This programme contains some strong language
(YODELS) Gooooooood evening,
good evening, good evening, good evening
good evening and welcome to QI, where tonight's theme is Killers.
And our keen ktenologists - look it up - are...
the menacing Jason Manford.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
The merciless Sandi Toksvig.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
The murderous Trevor Noah.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And the mostly harmless Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
So, let's hear their homicidal death-knells. Sandi goes...
CLOCK CHIMES
Just once. Jason goes...
CROW CAWS
Trevor goes...
KNIVES SCRAPE
And Alan goes...
# Killing me softly with his song Killing me softly... #
Well, it was common in the Second World War, death by Flack.
So, name the world's second-best hunter.
I mean, human beings must be the first, surely.
We get rid of entire species without any trouble at all.
Which one is that? Second-best hunter...
Do you recognise him? Hemingway.
That's Hemingway, he was mad on hunting.
And man is indeed the most efficient,
we wipe out whole species. Yes, so who's second?
Sharks. Killer whale.
I always get... Killer whale is the right answer.
Very good.
He's even got it in his name.
That's how successful he is, he even called himself a killer.
He's even got the word killer in his name, you're right.
And the point about the killer whale is firstly,
that they're misnamed, that it was the Spanish name for them,
which we misinterpreted as killer whale.
They're actually whale killers. They kill whales.
I've seen a documentary where they pursued a mother and a baby.
Grey whale, yeah.
For hundreds of miles. Up the coast of California, probably.
Two or three of them, and eventually they get too tired to fend them off
and then they eat the baby whale.
I know, the point is they act in packs. And they're not whales.
They're people.
Can you tell from, almost from the arcing leap that he's making.
It's a dolphin.
They are dolphins that really, really are very intelligent.
And they have an amazing way of attacking their prey.
And apart from whales, they're particularly fond of a juicy...?
Seals. They eat... Yeah, they love their seals.
But what's so impressive is the technique they use
and also how they... Well, they beach themselves, don't they?
They actually... That's one way,
is they actually get them on land, yeah.
But there's an even more impressive way, which is they
try and tilt the little ice flow that the seals will be on...
Knock them off. And if the ice flow is too big,
they line up in a row with a leader who sort of blows a signal.
The young ones watch and they literally,
they sort of check that the young ones are watching so they learn
the technique, and then line abreast, they charge the ice flow,
creating a bow wave, which goes over the ice flow so the seal falls off.
We can show you that. Here they are.
There you are, there's the line of them.
And there's, the wave is going to go right over the...woof!
Knock the poor thing off.
But it's very cunning. And sad. And sad, it's true.
Clever. But, damn, it's clever.
Another smart move that was observed in 2005 by...
What is the other word for a killer whale? I'm sure you know. Orca.
Yeah. A group was found, or at least a single orca was seen,
regurgitating into the sea.
And herrings then flocked down to eat the puke...
Sorry, did I say herrings? I meant herring gulls.
And I come from the land of the herring
and I'd lost myself in this story.
These birds swooped down onto the puke and started to eat it
and it then ate the birds. So it was a clever strategy. Bait.
It was bait. It created its own bait by throwing up.
And then other orcas were seen to imitate it.
It had never been observed before and that's what's
so dolphin-like about them.
They learn new behaviours and transmit them.
Do you think it discovered it by accident?
It'd had a bit of a night on the sauce and... Probably.
Oh, hello, the gulls are coming. Almost certainly.
It'd probably eaten a dodgy prawn. Yes.
It's one of the worst things about being sea life.
Constantly eating seafood all the time.
That's right, they don't have a vegetarian option.
Also, as you rightly said, they do attack on land,
that's to say they come precariously close to beaching themselves.
They're always in disguise then, aren't they?
They wear hats and scarves. They look like lifeguards.
Seal moustaches. Two of them on each other's shoulders with a long coat.
We can see them doing it actually,
we've got a little bit of footage of the attack of the orca
on the poor old...
The seals think, "We're safe now..." Oh, no.
Ooh.
But, oh...
Well, it's in there somewhere. Oh, there we go.
You should voice-over more wildlife documentaries.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
That one got away.
Bizarrely enough, I did voice-over one called Ocean Giants,
which was about dolphins and whales, yeah, precisely.
But fortunately it wasn't quite such a vague script.
I did a show for the BBC called Walk On The Wild Side.
Oh, yes, I did one of those, yeah.
And you did, you played a panda I think, that was over-eating
or something. And we also had Sir Tom Jones do one.
And everyone, like yourself, we just sent them the script
and, you know, it takes two minutes just to record it
and send it back in. And Tom Jones,
we just got a phone call one day in the studio,
and he said, "I've been, I've been sent this script
"saying you want me to play a lion." I was like, "Yeah, that's right.
