
veritable Liblabble.
This is a newly minted
and completely useless word,
coined by my Elves.
It's the collective
noun for a group of Ls.
And here are some. El Salvador,
the Reverend Richard Coles.
APPLAUSE
El-egant, Sara Pascoe.
APPLAUSE
One L of a guy, Bill Bailey.
APPLAUSE
And a snowball's
chance in L, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Now, let's hear their L-ish buzzers.
Sara goes...
MUSIC: Crocodile Rock
by Elton John
Aah. Bill goes...
MUSIC: Saturday's Kids
by The Jam
Richard goes...
MUSIC: Y Brawd Houdini
By Meic Stevens
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Speedy Gonzales
by Pat Boone
♪ You better come home,
Speedy Gonzales... ♪
- Well, let's not do a show,
let's just listen to that all
day. - Listen to that.
All right, well, let's leap in with
some laughter.
What has four legs
and a sense of humour?
BILL'S SONG
Bill?
Ant and Dec.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- It covers the facts. - It does.
- I can't really take anything away
from you. - It's technically correct.
- It is. I'm going to give you...
- I deserve points. - You will get them.
- Ooh!
RICHARD'S SONG
- Richard?
- Lester Piggott's tax return?
Whoa, very good, very good,
very good.
Not very topical,
so some of the younger members
of the audience won't
know what that is.
A laughing hyena.
Yeah, hyenas have four legs
and they do laugh, that's true, but
do they have a sense of humour?
Or is it just the sound they
mimic, or at least to our...
I don't think it's
laughing, is it, more...
- IMPRESSION
- It's a call, it's a call, yeah.
- Impressive, that was very good.
- Well, yeah. - Yeah. Anyway.
- A pantomime horse.
- Well, no, it's not a
pantomime horse. - A pig.
- Pig. - Er, no... - Is it a mammal?
- Yes. - OK, so what's a sense of
humour...? - Cow.
We know this because it's an animal
that has been much observed.
OK, is this, I know that they
can make rats laugh.
- Yeah, ah. - Is that what it is?
- Yes.
- OK, so rats. They tickle rats.
- They tickle rats!
And they, and the rats make tiny
little laughs. And it's so
interesting.
In fact they're so high,
human ears can't hear them,
and we have film of it, it's
an Estonian/American researcher,
and there he is. He rejoices in the
name of Dr Jaak Panksepp.
Now it may at first look as
if he's actually torturing,
but it is, you will see it returns
to his hand, it likes this.
- Are you sure? - Yeah.
It's going, "Help me!"
"The others are in cages!"
"Can you hear me, anyone?!"
- Yes? - So I read, I read quite a lot
about this, because actually it's
all to do with how they have sex
as well, so it's really interesting
that if a woman has a bad,
not a woman, a female rat, sorry...
I really anthropomorphized...
- A lady rat. - A lady rat. - A lady rat.
- Could be a lady, yes. - A lady rat.
If a lady rat has a bad sexual
experience with a male rat,
she will never have
sex with him again,
and even if he's the only
available male, she won't.
And if she has a good sexual
experience with a fake rat,
she will keep going
back to that one.
And it's really interesting,
and that's a whole thing with all
the tickling and the play, there's
quite a lot of interplay with
- the male and female rats to do with
love-making. - You're absolutely
right.
Did you know, Stephen,
that there's a research that shows
that bees are pessimists?
STEPHEN LAUGHS
I'm not making this up,
I read this in the New Scientist.
They would do some
sort of stimulus to a bee
when a good thing happened,
so it would know that something
nice was happening, and then another
thing when a bad thing was
happening, so it'd know that
something bad was happening.
And then they did
a sort of neutral stimulus
and the bees all behaved as if it
were the bad thing about to happen,
they opted for the glass
being half empty.
- Goodness me. - Rather than half full.
So bees are pessimists.
- That is...
- That's right, when you see bees,
a lot of the time, when they're
buzzing round a plant, they're
actually, what they're actually
saying is, "What's the point?"
"Whatever." I could get the nectar,
I could go back to the hive, but
really, where am I going with this?
- Exactly. - But even worse than that,
because this is all, I always think
that
bees, it's weird for them, because
flowers really are using them
- for a three-way, because flowers
can't have sex with each other.
- Absolutely right.
- Oh, so it's like the bee comes in...
- So they need the bee to do it with
- both of them, and the bee is like,
I'm not even in a relationship,
I'm just the person you bring in.
- You get off, you get off.
- I'm just a, I'm just a, I'm just a
gimp for you. Yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah, exactly, "I'm a toy."
- "I'm a go-bee-tween."
- A go-bee-tween! - Yeah. - Oh, I like what
you've done there.
APPLAUSE
The queen bee, who you'd think might
be the one who's having
the good life, lays 3,500 eggs a day
- for two years and then dies in
excruciating pain, I presume. - Yeah.
- This is why... - She doesn't even have
any Sudocrem or anything.
