QI (2003–…): Season 9, Episode 7 - Incomprehensible - full transcript

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Good evening, good evening,

good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening.

Welcome to QI, where tonight's show
is completely and utterly
incomprehensible.

Venturing into the unknown with me
tonight are...What's his name?

APPLAUSE

And...Oh, you know!

APPLAUSE

And...Wait, don't tell me!

APPLAUSE

And, finally...No, I've never
seen him before in my life.



APPLAUSE

Our buzzers tonight are no less
perplexing than our questions.

Sue goes.
BABY TALK

LAUGHTER
Eleven types of wrong, just there.

Brian goes.
LASER NOISE

Ross goes.
HIGH PITCHED RANTING

Alan goes.
ALAN TALKING GIBBERISH

"..dirty old bag."
LAUGHTER

- Wow! - Is that your internal dialogue?

I think so.
I don't know how they got that.

- Don't forget, in this series,
we have the Nobody Knows joker.
- TANNOY: Nobody knows!

There are some questions to which
no-one knows the answer

and if you think the question I ask
has no known, authoritative answer,

play your Nobody Knows joker
and you will get extra points.



Let's start with something that
is not even in the same language.

Listen to this
and tell me what it means.

SQUEAKING

- That's a rodent. - It's a rodent.
Good. Can you narrow it down?

- Is it the squeaky door to his rodent
house? - He's asking for some oil(!)

The astonishing thing is,
we do know what that means.

I can vouch for this.
There are people who study this.

My director on one of my
documentaries got a PhD from Oxford
studying frog communication.

- He sat there for three...
- He was a professor of French?
LAUGHTER

No, stop it. Sorry.

He sat there for three years, in
the outback, somewhere in Australia,

and he discerned about three words
which I think were something like...

Ribbit.
LAUGHTER

You are absolutely right. There are
zoologists who spend their life

trying to understand communications
of various species.

- Do you know what this species is?
- The gopher. - It is a gopher.

Exactly. A prairie dog. It's also
known as a ground squirrel.

Isn't ground squirrel a condiment?

LAUGHTER

A little ground squirrel, madam?

LAUGHTER

He's making that face cos he's got
Philip Schofield's hand up his bum.

LAUGHTER

That takes me back a bit!

Is that what the squeaking noise is?

When I say, that takes me back,
I don't mean there was a time...

LAUGHTER

It's all gone wrong!

Anyway, there is a scientist,
Professor Con Slobodchikoff

of Northern Arizona University,
who spent 30 years

studying the language
of these prairie dogs.

- Do they warn one another
of predators?
- Yes.

Is that one of the words?

He's used computer analysis
and they are able to distinguish
between different types of predator.

Humans, badgers,
various other animals.

Not only that,
different geometric shapes.

And they have a different
sound for each one?

- And different coloured shirts
that humans are wearing.
The noise we heard.
- SQUEAKS: Human!

The noise we heard in prairie dog
was, "There's a human approaching
wearing a yellow shirt."

I know that sounds almost
inconceivable.

They can't distinguish between
different genders of human
but they can in different height.

If a tall human approaches
in a yellow shirt, the leader
will make a series of squeaks

and, under computer analysis,
you can differentiate between

- a tall human in a red shirt
and a short human in a red shirt...
- How wide is their colour palette?

..and a tall human in a yellow shirt
and so on.

Apparently, if a transvestite
in tartan approaches, they explode.

LAUGHTER

Here is a similar clip
but translated into English.

Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!

Al! Alan! Alan! Alan!

Alan! Alan!

Alan! Alan! Alan!

Oh, it's not Alan. That's Steve.

Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve!

Steve! Steve! Steve!

Steve!

We can watch that forever,
can't we?

APPLAUSE

Now it's time for some
interplanetary incomprehension.

What did the Pope's librarian say

when he first saw the rings
around the planet Saturn?

They initially thought the planet
had ears.

- Ah, yes. - That was Galileo.

I don't think he actually
thought it had ears
because Galileo was a genius.

Ears in the sense of jug ears,
wasn't it?

No, that's Galileo,
who was sensible.

I'm talking about the librarian
of the Pope.

He genuinely believed
that it was possible that after
Christ's ascension into heaven,

the rings of Saturn were
where he put his foreskin.

Ah, yes.

Now you may think I am trying
to mock the Church,

this is all nonsense,
but Christ was a Jewish boy

and like all Jewish boys,
on the eighth day of his birth,
he was circumcised.

