APPLAUSE
Goo-oo-oo-oo-ood evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, and welcome,
welcome to an episode of QI that is all about jeopardy.
Joining me to fight crime, fear and disorder tonight,
Wonder Woman, Julia Zemiro.
Yes.
A Super Girl, Sue Perkins.
A Boy Wonder, Ross Noble.
And our own Danger Mouse, Alan Davies.
So, buzzers, please. Julia goes...
PSYCHO STABBING THEME
Oh, that's jeopardy.
And Sue goes...
JAWS THEME
Ooh.
SHE PRESSES IT AGAIN
Yeah. Definitely worth doing twice. Ross goes...
DRAMATIC SURPRISE MUSIC
And Alan goes...
VEHICLE REVERSE WARNING
LAUGHTER
Well, they are quite dangerous, vehicles, yeah, good choice.
Yes, absolutely. Well, we must be vigilant, because danger stalks us
from the moment we wake up to the moment we retire.
How far can you go on a cup of Joe? Hmm?
- Cup of Joe being an Americanism for? - Java coffee? - Coffee?
- Coffee, a cup of coffee, yeah. - I thought it was an insane cat.
That you could actually ride on the back of Joe.
- That is a caffeine-crazed cat, yes. - That's a flat white too many
- for that little kitty. - It is rather, isn't it?
How far you can actually go in terms of energy?
- Is that what you...? - It's actually, it's more literal than that.
If you're carrying a cup of coffee,
how far can you go before you spill it?
This is all down to a science. What is the science of
- the movement of liquids called? Do you know? - Wobble-ology.
Fluid...
- dynamics. - Yes.
- It's a whole science. - Of course. - Oh, fluid dynamics!
It's a whole science and a most important one
and much has been discovered as a result of fluid dynamics.
It is a very useful and fruitful area of discovery.
One of the things they've discovered
is that the average human stepping pace
happens to cause an oscillation,
which means that between seven and ten steps,
you are going to spill the coffee.
You will set up a series of wave movements that means
the furthest you can go is probably about ten steps
before you will definitely have spilled some coffee.
This is the Mrs Overall effect.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So, a long jumper could still perform and drink before it spilt
because that's only three?
- That's true, but... - Whoa, whoa! Hey!
I think they're talking about a normal walking pace rather
than a hop, skip and a jump, or a long run
but it is a peculiar fact and it's verifiable by trial.
Some scientists need some serious, proper work to be getting on with.
It was probably from not doing proper work.
They probably went down and just went, "Shall we get a coffee?"
And they went, "Oh, I'm meant to be working. Right, measure me. Hey!"
It is the University of California and Santa Barbara,
which is known as the surfers' university for slackers
in California, though I'm sure
that's deeply unfair on a highly respectable academic institution.
They suggest a flexible container to act as
a sloshing absorber,
with a series of annular ring baffles.
So they're suggesting the...
Annular ring baffles!
That's a character in The Hobbit, surely. Mr Ring Baffles.
That sounds like space.
I'll tell you what, the amount of times my annular has been baffled.
- Oh, dear. I'm always down the hospital. - Baffle your ring, sir?
Yeah.
- It's a bit of a tautology, because annular means ring-like anyway. - Yes.
- So it's a bit silly. - Annular ring baffle?
You used to take the baffle out of your exhaust pipe to make it
- louder when I was a teenager. - Baffling is sound muffling,
but it's also absorbing waves and that's essentially the same thing.
Because if you're muffling sound, you're absorbing the waves.
So if you put a baffle in your anus, that'll make you have quiet farts.
An arse silencer.
I suppose so. I suppose it would.
Until pressure builds up to such a stage...
- And then you're potentially lethal. - You could have someone's eye out
in the aisle at Waitrose, which you wouldn't want.
- No. - But there have been more obviously useful...
Baffle your ring, sir?
There have been more useful applications for this
business of whole... this whole resonance business of building up
frequencies that cause oscillations that can be dangerous.
And have you seen Albert Bridge in London?
There's a sign leading from Chelsea.
There it is. It's a famous sign, it's a rather beautiful one,
"All troops must break step when marching over this bridge."
- Why would that be? - Something to do with an oscillation.
Yeah, exactly. If you're marching in rhythm,
"Chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk,"
you might set up a resonance that would cause the bridge to collapse.
The marching creates an oscillation, which creates an unstable structure,
which means the bridge can act like one of those pirate ship rides
- when the local fair comes. - Yeah.
That's why Michael Flatley can never get north of the Thames.
LAUGHTER
That's a true, it's a true reason. He's furious.
He's always wanted to go to Madame Tussauds.
Right now he's at the Elephant and Castle going, "I can't believe it, I want to go and see the Queen
"and I just can't get over there.
"It's a bleedin' nightmare..."
Shocking state of affairs. And the fact that...
Talking of crossing the Thames,
there's another bridge where that problem arose -
the Millennium bridge between St Paul's and Tate Modern,
the wibbly-wobbly bridge as it was known,
closed for two years and it cost £5 million to put right,
the fact that it was twisting in the wind.
That was mainly cos Russell Watson was making videos on it.
Every time you see any Russell Watson video,
it's him by the Thames, looking out into the distance.
There's nothing wrong with that bridge, it was him singing.
You've got Flatley up one end, you've got Watson up the other -
- it's a nightmare. - Good, well, I think we've...
LAUGHTER
Now, what's smaller than the moon and keeps moving the sea around?
Smaller than the moon.
Is it a seal on caffeine?
No.
Is it one of our other moons?
No, it's not a moon of any kind, it's not a celestial body.
- It's a marine creature. - Like a big whale?
This better be the blue whale.
It so is not the blue whale.
Is it an animal that lives in the sea
that moves the sea with its mass?
Yes, ultimately, with its combined mass, not its individual mass.
- Is it plankton? - PSYCHO STABBING THEME
Many, many, many fish, like a school of, a school of...
Fish.
No, it actually accounts for 40% of the biomass of the ocean.
Algae.
- No. It's, amazingly, not. - Cola tins. - But it's not a fish.
No. We call it a fish, but it isn't a fish. No.
- Jellyfish. - Jellyfish is the right answer. - Ah, genius right here.
It's quite extraordinary.
Now, it used to be believed that a jellyfish propelled
itself by squirting water out of the back, as it were,
by jet propulsion, but it's been discovered by the scientists
at Caltech that it's actually slightly more complex.
And what these jellyfish do is,
they essentially cause an enormous amount of the water at the top,
which is oxygen rich, to go down to the bottom,
and a lot of the water at the bottom,
which is full of nutrients, to go to the top.
And they keep the circulation of the water extremely healthy.
And they might contribute a trillion watts of energy,
which is easily as much as wind or tidal pull.
And they also mix the cold with the deep warm water at the surface.
I've got one I put in the bath
- so I don't have to do that. - Yeah, that would do it.
Just chuck it in the end...
Yeah. My God!
"Up your end, get back up your end, I don't want stinging."
So they're like the mixer tap of the ocean.
It's a very good way of putting it.
But they can be malign as well - it so happened in 1982
that a ship had in its bilge water a particular one called
the Mnemiopsis leidyi, which is a comb jelly, from North America,
and they arrived and had no local predator.
In less then a decade, the population had reached
a biomass of one billion tonnes in the Black Sea,
which is where they were.
And one billion tonnes is ten times the weight of all the fish
we catch every year around the world.
And it destroyed everything.
Fortunately, then an another carnivorous jellyfish arrived,
and it only eats the Mnemiopsis and so it ate them all,
and once it had eaten them all,
the balance was restored and fish returned.
Just one of these things turned up?
- No, a few in the bilge water of a ship. - And it ate the lot.
No, enough to breed, but my God did they breed.
Isn't that extraordinary? Those just little jellyfish that look so kind
of light and nothingness are 40% of the biomass of the ocean.
I think that's quite interesting. How many jellyfish are there here?
- In that picture? - Yeah.
What, is it one with a very flamboyant hat on?
KLAXON
- Oh! - Ah, dear.
Sorry, where are the words "with a flamboyant hat on"?
It was the one that was enough. But it is a flamboyant hat.
The flamboyant hat gives it its name.
Portuguese Conquistadors wore hats like that.
They didn't have many in Croydon.
They didn't, no. But...
Is it a Man O' War?
A Portuguese Man O' War is what it is, but it's not...
I'll give you a clue that it's not a jellyfish.
And it isn't even a single creature.
A Portuguese Man O' War is not one animal. It's a colony of animals.
- Oh, God. - Aaah. - That operate together as one, with incredible...
- Like the Borg. - Yes, we are Borg, exactly.
We are Borg. We are jellyfish.
Why isn't it called the Men O' War then?
I know, because originally people didn't understand that
and so they called it the Portuguese Man O' War,
it looked like a Portuguese helmet on the top.
The inflatable bladder along the top is one creature,
which provides buoyancy, and works as a sail.
The tentacles are separate and carry the coiled, spring-loaded
harpoons, which have the most incredible speed.
They explode in 700 billionths of a second,
which is the fastest known animal mechanism on earth.
And very painful.
And there are other creatures that make part of this colony.
Gastrozooids, which digest the food, and gonozooids,
which are the gonads, the sexual reproduction part of it.
- They're separate? - They are.
The stomach floats along and then you've got the gonads behind.
- Yeah. - So the stomach's looking for its bollocks, essentially.
It's called a Siphonophore, that kind of a creature,
and because they drift passively,
they collect in vast herds of thousands or so.