I know, exactly, and it's just the
luck of the draw as to
- which female bee is going to be
chosen as the queen.
- Yes. - Me? Oh. Sash.
Tiara.
All of this, it proves that that
saying, you know, we have to,
when you explain to kids about,
you know, sexual reproduction,
you tell them about the birds and the
bees, it's
- just not fit for purpose at
all, is it really? - It really isn't.
- The birds, yeah, just about. Bees,
no. - No. - You know. - A horrible life.
We're going to be sexless
lackeys for a monstrous
sugar-giant, you know.
APPLAUSE
That isn't...
I'm not telling that to any kids.
They'll go, "OK."
But in terms of human and animal
senses of humour, there is
Koko, a gorilla
born in San Francisco Zoo you may
know about, who knows supposedly
2,000 words and 1,000
sign language words, and is said to
comprehend both puns and slapstick.
The puns, and you believe it or
don't, she was once asked,
"What can you
think of that is hard?"
And she replied "a rock" and "work."
Which is extraordinary.
Excellent, yeah. It
is amazing, yeah.
- That that's a category slip, you
know, it's a genuine sort of pun.
- That's a zeugma isn't it?
- It's like a zeugma, yeah. - A
zeugma. - She only needs a couple
- more and she could do a...
- You get, that's a good word, so
that's it, zeugma or zeugma, yeah.
- zeugma.
Slapstick, she once tied her
trainer's shoelaces together
and then signed the words,
"chase me."
Brilliant.
And the brilliant Miriam Rothschild,
of whom you may have heard, she did
much work on pond life of various
animals, and the extraordinary
life cycles of incredible species,
but she also had a parrot
that could imitate her calling
the dog and whistling and saying
for a walk, and the dog would arrive
and then the parrot would laugh.
Extraordinary thing.
You know this joke, you must know
it, it's a friend who has a parrot,
and the sports results are going and
he goes, "Norwich one, Ipswich two."
And the parrot goes, "Oh, no! Ooh!"
And you're thinking
"What's going on there?"
"Well, every time Norwich lose, the
parrot cries and bursts into tears."
And he says, "Well, what happens
when Norwich win?"
"I don't know, I've only had it four
years!"
That came from the heart, ladies and
gentlemen. There you are, anyway.
There are all kinds of different
human laughter,
which have been
categorised by a Dr Dirk Wildgruber,
of the University of Tubingen,
in Deutschland.
There are,
some types are joyful laughter...
ONE PERSON IN AUDIENCE LAUGHS
Thank you, audience!
That was sarcastic joyful laughter,
which is slightly different.
Terrifying.
- Joyful laughter...
- BILL AND SARA LAUGH
- Social laughter.
- LAUGHS POLITELY
- Taunting laughter.
- LAUGHS OBNOXIOUSLY
Aaah. Oh, dear.
- Schadenfreude laughter.
- LAUGHS SMUGLY
Any other kinds that are
in your head?
Laughter when people, you tell them
something and then they laugh,
like they've got it and then
they realise they don't, and they go,
"Ha-ha! What?"
And there's also of course, the
Sid James type of sexual laughter.
CACKLES
When we were doing Jonathon Creek,
we had these two prop boys
and they used lots of rhyming slang.
And there was another one who
didn't know any of it.
All the time he'd say.
"What do they mean?"
One morning, they said,
"We had a lovely bit of Sinatra
on in the van this morning."
And he went, "Ha-ha,"
the other fella.
"Ha-ha."
And they looked at him like,
"We were just playing some
Frank Sinatra!"
LAUGHTER
He said, "Oh, sorry. I thought
it was a slang thing."
That doesn't mean you laugh.
"Well, I just thought it was going
to be funny cos it was
a slang thing.
"Normally it's a slang thing
and then we all laugh.
"I never understand it."
There's a very particular kind of
laughter you get
when people occasionally listen to
your sermon.
It's a sort of polite laugh, like
what you get in a Shakespeare play.
Oh, yeah - teachers at Shakespeare.
LAUGHS POLITELY
You are a card!
Because even I...sin.
How do and when do rats get sad?
CROWD AWS
When they stop tickling them?
When you stop tickling them.
Might be slightly disappointed.
Aw!
When they're cold. In the sewers,
they all sleep together,
when the frost comes
they all freeze to death...
A few found sleeping in a circle,
and the reason they're all connected
is cos the urine that comes
out of them constantly is frozen,
and it's just a solid urine disc
with rats in it.
Sad, sad - think of the word sad.
Seasonal affective disorder.
- Seasonal affective disorder.
- In the winter. - No!
They get sad in the summer?
The winter is for people like us
who are diurnal,
who live by day.
Rats are nocturnal.
So we have circadian rhythms,
and they have...?
For an extra point.
Circu...
Circanoctium.
Oh, circanoctia!
They have around-the-night rhythms,
we have around-the-day rhythms.
