APPLAUSE
Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening and welcome to QI.
Tonight, we'll be covering a kaleidoscope of K topics.
My co-pilots on this kamikaze caper are: the keen-eyed Sandi Toksvig!
The kick-arse Liza Tarbuck!
The knee-high Susan Calman!
And the knave very voluble Alan Davies.
And the buzzers today are kaleidoscopically colourful.
Sandi goes:
# Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair... #
Liza goes:
# Green is the colour of the sparklin' corn... #
Susan goes:
# Blue is the colour of the sky... #
And Alan goes:
# We'll drink a drink a drink to Lily the Pink the Pink the Pink
# The saviour of the human race... #
AUDIENCE CLAP ALONG
It's like an old people's home!
Join in. You can have your cocoa in a minute!
- Yes. - It's only for an hour!
Old people's home? It's like a Nazi rally.
That was how they used to warm up at Nuremberg.
Now we had better get on with our erste Frage,
the first question, which is about your kin.
Your kin and kindred.
Do you know what your relatives smell like?
My grandmother used to smell of Lily of the Valley.
Nobody smells of Lily of the Valley any more.
That was very common.
Grandmothers don't smell the same at all now, do they?
- They used to smell faintly of mints. - And Amontillado sherry.
- Oh, yes. Just the one. - Just the one, dear.
Baileys. That's what my gran smelled of.
Baileys, round the inside of the glass with her finger.
Oh, my goodness! Desperate.
There used to be a perfume called Tramp.
- Yes, there was! - Tramp.
And the advert for Tramp
was a young lady who knows what she wants,
and that's to be called a Tramp, apparently, in the 1970s.
And she wanders through a market and all these guys are like "Hey,"
- and she's like "I'm a Tramp." - It was a famous nightclub in Jermyn Street.
Tramp or Charlie.
Charlie! I can remember Benny Hill
doing a monologue about going to one of those King's Road...
"It was a den of ini-quiety."
He said, "It was full of kinky boots and underwear."
He said "I could smell her Charlie across the room."
I mean, it was her perfume.
Just so wrong.
Men used to smell of Old Spice, didn't they?
- Dads smelled of Old Spice. - And Brut.
Brut, yes.
Paul Abbott once wrote a line in something I did for him
which said, as our characters went into my parents' house,
the last line was, "Don't say anything about the smell,"
- which was really fascinating. - It makes you think of it.
Absolutely. It was that line of genius that he's very good at.
That is very good, isn't it? Well, in fact...
I'd know the smell of my children anywhere.
- My own children. - That's an interesting point.
It seems that a lot of members of the animal kingdom do,
- for very good reasons. - I was sat on quite a lot...
So it would ring a bell.
..by an older brother in order to incapacitate me during disputes.
- Very beautifully put. - And there was a certain aroma that I think...
How powerful the olfactory memory can be.
- It is the most powerful. - If he sat on me today...
- You'd know! - I'd be thrown back to 1973.
Well, you're absolutely right.
Can you think of an evolutionary or ecological reason
why you might need...
Well, you would not want to mate with your cousin.
You wouldn't want to shag your own close relatives.
So you'd want to know what your relatives smelled like so that you...
This sounds like all shagging takes place in the dark, but...
I mean, for example, most mammals don't raise their young
the way we do with long, long bonding,
so you recognise your mother and say, "I must not shag my mother."
But in other mammals, they might not see their father, for example.
The mouse lemur, which is one of the cutest little things,
the Madagascan mouse lemur, is reared exclusively by its mother.
But it can recognise its father's smell and avoid shagging him.
And butterflies have incredibly keen senses of smell.
They can smell mates from a huge distance away.
But if they're inbred, they have fewer sex pheromones.
Don't they say that as well,
when you're getting together with somebody,
that part of the reason that you get on well
is that you enjoy each other's smells?
- It seems so. - And it can keep you together.
I don't know about women, but men have no sense of smell who are...
Do you remember the word?
- Wordsworth was this, has no sense of smell. - No.
Anosmic. Anosmic.
You can't taste any food or anything.
You wouldn't be able to taste food.
But men who have no sense of smell get less...fewer sexual partners.
I thought you were going to say takeaways!
"I'll just have toast again."
Erm, Dr Johnson, somebody once said to him, "You smell."
And he said, "No, I do not.
"I stink."
There you are.
Nature has its reasons for producing smelly rellies.
Just... Some ways of blackmailing your parents.
Oh, yes.
Emotional blackmail, I would have thought.
My children can blackmail me at any time
by threatening to join a team sport.
