QI (2003–…): Season 7, Episode 4 - Geography - full transcript

APPLAUSE

Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-od evening,

good evening, good evening and welcome to QI,

where we're gallivanting round the globe with "G" for geography.

And joining me from the four corners of the Earth are the king of the jungle, Jimmy Carr.

CHEERING King of the jungle? Really?

The queen of the desert, Jo Brand.

CHEERING

The prince of Port Talbot, Rob Brydon.

CHEERING

And the man in the moon, Alan Davies.



CHEERING

With that in mind let's hear their global warnings. Jimmy goes:

THUNDER ROLLS

Rob goes...

FOGHORN BLOWS

Yes, you do. Jo goes...

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

And Alan goes...

'Forties, Cromarty, North Utsire, South Utsire,

'Chingford, Loughton, Woodford Green.

'Mainly poor, veering strangely.

'Minus 75, occasionally Rockall.'

Quite. Now, tell me,

what ruins over 300,000 British car journeys each year?



Radio One.

Very good. Very good.

300,000 British car journeys. Is it kids in the back going,

"Are we nearly there yet?" And you go, "No, put the hood back on your head."

KLAXON BLARES

Oh, so soon! Oh, I'm sorry.

You're barely warmed up. The satnav sending you down into a field.

Basically, you are right. 300, 000 insurance claims

for serious road traffic incidents, or accidents, are put down to satnav these days.

We were in the car. My girlfriend genuinely said, "Where would we be without satnav?"

Thanks for that, love. That's added value. That's very good.

Well, there was a touring acting group whose pink Mercedes van...

They had to be rescued off the roof of it by helicopter because the satnav

directed them down into a ford, a stream.

Yeah, but how much of a div would you have to be

to actually see it ahead of you and drive into it?

It might have been night. They were in the country.

You go down a lane, it turns out to be...

JO: It's quite good these days, cars have headlights.

It's a fair point.

She's got a very persuasive voice. She has. I call her my "navigatrix".

I've had an idea. I know this isn't Dragons Den, it's QI,

but I've had an idea. You get satnav,

but you print it out into a booklet that you can just flick through.

ROB: What would you call it? Er...

Satlas. A satlas. A satlas.

What I don't like about satnav is when it interrupts the radio.

You'll be listening to a very nice thing on the radio, maybe a play or something.

The voice, of course, cuts over the radio always at a crucial moment.

You'll be getting to the climax of the play.

"And I tell you, David, the reason that we never had children is..."

"Turn left in 40 yards."

You do a lot of voiceovers. Yes.

Have you been asked to do one? You'd be very good.

If you did that voice of a little man trapped inside a box.

Yes! Do your man who's trapped in a box, or your American radio set that you've swallowed.

Here we go. Ready?

FAINTLY: Where are you? I don't know where you are.

Isn't that brilliant?

It's a small thing, Stephen.

People who do satnav voices... John Cleese does one.

Does he? I thought that was an urban myth.

No, he does. You can record it onto your own satnav. You can do.

I've done that on ours. Aww!

I didn't tell my wife and then...

She went for a drive and it was me going, "Go left! Go left!"

"Come on! Right here!"

No wonder there's so many accidents!

One of the favourite satnav voices is Nigella Lawson...

Joanna Lumley. You'd THINK Joanna Lumley. The ones I have are

Billy Connolly and Julie Walters. Billy Connolly?!

He's done it? AS BILLY CONNOLLY: I know!

The least favourite... See if you can guess.

Erm... JO: Brian Sewell.

Simon Cowell... JIMMY: Hitler?

I think he'd have kitsch value. Catherine Tate.

Are these impressions? Simon Cowell hasn't gone into a studio and recorded, surely?

All he does is "Left, right, straight on" and they fiddle about with it.

Yup. You just do a few.

And Baroness Thatcher is the... But there's also a Julian...

Right, right, right!

There's a Julian Clary pack, too,

apparently, which is advertised as "with free Dale Winton voice and alerts."

"You're passing a wooded area.

"Park the car."

There have been disasters. Perhaps the most extreme

was a Syrian lorry transporting cars from Turkey to Gibraltar

who was diverted to the Grimsby area,

1,600 miles out of his way.

Because there is a Gibraltar Point off Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire.

So he just blindly... Not blindly, but he...he followed it

and was seen trying to drive into the North Sea, that's when he was stopped.

A lot of villages' lives are ruined by being cut-throughs.

Friends of mine back in Wales, quite a few of them have got a Welsh...