And that's why the appearance of one is enough to
clear an Australian beach, as you probably know,
because one tends to mean there are going to be lots.
And the sting is very painful.
10,000 Australians a year, on average,
receive a Portuguese Man O' War sting. Not pleasant.
- Toughens you up though. - Exactly.
I mean, that's life, isn't it?
One day it'll toughen you up enough to win a test match against us.
AUDIENCE GASPS AND APPLAUDS
- Sorry. Come on. - Yeah, that's it.
How many times in history have I been in a position
to be able to say that? Not many.
- Oh, I know, and I enjoyed it, so much. - Exactly.
A Man O' War can hurt you, but not kill you.
But what is Australia's deadliest creature, in fact?
PSYCHO STABBING THEME
Rupert Murdoch.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- After Rupert Murdoch. - So sorry about that.
And the fact he came here. Yeah, sorry.
Yeah. Excluding a member of the human race,
which I'm not sure whether that does or not, but anyway.
Are we talking deadliest in terms of its actual killing ability?
- Causes the most fatalities every year. - I would say the kangaroo.
It's not the kangaroo.
Is it the spiders, the funnel web, the red back?
KLAXON
It's not that. Spiders.
- It's going to be something on the road. - It's the box jellyfish.
- KLAXON - It's not, that is a nasty creature.
- But they stop your heart. - Is it people? - Is it rabbits?
Is it rabbits running in front of utes,
- or some sort of...? - You're right that most
of the deaths caused by animals in Australia are caused on the road.
- The animal that is most responsible... - Crocodile?
- DRAMATICALLY: - Is it man?
The most deadly of all the creatures?
DRAMATIC SURPRISE MUSIC
- Snakes. - Shark. - No.
KLAXON
- I was not born there. - Is it the domestic cat?
It's not the domestic cat, though in the year under,
the sample year we're taking,
one human being in Australia was killed by a cat that year.
But 128...
A cunning plan, executed skilfully and quietly.
- Yeah. - It's the road, the road's involved.
- Often the road is involved. - Are the people in a car at the time?
- Sometimes yes, but... - Oh, a kite, is it the...?
But sometimes they're on the animal involved.
- They're on the animal. - Horses? - Oh, horse.
It's a horse, yes.
- A horse, more people are killed by horses than... - Really?
- Oh, ho! - Oh, it's a very angry horse there.
That is a very angry horse.
- He needs a dental hygiene appointment ASAP. - It does.
Yeah, because they fall off and break their neck or
indeed they cause car crashes, and so on.
And horses kill three times more than the ones you've mentioned.
Is it because people just don't ride horses often then, all of a sudden,
they decide, "Oh, I did this once as a kid," and they get on a horse?
I mean, they're incredible animals. They're very powerful.
Incredibly powerful,
they're incredibly stupid and incredibly nervous.
They shy, they rear, they're frightened.
"Oh, what's that?" It's a hedge.
"Oh!" It's a piece of paper!
When we lived in Australia, my wife bought a horse
and she was desperate to try and get me to ride, right.
She said, "I've bought a horse, it's docile, you'll be fine."
- They never are. - Well, no, actually the problem was it was too docile.
What happened was it ended up being studied by Melbourne University
because, yeah, because it was one of the few horses
that was...medically got narcolepsy.
So I swear to God, no...
It's one of the rare cases of a narcoleptic horse.
So she buys this horse and she says...
She couldn't work out why every time,
when she was grooming it, it would get heavier and it would just...
LAUGHTER
"Oh, oh, eh, woah!" Like that.
And so she couldn't groom it, because it would fall on her.
So she says to me, "It's fine, the horse is narcoleptic, get on it."
And so I got on it, in full motorbike gear, because
I wasn't taking any chances, and I sat on this horse and it started
to just, and you know normally you kick a horse to make it go.
This one, you kicked it and it would go, "What? Eh?"
Like that, to wake it up.
I had a friend, he never came to visit us, unfortunately,
but I've a got a friend over here who's got narcolepsy himself
and that would've been the funniest thing. Can you imagine?
Cos he would've been on the back of the horse and then, like,
if they got it in time - it would be rubbish if he was awake
and the horse went - and he's like, "Uh!" and the horse...
It's a waste of time. Could you imagine,
as a cowboy film, a narcoleptic...? Just the two of them.
It was a genuine narcoleptic horse.
And sometimes it would fall asleep against the electric fence.
So it would go, it would go like that, "Ha, hey, ha, ho, ho!"
It's like Jack Douglas from the Carry On Films.
Yeah. It was amazing, narcoleptic horse.
- Oh, well, that's my kind of horse, frankly. - Yeah.
But it is the horse that turns out to be the deadliest animal,
followed by the cow,
20 deaths are from cow, those are mostly on the road again,
and then dog, 12 deaths from dogs.
Sharks killed 11 in this particular period we're looking at,
though last year was a very bad year for shark deaths, particularly in
Western Australia, I know in Perth.
Eight by snakes, which is amazing because Australia has something like
80 or 90% of all the deadly snakes on earth.
Crocodiles, alligators only four, spiders only three, and one person
killed by cat.
- But what a cat. - Yes.
- Did you see that woman... She had her bum bitten off by a shark... - Ow.
..and they did, you know how they do face transplants?
- They did a bum-otomy? - They didn't put a face on it.
They did that to Ann Widdecombe.
So she actually had a bum transplant.
Who donates their bum?!
"Not my organs, but if you could just..."
I could do with one buttock, like a kidney, you could do with one.
A bum, that's just a bit of flesh, you could get that from anywhere.
I don't see that as amazing.
You could harvest that off somebody while queuing at the supermarket.
But one buttock? That's how you'd create the fart,
that would be... Where's the joy in life of going, "Oh, here it comes"?
HE SIGHS
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Someone must go and measure our felicity by flatulence,
it has to be said.
I'm not sure that it's the vibrating of the buttocks that
makes the noise.
You want to get it baffled.
Yeah. Indeed.
We discovered in series G that spiders are not deadly as such,
but they are aggressive and they're certainly cannibalistic.
If put 10,000 spiders in one room,
you'd eventually end up with one enormously fat spider.
And the works of Shakespeare.
Yes! Anyway, horses kill twice as many Australians
as any other creature.
How would you defend yourself against this beast?
- Oi! - Oh. - What the hell is that? - Yeah.
- What is it, Stephen? I can't... - It's a dinosaur. - Yeah.
It's a dinosaur called Fruitadens haagororum.
- It's a weird-looking dinosaur. - It is a weird-looking one.
It's a friendly-looking one, strangely.
Well, if you ignore the massive great spear its got for a tail.
- That is pretty big. - It's got a lovely fringe though.
- It's got a mohawk. - It's actually feathered, in fact.
- Oh, feathered fringe. - And it has front fangs upwards, very unusual.
- Front fangs and a feathered fringe? - Front fangs and a feathered fringe.
Are you Ronnie Barker?
The surprising thing about it, I suppose, is that we have this
view of dinosaurs, which is largely to do with their size.
The way to deal with that would be
just to squash it with your foot, because it's tiny.
It's absolutely... It's basically about four inches tall.
It's the smallest dinosaur we know about.
Tiny-winy little dinosaur. Absolutely, four inches, that's it.
- So was it a herbivore? An omnivore? Aaah. - Aah.
Paris Hilton would have that in a flash.
Yeah, exactly. It's about the size of a Chihuahua. A tiny Chihuahua.
It ate plants and worms and some people think frogs, possibly.
It lived in the late Jurassic period,
150 million years ago,
dodging between the legs of all the Allosauruses and Brachiosauruses.
It's called "Fruitadens"
because the first fossilised remains of one were found in Fruita,
which you may remember is a town in Colorado, which gave the world
Mike the Headless Chicken, who was a hero of a QI episode some years ago.
Oh yes, Mike the Headless Chicken.
- Though it's a bit of a coincidence. - He lived for years.
So it's probably a scavenger.
It was the dinosaur equivalent of a rat, probably.
- Four inches, that thing's four inches? - Four inches, yeah.
Ornithischia is the name of its family, "bird-hipped" that means.
Its closest living relative is a bird.
As you probably know, a lot of people think that all dinosaurs were ancestors of birds,
and it's certainly true that recent experiments have been able to
trigger ancient dinosaur genes.
They've managed to produce chicken embryo that grew
curved dinosaur fangs by triggering
dormant genes that are not usually triggered in the birth of a chicken.
I bet Colonel Sanders is shitting himself!
And then they grew one with a small tail, not a feathery tail,
but a real tail.
And palaeontologist Jack Horner, who wrote a book called
How To Build A Dinosaur, predicts the imminent arrival of the world's
first chicken-osaurus, basically a chicken with fangs, tails and arms.
- You're talking crazy stuff. - I know it is crazy stuff, isn't it?
It would have scared the living daylights...
They'll still make the KFC fang-o-saurus burger.
Nothing will stop them.
But no dinosaur was bigger than what?
What is the biggest living creature that has ever existed on the planet?
The T-Rex? Or that giant tall one there.
No, I said no dinosaur was ever bigger than the biggest living...
- Oh, I see. - The whale. - The blue whale,
it was your chance to be right with the blue whale, Alan!
The blue whale is bigger than any dinosaur. I know.
Ooh. Bummeroony. I'm so sorry.
But there still are very small reptiles.
I've been to Madagascar and had one, a brookesia chameleon, a pygmy chameleon,
and I've had one right on my finger and you can see that.
They are absolutely, they are perfect, perfect chameleons.
Was it tasty?
Aaah.
Here's a question, if you ate a chameleon...?
It was just the most beautiful thing.
Went for a night walk in the woods and came across it.
Obviously incredibly easy to miss.
And they sit there quite happily on your finger.
They are perfect chameleons, their eyes do the thing of swivelling in all directions.
Right, so, if you're threatened by a Fruitadens dinosaur,
the best thing is probably to squish it with your foot.
How did blind King John of Bohemia find his way round the battlefield?
Like that.
- By saying, "Where are we?!" - He must have had helpers.
- Somebody must have helped him. - They did in the most particular way.
He became King of Bohemia in Poland as a teenager and he loved war
and that was his undoing, because he developed ophthalmia
and became blind but that didn't stop him from wanting to fight.
He joined up with Philip IV of France
and made the big mistake of taking on Britain.
Oh, you don't do that. Oh, no.
We get the dusty old cane out of the cupboard
and we give Johnny Frenchman a damn good slapping.
- So this is the Hundred Years' War? - It was indeed.
In 1346, 30,000 troops of Philip, including blind John of Bohemia,
died at the battle and 200 English died.
- That is embarrassing. - That is a bit embarrassing.
It is a bit of a whitewash.
But many people regard that battle as the end of chivalry
because we cheated by using longbows and canon.
- You see! - The French were used to hand-to-hand combat
- and they just couldn't cope. - "I spit on your face!"
"Let's have a little wine before we begin. Just a little."
We had a technological advantage.
You'd think after 20,000 the other 10,000 think, "You know, I'm going to jack this in."
Actually, John of Bohemia's son Charles did run away, very sensibly,
and had a very successful life. He became a highly creditable holy Roman emperor
and presided over a golden age of Bohemia.
Who goes in and cleans up this mess?
Oh, there's a lot of scavenging, I'm afraid, of the dead bodies.
It's a pretty nasty business, those battles,
but importantly John did fight. What he would do was, as it were,
he would have a rider to the left of him and rider to the right of him
and he would be lashed to them and they pointed him
in the right direction and he would just wield away.
The two of them surely would just ride well away from the battle
saying, "You've got him, sir, you've got him!
"There's another one. Well done, sir!" And bash swords together.
Unfortunately...
- With sound effects. - The whistle of arrows. - "That was a close one!
"Oh, I'm hit, sir! I'm hit!"
That's what you and I would do, but unfortunately they were too stupid
and they did indeed dart into the fray.
Is this what they wore?
One's got one of those perfume bottles and a pineapple on his head.
The other one's wearing those things that you squeeze an orange with.
Oh, yes! That's right. It is.
A lemon juicer kind of thing.
Did he ask for that costume or was it cos he was blind and went,
"Stick a pineapple on his head. That'll be a laugh?"
How would they choose who would flank?
I guess he just gave orders, "You will go one side of me and you will go the other."
That'd be a great idea for blind people nowadays with the white stick.
Some people don't get out their way and don't pay them respect.
I say we get rid of the white stick, give them a sword,
down the street like that.
People in wheelchairs, the old Boadicea things out the side.
- Or a light sabre. - Exactly. Now we're talking.
Can you get those? Are they real then?
Oh, yeah.
They are real. They are absolutely real.
IMITATES MOVING LIGHT SABRE
If you strike me down now, I will become more powerful than ever.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Alec Guinness spoke of a story when he became Catholic
and when his son Matthew was about eight,
he decided to give him a crucifix for his birthday.
"You may not appreciate it now, but one day you will find
"this extremely important."
And Matthew picked it up and just went...
IMITATES AN AEROPLANE
Well, blind King John of Bohemia did die in the Battle of Crecy,
but so brave was he considered by the victor of Crecy,
the Black Prince,
that he took blind King John of Bohemia's motto,
which was German for "I serve." Do you know what that is?
- Where the bloody hell am I? - Ich... Ich...
- Yes, the Prince of Wales. - Ich... - Ich dien,
which is still the motto of the Prince of Wales, "I serve".
Also, this is more controversial, the three ostrich feathers that were
the symbol of Bohemian Prince
and it all comes from blind King John of Bohemia.
Anyway, so that was the Battle of Crecy - the end of the days
of chivalry, the beginning of machine wars if you like,
- longbows and canons and so on. - And cheating.
And cheating, if you want to put it that way.
Speaking of riding into danger,
which fairground ride is most dangerous - the Wall of Death,
the Wheel of Death, the Death Slide
or the Euthanasia Coaster?
Well, I'd go for the latter, but that's just,
- I've been on a Wall of Death. - Yes, what is a Wall of Death?
That's the bike where you go up and there's a...
- What keeps you from falling? - Sticky tape.
LAUGHTER
Audience? Centripetal, centripetal force.
- Like a salad spinner. - Yeah, if you like, exactly. - Was it fun?
It's a lot of fun, my dad detached his retina.
- Woah, seriously? - Yeah. - No! - Yeah, on the...
What, before he got on, he went, "Right, here we go, hey!"
- He wanted to be like blind King John of Bohemia. - Yes, and you stick.
My sister went on one of those, right,
at the Cramlington Carnival and as it was going around,
there was a kid next to her with a goldfish in a bag and it exploded.
- Ah. - Oh, no!
But the trouble is, he couldn't do anything about it,
she couldn't do anything about it, so they're on there like that,
"Wey hey!" and it went, "Boof!" like that.
And the two of them just sort of go, "Woah!" like that.
As it slowed down, "Blurgh," and then, yeah.
Poor little goldfish.
The Wall of Death is also an expression
at heavy metal concerts.
- Yes. - Just before some amazing song that's going to go off,
all the fans move out into two lines and leave a passageway
and before the most violent sort of song reaches some crescendo,
- they all go, "Boom!" - Absolutely right.
It's a kind of moshing wall, exactly, in which they fight,
and there has been a death at one of those in fact.
Well done for naming that. Definite points there.
The Wall of Death was first seen in Coney Island in 1915.
There have been a few reported accidents but no fatalities,
- and we can add to that list, two detached retinae. - Yeah.
There was one, a guy had a bear on. Have you seen that?
A car on a Wall of Death and there's a bear in the car.
- Poor bear. - Just putting it out there. - Not nice!
The Wheel of Death is slightly harder to describe,
it's a circus apparatus, a beam attached to a tower.
The tower rotates about its centre and there's a hoop
and the acrobat stands inside and they're inside something
that's also rotating so it's a kind of double rotation thing.
- With no safety cables? - No, it was invented in 1933 as the space wheel
and there were fatalities and then it was brought back in 1970
as the Wheel of Death and, ironically, since then,
there have been no deaths. It's been safer.
- Have you seen the Globe of Death? - Oh, no. What's that?
It's like a mesh ball, like that,
and one motorbike goes round, like this,
- and the other one goes like that. - Oh, my God!
- The timing has to be so good. - Yeah.
The Death Slide is really better known as a zip wire.
But you are right that in theory the most deadly of them
all is the Euthanasia Coaster.
It's a project of an art student in London called
Julijonas Urbonas, a Lithuanian PHD student.
It exists as a 1:500 scale model, and you can see there,
the idea is that the ride would last three minutes.
A two minute ascent to the very, very top, it's 1,600 foot.
- Oh, God! - So very, very high.
You then have a minute's 223mph plunge
down into those rolls like that, during which you're
pulling ten G's, and that would kill the rider through what's called
cerebral hypoxia, in other words, deprivation of oxygen to the brain.
- Have Chessington World of Adventure bought it? - No, they haven't.
He believes his design offers a humane and meaningful death.
I don't know quite why it's meaningful.
- Die like a screaming clown. - That would be amazing,
- because you could actually build a chapel at the end. - Yes.
- And the family could just sit there. - Absolutely.
And then the best thing of all is, after the funeral,
you get a picture of your loved one, like that.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- On a handy key ring. - Have it on mugs, anything you want.
Well, he believes that the ascent offers the chance for reflection
and the riders can still pull out once they've reached the top.
If not, death is painless, quick and apparently euphoric.
Though how they know, I don't know.
There's one in Auckland, one of those ball things that you
sit in and you have the bungee straps and they fire you up the top.
- Oh, my goodness. - But they make you wear like
one of those surgical mask things.
And I said, "Why are they wearing the surgical masks?"
And apparently, because it's right next to an office building,
people are trying to work and you hear, "Arrrgh!"
Like this. And it was putting them off. So now it's kind of, "Wargh."
So some bloke's going, "Well, our predicted sales over the next..."
"Waaargh!"
Vomit on the windows.
I went to Alton Towers once and they had this ride
where you just go along and then you get to the edge of a vertical drop
and it goes like that and everyone goes, "Aargh!"
And then it just drops you straight down a hole in the ground.
- Good God! - And if you sit in the cafe next to it,
you can see it out the window. So while you're having your sandwiches,
about every 60 seconds, "Aargh!"
- LAUGHTER - "Aargh!"
- All day long. - Why do people...? I couldn't bear it.
I'm always fascinated why people love that feeling.
I mean, roller coasters when I was a kid,
it was like, "Argh," and that was it. But now they're so extreme.
- Yeah. They really are. - I don't get the kind of exhilaration of it.
No. I've bungee jumped and that was so exciting,
I immediately had to do it again, I absolutely loved it.
What about the guy who made his own bungee jump?
That was stupid.
- I think he won a Darwin Award. - Oh, dear.
He made his own bungee jump with a rope.
LAUGHTER
So, just hung himself.
Well, no, it took his foot off.
AUDIENCE GASPS
When the rope went taut, his foot came off.
- That's just horrific. - That's what the Darwin Awards are all about.
Yeah, it certainly is.
What's the biggest dead body in the world?
'Vehicle reversing.'
Blue whale.
KLAXON
- I'll give you a hint, it's a body of water. - The Dead Sea.
KLAXON
- No, it isn't the Dead Sea. - The Black Sea cos of the jellyfish. - Yes!
Not because of the jellyfish. They certainly didn't help,
but the Black Sea only the very top has any living things growing.
90% of it is absolutely dead
and it is much, much, much, much, much, much bigger
than the Dead Sea, and much, much deader,
90% as I say is just simply nothing.
It's been dead for millennia so it's not our fault for once.
It's a very steep basin into which the upper and lower layers don't mix
and the bacteria use up all the oxygen and you take the oxygen out of a sulphate,
you're left with hydrogen sulphide, which is the rotten eggs' smell
the Black Sea is the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulphide
on the planet and it's deadly.
Is there any use for that? Someone can devise a use for that,
some scientist who isn't measuring how long it takes to spill
his coffee on the way back from the machine.
They have already devised a use for it
- and that is as a poison to kill people. - Great(!)
If the euthanasia rollercoaster doesn't take off.
It's a hell of a Butlins.
In Japan, in particular, it's very, very popular
because you can use various household cleaners and pesticides
to make it and 2,000 detergent suicides
as they're called have been recorded in Japan since 2005.
A single breath is enough to kill a human being.
It's almost as deadly as hydrogen cyanide.
It's a lot, isn't it? I know, it's pretty disturbing.
One of the dangers is that after the first sniff
it does not smell anything, it kills the olfactory system
and so 80% of people who turn up at the scene
of a detergent suicide are themselves poisoned by the gas remaining
because they can't smell it. So it's really most unfortunate.
So there's not much cheerful about that, I have to say,
I'm sorry about that. So we can cheer ourselves up.
What isn't a blue whale,
but floats around in the sea and weighs as much as a blue whale?
Is it an elephant on holiday?
An elephant doesn't weigh as much as a blue whale.
- No, it's really... - A ship?
- No. - Submarine.
No, it's something that the blue whale consumes.
- A massive lilo. - Plankton.
The blue whale can consume its own weight in?
- Plankton. - Well, actually in water. It dives all the way down
and then dives up again with its mouth open
and it swells, and swells, and swells.
And it literally can take on 90 tonnes of water.
Quite a staggering sum.
Got to love a blue whale.
- That's right, we do love them. - That's one thirsty mother.
They can actually take in something their size.
Not to swallow, as you know, because,
- as we've discussed... - The grapefruit issue.
A grapefruit is the biggest thing they can get down their gullet.
But they get this gigantic amount of water inside them. Really amazing.
And they go really deep and no one's been able to go
deep enough to find out what they do until very recently.
- Just gossiping. - Just gossiping. That's right.
"Ooh, kaa." "Really?"
Having quizzes in which people say, "Is the answer Alan Davies?"
Yeah.
The water in a blue whale's mouth weighs as much as a blue whale does.
Why shouldn't you mess with the maxillofacial death pyramid?
Is it cos it's got the word "death" in it?
That is a hint, the maxillofacial death pyramid.
- Call it the fun pyramid. - Maxillofacial means?
Maxillofacial is who you go to see when you get a broken cheekbone.
- Yeah, exactly. it is the maxillary area, the jaw. - It's the top jaw.
But it's, the maxillary, the pyramid is actually sort of there,
from the bridge of the nose down through...
It's like a facial Bermuda Triangle.
There it is, yeah, yeah.
And it's basically about blood flow from the brain down,
if you've got little infections and things, it goes down through
there and then gets sorted out by the immune system.
What can happen if you pick your nose and your spots
and things, is you can get bacteria in it that sort of block it
and force it all the way back up into the brain.
Meningitis is an example of that, and syphilis indeed is.
- From picking your nose?! - Not from picking your nose...
- Good God!! - Yeah, that's how you get syphilis.
It does, it slightly depends on what you're picking it with!
LAUGHTER
That's how you explain it to the wife.
"No, I was just picking my nose, love. Must have spread."
There is actually a DIY hard-core punk band from Sheffield
- called the Maxillofacial Death Pyramid. - Really?
- I like the sound of that. - It's quite a mouthful when asking for a ticket,
but they're probably excellent and, if you're watching, you know,
I'm coming to your next concert. I absolutely guarantee it.
The internationally recognised symbol for death metal bands.
- Yeah. - So you've got to be a little bit careful about picking your nose,
pleasurable an activity as it is.
You can die from it!
Yeah. That's something to tell the children.
Well, there you are. Now, making hydrogen with nails
and drain cleaner would be a very jolly jape indeed, don't you think?
- Yes, I think so. - So, let's try it.
To prove that it's hydrogen, I'm going to have to set fire it.
And I'm going to set fire to it on my own hand,
first of all I'm going to have
a basin of water, I'm going to put here,
to dip my hand in, to wet it so I don't burn myself too badly.
And then I have my really...
Oh, hello.
Made a mistake, sorry, man in my ear furious with me.
"What are you fucking doing?!"
"Put the water down!
"Do this properly or you will die, do you understand?!"
- No... - "Start again, for fuck's sake!"
LAUGHTER
He was much gentler, very sweet. So, anyway.
I've been told to tell you not to try this at home.
- Try it in someone else's home. - Yeah.
The fire exits are there, and there.
What I've got here is I've got some ordinary
green-coloured washing-up liquid.
We're not allowed to mention it's Fairy. Its name.
And I've got a little chemical lab, I don't know what you call
- this little... - Flask. - Flask, I think is the word.
Oh, this is like going on a picnic with Heston Blumenthal.
- LAUGHTER - It's got some nails in it and I'm going to add a few more,
a little bit of zinc.
And I've got here, this is the hydrochloric acid, very strong.
When are you going to put on the safety goggles, Stephen?
Now, cos I'm about to open the bottle of acid.
"Put the fucking safety goggles on!"
Not only that, but I've also got, I've also got a...
- I've also got a mask. Here we go. - What about us?!
Sorry, can I just ask, YOU'RE putting on safety goggles?
- Yeah! - YOU'RE putting on a mask.
What's the story here?
Yeah, you're fine, you're expendable.
I may have the mask upside down.
It does tell you to put the mask on your children
before putting it on yourself, as on an aeroplane.
"Got the fucking mask upside down!"
Right, OK. I've got the goggles, I've got this.
Now what I'm going to do, all right, is I'm going to pour this acid.
Jesus, onto some nails?!
- Into the nails, that's right. - Why?
The zinc and the hydrochloric acid will react.
- Has he been drinking? - Yeah. He's been drinking that.
Oh, there we go. And that's, that's going to produce quite a lot.
- It's going towards me! - It's blowing our way!
I now have to put this, I have to put this cork in it.
- Geez! - If I put the cork in it tight enough,
it will come out of here, and I put this in here and it will bubble up.
Right, that's important.
- If you say so. - The bubbles are made of hydrogen.
And the only way to prove it is to grasp the bubbles,
I'm going to wet my hand now, to be safer. And grasp these bubbles.
What the hell is that? It looks like a sex cactus.
And I'm going to go...
Oh, God!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Really exciting. Really exciting.
We can try that again.
Oh, yeah.
- Let's get even more bubbles. - That is great.
Stephen's goggles are so steamed up, he's completely blind!
- Even more bubbles here. Here we go. - Blind King John of Bohemia.
- Oh, come on, oh, work, lighter. - Anyone got a light?
- Oh the lighter's stopped working. - APPLAUSE
Let's try it again, one more.
Wet your hand again! You didn't wet it!
- You didn't wet the hand! - Come on. Bloody lighter!
- Expelliarmus! - Oh. Oh there we go.
- We'll take that off now. - Wow!
- I've made hydrogen, ladies and gentlemen. - Wow.
APPLAUSE
- Wow. - How very exciting. - Pretty exciting. Let's cover that.
"Put the lid on the acid!"
There we are. We can let all the hydrogen disappear.
And our wonderful science elf said, he said, he's so scientific,
he said, "And don't touch that because it's exothermic."
- It just means it's hot. - Hot, it's hot.
- Had to say "exothermic." - That's the smell, that's quite the...
- Can you smell? - Pretty whiffy. - Yes. - Pretty eggy whiffy.
Well, a bit of hydrogen sulphide probably in there,
that might kill you, of course. But let's hope not.
Let's hope at least you survive until we get to the scores.
Well, I have to say, sadly, in last place...
Is it that bad?
It's down wind.
Well, especially now I know it's potentially fatal. Yes, it is!
No, it's not hydrogen sulphide. It's just hydrogen.
So, I'm afraid in last place, but it's a very creditable last place,
and only just, with minus 16, is Julia Zemiro. Oh!
- APPLAUSE - Thank you.
And through some extraordinary good fortune, avoiding final place,
third place with minus 14, Alan Davies.
- Thank you very much. - Highly respectable.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And, my goodness, it's tight at the top,
with minus seven, in second place, Ross Noble.
APPLAUSE
So, that can only mean that our winner,
with a magnificent minus six, is Sue Perkins.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
So, it's goodnight from Sue, Ross, Julia, Alan and me.
Now, you come back soon now, you hear?
Do that thing and be lovely to each other. Goodnight.