I give them anything they want, anything,
- as long as I don't have to go and watch them perform in some sporting event. - Really?
- Can't be doing with it. - You're right, that is the well-known way children blackmail their parents,
by pester power and if you don't... "I'll never speak to you again" and such things,
but in the animal kingdom can that exist?
- Do you know of any... - Some kind of emotional blackmail?
Yeah, there's a particular species of bird,
the pied babbler, whose young
actually leave the nest and threaten to throw themselves off until their parents
come back and feed them, push them back in the nest, feed them more.
Suicidal birds?!
Kind of, pretendingly so.
Feed me or I'll jump! Can't fly.
- Oh! - Bye, then.
Darling, darling, let me give you some more food.
- It's very sophisticated. - It is sophisticated.
But why don't the adults remember that that's what they were doing?
That's the problem, you never remember.
Oh, he's gone over the edge again. He was bluffing, he was bluffing.
I used to do that when I was younger, I'm not falling for it.
- You don't remember what you did as a baby. - That's true, you don't.
That's another thing, you notice the beaks,
have you ever seen a very particular kind of beak that is in young birds?
A koha bird has the most remarkable beak,
which basically represents a face.
Oh, my God.
But weirdly not even a bird face, it looks more like a human face.
- Doesn't it? - That is basically saying,
- "Put the food here." - Wow.
It's like those things they had for men to aim at
- in the urinal, isn't it? - Yes!
It looks like Alan Carr.
I'm half closing my eyes now. Yes, it does.
- It does look a bit like him. - That's remarkable, isn't it?
It is extraordinary.
So there's a little man in there, and he wants some food as well.
The whole intestinal tract. And then as it gets older it fades.
- Just extraordinary. - That's brilliant.
What are we looking at here?
- A bird. - More birds. - Yes. - Is it a cuckoo?
The cuckoo's gone in the nest.
What do most cuckoos do?
They throw the eggs out of the nest, of another species.
Oddly enough, that's not most.
It's 50 odd of a species of which there are 136.
Only about 50 odd do it, the other 80 don't.
It's enough to cause talk, though.
It is, but a minority of cuckoo species are cuckoos in the nest.
They're giving the rest of them a bad name.
Nice cuckoos have got to do so much work to make up for the reputation.
So, birds blackmail their parents, just like people do.
Why did the spider go to the bathroom?
Ooh.
- They don't come up the plughole, they fall in. - Correct.
Fall in and they can't get out.
But why do they go there, are they thirsty?
- Well, they're house spiders, so they live in a... - House.
- I've got the hang of this show. - I still feel there's a trick coming.
They're usually hidden nicely in the wainscoting.
They can last a long time without food,
- but one thing they can't do without... - Is a drink.
Now, just put your own considerations apart!
Are they voyeurs? Do they like watching people in the bathroom?
"Here they come!"
That's why they're called spider. "I spied her!"
As I say, they can do without food and they can do without drink,
but they can't do without...?
Washing.
- Exercise. - Well, kind of. It's sex.
The male spider, come autumn, has got to get his rocks off.
This is where they lose their inhibitions.
That's when you'll see them in bathrooms and so on.
They don't really stand out. On carpets, you might miss them,
but in bathrooms, against the white, they're unmistakable.
But what happens if they don't have sex? Do they explode?
It's a primary imperative amongst a lot of animals.
They have an eight-finger shuffle.
Essentially, when I see these spiders
running around my house in the autumn, they're just really horny?
Yes. The male's looking for a female.
That makes it worse.
I've come round to spiders,
because they eat about 2,000 bugs a year,
and that's 2,000 less of those in your house and just one spider.
- Completely. - Or two, because they've got to have sex.
I pulled a curtain once when I was still in bed,
and you know the dread thing of seeing that above you?
And for the length it took for it to drop,
I was up over my boyfriend
and at the end of the room before it dropped.
It's the quickest I've ever moved in my life.
That would be a very good Olympic sport, spider drop.
The height of the spider
and then the distance you're going to travel, some calculation,
degree of difficulty.
That's a garden spider web, isn't it?
But in houses, you get cobwebs, which are messy and asymmetrical.
Film companies have spray cobwebs,
which is the most glorious thing.
I'm sure you've done it in Jonathan Ross. This is magical stuff.
You can presumably buy it online,
but it's so great for Halloween parties. I recommend it.
Did you just say Jonathan Ross?
I didn't even notice! Sorry. I meant Graham Creek!
I like the idea of Alan having had a brief career as Jonathan Ross.
Maybe it's like Doctor Who, everyone gets a shot at being Jonathan Ross.
