Jobs QI XL

This programme contains some strong language.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Well, good evening, good evening, good evening, good eve-e-e-ening...

I'm running out of good evenings. To the QI Job Centre.

Scanning the situations vacant tonight are

retired civil servant Sarah Millican.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Former cloakroom attendant David Mitchell.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Unemployed pianist and saxophonist the Reverend Richard Coles.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

And ex-Epping flea market sandwich-board man Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

By their buzzers shall ye know them.

And Sarah goes...

BELL RINGS

Ooh. And David goes...

TOILET FLUSHES

That's a cloakroom being attended. Richard goes...

SAXOPHONE SQUEAKS

Aw, bless you, I've heard you on Waterloo Bridge. And Alan goes...

'Sandwiches, sandwiches!'

That's what you mean by a sandwich board, is it?

Well, not strictly.

I'd like to say, the cloakroom I attended was for actual cloaks.

-It wasn't a euphemism.

-Oh, it really was a cloakroom?

It was for where people left their coats and bags,

-and I suppose the occasional cloak.

-And...

But with it being in the 20th century, it wasn't very cloak-heavy.

No.

I have to say, I actually do have a cloak.

It's standard issue for clergyman.

Oh, yes, you would have one, wouldn't you?

SARAH: Has it got pockets?

It's got deep poacher's pockets,

so you can keep things like holy water in there, if you wish.

Just in case you need some.

In case you happen to meet a girl who's possessed by the devil.

Exactly. But also, it's a practical garment.

There are bits, special tapes and bits you can hang onto

and wrap round yourself. I recommend them. They're lovely.

Is it true, do you kiss your stole before putting it over your shoulder?

Yes, there's a special prayer when you're getting kitted up.

You kiss the cross and say a prayer as it goes over your head.

I'm thinking of Max von Sydow going, "The Beast will say many things...

"The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!"

And then the green vomit comes out and...

Have you done any of those?

-To be fair, actually, I have done a couple.

-Forget all the questions -

I'm going to get down to this.

"Exorcisms" is more interesting.

Well, we don't call it... We call it "deliverance" now,

rather like the takeaway man on the moped.

Though I was in a parish where there was a major drug problem

and so, quite often, you'd be called out to people

-who'd just done a lot of speed.

-Right.

They'd describe what had happened

and you realised they were talking about the horror film

-that was on at the pictures the week before.

-Oh!

I had a friend who was...

-I don't remember if you remember Dom Sylvester Houedard...

-Oh, yes!

He was called in, not to do an exorcism,

but a man said he was Napoleon.

And Dom Sylvester said, "Well, that's unfortunate for you,

-"because

-I

-am Wellington."

There was a friend of mine who had a psychiatric unit in his parish.

And there was a gentleman there who thought he was God

and would sort of follow Donald around the unit,

-asking him hard questions about the hypostatic union and things like that.

-My God.

One day, Donald got impatient with him and turned to him

and said, "If you are God, would you kindly settle,

"once and for all, the exact relation of the three Persons of the Trinity?"

And the man said, "I never talk shop."

APPLAUSE

Listen, it is way off, WAY off base here,

but I'm having a good conversation

and that, in the end, is what QI is supposed to be about.

So let's begin with our first question.

Confucius once said, "Give someone a job they love

"and they'll never have to work again."

So, what sort of jobs are these?

We've given you what, in the social media world, as you know,

-is called a cloud.

-'Sandwiches!'

Yep?

LAUGHTER

That's only going to get funnier, isn't it?

-I hope so.

-Yeah.

A ripper is a murderer.

Well, obviously, yes...

A highly-skilled murderer. An expert.

-In Whitechapel, usually.

-Yes, yes!

-Yeah. Sometimes in...

-I knew that was right.

These days most murderers are amateur, though, aren't they?

It's very difficult to make a living out of it.

-As a job, yeah. No, it's a good point.

-It's true.

A ripper, actually, you might know. There is a word,

it's the kind of word a crossword fiend might know - riparian.

R-I-P-A-R-I-A-N.

Riparian, does that mean anything to you?

I feel it should.

Yes. It comes from the Latin "ripa" - river bank.

So the riparian means of the riverside, of the river bank.

A fish seller who sells fish off the banks...

-Oh, this is like a 3-2-1 clue!

-I know, I'm so sorry.

I thought we were getting somewhere,

it's going to be someone who repairs the banks of rivers.

OK, no, he sells fish now!

I'm so sorry.

A burgrailler.

That's presumably someone who grills burgers?

Just, the general spelling in the average burger joint. No.

A burgrailler was someone who removed burrs

from the teeth of combs in a cotton mill.

Oh, I thought it was going to be from the Queen Mother.

And we have a willyer, which comes from the same profession.

Is that someone who was both in the Black Eyed Peas and the Wurzels?

Oh, it's will.ay.er!

will.i.arr!

will.i.err!

Oh, very good.

APPLAUSE

Excellent.

You see, your years working with Jimmy Somerville and The Communards

have not dulled the edge of your wit, I'm glad to see.