It's not a famous voice, but it's a Welsh satnav, which goes... In Welsh?

No, no, no, just a Welsh attitude, Welsh approach to life, or death.

WELSH ACCENT: "Turning coming up now in about 40 yards. Get ready for it.

"Getting a bit closer now. Get ready, here it comes.

"Oh, you plank, you've missed it!

"Right. Do a U-ee. Do a U-ee.

"Do it, don't... Oh!

"Pull over, attach a hosepipe to the exhaust and just end it all."

That's a very popular one. Is it?

Well, apparently, driver distraction contributes to a quarter of all accidents,

according to RoSPA, the Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents.

And using a handheld mobile or a satnav is about equal, apparently.

So while we're on the subject of directions, who is to the right of Genghis Khan?

THUNDER ROLLS

Yea? That's quite frightening.

Every taxi driver I've ever met?

Was it a dinner party? Girl, boy, girl, boy, Mrs Khan.

Mrs Khan.

Well, there are 500 Mrs Khans. 500?!

He married 500 times. That's a sitcom waiting to be made!

He had so many children that actually, they recently did a test

of Central Asian males and they found that 8% of all Central Asian males

are related to a common ancestor about 1,000 years ago,

which may well be Genghis Khan.

Do you think in 1,000 years, they'll talk the same way about Russell Brand?

It's highly possible.

JO: I quite fancy being one of 500.

At least you'd only have to have sex with him every year and a half.

That's true, but he might well have chopped your head off afterwards.

He was rather violent, as you know.

And in death he was violent too, in a weird kind of way.

What we're talking about, I literally mean who's on the right...

Oh, you mean buried alongside him? Yes.

Is he buried with relatives or with victims, or plunder?

Well, the thing is in Mongolian tradition, when a great ruler,

and there was no ruler as great as Genghis Khan, obviously.

He had to be anonymous. No-one could know.

It gave them a problem. According to Marco Polo,

20,000 people were killed to keep his burial place secret.

All the slaves who excavated the grave were killed by soldiers

and then all the soldiers who killed the slaves were...

That's how bad it was.

Until they realised they were in danger of killing everybody who knew where the grave was.

So what they did... This is really peculiar.

They realised... Camels have got long memories, OK?

This is really unpleasant.

A suckling baby camel, they killed in front of its mother

by the grave where they were going to bury Genghis Khan, right?

And then they took the mother away.

And they buried the baby camel next to Genghis Khan.

So that's who's to the right of Genghis Khan.

And every year... JIMMY: I was gonna guess that!

Every year, the camel would remember exactly where the grave was,

because it knew exactly where its little baby was! It's very sad.

JIMMY: That's a lovely story. Yeah!

But then the camel died... I might tell my daughters that tonight.

Get them off to sleep. Eh, girls,

I've got a lovely story about a camel.

JIMMY: Then the camel died, right?

Then no-one knew where he was buried. So that was unfortunate. Tell me about Mongols.

Mongol hordes. Mongol hordes, yeah.

Two million people, the Mongol hordes amounted to,

but they managed to kill an estimated 50 million of their enemy.

Staggeringly savage. And what gave them the advantage, principally?

They had lasers.

They did have weapons...

Proton torpedoes.

They had weapons that were ahead of the time. They did.

They had short bows. They weren't huge longbows.

They carried them in the saddle, because it was the riding,

it was horses... They were bloody good at riding, weren't they?

They'd ride for days. They used to jump across.

That's right. They wouldn't even go to the loo.

They would go to the loo while jumping from one horse to the other.

What, in the air, or...?

If you mistimed that, that's bad luck on the horses.

Would you not love to see that? I'm sorry, I've shat on this one.

Jumping from horse to horse and doing a little wee, that's a magnificent thing.

But, yeah, it was their horsemanship and their bows and arrows that did it and just their violence.

Their desire and happiness at killing people.

But they were a great big empire. And they're not so angry any more.

Mongols? No, they seem rather cheerful.

They don't have a reputation now, do they, for horde-ing and... No!

Lovely people. Very charming, very nice.

They don't hoard any more. They've got Cash In The Attic. It's all gone.

They're very fine. But, anyway, Genghis Khan is buried next to a baby camel,

which acted like a 13th century satnav, guiding people back to his tomb.

Now, how did the teacup change the course of Chinese history?

Did they used to have tea just in their hands, like that, or...?

No. They invented it... You might almost say... Aagh! Aagh! Aagh!

"We're going to have to invent something for this!"