He went, "I don't really like lions." And I was like, "What?"
Like...
and I said, "Well, we're recording tomorrow,
"is there any animal you'd prefer?"
He went, "I'm a big fan of the penguin."
I had like 24 hours to write a penguin sketch.
Did it sing, the penguin? Did you get it to sing?
No, it was just, it was a penguin... It did when he'd finished with it.
Well, there you are. Killer whales, they're not whales,
but they are killers.
Now, how can a bottle of whisky save your life?
Ah.
Well, in a fight, I'm assuming.
Is it the bottle or the contents?
It's the contents, ingestion of whisky.
Well, if you suffer trauma and you've got ethanol
in your system, presumably you're going to be better off. Presumably...
Shut up! How did you know that?!
Because I've had a lot of trauma while drunk.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You are absolutely right.
There is a documented case where it was literally a bottle of whisky.
There was a New Zealand chef called Duthie,
who went on a vodka binge, and he went blind.
He was literally blind drunk.
They think it was because he was on diabetic medication,
and that this basically turned it all into formaldehyde,
which can cause blindness, as well as preserving you very nicely.
And the usual thing is to put someone on an ethanol drip.
They didn't have any medical ethanol in this particular hospital,
but they did have an offy, so they went and got a bottle
of Johnny Walker Black Label, and they put him on a drip,
and five days later, he woke up with sight fully restored.
Wow! Wow.
On a whisky drip. It was a whisky drip, literally a bottle of whisky.
Sounds like a good name for a pub, doesn't it? It does, actually.
The Whisky Drip. I think it's a fact,
if you have an accident or a serious injury and you're drunk at the time,
you're probably more likely to recover than if you are...
Shut up again!
..sober. Oh, sorry.
Did you sneak into my dressing rooms and look at my cards?
No, no, no! I mean, I know this. I wrote a play,
which was a lot about soldiers and how they deal with things.
And some of the soldiers who were intoxicated at the time
of the battle did better, they recovered better.
Well, you're absolutely right. Did you know this?
TREVOR: I always knew about the rag doll effect,
if you have the alcohol and then if you fall or if you're in a
car accident, because you don't brace,
it's the same as a baby, if you drop babies, they're fine, they just...
So if you're drunk, that's why you recover quicker,
because you just don't brace and then you, it just goes through you.
Do you think they probably end up in more situations
where you're likely to get hurt?
That is a true, because...
You get other injuries, you get other DRIs, don't you,
Drink Related Injuries. DRIs, I like the fact you know that.
That's a bit disturbing. Yeah, well a friend I know...
All right, we've got Mr Davies presenting with a DRI again.
I had a friend who had a great DRI where he managed to get home,
against all odds, and then fell asleep against a radiator.
Oh!
Quite a nasty burn on his arm, he had. Yeah.
There was like a practical joke, like kids did,
when I was growing up, which was to fill a ball, a football,
up with cement, for example, you know, from somebody's garden...
Oh, wow! You fill a football and leave it outside a pub.
And drunk men cannot resist.
Oh, Jesus!
They just can't resist a football.
"I've got this one, Dave!"
Oh, argh!
That is the... It's a hell of a practical joke, but it's...
Especially if you put a goal post on the wall. Yeah.
But this is extraordinary, all I have to do is fill in the dots here.
It was Lee Friedman of the University of Illinois in Chicago
who spent 14 years examining this effect.
He analysed the blood alcohol of 190,000 trauma patients.
He found that with the exception of burns,
death rates from all types of traumatic injury fell as
blood alcohol levels rose, which is extraordinary, isn't it?
190,000 seems like an enormous number of...
It's a big cohort, as they would say, isn't it?
Exactly. Which makes it quite a respected study.
Amongst the extremely drunk, mortality rates were cut by
nearly 50%. Gunshot and stab victims, however,
showed the greatest benefit, which wouldn't be the ragdoll effect,
I don't suppose. There's some kind of anaesthetic element to it really.
There is the anaesthetic element, which I suppose makes you behave
less dramatically in a way that increases blood flow.
Yeah... "Oh! I'm bleeding!"
You say, "Oh, look at that." "Oh, no! Oh, no!
"Awww.
"Must've been shot!
"Ha-ha-ha-ha!
"Oh, I'd better just have a short.
"And then I think I'll go to hospital,
"it's going to be so busy on a weekend."
"One more Jager Bomb couldn't do any harm, could it?"
"Well, this isn't going to wait..."
Yeah, exactly.
"Come on, let's go to hospital.
"They've got a bar, they'll have a bar there."
"Hobs, hobsital."
"I'm fine. I've been shot, but I'm fine."