In Scandiwegian countries,
where in winter it's very
dark for a very long time,
they use things
almost like usherette trays,
with ultra-violet tubes,
and they get about an hour or
two of that and it cheers them up,
cos melatonin is produced
in the brain that cheers them up.
It's one of the things that
cheers you up.
But they found, with rats,
somatostatin,
which is a depressive, was caused
in those that had too much sunlight.
So what do they provide?
Sunglasses for the rats?
There you are.
Rats get sad in summer,
not in winter.
Here's something that sounds
ludicrous, but is no laughing
matter.
What's a really ostentatious way to
turn off a gas fire?
RICHARD'S SONG
Send a flood.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You and your God!
Yes, rats...
It's trying to use, in a benign way,
the most powerful force that man
has ever harnessed.
Sarcasm!
LAUGHTER
Call yourself a gas fire?!
Where would we be without sarcasm,
eh?!
Sarcasm needs a pipe.
You need a pipe with sarcasm?
Yeah, great(!)
It's the sarcasm...
It's the sarcasm slammer.
Yeah.
Fusion power.
Fission power is the one we've
yet to harness.
We hope not, but fission is the one
we have harnessed.
For nuclear bombs.
Yeah.
The first one was the A-bomb.
And the father
of the H-bomb was...
Penn and Teller.
Edward Teller,
you're absolutely right.
Teller, like a lot of scientists,
was an idealist
and he felt that we had this
enormous source of power, surely we
can't only use it for weapons!
And he quoted the Bible -
he quoted Isaiah, saying,
"We've got these weapons, let's
use them for something peaceful."
What's the Isaiah quotation.
You would beat your sword
into a ploughshare.
That's right! We'll
beat your swords into ploughshares.
And he dreamt up all kinds of weird
plans to use H-bombs,
like for example,
widening the Panama Canal.
Yeah, I know, it seems a little bit
speculative.
Crossrail.
Yeah, Crossrail!
What's that one? H2N2?
HS2.
HS2, yeah.
Through Buckinghamshire,
just basically a huge...
HE MIMICS EXPLOSIONS
Finished!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Yeah, and they thought not just
the Panama Canal,
we'll get one through...
Well anywhere really!
Using 22 nuclear bombs to build
a massive road
and railway path through the Bristol
Mountains in California -
Project Carryall.
There was another one,
using 1,000 nukes to blast
a city-sized airship into space.
They spent money on all these -
Operation Plowshare, it was called.
And the Russians did the same.
What's the smallest nuclear
bomb you could have,
like to just knock out
a bit of a building
if you were doing an extension?
Two things were actually tried,
cos the rest were just shelved
and the money stopped coming in.
One was detonating nukes underground
to create steam to generate
electricity.
This was abandoned
when it turned out to be impossible
to contain the explosions.
Using nukes for fracking
natural gas.
Which worked,
but the gas was radioactive.
Bit of a PR disaster
in your kitchen...
Light the oven. My hair! My hair!
It's going to play very
well in the Tory home counties.
Not only are we going to frack you,
we're going to blow
you up with a nuclear device.
Exactly. But there was one very
successful one the Russians did,
they used five times,
four of them completely successful,
but none of them with any fallout
that was destructive,
and that was putting out huge
gas field fires.
And so successful it was, that the
Americans considered
using it in the deep water...
The BP thing.
The BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yeah.
In the deep water horizon, as it was
called.
They were going to nuke it?
- Well, they were, yeah.
- A lot of spin in that.
Look away now.
India's first nuclear device -
do you know what it was
called and when it might have been?
It was a curry.
LAUGHTER
It was so strong...
..that it literally
blew your head off.
The vindaloo bomb...
People's eyes were
watering for 1,000 square miles!
God, that's so strong!
Oh, the smell of it!
Aah!
It was actually called
the Smiling Buddha.
It was set off in 1974.
Now for something
a little more local.
Name some domestic appliances that
really nobody wants.
RICHARD'S SONG
- Richard?
- In a vicarage, a tie rack.
LAUGHTER
That is good.
Very good, yes.
I can't take that away from you.
BILL'S SONG
I appeal, I'm appealing, sir,
that, just a very...
It's an act of great pedantry -
that's not technically an appliance
Unless it's an electronic tie rack.
RICHARD'S SONG
An auto steam tie rack.
There are electric tie racks, yeah,
there are tie racks that go, bzzzzz.
- Really? - Yeah, there are, I promise
you, electric ones. - Such a thing
exists?
- I promise you. - Wow.
- And that actually takes us
to what the right answer is,
when you said steam. Yeah?
Those Corby trouser presses that you
have in hotel rooms,
- I've never heard of anyone using
them. - Brilliant.
Do you mean others don't?
Am I the only one?
- You've used one? - I use them. I use
them. I've used them.
- Oh, OK, well, I've got that wrong.
- But not necessarily for trousers.
Anyway, there's a whole
load of appliances that were
made in the 1920s and '30s,
when a lot of British people were
starting to get a little bit more
prosperous, just before the Crash.