They invented it so early that it was a disadvantage.

It held back the course of Chinese history.

Oh, when they were building the Great Wall, was everyone going, "Right, cuppa?" "Yeah..."

They had to make 5,000 cups of tea and then, "Well, the day's over. We've got nothing done!"

Unlike the Europeans... Is it because...

Now, is it something to do with metal and ceramics?

Or is it because they invented it and so didn't invent other things that would have come before it?

In our culture, we came to china much later, which we got from them, hence calling it "china".

But we had bronze and things.

We also liked wine, which they never drank in China. And wine,

the colour is very beautiful,

and we developed a technology for containing wine. Glass. Glass.

With glass came lens grinding, came telescopes and microscopes.

And through spectacles, intellectuals and scientists

had an extra 15 to 20 years of reading and active life

and, further, all the way through

to the invention of medical science, flasks, beakers, retorts.

Glass is chemically neutral.

Doesn't react to anything that's in it.

And the Chinese had no glass made in all of China

from the 14th century right up to the 19th century.

ALAN: And no mirrors either. And therefore no mirrors.

So, in fact, just because they were satisfied with the teacup and didn't bother...

this incredibly ingenious race who'd otherwise have invented so many other things,

and did invent so many other things...

The one thing they couldn't do.

And electronics used glass for valves and so on.

The irony is, a lot of them prefer coffee.

Go figure!

What did they do for windows? They used paper.

Ha!

Paper's rubbish for a window!

It gets wet and you can't see through it.

And they had dark houses. That's another thing. Dark houses!

They didn't have light bulbs either. These people are useless!

What about lanterns? Turn the lantern up in the dark. They had lanterns like that.

Paper lanterns. That's the worst invention yet.

They could always let off a few indoor fireworks, couldn't they?

They had fireworks, yeah.

But they, obviously, invented the plastic tub for keeping rice in...

centuries ago, and those tinfoil ones with the cardboard lid. Yes.

So they were way ahead in some areas.

They clearly were. Anyway, there you are.

The course of Chinese history changed by their preference for tea,

which meant they never bothered to develop glass.

Where would you find the world's driest lake,

the world's smallest mountain range and the world's wettest desert?

Are they all in the same place?

They are in the same... ROB: We're looking at America.

We are in America. You can tell. It's a giveaway.

We're in the mid-west of America. We are in...

Start on the left of our triptych. Where's that?

That's Salt Lake Flats or apartments.

It is. It's the biggest and driest lake in the world

and it is a salt lake and it's so flat that it's very useful, so useful that it's...

The land-speed record. Anthony Hopkins, world's fastest Indian.

AS HOPKINS: "I want to break the record. I'll do it in this car. Here I go.

"I'm playing a New Zealander. Sometimes my accent will be that

"and other times it will be something else. It doesn't matter! I'm Anthony Hopkins!"

Now what if he was trapped in a box?

FAINTLY: I'm Anthony Hopkins. I'm trapped in a box.

Oh, you are wonderful!

I'd choose you as a companion for a walking tour or to be trapped in a lift with any day.

But, yes, you're right. And the name of that particular name

was given to a famous Triumph motorbicycle.

Does that help you give its name? Oh...

Bonneville. It's the Bonneville, yes. Bonneville Lake.

And it's so flat you can see the curvature of the Earth on it. Wow!

So not flat then? Curved.

Literally curved.

So, yes, the salt flat is the driest lake.

Why do they call it a lake? Cos it's not. It's a dried-up lake.

Its shape and all its features are dominated by its ex-lakeness.

Except for the water. Except for the water, yeah.

The Mediterranean was once the biggest dry lake in the world, in the Late Miocene era.

The water came in over the Straits of Gibraltar. Yeah! Six million years ago.

I saw that in the Plymouth aquarium.

That must have been fabulous for all the towns all around Spain and Portugal that rely on tourism.

It must have been a hell of a year.

It just kind of came in and they went, "This is fantastic.

"Finally, these jet-skis will get an outing." It's true.

Anyway, the Rock of Gibraltar, which joined North Africa to Spain crumbled away

and the water from the Atlantic flooded in and there you were, there was the Mediterranean Sea.

And all the fish in the Mediterranean are descended from Atlantic types.

You mentioned the Rock of Gibraltar. People think of monkeys. They do.

JIMMY: Excellent point. Yes. Yeah. Is that it?

No. No? No. Right. What else do we know about Barbary apes? Nothing.

Oh, OK. It was it.

Barbary monkeys, which are miscalled Barbary apes...

they are actually monkeys... you were quite right to call them monkeys. Thank you.

Smallest mountain range was the mid-most of our triptych. Where's that?

That's not far away.

Isn't that a hill? Incidentally, Bonneville was in which state? Utah.

Utah is exactly right, yes. And we're moving a little further.

What's the capital of California?

Yeah! State capital of California?

Oh! I know what it is. It's where the university is, isn't it?

Isn't it where he goes in The Graduate, in the car?

Dustin Hoffman drives to see Elaine. Sacramento.

"Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!"

I'm doing Dustin Hoffman. "Elaine!"

AS HOFFMAN: "Oh, Gawd. Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs Robinson?"

Sorry, Stephen. Has he had a stroke?

So the smallest mountain range. The smallest range.

The Hoffman Mountains. Yes, Sacramento is the state capital of California.

How is that not a hill? What defines a mountain?

That's a good question. In the US, anything that rises 1,000ft from base to apex is a mountain.

In the UK, the official definition is 600m above sea level.

A little less than 2,000ft.

In this mountain range, they're 2,117ft.

It's only 10 miles in diameter, the whole range.

One thinks of the wonderful British film starring that great British actor Hugh Grant...

The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain.

Oh, yes. That's right. Thank you. And, so...

Hang on a second, Stephen. I was thinking, do you do Hugh Grant?

AS HUGH GRANT: Gosh, so I went up a hill and, er, sort of came down a bloody mountain.

I had a feeling we might be going there. Very good.

Excellent. And moving on, the wettest desert?

The wettest... The North Sea.

You see, you have to stick to the definition of desert.

Still in America? Yes. What's the definition of a desert?

A desert is a place... Where there's virtually no rainfall.

Is that right? Well, there's quite a lot of rainfall here, but there's a moisture deficit.

It loses more moisture than it...

It's kind of got a holey floor?

Yeah.

It qualifies. It's the Sonoran Desert...

Oh(!) In California.

Oh.

The western states of the USA have many unusual features,

including the driest lake, the smallest mountain range and the wettest desert in the world.

Now in 1851, James Wyld installed a 60ft high scale model of the Earth

in the middle of London, including all the land masses

and the seas and the mountains built to scale.

What was the best direction to see it from? What about from inside?

Yes, is the right answer. Yes! It was a perfect representation...

APPLAUSE

It was one of the wonders of the age.

It was there in Leicester Square between 1851 and 1862.

A visitor said, "I never met with anyone who wasn't delighted with it or didn't find it most instructive."

I don't know if you can see the details there. Top left,

you can probably see Scandinavia and Britain,

just at the very top left, sort of between ten and 11 o'clock. Oh yeah.

Yeah? What's fascinating about it, is that you're obviously inside it,

so it's an inverse of how the world is.

And yet, one of the odd things about the way maps and projections are...

A globe is an accurate representation of what we think the world is. It's round.

But that one, being inside it, is exactly the same.

In other words, if you were to take a piece of paper and you were to draw the world

and do this and look at the paper on a cylinder,

you'd say, "OK, right, that's kind of like how it is."

It would look identical if you took the same paper and looked at it

when it was concave rather than convex.

JO: So what happened to it then?

Well, sadly, it came down after 12 years.

The lease on the ground expired. Whoever owned Leicester Square.

How absolutely pedestrian. The lease on the ground on which it stood.

So high rents in the West End...

It's a brilliant thing to build again.

Wouldn't it be wonderful? It was very successful.

It was there to coincidence with the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park,

but it gave everybody joy and pleasure.

As in all those drawings, there's someone pointing like that.

And top hats. All wear top hats to go inside the Earth. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Anyway, there it was. A man called Wyld.

His great globe in Leicester Square.

And it was an enormous triumph.

Scale model of the world viewed from the inside.

Let's try something simpler. Where did the Arctic Highlanders get their cutlery from?

Sheffield, that's where you get your cutlery from. Ah, Sheffield!

KLAXON BLARES

ROB: Ah, from Nordic... JO: IKEA.

KLAXON BLARES

JIMMY: When you say, what was it, northern...?

Well, that's the clue.

Arctic Highlanders was the... Do you mean Eskimos? We now call them Inuit.

Polar Eskimos, yeah.

A man called Ross, after which the Ross Sea is named,

he was the first European to encounter this tribe of Inuits.

200 of them, he met. It was an extraordinary meeting.

They thought they were the only people on the planet.