Amongst drivers, however, you were two to four times more likely to die
in a car crash, or of a car crash, as it were, involved in a car crash.
But I think you've covered everything quite brilliantly.
There's the ragdoll effect
and there seems to be an improvement in recovery from trauma.
So if you think you're going to get shot or stabbed, get drunk first.
Now you use a silver bullet for...?
Vampires. You could try it on a vampire,
I don't think it would do any good. Got to be a werewolf.
Or silver does, or silver...
Oh, is silver good for vampires? Silver's good for vampires.
Are these real now? You're very knowledgeable about this.
The reality of vampires.
Because part of the myth was that the silver came from the coins
that Judas got, you remember. Yes, 30 pieces.
The first vampire came from Judas when he was...
when he hung himself after Jesus...
SANDI: Did he turn into a vampire?
TREVOR: Well, they say that Judas became the first vampire,
and then the silver burns them
because that's what they gave Judas to betray.
He got the silver pieces. So that's why it's silver for all of them,
but you want a bullet for a wolf because they're fast.
Vampires, just, the gun is useless, so...
Well, that's covered the vampire side of the question
quite perfectly. But the square bullet, on the other hand,
these don't need to be silver. Against who would...?
I think this is... I think this is a very old gun
and I think it's something politically incorrect.
Is that right? Again, yeah. You've been...
I'm going to test my cards for your DNA and fingerprints.
No, it's the... I'm slightly distracted
cos that so looks like a woman I went out with, but...
APPLAUSE
Every morning I'd say the word orthodontist.
I don't think any man would ask for oral sex
from that particular werewolf, to be perfectly honest.
I think that would be a risk.
You're right, it was designed in the early part of the 18th century,
in fact in 1718. I think it was to kill Turks. Turks.
Turks, but most specifically Muslims, I think.
The square bullet was to show them how great Christianity was.
I think that was the kind of plan behind the square bullet.
There was a specific gun...
It was called the Puckle Gun.
Puckle Gun, James Puckle. James Puckle, invented it in 1718,
and his idea was that you used the round bullets for Christians,
and the square bullets were for the Ottoman Turks.
Quite a good idea, the square bullet,
because if you drop one, it won't roll away.
There is, however, a bad side to it.
You can't rifle a square bullet,
and it's the rifling that gives it accuracy through the air.
So are they a bit rubbish, the square bullets?
It makes it spin and go fast. It would just go wobble, wobble
wobble, wobble. Wouldn't hit anybody.
So if you were a Turk or a Muslim,
you'd be encouraging the square bullet.
"I think you should definitely use the square ones on us."
It was supposed to show the benefits of Christianity,
in fact it showed, it inferred, the deficiency of James Puckle's ideas
of aerodynamics and rifling.
You might hit a Christian!
You might accidentally hit a Christian.
It's not really right to call it the first machine gun,
but it was three times faster to load and fire
than the current musket.
It was nine rounds a minute, which wasn't bad for 1718.
It's interesting, cos I guess technically the first bulletproof
vests were created by the Zulus, when they were fighting the British.
And Shaka discovered that if you dip your leather shield in water
before you go into battle, then the pellets couldn't penetrate.
Oh, is it really, was that...? Yeah, yeah, that's...
It hardened the leather that much. Yeah, and that's how the Zulus
could kill so many. Because what will happen is,
they only needed one bullet and then they would advance so quickly
that then they would kill five or six British people
before they could reload.
Do you have Zulu blood in you?
I do, I guess, yes, because...
HE CLICKS TONGUE ..Xhosa people are of the Zulus.
Oh, you're Xhosa. Oh, do that again, I love that. I'm half Xhosa.
Oh, do it again. Xhosa. Xhosa. I can't do that.
It's given as an exclamation mark, isn't it?
No, that's the X. There's three clicks.
There's the X... LATERAL CLICK
There's the Q... POSTALVEOLAR CLICK
And the C, which is... CENTRAL CLICK
Those are the three different...
Oh, it's just... I love that. So that's the... You've seduced me.
Not that you wanted to, I'm sure.
Who was that wonderful... Was it Miriam Makeba who sang...
Yes, The Click Song. It goes...
HE SINGS THE CLICK SONG
That's the song. Oooooh!
APPLAUSE
Yeah, so the Xhosa's were technically...
they were basically pacifists of the Zulus, you know.
They were chased out, they separated from the tribe. Right.
So they weren't as... Like, the Zulus were really our pride...
In terms of military, they are our pride and joy, they are...
With the assegais...
Yeah. Everything they did was revolutionary, just like the first...
They were the first ones with the shortened spear,
so Shaka invented a spear that was quicker to stab with
and not as cumbersome to lug around.
Right, like a sort of javelin... Yes, yes, yes.