And they thought about going
"On the electric", as it
used to be said.
"We're going on the electric."
And what would be the main,
the killer app that would put them
on the electric?
- The thing they wanted to have most.
- Electric light? - Heat.
That would be one.
- Plug-in radio? - The wireless set.
Yeah. - Yeah.
And who were the other main
suppliers, other than electricity?
That had already been there.
- Gas. - Gas.
They thought, well, what we'll do is
provide gas-powered radios,
to stop people from going
on the electric.
And there's an example of one.
And they put them out and they said,
"Not only will you get the BBC,
"but you will warm the room
slightly."
Slightly.
Through the glow
of your contentment.
Increase the chances
of your house exploding.
And not only did
they produce wirelesses,
they produced trouser presses,
oddly enough, washing machines,
washing-up machines,
everything that you can think
of that is a household appliance,
a white good, as we would now say.
There were gas-powered fridges,
weren't there?
Yes, there were indeed. Very much
so. But they just didn't catch on,
because electricity was just
more reliable.
It's not that the gas
actually powered the radio
so much as that the gas created
the current that powered the radio.
So it was still electric, it's just
you used your existing gas main.
How does that work?
How can gas create electricity?
Get heat,
and then you put it in a machine...
A special machine with
a magnet in it.
Well,
they burn coal for power stations.
That's turning a turbo -
you haven't got a turbo.
It's the difference between cold
and heat -
it's the thermoelectric effect.
Russians used it with kerosene,
way out in Siberia
and places that were
incredibly cold.
They actually recommended -
God bless communism -
people open the window to hear
the radio better.
So that the distinction
between the cold outside
and the hot inside was even greater,
which created this current.
Talking of radio, in the 1930s,
there was a magnificent programme
that I would have loved.
There was a fellow called
FH Wallace,
who was the Phil "The Power" Taylor
of his day.
By which I mean...
Darts professional.
Yes, a great darts player.
And he played in The Alexander Arms
in Eastbourne,
and he, on the radio, would throw
three darts, from 301 down,
and his score would be announced,
then there would be a pause while
people at home could throw three
darts and write down their score
And if they beat him,
they didn't get a prize,
they could say, "Pat yourself on the
back when you go to work tomorrow."
That was a whole radio series.
I'm not saying people were easily
pleased in those days but...
Why didn't they just fast
forward to the internet
and people on those
kind of Gala Bingo sites,
like, "You get a free £5."
They're just doing
that on their own -
pat on the back, you lost 56 quid!
Anyway, moving on...
Now for some uneasy listening.
What's the most depressing radio
programme of all time?
Oh, Simon Bates, by miles.
"But that's, surely that's the story
of people who fell in love."
"She did die
of the cancer. But..."
"He battled through the cancer
and then here's their song.
"Too Drunk To Fuck by the great..."
STEPHEN LAUGHS
For those who are not familiar with
what we're talking about,
Simon Bates used to run a
series called Our Song.
- Our Tune. - Our Tune. - Our Tune.
HE SINGS TUNE
And people wrote in basically with
the most depressing story of how
- they were in love with someone who
then died of some appalling disease.
- Oh, God, it was nauseating. Christ!
And he'd read out the,
"We met and we fell in love," and
all that. "She was then..."
- It was a series of awful disasters,
accidents.
- Diagnosed with this or run over.
She was run over by a vehicle, she
lost all the use of her limbs and...
- I'm sure people sent them in and
just made it up. - I think so. - They
must have done.
"Sadly she did die, but to this day,
you know, Knock Three Times is our
song and always will be."
She was caught up in a nuclear
explosion
that was used to put out a fire.
Then a rat burrowed its way
through her leg
and wee'd in her eye.
And she struggled on,
with a gas radio for a companion.
This was Radio One,
- this was supposed to be the hip
young station. - Yeah. This was hip.
I have to say I have several
correspondents who would say
- that Saturday Live was the most
depressing radio station. - Really?
Yeah.
KLAXON
- We don't think your radio show...
- No, I like it. - Well, we have to, you
know of this thing now
that you're interactive with your
audience, so actually, as you're
broadcasting live
you have a screen in front of you,
with a Twitter feed on.
Not advisable, ladies and gentlemen,
I have to say. No.
It's a very good moral and spiritual
discipline, as everything you
say is immediately commented
on by some regular Twitter...
With #SaturdayLive,
or #RichardColes is a...
I remember one time...
#Smug-Maester twat vicar.
Oh, crumbs!
I swear there is someone
who does #smug-maester
and another one #twatvicar.
- Oh, that's horrible.
- Oh, Richard, that's so unfair.
- And it's my mother.
LAUGHTER
I did a thing once, I wrote
an article in which the joke was,
in the article was on me,
but I did call Frank Lampard a twat.
And it was a joke.
