Liblabble QI XL

This programme contains some strong language

APPLAUSE

Goooood evening, and welcome to QI,

which tonight is a veritable Liblabble.

This is a newly minted and completely useless word,

coined by my Elves.

It's the collective noun for a group of Ls.

And here are some. El Salvador, the Reverend Richard Coles.

APPLAUSE

El-egant, Sara Pascoe.

APPLAUSE

One L of a guy, Bill Bailey.

APPLAUSE

And a snowball's chance in L, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

Now, let's hear their L-ish buzzers. Sara goes...

MUSIC: Crocodile Rock by Elton John

Aah. Bill goes...

MUSIC: Saturday's Kids by The Jam

Richard goes...

MUSIC: Y Brawd Houdini By Meic Stevens

And Alan goes...

MUSIC: Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone

# You better come home, Speedy Gonzales... #

-Well, let's not do a show, let's just listen to that all day.

-Listen to that.

All right, well, let's leap in with some laughter.

What has four legs and a sense of humour?

BILL'S SONG

Bill?

Ant and Dec.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-It covers the facts.

-It does.

-I can't really take anything away from you.

-It's technically correct.

-It is. I'm going to give you...

-I deserve points.

-You will get them.

-Ooh!

RICHARD'S SONG

-Richard?

-Lester Piggott's tax return?

Whoa, very good, very good, very good.

Not very topical, so some of the younger members

of the audience won't know what that is.

A laughing hyena.

Yeah, hyenas have four legs and they do laugh, that's true, but do they have a sense of humour?

Or is it just the sound they mimic, or at least to our...

I don't think it's laughing, is it, more...

-IMPRESSION

-It's a call, it's a call, yeah.

-Impressive, that was very good.

-Well, yeah.

-Yeah. Anyway.

-A pantomime horse.

-Well, no, it's not a pantomime horse.

-A pig.

-Pig.

-Er, no...

-Is it a mammal?

-Yes.

-OK, so what's a sense of humour...?

-Cow.

We know this because it's an animal that has been much observed.

OK, is this, I know that they can make rats laugh.

-Yeah, ah.

-Is that what it is?

-Yes.

-OK, so rats. They tickle rats.

-They tickle rats!

And they, and the rats make tiny little laughs. And it's so interesting.

In fact they're so high, human ears can't hear them,

and we have film of it, it's an Estonian/American researcher,

and there he is. He rejoices in the name of Dr Jaak Panksepp.

Now it may at first look as if he's actually torturing,

but it is, you will see it returns to his hand, it likes this.

-Are you sure?

-Yeah.

It's going, "Help me!"

"The others are in cages!"

"Can you hear me, anyone?!"

-Yes?

-So I read, I read quite a lot about this, because actually it's

all to do with how they have sex as well, so it's really interesting

that if a woman has a bad, not a woman, a female rat, sorry...

I really anthropomorphized...

-A lady rat.

-A lady rat.

-A lady rat.

-Could be a lady, yes.

-A lady rat.

If a lady rat has a bad sexual experience with a male rat,

she will never have sex with him again,

and even if he's the only available male, she won't.

And if she has a good sexual experience with a fake rat,

she will keep going back to that one.

And it's really interesting, and that's a whole thing with all

the tickling and the play, there's quite a lot of interplay with

-the male and female rats to do with love-making.

-You're absolutely right.

Did you know, Stephen, that there's a research that shows that bees are pessimists?

STEPHEN LAUGHS

I'm not making this up, I read this in the New Scientist.

They would do some sort of stimulus to a bee

when a good thing happened, so it would know that something

nice was happening, and then another thing when a bad thing was

happening, so it'd know that something bad was happening.

And then they did a sort of neutral stimulus

and the bees all behaved as if it were the bad thing about to happen,

they opted for the glass being half empty.

-Goodness me.

-Rather than half full. So bees are pessimists.

-That is...

-That's right, when you see bees,

a lot of the time, when they're buzzing round a plant, they're

actually, what they're actually saying is, "What's the point?"

-"Whatever."

-I could get the nectar, I could go back to the hive, but really, where am I going with this?

-Exactly.

-But even worse than that, because this is all, I always think that

bees, it's weird for them, because flowers really are using them

-for a three-way, because flowers can't have sex with each other.

-Absolutely right.

-Oh, so it's like the bee comes in...

-So they need the bee to do it with both of them, and the bee is like,

I'm not even in a relationship, I'm just the person you bring in.

-You get off, you get off.

-I'm just a, I'm just a, I'm just a gimp for you. Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, exactly, "I'm a toy."

-"I'm a go-bee-tween."

-A go-bee-tween!

-Yeah.

-Oh, I like what you've done there.

APPLAUSE

The queen bee, who you'd think might be the one who's having

the good life, lays 3,500 eggs a day

-for two years and then dies in excruciating pain, I presume.

-Yeah.

-This is why...

-She doesn't even have any Sudocrem or anything.

I know, exactly, and it's just the luck of the draw as to

-which female bee is going to be chosen as the queen.

-Yes.

-Me? Oh. Sash.

Tiara.

All of this, it proves that that saying, you know, we have to,

when you explain to kids about, you know, sexual reproduction,

you tell them about the birds and the bees, it's

-just not fit for purpose at all, is it really?

-It really isn't.

-The birds, yeah, just about. Bees, no.

-No.

-You know.

-A horrible life.

We're going to be sexless lackeys for a monstrous sugar-giant, you know.

APPLAUSE

That isn't...

I'm not telling that to any kids. They'll go, "OK."

But in terms of human and animal senses of humour, there is

Koko, a gorilla born in San Francisco Zoo you may

know about, who knows supposedly 2,000 words and 1,000

sign language words, and is said to comprehend both puns and slapstick.

The puns, and you believe it or don't, she was once asked,

"What can you think of that is hard?"

And she replied "a rock" and "work." Which is extraordinary.

Excellent, yeah. It is amazing, yeah.

-That that's a category slip, you know, it's a genuine sort of pun.

-That's a zeugma isn't it?

-It's like a zeugma, yeah.

-A zeugma.

-She only needs a couple more and she could do a...

-You get, that's a good word, so that's it, zeugma or zeugma, yeah.

-zeugma.

Slapstick, she once tied her trainer's shoelaces together

and then signed the words, "chase me."

Brilliant.

And the brilliant Miriam Rothschild, of whom you may have heard, she did

much work on pond life of various animals, and the extraordinary

life cycles of incredible species, but she also had a parrot

that could imitate her calling the dog and whistling and saying

for a walk, and the dog would arrive and then the parrot would laugh.

Extraordinary thing.

You know this joke, you must know it, it's a friend who has a parrot,

and the sports results are going and he goes, "Norwich one, Ipswich two."

And the parrot goes, "Oh, no! Ooh!"

And you're thinking "What's going on there?"

"Well, every time Norwich lose, the parrot cries and bursts into tears."

And he says, "Well, what happens when Norwich win?"

"I don't know, I've only had it four years!"

That came from the heart, ladies and gentlemen. There you are, anyway.

There are all kinds of different human laughter,

which have been categorised by a Dr Dirk Wildgruber,

of the University of Tubingen, in Deutschland.

There are, some types are joyful laughter...

ONE PERSON IN AUDIENCE LAUGHS

Thank you, audience!

That was sarcastic joyful laughter, which is slightly different.

Terrifying.

-Joyful laughter...

-BILL AND SARA LAUGH

-Social laughter.

-LAUGHS POLITELY

-Taunting laughter.

-LAUGHS OBNOXIOUSLY

Aaah. Oh, dear.

-Schadenfreude laughter.

-LAUGHS SMUGLY

Any other kinds that are in your head?

Laughter when people, you tell them something and then they laugh,

like they've got it and then they realise they don't, and they go, "Ha-ha! What?"

And there's also of course, the Sid James type of sexual laughter.

CACKLES

When we were doing Jonathon Creek, we had these two prop boys

and they used lots of rhyming slang.

And there was another one who didn't know any of it.

All the time he'd say. "What do they mean?"

One morning, they said,

"We had a lovely bit of Sinatra on in the van this morning."

And he went, "Ha-ha," the other fella.

"Ha-ha."

And they looked at him like,

"We were just playing some Frank Sinatra!"

LAUGHTER

He said, "Oh, sorry. I thought it was a slang thing."

That doesn't mean you laugh.

"Well, I just thought it was going to be funny cos it was a slang thing.

"Normally it's a slang thing and then we all laugh.

"I never understand it."

There's a very particular kind of laughter you get

when people occasionally listen to your sermon.

It's a sort of polite laugh, like what you get in a Shakespeare play.

Oh, yeah - teachers at Shakespeare.

-LAUGHS POLITELY

-You are a card!

Because even I...sin.

How do and when do rats get sad?

CROWD AWS

When they stop tickling them?

When you stop tickling them. Might be slightly disappointed.

Aw!

When they're cold. In the sewers, they all sleep together,

when the frost comes they all freeze to death...

A few found sleeping in a circle, and the reason they're all connected

is cos the urine that comes out of them constantly is frozen,

and it's just a solid urine disc with rats in it.

Sad, sad - think of the word sad.

Seasonal affective disorder.

-Seasonal affective disorder.

-In the winter.

-No!

They get sad in the summer?

The winter is for people like us who are diurnal,

who live by day.

Rats are nocturnal.

So we have circadian rhythms, and they have...?

For an extra point.

Circu...

Circanoctium.

Oh, circanoctia!

They have around-the-night rhythms,

we have around-the-day rhythms.

In Scandiwegian countries,

where in winter it's very dark for a very long time,

they use things almost like usherette trays,

with ultra-violet tubes,

and they get about an hour or two of that and it cheers them up,

cos melatonin is produced in the brain that cheers them up.

It's one of the things that cheers you up.

But they found, with rats, somatostatin,

which is a depressive, was caused in those that had too much sunlight.

So what do they provide? Sunglasses for the rats?

There you are.

Rats get sad in summer, not in winter.

Here's something that sounds ludicrous, but is no laughing matter.

What's a really ostentatious way to turn off a gas fire?

RICHARD'S SONG

Send a flood.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

You and your God!

Yes, rats...

It's trying to use, in a benign way,

the most powerful force that man has ever harnessed.

Sarcasm!

LAUGHTER

Call yourself a gas fire?!

Where would we be without sarcasm, eh?!

Sarcasm needs a pipe.

You need a pipe with sarcasm? Yeah, great(!)

It's the sarcasm...

It's the sarcasm slammer.

Yeah.

Fusion power.

Fission power is the one we've yet to harness.

We hope not, but fission is the one we have harnessed.

For nuclear bombs.

Yeah.

The first one was the A-bomb.

And the father of the H-bomb was...

Penn and Teller.

Edward Teller, you're absolutely right.

Teller, like a lot of scientists, was an idealist

and he felt that we had this enormous source of power, surely we can't only use it for weapons!

And he quoted the Bible - he quoted Isaiah, saying,

"We've got these weapons, let's use them for something peaceful."

What's the Isaiah quotation.

You would beat your sword into a ploughshare.

That's right! We'll beat your swords into ploughshares.

And he dreamt up all kinds of weird plans to use H-bombs,

like for example, widening the Panama Canal.

Yeah, I know, it seems a little bit speculative.

Crossrail.

Yeah, Crossrail!

What's that one? H2N2?

HS2.

HS2, yeah.

Through Buckinghamshire, just basically a huge...

HE MIMICS EXPLOSIONS

Finished!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Yeah, and they thought not just the Panama Canal,

we'll get one through...

Well anywhere really!

Using 22 nuclear bombs to build a massive road

and railway path through the Bristol Mountains in California -

Project Carryall.

There was another one,

using 1,000 nukes to blast a city-sized airship into space.

They spent money on all these - Operation Plowshare, it was called.

And the Russians did the same.

What's the smallest nuclear bomb you could have,

like to just knock out a bit of a building

if you were doing an extension?

Two things were actually tried, cos the rest were just shelved

and the money stopped coming in. One was detonating nukes underground

to create steam to generate electricity.

This was abandoned

when it turned out to be impossible to contain the explosions.

Using nukes for fracking natural gas.

Which worked, but the gas was radioactive.

Bit of a PR disaster in your kitchen...

Light the oven. My hair! My hair!

It's going to play very well in the Tory home counties.

Not only are we going to frack you, we're going to blow

you up with a nuclear device.

Exactly. But there was one very successful one the Russians did,

they used five times, four of them completely successful,

but none of them with any fallout that was destructive,

and that was putting out huge gas field fires.

And so successful it was, that the Americans considered

using it in the deep water...

The BP thing.

The BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah.

In the deep water horizon, as it was called.

They were going to nuke it?

-Well, they were, yeah.

-A lot of spin in that.

Look away now.

India's first nuclear device - do you know what it was

called and when it might have been?

It was a curry.

LAUGHTER

It was so strong...

..that it literally blew your head off.

The vindaloo bomb...

People's eyes were watering for 1,000 square miles!

God, that's so strong! Oh, the smell of it!

Aah!

It was actually called the Smiling Buddha.

It was set off in 1974.

Now for something a little more local.

Name some domestic appliances that really nobody wants.

RICHARD'S SONG

-Richard?

-In a vicarage, a tie rack.

LAUGHTER

That is good.

Very good, yes.

I can't take that away from you.

BILL'S SONG I appeal, I'm appealing, sir, that, just a very...

It's an act of great pedantry - that's not technically an appliance

Unless it's an electronic tie rack.

-RICHARD'S SONG

-An auto steam tie rack.

There are electric tie racks, yeah, there are tie racks that go, bzzzzz.

-Really?

-Yeah, there are, I promise you, electric ones.

-Such a thing exists?

-I promise you.

-Wow.

-And that actually takes us to what the right answer is,

when you said steam. Yeah?

Those Corby trouser presses that you have in hotel rooms,

-I've never heard of anyone using them.

-Brilliant.

Do you mean others don't? Am I the only one?

-You've used one?

-I use them.

-I

-use them.

-I've used them.

-Oh, OK, well, I've got that wrong.

-But not necessarily for trousers.

Anyway, there's a whole load of appliances that were

made in the 1920s and '30s, when a lot of British people were

starting to get a little bit more prosperous, just before the Crash.

And they thought about going "On the electric", as it used to be said.

"We're going on the electric."

And what would be the main, the killer app that would put them on the electric?

-The thing they wanted to have most.

-Electric light?

-Heat.

That would be one.

-Plug-in radio?

-The wireless set. Yeah.

-Yeah.

And who were the other main suppliers, other than electricity?

That had already been there.

-Gas.

-Gas.

They thought, well, what we'll do is provide gas-powered radios,

to stop people from going on the electric.

And there's an example of one.

And they put them out and they said, "Not only will you get the BBC,

"but you will warm the room slightly."

Slightly.

Through the glow of your contentment.

Increase the chances of your house exploding.

And not only did they produce wirelesses,

they produced trouser presses, oddly enough, washing machines,

washing-up machines, everything that you can think

of that is a household appliance, a white good, as we would now say.

There were gas-powered fridges, weren't there?

Yes, there were indeed. Very much so. But they just didn't catch on,

because electricity was just more reliable.

It's not that the gas actually powered the radio

so much as that the gas created the current that powered the radio.

So it was still electric, it's just you used your existing gas main.

How does that work? How can gas create electricity?

Get heat, and then you put it in a machine...

A special machine with a magnet in it.

Well, they burn coal for power stations.

That's turning a turbo - you haven't got a turbo.

It's the difference between cold and heat -

it's the thermoelectric effect.

Russians used it with kerosene, way out in Siberia

and places that were incredibly cold.

They actually recommended - God bless communism -

people open the window to hear the radio better.

So that the distinction between the cold outside

and the hot inside was even greater, which created this current.

Talking of radio, in the 1930s,

there was a magnificent programme that I would have loved.

There was a fellow called FH Wallace,

who was the Phil "The Power" Taylor of his day.

By which I mean...

Darts professional.

Yes, a great darts player.

And he played in The Alexander Arms in Eastbourne,

and he, on the radio, would throw three darts, from 301 down,

and his score would be announced, then there would be a pause while

people at home could throw three darts and write down their score

And if they beat him, they didn't get a prize,

they could say, "Pat yourself on the back when you go to work tomorrow."

That was a whole radio series.

I'm not saying people were easily pleased in those days but...

Why didn't they just fast forward to the internet

and people on those kind of Gala Bingo sites,

like, "You get a free £5."

They're just doing that on their own -

pat on the back, you lost 56 quid!

Anyway, moving on...

Now for some uneasy listening.

What's the most depressing radio programme of all time?

Oh, Simon Bates, by miles.

"But that's, surely that's the story of people who fell in love."

"She did die of the cancer. But..."

"He battled through the cancer and then here's their song.

"Too Drunk To Fuck by the great..."

STEPHEN LAUGHS

For those who are not familiar with what we're talking about,

Simon Bates used to run a series called Our Song.

-Our Tune.

-Our Tune.

-Our Tune.

HE SINGS TUNE

And people wrote in basically with the most depressing story of how

-they were in love with someone who then died of some appalling disease.

-Oh, God, it was nauseating. Christ!

And he'd read out the, "We met and we fell in love," and all that. "She was then..."

-It was a series of awful disasters, accidents.

-Diagnosed with this or run over.

She was run over by a vehicle, she lost all the use of her limbs and...

-I'm sure people sent them in and just made it up.

-I think so.

-They must have done.

"Sadly she did die, but to this day, you know, Knock Three Times is our song and always will be."

She was caught up in a nuclear explosion

that was used to put out a fire.

Then a rat burrowed its way through her leg

and wee'd in her eye.

And she struggled on, with a gas radio for a companion.

This was Radio One,

-this was supposed to be the hip young station.

-Yeah. This was hip.

I have to say I have several correspondents who would say

-that Saturday Live was the most depressing radio station.

-Really?

Yeah.

KLAXON

-We don't think your radio show...

-No, I like it.

-Well, we have to, you know of this thing now

that you're interactive with your audience, so actually, as you're broadcasting live

you have a screen in front of you, with a Twitter feed on.

-Not advisable, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say.

-No.

It's a very good moral and spiritual discipline, as everything you

say is immediately commented on by some regular Twitter...

With #SaturdayLive, or #RichardColes is a...

I remember one time...

#Smug-Maester twat vicar.

Oh, crumbs!

I swear there is someone who does #smug-maester

and another one #twatvicar.

-Oh, that's horrible.

-Oh, Richard, that's so unfair.

-And it's my mother.

LAUGHTER

I did a thing once, I wrote an article in which the joke was,

in the article was on me, but I did call Frank Lampard a twat.

And it was a joke.

Anyway, he complained about it

and I thought, "Oh, I'd better find the article, because I can't even

"remember what I wrote," So I Googled Frank Lampard twat, nothing came up,

and then I Googled my own name with twat, and so much stuff came up.

-That's dangerous.

-That was really dangerous.

-And then I started Googling my name with any other term of abuse.

-Ooh!

And I had really one of the worst evenings of my life.

Never ever do that. Never Google yourself.

And that should be like one of the,

that should be, you know, a commandment.

-You know. "Thou shalt not Google thyself."

-"Thou shalt not Google thyself."

There was an awful time, which I think has passed,

-when if you put in the C word into Google, the first return...

-Your name would come up!

No.

Thank you! Virtually...

Excuse me?! Virtually that.

-If you typed in the C word, the first thing that came up was "Englishman."

-Oh.

If you want to learn some new words, you could always do the Guardian Easter piece,

on the online edition, and then read the below the line comments afterwards.

-Oh, it's like looking into a sewer, isn't it?

-That's quite fun.

-Let's not go there.

I don't know, sometimes it's good though, I have to say.

There was Ronan Keating doing a version of Fairy Tale Of New York, by The Pogues.

-He didn't, did he?

-Yes, he did.

-It is as horrific as it sounds. He has to...

-McGowan he is not.

He has to Irish himself up a bit to be in the Pogues.

But there's a tsunami of hate which of course accompanies it on the YouTube comments.

But my favourite YouTube comment of all time, it just says:

"This is the worst thing that ever happened."

And it sort of is!

I used to do this listener complaint programme for Radio 5, when that first started,

there used to be live people calling in, and there was a woman who phoned up once,

and I saw her name, it was Margery from Hemel Hempstead.

And I took the call and I said, "Margery, from Hemel Hempstead, what's your complaint?"

And she said, "I'm absolutely disgusted with everything." and put the phone down.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Oh, bless her, bless her.

Well, the most depressing radio of all time may have been

Simon Bates, it certainly isn't Saturday Live, which I urge

you to listen to every Saturday, with Richard at the microphone.

Drahtfunk. Drahtfunk.

Drahtfunk.

Yeah. Wire radio. And what happened is, the Swiss and the Norwegians

and the Swedish discovered that they could use,

first of all electricity, which they had bored holes through

the mountains for, they could use electricity to transmit radio,

and then, when phone lines were installed, phone.

And the Germans used this in the war.

And they used it for very depressing broadcasts about bomber raids

that were coming over, because it couldn't be scrambled.

And nor would the bombers be able to use live radio that the

Germans had, to fix their position, so they could

close their radio stations down, during the night, and use these.

And German people would listen and they'd get grid references,

you know, there's a bomber wave coming and it's on F14 and

the people of Stuttgart or wherever it might be would go, "Oh, God, it's coming towards us."

And they'd be able to get into the shelters. So, it was depressing.

It was depressing radio, it was always bad news.

-Did they play songs in-between?

-No, they didn't.

- Missing a trick there. - The Beach Boys.

Have you ever heard Radio Pyongyang?

-Never have.

-You've got to listen to it.

It's mostly songs about the Great Leader and how marvellous he is,

interspersed with incredibly terrifying

broadcasts by the lady who read the news,

who's got that rather dramatic sort of thing.

The awful thing is, if you buy a radio in North Korea,

-it's pre-tuned.

-Of course.

You can only get Radio Pyongyang.

That's the only thing you can get.

But people try to smuggle in sets from China for a bit of variety.

You'll get Gardener's Question Time.

Anyway, moving on.

Alan, would I enjoy kissing any of the gunner's daughters?

Yes, you would. No, you wouldn't.

-There are no daughters.

-Well...

-By kissing, do you mean...?

Yes. In all those cases, you're right.

You're right to be cagey. Of course it's nothing to do with The Arsenal.

Isn't there a band, there's a band from Seattle called Kissing The Gunner's Daughter.

-Is there really?

-Yes, there is, yeah.

-Well, do you know what it refers to?

I do actually, yes. It's a naval term, isn't it?

-Yes, it is naval.

-It's a rather unpleasant term.

Describe.

For being strapped to a cannon and then being beaten?

-Yes, whipped with the famous...

-The cat o' nine tails.

-With the cat o' nine tails. Absolutely right.

-Yes.

-It was horrific.

What's extraordinary is that it's still in use.

Not in the British Navy, or not in Britain.

Did you know that the victim had to make their own cat?

-Often they did, not always, but often they did.

-Yeah.

Sometimes it was their best friend, which was miserable.

That's right, you'd make out of blancmange.

Oh, this, yes, it's all I had.

There's another naval punishment, you can get "firked."

I'm sorry?

You can get firked.

-Explain?

-You get firked...

-If you're... This is true, I'm not making it up.

-Yeah, don't keep saying it, explain it.

It was the punishment,

if you were a cook in the galley and you ruined the meal, you got firked.

I'm not making that up.

You really like saying it though, don't you?

Just keep saying it, man.

I just can't, I don't know what you mean, Stephen.

But they would take the staves from a firkin and beat you with that,

and it was called being firked.

Oh, a firkin being a large barrel.

A firkin being, well, not a very large barrel,

but they, you were beaten with the staves from a firkin, firked. That's true.

Wow, that's brilliant. Well, also, apart from the gunner's daughter,

at the time the Royal Navy enlisted boys as young as nine,

who were running errands and so on, helped with the cooking.

And these cabin boys were punished in a marginally more humane

way, by being bent over a gun and lashed on the bare bottom.

This was called "Kissing the gunner's daughter".

And the lash itself was known as the "boy's pussy".

Which sounds all wrong.

Or it was called the "boy's cat" or just "pussy".

It had only five strands of whip cord, with no knots in it.

It was sort of um, Sony's My First Cat 'O Nine Tails.

Isn't it?

Yeah, its true level.

It was the innocent version. And that was kissing the gunner's daughter. Pretty nasty.

From lashings to lese-majeste.

Why was George III very nearly, literally, toast is 1776?

1776, you say?

It's a rather important year...

RICHARD'S SONG

Was it the firing of the colonies?

Very good.

Well, it is the year of course of American independence.

But the fact is, there's a rather marvellous MP,

who dies in 1813,

and was well ahead of his time and

about whom more should be known.

His name was Hartley, David Hartley,

and he was a scientist, a friend of Benjamin Franklin

and was the first MP to present a bill opposing slavery.

Decades ahead of anyone else.

But his main claim to fame, was him work on fireproofing of houses,

which he achieved by placing metal sheets under the floorboards,

so the joists wouldn't catch fire.

And they were so successful that he invited George III

to his house in Putney,

which was a special fire-proof house.

Breakfast was served in one of the rooms,

the kettle was boiled on a fire made on the bare floorboards

Hartley went upstairs, set fire to a bed,

which set fire to the curtains,

while Hartley lit two more fires on the stairs,

so it's like a sort of stuntman,

one under the stairs - all burn merrily.

And they all died of smoke inhalation.

He put fires under the rooms,

on the floor below the royal family, with tar, pitch and kindling,

and set fire to it.

And everyone survived, it was all fine.

And he was made somewhat of a local hero...

Local fire officer.

It all, as it were, caught on,

cos a lot of people thought, well, this is the way to avoid fires.

It was a most impressive thing.

It would be an amazing assassination attempt,

to say, "Hey, I've made a fire-proof house.

"Why don't you come round and I'll show you?"

Ah, Guy Fawkes number two. See you later!

-True.

-Teething issues.

Fortunately, they trusted him.

But his major and lasting achievement is the he invented

the fire curtain for theatres.

So in the interval, when you see a fire curtain drop down rather dully,

or something that just says "fire curtain"...

So he's the real Mr Sands.

Exactly. Explain about Mr Sands.

Sometimes it's Dr Sands.

They do this in the tube and in theatres,

if you hear an announcement asking for Dr Sands,

it means there's a fire somewhere in the building.

So if your name is actually Mr Sands and you want to go to the theatre,

and you go there and ask for your tickets,

people will start running away.

Theatre's burnt down all the time, didn't they?

-Extraordinarily so.

-There was a lovely story of, was it Sheridan, his theatre

caught fire and he was outside and he was sitting there having a drink.

Someone said, "Mr Sheridan, surely you should be throwing buckets of water on this."

He said, "Can't a man take sack by his own fireside?"

The only difference now in the Globe in Southbank,

the only difference between that and the original is that

you're not allowed to have a thatched roof in London any more.

It's the only difference from the Elizabethan one.

Yes, Shakespeare's Globe caught fire and was put out by beer.

-Was it?

-Yeah, in his day.

Which is rather pleasing - I don't know why, but it is.

Now, let's get a little lachrymose. What are Dutch tears?

I don't know.

Dutch courage is when you drink booze, it's a euphemism for something.

Well, because we went to war with Holland so many times,

at least three Dutch wars, that we tended to use the word Dutch,

Dutch wife, Dutch uncle, Dutch, you know, courage.

-So it'll be some sort of tear drop thing.

-It is a tear shaped thing.

Actually, from Mecklenburg, or at least it was introduced to...

Britain from Mecklenburg, by Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

Does that mean anything to you? I don't know.

Why are you saying that in that way?

Prince Rupert of the Rhine, played by Timothy Dalton,

-in the film Cromwell, you may remember, a very dashing figure.

-Of course.

Probably was responsible for Charles I losing the civil war.

-Is it some sort of ammunition?

-It's not.

-In fact I'm going to show you what it is...

-Is it a decorative thing?

It's very extraordinary, I'm going to pick up this object here.

It's a light box. And I'm going to turn it on.

I'm going to get my little camera here.

And maybe you can see, there we are.

It's a sort of tadpole-y like thing.

What it is, is a...

If I turn it you can see this is actually a polarised filter,

so what you're seeing is this moire effect in the middle.

Because if you take an ordinary drop of molten glass

and you drop it into cold water it instantly solidifies, of course.

The outer part, the part that hits the water solidifies first.

The inner part doesn't have time to get as hard as the outer part,

tries to contract, there's no space for it to contract,

so there is a kind of tension built into it.

This a kind of time bomb waiting to happen,

but it's held together by the hard outer casing.

And if I were to clip off the tail, it would

release all the energy inside it.

And it would explode.

And not only would it explode, it would

explode at a speed three times greater than a sniper's bullet.

Incredibly fast. In fact so fast...

So that's how much kind of energy is stuffed inside it.

So fast I'm going to have to do it in a little bowl.

So I'm going to put the camera aside here.

But firstly, I'll show you that it's really solid,

because I can smack it with a hammer and it won't even vaguely be hurt.

Look.

Maybe you can start being a cameraman now, young Alan.

That's it, put those on just in case it breaks. There you are.

-Ready, sir.

-Yeah. Now can you see that there?

-I don't know, it hasn't got any kind of view-finder.

-No, no, look at, there.

-It's like the Chuckle Brothers.

-Oh, look, there.

APPLAUSE

That's horrific!

Oh, no.

That's glass and I'm absolutely hammering it...

-All right? Mind your finger.

-That is so bloody solid.

This looks like one of the weirdest court scenes I've ever seen.

Order!

-I will have order!

-Order!

So, you have to believe me that you hammer it and hammer it

and hammer it and hammer it, and we've now got one, I'm going to put

these gloves on, because health and safety above all is my watch word. There we are.

But also they look good.

And, oh, Alan, you old queen.

I'm just filling in, I'm just filling in.

So here we are. Now...

Oh, that's, that's making me feel giddy.

I don't know if you can see here.

But I've got one in here. Now you have to try and be...

Oh, don't.

That's awful.

What you have to try and be now is try and be a good cameraman, Alan.

Can you, let's see, can you see...?

Can you see that one in there?

And all I have to do is try and clip the tail.

Oh, Lord.

Oh, God. I'm quite scared.

If I clip the tail, it should release the energy of this...

Whoa!

There you are, the whole thing exploded. So having hit it there...

-APPLAUSE

-Dutch tears. Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you to my glamorous assistant.

We can probably see a little slowed down version of that.

-Wow.

-It's pretty amazing.

And that's just clipping the absolute end of the tail.

Even though you can smash the head of it and it won't be hurt.

We have, in the audience, Stephen Ramsey, from Imperial College,

who's kindly leant us these Rupert's Tears. Stephen, are you there?

-Hi, Steven.

-Thank you very much.

When was this effect discovered?

I think, when you had the glass blowers working from the hot furnace,

they gathered the glass on their irons, and to get rid of the excess glass on their iron,

they would stand them into the hot water, and some of these droplets

would drop off and get the super-hardened toughened glass,

and I think someone, probably by accident thought,

"I'll snap the end off that."

And suddenly had an explosion.

I believe that super-hard toughened effect is what we all

-rely on for windscreens in cars.

-Yes. That's how toughened glass

was first made, by pulling the glass and blowing cold air onto the surface

-to super-cool it.

-Theoretically, could it put out a gas fire?

When Will Byrne approached me to make these Rupert Drops for the show,

and in my lifetime as a glass blower, I've made them many times,

and I always have a two-litre glass vessel that I put on my bench

and drop the hot glass in.

And I dropped one in and thought, "Oh, good."

And as I watched, it exploded and the shockwave blew a two-inch hole

-in the glass vessel.

-Wow.

Thank you for introducing Will Byrne, who is our Science Elf.

And thank you, Stephen Ramsay.

That was very exciting, I love a laboratory lark.

Now it's time to tweak the tail of General Ignorance.

So fingers on buzzers, please. Here's a question about Lent.

Whom should you visit on Mothering Sunday?

RICHARD'S SONG

Yes?

Your vicar.

-Explain.

-Well, Mothering Sunday was the return of usually

children in service to the mother church of where they lived.

-That's correct.

-So it wasn't going to see your mother, you'd go to the mother church,

-and they'd pick primroses to take to their nearest and dearest.

-Correct.

-That's what I think.

-You're absolutely right.

And as a churchman I suppose you should know that.

Most of us believe, of course, it is just a greeting card

opportunity or a flower opportunity to be nice to your mother,

which is what it's become. But it's actually nothing to do with your biological mother,

it's to do with your mother church, as you rightly say.

Do you think that excuse is going to hold up next year for any of us?

But I think I knew when I was young that it was called

Mothering Sunday, rather than Mother's Day.

Mothering, yes. It's always been Mothering Sunday.

They tend to call it Mother's Day now, don't they?

-It's just another chance to sell another card.

-Oh, totally.

Do you know sometimes, a greetings card is the most marked-up thing on general sale.

But I said, what about cinema popcorn?

-Ooh, very good.

-Oh, no.

-The mark-up.

-Oh, it must be enormous.

-I thought it was eggs.

Eggs?

-Because an omelette costs so much more than an egg.

-That's true.

LAUGHTER

Your mind works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

On Mothering Sunday you visited your mother church,

not necessarily your mother.

Now, what colour are the flags on the moon?

Do they look different when you're there? Are there no flags?

-There's no moon. Oh, God.

-There are flags.

I just feel about 100 klaxons waiting for me.

Five times bitten, five times shy.

Yeah?

-RICHARD'S SONG

-Are they grey?

Grey is probably a reasonable answer.

One thing you can be absolutely certain is they're not red, white and blue.

The temperature extremes are really remarkable on the moon.

From 100 degrees Celsius heat for 14 days

and then 14 days of 150 degrees minus Celsius.

And so it's going through all that.

Plus, there's no atmosphere, and so no protection from ultraviolet light.

And we know enough what a set of curtains or a sofa that's in,

you know, daylight, in a couple of years can get faded,

so you can imagine what a flag would be like.

And they're made of nylon,

so bleached white probably powdered nothingness by now.

This came up at Mother's Union the other day, the space...

-The Voyager...

-That's my favourite...

-So much does.

-The Voyager space craft, yes.

-Yes.

-Still going.

-The furthest man-made object from earth.

-Yeah.

It's 1977. Would it look scruffy?

That's a really good question.

I mean, would the paint have gone, in, I don't know, solar...?

I imagine when it went through the Kuiper belt and things like that,

-it probably would have got a bit of bashing.

-It would have had a few knocks and dents.

My favourite thing about the Voyager that I like is that

they think that it's left our solar system, they're not sure.

And they've estimated that the time it will take to reach

the next solar system is 40,000 years.

I know. It's phenomenal, isn't it?

And it's going to go out of radio transaction in about ten year's time and then it's just gone.

And I thought West Anglian Trains were bad, but there you are.

Anyway, all the stars and stripes on the moon are now plain white,

or possibly grey, if they've survived at all.

What was the first man-made sonic boom?

-RICHARD'S SONG

-Whip crack.

Whip crack. Whip crack-away. Whip crack-away.

KLAXON

You're right - whip cracks are sonic booms.

There's been recent development

in the field of sonic booms,

or in the field of a strange thing called food physics.

Oh, dear.

You wouldn't think there was such a thing as food physics.

-Is it popcorn?

-It might be popcorn.

It's basically crunchy food.

It's a bizarre idea that someone might think,

"Hang on, do we really understand crunchy food?"

Dr van Vliet, a Dutch food physicist,

spent the last seven years figuring out how crunch works.

And he basically said crispiness and crunchiness appeal to us

because they signal freshness.

The staler the chip, obviously the quieter it is,

or any fruit that gets soft and mushy.

For food to go "crunch" when it's bitten, there has to be

what's called a brittle fracture.

A sudden high-speed crack which actually

travels at at least 300 metres per second.

Which is the speed of sound.

So you're getting a sonic boom from...

-CRUNCHING NOISE

-Yeah.

So in a sense we eat by our ears, cos a lot of our interest

and appetite is engendered by the fact we know food is crunchy.

But you wouldn't want any crunchy hummus.

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the way to go - crunchy hummus.

It's a good name for a band anyway.

Each crunch in crunchy foods is a teeny-weeny sonic boom.

And with that, it's the scores.

I simply don't know what to say.

Despite his superior knowledge and his holiness,

in last place with minus eight, it's the Reverend Richard Coles.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Third place, with minus six is Bill Bailey.

APPLAUSE

Third again.

I just don't know how I'm going to say this,

in second place with minus one...

is Sara Pascoe.

APPLAUSE

I can't believe Alan's the winner.

Yeah. You've got there before me, because in first place, and this may

be a first for first place, with plus four is Alan Davies!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It only remains for me to thank Sara, Bill, Richard and Alan.

I leave you with the last words of someone who was not

so much scraping the barrel as draining it.

Dylan Thomas's last triumphant uttering...

"I've had 18 straight whiskies, I think that's the record."

And then he died. Good night.

APPLAUSE