Cos the spear hadn't really been changed over all those years,
and he... So he changed that, he changed everything.
He was one of the best military, you know... Yeah.
You guys...if it wasn't for the guns, you guys wouldn't be here.
I know, we wouldn't have had a chance.
Just do that bit of singing again.
With the...? Just do that bit of singing again.
SINGS THE CLICK SONG
That's the song.
You don't know me well, Trevor, but I'm on the turn, I'm telling you.
APPLAUSE
You've only got Jason and Alan left to seduce, Trevor, I have to say.
I think he's a cracking fella.
Well, there you go, that's your man Puckle and again, well done, Sandi.
The knowledge, just amazing.
Now, here's a killer question for you, Alan. We are both actors.
Why are we so grotesquely overpaid?
Market forces.
We're not in charge of the distribution of wealth.
Any excuse we can think of.
What profession within the film industry might think that
they are responsible entirely for the way an actor conveys...
Screenwriters? The screenwriter certainly has a lot,
as far as the story is concerned, but they can't control,
as it were, what an audience reads into an actor's eyes.
Cameraman?
The editor. The editor, yeah.
In 1919, when cinema was being born, there was
a film-maker called Lev Kuleshov
and he proposed putting together a film in which
you saw an actor looking at things
and you noticed that the audience read into the actor
different emotions according to what they are looking at.
So the idea is that we think they're looking melancholy
because they're looking at something... Or hungry. Or hungry.
But the actor has actually not changed.
It is exactly the same shot of the actor. That's the trick of acting.
All actors know that. Yes, it's not to act.
If in doubt, don't do anything at all. And directors will tell you.
Milos Forman famously shouts, "Stop acting! Somebody is acting here!"
There's a famous Bogart one.
At the end, he looks down on some carnage
and everyone was very impressed by the emotions he portrayed.
But the shot had been done much later and the camera went down low
and he stood up on a balcony and the director said, "Look bored."
Yes. It works like that. They cut it in. It's extraordinary how it is.
It is the effect, the timing of the story,
it's what the actor seems to be looking at
and it's the audience that does the work.
They read the emotion into the face.
Oh, look, we've actually cut our own together.
So you can see here, what's this emotion? Confusion.
He's looking hard at something.
HE GASPS Can he believe it's true?
LAUGHTER
Oh, no, Arsenal have lost again.
LAUGHTER
What a beautiful bike.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
There you are.
Proof positive, as if it were needed. Anyway.
Thanks to the Kuleshov effect, good acting may be just good editing.
Now, Alan, be honest. Have you ever enjoyed a shower in chocolate sauce?
Is this a euphemism?
It emphatically is not.
And everybody is to put away those thoughts.
No, I've put my hand in a chocolate fountain...
KLAXON SOUNDS
We are almost certain you have enjoyed a shower in chocolate sauce.
Ooh! Oh, hello.
I was so drunk, Sandi.
I suspect that most of you... Not necessarily all of you.
It sounds a niche area of interest, certainly.
Well, let's think of films that have got showers in them. Psycho.
Did you enjoy it? Yeah, it was a good film.
Yeah. And the shower scene is the pivotal scene. Oh, now.
Oh, because it's black-and-white.
It's black and white. The water doesn't read on film.
The water does. No, it's the blood. Which was chocolate sauce.
Bosco chocolate sauce.
Bosco's chocolate sauce was used for the blood.
Actually, talking, as we were, of editing,
one of the reasons it is the most famous scene, possibly,
that Hitchcock directed
and one of the most famous scenes in all cinema is that it contains
77 different camera angles and 50 cuts and lasts only three minutes.
I have done this.
I've sat there, counting the number of cuts in three minutes.
You must get out, Stephen, really.
I'm never sitting next to you at the cinema. No, not at the cinema.
Who's brought Rain Man with them?
50 cuts there! Stop the clock.
When I was a kid in the States, we used to have ice cream with
Bosco chocolate sauce on it and you couldn't serve it without going...
IMITATES PSYCHO THEME
So you all knew. Have you seen Psycho? TREVOR: I have not, no.
Your generation, you just don't go for the classics.
Cos it's black-and-white, you go... HE YAWNS
I'm waiting for it to come out on Twitter and then I'll...
LAUGHTER
Exactly. The sound of the stabbing, I think, was a knife in a melon.
Absolutely right.
And, actually, Hitchcock first wanted the scene to be just,
as they say, effects. In other words, the sound of the water,
the sound of the shower curtain being torn
and the sound of the knife going into the melon.
But his favourite composer, who composed a lot of his films,
Bernard Herrmann,
wrote this astounding score with these jagged things
and begged him to listen to the version with it and Hitchcock
said, "You're right," and actually doubled his pay on the movie.