Anyway, he complained about it
and I thought, "Oh, I'd better find
the article, because I can't even
"remember what I wrote,"
So I Googled Frank Lampard
twat, nothing came up,
and then I Googled my own name with
twat, and so much stuff came up.
- That's dangerous.
- That was really dangerous.
- And then I started Googling my name
with any other term of abuse. - Ooh!
And I had really one of the worst
evenings of my life.
Never ever do that.
Never Google yourself.
And that should be like one of the,
that should be, you know,
a commandment.
- You know.
"Thou shalt not Google thyself."
- "Thou shalt not Google thyself."
There was an awful time,
which I think has passed,
- when if you put in the C word
into Google, the first return...
- Your name would come up!
No.
Thank you! Virtually...
Excuse me?! Virtually that.
- If you typed in the C word,
the first thing that came up was
"Englishman." - Oh.
If you want to learn some
new words, you could always do
the Guardian Easter piece,
on the online edition,
and then read the below the line
comments afterwards.
- Oh, it's like looking into a sewer,
isn't it? - That's quite fun. - Let's
not go there.
I don't know, sometimes it's good
though, I have to say.
There was Ronan Keating doing
a version of Fairy Tale Of New York,
by The Pogues.
- He didn't, did he? - Yes, he did.
- It is as horrific as it sounds. He
has to... - McGowan he is not.
He has to Irish himself up a bit
to be in the Pogues.
But there's a tsunami of hate
which of course accompanies
it on the YouTube comments.
But my favourite YouTube
comment of all time, it just says:
"This is the worst
thing that ever happened."
And it sort of is!
I used to do this listener complaint
programme for Radio 5, when that
first started,
there used to be live people calling
in, and there was a woman who phoned
up once,
and I saw her name, it was Margery
from Hemel Hempstead.
And I took the call and I said,
"Margery, from Hemel Hempstead,
what's your complaint?"
And she said, "I'm absolutely
disgusted with everything."
and put the phone down.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Oh, bless her, bless her.
Well, the most depressing
radio of all time may have been
Simon Bates, it certainly isn't
Saturday Live, which I urge
you to listen to every Saturday,
with Richard at the microphone.
Drahtfunk. Drahtfunk.
Drahtfunk.
Yeah. Wire radio. And what happened
is, the Swiss and the Norwegians
and the Swedish
discovered that they could use,
first of all electricity, which they
had bored holes through
the mountains for, they could use
electricity to transmit radio,
and then, when phone lines were
installed, phone.
And the Germans used
this in the war.
And they used it for very depressing
broadcasts about bomber raids
that were coming over,
because it couldn't be scrambled.
And nor would the bombers be able to
use live radio that the
Germans had, to fix their position,
so they could
close their radio stations down,
during the night, and use these.
And German people would listen
and they'd get grid references,
you know, there's a bomber wave
coming and it's on F14 and
the people of Stuttgart or wherever
it might be would go, "Oh, God,
it's coming towards us."
And they'd be able to get into the
shelters. So, it was depressing.
It was depressing radio,
it was always bad news.
- Did they play songs in-between?
- No, they didn't.
- Missing a trick there.
- The Beach Boys.
Have you ever heard Radio Pyongyang?
- Never have.
- You've got to listen to it.
It's mostly songs about the Great
Leader and how marvellous he is,
interspersed with incredibly
terrifying
broadcasts by the lady who
read the news,
who's got that rather
dramatic sort of thing.
The awful thing is,
if you buy a radio in North Korea,
- it's pre-tuned. - Of course.
You can only get Radio Pyongyang.
That's the only thing you can get.
But people try to smuggle in sets
from China for a bit of variety.
You'll get Gardener's Question Time.
Anyway, moving on.
Alan, would I enjoy kissing
any of the gunner's daughters?
Yes, you would. No, you wouldn't.
- There are no daughters. - Well...
- By kissing, do you mean...?
Yes. In all those cases,
you're right.
You're right to be cagey. Of course
it's nothing to do with The Arsenal.
Isn't there a band,
there's a band from Seattle called
Kissing The Gunner's Daughter.
- Is there really? - Yes, there is,
yeah. - Well, do you know what it
refers to?
I do actually, yes. It's a
naval term, isn't it?
- Yes, it is naval.
- It's a rather unpleasant term.
Describe.
For being strapped to a
cannon and then being beaten?
- Yes, whipped with the famous...
- The cat o' nine tails.
- With the cat o' nine tails.
Absolutely right. - Yes. - It was
horrific.
What's extraordinary is
that it's still in use.
Not in the British Navy,
or not in Britain.
Did you know that the victim had
to make their own cat?
- Often they did, not always, but
often they did. - Yeah.
Sometimes it was their best friend,
which was miserable.
That's right,
you'd make out of blancmange.
Oh, this, yes, it's all I had.
There's another naval punishment,
you can get "firked."
I'm sorry?
You can get firked.
- Explain? - You get firked...