It's actually a willyer, it's also called the woollyer.

But willyer is a more common name for it

and again, we're back in the world of the loom,

operating a willying machine, which sep...

GIGGLING I've done that!

Yes, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Wharfinger, you might be able to work out.

There's an odd thing that we do in English,

which is that we add a letter N where one isn't necessary.

So, for example, if someone is on a passage, on a journey,

we don't call them a passager, we call them a passenger.

If someone sends a message we don't call them a messager,

we call them a messenger.

It's a very odd English thing, of adding this N.

And a wharfiger is someone who might...?

Wharfage?

Yeah, own a wharf. Basically, a wharf owner is a wharfinger.

Do people own wharves now?

These days you don't meet many people who say, "I'm in the wharf business."

-Actually you might have a Worf...

-I've got a lovely wharf!

Star Trek: The Second Generation had a character called Worf, didn't it?

-He was a Klingon with a big nose.

-Was he?

-Oh, yes.

-And no sense of humour.

You do surprise me, with the moments when you dip into popular culture, which ones you choose.

-I am secretly a bit of a Trekkie, I have to say.

-Are you?

-HE MIMICS PICARD:

-Make it so.

Could you play Vulcan chess?

-Oh, no, that's very difficult.

-Do you remember Vulcan chess?

I remember Vulcan chess. Very, very difficult.

-And T'Pau, do you remember there was a pop group called T'Pau?

-We toured with them.

That took their name from an episode of Star Trek.

You toured with T'Pau?

When you're on tour, if you're in a band, you tend to be on the same circuit as other bands

and we used to bump into Carol Decker,

who was the singer from T'Pau.

You'd be in a hotel with T'Pau and Public Image.

So you'd be having your breakfast between John Lydon and Carol Decker in a strange, weird sort of...

I'd like to see you partying with Shaun Ryder from...

But there was no partying, because, actually,

if you're on tour, you're so busy.

Everyone is in bed by ten, it's the people around who...

No, no, maybe they didn't tell you about the parties that went on afterwards.

I once stayed in a hotel in America with Black Grape,

which was the band that Shaun Ryder formed after he left,

you know, Manchester,

and it was so rowdy on the floor of the hotel...

-Rowdy!

-When I woke up... Hey!

When I woke up the next morning, I opened the door

and there was a bottle of extremely high-quality brandy

with a little note saying, "Hope you weren't disturbed. Love, Shaun."

And I looked all the way down both sides of the corridor

and there was a bottle of brandy there.

We did have a bass player who came down one morning as we were checking out

and said he had trashed his room.

We were quite pleased,

because no-one had ever done that in our band, at all.

But it turned out that actually what he'd done

was tear up a copy of the Guardian.

STEPHEN HOWLS WITH LAUGHTER

And we made him go and tidy it up again.

-All right.

-BELL RINGS

-A nut-steamer.

-Yes.

Is that somebody who works in a spa?

-Sounds right. It does sound right.

-SAXOPHONE SQUEAKS

-Flong maker.

-Yes.

I have a theory that this might be a gentleman

who makes foundation garments for ladies.

And it's those very thin things

which are a cross between a thong and dental floss.

-Oh, I know just what you mean.

-Yes.

-An arse-floss piece of...

-Yes.

-Yeah, ooh! Ooh. Yes, horrible, yes.

The person cleaning it is the one you feel sorry for.

No, flong actually is a corruption of the French word "flan".

It means a heavy base.

Oh, isn't that interesting?

And it's actually from the word "printing".

What the flong made was actually... Because it was solid,

the Greek for solid is "stereo", and it was known as stereotyping.

Because you were making the same thing each time.

You made a stereotype.

And oddly enough, the noise the ink made was rendered as "cliche".

The noise. "Cliche, cliche" noise that it made

when you rolled the ink.

So both stereotype and cliche, which sort of mean the same thing,

are both printers' terms.

And so, literally, a cliche is made by stereotyping.

-Yes, exactly.

-Right.

-It is incredibly pleasing.

-Yeah.

And we're only here to be quite interesting,

we don't expect you to be rolling on the floor barking like a seal,

vomiting with laughter at that thought.

But I do hope you will take it home,

wrap it in a little parcel of lavender paper

and store it in the bottom part of your drawer.

-I'm worried I'll get it wrong.

-Yeah, OK.

I'm planning to slightly mis-remember it

and see some version of it in 20 years' time.

So, the one we can't help you with is a macaroni loper,

no-one seems to know.

We think it may be simply some sort of pasta job

of twisting macaroni into a...

Making necklaces out of macaroni, that's what it is.

But the reason we know all these are all jobs

is because of the 1891 UK census - people had to put their profession.

And these are just some of the professions.

So, we just know that someone in the 1891 census,

or probably more than one person, said "Oh, I'm a macaroni loper."

-Yes.

-And no-one's ever explained.

No, unfortunately.

Because nowadays in the census, don't some people...

They put that their religion is Jedi, as a sort of joke.

Maybe the macaroni lopers are having a laugh at our expense.