Hitchcock sounds like Jeremy from Top Gear.
He sounds exactly like that.
AS JEREMY CLARKSON/ALFRED HITCHCOCK: "You're right!"
Yes. "Just two seconds in and you're nursing a semi."
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Everybody was against him making the film.
He'd just made North By Northwest,
one of his most lavish, colourful, beautiful, extraordinary thrillers
and he wanted to be known for a different kind of film
cos he was always experimenting, always trying different things.
That film was so clever, Psycho.
You're with Janet Leigh all the way from the beginning.
She hatches this plan, she's got this money.
She steals 40 grand. You can't wait to see what's going to happen.
And then she's gone, halfway through the film.
Oh, thanks for spoiling it!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I don't feel I have, really,
given the picture of her being murdered in the shower.
Do you remember the last shot of the shower scene?
Just to get really nerdy.
Isn't the eye and the plughole?
Her head is sideways down. All the shots are...
There's no long shots, it's all mid-shots and mostly close-ups.
He was so concerned to get it right that there just wasn't
time for her to get accustomed to these contact lenses that would give
her dilated pupils, which freshly stabbed people have, apparently.
So that was the one inaccuracy he was rather annoyed with.
No-one wanted to make it. Paramount said they wouldn't.
He said, "I'll make it black and white. It'll be cheaper."
They said, "No." He said, "I'll use my TV crew."
He used a TV crew to make it, not a film crew.
It's one of the most successful movies of all time.
Nominated for Best Picture Oscar.
It's worth seeing, Trevor, but not with Stephen. No.
Sandi'll take you.
Do you know, this evening has changed my life?
Now, describe the curriculum at the British Hate Training Academy.
Oh, dear. Watching Jeremy Kyle all day and all night.
Yeah, that would be... That would be good hate training.
It would, actually, wouldn't it?
I would imagine that maybe it's very difficult to get soldiers
to hate anybody. Kill, yeah.
I would imagine maybe there was some scheme to try and get them...
In the Second World War, we had hate schools.
Has there ever been a more pointless padlock in the world?
"You're not getting my shirts!
"Back orff!"
It's a pretty astonishing look, isn't it?
But, no, Sandi, you're right.
There were hate schools.
"These medals are sticking into my chest! Arrrgh!"
LAUGHTER
"Aaargh, God!
"All of them are pinning me in the chest!
"My hat is too small!
"Get me a new hat!"
What do you suppose the chances are
of twins getting the same number of medals?
It's a good point.
Do you know, I've gone deaf in my left ear now?
Very sorry.
Back to the serious and terrible fact, is that in order
supposedly to encourage British troops of the Second World War,
we put them into rooms and showed them appalling atrocities.
Rotting corpses, starving people.
They were then taken to slaughter houses, where they watched sheep
being killed and they were smeared with their blood, and made to...
This was common, though, wasn't it? Because didn't they say to
the Vietcong that the US Marines ate babies, that kind of...
Oh, it was certainly true that this black propaganda was given out.
You know, in the First World War the Germans raped nuns and all that.
But this was actually being made to witness really awful things,
in order to get your blood up, was the idea.
But when the papers and the public found out,
there was an absolute uproar.
No less a figure than the Bishop of St Albans said,
"The attempt to inculcate hatred in the fighting forces
"and civilians is doing the devil's work."
And General Sir Bernard Paget,
who was Commander in Chief of the home forces, he agreed.
He said that, "Hate was foreign to British temperament.
"And we hate it."
But it is a... It is a...
He didn't say that bit.
It is a very serious issue.
I think it was after the Second World War,
they estimated only between 15 and 20% of anybody
in any armed force had ever fired their gun. Yeah.
Because mostly people don't want to. That's right.
And if they do fire their gun, they tend to try and miss.
All of us know stories of people who have survived wars, and
the one thing that absolutely tears them up is the fact
that they've killed someone. The closer you are to the actual kill...
If you kill somebody with a bayonet rather than shoot them at a distance,
the more likely you are to suffer trauma.
TREVOR: They very famously said the most gentlemanly fighters
in the wars were the air forces,
because they almost had an unspoken rule that they wouldn't shoot a plane
that's already going down.
And you wouldn't shoot a guy on a parachute either, you would...
He's down, he's out, so you wouldn't... No, never do that.
And if it was a good fight, and you respected them
and they were going down, they would do a little wing tip salute
as they flew away from them, which is just touching.
Yeah, that would be like, "Argh... Oh, that's nice.
"Arrgh!
"Oh, fair enough, right."
APPLAUSE
Anyway, the fact is they stopped them,
not because of public outrage but because it didn't work.
The effect it had on soldiers was to depress them.