- If you're... This is true, I'm not
making it up. - Yeah, don't keep
saying it, explain it.
It was the punishment,
if you were a cook in the galley and
you ruined the meal, you got firked.
I'm not making that up.
You really like saying it
though, don't you?
Just keep saying it, man.
I just can't,
I don't know what you mean, Stephen.
But they would take the staves from
a firkin and beat you with that,
and it was called being firked.
Oh, a firkin being a large barrel.
A firkin being,
well, not a very large barrel,
but they, you were beaten with
the staves from a firkin,
firked. That's true.
Wow, that's brilliant. Well, also,
apart from the gunner's daughter,
at the time the Royal Navy enlisted
boys as young as nine,
who were running errands and so on,
helped with the cooking.
And these cabin boys were
punished in a marginally more humane
way, by being bent over a gun
and lashed on the bare bottom.
This was called
"Kissing the gunner's daughter".
And the lash itself was known as the
"boy's pussy".
Which sounds all wrong.
Or it was called the
"boy's cat" or just "pussy".
It had only five strands of whip
cord, with no knots in it.
It was sort of um,
Sony's My First Cat 'O Nine Tails.
Isn't it?
Yeah, its true level.
It was the innocent version. And
that was kissing the gunner's
daughter. Pretty nasty.
From lashings to lese-majeste.
Why was George III very nearly,
literally, toast is 1776?
1776, you say?
It's a rather important year...
RICHARD'S SONG
Was it the firing of the colonies?
Very good.
Well, it is the year of course
of American independence.
But the fact is,
there's a rather marvellous MP,
who dies in 1813,
and was well ahead of his time and
about whom more should be known.
His name was Hartley, David Hartley,
and he was a scientist, a friend of
Benjamin Franklin
and was the first MP to present a
bill opposing slavery.
Decades ahead of anyone else.
But his main claim to fame, was him
work on fireproofing of houses,
which he achieved by placing metal
sheets under the floorboards,
so the joists wouldn't catch fire.
And they were so successful that he
invited George III
to his house in Putney,
which was a special
fire-proof house.
Breakfast was
served in one of the rooms,
the kettle was boiled on a fire
made on the bare floorboards
Hartley went upstairs,
set fire to a bed,
which set fire to the curtains,
while Hartley lit two more
fires on the stairs,
so it's like a sort of stuntman,
one under the stairs -
all burn merrily.
And they all died of smoke
inhalation.
He put fires under the rooms,
on the floor below the royal family,
with tar, pitch and kindling,
and set fire to it.
And everyone survived,
it was all fine.
And he was made
somewhat of a local hero...
Local fire officer.
It all, as it were, caught on,
cos a lot of people thought, well,
this is the way to avoid fires.
It was a most impressive thing.
It would be an
amazing assassination attempt,
to say,
"Hey, I've made a fire-proof house.
"Why don't you come round
and I'll show you?"
Ah, Guy Fawkes number two.
See you later!
- True. - Teething issues.
Fortunately, they trusted him.
But his major and lasting
achievement is the he invented
the fire curtain for theatres.
So in the interval, when you see a
fire curtain drop down rather dully,
or something that just says
"fire curtain"...
So he's the real Mr Sands.
Exactly. Explain about Mr Sands.
Sometimes it's Dr Sands.
They do this in the tube
and in theatres,
if you hear an announcement
asking for Dr Sands,
it means there's a fire
somewhere in the building.
So if your name is actually Mr Sands
and you want to go to the theatre,
and you go there
and ask for your tickets,
people will start running away.
Theatre's burnt down all the time,
didn't they?
- Extraordinarily so. - There was a
lovely story of, was it Sheridan,
his theatre
caught fire and he was outside and
he was sitting there having a drink.
Someone said, "Mr Sheridan,
surely you should be throwing
buckets of water on this."
He said, "Can't a man take
sack by his own fireside?"
The only difference
now in the Globe in Southbank,
the only difference between that
and the original is that
you're not allowed to have a
thatched roof in London any more.
It's the only difference
from the Elizabethan one.
Yes, Shakespeare's Globe caught fire
and was put out by beer.
- Was it? - Yeah, in his day.
Which is rather pleasing -
I don't know why, but it is.
Now, let's get a little lachrymose.
What are Dutch tears?
I don't know.
Dutch courage is when you drink
booze, it's a euphemism for
something.
Well, because we went to war with
Holland so many times,
at least three Dutch wars, that we
tended to use the word Dutch,
Dutch wife, Dutch uncle,
Dutch, you know, courage.
- So it'll be some sort of tear drop
thing. - It is a tear shaped thing.
Actually, from Mecklenburg, or at
least it was introduced to...
Britain from Mecklenburg, by
Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Does that mean anything to you?
I don't know.
Why are you saying that in that way?
Prince Rupert of the Rhine,
played by Timothy Dalton,
- in the film Cromwell, you may
remember, a very dashing figure.
- Of course.
Probably was responsible
for Charles I losing the civil war.