I once had to have a discussion about that,

when I was involved in prison chaplaincy,

because one of the prisoners wanted a Jedi chaplain.

-No!

-Yeah.

In the end we found a shaman in Lincoln who did the job.

And did he come with a little light sabre?

No, he had a shaking stick.

-But we thought that was the nearest we could get.

-That would do.

-Yeah.

-Wow! That's pretty impressive.

Star Wars will outlive all the major religions, I'm sure.

-You think?

-Yeah.

-Maybe it will. Maybe.

AUDIENCE MEMBER CLAPS

Someone clapping!

There's one little Ewok at the back!

Anyway, there we go, that's question one over with.

How does snake farming work?

You plant them in the ground.

Unless they're doing the actual farming.

That might be quite tricky, just put them on a tractor and watch them go.

Well, there was one great snake farmer, called Bill Haast,

who lived from 1910 to the year 2011.

And he died, 100-years-old,

and he specialised in handling snakes, venomous snakes.

And how do you think he protected himself from being bitten?

Cut their heads off?

No, he kept them very much alive and made a lot of money out of them.

-Can you sort of get used to it?

-That's the point.

In fact, he got himself bitten so much, he became immune.

He was bitten over 120 times, the first time when he was 12.

20 times almost fatally, he said.

You may say, "Well, he was just a dick,

"he was just someone who was just a show-off."

Actually, he did it for a reason, and that was to save other people.

His blood was so rich in the antibodies...

There are snake handlers, of course,

who are religious people in America, some of the Southern States.

Why'd you have to drag religion into everything?!

Sorry. The Bishop's watching!

But they, because they take rather at face value

a text from the Gospel of Mark, which says that,

"You shall not be hurt by a serpent if you are kind of in our club."

So they go around, picking up serpents and, of course,

most of them die hideously of snakebites, sooner or later.

But they don't seem to develop this.

No, I think the point is you have to build it up. Well, there you go.

You might also know of a king of Pontus.

Northern Turkey is where Pontus is.

And there was a king there, Mithridates,

and he was very much an enemy of Rome

and he was convinced he was going to be poisoned

and he was one of the first people we know of

who made himself immune to poisons by taking small amounts of them.

Sure enough, he was indeed cornered by the Roman general, Pompey,

and he took poison, a really strong dose

and it still didn't kill him,

so he had to get his servant to stab him to death!

I went to India on holiday and there was a bit of food going on

and there were some green chillies in a glass.

Now, some green chillies are quite chewable and dippable...

And some are so not.

And I pick this one up and I could see three Indian ladies

peering round, putting their heads round.

They were virtually nudging one another,

cos they'd clearly put these out as a trap.

And I nibbled the very end of it

and then I was numb down the side of my face for several minutes.

-Terrifying.

-But while I was there,

there was a story about an Indian woman who could eat...

She set a record, it's in the Guinness Book of Records...

-I mean, dozens of these things.

-Yeah.

-Same principle, I suppose.

-Building up tolerance.

-Have you been to Iceland?

-No.

-Oh, with the smelly fish?

-Hakarl. Have you had Hakarl?

Never had it, no.

They give you this dish and it's got these little cubes

of foul-smelling strong cheese in it and you sort of take this cheese

and you eat it and it's absolutely disgusting.

They go, "Ho-ho-ho."

You go, "That's the worst cheese I've ever tasted."

They go, "That is not cheese." "What is it?"

And hakarl is they kill a shark

and then they bury it in sand on a beach

-so it putrefies in its own urine.

-Yes.

-AUDIENCE GROANS

-They do.

And then they dig it up and cut into cubes and give it to tourists.

And we're supposed to feel sorry for their financial crisis?!

Up yours, Bjork!

Were they worried that tourism was going to get out of hand

on that freezing-cold island?

How bad do things have to be that putrefied urinous shark meat

is your delicacy?

It is true. Gracious me. I think we should move on.

So, what might an inspector of nuisances do?

Did nuisance used to mean something else?

Was it like nuisance, meaning a noise or a party or a...

Well, yes, it would include a noise, yes.

It was basically, kind of, an equivalent

of today's Environmental Health Officer.

They were appointed by the local authority

as sanitary and health issues...

One man's nuisance is another man's rowdy evening in the hotel, isn't it?

-Yes, but this is like...

-Who decides what a nuisance is?

Well, this is like, you know, if your neighbour is a hoarder,

or they're smelly.

This was in days before the more common sanitation that we expect.

So if it was really smelly, very noisy.

They would also disinfect houses that had had smallpox.

They were also responsible for the scavengers,

and what were the scavengers?

Were they people who made a living

through going through the leavings of others?

That's what you would think. Like mud-larkers going through the beaches.

It actually had a more specific and unsavoury meaning, originally.

-Is it waste?

-Waste. Night soil men, they used to be called.

-Night soil. Ooh.

-Night soil.

-They stole poo?

-Well, not stole, but...

-Just ones you've done in the night?

People had...

People had outside jacksies,

that were not connected to any system of sewers.

They were just a hole.

It was just a hole, and so there would be a pile of poo

and the night soil man would come with his spade

-and he'd take your poo away.