It's interesting cos the Germans,
instead of showing videos of the opposing side to get
the soldiers desensitised, they famously made them kill their dogs.
I don't know if you remember... Not remember it, like you were there.
But I mean...
Stories where they would have a dog, a puppy to raise their whole lives,
and when they graduated from training, then the last assignment
was to kill the dog, which you obviously have grown to...
SS training. Yeah, it was the SS. That must have been absolutely...
That's unspeakably brutal to ask someone to shoot a puppy. Or a dog.
Anyway, which is most dangerous - 1,000 bananas,
half a litre of wine,
1.4 cigarettes or two days in New York?
You could fall on quite a lot of those banana peels.
Slip, yes, you could. You could. Or spiders inside.
Yes, you could have a tarantula on the inside, yeah, yeah.
But they're all quite dangerous, I suppose.
In fact, we know that they're all equally dangerous.
Oh. And how can we know that?
Is there a scale of dangerousness-ness-ness?
TREVOR: There's the banana-cigarette-New York scale
that they generally use. Exactly. That's the scale.
Is it about toxins, that you absorb or take in?
Well, it's a Professor from Stanford called Ronald Howard,
as long as it's not the guy who was in Happy Days,
and directed Apollo 13.
It was in 1968 he developed the micromort.
And a micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death.
So the higher the risk, the more micromorts, obviously.
So if a million outings on a hang glider result in eight deaths,
then there's a fatal risk of eight micromorts attached to hang gliding.
So how many micromorts in a banana? Well, I'll tell you.
If you take the normal background risk in the UK,
it's actually 41.6 micromorts.
So the chances of sudden death in Britain,
from leading a normal life are about four in 100,000.
What, four people die unexpectedly from eating a banana?
No, no, just that's background. This is just background.
We've not come to the bananas yet.
Oh, sorry, I'm over-excited.
Yeah.
Your ordinary risk... Yes.
..of dying suddenly is four in 100,000.
I've got it now. Right.
But activities that raise the level of risk...
Have you died suddenly? I died suddenly.
There you are. Activities that raise the level of risk
from 41.6 micromorts, which is the average risk we all share,
by one micromort alone, are smoking 1.4 cigarettes yourself,
living for two months with someone else who smokes.
Half a litre of wine.
Not doing a wee when you really need one.
1,000 bananas is actually because of their radioactivity. SANDI: What?
They do contain a lot of potassium. Ah, yes.
But they are faintly radioactive. Wow.
Very faintly. 40 tablespoons of peanut butter...
So, I'm still on the bananas, you have to...
You have to eat 1,000 bananas?
If you ate 1,000 bananas, not necessarily all at once,
cos that would kill you straightaway. Yes.
Obviously, you would burst.
The point is, for every 1,000 bananas you eat... Yes.
..your chances of sudden death increase by one micromort,
which is... What is the matter with scientists?!
Who? Who is going to eat 1,000 bananas?
Why would you even work this out?!
Over your lifetime. I've eaten 1,000 bananas.
So should you be counting how many bananas you've had? No.
It's only one micromort, it's a one-in-a-million chance.
But how does the thousandth banana kill you?
Because of the level of radioactivity. Oh, God!
For every 1,000 you eat, you're...
You've already got 41.6 micromorts, which is...
I feel unwell.
I'll give you a book to read afterwards and it'll explain it.
Thank you, darling. Cos it takes too long.
But go to New York, have a cigarette with a glass of wine
and a banana split.
And say, "Fuck you, world!"
APPLAUSE
All of these increase your...
They're such tiny margins, that's all.
"I'm going down."
My headmistress at boarding school was always in a terrible panic
about fruit. Fruit?
Fruit, yes. She found that...
She spent hours teaching us how to eat a banana correctly,
because of the manners, and I remember her saying...
Which mustn't make the cheeks bulge, no...
And you don't, you don't do this either.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
So she didn't like... She taught you how to eat a banana.
She was very worried and she'd spent a long time on bananas, and I said,
"How do you eat an orange," and she looked over the top of her glasses
and said, "No young woman should ever embark upon an orange."
Wise words.
Scuba-diving adds five micromorts to background levels.
Taking heroin adds 30.
A night in hospital adds 75.
Just one night in hospital.
But giving birth raises the risk to 80 micromorts.
So it is double the background.
So, if you're feeling ill,
you'd be better off taking a bit of heroin than going to the hospital.
A night in hospital can be rather perilous.
Is it a myth that heroin is
the only thing in the world that cures a cold?
Is that a myth? I think the guy underneath the arches...
A guy trying to sell me some heroin, yeah.
Is that how they peddle it in Manchester?
"Cure your cold, this will, lad."
Do you know the Irish cure for a cold?