They didn't know there were any other people in the world.

It's very much like that in Essex.

It's rather touching, isn't it?

They'd never seen anyone else, but they had cutlery.

Metal cutlery?

ROB: Where did it come from? Where did it come from? Aliens.

Aliens is not a bad answer.

Was it one of the guys that went to the North Pole

and left a bunch of stuff and they found...

No, no. This man Ross was the first European ever to go up close to the North Pole.

I'm talking a long time ago.

Look, see. I'm talking 1818, before anyone had been to the North Pole.

And they had proper knives?

They were a mixture of bone and metal. Was it mail order?

Did they find them? Did they excavate them?

They didn't have the technology to smelt metal,

they had no knowledge about iron ore or anything.

They thought they were the only people? The only people.

It's a puzzle. They had cutlery.

It wasn't from a box from Sheffield that sort of got washed ashore.

Not an abandoned Ford Escort? No.

It was still 1818. It was just...

Is it because the North Pole is magnetic and...

And all the cutlery naturally... LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

You know when you lose a screw, that's where it ends up.

Drifting shipwrecks? No. You were closest with aliens.

Was it meteorites? Meteorites!

Jo Brand, points there! Hey, that's two I've got right.

Three meteorites. They look like a woman sewing her tent and a dog to them.

That's what they called them. They took flakes from the one called the woman,

metal flakes, and attached bits of horn

and used them as eating implements, as cutlery.

70 years later, who was the first man to get to the North Pole, supposedly?

Was it Michael Palin? It wasn't Michael Palin, no.

Ranulph Fiennes? I'd have preferred it if it was Ralph Fiennes.

1880. 1880? Queen Victoria.

It was a man called Admiral Peary, an American.

Oh, Peary. I've heard of him. Yes, Peary. There he was. He was a yeti.

He was a pretty horrific figure, actually. I mean, he went to these same people

and stole their meteorites, basically, which they'd been taking their cutlery off

and sold them to a museum for 40,000.

He took some children, didn't he? Took children.

They took six, of whom four died of TB instantly.

One of them survived and was brought up by an American couple,

and was then horrified to discover his parents, his father,

as a skeleton in the National History Museum in New York, on display.

And complained and Peary refused to do anything about it,

but reluctantly gave him enough money to carry home.

It wasn't till 1993 that their remains were sent back to their homeland.

That's horrific! It's grim. Did he know he'd see his father,

or was he just wandering round the museum and went, "I know him!"

That's awful. It is. It's a horrible episode in the exploitation of a native people.

All of these things were done in the name of science, but also entertainment.

And for Peary, riches and ambition. He was psychotically ambitious.

Now people believe he didn't even get to the North Pole.

The story he tells, he went at a speed that no-one has ever gone on Arctic exploration.

That's what I look like before I've done my bikini line.

It's a great look.

It's a lovely look.

That beard's gone a bit mental as well, hasn't it? It's brilliant.

It is.

Polar Eskimos made metal knives by chopping flakes off meteorites

they called the tent, the dog and the woman. Now a watery riddle.

What are large, very large, blue, rare,

slow-moving, have calves, right, suffer from wet bottoms...

Oh, look at Alan's face! ..and are found all over the world?

Not the blue whale. You are right!

You weren't falling for that one.

What were the things? Large, blue...

Large, blue, found all over the world,

rare, have calves. Wet bottoms. Slow-moving. Wet bottoms.

You've lost me. I thought a Smurf with an aneurism.

That would be blue whales if it weren't for the slow-moving.

Blue whales are pretty quick. They can go up to 30mph.

I'm just going by the picture, but clouds. No.

They're not blue, to be honest. They're not blue?

The bits in between are. That's sky, isn't it? That's not clouds. I knew that.

We have thought this through. Is it a creature?

No, it's a phenomenon-non-non. It's not to do with ice, is it?

It is so to do with ice, it hurts. Is it a type of iceberg?

Not an iceberg though, no. No, that's right. Um...

Correct. Is this an ice floe, even though I don't know what that is?

Yes. You do know what an ice floe is. Is it a big lump? A glacier.

A glacier is an ice floe.

You can share the points. Is it a glacier? Yes. Oh, my God!

APPLAUSE

There we are.

I'm doing my bit to save those. I've stopped eating the sweets.

Very good. They can be enormous.

There's one 250 miles long, 60 miles wide, a mile deep.

I mean, they're vast. Calves. How do they have calves?

The bits that break off are "calves".

It's called calving when they drop... That was a red herring.