But it's 50,000 miles across.
Imagine the size!

They weren't aware of that.

"I need a peg to hang this massive
foreskin on!"

- I've got a new respect for Jesus.
- That is some girth!

His name was Leo Allatius
and his essay was called,

De Praeputio Domini Nostri
Jesu Christi Diatriba.

A diatribe, a discussion,
concerning the prepuce, foreskin,
of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is how to interest teenagers
in astronomy.

- This is a trick I've been missing.
- Is it out there as a relic?

Like all the relics,
there are 18 places who claim
to have the one true Holy foreskin.

Are there really?

Catherine of Siena was one
of the weirder of the saints.

She believed that Christ gave her
his foreskin as a wedding ring

- in their mystical marriage.
- What a gift(!)

After her death her hand
was cut off and became a relic

with its invisible foreskin
on it as a ring.

She was extremely anorexic,
a peculiar woman.

She actively sought out
degrading experiences.

She once drank a cup
full of cancerous pus

from a woman who had abused her.

But has she appeared
on Mock the Week?

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Now, more importantly,
more significantly,

how were the rings around Saturn
actually formed?

- I'm going to play the card there.
- You are right!

- TANNOY: Nobody knows!
- You are a true scientist.

- Nobody does really know, do they?
- A-hem!

There are two major...
LAUGHTER

- Well done. - Thank you.

Well done!
APPLAUSE

I didn't copy. I wasn't copying.

There's a Socratic acceptance
of the limits of one's own knowledge
and there's ignorance.

I'm not saying which is which.

No, quite right.
There are two major theories.

I think there are two major
theories. Is that right?

There could be a moon that was
either disrupted, so something
hit it and fragmented it,

although they are almost pure
water ice,

which, come to think of it,
makes the moon theory
a bit unlikely, doesn't it,

because moons are made of rock.

- Actually... - The other theory is
that it is something to do with
the formation of the planet itself.

That something spun-off it
in some way

- and then achieved a stable orbit
around and formed these...
- God spilled his drink.

The structures are held
by the other moons.

- There are over 60 moons of Saturn.
- Are they part of the rings or
separate? Some of them are inside.

Small moons called shepherd moons
which go around

and you get rings in between
those moons

and it's got moons outside the rings
which affect the structure
of the rings, so they orbit outside.

- It's a very complex...
- Any life-carrying moons?

There's a moon called Enceladus,
which is about as big as Britain,
it's a very small moon,

but it has fountains of ice
rising up out of the surface

and it's thought there may be
liquid water beneath the surface,
so pockets of liquid water.

Everywhere on Earth that you
find water, you find life.

Of all these moons, this is the
one thing I wanted to ask you,

of all these moons, which one is
most likely to be the home to Ewoks?

LAUGHTER

- That would be Titan. - Titan?

It's got a thicker atmosphere
than the Earth
so you'd need to be furry.

LAUGHTER

Good answer!
APPLAUSE

We just have to destroy the one
that has Jar Jar Binks on it.

It's very important
when you're learning to study

- to know which notes to take,
not just to take any old notes.
- I saw that. Intelligence at work.

Now, while we're up in space,
how do you imagine spacemen
follow penguins about?

Why would they want to?
How would they do it?

- I suppose to track colonies.
- You're absolutely right.

They used to try and use little
bands around their flippers

but they found that there was
a 44% increase in mortality

amongst penguins
that had these things attached

so they had to find a way
of observing penguins

and they found they could do it
through space.

What's interesting is,
it's the activity of the penguin
that is most revealing is...

- Is it their droppings?
- It's how they poo.

- How do they poo? - A German scientist
from Bremen...
- Straight up.

LAUGHTER
Into the atmosphere.

He discovered they squeeze
four times harder than humans.

- They fire it? - Yes, they do.

It's a bit like toothpaste, and
when you get lots of them together,

they spell out, "Piss off spacemen."

It's a streak.
They leave a streak of faeces.

- A splatter gun of guano
that's visible from... - Like that.

Oh, no, don't tell me
it's sat in the middle of it.

No, it's not, that's the point.
It's squirted it out.

- 30cms away from its body, it goes.
- Somebody took that photo.

They've still got to walk
through it! Surely they should
squirt it out the sides.

It's like painting yourself into
a corner, really, isn't it?

LAUGHTER

It just looks like somebody ran
over that one in a Land Rover.

Someone's up in space, looking
down for Emperor penguin poo?