You were the sixth Jonathan Ross.
I've had a long enough career to regenerate.
Spiders, I think, can't see very well.
So you would have been as much a surprise to the spider.
I don't think they drop on you on purpose.
They don't see you and think, "Ooh, I'll have a go."
"It's Liza Tarbuck! Liza Tarbuck!
"I'm going to get an autograph.
"Wahey! Oh, she's gone!
"I used to like you!
"Liza!"
That was brilliant. It was like Jonathan Ross was in the room.
Mrs Spider, after mating the house spider, what will she do?
- Eat it. - Yes, the most famous being the redback. - Black widow.
Or the black widow, indeed.
The redback, the male is really the most willing for it.
He will inseminate the female and then jump into her open mouth.
- How marvellous! - Last thing he does.
Your good old British house spider, she has the decency to
wait for the male to die before eating him, so it's kinder.
She must feel weird if she has sons cos
- she knows how they're going to go, so it can't be... - It's true, it's true.
Look at the boy, oh, shame.
You'd think she'd want either the insemination or the spider dinner.
She might not have wanted either of them.
- That's true. - Would have gone...Oh, God!
Ah-ah-ah...
- I've just had tea. - Eat me, eat me.
But I suppose it kills two birds with one stone,
because sometimes if you have had a little bit of the sexy, sexy time you are hungry.
That's true.
And it's sometimes annoying to have to get up and make a pasta dinner.
And so what it is, you've just had a bit of a...
I expect in the future men will evolve
with the Domino's logo on them.
And so women will lie there going, "At last, that was actually OK.
"Come on, come on."
- And then everyone's happy. - Yes.
So, if there's a spider stuck in your kitchen sink,
he's probably on the pull.
The best way to help a spider is by giving him a little ladder.
But what's the point of Snakes and Ladders?
Ah, now I did a programme about this,
- because actually it originated in India. - It did.
And it was a morality game, as so many of our games were, or are.
- Instructional. - Yes.
But wasn't it linked, as well, with Ludo?
Well, you have Snakes and Ladders
on one side of the board and Ludo on the other.
Yes, you do, that's right.
It's as easy as that!
So they are, in many ways, linked.
But this, as you say, do you know what the message is, as it were?
- In the States it was called Chutes and Ladders. - Really?
If you'd eaten all your dinner you could go up a ladder,
and if you'd done something bad, like,
I don't know, become President
and not closed down Guantanamo or something,
then you went back down the chute.
- So it was the same, I suspect it's to do with... - That's right,
it's learning various lessons. The K, in this case,
is karma.
It's a first or second century Hindu game,
and the snakes represent different types of sins.
The ladders let you reach nirvana, which is the finish there.
You can see, the original game isn't quite the same structure,
but it's not that far off. That's how it looked.
If you hit a snake it represented a vice,
for which you are punished.
So evil deed squares include disobedience,
which moved you from square 41, to square 4.
Drunkenness, 62 to 21,
murder, 73 all the way back to number one.
- I should think so. - Quite right.
Desire, almost there, 99, all the way back to 29.
And the virtues, which were the ladders that took you up,
included faith, perseverance, compassion...
Arsenal supporter.
I'm afraid, Alan, knowledge.
Now even more afraid, self-denial.
- So really a properly ancient game. - Genuinely ancient, yes. Second century.
And one that has sort of survived, I think it has.
Do you young people in the audience play Snakes and Ladders?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.
That man's taken a survey.
Don't you, of an evening?
That one didn't sound very young.
Is there a Snakes and Ladders app? No?
Well, while we're in a playful mood,
I have one of my knick-knacks to show you.
ALL: Ooooh!
Yes, now this...
The great Lord Kelvin in the 1890s was wandering along a beach
with a friend called Hugh Blackburn, who was a mathematician.
They found a pebble and a surface on which to spin it
and they found it had a peculiar property, not unlike this,
which is called a tippe top.
- Erm, and you give it a spin... - Oooooh!
- Oh! - It turns upside down.
Now, what you, sort of, don't notice because it's still going
clockwise but it's upside down, so it's reversed the direction of spin.
Oh...
And engineers and mathematicians like Bohr
and Pauli were fascinated by this.
It is quite fun.
We can show you some VT of it being done properly,
then you can see slightly better spin there.
So, this is about, you know when they were saying...
The spin is still going...sorry.
Where they were saying that the earth axis is going to change
and that north is going to be south. It's much like this.
- Sorry, Liza, is the world going to turn upside down? - Apparently so.
- Soon? - Tuesday, it's happening on Tuesday.