- Is it some sort of ammunition?
- It's not.
- In fact I'm going to show you what
it is... - Is it a decorative thing?
It's very extraordinary, I'm going
to pick up this object here.
It's a light box.
And I'm going to turn it on.
I'm going to get my little
camera here.
And maybe you can see, there we are.
It's a sort of tadpole-y like thing.
What it is, is a...
If I turn it you can see this is
actually a polarised filter,
so what you're seeing is this moire
effect in the middle.
Because if you take an ordinary
drop of molten glass
and you drop it into cold water it
instantly solidifies, of course.
The outer part, the part that hits
the water solidifies first.
The inner part doesn't have time to
get as hard as the outer part,
tries to contract,
there's no space for it to contract,
so there is a kind of tension
built into it.
This a kind of time bomb
waiting to happen,
but it's held together by the hard
outer casing.
And if I were to clip off the tail,
it would
release all the energy inside it.
And it would explode.
And not only would it explode,
it would
explode at a speed three times
greater than a sniper's bullet.
Incredibly fast. In fact so fast...
So that's how much kind of energy is
stuffed inside it.
So fast I'm going to have to do
it in a little bowl.
So I'm going to put
the camera aside here.
But firstly, I'll show you that
it's really solid,
because I can smack it with a hammer
and it won't even vaguely be hurt.
Look.
Maybe you can start being a
cameraman now, young Alan.
That's it, put those on just in case
it breaks. There you are.
- Ready, sir.
- Yeah. Now can you see that there?
- I don't know, it hasn't got any
kind of view-finder.
- No, no, look at, there.
- It's like the Chuckle Brothers.
- Oh, look, there.
APPLAUSE
That's horrific!
Oh, no.
That's glass and I'm
absolutely hammering it...
- All right? Mind your finger.
- That is so bloody solid.
This looks like one of the weirdest
court scenes I've ever seen.
Order!
- I will have order! - Order!
So, you have to believe me
that you hammer it and hammer it
and hammer it and hammer it, and
we've now got one, I'm going to put
these gloves on, because health and
safety above all is my watch word.
There we are.
But also they look good.
And, oh, Alan, you old queen.
I'm just filling in,
I'm just filling in.
So here we are. Now...
Oh, that's, that's making me
feel giddy.
I don't know if you can see here.
But I've got one in here.
Now you have to try and be...
Oh, don't.
That's awful.
What you have to try and be now is
try and be a good cameraman, Alan.
Can you, let's see, can you see...?
Can you see that one in there?
And all I have to do is
try and clip the tail.
Oh, Lord.
Oh, God. I'm quite scared.
If I clip the tail, it should
release the energy of this...
Whoa!
There you are, the whole thing
exploded. So having hit it there...
- APPLAUSE
- Dutch tears. Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you to my glamorous assistant.
We can probably see a little
slowed down version of that.
- Wow. - It's pretty amazing.
And that's just clipping
the absolute end of the tail.
Even though you can smash
the head of it and it won't be hurt.
We have, in the audience, Stephen
Ramsey, from Imperial College,
who's kindly leant us these Rupert's
Tears. Stephen, are you there?
- Hi, Steven. - Thank you very much.
When was this effect discovered?
I think, when you had the glass
blowers working from the hot furnace,
they gathered the glass on their
irons, and to get rid of the excess
glass on their iron,
they would stand them into the hot
water, and some of these droplets
would drop off and get
the super-hardened toughened glass,
and I think someone,
probably by accident thought,
"I'll snap the end off that."
And suddenly had an explosion.
I believe that super-hard toughened
effect is what we all
- rely on for windscreens in cars.
- Yes. That's how toughened glass
was first made, by pulling the glass
and blowing cold air onto the surface
to super-cool it. Theoretically,
could it put out a gas fire?
When Will Byrne approached me to
make these Rupert Drops for the show,
and in my lifetime as a glass blower,
I've made them many times,
and I always have a two-litre glass
vessel that I put on my bench
and drop the hot glass in.
And I dropped one in and thought,
"Oh, good."
And as I watched, it exploded and
the shockwave blew a two-inch hole
- in the glass vessel. - Wow.
Thank you for introducing
Will Byrne, who is our Science Elf.
And thank you, Stephen Ramsay.
That was very exciting,
I love a laboratory lark.
Now it's time to tweak
the tail of General Ignorance.
So fingers on buzzers, please.
Here's a question about Lent.
Whom should you
visit on Mothering Sunday?
RICHARD'S SONG
Yes?
Your vicar.
- Explain. - Well, Mothering Sunday was
the return of usually
children in service to the mother
church of where they lived.
- That's correct. - So it wasn't going
to see your mother, you'd go to the
mother church,
- and they'd pick primroses to take to
their nearest and dearest. - Correct.
- That's what I think.
- You're absolutely right.
And as a churchman
I suppose you should know that.
Most of us believe, of course, it is
just a greeting card
opportunity or a flower opportunity
to be nice to your mother,
which is what it's become.
But it's actually nothing to do
with your biological mother,
it's to do with your mother church,
as you rightly say.
Do you think that excuse is going to
hold up next year for any of us?
But I think I knew
when I was young that it was called
Mothering Sunday,
rather than Mother's Day.
Mothering, yes.
It's always been Mothering Sunday.
They tend to call it
Mother's Day now, don't they?
- It's just another chance to sell
another card. - Oh, totally.
Do you know sometimes, a greetings
card is the most marked-up thing on
general sale.
But I said, what about cinema
popcorn?
- Ooh, very good. - Oh, no. The mark-up.
- Oh, it must be enormous.
- I thought it was eggs.
Eggs?
- Because an omelette costs so much
more than an egg. - That's true.
LAUGHTER
Your mind works in mysterious ways,
its wonders to perform.
On Mothering Sunday you
visited your mother church,
not necessarily your mother.
Now, what colour
are the flags on the moon?
Do they look different when you're
there? Are there no flags?
- There's no moon. Oh, God.
- There are flags.
I just feel about 100
klaxons waiting for me.
Five times bitten, five times shy.
Yeah?
RICHARD'S SONG
Are they grey?
Grey is probably
a reasonable answer.
One thing you can be absolutely
certain is they're not red, white
and blue.
The temperature extremes are really
remarkable on the moon.
From 100 degrees Celsius
heat for 14 days
and then 14 days of 150 degrees
minus Celsius.
And so it's going through all that.
Plus, there's no atmosphere, and
so no protection
from ultraviolet light.
And we know enough what a set
of curtains or a sofa that's in,
you know, daylight,
in a couple of years can get faded,
so you can imagine what
a flag would be like.
And they're made of nylon,
so bleached white probably powdered
nothingness by now.
This came up at Mother's Union
the other day, the space...
- The Voyager...
- That's my favourite...
- So much does.
- The Voyager space craft, yes.
- Yes. - Still going. - The furthest
man-made object from earth. - Yeah.
It's 1977. Would it look scruffy?
That's a really good question.
I mean, would the paint have gone,
in, I don't know, solar...?
I imagine when it went through the
Kuiper belt and things like that,
- it probably would have got a bit of
bashing. - It would have had a few
knocks and dents.
My favourite thing about the Voyager
that I like is that
they think that it's left our solar
system, they're not sure.
And they've estimated that the
time it will take to reach
the next solar system is
40,000 years.
I know. It's phenomenal, isn't it?
And it's going to go out of
radio transaction in about ten
year's time and then it's just gone.
And I thought West Anglian Trains
were bad, but there you are.
Anyway, all the stars and stripes
on the moon are now plain white,
or possibly grey,
if they've survived at all.
What was the first
man-made sonic boom?
RICHARD'S SONG
Whip crack.
Whip crack. Whip crack-away.
Whip crack-away.
KLAXON
You're right -
whip cracks are sonic booms.
There's been recent development
in the field of sonic booms,
or in the field of a strange thing
called food physics.
Oh, dear.
You wouldn't think there was such
a thing as food physics.
- Is it popcorn? - It might be popcorn.
It's basically crunchy food.
It's a bizarre idea that
someone might think,
"Hang on, do we really
understand crunchy food?"
Dr van Vliet,
a Dutch food physicist,
spent the last seven years figuring
out how crunch works.
And he basically said crispiness
and crunchiness appeal to us
because they signal freshness.
The staler the chip,
obviously the quieter it is,
or any fruit that gets soft
and mushy.
For food to go "crunch"
when it's bitten, there has to be
what's called a brittle fracture.
A sudden high-speed crack
which actually
travels at at least 300 metres per
second.
Which is the speed of sound.
So you're getting a sonic
boom from...
- CRUNCHING NOISE
- Yeah.
So in a sense we eat by our ears,
cos a lot of our interest
and appetite is engendered
by the fact we know food is crunchy.
But you wouldn't want any
crunchy hummus.
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the way
to go - crunchy hummus.
It's a good name for a band anyway.
Each crunch in crunchy foods is
a teeny-weeny sonic boom.
And with that, it's the scores.
I simply don't know what to say.
Despite his superior knowledge
and his holiness,
in last place with minus eight,
it's the Reverend Richard Coles.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Third place,
with minus six is Bill Bailey.
APPLAUSE
Third again.
I just don't know
how I'm going to say this,
in second place with minus one...
is Sara Pascoe.
APPLAUSE
I can't believe Alan's the winner.
Yeah. You've got there before me,
because in first place, and this may
be a first for first place,
with plus four is Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It only remains for me to thank
Sara, Bill, Richard and Alan.
I leave you with the last
words of someone who was not
so much scraping
the barrel as draining it.
Dylan Thomas's last triumphant
uttering...
"I've had 18 straight whiskies,
I think that's the record."
And then he died. Good night.
APPLAUSE