No, they're looking for
how they're flocking together,
how they're living,

and through an examination
of their faeces,

which are clearly visible
because of the trails and streaks
they leave behind,

they're able to predict
population rises and falls.

I think it's rather wonderful.
It's a fantastic way of being able
to observe animals

without them even knowing
they're being watched

and being able to gauge their diets
and health.

Still in space, what's the main use
for the second commonest gas
in the universe?

- Oh, second commonest? - Yes.

- What might be the second most
abundant gas in the universe?
- Hydrogen.

Hydrogen is the most common,
I believe.

- Nitrogen. - No.
- Helium. - Helium is the right answer!

Helium... filling balloons!
I was going to say filling balloons.

Filling balloons is not the reason.

Squeaky voices! Squeaky voices!

KLAXON SOUNDS

The question is...

..the point is,
there is a shortage on Earth,
not in the universe, of helium.

The demand for it has gone up
in the last 15 years

and it is not because
party entertainment
has become a bigger thing,

- it is actually for something else.
- We use it for refrigeration.

Refrigeration.
And it's a diagnostic device.

- An expensive but highly
effective diagnostic device
that needs cooling.
- The MRI.

That is the right answer.
The superconducting, the coils...

They have to be that heavy
otherwise they just float off.

It's a nightmare.

They came from particle physics
technology.

You often get criticised
because exploring the universe

is not seen as a useful thing to do
for some reason in our society.

Actually, the offshoots
are completely unpredictable

and one of the offshoots
of exploring particle physics,

the world of the atom, quantum
mechanics, was the MRI scanner.

- We use helium to cool down the LHC.
- Oh, do you?

The Large Hadron Collider,
27kms in circumference...

What was unfortunately misprinted
as the Large Hard On Collider.

My spell-checker does that.
Large Hard On Colluder.

It colluded in a large hard on(!)

But it runs at -271 degrees,
so 1.9 degrees above absolute zero.

That's because you need these
superconducting magnets
that are in MRI scanners.

They're magnets made of wire
that have no electrical resistance.

You can put a current through it
and have a massive magnetic field.

But the helium is the only
substance that is liquid.

Our information is, and I don't
know what you guys at CERN have,

is that it's possible that on Earth
we will run out of helium by 2035,

- which is not that far away. - How are
we going to make funny voices then?

With the Collider, with all those
magnets in a circle underground,

on the hills and everything,
those Swiss cow bells on the cows,

when you turn it on, do they
all run in a big circle? Moo!

Moo! Moo! Getting dragged around.

They go at 99.999999%
the speed of light,

so they go round 27 kilometres
11,000 times a second

and the cows would weigh, if we did
that, 7,000 times more than they do.

- Ouch, my brain! - Wow!

- It's giving me an erection.
- What, the LHC?

- You've become
a Large Hard On Colluder.
- Exactly!
LAUGHTER

Exploration.
That's the value of exploration.

And at the smallest level, at
a human level and at a cosmic level

and at a minute particle level.
That's the beauty of it.

Oh, gosh, I could almost beat it
down, and we must carry on...
APPLAUSE

I'm glad you are all excited
because it is good.
APPLAUSE

Now, this sounds very existential.
When is the present?

I'm not going to fall into that trap!
Who's going to say it?

Well, it's not really a trap. It's
a genuinely interesting question.

There are different ways
of trying to describe
what the present might be

but let's talk about the present
in terms of archaeology.

Why are there acorns on the sign?
Is that connected?

It's the sign for squirrels.

Acorns in the future.
Acorns in the past.

Did you not know that squirrels
have the capacity to time travel?

They are the only ones
who can do that.

They keep it very quiet because
the nuts are better in the past.

Archaeologists have an acronym, BP,
which means Before Present.

They can date the present.
It's an exact date.

January 1st, 1950.

- That's the present?
- For archaeologists.

There's a good reason for this.
You might be able to work it out.

If you did,
I would be very impressed.

- Is it plastics? - Not quite. - Bakelite?

- Is it...? - No. Archaeologists are
interested in the distant past.

And, recently, in the last
100 or so years, certain techniques
have enabled us to discover...

Carbon dating.

Carbon dating has allowed us
to discover how old things are.

In the 1950s, basically, they
decided by January 1st, 1950,

we had so screwed up the atmosphere
with nuclear testing

that no carbon dating could be
trusted after January 1st, 1950.

That is known as the present.

These archaeologists
need to learn a bit of physics.

According to Einstein's Theory
of Space and Time, which is our
best theory of space and time,

there's no such thing
as a present moment which spans
the universe or even the Earth

or, in fact, even two people
moving relative to each other.

It is absurd to think of an event
that might be happening now
in a galaxy

and me doing this
as being simultaneous.

That has no meaning, cosmically,
does it?

You can swap the order of them
as long as they're not
causally connected.

You know, if I throw a glass...
LAUGHTER

If I was to throw a glass over there
and it smashes on the ground,

obviously, I caused it to smash
by throwing it.

You can't have the smash
before I throw it.

However, say the sun and the Earth,
the sun is eight light minutes away,

if the sun exploded now, we wouldn't
notice for eight minutes.

For eight minutes,
anything that I do here,

I talk and I talk and, four minutes
later, I'm still talking.

You can swap the order
of those things around

until the point at which
they become causally connected.

In that case, until the explosion
destroys the earth.

At a quantum level, time can appear
to go forwards and backwards

and follow exact rules in whichever
way it's going, doesn't it?

Richard Feynman had a theory,
which was a legitimate theory,

that there's only one electron
in the universe.

We're all made of electrons.

- Slowly. We're all made of what?
- Electrons.

How do you spell electron?
LAUGHTER

The Sun has exploded.
LAUGHTER

We have eight minutes to live.
LAUGHTER

Is it a wine glass
or more of a tumbler?
LAUGHTER

Richard Feynman, a great physicist,
he got a Nobel Prize,

he said that...you see,
all electrons are exactly the same.

He said, I think perhaps there's
only one in the universe

and it keeps moving backwards
and forwards through time

and every time it crosses "now",
this sheet that we call "now",

you see an electron,
electron, electron.

So all the electrons in my hand,
the billions of them, are the same
as the electrons in your hand.

It's just one, wandering backwards
and forwards in time.

And that was a legitimate view.

I've got a feeling that
when you're late for a meeting,

you're an absolute nightmare.

LAUGHTER

"You were meant to be here
eight minutes ago."

"Well, actually...
If I was to throw a..."

"Oh, God, he's doing it again!"

A man called Arthur Eddington
came up with a phrase that

has often been used to describe
this nature of time
as we perceive it,

which is "time's arrow".

People think of it as going
in that direction.

There are limitations to that,
is really what you're saying,

as a theory.

Yeah. We don't know how time works
at a very fundamental level.

But time's arrow -
I got my head around that a bit.

You don't need maths, everything's
going forward and as it does,
it decays.

- Yes.
- So then you understand entropy...

For instance... All you need is
an analogy that's pertinent to you,

so in my case, "all relationships",
and then you realise...of course!

That perfect 18 months,
and then they're dead.

- The second law of sexual dynamics.
- Yeah, that's how I...

According to me,
that's how I extrapolate.

To make it statistically
significant you have to have
an awful lot of relationships.

Oh, I do!

And they really do all suffer
a form of entropy!

Now, who fancies an ingenious
interlude?

I have some exciting props that I'm
thrilled about - I love doing this.

Here - candles. See?

Candles.

I'm going to light
these candles here.

Red, white and blue.

SUE: Is that from
the Ikea Black Mass kit?!

ROSS: Is this the point where
we all have to kneel down

- and pray to Jesus's foreskin?
- No!

I promise you I'm going to
extinguish these candles, right?

I have a jug here.

I'm going to extinguish them
using an invisible gas.

Not by liquid - using an invisible
gas. I just want you to tell me...

I'll let Brian off,
cos he'll know this.

This to him is so
"book one, page one"
of Boys' Wonder Book of Science,

but that's the level I'm at!
I'm putting this powder in first.

- Do we know what the powder is?
- Then I put in this liquid. - Custard.

- It's not custard. - Oh, it's...!
- I'm going to cover it. Now, watch.

I'm not going to pour
the LIQUID onto it,

I'm just going to pour the GAS
onto here.

- And out go the candles. - Oooh.
- SUE: Oh, I like that!

APPLAUSE

- I've got a feeling...
- Do another one. Do something else.

I should be presenting the Royal
Institution Christmas lectures!

So can one of you,
who isn't a professor at Manchester

and a fellow of the Royal Society,
tell me what was going on there?

- Is it magic? - It's not...!
LAUGHTER

- SUE: I think it's carbon dioxide
going in. - Yes.

I took sodium bicarbonate,

a very common household thing
you might use for indigestion

or for cleaning purposes -
and vinegar.

I put them together and
they precipitated Co2. Which is...?

Heavier than air.

And simply pouring it there
just snuffed out the candles.

I've never seen anyone
pour a gas before.

I know, you don't think of gas as
being a pourable thing, but anyway.

I can't tell you how relieved
I am that it worked.

Well done, everybody. Especially me!

APPLAUSE

If you're ever tempted to carry
liquid nitrogen in a lift,

which actually in physics
departments...

- Liquid nitrogen is very cold.
- It is cold, but they don't LET you
carry it in lifts,

because if you spill it,
then you get nitrogen gas,
and that's heavier than air,

- and it pushes all the oxygen
to the top of the lift.
- And people suffocate? - Yes.

- Even though it's nitrogen,
which the air is, mainly.
- A mixture.

Every Al Qaeda cell watching this
tonight will be going, "Right!"

- "Where's the nearest tower block?"
- Running around with nitrogen!

I remember a chemistry lesson,
one of the most beautiful things
I'd seen.

Chemistry master came in, someone
had prepared some liquid nitrogen -
we didn't quite know what it was -

and he came in with a rose he'd
just picked from the garden.

He dipped the rose in for a second
and then smashed it on the table,

and it shattered like glass
into a thousand pieces.

You may say, "how destructive" and
yet it was staggeringly beautiful.

The idea that you could alter
the state of something at such speed

that it could become...from being
the softest, most malleable thing.

- Isn't that lovely? Don't
you think that's gorgeous?
- ROSS: Beautiful. - It is.

- I think you're humouring me! - No! - You
want me to go back to foreskins.
- No.

I think it's a hilarious
Valentine's Day prank.

"There you go". Wah!
"Not for you!"

LAUGHTER

The surface of Saturn's moon, Titan,
that's so cold that...

Ooh, hang on. I know a Titan!
Titan's the one where the Ewoks live!

Ewok planet! Yay!

You see!

So hang on, I've got it -

so basically, you're saying
you can shatter an Ewok.

- Yes! It's got lakes of liquid
methane. - Wow! - Cos it's so cold.

And the methane behaves
exactly like water on earth

so you get rain - methane rain,
methane snow, methane ice

and lakes of methane.

- There's a lake there which
is as large as Lake Superior.
- SUE: Of methane?

- Which is essentially a fart.
Liquid fart. - Exactly that.

I don't want to go there.
Strike it off.

If I could stand on a planet

and throw an Ewok into a lake of fart
that would just be...

That'd be...
SUE: Smash it into a fart lake.

You couldn't,
because it would shatter.

Even better!

LAUGHTER

Right, so I could be tossing Ewoks
into a lake of fart? Aaah.

Everyone has their own heaven.
That's yours.

When you say tossing Ewoks
into a lake of fart...?!

LAUGHTER

- Steady.
- That's exactly what I meant.

Oh!

You know what?
After this show finishes, I'm off.

I don't care, you'll never see me
again. "Where is he?
"He's off tossing Ewoks again.

"Into his lake of fart.
On a pedalo made of smoke."

LAUGHTER

"Wa-wa!"

Is liquid methane flammable
in the same way that methane gas is?

This could be one of the great
questions on the show. No, but why?

On Titan.

- Why not? Do say. Is there no oxygen?
Ah!
- Yep - no oxygen.

- SUE: So just fart. - So if there WAS
oxygen...?
- It would be.

All you're thinking of
is things to do in the pub!

Has that ruined it? Not the image
of him, tossing an Ewok,

you don't want to go there
because you can't light your fart!

LAUGHTER

The great Sydney Smith said
heaven was eating foie gras
to the sound of trumpets.

You have redefined it as
tossing Ewoks on lakes of methane.

Not things to do in HEAVEN,
just things to do on Titan.

- Oh, right, Titan!
- SUE: That's in the guide book,
Things To Do In Titan.

Top Ten in the front of the guide...

"If you only have access to a wookie,
you will need a bigger lake."

That's just basic science.
I could tell you that.

A test now of your nautical
knowledge.

- What variety of lettuce did they
serve on board the Titanic?
- Iceberg.

Ah!

KLAXON

- Well, bless you for...
- I took one for the team, as it were.

You did take one for the team.
No, the iceberg lettuce had been
developed in Pennsylvania,

but it wasn't available in Europe
until many years later.

- Rocket? Lollo rosso?
- The answer is, we don't know.

- Oh. - We do know there were 700 heads
of lettuce on board.