Just if I've got to get up and deal with my bills or not.
This is even, perhaps, more impressive.
This little thing here, and what's strange about this is
I can spin it one way but not the other.
If I spin it anti-clockwise, it goes very happily anti-clockwise
but if I try and spin it clockwise, it not only will resist,
it will stop and spin anti-clockwise.
I'm now going to try and spin it clockwise.
Because of the shape... the particular shape?
Obviously it's the reason, yes.
- Messing with its...you're twisting its melons, man. - Yeah!
And then round and round and round again.
- Do you know physics is extraordinary. - It is, try it anti-clockwise.
- It really is...why? - I know, it is very mysterious.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to dismiss you by saying it was because of the shape.
I'm trying to ascertain what the shape...I couldn't really see what was the shape.
- It's a cat's tongue, Alan. - It is a cat's tongue.
So, there you are. That shows it goes nicely counter-clockwise.
- Let me see. - It's sort of a humpy thing.
Slight hump in it but it's nothing...
- But it's got a twisty bit. - Tiny twist. Now, do it clockwise.
- Isn't that amazing? - Did you say it has a name?
This particular thing is called a rattleback.
That's extraordinary, isn't it?
Yeah, so that's the tippe top and the rattleback.
Two very extraordinary objects that you can spin around
and seem to have minds of their own.
Now, name the world's scariest spice.
- Well, it's none of them. - No.
Because I was a member of the Spice Girls fan club at the age of 20.
LAUGHTER DROWNS OUT SPEECH
- They were amazing. - They WERE amazing.
They take a lot of flak now but they were amazing.
Zig-a-zig-ah.
I just happened to be in Spice World: The Movie.
I went to see that in the cinema.
Which one were you playing?!
I honestly literally did it
because I had nephews who were at the age
where to get the signed photograph of each one of the Spice Girls,
it was like ten Christmases for them at once,
and they were so thrilled.
I would have pretended to be one of your nephews to get a signed photograph.
You spoke to everyone who was on that film and they said, "I'm doing it to get their autographs."
- What was the question? - Oh, yes, which is the scariest spice of them all?
- So, we're not going to be looking for an actual spice? - Well, yes.
- So, it's once of these? - Yes.
In order to big-up the price of spice,
and it didn't need much to do it back in the 17th century,
spice was the most precious commodity in the world.
Indeed there were spice wars between...?
- The British, the Dutch and the Portuguese mainly. - Absolutely right.
- And the island of Banda... - Yes.
..in Indonesia was swapped for Manhattan.
Well, one of the Banda islands was, yes.
Because it had so much nutmeg on it
- and nutmeg was more valuable than gold. - Indeed.
And they used it to preserve meat.
Well, they do and at the time, they thought it was
a cure for the bubonic plague, which increased its value even more.
The island was actually called Run, which is
- one of the Banda islands but, erm... - Have you been to a spice farm?
It's the most astonishing thing cos you say,
"Oh, I'm going to go to a spice farm.
"Thinking there'll be the nutmeg here and the paprika here..."
It all grows all together in the most fantastic eco-system
and you walk around and they're intertwined.
It's the most heady experience I've ever had in my life, it's fantastic.
- Yeah. - Spice farms in places like Tanzania...incredible.
- Tanzania and also Sri Lanka. - So, that's nutmeg there? Love that.
Yeah.
And nutmeg is related to mace in which way? What way? How way?
- Cousins. - Well, I think it's that I put mace in my beef stroganoff
but not nutmeg, does that work?
Mace and nutmeg are the same plant,
- just different parts of the same plant. - Oh, OK. - Actually, yeah.
But the one we're talking about is cinnamon.
And the salesman of cinnamon, in order to sell it at the most
premium price they could, used to tell of where it came from.
Which was the nest of this extraordinary bird,
which they called the kinnamomon orneon.
And it used these twigs of cinnamon in its nest
and what they would have to do to catch it, this giant bird,
is they'd leave slaughtered bits of giant oxen
and the birds would take them up and put them on their nest,
which would over-balance the nest and it would fall down
and they would take out the cinnamon twigs.
And, so they would charge all the more money for how dangerous
it was, basically, to gather from this mystical bird.
That is so fantastic,
cos you can imagine on the Silk Road or the trade roads
stopping and earning your supper of a night by telling
the tale of that particular thing.
Exactly and in fact it is the bark from a tree,
which doesn't take that much skill.
But to travel the distance it did, once it got to Britain,
a long, long way away...
- Oh, yeah. - ..only the very, very richest of people could afford it.
But just stay on spice for a moment.
I've prepared some allspice for you.
I've put them all into pots.
And I want you to tell me which spices you can smell in there,
which different spices.
I've got one for myself.
If it goes everywhere that'll be funny.
- Wow. - What can you smell? - Cloves.
- Cloves, definitely. - Cloves, definitely.
KLAXON SOUNDS
- It's not me, wasn't me, I didn't do anything. - It was me.
Anything else? You definitely said cloves, definitely.
I said loaves.
- Loaves! - It's very strong.
- It IS strong. - It's persimmon. It actually smells like a grandparent.
I wish I could make the audience smell it,
one day there will be smell-ivision, and we can share.
- Is somebody going to catch if I throw it? - It's very strong.
Oh!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Shall I pass it on?
Pass it along.
Thank you so much.
You can hand it to someone in the audience behind you.
- Who's good at spices? - You better have the lid. - Tell me what that is.
No, it's not clove.
Well, it's sort of a cheat, really, it is called allspice,
and a lot of people seem to believe
allspice is a mixture of spices, but it isn't.
It is a specific plant that gets its name
from smelling like a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves,
and it's called Pimenta dioica.
- AUDIENCE MEMBER SNEEZES - Oh, bless you.
That's very funny!
Don't get too close to it, sir.
We know where it's reached in the audience.
It's all over the back of row three now.
Excellent.
Now, the word pepper has, as it were, two meanings for us.
We have the pepper, which is salt and pepper
and then we have hot peppers.
And do you remember the name of the scale
by which you measure the heat of peppers?
I heard a little whisper in the audience.
If you have a really strong one, it smells like someone's died inside you.
- Ahhhhh... Ooooohhhh.... - Someone in the audience is dying to get out here. - Richter. - Say it again?
- FROM THE AUDIENCE: - Scoville.
Scoville, Scoville Scale, you're absolutely right.
And on the Scoville Scale a jalapeno, for example, is 5,000.
Whereas, the hottest one is the Trinidad Maruga Scorpion.
- Oh, it sounds hot. - Which ranks over two million on the Scoville Scale.
Could it kill you, if it was that...?
Almost, I mean, the hottest possible on the Scoville Scale
are actually genuinely poisonous but the hottest curry,
supposedly, ever measured that's been eaten...
It was eaten by a Dr Rothwell, who was a radiologist,
perhaps appropriately.
In order to prepare it, the chef had to wear goggles and a mask...
Like so, and it produces crying and shaking and vomiting,
in eating it.
Very like our local Indian.
The restaurant's owner said that Dr Rothwell was hallucinating
and he himself took a ten minute walk down the street weeping,
in the middle of eating it.
Took him an hour to eat. Which is not bad.
So, so hot!
Now, which Olympic sport should women not take part in?
Weightlifting.
- She looks so pleased with herself. - She does, as wouldn't you be.
Four scenes away from a prolapse though.
I'm trying to think of her name, she's amazing.
She can lift the equivalent of two fridges over her head.
- She's an astonishing... - Cheryl Haworth, by the way.
Cheryl Haworth, that's right, and she's an amazing weightlifter.
- I went to women's weightlifting in the Olympics. - Did you?
Marvellous.
And a woman from Kazakhstan won,
very emo...not a dry eye in the house.
- You can see the physical effort. - Oh, absolutely.
It's quite funny, the weightlifting, because usually,
I was going to say the trainer but it's more like the handler...
Coaxes out the weightlifter...
This way, this way.
- And then they get the powder for the... - Oh, yes.
..for grip and then they get in position
and they go "sh-sh-sh" and you all have to be quiet.
You could hear a pin drop and then they make this...and
when they can't do it, it's heartbreaking.
- It's four years... - They turn their back on it.
If they do do it, everyone erupts.
- So, it's a very emotional experience. - I bet it is.
There was one girl who fell down and got pinned under it.
PANEL GASP
Everyone's craning their necks for a view.
Is she alive?
Twitching...
STEPHEN LAUGHS
Took about four people to lift the thing off her neck, you know.
- Kept getting help cos it was enormous. - Exactly.
It was very, very exciting.
- Everything about the Olympics was exciting. - It was.
- It was quite exciting just going to the ExCeL centre, no-one's ever said that before. - No.
- Are you talking about the ancient Olympics or... - No, the ancient Olympics was all male anyway.
No, this is, obviously, women should be allowed
and can take part in all the summer Olympics...
Except Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, he said
that it should just be about male athleticism, applauded by women.
But we've moved on from that, as we know. So, when we say "should"...
- Is it a K? - Yes, it is a K. - It's a K thing?
It's a K, the word actually means, in its own language,
a man's something.
Which is why, technically, you can't have a woman's version of it.
- Kayaking. - Is the right answer.
- Really? - Yeah.
APPLAUSE
Absolutely right.
In the Inuktitut language, it means a man's boat.
Except, they also had all female boats
- and I'm trying to think of the name of them. They had a boat that was only for the women. - Kayakette.
And traditionally the women caught more fish...in their boats and
they've got a completely different name, like an umiak, I think.
It was called a trawler.
Errrr!
Sometimes the men used the umiak for hunting walruses and things,
but they were mainly used just for transporting people and objects.
Now, these two in this picture, one seems to have a quiver
for arrows and the other one seems to have a baby...
- Growing out of her shoulder. - It would be awful to get those mixed up.
Baaaaah!
That's so true.
Stephen, you say that now it's all marvellous equality,
it's not completely.
For example, in the women's football,
in the 2012 Olympics,
the Japanese sent a women's team and they sent a men's team,
and the men's team came from Japan in business class,
and the women's team came in economy.
- That's not my fault! - No, I'm just saying!
I wasn't blaming you.
They did go back, I have to say,
in a different way, in that the women went back with a silver medal,
and the men went back without anything.
In the Olympics, for example,
there are only two sports which are wholly co-ed, as it were.
- Equestrian, presumably, would be one. - Equestrian, the other is sailing.
It doesn't seem to make a difference.
Almost all sports were invented by men to show off skills men have,
so that's kind of why I think men are good at them.
I like the ones where they do those trial ones,
and I think it was 1900 in Paris
they had poodle clipping as a trial sport.
- It's a nice thought, it's actually not true. - Is it not true?
- It's a myth but it's a lovely idea. - I'd like that.
Now for a question about going under the knife.
What's the advantage of having
an arm surgically attached to your face?
You could use it like a trunk.
- You could. - Feed yourself buns.
Can you not feed yourself buns already?
If you're doing something, doing something else,
so let's say you were performing surgery, and you got peckish,
- you wouldn't have to get anyone else to help you. - That's true.
- Are you talking about an arm, or an arm and a hand, or...? - Extra arm.
- No, it's not to give you an extra arm. - Skin grafting.
It was kind of skin grafting.
It was done in the 17th century by an Italian surgeon.
That's the process - there's your arm.
It's the bit near the shoulder,
and it's attached, as you can see, to the nose.
It was quite common in that period for the nose to perish,
to disappear, to get diseased from...?
- Oh, syphilis. - Syphilis, I'm afraid.
There was a man called Gaspare Tagliacozzi,
who was a surgeon from Bologna,
and he performed this rhinoplasty, essentially.
- Can you name a famous person who had a nose made of metal? - Tycho Brahe.
You probably pronounce him better than most,
- because he was your countryman. - The Danish astronomer.
He had a zinc, was it, or brass...?
- I think it was brass. - Oh, how fabulous.
Can he play it like a trumpet?
Disconcerting as well, colour wise,
to have a big brass nose, with a fine shine on it.
I'd like an eye on me finger.
- An eye on your finger. - Mm.
I'm sure it'd be possible one day.
Fit for the uses on buses and tubes.
I'm afraid people get...
- LAUGHTER - No! Not for an auto colonoscopy!
Stop it!
Behave! That's just revolting.
A-ha.
Of course, the other thing is, there was
a nobleman who decided he didn't want anybody's...
There was a nobleman who decided he didn't want...
I'm reading.
There was a nobleman who decided he didn't want a cut
made in his own arm, so he had a servant have his arm cut.
- Really? - Yeah.
And the servant had to sort of follow him all around.
Of course, what happened was the servant died
and the nose was rejected.
Of course.
And they weren't sure whether he died
because it was rejected or whether it was rejected because he died.
So he had no nose and nobody to get the tea!
There's another operation - a gynecomastia,
which is breast diminution.
In 2012, a paper called
Gynecomastia in German Soldiers - Etiology and Pathology,
looked at the number of breast reductions that were taking
place among the male members of the German army.
Abnormal breasts - why would German soldiers have abnormal breasts?
- They drink too much milk. - No.
Is it when you march like this?
Not quite the marching, it's a ceremonial buffeting of your
rifle against your chest.
It actually causes the breast to enlarge.
Is it like a shock thing?
It's a shock and the breast has to get used to this regular
pummelling, and decides to push extra fat out to protect itself.
- Wow. - It's during ceremonial drill...
Women could save money on breast implants and just get a gun.
I think it might be quite odd
if you were just sitting on the bus doing that all the time.
I'd save it for private!
I think if you took a gun on a bus at all you'd be in trouble.
In the last six years,
212 German soldiers have had this procedure,
which is not inconsiderable,
considering that, being a male soldier, it's presumably embarrassing.
Exactly. I just thought, wouldn't it go away?
Yeah, the modern German army...
- MIMICS GERMAN ACCENT: - Forget all your notions of the Nazis,
we're whole new peoples!
We're very at ease with our inner woman, you know.
It's really, there's no embarrassment -
I could show you my breasts. And I'm not embarrassed at all.
It's fine.
- That's an incredibly sexy accent. - Thank you. - It really is.
APPLAUSE
I think camouflage clothing is weird cos you can see them perfectly well.
You may have missed the point but I kind of know what you're saying.
Right, let me take you back to a day in September, 2005.
Why did so many Russians have it off?
- Was it football? - Wasn't anything to do with football.
- Is it to do with voting? - Voting? No. Actually, only in a province.
The governor of this province and the particular town.
Ulyanovsk is the name of the town. That might be a hint.
Ulyanov mean anything to you?
- Erm... - Someone in the audience will know what the name means?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Lenin.
- Lenin's real name was Ulyanov. - Oh! I had no idea.
So his town was named after him - Ulyanovsk - and it was a popular
destination, in Communist times.
People would come and say, "He vos born Ulanovsk."
There's me just thinking he was from Liverpool.
I was trying to get into my... You have to sound as if
you are speaking backwards. "Iz alvays difficoolt ven...
"Lenin vos born in Ulyanovsk."
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
The governor of...
"I hope ze destination..."
- There he is. - Oh, look at him!
- Looks as if he's praying. - Bruce Forsyth.
LAUGHTER
- Oh, my God, it is! - Yeah!
"Nice to see you..."
Brucefski Vlad Forsythski.
He decided that the town was suffering and...
Well, it is. Look at the bloody architecture.
LAUGHTER
Most Communist architecture is even worse than that.
But he decided it needed to increase its population,
- so he named a day... - Was there an edict? - Yes.
And it was basically Shag Day and if you could show
that you had conceived that day, you got prizes - very Bruce Forsyth! -
like a fridge.
LAUGHTER
"Fridge - yes, yes!
"Vot else do you have?" There was a star prize, which was a 4x4.
Really, yes.
- On that day, what did gay people do - redecorate? - I'm afraid, gay people...
- Yes, they do that every day! - Oh, sorry!
- Silly me(!) - Gay people were never the first priority
and still aren't in Russia, I'm afraid. The Day of Conception.
On those game shows in the '70s, they'd give you a speedboat
- or a caravan. - Yes!
Things you just didn't want, at all. "You've won a caravan."
There'd be someone standing in the door, waving.
Do they pair you up, like a dating thing?
- Oh, I see what you mean. - "I vouldn't advise it."
I think it was a very severe Russian...
I think it had to be within marriage.
- They didn't want to fill Ulyanovsk with bastards. - No.
- That was the last thing they wanted. - Riff-raff. - Yeah, exactly.
Even in the Napoleonic era, there was a Russian general
called Alexey Arakcheyev, who insisted that all the women
on his estate have a son every year. If they had a daughter,
or didn't have any child, or even miscarried, they were fined.
- That's a bit harsh. - It was tough, but they understood it(!) - Yes.
- They knew where they were(!) - Seems perfectly reasonable to me(!)
Anyway, in 2005, the mayor of Ulyanovsk
gave everyone a day off, so they could play Hide The Sausage.
LAUGHTER
- We need to talk about Kevin. - Oh, right. - What can you say?
- Oh. - Kevins. - One of my best friends is called Kevin.
Well, I'm sorry. I say that because that is a clue as to the answer.
- Is it the meaning of the name? - Unfortunately, it's just not
a good name to have if you are on the hunt for a partner.
On dating websites, people are actively put off by the name Kevin,
I'm afraid. They get fewer replies.
So, if your name is Kevin, use your middle name,
but not if your middle name is Marvin, Justin or Dennis,
cos they are equally unfortunate.
- It's so unfair. - I've never met anyone called Kevin.
I've never met a Kevin. I've never met a Kevin.
You've never met a Kevin? You've never met any Kevin?
There's a Kevin there! You can meet him!
- Is there someone called Kevin in? - Hiya! Susan - Kevin!
Yay! There we go!
- Not only that... - Do you know...? - Not only that, he's gorgeous!
- He's gorgeous! - He's lovely!
"Before tonight" - it's like Surprise, Surprise - "before tonight
"I'd never met a Kevin, now I'm married to one."
Do you know what was nice? You were so pleased.
You were like that, "At last! My time in the sun! It's Kevin!"
Also, if you're female, there are four names that do just as badly
for women - Mandy, Chantelle, Jacqueline and Celina, with a C.
Apparently, the best names, which are rather dully middle class,
are Jacob and Alexander and Charlotte and Emma,
just in terms of returns on the website.
I'll give you some names last year born in America, beginning with K.
Krymson, K-R-Y-M-S-O-N. Klinton, with a K.
Kingsolomon, all one word.
LAUGHTER
- He's mine. - Keats and Kdrian - letter K, D-R-I-A-N.
- YORKSHIRE ACCENT: - "Kdrian, coom in, our kid, your tea's on t'table.
Sorry, don't know why I said it like that.
There were ten Kindles, as in the e-reader.
- People are called Kindle? - Ten in America baptised or given that name. And ten Kingdavids, all one word.
My sister-in-law used to work in a hospital and there were
a pair of twins born - this is in Sunderland - and they were named
Fifa and Uefa.
LAUGHTER
- GEORDIE ACCENT: - "Little Champions League, you get in now!"
- Fifa and Uefa. - That's fantastic. - They're not even words. - Right.
You're less likely to click with people called Kevin, sadly.
Now it's time for General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please. Which way is this comet going?
- ALAN'S BUZZER - Where's it headed to?
I think it's going that way, I thought was the answer.
- KLAXON SOUNDS - Oh!
Dagnabbit!
It looks as though the tail is to the left.
The tail is caused by solar wind.
There's nothing to reveal the direction of travel.
It's solidified carbon dioxide turning into gas in the solar winds,
and it's always pointing away from the sun, the tail.
- Isn't it beautiful? - They are beautiful, aren't they?
Who took that picture?
That's a good effort.
You could put it into a competition.
"I shot this on a Nikon F8, standing on a stepladder."
"It took me 40 years to get the film developed."
I assume from some passing object that NASA sent up.
But it comes from the Greek comitos, do you know what that means?
- Electrical store. - No.
APPLAUSE
It means "long beard",
and that's what it reminds people of, a nice long beard.
The point is, there's nothing to reveal the direction of travel.
- We don't know where that one's going, then? - We simply don't know.
- Luton. - It's going to Luton. That'll do.
Describe the skin on a crocodile's head.
There isn't going to be any, is there?
- Thick. - Thick is probably right, yeah.
- This is a trap, isn't it? - Yeah.
- Would I? - Yes.
- They don't have any skin. - Yeah, they do.
- It's not that. - It's not that, then, yeah.
Shoe.
Reptilian.
Yes, that'll do. But it isn't scaly.
- Not scaly. - That's right.
Not scaly.
Move on, then, next one.
- Just do a quick explanation. - Fish are scaly.
It's cracked skin and it's irregular.
Scales are genetically programmed to appear and are regular,
but these are different on every single crocodile
and they're not regular.
Once, I did an extraordinary trip, where I canoed across Africa -
I don't recommend it, you get a condition called trench bottom,
and, um...
- Met a wonderful woman... - Sorry, you did what nude?
- I canoed across Africa. - Nude?
No, no, not nude.
All I could hear...
It was in my head.
It wasn't dangerous enough, so I...
I thought I heard you say, "I can nude."
That's why I went, "Pardon?"
Anyway, I met this woman, this missionary, and I said to her...
LIZA LAUGHS
She said, "I hope you're not in a kayak."
- She was a missionary...? - A missionary.
And she said to me, "Are you worried about crocodiles." I said, "Yes."
She said, "If you should meet a crocodile, here's the advice -
"offer it your arm, cos then you've still got both legs to run away."
True.
I like that. We know another good way.
Put a rubber band over its mouth.
It can only move one jaw and it can't put any pressure upwards,
snap it down.
The things that look like scales on a crocodile's head
are actually just cracks in its skin.
So, that's the end of the show, so let's find out
who's the clever clogs and who's a big stupid old thicky.
In equal last position, on minus nine,
- it's Liza and Susan! - SHE CHEERS
APPLAUSE
In a highly-respectable second place,
with minus four, Alan Davies!
APPLAUSE
Which means that our runaway,
super-soaraway winner, with minus two, is Sandi Toksvig.
APPLAUSE
So, it only remains for me to thank Susan, Sandi, Liza and Alan.
Good night.