APPLAUSE, CHEERING
Well, a very, very, very, very good evening to you, ladies and gentlemen
and welcome to QI, the BBC's answer to Pop Idol,
otherwise known as Bone Idle.
To educate, inform and entertain, these are my intentions,
and paving the road to hell with them tonight are Rich Hall,
Clive Anderson, Phill Jupitus
and Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
The four panellists of the Apocalypse.
May the Lord Reith have mercy on your souls.
Let's have a round on the buzzers and bells.
Um...Rich, how do you sound?
FIRST FEW NOTES OF BIG BEN
And Clive goes...
- NEXT FEW NOTES OF BIG BEN - Hey, wait a minute.
LAUGHTER And Phill goes...
NEXT FEW NOTES OF BIG BEN
And Alan goes...
CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS
LAUGHTER
Excellent.
Right, gentlemen. Bombs away.
Alan, have you heard about the Mexican kamikaze squadron?
(IMITATES SPEEDY GONZALES) Kamikazes! Are they like that?
That's right. Only Mexican.
(FAKE ACCENT) I care not for myself, only my country.
LAUGHTER
Very good indeed. Very good indeed.
- For the emperor! - LAUGHTER
Andale, andale.
I just imagine a bloke in a big hat riding a donkey into the Alamo.
LAUGHTER That was...
They eat so many refried beans, they fart themselves to death
and they explode in front of the enemy.
Well, it's an oddly interesting thought
because kamikaze's the Japanese for "divine wind".
- "Divine wind"? Really? - That's what it means, oddly enough.
- Um...it is a Japanese word. - God's guffs.
Yeah. But these... LAUGHTER
- These little Mexican critters... - They're not people.
Exactly. Not people.
..were deployed by the US Army in the Second World War
against the Japanese.
They're not like the dolphins they deployed in the war against Iraq?
In the Gulf War? No, they're not.
They let them out and then they pissed off.
What they call the Mark 8 MMS - marine mammal system.
What are the odds that the Iraqi Navy will be leaning out from a boat
with a flaming hoop like that?
LAUGHTER
Hang on. But a critter is... would be some sort of a desert fox.
No. Uh... LAUGHTER
- Well... - (LAUGHS)
- Very close, actually. - It's gotta be an insect, hasn't it?
Uh...between an insect and a fox you might say.
- Between an insect and a fox. - You might say.
- In size or in... - It's kind of...
In fact, it is more fox-like than insect-like, but it flies.
- It's quite fox-like. - A bat.
- A bat is the answer. - A Mexican bat.
- Oh!
You're not gonna like this. It's horrible...
How do you know that's Mexican without a sombrero?
Well, it's actually... LAUGHTER
It's the breed of the bat. It's a Mexican free-tailed bat.
- I actually know the answer to this. - Do you? Give it to us, Phill.
It's the...the American Navy, in their wisdom,
because they say these bats would fly up under the eaves and nest,
and they thought, "Well, if they see, out at sea,
a Japanese aircraft carrier,
or the hangars of the airplanes, they'll nest."
- Oh, yeah. - And they filled 'em with explosives.
- Right? - Yeah.
- LAUGHTER
But what would happen is is where they were sewed up
the bats would go, "What's that?"
And they'd start nibbling at themselves
and exploding in an untoward fashion.
LAUGHTER
You're very close, Phill.
It's not actually the navy and it's not boats.
- Is it not? - It's...
I'm very close in that I'm nowhere near at all.
Well, no, you got the principle.
In aeroplanes, hundreds of these bats with little waistcoasts...
LAUGHTER I know it sounds absurd.
They went there with napalm in them and a detonator
and the idea was to drop them over Japanese towns round about dawn,
so that as the light came, as all bats will,
to escape the light they would go into the...
As you say, the eaves and the rafters of the houses,
and then, at a particular time, would detonate,
causing these whole towns to burn
because most Japanese towns were made of wood and paper.
You've gotta set the napalm off, so they have to follow them out...
Well, there is some sort of ignition device incorporated...
- What do they... - Was it a book of matches?
LAUGHTER
The...um...they actually...
..there is a poetic justice, however.
Sorry. You...as a friend of our furry creatures,
you will be pleased to know that poetic justice prevailed
and that before they ever used these bats against the Japanese,
they were testing and the wind changed
and the bats that had been dropped
on a target little wooden city in the desert
were blown back to the headquarters of the American Army and blew it up.
- LAUGHTER - I don't find it poetic.
- Do you not find it poetic? - Well, I'm American.
LAUGHTER
As I understand it, the kamikaze pilots...
..they only gave them enough fuel to go one way, right?
Yes.
They do that with all planes, though.
LAUGHTER
- Technically... - LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE
So, technically, all airplanes are kamikaze planes.
- Really. - LAUGHTER
- Unless you buy a return ticket. - LAUGHTER
This is why I think that planes should run on AA batteries.
You wanna go to London and New York? All right.
You have to buy 200 AA batteries.
They only bring enough batteries to get you there. No wastage.
You can always get them at the airport.
- Yeah. - That's true.
And then if you run out over the ocean
somebody's got, like, a Walkman or something
- you could get some more batteries... - LAUGHTER
But what if, under the plane,
the bit of ribbon that you pull the batteries out with hasn't...
- LAUGHTER - Where's that gone?
And so you have to get the end of a biro and...
LAUGHTER
- You're hanging underneath a 747... - 35,000 feet.
..trying to dig out 32 AA batteries with a biro.
Well, none of this is as mad as a bat with a napalm waistcoat.
- Yes. - But it's like a step.
Cos one minute they're trying to get little bats
with little napalm to blow up, and then, "OK, that didn't work.
An atomic bomb, then. We'll blow up two cities."
- And that... - Clive, I'm glad you said that.
That brings me to my next question, which I'm gonna address to Rich.
Which comedian went and dropped an atomic bomb on Japan?
That would mean, basically, which comedian bombed in Japan.
- (LAUGHS) - And that would have been me.
Did you bomb in Japan?
I bombed so horribly in Japan that I...
In front of an English-speaking audience?
- No. Japanese-speaking audience. - LAUGHTER
I think I've put my finger on what went wrong.
- That had a lot to do with it. - LAUGHTER
No. A comedian member of...what you might call a troupe of comedians.
- One of the Stooges. - No. Better known than the Stooges.
- Abbott and Costello. - Woo-woo-woo-woo!
- Why, you knucklehead! - LAUGHTER
You dropped that atomic bomb on Japan!
Whadda do you wanna do that for? Why, I oughta... Oh!
LAUGHTER
They'd never have won the war if those blokes had had a plane.
- Oliver Hardy. - No. This man didn't drop the bomb.
He contributed materially to the technology
behind the dropping of the bomb.
Very specifically behind the dropping of the bomb.
Well, he...he invented...
everyone else was working on the nuclear explosion.
He invented little doors that went...chi-chi-chi, chi-chi-chi.
They were a particular clamp.
There's a particular clamp that held the bomb to the aeroplane.
- The Bob Hope... - The Crazy Gang.
Marx Brothers.
The best known of them all, the Marx Brothers.
- Zeppo. Zeppelin-o. - That one there.
The one with the ring round him. What's his name?
- Karl. - No.
LAUGHTER
We've got, reading from left to right,
Harpo and Groucho, and on the right-hand side there's Chico.
- Zeppo. - Zeppo is the right answer.
- The bomb door designer. - Zeppo Marx.
And he joined after Gummo, also known as Who-o...
LAUGHER ..left the stage act.
He was in five of the films, the last one being Duck Soup,
and he left to become an agent and to set up a company
that specialised in engineering and design.
- Called Blammo. - Uh...called...
LAUGHTER It should have been called Blammo.
And he came up with the clamp that help the bomb
as well as a wristwatch he came up with
that detected your pulse and gave an alarm
when you were having a heart attack.
LAUGHTER
And...I mean, Groucho said he was a lousy actor
and couldn't wait to get out of the Marx Brothers,
but he also added, and everyone seems to be in agreement,
that he was far and away, off-screen,
the funniest and the wittiest of the Marx Brothers.
Harpo could actually talk in real life.
LAUGHTER No!
- Oh, now you've shattered all my... - I read his autobiography.
He spent the first 15 years of his life nicking stuff
and he's really proud of it.
They all did. They were gangsters in New York. Big hoodlums.
The Three Stooges are flying planes and they're the Gangs of New York.
The Gangs of New York. He's got the stovepipe hat.
We're gonna kill you if you don't give me the money.
LAUGHTER
He had a long career as an after-dinner speaker
later on, Harpo, cos he could just stand up and say,
"Unaccustomed as I am..." and everyone fell about.
LAUGHTER
Lot of the early 20th-century gangs in New York were Jewish.
Dutch Schultz, people like that,
right up to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.
I think that a lot of the Scorsese oeuvre would be a lot nicer
if people had horns and... (BEEPS HORN)
- You know, De Niro... - LAUGHTER
..had had a funny hat.
"Eh, Johnny, whats-a you gonna do?" (BEEPS HORN)
LAUGHTER
"You think I'm funny how? I'm gonna play this (BLEEP) harp over here."
LAUGHTER
"I amuse you?!" (BEEPS HORN)
LAUGHTER
Fantastic.
Now, Phill, one for you, I think.
What goes "woof, woof, boom"?
A suicide corgi.
LAUGHTER
The next Norwegian entry for the Eurovision song contest.
LAUGHTER
# My heart goes woof, woof, boom. #
Terrierist.
LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE
Oh, excellent. Joy upon joy.
Very, very good. You must have some points for that.
Excellent. No, you kind of said it...
Well, we know how grotesque the Americans can be,
sending bats into combat,
and now...uh...the Russian flag, as you see, waving behind you.
- (GASPS) Dog with a bomb in it? - And the Russians could be just...
Dogs with bombs tied to them is what we're looking for.
- (ALL EXCLAIM) - I know. It's...
- Oh, man. - ..what man is capable of, isn't it?
- (ALL EXCLAIM) - It's too grotesque.
The story...the story is horrible.
They trained them by making them very, very angry...
Throw a stick at a tank and he'd just go.
Well, no... LAUGHTER
- (BARKS) - Do you know...
LAUGHTER
Why don't they just throw a bomb at the tank for God's sake?
Instead of making the dog go...
Because they're armour-plated and the point is
they would keep the dogs very, very hungry
and then put food under a tank, which is the vulnerable part,
which you can't get a bomb at easily.
Why not just put a bomb there?
While you're putting the food down, why not just put a bomb there?
LAUGHTER No, no. No, no.
- This is in their training. - Oh, with the training. Sorry.
So they become used to looking under tanks for food...
- Oh, dear. - LAUGHTER
I thought you meant on the battlefield.
Whose job was it to change gear on that dog?
LAUGHTER
- That is the trigger... - That's the trigger for the bomb.
- When he gets under the tank. - This is just...
I bet you all eat sheep, though, don't you, on a Sunday.
- No, no. - LAUGHTER
Mmm. Lovely sheep.
Don't worry. That one didn't blow up.
- LAUGHTER - He lives on a farm now.
- LAUGHTER
- His back's broken, but... - LAUGHTER
I...um...I have to tell you that there was, again, poetic justice.
The dogs just turned round in the battle
and saw the tanks which are Russian-shaped,
which they recognised as having food under them,
and so they went and blew up their own tanks.
LAUGHTER
So...uh...the Russians started to shoot all the dogs...
They didn't shoot that one. They didn't shoot that one.
He lives on a farm. They really love him. They stroke him a lot.
LAUGHTER
Anyway, onto our next picture question.
Why is this picture a double first?
Are they gonna use the penguin to blow up the Scotsman?
LAUGHTER
It's...it's a brilliant plan.
The first time the pipes are played in Antarctica.
Yes. It's probably the first time
a penguin was ever subjected to any kind of music.
That penguin, two seconds later, went like that...
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Is this the first ever Edinburgh festival?
LAUGHTER
- Would that it were. No. Did you... - (LAUGHS)
Would that it were, Stephen Robinson.
"Ah, would that it were. Would that it were."
LAUGHTER
(IMITATES ROBERT ROBINSON) LAUGHTER
No...uh...
"This one for mother and oldest son."
"Did you know that..."
..uh...that 50% of pipers are...
I don't mean news pipers, I mean bag pipers...um...
50% of pipers suffer from repetitive strain injury
and also are hard of hearing.
- LAUGHTER - Well, that is poetic justice.
That... Exactly! Very good. Excellent.
Oh, how neat. APPLAUSE
No, it's the first postcard ever to be sent from Antarctica.
So, obviously you don't bring a lot of stuff to Antarctica.
This guy had to drag his bag...
What if they had hit a crevasse?
Too much weight and it turned out it was just because he'd brought a...
You never know. It might have saved his life.
It might have caught in the crack and he'd swing from it.
LAUGHTER
That did come out oddly, but you know what I mean.
Now, what is the common name of the species Ursus arctos?
Ursus arctos.
- Well, it's the polar bear, is it? - Polar bear, do you say?
ALARM BLARES Oh, dear, dear, dear.
- No, it's not the polar bear. - That was a bear trap.
It was indeed a bear pit. A bear trap.
No, no, no. No, the common name is... Two common names.
If you're American there's one name, if you're European another.
- Grizzly. - What's Ursus mean?
Ursus is the Latin for bear
and arctos is the Greek for bear.
- Oh. So it's a bear bear... - It's a bear bear, yeah.
What's a hair bear in Latin?
LAUGHTER
- We shall have to find out. - They were great, weren't they?
The Hair Bear Bunch.
You can join in at some level I find.
LAUGHTER
There's always a way in.
- There's a grizzly. - That's a grizzly bear, yes.
Ursus arctos, or the brown bear.
The point is that the arctic itself...
The Arctic, and therefore, of course, the Antarctic,
is named after the bear, not the other way round.
It was the region of the bear,
where you see Ursa Major, the great bear.
The constellation in the sky is always over the north.
so the arctic's named after a bear,
so the Antarctic is named after the ant and the bear.
(LAUGHS) Yes, that's... LAUGHTER
- Ant and Bear. - Why would that be?
- The Adventures of Ant and Bear. - They're like Ant and Dec.
Yes. Exactly. LAUGHTER
Only easier to tell apart, obviously.
LAUGHTER And I think easier to tolerate.
- And... - LAUGHTER
- APPLAUSE - Oh, Ant and Dec.
I love their work.
They won't come on the show now you've said that.
Oh, bother. Bother, bother, bother.
LAUGHTER How am I going to live with myself?
- Uh... - No, they're good!
Write them a letter. Antony and December you should...
They could be walking up and down under here as we speak.
LAUGHTER
- They're not... - Ant is always on the left.
- Oh, is that how you can tell? - Always on the left.
So reading from left to right they're in alphabetical order.
- Ant and Dec. Ant and Dec. - Easy.
And it's weird, even when you go around them and go from behind,
they still... somehow it works.
Like the eyes following you round the room.
It's like the moon going with you up the M1.
Ant and Dec always.
No, the polar bear is actually Ursus maritimus, as if you cared.
Um...how do polar bears disguise themselves?
- Uh... - LAUGHTER
They stand in front of anything white.
That's probably the right answer I suspect, yeah.
- What, do they dress up in something? - No, no.
There is, apparently, a misconception
that they cover their nose with their left paw
in a sort of ostrich burying its head in the sand sort of way,
thinking that it disguises themselves.
Like that. Like our model. Our demonstrator is showing us now.
- Where's Alan? Where's Alan gone? - Where's Alan gone?
LAUGHTER Where has he gone?
Are you sure they're not just checking
whether they've got bad breath?
LAUGHTER
I don't understand, if you're a 12-foot, 800-pound bear,
why you have to disguise yourself at all?
- That's absolutely spot-on. - Bear tax.
Who is... Bear tax?
LAUGHTER
- No bears here. - LAUGHTER
Alan? I haven't seen him.
LAUGHTER
Or they stand in...like that
and they put three bits of coal there and a carrot in their mouth.
LAUGHTER
Delicious. Now, there we are.
This brings us neatly to our general ignorance round,
in which we ask Alan is this a rhetorical question?
No.
Quite right. LAUGHTER
So...
LAUGHTER
- Thinkers... - Oh! I hate those.
LAUGHTER
What's the point of rhetorical questions?
Hey. LAUGHTER
So, fingers on the buzzers.
Uh...how many states are there in the United States of America?
CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS Alan.
- 50. - Oh, dear!
ALARM BLARES Oh, dear, oh, dear.
- It's 46, technically. - Oh.
Because four of them are not states.
- There they are. - Ah.
That's Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
- They're commonwealths. - They're commonwealths. Exactly.
All four of them are actually commonwealths rather than states.
What that constitutionally means...
Is their governance any different from the other?
Do they have governors and they have the same sort of...
..when conducting their business?
There's so many straight lines. Isn't God odd, you know.
LAUGHTER The odds against that...
They've all got straight lines apart from one.
Only one state in the US hasn't got a straight line in it.
Oh, that's a good question. I should imagine that would be Hawaii.
- It is. Well done. I knew you'd... - Oh. Oh. Well, there you are.
No, it was just a guess. Anyway... Gosh, how interesting.
Now... LAUGHTER
..staying with America, in the whole of the Second World War
only six Americans were killed
by enemy action on US soil,
all of them at a church picnic, right?
The cause of death was a Japanese Fugo,
and my question is, what is a fugo?
He's the seventh Marx Brother.
LAUGHTER
We were hoping you might say it was a poisonous fish,
because there is a poisonous fish called a fugu, but it's not that.
No, a fugo is a paper balloon.
There were atomic bombs in one direction
and then, "OK, let leash the paper balloons then!"
LAUGHTER They sent thousands of them.
- Over the Pacific... - With a bomb hanging off it?
With bombs on them, yep.
But the odds against them landing on a city in mainland United States
are drastically against,
because most of it's kind of wasteland.
It's farmland to the west and desert...
BELL TOLLS Whoops. Hello.
- It's not wasteland. - Well, no, not...
LAUGHTER
No. All right, but the chances are
that if you send a random balloon into mainland United States,
the chance is more likely
it will hit something which is not gonna kill people.
It's a clever weapon, though, isn't it?
Presumably because radar wouldn't detect it
because only the little bits of metal in the bomb would be even...
But the paper wouldn't show up on radar.
Absolutely - it was made of a paper called washi, which is from mulberry.
- Wahi! - Washi or wahi, if you prefer.
- Balloon! - Very good.
- Fugo... - (FAKE JAPANESE ACCENT) Baroon!
Yeah. Fugo it's called.
No good at... Can't do a Japanese...
But they did know about the jet stream,
which no-one else knew about,
which allowed it to travel hundreds of miles an hour.
But...actually, they were made by schoolgirls
who didn't know what they were making.
They stuck pasted... BELL TOLLS
LAUGHTER
Birmingham is a wasteland.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE Is that so?
- Yeah. - That's in Alabama, I believe.
- Is that right? - Yeah, Birmingham, Alabama.
That's a wasteland. They should team up with each other.
They should. LAUGHTER
Anyway, those are fugo bombs,
but fugu, which you neatly avoided the trap of...
- It's blowfish... - Not that puffer fish thing.
- It's the big one... - There's a bit in the middle that...
Oh, yeah. Is it about six people a year die in Japan as...
It's...yes... Actually, a bit more than that.
Between 30 and 100 suffer from the poisoning
and half of those die,
so it's sort of anything between 15 and 50, I suppose.
800 Americans die in a McDonald's every year.
- Really? Wow. - Which one?
LAUGHTER
Best to avoid that one.
He certainly will. (LAUGHS)
- The Blowfish McMuffin. - LAUGHTER
But you're right. This is a fish which has inner parts - organs -
which are deadly poisonous.
- They just love the daring of it. - Well, that's what I thought, Alan.
But, actually, it turns out
that, in fact, there are traces of the poison always left
and if they're small enough...
- Get you high. - You're quite right.
It's tetrodotoxin, which is very, very poisonous.
And you have to be specially trained
in the art of filleting this particular fish,
and all the restaurants in Japan where you can eat it
have little lanterns hanging outside made of the skin of this fish
with a little symbol to show that it's a trained...
Part of the training is you have to eat the fish that you've just cut.
- LAUGHTER - Have you had the fugu?
No, I haven't. I've never been to Japan.
You're so tall, you'd be like Godzilla.
- They'd be... "Aiee! Stephen Fry-u!" - Mr Fly! Mr Fly!
- LAUGHTER - Mr Fly!
You'd be rampaging through downtown Tokyo.
Baaaa!
LAUGHTER
Oh, a museum!
Why is it that the Japanese... LAUGHTER
It's always a 50/50 ball, isn't it, whether it's an R or an L,
and they always get it wrong.
I refuse to generalise about a race of people.
LAUGHTER
I heard Mike Myers do an American name, Rory Templeton,
and he called him "Rorui Temperaton".
LAUGHTER
If you want the Japanese to sort of virtually commit suicide,
just ask them to say orange tip fritillary.
LAUGHTER
"I will not do it! It's..." LAUGHTER
(JAPANESE ACCENT) "For you, Mr Fry, the interview is over."
"You build bridge now!"
LAUGHTER
"So much for the Geneva Convention!"
LAUGHTER
Um...oh, yes!
They're all absolutely correct, yes, whatever the question was.
LAUGHTER
- Fugus. Fugus. That's right. - Fugus.
Fugus and Fugos.
Right. So, when are penguins found near the Magnetic North Pole?
CUCKOO CLOCK SOUND Yeah?
When they're wearing a suit of armour.
LAUGHTER
BELL TOLLS
Uh...they're going to be soon because the...
..the magnetic north and south is going to switch any minute now.
Oh, give the man five points! Absolutely spot-on.
APPLAUSE
The trap was to say, "Well, of course,
penguins only live near the South Pole,
so they'll never be near the North Pole,"
but the fact is the north and the south flip in magnetic...
I think penguins might be my favourite animal.
- They are wonderful. - I like the one on the bottom left.
LAUGHTER
- He looks like security. - He does, doesn't he?
Um...yes, the actual root of the question,
though penguins are, in so many ways, I suppose, more interesting,
was that the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa
every million or so years.
- The... - Really?
So, any minute now,
everyone's fridge magnets is just gonna fall on the floor?
No. That's not...
Loads of people start believing in bloody God again, won't they?
No. That's not how fridge magnets work.
What will happen is
compasses will point to the south rather than the north.
That'll be great for orienteering, won't it?
I think people will get used to it quite quickly.
- No, they won't. - I think they will.
North, not south.
I don't live in South London, I don't care what you say.
LAUGHTER
I believe you there. Oh, dear. APPLAUSE
- Do we know why it happens? What's... - No. I don't think we do.
- It's a very mysterious process. - Just somebody flicks a switch...
If the earth were not magnetic,
there would be no life on it,
at least, certainly no life like us, because...
- Oh, what a loss. - Yeah.
The magnetism deflects the solar rays...
I want you to imagine that the penguin
is a malicious and dangerous conqueror of peoples,
and now look at that picture.
LAUGHTER
I think it's...they don't have many predators.
Obviously in the Antarctic they don't.
Polar bears eat 'em.
They don't live in the same continent.
- Don't they? <font
The polar bear lives in the north and the penguins in the south?
- They've never seen one another? - No. No.
In my mind, they all... it's like lions and tigers.
In my head they're all hanging out together and they've never met.
But lions and tigers don't either. Yes, exactly.
Lions, Africa. Tigers, Asia.
Imagine if it was like that with men and women.
- LAUGHTER - Here's a thought, right?
Do you think it would be better
if it was harder to conceive but easier to give birth?
LAUGHTER
If I was a woman, I would certainly think that, I should imagine.
- I mean, who cooked that up? - It's pretty mean, isn't it?
- It's all backwards, isn't it? - Yeah. You're right.
Mind you, you wouldn't want to gasp in agony for 36 hours to conceive.
(LAUGHS) Well, that's unusually what it sounds like.
LAUGHTER Let's move on, then.
What is wrong with this picture?
BELL TOLLS Yes?
No Starship Enterprise.
LAUGHTER, CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS
It should be the other way up.
Yeah. Absolutely right. Have some points. Quite right.
It's upside down, according to our, you know, usual convention
of putting north at the top and south at the bottom.
So in 200,000 years' time this is gonna be completely wrong, isn't it?
It might, but at the moment its north pole's at the top
and its south pole's at the bottom.
What I meant was it should be vertical.
Oh, I see. LAUGHTER
- How very honest you are, Davies. - I can't help it.
You can take those points off yourself.
And lastly, on poles,
how are Boy Scouts connected to poles?
LAUGHTER
Don't look at me like that... BELL TOLLS
As part of their uniform
they used to have a hat and a pole and a neckerchief
and a special pole
which was used for erecting their tents, for example.
- Something to do with Poland. - It is to do with Poland.
Um...name things that are particular about boy scouts.
- Dib, dib, dib, dob, dob, dob. - That's one.
- The salute. - The salute. Well, you've got there.
It's very, very close to the Polish salute.
Let's have a look at a Polish salute
and a boy scout salute together, shall we?
There you are. On your screens now.
- Which one's the Pole? - Oh, let me think.
Let me think. LAUGHTER
- There's two fingers... - What a weedy, nerdy scout.
It's the Milkybar Kid, I think, isn't it?
- We need hard scouts. - LAUGHTER
I loved the Boy Scouts.
We went to 'Nam.
LAUGHTER
It's actually said to be an American invention, the boy scout movement,
more than really British.
Although it's said to be Baden-Powell by many,
there was a man called Seton
who founded a movement called the Woodcraft Indians.
Did you go in a helicopter gunship?
(IMITATES HELICOPTER)
He had a little waistcoat with napalm strapped in.
- LAUGHTER - With the Doors playing really loud.
Now, boys, if you see anybody wearing black pajamas,
you run towards them...
LAUGHTER
..and you press that button there.
Dib, dib, dib.
- Kaboom! - LAUGHTER
You got your woodcraft, you got your killing gooks...
LAUGHTER
You've got your napalm waistcoat too.
Well, there you are. Yes.
And Poles are the only army, I think,
where they have that salute with two fingers,
supposedly after some Polish war hero who had three fingers blown off.
- Do I look Polish? - You look very Polish, yeah.
- LAUGHTER - Oh! Do a Polish polar bear.
Fantastic. Thank you.
Well... LAUGHTER
..on that bombshell, that's it for another week I'm sorry to say.
And the final scores are poles apart.
Phill scored a piping hot 4.
Rich barely scraped in ahead of Clive with 2 and 1 respectively,
but Alan bombed with minus 4.
APPLAUSE
Two fingers to Alan and to you all.
It's do widzenia. Goodnight.
APPLAUSE
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