-Right.

And that was a job - not a pleasant one.

They were known as scavengers.

And it was a deeply unpleasant, but a deeply necessary job, obviously.

Would you have to tip your scavenger,

like you have to do with milkmen and postmen at Christmas?

-It's a very good question.

-You leave a Christmas box.

You leave a Christmas box! A perfect varnished stool.

The best stool you've produced, you save it up for him.

-Your favourite one.

-I had a thoroughly good dinner that day

and I think that's quality, that stuff.

That's right, you can't spot a nut or a crack in it.

It's absolutely lovely. Lovely. Lovely. That's what you'd do.

It doesn't remain in that... I know this,

because I was a chaplain for a bit in Uganda,

and they have scavengers, night soil people there.

But I only saw it once and I shudder to recall it,

but it was sort of mulched down, if I may put it that way.

-Ah. So it's not...

-So it loses its...

So it's not in its shape and form?

-It's slop.

-Slop.

-The same thing happens with squirty cream.

-Exactly.

-It comes out a lovely shape.

-Yes, you're right.

-Leave it for a few minutes and it's all gone...

-Loses its form, doesn't it?

It does, yeah.

And no-one likes a stool that's lost its form.

-Yeah.

-Absolutely. Points deducted.

SARAH: You've just ruined squirty cream!

Points deducted for a sloppy stool.

Anyway, enough already, let's move on.

Now, what is it about software engineers

that drives people to violence?

I've got a theory about software engineers,

or the problem with software engineers -

-it's that they're all REALLY into computers.

-Yes.

And they say, "Why not have a little twiddly bit

"that does that when you do that? That would look pretty."

Well, the upside is it would look pretty.

The downside is that's another thing that doesn't work.

It takes up processing power or speed.

Do they call them "twiddly bits"?

They've probably got some technical name, even for twiddly bits.

The usual word is "feature." Yeah.

Well, that is certainly one thing that is annoying.

I don't like software which anticipates needs I don't have.

The sort of spell-checker thing,

which corrects your spelling to words you didn't want to spell.

I've got RSI now from correcting the corrections on my phone.

-If I want to type the C word - and I do sometimes...

-Yeah.

..it comes up with Cynthia, and that's my mother-in-law's name.

-Right.

-And she's lovely, and it seems so unfair.

Let's hope it doesn't work the other way round.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

You're so nice!

Well, unfortunately in the original Greek, it is Kunthia.

-Is it?

-There is no letter Y in Greek. it's an upsilon, it's a U.

-That's alarming.

-It is Kunthia.

No, I'm going back to the very first software engineer that ever was.

Babbage?

Well, Babbage owed an enormous debt to this person.

-Ada Lovelace.

-Ada Lovelace also owed a debt to this person.

-Ada Lovelace wanted to use the same...

-I'll get my cloak.

You've done very well! Ada Lovelace was the daughter of?

Mr Software.

LAUGHTER

So disappointing.

-Because, you know, you have a Mr Baker, don't you?

-Yes, you do.

And a Mr Butcher. Mr Cooper.

Old Jeremiah Software!

But it's so much more interesting than that,

she happened to be the daughter of Lord Byron,

and she was one of the great mathematicians of her age.

And she was a woman we should celebrate.

And she was a colleague, as you say, of Charles Babbage,

and they had got their difference engine,

and they wanted to steal the idea of a Frenchman,

who'd come up with the idea.

And it's a software idea, it was for automating something.

As a little boy, he used to sit on a particular type of machine

and watch it working and thinking, "I could make this better."

And he invented the punch-card system for it.

And he has... Its name is...

It's not those pianos that play themselves?

No, Pianolas use the same system. But this is before that.

It's much more useful,

because it made something everybody in the world wanted to buy.

Which is clothes. And textiles.

Oh, is it for, like, a pattern on cloth?

A loom. A loom. It's a loom, and it's a particular kind of loom...

-RICHARD:

-Jacquard.

Jacquard is the name, Joseph Marie Jacquard.

And he was an extraordinary man, born in 1752,

and these looms were used right up until our lifetimes.

But there you are.

-Look at that.

-That's what he invented.

Now, you look at those punch cards, you think, now, what can that do?

Babbage correctly saw

this couldn't just make a loom and a tapestry and a picture,

but it could also possibly do calculations

and other such things that mathematicians were interested in.

And so we have a portrait of Jacquard himself,

which is done in woven silk using a Jacquard loom.

That is done by punched cards. Isn't that astonishing?

The depth, the tone, look at the knees there, the way the cloth is.

-I mean, that's...

-It looks almost like a photograph, doesn't it?

-It almost looks like a photograph.

-Yeah.

-That is...

You'd think he'd be happier, wouldn't you?

Well, that's true. Smiling in photographs is a very recent thing.

-Oh, really?

-It was never considered normal,

it was considered weird to smile in photographs.

But the question was, why did he drive people to violence?

Ah, because he...

Was it like Luddites, did they come and smash his machinery?

They did, because it took so much work away from them.

-Are these the shoe throwers?

