Good evening!
Welcome to the QI petting zoo,
where today we are particularly
petting animal pals beginning with P.
At crossed porpoises, Danny Baker.
Thank you. Thank you.
It's that ptarmigan, Phill Jupitus.
Starts with a P!
Cos it's spelled with a P.
And this should put the cat among the pigeons.
It's only Teri Hatcher!
And our very own prawn star, Alan Davies!
And their buzzers this week are birds beginning with P.
Danny...Peacock.
Phill...Parrot.
I think that was R2-D2.
Teri...Penguin.
And Alan Partridge.
A-ha!
Seeing as it's our P animal show,
there's bound to be at least one question about pigs,
so what I want you to do is to look out for one of those
and, if you spot it,
then you have a pig and you can throw the pig and shout, "Pig!"
For extra pig points. Now...
First question, complete this sentence.
Donald Trump is the first President in 168 years not to have...
Come on, anyone!
Not to have what? A trace of common decency?
Empathy? Empathy...
Charm.
These are all too obvious.
I'm going to go with not to have the ability to pee standing up.
Wow.
So since 1850.
What happened in 1850?
Coronation Street started.
It's all the whole show is about.
Oh, pet, animal!
Pets. He's the first President not to have a pet in the White House.
He's got Melania.
They all had pets. Thomas Jefferson had two bear cubs.
Benjamin Harrison had two opossums
called Mr Reciprocity and Mr Protection.
What?! Franklin D Roosevelt had a great Dane, rather confusingly
called President.
Herbert Hoover's son Allan had a pair of alligators.
John Quincy Adams, he was the sixth President,
he kept his alligator in the bathtub.
It was a gift to him from the French general Marquis De Lafayette.
Do you remember, Teri, if you were driving north from Florida, there
used to be alligators for sale -
like, this big - and you could buy them?
It was not uncommon, was it? Right, yeah. Now aren't they in New York?
That is what they say, there are alligators living in the sewers
because people flushed them down the toilet.
And I knew that as a child and I never wanted to sit for too long
on the toilet. I was like that.
You can't sit too long. No, ever.
Teddy Roosevelt, I think,
gets the prize for best Presidential pet owner.
Nine dogs, two ponies, two cats, a hen, a lizard, a blue macaw,
a garter snake named Emily Spinach...
..named by his daughter Alice
because it's "as green as spinach and as thin as my Aunt Emily".
A small bear, a piebald rat, a pig, a rabbit, a laughing hyena,
a barn owl, a one-legged rooster and five guinea pigs.
He also had six children.
Seems a lot, and a badger called Josiah.
He also had a pony called Algonquin.
He was so beloved by the President's son Archie and that when he was sick
in bed, his brothers Kermit...
Kermit and Quentin brought the pony up in the lift.
"We'll bring the pony up to the room now!"
"Where would you like your pony?"
I don't think mother would allow that!
Oh, we could work that up.
But, apparently, there was a mirror in the lift and the pony was
so obsessed with its own reflection, it wouldn't get out the lift.
Wow, I'm handsome!
This is my favourite. Andrew Jackson had an African grey parrot
named Poll, who was famous for shouting obscenities
at visiting dignitaries.
And it even disrupted Jackson's own funeral.
Who doesn't want that? A swearing parrot in the White House.
I read last year that a parrot, I think it was, like, 50 or something,
it used to be very amusing and all the things parrot say,
but it was on its deathbed
and they literally gathered around,
because it had been in the family 50 years,
and before it expired, the parrot turned and said, "Thank you."
I mean, that's nice,
but what an ungrateful bastard the rest of the time.
In 1940, Franklin D Roosevelt was given a Scottish Terrier puppy
that he named Murray the Outlaw of Falahill
after one of his Scottish ancestors,
and it was known as Fala,
and it travelled everywhere with the President.
He became a celebrity in his own right.
He had his own secretary to answer fan mail.
That's him there with the genius Eleanor Roosevelt,
who really was the power behind
the throne in that particular presidency.
During the Battle of the Bulge - the last sort of big German offensive in
the Second World War - the American soldiers used to ask each other
the name of the President's dog, and if you got the answer Fala,
you knew it probably wasn't a German who was masquerading as an American.
Donald Trump is the first President of the United States
to steer clear of any petting in the White House.
Oh!
I'm just going to let that live in the air for a little bit.
Now, who here is afraid of a tiny dancer called sparklemuffin?
It's going to be an animal, isn't it?
It is, because I said at the beginning,
the whole show is about animals.
Is it one of us who's afraid of it?
I think Phill might be afraid of it. What are you afraid of, Phill?
I'm loosely arachnophobic.
Yes. I don't favour the eight-legged groove machines.
What is it you don't like about them? Is it this?
No, I quite like that.
I think you may have cured me, Hatcher.
That's what I'm here for!
That's shock therapy that I wasn't expecting.
I'm trying to think what I'm afraid of - hang on a minute.
My biggest fear is being stuck in a lift
with a man who's confident he can fix it.
"No, no, I've done this before, it'll be all right."
Are you afraid of anything, Teri?
Uh, snakes.
Do they have a lot of snakes in California?
They do. Rattlesnakes, yeah.
And I have done interaction with a rattlesnake once.
It was, like, a spa kind of place
and this really big rattlesnake was coiled up, like, right there.
Just like you see in the movies, it was horrible,
and all the women I was with jumped away, like kind of pushed me forward
toward the snake... And I thought it really showed, like,
what your real character is.
Like, are you the person that throws the other people into the snake?
But did Superman not come? Did he not....
No, you think that as many times as I've yelled, "Help, save me,"
like that would be my go-to, but I didn't say it, he didn't come.
Anyway, here's the thing.
I think you're going to be cured of the whole arachnophobia,
because this is the cutest spider of all time.
The sparklemuffin is a nickname given by researchers
to a newly discovered species of peacock spider.
So these are chia seeds,
and a single one is the size of a chia seed -
that's how tiny, tiny they are.
There are other species -
there is one called a circuit board peacock spider.
It's got a pattern like an electrical circuit board,
and there it is. And there's the bat-like peacock spider,
the elephant peacock spider,
which looks honestly like it's got a picture of an elephant
on its bottom. They are really, really small,
and not only are they the only known dancing spiders,
they're also home to nature's smallest rainbow. No!
They diffract light from their bottom,
and it's the only known example of...
You're suddenly excited by this!
No, I was just picturing being able
to have rainbows coming out my bottom. Yes! Now we are!
It's not even raining!
Let's have a look and see if we can see it dancing.
Oh, my gosh!
It's cute!
Look, check it out! That music has been added on after, hasn't it?
I'm pretty sure he's not playing that.
He's miming. So they've tried to recreate
the colours on these microscopic bottoms,
and they simply can't replicate them.
They've used engineers, biologists, physicists.
I've worked a long time to try to be able to make my butt move like that.
And have a rainbow come out of it.
Rainbows or no rainbows, that's awesome.
Being able to move like that.
Half the ones that we know about have been named by a single person -
Australia's Dr Jurgen Otto -
he works for the Australian Department of Agriculture.
He says they have personalities
to match their brilliant colours and intricate dances.
He said, "They display curiosity and fear",
"they hide behind leaves when they're scared,"
"so I often compare them to puppies and kittens."
Spiders don't have ears, right?
So they can't hear you, but they can feel vibrations through the legs.
Can't hear you at all? What?
All that, "Get out of the bath!"
Completely pointless?
"How did you even get in there?"
So, a female has to be a virgin, that's a pre-requisite for mating,
and then he'll do the dance for her for a couple of minutes.
Not in Essex!
Sorry, it's an open goal. I know, I know.
You just lost Billericay, didn't you?
So, if the female has already mated,
then no matter how much he dances, she won't mate again.
I don't know what it is, she tried it once, she didn't like it.
Anyway...
Sparklemuffin is a tiny dancer with an extremely attractive backside,
which gets Phill Jupitus into a highly emotional state.
What's black and white and pissed all over?
Oh... Er...
A penguin that got into a pirate's stash of rum.
Oh!
Wow!
Wow! Seriously, that was impressive.
Yeah!
No, OK, so it is the giant panda.
In order to introduce giant panda cubs into the wild,
the researchers at China's Wolong Nature Reserve,
they dressed as adult pandas,
and they covered themselves in panda pee.
Why might they do that?
Because they're perverts!
Watching panda porn all night,
which is a very slow watch, I have to say.
Something to do with settling the young ones in the wild, is it?
Yes, they don't want them to get used to humans.
Here's the thing about pandas - they look very cute,
but let's remember the bear part of their name.
Yeah. They are still aggressive, you don't want them to go into
villages and go, "Oh, those nice people!"
So they wanted them to feel that they were with actual pandas,
and the way to do that is to cover them in the panda urine
so they don't smell of human beings.
The scientists in China are not the only ones who have dressed up
as animals and utilised urine in the last few years.
There is a man called Joel Berger,
he's a biologist at the Colorado State University.
And what he wanted to do was see
how moose reacted to other species' urine.
So he dressed up as a moose and then he soaked snowballs in urine
from other creatures, and he lobbed them at the moose.
It sounds ridiculous but it has a really serious scientific purpose.
So bears and wolves were reintroduced
in places like Scandinavia,
and also in the United States,
and what they realised it that the moose had never seen one before.
And what they wanted to do was
to work out whether they had any instinct to run away.
So they threw snowballs soaked in the urine of the predators
and they realised that they didn't know to run away, but...
Oh, and what happened?
It took them one generation to go, "Wow, OK. Those are not friendly."
So they could relearn their anti-predatory responses.
In Hawaii, there was a terrible rat problem.
So they went, well, what is the natural predator of the rat?
And it's the mongoose.
So they imported thousands of mongeese during the winter months
to go after the rats and to get rid of them.
Well, at the end of the winter, there was still more rats
than they could possibly deal with, they couldn't understand,
until someone said, "Did anyone check this out?"
"Rats are nocturnal. Mongeese aren't."
They've never actually met each other.
And now they had a mongoose problem and a rat problem.
But they never actually met.
The first pandas that Westerners learned about
was from a French missionary in China, Armand David.
He brought a dead specimen from local hunters in 1869.
And that must have been an astonishing thing,
no-one had ever seen one before.
The extent to which it's related to the red panda,
that's been debated backwards and forwards. But it isn't, really.
The giant panda is a bear, the red panda is closer to a racoon.
But they have recently discovered
why they've got black-and-white fur. Oh!
Any thoughts on why that...?
Because the colour licence is more expensive.
Here's the thing, the diet is so bad
that they can't hibernate in the winter.
So they are active through both the winter and the summer.
And they need camouflage for both seasons.
So the black bits help to camouflage them in the summer,
and the white bits help to camouflage them in the winter.
And it was discovered by a guy called Tim Caro -
he's a University of California biologist -
and he's the same researcher who spent ten years working out
why zebras are black and white. Cheap licence.
It's probably to deter flies who, for some reason,
it is unclear, do not like landing on striped surfaces.
"Oh, no, I'm not going down there!"
I've been to Africa, and I saw plenty of flies around the zebras.
Yes, but they don't land.
Oh, they don't land!
They spin around going,
"Has anybody seen a horse, a plain horse?"
If you shave one, they're that colour...
The skin matches the stripes, a zebra.
Yeah. And, uh...
You sadist. Oh, no...
That is another thing, if you take a zebra to a supermarket
and you fire a barcode gun at it, it says, "Zebra".
"Unexpected item in bagging area."
If you are working in Wolong Nature Reserve
and you're not covered in wee,
you are in danger of causing panda-monium.
Ohh! Hey!
Thank you.
Now for a question on perilous primates.
Who has got the most dangerous elbows?
A chimp.
That seems so obvious. I thought it would go off.
You don't get the buzzer? You don't get the buzzer?
You want me to tell you? Yeah.
It's the slow loris.
Oh! It's the only known venomous primate.
"Come on, loris, chop chop!"
"I'm not in a hurry."
It has venom... "I'm not in a hurry."
"I'm actually completely lost. It's pitch-black."
"But I've got my poisonous elbows with me wherever I go!"
It has a patch on its elbow, which...
Does it smoke? No, it literally...
It activates it by being mixed with saliva.
What? If it bit you, a human being, it could cause anaphylactic shock,
it can cause death... Wow. ..and they are all endangered.
There are about eight species of slow loris. Well, good! No!
So it licks its elbow, activates the poison in its mouth...
And then it bites you. That's correct. It's a SLOW loris...
It is a slow loris. So not only is it slow,
its enemy has to wait for it to lick its own elbow
before it goes into action. Yeah. But once it...
We all kind of want to try it!
Here is the really sad thing about it.
Because they look sort of passive,
they have got those marvellous big eyes, lots of people want them
as pets, and this is really sad that people pull their teeth...
Ahh!
I know! ..and they die of infection.
But the reason they have the big eyes is they've evolved to mimic
cobras. It is an astonishing thing,
and they can not only hiss
but they can undulate in a serpentine fashion,
because they've got an extra vertebrae in their spines.
They seem to have evolved to frighten off people.
They don't want to use the venom would seem to be the thing.
There's a wonderful description by a man called John Still,
writing in 1905 in Sri Lanka.
He's the very first person to record confusing a slow loris with a cobra.
"I saw the outline of a cobra sitting up with hood expanded
"and threatening a cat who crouched about six feet away.
"This was the loris who, with his arms and shoulders hunched up,
"was a sufficiently good imitation of a cobra to take me in
"as he swayed on his long legs and, every now and then,
"let out a perfect cobra's hiss." Wow. Wow.
Wonderful creature.
Now, let's practise a little German.
What type of animal is a Stachelschwein?
Oh! Yes.
Did you throw a pig at me?!
OK, so not that one.
What about a Wasserschwein?
Is it like a water vole?
Heading in the right direction.
What about a Schweinswal?
These are all sausages.
It's not a walrus or something, is it?
No, what about a Nabelschwein? They're all related, though.
No, they're not related at all.
Why do they keep using that word?
Let's go back. Stachelschwein - or spike pig - is a porcupine.
Ah! A Wasserschwein - or a water pig - is the capybara.
There it is in the middle. Oh, OK.
And a Schweinswal - or pig whale - is a porpoise.
I love capybaras.
I don't know if you've seen one, they're amazing.
Brilliant, yeah. Largest rodent in the world.
Well, you can see from that picture, it's bloody enormous.
They grow to be about four-foot long,
and there is a special Easter feast in Venezuela,
and they eat it like turkey at Thanksgiving.
Apparently, it tastes a bit like rabbit.
It's like a big version of a guinea pig?
Yeah, like a massive version. But you eat it at Easter.
I've been to Peru, and I've eaten guinea pig.
Oh, how was it? In Lima, Peru, there's three of the top 50
restaurants in the world happen to all be in Lima,
and it's really like a national...
Like, everyone eats it, even in these three
Michelin-star restaurants, they make "the best" guinea pig.
And I had a guinea pig as a child, as a pet,
so I tried it twice and I got to the third time, and I was just like,
"I can't do it."
They sell them in Chile anyway on sticks covered in honey,
and there's kids who've been allowed to stay up and watch this
who are sobbing their heart out.
Some of them are dipping a guinea pig in... I know!
Holding it in front of the fire.
"How long do you think it will take?"
The best way to cook it would be to put it in the wheel
in front of the fire and just let it go round.
"Run faster! I want you well-basted!"
Quite a lot of times, Asia gets stick for eating dog,
which they do,
but Switzerland is a huge consumer of dogs.
Up in the mountain areas. Seriously? Yes.
They're chocolate dogs. They're little chocolate...
Er... A Nabelschwein is actually what's known as a peccary.
It's a distant relative of the pig,
and again you'll find those in South and Central America.
I know a little fact about them. Yes.
Which is that in the 1980s, the band Siouxsie and the Banshees,
they adopted the one at London Zoo,
But on the condition that they could name it.
And they called it Gregory Peccary.
The German phrase which I really like - Innerer Schweinehund -
and it literally means your inner pig dog.
And it's the tiny voice that says to you,
"Stay on the sofa, don't go to the gym."
I speak fluent German.
Do you? No. Oh.
But I have a certificate that says I do.
Why? I went to a comprehensive school,
and we only did German for three months,
and the teacher left, but they asked if we wanted to do a language exam.
Anyway, I was ill on the one day that comprehensives were taking
languages. Anyway, I came back about two days later and they said,
"You've got to be away from everyone - you have to do it on your own."
And they put me in the library on my own to do it.
Well, I couldn't make head nor tail of the paper,
but there was a German dictionary,
and I got 81%
and, as far as the record shows, I am fluent in German.
So you behaved like a Schweinehund! A Schweinehund!
It's an interesting thing, it's a German insult,
but mainly in British movies.
And comics.
There was a very famous German pig called Tirpitz.
So there was a battle in 1915 off the coast of South America
And HMS Glasgow and HMS Kent, there they are,
attracted by German cruiser called SMS Dresden,
but it was very common to keep animals on board warships for food
and this German pig flopped into the water, an enormous sow,
and the British sailors spotted this,
they winched the pig onto the deck
and they adopted her as a mascot and
they named her after the head of the German Navy,
it was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
Wow.
Yeah, he's quite a guy.
I was in Shoreditch two days ago,
I think that bloke made me a flat white.
Um, how does that happen?
He's had an accident on a bicycle, I think.
He's gone over the handlebars.
My beard! I've got the photo tomorrow!
Wang! Aaagh!
It looks a bit like Bill Bailey, to be fair, doesn't it?
Moving on to palaeontology, we are going to place a tray of finds -
there are you are, you've got them -
and I would like you to identify the fossil.
Now, you can use any part of your body except your hands.
Thank you.
So, how might you identify any of them?
They told me I wouldn't need my glasses.
OK, do you want to borrow mine? Yes. There you go, sweetie.
These are all pebbles from a standard British B road.
OK. So Phill is heading in the right direction.
Can I put it in my mouth? No, you can't.
Teri!
Teri is exactly right, Teri has got the right answer.
Good, good for her!
So they've got various ways of distinguishing fossils
from plain old rocks, but one of the ways you do it is to lick them.
Oh, Jesus!
Pay no attention, I'm going to lick this long one.
That's actually a British sweet.
You don't have to... OK.
I really want to touch it.
No. No.
That's the ringtone I want!
It's hot in here. It's hot.
It is hot in here, Sandi.
So, first of all, you can tell by looking
and you can tell a bit by the texture,
but if all else fails, you can identify fossils by licking them.
Which one do you think is the dinosaur bone? Right...
If you look at, you can see A. B. It's A, the dinosaur bone.
It's stickier than a normal stone,
because it's got calcium in, it's porous.
Which ones did you lick?
Just the one in the middle.
You just licked the one in the middle, OK, good.
That's not as hot as when I did it.
No, it's not as hot. It's no way as hot as when you did it, Teri.
Right, what am I...
B. Try B.
Try B? Yeah, just have a lick of it.
No, don't put it all in your mouth!
Just lick it. Just lick it.
Hasn't anyone ever told you that?
It's dinosaur poo!
Is it?
What's the correct word for dinosaur poo, or any poo?
Delicious!
It's a coprolite.
Yeah, OK.
So it would stick to the tongue.
You don't necessarily have to touch them with your hands.
There is a place in the United States called Big Bone Lick.
It's in Kentucky.
I've never been to Big Bone Lick.
That's so weird!
It's on the top of my list now, though!
It's the birthplace of American palaeontology.
So it's an area of very high mineral content,
and it attracted bison, mastodon, moose,
musk ox and so on. Peccary. And unfortunately, also very marshy,
so the animals got stuck there and they left bones and they were
discovered by 18th-century American explorers.
I've got so much rock in my teeth, I can't function.
Are you eating the rock? I had a bit of it, yeah.
If you want to take the taste of rock out of your mouth,
I recommend the dinosaur shit.
Anything else I can put in my mouth, Sandi? What's this?
Which have you got? I don't know, is this tyrannosaurus penis?
I'll pop it in.
You can use your mouth to identify pearls, that is completely true.
It is something that you sometimes... On your teeth.
Yeah, so a real pearl will feel sort of gritty and rough
and the fake ones will feel, well, like all mine.
Do you know the phrase, "Lick into shape"?
Anyone know where that comes from? Um...
It's bears - there's the clue.
It was a belief in Medieval Europe that bear cubs were born shapeless
and they had to be made into ursine form by their mother.
I had a different thought.
OK!
Wow. We'll just leave that hanging in the air.
If you want to surprise a palaeontologist,
tell them to lick their own fossils.
Let's put the fossils away. OK.
Why do penguins take turns on the outside of the huddle?
Well, on the March of the whatsits,
they said it was because it's colder out there
and everyone has to have their go.
Are you saying that they're all trying to get
in the middle all the time?
No, here is the thing, it is so successful, the huddle,
that even in the icy Arctic winter, the ones at the centre get too hot.
It's a bit like having constant menopause.
And they need to get to the outside, otherwise they overheat.
It's like that on the tube sometimes.
If they can't get to the edges, they put their heads up
and they start breaking a terrible fuss,
because they are much too hot.
So the trick...
"Let me out or I'm going to fly, and you know I can do it."
So the trick is to get the packing just right.
So if they're too loosely arranged, they won't stay warm enough
and if they are too tightly jammed together,
then they can't rearrange themselves and the animals in the middle
will not get a chance to cool down.
So what they do is they take
really small 2-to-4-inch steps every minute or so,
and there's a sort of wave of movement
which rolls through the group.
Colder, colder, colder. Freezing. Warmer. Warmer.
Too hot, too hot, too hot.
Colder...
It looks like waiters going to a conference, doesn't it?
Sort of wonderful. Do you know what a group of penguins is called?
A pack.
If they are in the water.... A family pack.
..they are known as a raft.
Oh, you were talking about birds, not biscuits.
Chocolate biscuits. Yes. No.
There's a biscuit here called Penguin.
Oh, you'd love it.
If they are on land, it's called a waddle of penguins.
A what? A waddle.
In other Penguin News, fat penguins fall over more than slim ones.
It's a rather unsurprising answer.
They did an experiment where they got penguins to walk on a treadmill.
Oh, what a bad.... No.
There's four hours on BBC Four right there.
What's wonderful is some of them were lazy,
and they did what was called water-skiing.
They just leant on the back wall and just did that and sort of...
Are we there yet? How far?
How far we got to go?
We could learn a lot from penguins.
So, in 2017, German scientists advised people that on icy roads,
you should walk like a penguin.
So what you have to do
is you have to lean your torso forwards so the centre of gravity
is on your front leg as opposed to being jointly on both legs,
and then you have to put your feet out like this.
And if you walk like that, you won't fall over on the ice.
But it's a question of dignity, then, isn't it?
Yeah, but falling over's not looking too good is it?
I'd get pushed over.
Idiot.
OK.
Which people in this studio should we replace with pigeons?
Like a carrier, like a person who brings you...? Like a PA?
Like a sort of runner who brings you things, like a carrier pigeon?
I love this. No.
So the answer is the camera operators.
Well, they're the only people working apart from you.
So here's the thing - birds can't move their eyes.
Their necks have been designed to keep their heads completely still
when they move, so as they walk, if you look at them,
their heads and their eyes move forward
and then they lock into place, then the body catches up with them.
And then the head darts forward again, locks onto something new,
and the pigeon keeps going.
And that static image is what a good camera operator's trying to achieve.
And pigeons have been used since the early 20th century
as aerial photographers.
The very first person to attach a camera to a pigeon,
he was a German called Julius Neubronner.
It's pronounced "Noy-bru-ner."
"Noy-bru-ner." Thank you, darling.
81%!
That's not great with a dictionary - only 81%.
So this guy, an apothecary from the town of Kronberg near Frankfurt,
and he started receiving prescriptions
from a sanatorium in nearby Falkenstein using pigeon post.
He used to deliver medications back by post,
and he thought this was marvellous. So he got some pigeons of his own,
and then one of his birds came back rather mysteriously fed,
and he attached a camera because he wanted to find out where it had been
fed, and it turned out it was visiting a restaurant on the way,
in a neighbouring town.
Now, the cameras were quite big in those days.
Part of the problem of attaching it was that the pigeons landed
rather heavily when they came back
so he set up an elasticated landing board,
a bit like a small trampoline,
just outside the dovecote so they'd land straight into the...
..thing.
What? Just the elaborate web of bullshit this show constantly...
Of course, pigeons are hugely important.
In WWI, the wounding or molesting of a homing pigeon
was punishable by six months' imprisonment
or a £100... The wounding... Yep.
..or molesting...?
People didn't have a lot of entertainment in those days.
How is it working the camera?
Because if it's got the camera, and it's flying with one wing,
it's just going to go round and round.
Yeah, IT'S not actually working the camera, if you can imagine.
Going like that...
It's two chambers...
It's two chambers, Alan, and one of them has got gas in it,
and that releases very slowly as the pigeon flies,
and then that would depress the shutter button.
You only get one picture.
You only get one? It's not like the pigeon is going, "Smile, everybody!"
"Going in for a closer look!"
"Come here, little pigeon..." "Stop molesting that bird!"
Pigeons are perfect camera people,
so it's only a matter of time before they put our team out of work.
What's the...?
You're going to be out of focus for months now!
What's the point of a poodle's perm?
To keep it warm? Keep it warm, but why is it those odd shapes?
Oh, well, that looks artificial, those ears have been trimmed.
The name poodle is the German for "water dog".
It's the same route as "puddle".
And the ludicrous hairstyles are to help them get their quarry
from the water. That's what they were designed for.
The thick outer coat of a poodle is unbelievably heavy when wet
so you shave the bottom half of the body,
cos, obviously, you don't want them to drown, and then,
the front bit is to keep the organs warm in cold water,
the bracelets of ankle hair to protect the joints from rheumatism,
shaving the hair around the face, so, obviously, you want the mouth
and the eyes free so they can fulfil their retrieving responsibilities.
And, the topknot, also to keep the hair out of the eyes,
but, eventually, they used to tie knots of brightly coloured ribbon
so you could recognise which was your dog.
I always thought that was something that Crufts had come up with.
No, darling. Absolutely all of it had a reason.
Now, it became more ornate,
particularly in France in the 18th century.
People liked to mimic the ornate hairstyles of their rich owners.
It became silly, but it didn't start in this way.
There are different styles you can ask for.
You can have the Continental or the English saddle.
So, Continental there on the left, but they're both designed
to show off what's called a poodle's squareness.
So, in a properly square poodle, the area from the breastbone to the rump
measures exactly the same distance as the shoulders to the ground.
So, a good-looking poodle ought to be exactly square
in its measurements.
And now it's time for Alan's pet hate,
the round that we call General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
OK. What does the S on Superman's chest stand for?
Love that noise! Well...
Super.
So it's not an S.
Simon.
How can they type that fast?!
So in the 2013 film, Lois Lane actually asks...
I don't know why I'm telling YOU. I don't either, but...
She actually asks Superman what the S stands for, and it's not an S,
it's a Kryptonian symbol of hope.
It just looks like an S by coincidence.
It looks exactly... Apparently. I should have known that.
You should have, yes. Let's try one you should know.
Superman's real name is of course...
Jor-El. No, it's Kal-El.
Oh, Kal-El, you're right!
Jor-El's the dad. Look at me,
I'm the least Superman knowledgeable person on this panel.
How many episodes did you play Lois Lane?
Clearly not enough.
I guess it was four years times 22, so what's that? 88.
Something like that.
Just look at this picture of you.
Can I just say, that picture of you was, at the time on the internet,
the most downloaded image in the world?
Yeah, it was only because that was like the beginning of the internet.
No, doesn't she look amazing? Look at that picture.
So why did you reveal it straight away?
You should've had us sitting here for 20 minutes going...
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba,
ba-ba-ba-ba-ba...
Any minute now.
Dial-up AOL... Dial-up, right.
But Lois is not Superman's only love interest.
Lana Lang. Lana Lang.
Same initials, so he can keep the tattoo, which I quite like.
Very good.
Did you enjoy doing it? Oh, I did. I did. And we still keep in touch.
We actually...
Fly around the Earth sometimes.
Last summer, we did a Comic-Con in Sydney together.
Is that where the fans go and...? Yes.
And we climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
And I don't think he'll be mad if I tell you this story,
but I didn't know that he was afraid of heights.
Aww!
I don't know who has climbed that bridge,
but it is quite high and it can freak you out.
But we really had a good time together, yeah.
Because the best bit in the story is his disguise,
isn't it? He only has glasses on, then he takes them off.
Which of course is why I really know nothing,
because if I was fooled by glasses on, glasses off...
Wait, take your glasses off. Oh, my God, where did Sandi go?
Yeah, exactly.
Somebody bring back Sandi - she's running the whole thing!
Thank God you're back!
Oh! We were really lost there.
Here's a very strange thing. They did a study in 2016
at the University of York,
and they showed people side-by-side images and asked
whether each image was of the same person.
And so, the images included pairs
where both faces were wearing glasses
and pairs in which neither face was wearing glasses
and pairs where one face had glasses or not.
And in the first two categories,
people guessed correctly 80% of the time.
But, when it was a photo like this,
one with glasses and one with not,
only 74% could recognise it was the same person!
So, maybe Lois wasn't as bad as we thought.
It still seems chancy because three out of four people would have gone,
"Oh, hello there!"
Superman's S stands for s...
hope.
How does the crow fly?
A-ha! Yeah, Alan?
In a straight line, directly to its destination.
Anybody else? Round and round in circles.
Constantly lost.
No, they did a study at Oxford University, and it is true that
crows and pigeons use
natural magnetic and solar compasses to navigate,
but that's not as important as their knowledge of human transport routes.
So let's imagine that a crow is travelling from Portsmouth
to the Peak District.
It would follow the M275...
..then the M3.
It would get on the M40 to Oxfordshire,
take the A46 to Coventry and follow the M1 for 62 miles.
Really, that's true? Yes, darling, everything I say is true.
There's a start-up company in the Netherlands called Crowded Cities,
and they're trying to get crows to recognise cigarette butts
and drop them into a bin,
and if the camera in the bin recognises the object
as a cigarette butt, it gives the creature some food.
Wow. What sort of food?
It'll be, you know, a bit of grain.
You know, I'm just saying that sometimes when you're abroad
and you've spent all your loose money...
You get a bit peckish... And if it's something yummy...
You're going to pick up cigarette butts and put them...?
Damn straight. OK. And I'll wear a crow suit while I do it.
Cover yourself in panda pee.
Let's not be silly. Sorry.
OK.
There's a Belgian designer-scientist called Tuur Van Balen
who wants to use pigeons to clean up things.
So, he's working on a pigeon diet
that would turn pigeon faeces into soap.
So, they would actually clean cities instead of dirtying them.
Now, I think it's a slightly impractical plan if I may say so,
because he first has to get a pigeon to fly into a box
in order to eat the different diets that he has come up with
to create different kinds of soap.
And there he is and he has got one.
Now, how many tentacles does an octopus have?
Ooh!
Isn't it eight?
One? No.
Two. Two?
No.
Ten.
Ten? Ten? No.
Is it none? It's none.
So we used to use tentacles as interchangeable with arms,
but the modern convention is
if an invertebrate structure has suckers
along its entire length, that's an arm.
If it only has suckers at the tip, that's a tentacle.
So octopuses have eight arms, but they have no tentacles at all.
So the ones that do have tentacles are things like jellyfish
and sea anemones and coral.
Octopus suckers not only suck but they can also smell and taste,
and they can stick to any surface except...
The television.
Themselves. They never stick to octopus skin,
because that would be annoying.
Anybody in the room remember the names of any famous octopuses?
It was the one that guessed the World Cup results.
Paul. Paul the octopus.
They brought him two boxes containing food.
And then, the boxes were identical apart from they were decorated
with the different team flags of the competitors.
And then, whichever box he ate from first,
apparently, that was his prediction that the team would win.
What they discovered was he had a strong preference
for horizontal stripes.
All the flags of the countries he favoured had horizontal stripes.
So, he had quite a good run, though, didn't he? He did, yeah.
OK. What's the first line of Moby Dick?
"Call me Ishmael."
There we go.
No. So it is the first sentence of Chapter One,
but it's not the first line of the book.
There's two rather rambling introductory chapters.
They're called Etymology and Extracts.
So, that is the first bit of the book.
The first line is etymology
supplied by a late consumptive usher a grammar school.
I was going to say that. Yeah.
Who is Ismael? He's the one who tries to get on the ship.
Well, a lot of people say it's the name of the narrator,
but it isn't. We don't know the name.
He just says, "Call me Ismael", but it could be anything.
It's a biblical reference. His actual name is unknown.
But enough of our imaginary menagerie,
it's time for the scores.
In first place, as proud as a peacock...
Oh, my goodness - with -7, it's Danny.
Oh, excellent! Thank you.
In second place with -18, it's Phill.
In third place, making a fantastic debut with -38, it's Teri.
And in last place, as sick as a parrot,
with -54, it's Alan.
Thank you to Teri, Phill, Danny and Alan.
That's all from us, so goodnight.