We automatically thought either something with huge calves, or baby calves.

Yes. And the wet bottoms. Ah, don't get me started.

That's when, in warmer climes,

there are some which are almost not freezing.

They're nearing zero degrees centigrade and they slide down, and their bottoms are warmer.

The underside, the bits on the earth, is warmer and slides down.

And they go... What's the fastest you imagine a glacier is likely to go?

40. 40 what? 40 in a 30.

They might go a couple of inches or something in a year.

Well... I would say more than that. ALAN: Ten feet.

65ft a day is considered very rapid. But there was one...

Two inches is a bit off then.

..in Pakistan that went 7.5 miles in three months.

There must be another word for a glacier there then.

A racier glacier, if you like.

Amazingly, you get them all round the world, including the Tropics.

Really? Tropical glaciers, hello? Bit odd. But they do.

They're the fruit-flavoured ones, aren't they?

There's one on the border of Uganda and Congo. It's equatorial. High up? Yes, pretty high.

Do you find life in glaciers?

Yes, oh, yes. What kind? Smurfs.

You would find plankton underneath the glacier,

perhaps trying to permeate the membrane of the glacier...

There's red algae, and there's a creature that lives on the red algae, a kind of worm.

A wiggly worm? An ice worm. A wiggly ice worm.

It's a sort of annelid worm.

There's one. Lovely picture. Oh, yeah.

ALAN: What a life! It's an amazing life.

But in one glacier they found more of those worms than there are

humans on the surface of the planet. Oh, Good Lord! Really?

Wow! After they'd found a billion, they just kept on looking. Yeah!

"There's another one! And another one!

"There's another one." Their ideal temperature's about zero.

They freeze to death at minus seven and above five, they melt.

They are quite like an ice cream in that regard.

Is that not delicious? Yeah!

Anyway, yeah.

Now... Incidentally, why are there no snakes in Ireland? Sorry?

Why are there no snakes in Ireland? Oh, I know this. Because... Ah!

There's a reason that's related to the question I've been asking. Something to do with the Ice Age.

Yeah, there were 20 periods of glaciation in Ireland.

It was just coming and they were withdrawing, coming, withdrawing...

So there's no... Snakes. LAUGHTER

You realise what you've just said? Yes.

You really can't help it, can you? I just am sorry, but...

JO: Is that why they're all Catholic in Ireland?

Snakes can't survive in frozen ground.

Glaciers are found all over the world and they're large, blue and they have calves.

But, unlike the surprisingly nippy blue whale,

they can't manage much more than about 60ft a day at top speed.

Now, the USA claims the legal right to seize territory

wherever it might find what?

Oil. THUNDER ROLLS

KLAXON BLARES Oh!

Is it a street without a Starbucks?

Would it be...

What is it, an American hostage or prisoner or something?

No, it's essentially a law which has never been repealed, a law that's 150 years old, almost.

It is the Ark of the Covenant? No, no.

Is this involved in any sort of action film that I will have seen?

No, though it is involved in the plot of Dr No.

It's how Dr No dies in the novel actually.

He's covered in this, that if it's found on an island that's unclaimed,

any American can raise a flag and claim it.

Gold. It's a kind of gold. It was as valuable almost as gold in the 19th century.

Silver. Er, no.

Nickel. No, it's not a metal.

ROB: Tupperware. Platinum. It's not a metal.

Not plastic. Christ... All right.

Diamond! Does anyone in the audience know?

WOMAN: Guano! Guano they shout, and they are right.

Points to the audience... Guano? Guano.

Is that a delicious drink that didn't really take off?

No. What's guano? Bird shit, isn't it? Yes.

It's the poo from birds... Do I get a point? ..that have eaten a lot of anchovies in Peru.

What?! Have you gone out of your mind, man?

It was one of the most valuable products in the 19th century.

It was a fertiliser that is unbelievably rich in nitrates and potassium

and all the things that you need to double, treble,

quadruple, quintuple the yields from land. It was immensely valuable.

It created many, many millionaires and was responsible for 75% of Peru's entire economy.

And it was a pretty horrific thing, as you can imagine, to mine, to excavate.

Open-cast mining. Cos it dries like concrete. Really, really tough.

So they used to use pickaxe and dynamite to get it away.

And they had huge armies of, essentially, slaves,

and Chinese and convicts, who'd be hacking away at this stuff.

Do we still use it now? That's interesting.

I mean, the anchovy shoals are being used now principally for...

Caesar salad. Sadly, if only they were, then they might survive, but...

For feeding fish farms. For feeding fish farms

and for feeding chickens and all kinds of things in China.

It takes 5kg of anchovies to produce 1kg of salmon meat, or farmed fish flesh.

People buy farmed salmon thinking, "Oh, this is sustainable."

But instead they're just using up enormous stocks of anchovy.

Since 1856, the USA has claimed a legal right to take possession of islands

where they find guano, birds' doings to you and me.

The properties of guano were first discovered

by the great father of geography, Alexander von Humboldt.

Who taught Alexander von Humboldt how to speak the Atures language

40 years after the last person who spoke it died?

A confidence trickster.

A parrot. Yes! Oh, Jo Brand!

JIMMY: That was good, though! Amazing!

Brilliant. You are rocking. APPLAUSE

You are absolutely rocking.

He was in Venezuela, Alexander von Humboldt,

and he heard about this tribe that had been eaten by the Caribs, a cannibalistic tribe of the area.

They'd all gone, apparently, but someone said, "No, there is a parrot who still is alive."

Parrots can live a long time... How did it talk its way out of that?

It had 40 words in the language, which Von Humboldt wrote down and learned.

Of course, we can't know how accurate it was.

He was with someone who spoke a related language

and they made guesses as to what the 40 Atures words might be.

Sort of like, "Who's a cheeky boy then?"

He would have quite liked that, cos he was gay, Humboldt, funnily enough.

Well, I find that stereotyping rather offensive.

So you're saying that all gay people are like "cheeky boys"?

No, he might have quite liked him saying... No!

When are you going to let up with your relentless gay bashing?

How many words can a parrot learn, do you know?

182. That's good and specific.

There have been some 200, but the odd thing is why they speak at all.

Why is it that they do mimic humans?

They have that thing in the back of their throat that I have, where they can go...

SPEAKS AS MAN TRAPPED IN A BOX

The extraordinary thing is, no parrot in the wild

has ever been observed mimicking another bird or another animal.

But there are birds in the wild that mimic noises.

Yes, myna birds and other birds, but parrots don't.

In the wild, they have their own screech and they're satisfied.

They don't imitate other birds. They've never been observed to.

That is a shock, isn't it?

Do you have the answer to this? No, I don't. Oh!

I'm sorry. No, it's a real question.

They imitate movements in the same way...

If you lift your leg, they will lift their leg or your hand or whatever.

They'll imitate what you do, physically. They like to do that.

It just amuses them. Seems to amuse them, at least.

But 40 words of this language that Von Humboldt spoke may seem very few,

but the fourth best-selling children's book of all time

has a vocabulary of only 50 words.

Which would that be? I... Erm... Oh, was it The Da Vinci Code?

It's not a modern-day book, it's a classic.

It's a 20th century classic.

I'll read some. Oh, is it Dr Seuss?

With, would, you, will, try, tree, train, they, not, on...

It's good, isn't it? Say, see, so, thank, that, the, then, there.

And "anywhere". Now I'm going to give it away. "Eggs, Sam, ham..."

I just said Dr Seuss.

Yes, absolutely. You ignored me! No, I was carrying on. I heard it.

Green Eggs And Ham. That's right. You didn't say the title.

I would have then said, "Brilliant!"

So Humboldt apparently learned Atures from a parrot.

Which leaves us plummeting over the sheer cliff of general ignorance. Fingers on buzzers.

What do Mongolians live in? FOGHORN

They're called something like "yak". It's like a "yult" or a "yak".

Do you mean a yurt? Oh! Yes, that's the one.

KLAXON BLARES No, that's not the one.

Yeah, thanks, Rob. No, yurt is a Turkish word and Mongolians would not be pleased

if you called their "ger", which is what they call their tents, a yurt. I won't.

No, indeed. Now we know. They don't call them that.

It's where they live and it means home in Mongolian.

Where in Holland is the Dutch city of Groningen?

Is it not going to be in Holland?

It's not. It's another one of the Netherlands.

Yes. You're very smart.

There are two provinces called Holland and they're both south of where Groningen is. There, you see.

Sorry, there's two places called Holland? Yup.

In the Netherlands, there are two areas called the Hollands,

North Holland and South Holland... OK.

In which Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam are.

But where Groningen is, is not in Holland. It's in the Netherlands.

That photo looked like Guildford, didn't it? It did a bit. That famous shot of Guildford.

That could be Britain.

So easily. If it didn't have a big sign saying "Groningen"!

That was the clue there, I felt. That's the giveaway.

They have a pub that claims to have been open non-stop for ten years.

So indeed it could be Britain. Exactly! Exactly.

Are you suggesting we have more in common with our European neighbours...?

I'm suggesting the world is becoming homogenised and indistinct

and, I for one, think that's a bad thing.

Hear, hear, hear! Quite right. There you go.

I think we all think like that. We're all the same.

Oh, very good.

Groningen is in the Netherlands, but it isn't in Holland,

which refers only to the western provinces, an eighth of the country's total land mass.

Us calling the country "Holland" is like them calling Britain East Anglia.

Which would be nice, but they don't.

What is quite interesting about Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire?

Is it to do with the height above sea level?

No, but you're so much in the right area.

Is it the height below sea level? Is it not flat and it hasn't got a church there?

Well, no, not exactly... The highest flat bit?

No, but think of the sea.

You're in Derbyshire. Oh, I know what it is!

It's the point in Britain that is furthest from the sea. The sea...

Yes, I've got it, Alan!

I won't have you competing for Sir's favour.

You're both very good boys.

Isn't it something like 72 miles, you can't be...?

Exactly. Well, 70 miles. Nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast,

which perhaps makes Church Flatts Farm the very middle of the country.

Anyway, which language is the Spanish national anthem sung in?

Well, I'm going to go for... LAUGHTER

THUNDER ROLLS Is it Spanish?

No. KLAXON BLARES

Is it Catalan? Oh!

KLAXON BLARES

Is it Castilian?

Well, that is Spanish really, isn't it? Classic Spanish. It's not...

Sorry, Stephen, can you remind me what was the language that guy was taught 40 years after it died out?

It's not that one, no. 'Rockall!'

I didn't say anything! Don't be aggressive. Is it instrumental?

Yes, is the right answer. Well done.

It's very odd. They have one of the oldest tunes called La Marcha Real.

It's the only anthem with no words.

The old ones were dropped after Franco's death in '75.

But they were inspired by visiting Liverpool fans listening to You'll Never Walk Alone,

which is a song from an American Broadway musical, bizarrely, called Carousel...

SCOUSE: Eh, eh! Don't talk rubbish.

It is!

JIMMY: You couldn't look any more Scouse.

The Spanish Olympic Committee held a competition in 2007

to replace the words of their Franco, fascist one.

They were withdrawn after five days, having fallen foul of several Spanish regions.

They criticised the new version, which was called Viva Espana,

unfortunately, for being too nationalistic.

What, for a national anthem?!

Yeah, for a national anthem, duh! The words were, "Long live Spain.

"We sing together with different voices and only one heart."

Doesn't seem that terrible. Rubbish.

La Marseillaise: "Do you hear...the roar of those ferocious soldiers?

"They come right here into your midst to slit the throats of your sons and wives."

Which is quite aggressive.

Or God Save The Queen has the sixth verse. Do you know that?

Of course I know the sixth verse to God Save The Queen!

Give us it. I have to sing it all the way through.

Is it about going up to Scotland and killing everyone?

"Lord grant that Marshal Wade May by thy mighty aid

"Victory bring May he sedition hush

"And like a torrent rush Rebellious Scots to crush

"God save the King."

Oh, I'm sorry. But perhaps the oddest one is back to our old friends the Dutch here.

This is still the Dutch national anthem.

"William of Nassau, scion of a Dutch and ancient line."

Fair enough. "Dedicate undying faith to this land of mine.

"A prince I am, undaunted, of Orange, ever free.

"To the king of Spain I've granted a lifelong loyalty."

In the Dutch national anthem, they say they've granted a lifelong loyalty to the king of Spain.

The most deferential anthem ever heard.

I mean, 350 years ago, Holland was part of the Spanish Netherlands, but that's a long time ago.

The Spanish national anthem is the only one which officially has no words.

They tried to write some but they were rejected for being too patriotic.

which brings us to the scores, ladies and gentlemen. Quietly confident.

Heaven bless my soul! I don't know how this happened,

but in last place with minus 28 points is Rob Brydon.

And just behind him with minus 21, Jimmy Carr!

So sort of a winner. Sort of the first of the winners.

Who can it be? Who can it be?

In second place with minus ten is Jo Brand!

And he breasted the tape at the very last minute with an impressive minus seven, Alan Davies!

So it only remains for me to thank Rob, Jimmy, Jo and Alan.

To wish you all safe onward journeys.

And I leave you with this from Ambrose Bierce.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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