My dad always used to say, "What you do is you get into bed with
"a hat and a bottle of whiskey and you put the hat on the end
"left bedpost and then you drink until you can see it on the right."
That's brilliant.
Absolutely superb.
There is one man whose micromorts we don't know.
He is Yasuhiro Kubo and he's a Japanese skydiver
who jumps out of a plane without a parachute
and then collects it from a partner on the way down.
We don't know his micromort because he is still alive
and it may be that he'll do 4,000 jumps and then die.
It'd be a good dumb show. If you see them falling and then he
goes over to the bloke who has the parachute and you see them going...
I knew there was something!
Oh, that is so distressing. Anyway...
Now, what can we do to stop the killer robots?
SANDI: Oh!
Go upstairs. Go upstairs! Daleks have shown that doesn't work now.
They can hover. Is this a Robot Wars one? Yes, Robot Wars.
It's about legislation, isn't it?
Are they not trying to legislate against these...? They are indeed.
There's a global campaign led by a group of academics
and Nobel Peace Prize winners, who see a very real threat.
And they're not wrong.
Look at the development of drones in the American army.
Robotic killing machines are very close indeed and yet...
The thing about the drone is that the drone has a human, as it were,
in the loop. But I think the thing with the idea of the killer robots
is that there is no human... That's the idea. ..in the loop.
It's Dr Noel Sharkey, professor of computer science at Sheffield,
who was, in fact, the consultant and appeared on Robot Wars,
that '90s TV show.
Did you have such a thing on South Africa television?
I think we might have gotten your Robot Wars. We had none.
I was very astonished when I first went to South Africa
and I was in Cape Town asking for directions, and they said,
"Turn right at the third robot."
Oh, yeah, we call...
I said, "What?" We call traffic... We call them robots.
We call traffic lights robots.
We have a very low bar for...
These are the same guys who invented apartheid so, I mean,
if you look at the... They were impressed. They were impressed.
Even more shocking was when I was filming there and it was
incredibly hot and someone asked me if I wanted some arse cream.
LAUGHTER
SOUTH AFRICAN ACCENT: "Do you want some arse cream?"
And I realise they were saying, "Ice cream," of course.
Chocolate arse cream.
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
You just always go that bit too far.
Yes, he does, doesn't he? I know.
Presumably, the robots,
they're not covered by the Geneva Convention in any way.
That's the problem. They are not regulated.
That is the real issue.
Do you not think we are just slowly going towards a video game?
That's what we're building towards.
Trevor, guess who the US Army is recruiting right as we speak?
If you play video games, they say you are at least 50% better than
just an average recruit off the street.
They're the ones they're hiring for...
What I'm saying is if we get to a point where we are fighting
the things only on video game...
Farting? You said it.
LAUGHTER
That's what you do in war. You can't control yourself and you just...
I don't know how you fight, Stephen, but that's how we...
SANDI: Surely, the really civil thing would be
to not have fighting at all. You have a game of Twister.
That's just ridiculous. How do you settle things?
Vladimir Putin and... Or Risk. Yes, Risk.
Or Scrabble. Lovely. Lovely games.
Vladimir Putin versus Obama at Scrabble. Or Twister.
Anyway, killer robots don't exist yet
but now might be a good time to make sure they never do.
So, here are some killers, but what do they prey on?
I'll perhaps give you a clue, if you don't know its name.
Sea food, that's a seal. It's a seal.
It is, it's called the crab-eater seal. It eats fish.
So the clue...
CROW CAWS
Yes?
Crab. Oh! Hey!
KLAXON SOUNDS
Surely you'd know better. Just getting it out of the way,
just so we could all move on and find out what the real answer is.
If we show you its teeth more close up,
you might get a sense of it. It's pretty...
SANDI: Oooh.
That's weird, why would you have teeth like that?
To be on a show like this?
It's to sieve. It's like a baleen plate in a whale.
It sieves out all the bigger things, so it actually just has,
like a whale...?
Krill. Krill.
Yeah. It just eats krill. And our next contender is...
Oh, I say.
Yes. That's called the Bagheera Kiplingi spider.
Does that ring a bell?
TREVOR: They kill tigers, don't they?
Well, bagha is the Hindi for tiger, and Bagheera is? The Jungle Book.
Is in the Jungle Book, and is a panther. Is it the panther?
Panther, and hence the Kiplingi,
so for some reason it's named after Rudyard Kipling.
It eats Bakewell tarts.
Lemon slices.
Oh, the Bakewell tart. I could eat five of them. Easy.
They don't do five in a pack, do you know what I'm saying?
You have probably no idea what we're talking about, poor Trevor.
They've surely got Kipling cakes in South Africa. No, we don't.
No? Really?
They're exceedingly good.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Do you not think the spider looks like he's trying to be cute
for the photograph? He does, he's posing. "Hi."
"Hiya, you all right?"
Spiders are known to be feeders on what? Flies.
Flies. They're known to be carnivorous.
But this is the only vegetarian spider on earth.
Well, no wonder he's cute. Yeah. Exactly.
They actually go out of their way to avoid rather nasty-looking ants
and hide round corners, until they can get to their staple food,
which is the buds of acacia trees. The acacia is very thorny.
They're the laughing stock of the spider community.
Yeah, they are, they're probably...
"Call yourself a spider? You're a disgrace."
Yes. They occasionally, to be fair, will eat meat.
It's a bit like, I don't know, the spectacled bear...
If they've had a drink. ..will be known to eat, you know, ants.
He'll have a kebab on the way home. Yes.
They can't resist it.
Oh! Let's have a kebab.
Would you like to see a great tit? Always. There you go.
There is a great tit. Great. That's a good picture.
It's a lovely picture of a great tit, isn't it? They mostly eat...
Insects. Yes. Caterpillars, in particular.
They are very fond of a good, juicy caterpillar.
Which is, of course, part of the cycle of an insect.
And, in Hungary, something very astonishing
has been observed with great tits.
They eat goulash.
They have been observed,
possibly because of lack of caterpillars in Hungary...
Eating chips. No, it's rather gross, actually.
They've been eating roosting bats.
They've been eating the entire innards and brains
and scooping out every part of a sleeping bat. Which is really...
That's a lovely story. Isn't it? It's quite a move for a great tit.
And we come finally to this chap.
Piranha. It looks like a piranha. It's a distant relative, though.
It lives in a completely different part of the world.
In Papua New Guinea. And is known as a pacu fish,
but has a nickname, which might give you a hint.
The teeth it has are designed to deal with its main food source,
which are seeds and nuts which fall down from trees above.
Which quite a lot of fish do.
But, if you happen to be swimming naked,
as many a Papua New Guinean might...
Uh-oh. ..it fully deserves its nickname, the ball-cutter fish.
AUDIENCE GROAN
There are at least two recorded examples of people
dying from castration from these.
Oh, does that count...? Does that count as a background mort?
Yes, that's definitely a micromort.
Presumably you can tell as the screams get higher and higher. Yes.
SHE SCREAMS
Until they're beyond the range of human hearing.
So they're pretty nasty. Wow.
But, what's the worst thing a swan can do to you?
They can famously break a child's arm.
Aaah!
KLAXON SOUNDS
No, there is no recorded example ever.
They have hollow bones, and the chances are they would break
their own wings if they attempted to swipe hard on the human bone.
Oh, I've been cautious of them ever since primary school.
Well, they're aggressive, they'll chase after you.
And I dare say, if anyone rings in and says I know someone who
claims their arm was broken, the chances are almost certain...
The school liar. Well, not if they were the school liar,
or they might well have... If you're running away and fell.
They might well have fallen over. Yeah. Exactly.
Where is that place where the swan goes and rings a bell? Fairyland.
No, no... LAUGHTER
Somebody shouting in the audience? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Wells in Somerset.
Wells in Somerset.
In Wells in Somerset there's a bell on the outside
and the swans learned to ring the bell and then they get fed.
That's marvellous. Little Pavlovian swans.
And if you don't feed them, they break your arm.
You're absolutely right. I mean, you're absolutely wrong.
Everyone else is marvellously right.
They are very aggressive. They can't break your arm, so there.
And now it's time for one of my Knick Knacks.
Crikey, how did that get there?!
I'm now, I'm going to demonstrate.
What a marvellous outing for the word "crikey". Yes.
I'm going to demonstrate to you how a chain reaction takes place.
Imagine these are little atoms,
and what I have is a series of mouse trap... Ow!
Mouse traps. Used for,
obviously, killing...mice!
And, fortunately, no mice will be harmed in this experiment.
All you will see
is the spectacular sight of random and explosive chain reaction
caused by one atom touching another, which are all in...
"Ball number 16, the eighth appearance this year."
LAUGHTER
So are you ready? Yes.
Here we go.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
All that for three seconds.
It's a lot of effort for the money.
On that nuclear bombshell, we reach the final curtain.
It's time for the scores. And how fascinating they are.
Way out in front, as you might imagine,
with her astonishing knowledge is Sandi Toksvig on 14 points!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Points-wise, one of the greatest debuts of all time,
Trevor Noah has plus nine!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And in third place, with minus six, Jason Manford.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING I'll take that. I'll take that.
Colour me astonished! In last place,
but with a deeply encouraging minus 28, Alan Davies!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Thank you.
And it only remains for me to thank Trevor, Jason, Sandi and Alan.
Good night.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd