APPLAUSE How lovely.
How very nice.
Hello!
Good evening, and a very warm welcome to the next episode of QI.
Next to me tonight are the next best thing, Ross Noble.
APPLAUSE
Who's next? Lucy Porter.
APPLAUSE
Whatever next? It's Frankie Boyle.
APPLAUSE
And, better luck next time, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Next, let's hear their buzzers. Ross goes...
# I wanna get next to you. #
Ooh. Cocktails, half price.
Frankie goes...
- # And the next step is love - The next step is love. #
Aww. Lucy goes...
# For 24 years, I've been living next door to Alice. #
- Alice... - And...
Alan goes...
- BELL DINGS - 'Next!'
Right, what's the difference between the next big thing and a turkey?
Well, a turkey is sometimes a disaster.
Yes, it's an American show business term for a flop.
- A terrible show. - Yeah.
So, the difference between the next big thing and abject failure.
It can be the length of the first half of the show.
By the interval, the next big thing was a turkey.
The worst show in the West End, the shortest show in the West End
where the iron - you know the thing that they to put in in the interval?
It got stuck in the interval and they thought,
"Oh, can't be arsed." And they never did the second half.
It got to the interval and even the theatre went, "No."
So, how can we tell? How can we tell that something is going to be
a big thing, or it's going to be a failure?
- Well, we don't know. - Yeah.
Till the curtain goes up and the audience comes in, who knows?
- But maybe you can know... - Well, here's the extraordinary thing.
There are certain people, consumers,
who systematically buy products that go on to fail.
And their lack of popular taste is unerringly reliable.
And they are called "harbingers of failure."
It doesn't conform to any pattern, age, sex, culture,
anything like that, or the region.
Unless he's the bloke... You know like on cop shows
where they drive through the boxes?
And he keeps getting hit by Starsky and Hutch
on a regular basis.
"I'm wearing the hi-viz, love. I'm sick of it."
But they did some research,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They analysed ten million transactions
at a chain of convenience stores, and what they discovered was,
people who buy the nail polish that fails
are also the people buying the ice cream that fails.
And there's some fantastic products that have been snapped up
by harbingers in the past. Watermelon-flavoured Oreo biscuits.
This is my favourite, there was a range of ready meals
made by a toothpaste manufacturer called Colgate's Kitchen Entrees.
- ROSS: - Oh, that, I would've bought that!
Would you have bought that, cleaned your teeth
- while you're eating? - You're eating the spaghetti
and flossing at the same time. That's genius!
But if you can find these people who've got what they call
a "flop affinity", then it's fantastic for market research.
There's a PH Wodehouse story, isn't there? About a producer
who brings his ten-year-old child to every show
and everyone thinks he's a really doting father,
but it's just that he thinks the public's expectations
are the same as a ten-year-old child.
And it helps him judge whether the show is going to be any good or not.
That's how Mork And Mindy got made.
- Because, erm, the guy that did Happy Days... - Yeah?
..his kid wanted an alien in Happy Days.
And he went, "Oh, yeah, go on, then. Put an alien in it."
So they put Robin Williams in as Mork in Happy Days,
and he was so successful, they did a spin-off series.
Biggest thing on telly.
- I'll tell you two things those harbingers have bought. - Yeah.
My book and my last DVD.
APPLAUSE
Well, I've got both those, so I feel terrible now!
90% of all new products fail,
and there is a Museum of Failed Products in Michigan.
It was meant to be a reference library of consumer goods,
but the vast majority are failures, and there's some fantastic things.
This is one of my favourites.
Pre-scrambled eggs in a cardboard tube,
designed to be eaten in the car.
I'll have that!
Breath mints that look like crack cocaine.
This is very good.
100% recycled pillow-soft "Shit Be Gone" loo paper.
"Shit be gone!"
You have to do that when you use it.
"Whack Off insect repellent."
We've all done that!
It's a funny way to get rid of insects!
Can I just say, I have got some fabulous information about turkeys
which is not totally relevant? But you know when you learn something,
and you just think, "I totally have to share this," OK?
So, in the 1950s, they discovered that males would mate
with a lifelike model of a female turkey as eagerly
as they would mate with the real thing. So, of course,
they decided to try and find out what was the minimal stimulus
that would get a turkey going, OK?
They gradually stripped the model of its tail, its feet and its wings.
This did not deter the male bird in any way.
When there was just a head left on a stick, they were still up for it!
That is why my range of turkey sex toys never took off.
They were too lifelike.
Yes, well...
A freshly-severed head on a stick was the most effective,
like, the sexiest thing.
That was followed by a dried male head.
And in third place, a two-year-old withered female head.
And in last place, but still eliciting a sexual response,
a plain balsawood model of a head.
I don't know if you've ever taken a turkey to a Punch and Judy show.
It's horrific.
Unbelievable.
- That's all I want to do now. - Yeah!
Anyway, the last people you want to buy your next big thing
are the first people to buy it.
Which of these would be nice next-door neighbours?
Galaxies, hyenas, newlyweds, octopuses or burglars?
That's more of a mime artist than a burglar.
It is, yes.
I imagine that burglars don't burgle their neighbours?
- Yes, that's absolutely right. - They go further afield? - Yeah.
- They're nice. - I won't do the neighbours. - They're not lazy,
- that's something in their defence. - No.
- FRANKIE: - It could be selfishness, though, couldn't it?
It could be that they just don't want to put
their own insurance premium up.
That's a very good point.
But you are right. Burglars are very good neighbours,
in that they're not going to burgle you.
Galaxies are bad neighbours.
So what happens, when they reach a certain age,
a galaxy stops spawning new stars
and they just swallow smaller galaxies.
So our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, is expected quite soon,
this is in astronomical terms, four billion years from now,
to eat two of its neighbours, the large and small Magellanic Clouds.
And then, about a billion years after that,
the Milky Way will get eaten itself by the Andromeda galaxy.
- Andromeda, yeah. - Yeah. What about hyenas?
- Good neighbours, bad neighbours? - All that laughing.
When Mrs Brown's Boys is on, it's probably a nightmare.
That's actually what they do in the studio audience.
They don't use canned laughter on that show, they have live hyenas.
The trouble with hyenas is,
- you spend days and days stalking your deer. - Yeah.
And then they just come and rob it off you.
So I bet they're terrible neighbours.
Terrible neighbours. Any more for any more, Frankie?
I just think, although you'd know that they weren't laughing at you,
- it'd be hard not to be a little paranoid. - Yeah.
They're extraordinary creatures, they're so aggressive.
There's so much testosterone in a hyena
that, when a baby hyena is born, the first thing it does
is it turns around and tries to kill the next one
that's trying to be born. So, they're really aggressive.
- However, very good neighbours. - Ah.
Most people who live in hyena-prone areas, in fact encourage hyenas,
because they control pests
and they clear up all diseased animal carcasses.
And they don't attack humans as much as that photograph might suggest.
That one's wearing a John Lydon wig.
What about newlyweds?
What do you think, good neighbours, bad neighbours?
Well, I enjoy hearing other people making love.
I so rarely do it myself these days.
Since my husband got a turkey's head on a stick,
he's not interested any more but...
- ROSS: - But also, all the wedding gifts,
all the boxes from the wedding,
they leave them in the garden, don't they?
So, yes, you get to hear the lovemaking,
but there's discarded boxes.
So, a tick in each column.
Anything else?
They did a survey in Colorado,
and they found that people are much happier if they think
they're having more sex than their neighbours.
That's a thing. And so, having a honeymoon couple move in next door
- makes you feel depressed. - But I would sort of think
that society's moved on.
So, like, in the old days, that would be the first time
they're having sex, when they get married.
Whereas now, they get married to try and save the relationship,
because the sex is gone.
What about gloomy octopuses? Good neighbours, bad neighbours?
They'd have lovely gardens.
Well, yes and no is the weird thing.
It's the common Sydney octopus, but it's known as the gloomy octopus.
Look at those eyes! Aren't they fantastic?
What it does is, it throws rubbish at its neighbours.
It lives in Jervis Bay in Australia, and it gathers debris into its arms,
and then it uses the jet propulsion siphons on the sides of its body
to hurl it at the neighbours.
It's really unusual to find projectile weapons in animals.
So it may just be over-enthusiastic housework, I don't know.
- Is it cos the octopuses next door are having more sex? - Yeah.
- LUCY: - The sound of the suckers... - SHE MAKES SUCKER SOUNDS
OK, that thought is never going to leave me now.
Now, the next question isn't a next question,
it's a NECKS question.
So, I have...
I think that would look nice on you.
- And you can have this one here. - Lovely.
And there we go.
This one there. Right, make yourselves a prat.
Now, who knows how to make a prat?
What have you done, darling, what knot have you done?
I don't know. It's what I used to do at school.
Did you ever have that thing called "peanutting" at school?
- When people pull your tie tight? - They pull it really tight
- and then you can't get it undone. - Yes, that happened a lot.
OK, do you know the answer to stop that happening?
Oh, I wish you'd been around in 1976!
If you put a 2p coin inside the knot,
then it's impossible to peanut somebody.
- I shall tell my boys. - Pass it on.
So, the prat, basically you have to have it back to front,
like this, in order to tie it.
I haven't worn a tie since I gave up the pipe. Erm...
Like this.
And this is a self-releasing version of the prat,
it's called a Nicky knot.
And the reason it's self-releasing,
is that, when you pull it out like that, you can just let it go.
And it won't end up in a knot.
APPLAUSE Thank you very much!
They're difficult to follow. So, here's what happened.
1999, there were two Cambridge mathematicians,
Thomas Fink and Yong Mao,
and they calculated the maximum number of ways to tie a tie.
They worked out it was 85.
And then there was a Swedish mathematician watching
The Matrix Reloaded - came out in 2003.
- Fantastic film. It's great. - Amazing. - Slow-motion bullet avoiding?
Brilliant.
LAUGHTER
I absolutely loved it.
But he's watching this film and instead of thinking,
"Here's a great film for learning how to..."
And it gets so much better in a chair.
This Swedish mathematician called Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson,
he's watching it and he realises that there is a tie
tied in a knot that isn't on the main list of 85.
And so, he re-worked the list and he came up
with a total number of ways to tie a normal tie -
177,147.
He did slightly change the rules,
but every time you face having to put on a tie,
177,147 different ways in which you might decide to tie it.
I hate ties.
I just sort of think the minute you get a really depressing job,
the one thing you have to wear is a sort of suicide kit.
Anybody know how long we've been wearing ties for?
- How long they've been around? - About five minutes, now.
We've had ties since the Thirty Years' War, which was 1618.
It was the Croatians who first brought the notion
of wearing something. They wore a little small, knotted...
Am I a time traveller?
Just turn sideways. Turn this...
APPLAUSE
- That is quite spooky. - My God, they've found out my secret!
Fire up the machine, we must travel back!
It's where we get "cravat" from. It's from the Croatians.
Then it took off, and the Parisians loved it.
King Louis XIV was so obsessed with his cravats,
he had a cravateur who used to lay out cravats for him to choose.
God, I've put on a bit of weight, haven't I?!
We could do a show with you just being characters from history!
Somebody once heckled me by saying,
"You look like every single character from Lord Of the Rings."
While we're doing knots, now, I've been practising this,
and I can do it about one in three.
So, you've all got an opportunity to give this a go.
There we go. That was pretty cool!
APPLAUSE
OK, so, it is just a length of chain,
and then you place the ring up in like this...
Now, if you hold it with your thumb,
and then hold it with one of your fingers and, what you need to do,
you just let the finger go and not the thumb.
Just try and let the... Yeah, Ross has got it!
APPLAUSE
- Just a few more goes... - All right, you're determined.
Put the chain... OK.
Don't make me get up and show you!
So, make your hand wide like this, OK?
And then, hook your thumb like this, but don't hook the chain.
Just hold that like that and only let your finger go.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I feel like a teaching assistant.
And where can you get one of those, this time of day?
Oh, yes! APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
I feel my time here has been worthwhile.
Right. Is this the neck verse thing?
CHORAL SINGING
Isn't it beautiful?
It's not worth losing your nuts for, though, is it?
Well, you might lose more than that...
Really? Is it about hanging?
It is about dying, certainly.
It's known as the neck verse. Does anybody know why?
- FRANKIE: - The neck verse is how a German doctor tells you
you have whiplash.
- I do know this. - Yes?
- There used to be a thing called benefit of clergy. - Yep.
Where if people could prove that they were in the clergy
- by reciting a verse of the Bible... - Yep.
..then they were tried under ecclesiastical law
instead of normal law, where they'd be more likely to get hung.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, it's brilliant.
APPLAUSE
It's Psalm 51 and it was known as the neck verse,
and you had to be able to recite it in Latin.
"O God, have mercy upon me,
"according to thine heartfelt mercifulness."
And, the benefit of the clergy, it existed for about 600 years,
from about the 12th century to 1841.
And some crimes, the clergy would get lesser sentences.
And so it used to be you had to prove you were clergy.
But over time, it was enough to prove you were literate,
so, obviously, in Latin, and this created a loophole.
So, illiterate people could learn that verse by heart,
and the courts were happy to go along with this legal fiction,
because there were many crimes which it was felt
that the punishment was too harsh. So, they would allow this fiction
that you were a member of the clergy,
and therefore you could get away with it.
In fact, Ben Jonson, the playwright, in 1598,
he avoided being hanged for killing an actor in a duel,
an actor called Gabriel Spenser, by pleading benefit of clergy.
I know a bit about Ben Jonson.
He murdered someone that he acted in a play with,
the play was called The Isle Of Dogs.
And it was so offensive that it was suppressed so completely
nobody's ever worked out what it was about.
- We don't even have a record of the script or anything? - No.
- And then you released it on DVD! - Yeah!
APPLAUSE
Do you know why priests wear a dog collar?
It's something that we associate with the clergy,
- but it's fairly recent. - I mean, I am going grey, I'll give you that.
You need to do that double chin a bit more.
That's it.
Is it just for ID?
It's just for ID. It's a Scottish Presbyterian invention
that was then adopted by the Anglicans in the 1840s.
So, it didn't really become widespread until the 1880s
and those bands that hang down, they're called preaching bands.
So it's like an early bar code?
Yes. Exactly like, exactly like that.
We don't have them in Denmark.
In Denmark, it's a Lutheran church, so they wear the Elizabethan ruff.
- Still got the ruff going on? - Yeah, going on. Oh, yeah.
Bring back the ruff!
- Very forgiving, a ruff. Very, erm... - But the vicar now would get a lot
of biscuit crumbs in the ruff, wouldn't he?
So, what's the best thing about clickbait?
There's nothing good about it at all, it's horrifying.
Why would you think it's horrifying?
Because there's nothing about me taking a quiz
saying which Game Of Thrones character I am
that suggests that I am in the market for a brand-new Lexus.
But why do you do it? That's the question, why do you do it?
Boredom. I think it's also the internet tries to sell itself as,
oh, it's connective, you're connecting with people
and you're not. The other day, I saw a thing about the FA Cup Final
on the BBC website and, at the bottom, it said "Get involved."
What, in the FA Cup Final?!
How?!
Can somebody describe clickbait for anybody who doesn't know what it is?
- LUCY: - The worst ones are the...
"23 things you never knew about ducks.
- "Number 12 will astonish you!" - Yeah.
They call them "listicles,"
which is portmanteau of "list" and "testicles" cos...
..they're all complete bollocks.
So, here's the weird thing.
The research suggests that the pleasure we get
from cute and funny or shocking videos,
the ones that do the rounds on the internet,
we get the pleasure from anticipating them
and not from actually seeing them.
So it releases dopamine when we think we're going to see something.
So dopamine... This is a neuroscientist put it this way -
dopamine is not about pleasure, it's about the anticipation of pleasure.
It's about the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself.
That's quite interesting, because, if you click on one of those things,
like, sometimes it will say,
"40 actresses, you won't believe what they look like now.
"Number 37 is amazing!"
- But you have to go through... - By the time you get to about 19,
the dopamine's worn off.
You never get to 37.
And people seldom get what's promised,
but we carry on and it's called intermittent re-enforcement.
And we keep getting more dopamine,
it's more addictive as you keep going through.
We're slaves to curiosity.
I find this profoundly depressing.
- I think so too. - All we're ever doing is anticipating stuff
and the only thing that's really going to deliver is Tinder
and the actual relationship is going to be terrible.
And we sort of know that's true, don't we?
But I don't think it's a new thing. I mean, "To travel hopefully
"is better than to arrive" is an old idea.
There's also a thing called the spoiler paradox,
which has a similar effect. People enjoy a story more,
when they know how it's going to turn out.
And we think maybe the story's easier for the brain to process,
without the distraction of wondering how it's going to end.
So, spoiler alert, Alan's going to come last today.
Already, the audience having a much better time!
Looking forward to something is more than half the fun, it seems.
And the next question is absolutely fantastic!
Who has green sponge balls?
- FRANKIE: - Is it...? - MAN: - SpongeBob SquarePants! - Ah...
KLAXON
APPLAUSE
That's why you're sitting over there!
- ROSS: - Can you imagine that bloke, for the rest of his life,
he's going to go, "And I knew the answer, and I shouted it...
- "Oh, God!" - Who was it? Hand up, hand up, who was it?
- Welcome to my world. - Let's have a clear shot of you.
- What's your name? - Nick! - You're going to be so sorry. OK.
You're a harbinger of failure, Nick.
- Anybody else know? OK. So... - Green sponge balls...
- Green sponge balls. - ..is what they have on a snooker table
in a tinnitus clinic.
So, who has, in the UK, who has green sponge balls?
- LUCY: - Erm... - Is it a medical thing? - No, it's a species.
Would it be a sponge?
- It's not a sponge, but is in the sea. - Seaweed?
It is seaweed. It is a kind of seaweed. Absolutely right.
APPLAUSE
But you know, what's sad is that there isn't any any more.
It's all gone,
but it used to be one of the must-have species
in the mid-19th century for seaweed collectors.
So there was a brief craze,
it gripped the daughters of Victorian well-to-do.
In fact, even Queen Victoria herself had a seaweed album.
- FRANKIE: - Before TV, people were just so bored.
They were just sitting there going,
- "Collect some seaweed, invade India..." - Yeah.
"Let's just try and get through this."
But it was a bit like pressed flowers.
You placed the seaweed onto the page, you weighted it down,
and then some gelatinous matter oozed out
and that stuck the seaweed to the paper.
But it was a huge thing. There were hobby shops
that sold specialist equipment, you could get special scissors
and pliers and stick with a needle on the end and all kinds of things.
For really lazy daughters,
there were ready-made seaweed albums available.
What happened - it was a bit like egg collecting and butterflies,
it caused the depletion of certain species,
some of which still have never recovered
and the green sponge ball is thought to be extinct because of that.
At least in the UK.
"Thought to be extinct"?
Ah, well, I've not done the whole coastline of Britain looking.
So there's a possibility.
- Yeah, I suppose there must be. - Well, the anticipation
of the green sponge ball is out there somewhere.
- Oh... - I tell you what's great about this story.
The very first book of photographs ever published in the world
is called Photographs Of British Algae
by Anna Atkins.
And she's thought to be the very first female photographer
and she did this wonderful... It's in the British Library.
I mean, seaweed's amazing.
There's thought to be 200,000-800,000 species
of micro-algae, which we can't even see.
- Too small to see with the naked eye. - That was a rubbish book. - Yeah.
Tiny book with nothing in it.
Incidentally, do you know why there's been a huge increase
in seaweed farming recently?
Sushi? People like the sushi?
KLAXON
Quick on it, aren't they?
Is it to do with Ben and Jerry?
Well, there is certainly seaweed in ice cream,
that is absolutely correct.
- LUCY: - Is it fuel?
Bio-fuel is exactly right.
It's very important as a renewable fuel.
The leading nations are China and Japan, South Korea,
but it is part of the UK's renewable energy strategy,
so we have farms that have been started off the Scottish coast.
And, in fact, there's an incredible seaweed farm in China
called the Sangou Bay.
It stretches for 10km out to sea and, unlike the wall,
it can be seen from space.
It is so huge, this seaweed farm.
The one that we eat, the red marine algae, Pyropia tenera,
that's been prized as a food since ancient times
in both Japan and Wales.
So in Japan, known as nori. What's it known as in Wales?
- WELSH ACCENT: - Nor-ri.
- I'll have some nor-ri, if you don't mind. - I like yours better.
- I love a bit of nor-ri. - What did you say?
- It's laver in laver bread, isn't it? - It is laver in laver bread.
So here's a great story. OK, so, for centuries, you could only harvest
seaweed from the wild, OK?
It couldn't be farmed.
And then there's an incredible woman in the 1940s
called Dr Kathleen Drew-Baker.
And she worked out the life cycle of laver and how it reproduced
and nobody in Britain paid any attention.
But the Japanese went crazy. It kick-started the gigantic
modern nori industry and thus the world-wide sushi craze.
It is because of Dr Kathleen Drew-Baker.
She never, ever went to Japan, but she is famous in Japan
as she's revered as the mother of the sea.
They hold a festival in her honour every April the 14th.
They sing songs at the Drew-Baker monument.
She didn't like posing for her picture, though, did she?
Also, what people don't know about her is that,
towards the end of her life,
she really angered Darth Vader.
LAUGHTER
That's very good.
Some years ago, an anthropologist asked Welsh youngsters
why they don't eat seaweed now,
and they said it's slimy, it's poor people's food, it's old-fashioned.
And so they were asked to name a fashionable food
and what did they say?
- ALL: - Sushi. - Sushi, yeah.
It's lovely, isn't it? But we probably eat it every day.
We eat it in ice cream, we have it in chocolate, toothpaste, beer...
- FRANKIE: - They eat it in Donegal. Dulse, it's called.
- As a snack or with food? - As a snack.
- Yeah. - Raw off the beach!
On all fours.
That picture on the right is slightly worrying. Erm...
Hang on a second, didn't you market that?
It's a harbinger of something, anyway.
It's because seaweed is also used as a sexual lubricant.
- It's incredibly effective at... - Seaweed?!
- Yes, seaweed. - Good lord! - Well, it's an extract called carrageenan.
It's incredibly effective at preventing
the spread of genital HPV, so, yeah.
That's worrying, if Godzilla actually exists,
that he's going to emerge already lubed up.
But handy if you're a little bit down there.
Just rub yourself against his foot.
"If you're a little bit down there"?
Come on, this is the BBC.
I can't say...
If you're a little bit down there
- and you've got a touch of the ahem... - Ahem! - And don't want to...
With the... Get the Godzilla and work with the, er, on the, er...
Yeah.
And this information video also available online.
A nuclear question for you next.
How does atomic gardening work?
Is that where you keep atomic kittens? In the atomic garden?
- That's so sweet, but no. - No.
What is atomic gardening?
It's a new Chanel 5 format.
Starring Alan Titchmarsh
and the unquiet ghost of Robert Oppenheimer.
LAUGHTER
- LUCY: - They're mutating Alan Titchmarsh. I love the idea.
We're going to have three heads on one Alan Titchmarsh.
- That's terrifying! - That's like every old lady's dream.
So it was a thing, atomic gardening. It was a thing, in fact,
almost all the peppermint oil used around the world to flavour things
like chewing gum and toothpaste comes from one cultivar
of peppermint. It's this Todd's Mitcham
which resulted from a very odd episode in 20th-century science
called atomic gardening. It was also known as gamma gardening.
So, after the Second World War, there was an Atoms For Peace
programme and it sought peaceful use for the science
that had led to the atomic bombs.
And people thought, if they exposed plants and seeds to radiation,
maybe some interesting mutations would result and there were some.
Red grapefruits and super-sweet sweetcorn,
both resulted from atomic gardening.
So various ways you could do it. You could strap the packets of seeds
to the inside of a hospital X-ray machine.
You could leave them in the fallout zone of a nuclear testing site.
Or you could do this, which is a circular garden
with a source of radiation in the middle.
And so the plant seeds RADIATE out.
- FRANKIE: - I think this could be an amazing episode of Countryfile.
"Welcome. I, John Craven, can now see through lead."
There was a wonderful woman called Muriel Howarth.
She was the doyenne of British nuclear gardening
and, in 1959, she grew the first atomic peanut.
It germinated in four days and was two foot tall.
I mean, sort of terrifying.
Wow. That's a hell of an M&M.
That is. Yeah.
There's an old movie, isn't there?
- The Effect Of Gamma Rays... - On Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
Do you know what's a really weird story about that film?
So, I was living in New York. Paul Newman directed it
and I auditioned to play the part of the daughter in the film.
- Really? - And I didn't get it. I was second. And do you know who got it?
Paul Newman's daughter! LAUGHTER
- Wow, that's amazing. - That is weird, isn't it?
So there are lots of things that we have today
which come from that period of gardening.
New varieties of rose and dahlias, snap dragons, carnations and so on.
There they were, Super Atomic Energized Seeds.
And so today, genetic engineering
has largely superseded the gamma garden.
Now to the NEST question.
Why would your mum have you for breakfast?
- Is there a species that eats its young? - Yes.
- Not all of the young, I presume? - Some. - It would be short-lived.
But why might that be?
Is it that the babies are just particularly delicious?
You think they just can't resist that.
Yeah, exactly, like a little quail or something.
You go, "Ooh...
"Ooh, lovely. Lovely bit of butter on that."
Yeah, it's lucky that chickens don't like eggs, really, isn't it?
- Yeah, that's true. - Yeah.
They're all sitting there eating omelettes and dying out.
Maybe it's that thing where you sniff your own baby
and they seem to you so delicious, you almost want to eat them.
- Yeah. - Maybe insects just go,
"There's no society to hold me back, I'm going to follow through."
I often say I could eat my son with a spoon.
- I don't mean it, but... LUCY: - Yeah. It's the knees.
I could just eat babies' knees all day long.
- I really could. Just the knees. - They are just gorgeous.
- They could have the rest. - Yeah. Even their feet are...
- Oh, yeah. - Delicious.
No, we are talking about a burrowing beetle and its larva.
And it chooses to make its life in a rotting corpse
of some kind or other, and that's where it has its babies.
And it has to adjust the size of the brood to the size of the carcass.
There's got to be enough food.
And so, researchers at the University of Edinburgh
have established that she will choose to eat the ones
that nag her most.
- This is great parenting. - Yeah. - This is what we all need, isn't it?
So, the burrowing beetle baby that keeps going, "I want a snack,
"I want a snack..." Gone.
- Finished. - If my children are watching, I am learning a lot.
Your children aren't watching,
they're in their bedrooms with their knees missing.
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Are you a nagger, Lucy? Do you nag your children?
No, they nag me. Absolutely.
Well, apparently, nagging does work.
They did some research at Harvard Business School
and the best way for managers to get staff to do something
is to nag them continually.
They found the most effective managers repeat themselves
at least once and often in two different ways.
So you have a conversation and you follow it up by an e-mail.
So nagging your staff is hugely successful.
How irritating is that?
I read a parenting book that said,
instead of couching everything in words,
you just say the salient word. So if you want them to put their shoes on,
you just go, "Shoes!"
"Teeth!"
And, in the morning, it's like I've got some really weird Tourette's.
Just... "Shoes! Teeth! Mummy's gin!"
Apparently daughters nagged by their mothers grow up to be high earners.
The thing I like is, in Japan, men who are trying to diet
can subscribe to a virtual wife
and she will nag you four times a day by e-mail
and there's different wife varieties on offer.
You can have a maid, a businesswoman,
a nurse or a manicurist.
Any of you boys do half the housework in your homes?
Don't be stupid!
Because here's an extraordinary thing.
In heterosexual relationships, even if the man does half the housework,
it's usually the woman who's in charge of allocating the tasks,
and making sure it gets done.
So, in other words, nagging itself,
yet another job about the house which women are expected to do,
and men wriggle out of.
Moving on now. All the way from Pennsylvania,
the marvel from Philadelphia, Euphonia!
What's her act?
She removes her legs...
..and hovers above a man on a knitting machine.
Well, you're not far off. It is a machine.
She looks rather hirsute, doesn't she?
She's called Euphonia, she's from 1845.
- FRANKIE: - Were they trying to do the turkey experiment with a human?
It's heading more and more towards the head.
She's stolen his beard, he's stolen her legs...
- Oh, that's scary. - Yeah.
So, 1845, a German inventor called Joseph Faber
exhibited this incredible machine.
It could talk, it had bellows for lungs,
a tongue and a larynx made of wires and reeds and levers,
and it was operated by a piano-like keyboard.
So there were 16 keys, plus one to open the glottis, the vocal cords,
and foot pedals, and sounds came out of her mouth.
She could laugh, she could whisper, she could sing God Save The Queen.
But the fundamental problem with her is that she scared people.
- Yeah, she's scaring me now! - Yeah. She had...
Urgh!
The turkeys have kicked off!
"That's the one."
HE IMITATES AN EXCITED TURKEY
It's like a frustrated turkey was in the room!
Apparently, her tongue lolled about in her mouth
- and her voice was awful. - Oh, no.
It was as if it came from the depths of a tomb.
It was very, sort of, hoarse and hideous.
And Faber, who made it,
twice he destroyed the Euphonia out of frustration.
And the first time, he rebuilt it, and the second time, well,
- he took his own life. - So it's basically like Siri.
It is a kind of Siri.
Now, how does a dog know another dog is a dog if it can't smell it?
It can see it?
- That's all there is too it. - Really?
Sometimes, it's right. That's why I keep saying it!
Sometimes, it's just right.
So the extraordinary thing about dogs is they come in such a variety
of shapes and sizes, more so than really any other animal species.
But a Labrador knows that a Chihuahua or a Newfoundland
all belong in the same category. So smell and hearing help,
but they actually recognise one another by their faces.
So they can be shown a range of dog breeds
and they're able to indicate which ones are dogs.
They can see.
- ROSS: - So is a dog more likely to buy car insurance...
off the one on the left?
Yes, that's right.
Do you think... Could a person tell another person by smell alone?
Ah, well, I could be blindfolded
and have my three children be in the room
and I would be able to know which one was which.
- You know if it's a human poo or a dog poo by smell. - Yes.
And by the feel of it when you stand in it.
LAUGHTER AND GROANING
Dogs can tell that dogs are dogs just by looking at them.
Now, fingers next to buzzers, please,
for the General Ignorance round.
Why are dock leaves good for nettle stings?
# Next to you. #
- Ross? - They're not.
You're absolutely right.
The fact is, we don't even know why nettle stings hurt quite so much,
or last so long. What we do know
is that nettles are covered with tiny little hollow hairs,
which break off when you touch them and they act like needles
and they inject, oh, it's a cocktail of unpleasantness into your skin...
But yet, delightful as soup.
Very good as soup and, in theory, very, very good medicine.
So, there's a thing called urtification,
- do you know what that is? - I don't, no.
It's beating yourself with stinging nettles, fundamentally.
And the Romans used to do it in Britain, because there was damp
and it gave them arthritis.
And so urtification apparently got rid of it.
And they did a study in 2000,
and the Royal Society of Medicine confirmed it is a safe
and effective treatment for rheumatic pain, so you can use it.
- Not many people know that the actor John Nettles... - Yes.
..you shake his hand, burns your skin.
- It's horrible, horrible. - But if you throw yourself against him,
gets rid of your rheumatism.
Very much so. Romans can't help themselves.
Getting John Nettles to smack himself against them.
Old ladies, he's like a faith healer.
You know when they're like... "Have you got rheumatism in your body?
"I want you to come down."
John Nettles slaps you on the knees.
Your kids would like him.
The longer I work with Ross, the more I believe him,
which is... LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH
Now, what kind of questions are barristers never allowed
to ask the witness?
Leading questions.
KLAXON
# Next door... #
- Lucy? - Multiple choice?
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"Did you A, kill them, B, have a takeaway, C...?"
"Oh, mostly Cs, you're a Gemini!"
So, you can sometimes have leading questions.
They are allowed in cross-examination.
So, when you're questioning the other side's witness,
it's absolutely fine. They're not allowed in what's called
evidence in chief. So, that's when you're questioning your own side.
You couldn't, for example, say,
"And did the accused hit you about the buttocks with the cucumber?"
You're not allowed to say that...
- "Or, did he B..." - Yeah. - "..put the cucumber between the buttocks?"
"Or, was it C, the actor John Nettles,
- "who was just trying to help?" - Yeah, you're not allowed to do that.
You have to say "what happened next", is basically the thing.
But, in cross-examination,
you're not only allowed to ask leading questions,
most people say you SHOULD ask them.
Is the fellow on the right, by any chance, saying "tattyfilarious"?
"Oh, what a lovely day, what a lovely day for committing murder."
That's why I didn't become a lawyer,
there's not enough funny voices in the law.
Now, what kind of evidence isn't going to get you convicted
under any circumstances?
Circumstantial.
KLAXON
And that was a leading question!
We think it's the case that you can't use circumstantial,
but in fact most convictions depend entirely on circumstantial evidence.
Because fingerprints and DNA samples and phone records,
credit card receipts, bloodstains, lack of an alibi,
that can all be circumstantial evidence,
stuff from which you can infer that somebody was present at a crime.
And finally, a male black widow spider
and a female black widow spider have just finished having sex.
What happens next?
- # Next to you. # - Yeah, Ross?
Tiny cigarette.
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- Oh, no, no! It wouldn't be a tiny cigarette, would it? - No.
It'd be eight tiny cigarettes. Like that.
"Shall we do it again?"
Maybe she could try and kill him in that way, rather than by eating him,
which I think is the answer that we were being led towards.
Ah, she eats him.
KLAXON
No, she does not, if she's a black widow.
So, there is one species in the widow group in which the female,
let's say, routinely eats the male...
- Scottish widows? - The Scottish widow!
Yes, but at least she's insured.
It's the redback spider of Australia, it's the only one.
There are three species found in North America
and post-coital cannibalism in one of the three is rare
and, in the other two, it's completely unknown.
And they get their name "widow"
probably because people have watched their behaviour in captivity,
when they're not behaving normally, I think.
So how dangerous do you think a black widow bite is to humans?
- Very. - No.
It's almost unheard of, in fact, for anybody to die from it.
- Right. - Bit of soap and water, that'll get rid of it.
Unless you have a particular allergic reaction to it.
Actually, it's surprisingly hard to get bitten in the first place,
because the venom is metabolically costly to the spider,
so she's not going to use it unless she absolutely has to.
And so they've done lots of tests and they've been poking and prodding
with jelly fingers and mostly it's a dry bite that you'd get,
so there's no venom in it. It's not, er...
Are they commercially available, the jelly fingers?
I think you could make your own.
Get that down! That'll be in that warehouse of things
that people don't buy.
The Museum of Failed Products.
Post-coital cannibalism amongst black widows is the exception,
not the rule. What usually happens is that the male says he'll text her
and then he never...
OK, next, it's the scores and, in first place,
with a magnificent 6 points, it's Ross!
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And in second, just one point behind with 5, it's Frankie!
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In third place, with -4, Lucy!
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APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH
And in fourth place, with -10,
it's the audience!
Which means that, in last place of the next show, is, was,
or will be, with -25, Alan.
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My thanks to Frankie, Ross, Lucy and Alan.
I leave you with this news from the Western Daily Press,
concerning what people plan to do next, after they retire.
A survey of 1,000 over-50-year-olds found that many
intended to travel more, write a book, do a parachute jump,
or take up a new hobby when they reach 60.
Some of those polled said they wanted to become a volunteer,
or raise money for charity.
While others just wanted to eat more cakes, and have more sex.
Until next time, goodbye.
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