-Ah.

-The saboteurs?

-And what's the French for a wooden shoe?

-A sabot.

A sabot is a clog.

And they would throw their clogs into the looms to break them up,

and a sabot, it was known as sabotage.

And that's where we get our word "sabotage".

They would sabotage his machines.

And actually Luddites in Britain were nothing like as violent

as the saboteurs of France, in Lyon and places like that.

-Different footwear, I suppose.

-Different footwear.

You can do more with a clog, can't you, than a conventional shoe?

-We had an outbreak of it in my parish.

-Did you?

Yeah, I'm afraid so.

It's a shoe area,

so when the automation of the shoe trade came in,

there was a bit of smashing up of machines.

That's a nightmare though,

because if the people are destroying the machines with shoes,

if the machine's still going, they're just making ammunition.

-For their own destruction.

-That's so true.

-And just the irony of it.

-Yeah.

Just immediately, as they come out, chuck them back at the machine!

You don't have to use shoes to make a machine break,

it's just the French wore wooden clogs and those sabots.

But it is fascinating, isn't it, to think of it?

Where would we be without trees?

Well, so true.

LAUGHTER

You're right.

Anyway, the first automated looms caused rioting by French weavers.

Name as many famous butlers as you can.

Jeeves.

Jeeves?

KLAXON BLARES

Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Jeeves was not a butler!

Was he not a butler? He was a man.

He was a valet, he was a gentleman's personal gentleman.

-A valet, sorry.

-What about Hudson from Upstairs Downstairs?

Hudson would certainly count, yes, absolutely.

A butler has to be head of a household.

A valet is a personal attendant, a gentleman's personal gentleman.

Oh, Christ!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I mean, you got away with this, didn't you, really?

Because you were quite young to play the role, weren't you?

I was young, yes.

I mean, you in particular, because he is quite a bit older, isn't he?

Well, in Carry On, Jeeves,

which is the very first appearance of Jeeves in Wodehouse,

"a darkish, youngish chap stood in the doorway,"

is the only physical description you get of Jeeves.

But as Bertie Wooster said of him,

"Although he is not a butler,

"if it comes down to it, he can buttle with the best of them."

And so... But the butler was literally a bottler,

-he looked after the cellar.

-What about John Gielgud in Arthur?

Yes, he played... Well, was he a butler or was he a valet?

-It's hard to tell.

-I'm saying he was a butler.

A gentleman, a man. "My man," they used to say. "My man."

The Fifth Duke of Portland so relied on his valet

that when the doctor visited, the doctor would stand outside the room,

the valet would do the rummaging around and call out what he saw!

"I'm just inserting my finger into His Grace now!

"I would say it's a, sort of, yellowy-blue colour."

And the doctor would say, "That's a very bad sign."

Or a very good sign. But...

"All five of His Grace's testicles are in order."

It is a most bizarre thing.

Many years ago, I was asked, as I'm sure you've been asked,

to address the Oxford Union.

They have asked me, but I always imagine that they just ask me along just so that they can go, "Pfft!"

No! They would love you. They would love you. They'd also...

"We have an entertainment, ha-ha-ha!

"Ask him something, ha-ha-ha!"

"Make the clown dance!"

"We've got someone from Essex!"

"He doesn't know! Ha-ha!"

"Take my cloak."

No.

I went, and I remember this quite -

even for Oxford, - astonishing young man, in a wing collar...

-HE MIMICS STUDENT:

-..who spoke in the most extraordinary manner,

whose name was Jacob Rees-Mogg,

and he was the son of William Rees-Mogg,

who had, for a time, been the Editor of the Times.

-Oh, he's an MP now, is he?

-And he's now an MP.

-And he...

-HE CHUCKLES

We may have a picture of him, there he is.

You're never going to mistake him for an Essex chav, are you?

-And surprisingly...

-He's River Dancing there, isn't he?

He's very tall, isn't he? Bigger than the houses.

He is very tall, yes.

That may be a parallax effect, I'm not sure.

But anyway, he was infuriated

when leafleting the streets of central Fife,

by the fact that he was mocked

because he was assisted by his nanny.

And what was so extraordinary was his response.

His response was,

"Well, I do wish you wouldn't keep going on about my nanny.

"If I had a valet, you'd think it was perfectly normal!"

A man of the people.

I've had a tweet relationship with Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Is he a Twitter friend?

Well, I think...

I don't know if it's actually him, but he quotes to me Anglican psalms.

That's very like him.

I can't think there would be anyone who wasn't him

who would want to do that.

It does seem a very strange pastime, I have to say.

He's stopped talking to me now, but he did for a while.

He's very busy running the country, with his nanny and his valet.

I think the nanny was doing the tweeting for him.

Mary Poppins and Jeeves are helping him out, that's all we need worry about.

Thank goodness. All is well in the world of Jacob Rees-Mogg, and I'm sure he's a lovely man.

Anyway, Jeeves was a valet, not a butler.

What use is a sheep in a gold rush?

-SAXOPHONE SQUEAKS

-Yes?