SUE: You make them sound like
heads of state!

The most grand of all the lettuce,
the head of lettuce.

Why did they only have 700 lettuce?
How many people were on the Titanic?

Either they'd already eaten
and that was how much was saved
or they just didn't order them.

What, they saved the lettuce,
but not the people?

1,500 people died on that ship!

"Get the lettuce,
for crying out loud."

No, no, no. I misread my card.
It was - hold the front page -

7,000 heads of lettuce.

No wonder the bloody thing sank,
it was full of lettuce.

- Lettuces float. - But...

Well, why did it sink, then?

LAUGHTER

Jesus!
What is wrong with these people?

- Where do you think the most valuable
icebergs are? - Valuable? - Valuable.

- You mean lettuce icebergs
or icebergs? - Icebergs.

Not necessarily on earth,
but in our solar system.

- Oh. - I'm thinking of Neptune
or Uranus.

Um, no. No. No. NO.

It's thought that the crushing
pressure might create

oceans of liquid diamond filled
with solid diamond icebergs.

- Mm. - Ooh. - I dunno who thinks this.
- ROSS: Mariah Carey.

She was the one that thought of that.

LAUGHTER

"How heavy are they? I'll be there!"

STEPHEN LAUGHS

- Does it seem to you to have
any value, or...?
- Well, yes.

- It could in principle.
- There is a lot of pressure there.

Huge pressures, deep down. Yes.

Now, you're on the bridge
of the Titanic, all right,

you see that iceberg up ahead,
it's slightly to your right.

What order do you give
the helmsman if you want him
to turn sharply left?

I think that's port. Left is port.

KLAXON
Oh no!

- What? - The odd thing is,
right up until 1933,

you gave the opposite command,
because a wheel like that

is only one form of steering
a ship - there were tillers

and if you wanted to turn left,
you'd push the tiller right.

- You're pushing it to starboard. - Much
the same as when you're on a pedalo.

Yes, exactly. Because there were
at least five different forms
of steering,

on different kinds of ship,
it was customary to say
if you wanted

to go hard port, you'd shout,

"hard starboard"
and they would go left.

But on a jetski,
you turn left and right.

So they must have rudders
that go in opposition.

But they have a jet, not a rudder.

It's a JET ski.

It's not called a rudder-ski, is it?

Is that how it turns, though?
There's the... The press...
The jet moves...?

- The jet moves on the... - Does it?
- I think so.

- Yeah. - Brian, do you know?
So far, you've known everything!

- Have you ever seen a jetski
with a rudder?
- Don't think they have
rudders, no.

SUE: They have a jet.

It's a JET ski! What are we not
getting about the jet...

Sorry.

All right.

I'd like you to fill in the gaps
in these slogans

for various places
or institutions.

We start with County Donegal's
slogan, OK?

- "Up here it's..." - Windy.

- SUE: Green. - It really is windy there.
- Different. - It's different.

Up here it's different.

That's Donegal's slogan.

You'll be pleased to know.
Northumbria Police, however...

"Total..."

Gobshites!

Arrest.

"Total policing", I'm sorry to say.

- Total brutality.
- Total brutality!

Total policing.

"Welcome to Northamptonshire -
let yourself..."

SUE: Down.

LAUGHTER

- Leave. - ROSS: Let yourself out.

LAUGHTER

At the nearest exit!

No, poor Northamptonshire.
Charming place. "Let yourself..."

- SUE: Breathe. - Relax.

- Breathe is good, relax is...
- Go. - Go is not bad.

Grow, apparently.

- Grow. - That is disgusting.
- Let yourself go!

Let yourself go!

ROSS: Give yourself a stiffie.

..a large hard-on.

This is an optimistic one here.

"Welcome to Tower Hamlets.
Let's make it..."

- ASBO week. - Out alive.

Let's make it out alive!

LAUGHTER

Let's make it happen.

- Let's make it happen.
- Let's make it happen.

there's another slogan which said,
"It did happen on Friday 17th.

"If you witnessed it..."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Oh, dear.

In 2007, the Scottish Parliament
and the Tourist Board Scotland

spent ?125,000 on launching
a new slogan.

I want you to find the word
they came up with.

They paid some very expensive
people. "Welcome to..."

- SUE: The heart attack capital of
Europe. - It's got to be Scotland.

Scotland is the right answer!

What genius! I mean, God! That was
the very best one I've ever seen.

All American states have
their mottos as well.

Kentucky decided they would spend
money on a new phrase for Kentucky.

There are two things that most
Americans know Kentucky for -

horse racing, Kentucky Derby...

- Fried chicken. - No, they don't
really know it for that.

ROSS: It's finger lickin' good.

The Kentucky Derby is one and
the other is bourbon whiskey.

They came up with a two word phrase

that embraced both racing
and whiskey,

and I just think it
is genuinely genius.

- Drunk horses. - No. Every time
you cross the state line,

you see it, you think actually
they were worth their money.

It just says, "Unbridled spirit."

That is a bit cool.
I think that's very good.

I think that's class, you know?

- It's not finger lickin' good
though, is it? - No, it isn't.

Though I would have you know,
and one doesn't like to boast,

I'm just going to anyway, but I
am actually Kentucky's Colonel.

The Governor appoints certain people
to be Kentucky Colonels

and, in theory, I could be called up

in defence of the Commonwealth
of Kentucky as it calls itself.

LAUGHTER
I know, it's unlikely to happen.

"Oh, bothering blast!
I can't get the bloody..."

I shall throw a family thrift
bucket at them.

I did a documentary where I visited
all the states of America

and they always go,
"Which is your favourite state?"

It's very, very hard to answer, but
as it happened, about the best time

I had was in Kentucky. I thought,
"I'll stick to that as my answer."

So I said Kentucky,
and about three months later,

I got a letter from the Governor
of Kentucky with a certificate

and, of course, with a baseball cap
and various other objects,

saying that I had been made
a colonel in the army of Kentucky.

There you are. You shall call me
Colonel Fry from now on.

- I have the key to the city of
Port Pirie in Australia. - Do you?

I was doing a gig and I was talking
to a bloke. Turned out he was

the mayor, so I went,
"Can I have the key to the city?"

And he went, "Yeah, all right then."

LAUGHTER

I didn't want him to back out,
so I said, "Where's your offices?"

"On the high street."
"I'll be down there tomorrow."

So I turned up, he got a shed key and
a ribbon and went, "There you go."

So there wasn't much Latin spoken
or anything like that.

No, there wasn't a ceremony,
I just turned up to the offices.

It was just a shed key in a bag.

You'll like this story
about driving in America.

I got a sat nav and we drove from
Atlantic City and the car hire place

was just off Lexington Avenue
in Manhattan.

So I put "Lexington Avenue"
in the sat nav

- and it took me to Lexington Avenue
on Staten Island.
- Oh, no.

After about an hour, I was thinking,
"This isn't feeling quite right,"

and then it took me down a
residential street off the freeway.

Then it just said, "You have
reached your destination."

No, that's someone's house.

I was expecting, you know,
yellow cabs and skyscrapers...

I've just done voice for them, so
that if you have TomTom or Garmin...

You drive along and it goes,
"Now the interesting thing..."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

"Now, now, now...

"The most darnedest thing, you would
not believe it, but..."

Did you do as if you were talking to
me, that's the worrying thing.

Left, you moron!

If you take a wrong turn instead
of making a U turn, does the hooter
come on? BEEP! BEEP!

I've put my voice on Katie's.
When she drives, it's me.

- Oh, that's nice. - You can record it,
"Left! Left! Left! LEFT!"

LAUGHTER

- Which is funny the first couple
of times.
- Yes, that's the problem.

I had a sat nav, after Port Pirie,

and the Nullarbor Plain
in Australia...

Between Adelaide and Perth.

Yeah, the longest straight road
in the world

and I sat on my bike, turned it on
and it said,

"Drive forward for two days."

And then it went, "Then turn left."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The stupid thing was,
it was such a long road,

I missed the left-hand turn.

You know that sat nav uses
relativity? Do you know that?

Oh, tell us.

I do know this. Is this right,
because of the gravitational pull

I do know this, up in space,
if they weren't regulated,

it would be a year out?
Is that right?

It'd be 38,000 nanoseconds
per day...

A year! 38,000, pah!

Because the rule of thumb is

light travels almost precisely
one foot in one nanosecond,

so a foot is one light nanosecond.

So 38,000 nanoseconds a day
is 38,000 feet a day.

That's how much it'd drift
if you didn't take account
of the fact that time...

Because of the gravitational field.

So the point is that the maths
built into the processors

in these geo-stationary satellites,

has to take into account
Einsteinian physics?

Yes. I visited the GPS headquarters,
it's in Colorado.

- ROSS: I bet that's easy to find.
- This is honestly true.

We typed it into a sat nav
and it took us into a field.

It didn't take us there.

But when they launched it,
the US Air Force was very suspicious

of this Swiss bloke and his
relativity nonsense,

and had the option of not
correcting, because they could not
believe that

time passes a different rate in
orbit than it does on the ground.

If you took a sat nav, a normal
domestic sat nav, right,

and put it in space rocket,

and went up into space towards
the satellite, what would happen?

Very good. That is exactly the kind
of experiment that Einstein
liked to do, isn't it?

Yeah, me and Einstein are like that.

Listen, we could go on like this for
ever, but we're simply not going to.

We stumble now into the gaping moor
of general ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers,
quick as you can,

what's the definition
of a galaxy?

BABY GURGLES

- Yes! - 'Nobody knows.'

You're right. Essentially there is
no absolutely official decision,

but there are scientists
trying to work out

precisely what a galaxy might be.

Duncan Forbes of
Swinburne University in Australia

and Pavel Kroupa of the
University of Bonn in Germany.

They have a launched an online
survey and we've been allowed

to be the first to see the results
of the poll.

But based on that, there is already
one new galaxy

that fits - globular cluster
Omega Centauri

seems to qualify, according
to those criteria, as a galaxy.

In the Hubble deep field image,
this year the most distant galaxy

ever discovered was found
in that photograph,

and it's 13.2 billion
light years away.

The Earth's been here
for five billion years,

so for most of the journey
of the light from those galaxies
you can see in that image,

the Earth wasn't even here,
it wasn't formed.

It formed when they were
almost halfway.

The further away you look,
the further towards the birth
of the universe you're looking.

How do we know which direction
to look? Did it begin over there,

or over there? Or we on
the surface of a balloon?

It began here, so the Big Bang
happened here in every point
in space.

The picture is that space and time
began at that point,

and it's been stretching ever since,
so all of space and all of time

in some sense were there
at the Big Bang,

so the Big Bang happened everywhere.
There's no centre.

ROSS: You can't really see it because
black's a very slimming colour!

It's true. I just think it's all
beautiful, wonderful and amazing.

So name an insect that spins a web.

BABY GURGLE
Yes, Sue.

Er, spiders.

ALARM BLARES

- It's an arachnid!
- It's an arachnid, Susan!

- What's the difference?
- It's got legs... Body!

Insects have how many legs?

- Six. - Erm...two, four, six, eight.
- And spiders have eight.

And insects have six.

It was particularly an insect
that spins a web I was after.

- The difference is the pedantry of
biologists.
- It is, you're right!

- Is there a six-legged spider?
- There isn't a six-legged spider
as far as I know.

- Does a moth spin? - Yes. There's
a very famous moth whose lava

- is responsible for this tie. - The
silkworm.
- The Bombyx, the silkworm,

is the lava of a moth,
but it's not really a web,

but there are insects
that spin webs.

These are cocoon-type things
for them to pupate inside.

Goats, also. Goats obviously aren't
insects, but this does sound really

like science fiction of the worst
possible kind.

- Spin? - Goats, yes. Scientists have
implanted the silk producing gene

from spiders into goats.

When the goats lactate,
their milk contains silk,

which can be harvested,
dried and spun into fibres.

It's a nightmare if you've ever
been caught in a goat web.

It's horrible. I'll be there for days
sometimes.

There's a lot you can get out of
goat - you can get cheese, wool,

sex... Sorry! You can get...
LAUGHTER

I don't know where that came from.

Anyway, basically,
they keep giving, goats.

- Just put the back legs in
your wellies.
- Oh! I-I-I...

Anyway, the point is several insects
do spin webs

of which the best known
are the web spinners.

Spiders, however, are not insects.

And finally the scores, which
are as baffling as always.

It's fascinating, it's remarkable,
it's wonderful it's exciting.

In last place, despite an
extraordinary performance

and remarkable knowledge
in many areas, I'm afraid
it's Sue Perkins with -17.

APPLAUSE

A highly creditable third place
with -6, Ross Noble.

APPLAUSE

But surely putting himself in
contention for a Nobel Prize

sometime in the next few years,
on +2 Alan Davies.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And it can come as no surprise
that the mop top from Oldham
is our winner.

On +5, it's Professor Brian Cox.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It only remains for me to thank
Brian, Sue, Ross and Alan,

and to leave you with this
observation from Will Rogers -

an ignorant person is one
who doesn't know

what you have only just found out.

Good night.