It can be cold and lonely on those prairies.

LAUGHTER

Yes, that's the first thing that would come into a man of God's mind.

Huddle for warmth, Stephen, huddle together for warmth.

No, well, the gold rushes aren't always in cold countries. But...

-SAXOPHONE SQUEAKS

-Is that what... Hang on, the Lord is your shepherd

and on a cold night on his own, he might shaft you?!

I believe...

I believe his rod comforts you.

They didn't teach me anything at theological college about this.

Oh, sorry, I do apologise.

Would you filter stuff through wool, thereby extracting the golden ore?

The man is right on the money, quite literally.

That's exactly what you'd do. Exactly what you do.

You take the fleece and the water runs through it

and it leaves behind the flecks of gold

and then you dry the fleece and shake them out.

It's as simple as that, it's a very good way, better than panning.

And there are people who believe, indeed there's one man who wrote a book about it,

his name is Tim Severin, he wrote a book called The Jason Voyage,

he's one of those people who believes a lot of Greek myths, a lot of myths generally,

are based on originally true stories that have become exaggerated.

And he believes The Golden Fleece may be one such an example.

Jason may well have taken a golden fleece

that someone had been using for panning for gold.

So, now, what are the Swiss planning to tidy up next?

-Those good old Swiss.

-BELL RINGS

-Yes?

-They, um... Army knives, that's what I was going to say.

Are they going to tidy them up? There's loads of useless things on them. All you need is the knife.

-To sort of reduce the number of stuff on them.

-Just a knife.

But they do have a plan to do some REALLY serious cleaning,

which will cost MILLIONS, but is, I'm afraid, very necessary.

-Is it in space?

-Yes. Well done, Alan Davies.

-What's the problem in space?

-Too many old satellites.

-Debris, space debris.

-As soon as we started going up there,

we started leaving crap everywhere we went.

It is so human, isn't it? It's like a festival.

Even if it's a chip of paint, you have to remember,

-it's orbiting at 18,000mph.

-You wouldn't want that in your eye.

So when it hits something else, they shatter,

so more and more shatter into smaller and smaller pieces,

which makes it harder and harder to clear them up.

So with the Swiss in space, there're attempting, technically,

to find ways of clearing up this debris, which is a serious worry.

-You need a Dyson.

-You need one hell of a Dyson!

-Dyson would think of something.

-Why the Swiss?

-It's interesting, isn't it?

-Why have they taken it upon themselves,

after years of not joining in and stockpiling Nazi gold,

why now are they being public spirited?

I've got a horrible thought -

it might be for profit.

-Oh!

-Oh, they're not just a bit OCD?

-I don't think...

Well, it could be a mixture, though.

If you've been to Switzerland, it IS a very clean and tidy country.

It was the first country I ever went to, years ago, I was tiny,

which had photoelectric cells in the urinals

and so when I left, it flushed and I heard a little click.

And so I just went back and forth, back and forth.

And someone came in and saw me doing this...

I had to explain...

That basically, that urinal,

-if it can sense when you've gone to flush, it's a robot.

-Yes!

It is like the debris in space -

as soon as we create artificial intelligence, we abuse it sexually.

Anyway, moving on, sorry. Let me give you the information on this.

The fact is, after 50 years now of space exploration,

the Earth is surrounded by junk from old satellites

and spent rocket casings and so on,

all way down to small pieces of wire and chips of paint.

All hazardous to current satellites,

on which our lives are beginning to depend -

GPS and so on and peacekeeping and all sorts...

-Grindr.

-Oh, Grindr! God, yes!

What would we do without Grindr?

There are, apparently, 480 million copper needles

because of some bloody stupid thing called Operation West Ford,

which was an American project from between '61 and '63,

to create an artificial ionosphere out of copper

that they could bounce radio signals off.

They actually wanted to seal the Earth. I mean, how mad is that?

So that's left all that junk.

Anyway, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

has a project called CleanSpace One.

There they are, in the snow, looking...

Actually, that's Telly Savalas' hideout in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Anyway, they will have a series of janitor satellites.

They will manoeuvre alongside the unwanted object,

grapple it with a claw - there you are -

then dive into the atmosphere.

So it's going to, first of all, grapple it with its claw...

Ta-daa!

-Oh, you can do this on Brighton Pier.

-Yes, exactly!

And then it goes...

The problem is, the actual janitor thing is also destroyed.

They both burn up in the atmosphere.

So for every speck or needle,

you have to send up a separate little old lady with a claw.

Which costs £27 million, each one of them.

-Oh, that's really cheap(!)

-That's what I mean by saying...

You just need a shove-y thing that shoves it into the atmosphere.

What about some sort of...?

I mean, admittedly, I haven't given this much thought,

but some sort of..."Hoover"?

You know, some sort of sucking thing?

A giant funnel? You'd think a giant funnel...

Does sucking work in the outer atmosphere, where there's no air?

There are two direction you want them to go in, you either want them

to stop being in orbit and come in and be burnt up in the atmosphere

or you want to push them into space, which is a bit loutish.

-That's even more littering, isn't it?

-It is. It is loutish.

We Brits have come up with a different solution at the University of Surrey.

And that is a nanosatellite, the size of a shoebox,

and it contains a 25-square-metre solar sail

So, when unfolded, this CubeSail, as they call it,

is driven along by photons from the sun

and it carries any junk and takes it out into outer space.

In due course, devices like these may have to be built into anything

that's ever allowed up into space again.

It must have on it something that will help with the problem.

But that's the problem.

At the moment, the Swiss have their 27-million-dollar machine.

So there you are.

Now, what would be the best planet in the solar system

to take your annual holiday in?

-BELL RINGS

-Or on? Yes?

Earth.

Absolutely the right answer, I can frankly say.

I don't think there could be a better answer.

Well, the great advantage of Earth is that you can survive on it.

Yes.

LAUGHTER

-It's so lovely on a holiday, isn't it?

-Yeah, it is, yeah.

-To be able to breathe air again.

-To just live through it. Yeah.

-SAXOPHONE SQUEAKS

-Yeah, exactly. Hello?

Uranus.

Why Uranus?

Because it would be much longer.

Ah, now, there you're getting very interesting.

It's about how long a year is or a season is.

Yeah. How long is a Uranian year?

A Uranian year is 84 Earth years.

-84.

-But each day is only 17 hours,

so again, it spins faster than us.

So how long would a fortnight be?

Oh, God! Why am I...?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It's a very good question indeed.

17 x 14 would be a fortnight.

-Would be a fortnight.

-How long is a year on Jupiter then?

A year is about 12 of our years, but it spins very quickly,

-so a day on Jupiter is only about ten hours.

-Oh.

-So you might not get a longer holiday, the further away from...

-No.

And I think I'd need those things that go round your wrists,

so you don't get travel sick, if it's spinning like that.

That's right. Jupiter is also entirely gas,

which is not really very nice.

The shopping and the sightseeing opportunities are amazing.

A layer of black liquid hydrogen 27,000 miles thick

crushes carbon into diamonds that are literally the size of the Ritz.

So you could really get some serious bling from Jupiter.

-Try to deal with that.

-Yeah.

Sort of that size - a diamond the size of a hotel.

And another thing that's rather exciting

is that it precipitates neon rather than water in the atmosphere,

which creates brilliant bright red rain.

Which is fabulous, that would be so pretty.

It would be lovely to go, wouldn't it?

-That there...

-That and a certain death.

You don't want rain on holiday, though, do you, even if it's bonny?

That storm, that eye as they call it,

which is in the middle of Jupiter,

is about four times the size of the Earth, so that's, you know...

So essentially, Jupiter's a nightmare,

because your annual holiday, not only is it a shorter fortnight,

it only happens once every ten years.

Yes, quite!

That is true.

A very bad choice.

Venus, on the other hand, rotates incredibly slowly.

A fortnight's break on Venus would last over 15 years.

That's how long the days are.

But you'd need factor 980 there, wouldn't you?

Oh, the weather is awful.

It's clouds of sulphuric acid,

the surface is hot enough to melt aluminium.

So you'd need really thick flip-flops.

And the atmospheric pressure

is equivalent to being half a mile under the sea on Earth.

The air isn't very fresh, it's mostly carbon dioxide.

So it really is a bit...

It's a bit like being in an Ibizan club at about six in the morning.

-Yuck!

-But you'd only want a week there, wouldn't you?

-You'd only want a week on Venus.

-You wouldn't want 15 years.

I think you're right.

So, now I have a dubious theory about Alice in Wonderland for you,

if you're quite interested?

-NEWSREEL:

-'A dubious theory from Stephen Fry.'

Yes...

Alice in Wonderland isn't a wildly imaginative children's fantasy after all -

it's a bitter, satirical attack on Victorian mathematics.

Dubious or not?

Visit aliceschmalice.co.uk to review the evidence

and decide for yourself.

-NEWSREEL:

-'A dubious theory from Stephen Fry.'

I like that one. I like that one a lot.

It's an interesting theory and there's a book written about it.

The fact is, as you know, Alice in Wonderland was written by...

-Lewis Carroll.

-Who was, in real life...

-A dog.

-A dog?!

You're so right, the last letter was wrong.

-He was a don.

-A do-N.

-A don.

A don, that's what you meant.

-In other words, he was a fellow...

-AutoCorrect. AutoCorrect!

Damn you, AutoCorrect!

-He was a mathematician at Oxford.

-Ah!

And he was a very conservative, classical mathematician

he believed in Euclidean geometry and things like that.

And there was a new world coming into maths

that would resolve in David Hilbert's famous questions

and the Poincare Conjecture and Riemann's Hypothesis

and all the things that Alan Turing and later mathematicians devoted themselves to.

The invention of the number nine, of course. Very controversial.

I've never taken to it myself.

Squeezed it between seven and 10 and...

-Er, eight and 10, in fact.

-Yes.

-Eight came even later.

-Eight came later, that's right.

-They needed it for the War.

-That's right, yeah.

They needed it for bingo, I think.

No, but the fact is he didn't like the way that maths

was becoming so extraordinarily abstract and pure

and less to do with either symbolic logic,

which was his particular subject,

or, as I said, the beauty of plain geometry, which he loved.

And so this particular author, Melanie Bayley,

argues that the scenes, particularly the Mad Hatter's tea party,

the encounter with the hookah-smoking caterpillar

and the meeting with the Duchess, whose baby turns into a pig,

all that sort of absolute nonsense,

he thought, typified modern mathematics.

And, most of all, he added in the later story of the Cheshire Cat,

who disappears, leaving only a grin -

it is a humorous way of making a serious point

about the futility of abstraction. How can a cat leave a grin behind?

The cat was brilliantly played in the Tim Burton film by...by, um...

Who did the voice of the cat? It was SUPERB!

LAUGHTER

-Oh, God.

-Hugh Laurie!

-Hugh Laurie, that it!

That's it. I knew it was someone good.

APPLAUSE

-2,000 points.

Anyway, Melanie Bayley, the author of this book,

reminds us that his other works are painfully dull and moralistic

or very technical works.

In fact, Queen Victoria read Alice and loved it so much and said,

"I do hope, Dr Dodgson,

"that you will dedicate your next book to me."

So he wrote a book called something like Problems In Symbolic Logic

and dedicated it to her, Her Majesty, Queen Victoria,

who must've read it and thought, "What the fuck is this?!"

-The Queen Victoria Bumper Book Of Boring Maths.

-Exactly!

-"Happy Christmas, Your Majesty."

-Anyway...

She says, this lady, Melanie Bayley, that Dodgson was most witty

when he was poking fun at something and only then

when the subject matter truly got him riled,

whereas we think of him as just an absurdist,

a kind of surrealist, a master of nonsense.

Anyway, it's nice to have dubious theories on our J series

and that's one of them. You can make up your mind yourself.

Now, it's time for a Jolly Jape,

this time involving lasers and balloons.

What can be coming next?

Here we are.

And I've got my laser.

This is one of these things they use, you know,

I'm going to point it behind me.

And we're using the smoke because it shows up the laser line.

-Can you see it there?

-Oh, yes.

-Yeah.

I'm deliberately, obviously... They keep shouting in my ear,

"Don't point it at people's eyes!" I'm not!

"Don't point it at their fucking eyes!

"It's fucking dangerous!"

The thing is, he knows he's the one who's going to be fired.

But there you are,

you can see reasonably well that there is a laser light there.

The lighting men are going, "Aaargh!"

This is ordinary laser light, the kind you'd use to...

At conferences to point on maps and all the rest of it.

And I'm just going to press the laser here and...

-Oh!

-Ohh!

-And...

Oh! And...

Oh! And...

Green, wow, cool! Ooooh.

Nothing. It's not popping, though.

-Weird.

-So, the black ones pop and the white one doesn't. Alan...

-Racist.

-You should have a...

LAUGHTER

That doesn't even begin to make sense. It's just...

I want you...

Take your black marker, please,

and can you make a black target

roughly in the centre of the balloon,

I'm going to let you press the button, as a reward, if you do it sensibly.

So, do a big...

The temptation to draw a cock and balls is overwhelming.

I know! A big black spot, so it'll work. Just there.

And fill it in as black as you can.

-Talk amongst yourselves.

-That's right.

-Colouring in.

If you'd worked for Blue Peter, you'd know how to do that while presenting to camera.

-Oh, yes, sorry.

-Yeah! There, you see, exactly.

I haven't done a cock and balls and I know you're disappointed.

-They're not.

-This is the back of Stephen Fry's head.

-Yeah, it is actually not unlike. OK.

-Will that do it, do you think?

-I reckon that's black enough.

-Is that black enough?

We know that black absorbs light and heat and white we know reflects it.

And we saw that the laser had enough energy to burst the black balloon.

So all you have to do, just leave it there,

it should be pointing in the right direction.

-Oh!

-Hooray!

There we are, well done.

Very enjoyable.

Victory.

So what was Darth Vader thinking with that?!

You see, the dark side will always lose.

-Yeah.

-Absolutely right. Well, that brings us to the scores!

Amazingly and finally, and there is no minus score.

Ooh. AUDIENCE: Ooh!

-Wow! In first place...

-ALAN CHUCKLES

-In first place...

-Patronising bastards!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

I've had points before!

In first place... In first place, aided by a first-class brain

and, of course, divine assistance,

with 23 points, is Richard Coles!

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Yep.

Sorry, I'd like to give my points to the poor.

Oh, what a holy man of God. Yeah, boos from the atheists.

We know he's only teasing.

In second place, with plus 13, is David Mitchell.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

In third place, with eight points, is Sarah.

Well done, Sarah Millican.

Thank you. Glad I'm not last.

And it's not minus! In last place, with zero, is Alan Davies.

CHEERING AND WHOOPING

-Well, there you are...

-It's not a plus.

That's all from Sarah, David, Richard, Alan and me.

Thank you, good night and be excellent unto each other. Bye-bye.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd