This programme contains some strong language.
Hello and welcome to a Piecemeal episode of QI,
featuring pieces, PCs, and PC gone mad.
Joining me in the safe space are the achingly inoffensive Jimmy Carr...
..committed to impartiality, Sally Phillips...
..very much on message, Gyles Brandreth...
..and prepared in an area where
nobody touches their nuts, Alan Davies.
And we've toned down their buzzers this week to avoid giving offence.
Sally goes...
Oh. Which is nice. Gyles goes...
Jimmy goes...
And Alan's is very PC indeed...
Step away from the car, please, sir!
Tonight, I'll be giving extra points for politeness,
and the really super thing about it is that if any of you gets a bonus
point, then everyone else gets one as well.
So we're all winners.
Hoorah!
First off, we are going to have our collars felt by PC Plod.
How can you tell if a PC is cut out for the job?
- Is it about... - Yes?
Making dummy policemen...
- Yes! - ...and then deterring criminals by placing them strategically.
This is exactly right! So you get points. Everybody gets points!
I'm slightly miffed that I finally
get points, and everyone else gets points as well.
I know. Life's a bugger.
Um, so various police forces have experimented with stationing
cardboard cut-out police officers at potential crime scenes instead of
actual officers, and they have experienced,
honestly, startling results.
In 2013, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police,
they put two cut-outs in bike rack cages at a place called
Alewife Station.
And theft rates instantly fell by two-thirds.
So let me give you a sense of what that is like.
I have here... Ahh! Yes, I know.
They've made him deliberately tall.
No, no, he's regular height.
No, he isn't! No, he isn't!
No, he's enormous!
He's standing on tiptoes.
Look at how big his head! His head's that wide!
Let us all get up! Come on!
Let's all get a photo! Come and have a picture with the police.
Come, Sally, come and smile with the policeman.
Oh, this is a photo you'll never see again.
Hold on just a moment. Hang on a second.
This opportunity doesn't come that often.
Are you ready? Grandpa's got his camera out.
Darling, darling, darling! That's the audience! I'm so sorry.
Bless him.
It's amazing. I've got so many photographs of my right ear.
You wouldn't believe it.
Oh, I absolutely would believe it.
You know they're filming this, Gyles? You do it.
I'll do it. There we go! There we go!
Smiling, everybody. You haven't got the policeman in it, now?
I don't give a fuck about the policeman.
May I share something with you?
What I know about you, Gyles,
is there's no stopping you once you've decided.
Well, all I will tell you is this.
The uniform isn't necessary.
I only know this because I happen to have made a One Show film about this
very subject. Oh, right?
And it turns out that it's entirely the eyes looking at you that make
the difference. It turns out that it is the head and the eyes, in
particular, that looking at people makes them stop doing whatever they
were thinking of doing.
Actually, we could have a cut-out Jimmy Carr
and it would be just as effective.
That wasn't meant to be nasty. It's all right.
But you can...you can buy those.
You can. Well, weirdly, I got given one.
Yeah, they're 14 quid, aren't they? Yeah.
Why? Why are they 14 quid?
You can get you cheaper. I mean, that's a ridiculous...
I might get a cut-out Sandi.
I did search you and you can only get your head, Sandi.
I want to be one of those little draught excluders.
I want to be one of those.
The good news is, you pretty much are.
Wow.
That whole thing about everybody getting points,
not looking so good now, is it?
Thames Valley Police,
they rotate two life-size cut-outs between the shops in Oxford,
Windsor, Maidenhead and Ascot, apparently,
and that deters shoplifters.
I think I can tell they're not real policeman.
Cos it's the way they're floating.
I have to say, the Police Federation are not too thrilled with this.
They reckon that it's an attempt to avoid paying salary and pension
costs, and of course it is, absolutely it is that.
It's also a bit embarrassing for them that they're just as effective
as a real policeman! Well, if you want to do embarrassing,
I think this is even more embarrassing, several forces have
admitted suffering theft of their cardboard policemen.
Three gone missing from filling stations in Derbyshire,
two were stolen in Cleveland,
and Humberside lost one from the Tesco supermarket in Grimsby.
I noticed that they're all men policemen.
Think how more effective it would be if they had women police persons in
uniform looking at you, beadily.
Like, really, when you're as frightened of your mother as I am...
Yes. That would've...
Or just your mother in a uniform?
I saw those pictures before my father burned them.
Gyles, just to come back to your point about the eyes,
you are absolutely right about it.
They did some experiments at the University of Newcastle in the psychology department,
and what they did was they put an honesty box in the coffee room,
so if you went and had a hot drink, you had to pay for it.
And they put some eyes, just a photograph of some eyes,
next to the thing,
and then, as a control, they swapped it over for a picture with some
flowers and what they discovered, with the eyes,
is that people paid 2.76 times more for their drinks
as when the flowers were there.
And one of the researchers said,
"Frankly, we were staggered by the size of the effect,"
and it was just enough that the eyes were looking at you.
Wow. I know, it's weird, right?
And it doesn't just work on humans.
So at the University of New South Wales, they tried painting eyes
on the back of cattle, OK? On the rear end.
It seems ridiculous,
so, lions, obviously, ambush hunters,
and they sneak up on prey from behind
but they tend to stop if they are being spotted.
So they painted eyes on the bottom of a third of a head of 62 cattle
and then they counted the returning cows after a ten-week period,
and no painted cows were killed by lions,
but three who didn't have eyes on the bottom were killed.
So should we be doing this with our own pets at home?
What, painting eyes on them?
The part of London where I live now, we have a lot of foxes.
Oh, right. And some of them are a bit predatory
and our cats are feeling a bit vulnerable.
So maybe what we need to do is shave the cats' bottoms,
and then paint eyes on them.
This feels like an alibi you're going to use...
Now, here's a piece of politics for you to be correct about.
Who wears the trousers in a pantisocracy?
Oh, it's one of those kinky parties, where people turn up in either
panties or socks, you take your choice.
It has got the word all in it, so panto for all, and then we have...
Socracy. Socracy.
So from isocratia, so equality of power,
so basically it is government for and by... Everybody.
..all, yeah. So it was...
Yes, Gyles? You rarely ask permission to speak.
Well, I know there are bonus points for courtesy.
Oh, yes, very good. What were you going to say, my darling?
I was going to say that I've actually lived in a pantisocracy.
Have you? And it's hell.
When I was about 17, a master from our school...
Where's this going?
He was subsequently arrested, but that is a different story.
I was at a co-educational boarding school in Hampshire,
and this master invited some of us to go on holiday to Devon,
and he said we are going to be pantisocrats,
and the idea was we went to a village where Coleridge, the poet,
had been on holiday, and he told us that Coleridge and a friend of his,
I think, Southey... Robert Southey...
They had invented this idea of a society where everybody was equal.
Yeah. And on this holiday,
all eight of us and this one teacher lived this life of being equals,
and we all had to be different Romantic poets.
I ended up as Byron. It was a ghastly, ghastly experience...
..and it put me off equality forever.
We went to Faliraki, it was awesome.
But you're right, it is an idealised, egalitarian government,
and it was a sort of pipe dream of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert
Southey. 1794, they were 21-year-old students,
and they were going to go to the banks of the Susquehanna River in
the United States, Pennsylvania.
They were going to start a sort of hippie colony, and difficulties
arose, because Southey clearly assumed that servants would do the
actual work, and women... By servants, you mean women?
I do mean women. Yes.
Women would do all the child-rearing and so on,
and the plan was scaled back, they weren't going to go to America,
they were going to go to Wales,
and then eventually it was abandoned altogether,
and I feel rather sorry for Southey,
because can anybody bring to mind a single piece of writing by
Robert Sutthey? In fact, I think it's pronounced South-ey.
Right, I was going to mention that, yep.
Does anybody remember a single story written, or poem written, by him,
at all? The Hungry Caterpillar?
You're not far off, so he wrote The Tale of the Three Bears...
Oh, yes! Which is the original story of Goldilocks.
Yes! Really? Yes.
And this led to what we all had to do on this holiday.
OK.
The idea was we were all asked to be different poets,
and the fellow who choose to be Southey told us the story of the
Three Bears. I had chosen to be Byron, not Lord Byron,
but his cousin, HJ Byron,
Henry James Byron, the man, as you know, Sandi,
who invented Widow Twankey for the pantomime Aladdin,
and also created the character of Buttons.
OK, you live and learn.
And three weeks of this, somewhere in Devon, all pretending to be
characters, it was hell, it was sheer hell.
Three weeks! Yeah, he, the master, of course, was on Coleridge,
and took it seriously, which meant taking opium.
He was a druggie!
And did you... Did you at any stage in the three weeks stop talking?
Oh!
I, for one, would have liked to have seen you give your Twankey.
But to live, to method act the
creator of Widow Twankey for three weeks?!
But, also, isn't it appalling that this great man, HJ Byron,
is virtually unknown? He was the first cousin of Lord Byron.
No-one is reading Byron any more, Byron Schmyron,
but every Christmas we go, we cheer at Buttons, Widow Twankey,
we love her, nobody even knows that this man exists.
How did he write just those characters?
He wrote the whole show, but I'm cutting to the chase,
because I don't want to take up too much of your time. No.
Good.
I desperately want to know whether you chose HJ Byron,
or whether he was imposed upon you?
One tiny second, Gyles...
Do not ask him any supplementary questions.
What were you thinking? What is wrong with you?
I so recognise... Sally! I so recognise the way your mind works,
because that's exactly what I would have done,
just like the time I went to audition for Jonathan Creek,
and just as I was going in the door,
I thought, "Oh, hang on, it would be brilliant if she was Spanish!"
Did you get the part? No, no, obviously not.
Obviously not, the character wasn't Spanish.
Excellent.
Here's a word cloud with other political systems starting with P.
See if you can work out what any of them are.
Is that Panicky?
Panarchy. Pan-ar-kee.
Or Southey or South-ee, I don't really mind how you want to say it.
I imagine that the system in America currently, is it?
Is it to do with anarchy?
It is by a writer called Paul Emile de Puydt,
in 1860. He was Belgian and the idea was individual fills in a form
and says what kind of government they would like to be ruled by.
So you could opt for monarchy, you could opt for democracy,
and once you are registered, you are subject to that regime.
So you get to choose which kind of government you would like to have.
We would choose to be run by Peter Pan, wouldn't we, in a panarchy?
I'll be Tinker Bell to your Wendy.
Now, I think they're flirting, but I couldn't swear to it.
Can you feel any frisson?
It's not getting that far, to be honest, but,
I mean, you know, give him time.
I'm very aroused.
So no change there, then.
Let's do another one.
Pornocracy, OK.
Have you considered doing this a bit more Spanish?
Pornocracy. It is, I think, what is happening
when, somebody, they have paid to adult film actress
a lot of money, to say that they did not have a sex.
So it was a period of history that was known as the pornocracy.
The Government of Harlots.
The Government of Harlots, yes. So it was 904 to 964,
so there were 12 Popes and they were mostly controlled
by a mother and daughter team, as it were,
from the Theophylacti family,
Theodora and Marozia.
It is known as the Rule of Harlots.
Of course, it wasn't called that at the time.
It is a coinage from the 19th century by German theologians.
Basically, they're saying if women are in charge,
then they must be harlots.
So, what else have we got up there but we haven't looked at?
Plutocracy. What do you reckon?
It's nothing to do with that wonderful character Pluto
from the cinema, is it?
Plutocracy is for people who are superior.
Wealthy people. Wealthy people.
That doesn't make them superior, it just makes them rich.
It's rule by the rich.
So the Roman Empire in its heyday, the Venetian Republic,
but, today, it is often used as a pejorative.
So you might say, for example, you might criticise
the modern United States, where the legislative process
has arguably been captured by well-funded interest groups.
So does pluto mean rich, then?
Plutos means wealth. It means wealth.
And so cratos, rule.
So we have one more, I think, that we've got there.
Particracy.
Parties? Ruled by parties? Rule by party.
Decisions taken at parties in the kitchen about two o'clock.
I love that.
It's where effective power is exercised by a party,
rather than by individual politicians or voters.
A good example? China. China's a very good example.
The Communist Party has pretty much of formal monopoly of power.
So, formally, the Chinese state does not have an army.
The People's Liberation Army
is actually the military wing of the Communist Party,
which is an extraordinary thing, that the Ministry of Defence
has no authority over the Army.
Right, name a Greek word with a silent P.
Enis.
Do you mean, as in, pterodactyl?
But why are you being klaxoned, why are you being klaxoned?
Is that not Greek in origin?
I don't know... It is Greek in origin.
So it has a silent P because we don't pronounce the P.
Well, I'm just trying to think of
the other words, like psalm and philosophy and...
..Philip.
Philip?
So, the fact is that English speakers dispense with them,
but the Greeks do not, there are no silent Ps in Greek.
All right, so how would they say pterodactyl?
Pa-tero-dac-til.
So the Greek person that grew up in Russia, presumably?
What about philosophy?
Well, philosophy doesn't work anyway, because that makes a "fuh".
So without the P, it is "hilosophy". You meant psychology.
Or psychiatry. If we have a look at the Greek alphabet.
So, for example, the letter
P-s-i, all right, they have a single letter, and we pronounce it "sigh",
but, in Greek, that sound is more
like the "ps" that we have in "lapse".
It's a "pss" sound. We say "sigh" and they would say "pss."
I'll give an extra point,
what's wrong with that list as I look at it, in fact?
There's no omega, is there?
Some of them are in the wrong order.
This alphabet explains why the Greek economy is in the state it's in.
What about ptarmigan, you know the bird?
Why do we think it's spelled in that way? I think I've forgotten how to
read, because none of this is making any...
Do you know what a ptarmigan is?
A ptarmigan? It's like a little grouse, isn't it?
No, it's cheese, you grate it on your pasta.
Ptarmigan is in fact a Gaelic word, tamarchan,
and what happened was there was a man called Sir Robert Sibbald,
and he wrongly assumed that it had been a Greek word of origin,
and so he put a P in front of it.
Now, there is no need for the P to be there at all.
It's not Greek in any way,
it is simply a Scottish word that he misunderstood.
Do you know, that's not quite interesting, it's riveting.
It is good, isn't it? So, Sir Robert Sibbald, I really like this, Alan,
this got me very excited, he was the very first person to
describe what creature, scientifically?
Step away from the car!
Is it the blue whale? It is the blue whale, yes.
Yes!
One of them got stranded in the Firth of Forth in 1692,
and it was known for a very long time as Sibbald's rorqual.
So he got the Ptarmigan wrong but he did get the blue whale right,
so I think that's pretty good.
The silent Ps were all pronounced until the preposterous English
purged them. Now, here's one thing the PC brigade haven't got their
teeth into yet - pie-eating competitions.
Or have they? Let's hear your proposals for making pie-eating
competitions a bit more PC.
I went to an extraordinary pie-eating event.
Oh, yes?
True story, 45 years ago...
For three weeks, he lived in a pornocracy.
This was after that. Oh, right.
I was just down from university, and I was invited by a man called
the Earl of Longford, Lord Longford, you may
remember him... I do remember him. He was a social reformer, prison
reformer. Yeah, prison reformer. He was a good man, and, 45 years ago,
he launched a crusade against the scourge of pornography in our
society, and he formed a committee, called the Pornography Committee.
I genuinely became the youngest member of this committee.
Yeah, no, I, seriously, I still have the raincoat I bought at the time.
It wasn't just me and Lord Longford on this committee,
there was a bishop, an Archbishop, a rabbi...
I think I know this, you walked into a pub...
No, we did better than that, we went into a club in Copenhagen.
We went, the bishop, the Archbishop, the rabbi, myself, we all went, on
an aeroplane, and we came to this club where they were offering
us a special pie.
True story. And we sat around the edge of this pie,
and when the crust was removed, you wouldn't believe it.
There they were, naked people.
Are we all allowed to tell our sex dreams?
This is fact.
I've still got the photographs!
The point is... And there was an enormous pie... Is there a point?
No, not much of a point... No.
So you were very successful, this pornography...?
No. What is interesting is, at the time, Lord Longford
was much mocked for this whole thing,
and, now, actually, everybody would agree with him,
that it was all about the exploitation of women,
and his view was let's go and see what is happening
and report on what is happening.
Well, I've actually done a significant amount of research in this area.
I mean, I don't look at pornography any more.
Not for moral reasons, I've just finished it.
We are going to talk about the World Pie Eating Championship.
It's held in Harry's Bar in Wigan. It's been held since 1992,
and they used to challenge competitors to eat as many pies as
they could in three minutes. And then, in 2006,
they thought we need to reflect modern, healthy eating,
so they eat just one pie, as quickly as they can,
and a vegetarian category introduced, following what was
described as relentless pressure from the Vegetarian Society.
Oh, please!
Oh, please, please...
Oh, please!
Vegetarians, too weak to be too demanding.
Oh, let them have a cheese and onion one.
So the organiser, Tony Callaghan, he said,
"I realise it may be controversial,"
"but this is the way forward for pie eating at this level."
Dave Smyth, who was the winner of the first contest in 1992,
he didn't think it was a good idea.
He said, "They've taken things too far."
"Pies are supposed to be meat and potato,"
"and anything else just isn't normal."
What I like is the organiser thinks that reduced pie consumption may be
responsible for the recession.
"If everyone eats two pies rather than one," he said,
"it follows logically that the pie sector of the economy could double"
"in size."
I mean, it's flawless logic. I know.
And it's not a competition without its difficulties.
So in 2007, there were 20 pies
prepared for the next day's competition,
and they were eaten in a single
sitting, by a rescue dog, called Charlie.
Well, he's the winner, then. I know.
His owner had been distracted - apparently there was a pigeon up a
chimney and so... This is such a northern story!
It's good, isn't it? So Charlie's owner, Dave Williams,
entered Charlie in the competition,
because he thought Charlie is an absolute natural.
Charlie would have been stuffed, wouldn't he?
Well, that was the problem!
He was entered, but he was full from the previous day, and he
only ate half his pie.
The current record, 22.53 seconds, held by Martin Claire
and that has been confirmed to us directly by the organiser.
His advantage is he has a removable front tooth.
I thought we would have our own pie-eating contest.
Shall I give you a few tips before we do anything?
So the first thing is, if it's a no-hands event,
apparently, you should secure your plate to the table using Velcro.
One of the ways you can prepare for the competition, chew gum,
get your jaw all sort of nice and relaxed.
Cheating would be adding a slug of cough mixture to the gravy.
Apparently, it could knock two seconds off your time.
Remember to breathe. Apparently, people forget to breathe
while they are eating the pie.
That's good advice for everyone, isn't it?
Are these our pies? Yes. Alan, there's your pie.
We have strict Pro-am distinction,
so I need to ask you officially,
has anybody ever earned money from a previous pie-eating competition?
I did a voice-over for Quorn.
Are you ready? I got a stopwatch, hang on.
OK. My pie's enormous.
Oh, oh, oh!
Is that some cough syrup, is it? Oh.
A little bit of cough syrup? I wondered why you asked for a bottle.
It's not that, you know what she's going to do?
She's going to take a bit of pie and then spew it out into there.
I know, I've seen her do this before.
How did it get so serious?
OK, are we ready? You want us to consume the whole pie?
Yes. Is this...? It's a pie-eating
competition, so you have to eat the pie.
OK. On your marks...
OK. Get set...
Right... Go!
Oh, Jimmy!
And the winner is Jimmy!
Aw!
I have eaten a pie that contained a human...
Was it in Copenhagen, 45 years ago?
It wasn't...
It was just before last Christmas in India.
I was researching a book that I'd been writing,
called, "Have You Eaten Grandma?"
A book about punctuation,
as you can imagine, and I discovered that there is a tribe...
- Yes. - ...in India... - Yes.
..that likes to eat its grandparents,
and the United Nations has banned cannibalism,
it's not allowed any more in the world,
with the exemption of this tribe in a part of India.
And these people believe that they should consume their grandparents,
literally, in order that the spirit of their grandparents should come to
them. When the person dies, the grandparent dies,
what they do is they feed it to fish,
and then when it's been eaten by the fish, they put the fish in the pie,
and then you eat your grandparents in the pie.
So I have eaten human fish pie.
Well, if only there were points for that. I know!
My favourite bit is, "I've still got the raincoat I bought at the time."
That's going to make me laugh for years!
But, in truth, my wife has sewn up the pockets.
Right, next in our piecemeal project,
four pieces of pie, pizza pie.
What's the pizza-litically correct
procedure for eating a piece of pizza?
What is... Yes?
Many years ago...
Many years ago... Yes? I was a friend of, and knew, Fanny Cradock.
Oh, dear Fanny.
The younger people won't know who she was, she was a television chef,
a sort of interesting cross between Mary Berry and Jeremy Clarkson.
A wonderful woman, and she taught me and my wife how to make pizza,
proper Neapolitan pizza, and she explained to us,
A, that you cut it up, but then you don't use knife and fork to eat it,
you have to eat it by hand.
Yes. And you have to feed one another.
Yeah. The fact is, you can eat pizza any way you please,
but there are certain thoughts,
there's some advice about how to do it and...
It's a fold, isn't it? It's a fold.
So the grease doesn't go everywhere.
Yeah. So what you end up with is a sort of triangular package,
with all the toppings inside, they don't slip off...
That looks exactly like Fanny's...
Yes? No, I think that's, that's the proper way to eat pizza.
It is. Well, I don't think so, I think that's a greedy way to eat
pizza, that's like bunging as much in at a time as you can,
whereas in Italy you tend to put a,
you tend to put a finger in and just sort of bend it.
That wasn't me! We're talking about eating pizza!
That wasn't me! Put a pizza in and then bend it, yeah?
That is your minds, that was not my mind!
Can I just say that my mother watches this...
Not for much longer.
No. You don't fold it, because then you don't get...
Where do you put a finger in, though, Sally?
Where do you put your finger? Well, you... How do you do it?
I'm just trying to think...
You can't put the finger in! You kind of, you...you make it so
it's like a bent, like a scoop thing, and, so you...
It's basically so that you can hold the end up.
Like a scoop, so you've got to keep it up, but then pop your finger in?
If you hold the triangle flat, the end will go floppy...
You're supposed to do it like that?
Yeah. Can I just say, is anyone else with me?
I've never really had a problem eating a bit of pizza.
I tend to pick it up and bite some off.
Yes, and just get on with it.
What about pizza toppings? Because that is a very emotive...
Yes, my darling?
I once met...
..Princess Margherita of Italy,
who was the great-granddaughter of Queen Margherita of Italy,
who, in the 1890s,
had the pizza topping known as the Margherita named after her.
And the colours of it were of the new Italian flag.
That is entirely correct. The tomato, the red, and all that.
And the basil. I've got a quite interesting pizza fact.
The guy that invented the Hawaiian pizza was a Canadian man.
A Canadian, yes. From the 1850s.
I don't know what everybody thinks about pineapple on pizza.
I'm not a fan myself.
I'm a huge fan. You like it? Yeah.
Well, the President of Iceland, in 2017,
Gudhni Thorlacius Johannesson,
he joked during a school visit that he thought pineapple should
be banned as a pizza topping.
This set off an international firestorm on Twitter.
And he issued a clarification, saying he liked pineapple,
just not on pizza, and he was glad, in principle,
you know, that he didn't have the power to ban it
and, personally, he recommended seafood pizza toppings.
This caused another firestorm. Oh, dear.
In terms of value for money, which pizza should you order?
So imagine you've got a small, a medium, a large.
If you want value for money, which one should you order?
Ooh, probably the small.
You think it's the small one. Why? Why do you think that?
Because it's an optical illusion.
So here is one of those rare moments when things that you learn at
school, maths, actually is fantastically useful.
So you can use Pi to calculate the area of a pizza.
Pi r squared. Pi r squared. absolutely right.
So imagine a Domino's Pepperoni Passion, OK?
The large one is 13.5 inches.
It costs £18. Good grief.
That is 12.58p per square inch.
The medium one is 15.4p per square inch.
And the small one is 19.75p per square inch.
The small one is 57% more expensive per square inch
than the large one.
I feel like I'm having an anxiety attack because I feel like I'm back in a maths GCSE.
All you need to know is that you might as well order the large one,
its way cheaper.
First ever Bitcoin transaction, this is astonishing,
it was for a pizza purchase, so it was in 2010,
and there was a Florida computer enthusiast,
he was called Laszlo Hanyecz,
and he offered 10,000 Bitcoins
to anybody who would bring him a couple of pizzas.
So somebody paid 25 to have them delivered,
got the 10,000 Bitcoins.
What is that worth...? They were worth 30 at the time.
As of December 2017, they would have been worth 100 million.
Whoa.
That's more money than I make in a year.
Now, we have a treat for you, we are going to do a pizza tossing lesson.
Please welcome Paolo, the group
training development chef from Strada.
Yay!
Hello, Paolo. Hello, there.
OK, so, you've all got some pizza dough.
Pizza dough. So what is the pizza dough made of, Paolo?
OK, the base is water. Yeah.
..and flour. Just plain white flour?
Yes. And when you open them, you open them with semolina and flour.
OK so this has got semolina in here?
And flour, yeah. Oh, right, so...
50-50. Put your finger in, Sal.
Right, Paolo is going to do the demonstration.
OK, the key point in your pizza, now... Yeah?
..is the way we open the pizza,
and not overdoing your edges of the pizza.
Always try to work it from the middle.
From the middle, OK. Why do you do that, what is it...?
Because, if you work your edge, you really kill your pizza,
is how we say, we kill the pizza.
Don't work the edge, you'll kill
your pizza, Gyles. Don't kill your pizza, Gyles! That's the reason
we're using the hands. OK. And we're not using the roll. No, OK.
Oh! Do you throw it in the air at all? And you throw? You toss and you
catch? Yeah. Yeah. Oh! What a shame. Hey!
Oh, hang on... And now, when you open, with your hands,
you always from the middle, you know?
OK. And stretch from the middle?
Moving it out, stretch from the middle? Oh no!
Is it necessary to throw it in the air?
Not really, no. Not really.
And you can make... Look, look! Here's Casper the naughty ghost!
What's the throwing in the air one?
I see people in there, and they throw them up in the air.
It seems more fun. He says it's not necessary.
I know it's not necessary, but a bit of fun?
Yeah. This is a pair of old knickers!
That's fantastic. Paolo, thank you so very much indeed.
You're welcome. Thank you.
Right, moving on, who has overdone it with the pie?
That's not very PC, that question.
Is it the people at Miami Airport?
Because if you go to Miami Airport, they're all trundling around,
these hugely gross people, who...
They're called Americans.
It's about maths. It's about maths. It is about maths, yes.
So the number pi begins, anybody, what does it begin with?
3.142726...
Just saying random numbers now.
3.141592...
And then on and on and on. Has it got an end?
I don't think it's got an end.
No, it's very much like one of Gyles's stories.
It goes on forever and it's irrational.
At the end of 2016,
pi had been calculated to over 22 trillion decimal places,
which is way more than we need.
So, for example, we need 15 decimal places,
that would be enough to calculate how to point a laser
which would hit the Voyager spacecraft,
which is about 12.5 billion miles away,
to an accuracy within 1.5 inches.
We would only take 40 decimal places to calculate the circumference
of the entire observable universe
to a margin of error of the width of one hydrogen atom.
So it is astonishing that people want to keep trying to see
how far they can go.
There are some sad stories about it as well, because in 1873,
there was a British mathematician called William Shanks,
and he published a ground-breaking calculation of pi
to 707 places.
It had taken him 15 years to do by hand.
And, mercifully,
he had been long dead when somebody noticed he'd made an error...
I know. ..on the 527th digit.
And that meant that all the subsequent digits were,
in fact, wrong.
You hope that there isn't a heaven. I know, it's sad.
What do you remember about pi from school?
I remember that the person who came up with the word pi,
the Greek letter pi, for this phenomenon
was a Welsh person. I know this because he's a kinsman of mine.
The dates, when he did this, was 1707.
He was known as William Jones.
I am Anglo-Welsh, myself, come from a long Anglo-Welsh heritage.
Let's go back through the whole thing, yeah.
This man, William Jones, known as Jones the Pi,
he...
I like everything about your story, except it was 1706.
He's got it to within a decimal point.
But you are right, attention to detail is everything.
So what is the thing that we remember about pi?
There's a mathematical thing everybody got taught at school.
2 pi r.
2 pi r. And that is the way in which we work out the
circumference of something.
So I want you to imagine that we have taken a piece of string
and we have tied it around the Earth's equator.
So that's about 40,000km, right?
And somebody comes along and goes, oh, I changed my mind, actually,
what I'd really like is I would like you to lengthen the piece of string
so that we can raise it just under 16 centimetres above the ground,
all the way around the Earth, OK?
So how much longer would the piece of string need to be to raise it
just under 16 centimetres above the ground all the way around the Earth?
A surprisingly large amount, and/or not as much as you'd think.
OK.
It is the radius plus 16 centimetres times pi, isn't it?
Which is?
40,000. Another 40,000.
Another 40,000? Another 40,000.
An extra metre.
Alan is absolutely right, it is just one metre of string.
Very well done.
So, explain that to us.
OK, so let's imagine that this is the Earth.
And, actually, this would work with any size sphere.
So what do we know?
We know that pi times the diameter
will give us the whole circumference, OK?
All we did was increase the diameter
by just under 16 centimetres on each side.
So that's 32 centimetres, we times it by pi,
by 3.14, it will give us just one metre more of string needed.
If we only need a metre more, we should do it. Yes.
And now for the section of this PC
show, which is full of "EC-PC" questions,
it's general ignorance!
But first, Gyles, you're a bit of a maverick, if I may say so.
Do you even know what it means to toe the line?
Well, I do. OK.
Well, I always thought toeing the line went back to my time in the
House of Commons...
You've set me up!
I did, and it's taken three hours.
You have previously asserted that the expression came from the House
of Commons, but we absolutely know that that is not true.
I don't know why you think you absolutely know everything,
because you don't necessarily.
There are the two lines... Yes. On the floor of the House of
Commons, you have to keep your toes behind those lines...
But why were they that distance?
Because it's the length of two
outstretched swords, so they don't allow...
The difficulty, darling, with this
story is that that chamber dates from 1950.
It...
Built on the model of the original chamber, which was built on...
All the paintings of the older versions of the chamber,
where you might actually have had a sword,
show no lines on the floor whatsoever.
The lines were invisible, as in the silent P.
The fact is we don't know, really, the true origin of the phrase.
The most likely is referring to getting your toes on a line to get a
group of people organised, so to start a race or a parade or
something, and another possible source is prizefighting.
So there was always a thing called the scratch,
and it was a line marked in the middle of the ring,
and the two contestants had to stand on the line in order to start the
fight. It's where we get the expression "up to scratch".
But the truth is we absolutely don't know, and I'm sorry,
we did set you up there, Gyles, yeah.
It's OK. Toeing the line has nothing to do with the House of Commons.
If you get this next one wrong, you deserve to be hung,
drawn and quartered.
We all know about being hung and quartered, what does drawn mean?
It means being disembowelled.
You've been set up, this time.
Did they do a little sketch?
Oh, were you hanged and then drawn through the streets in some way?
It is to do with being drawn through the streets,
but it's being dragged to the place of execution,
so in fact we have the phrase round the wrong way, it ought to be drawn,
hanged and quartered, that is the order of it.
Just to be clear, Alan, people were disembowelled,
I'm not saying that they weren't, as part of the execution,
but that would be in addition to the drawing.
So the OED entry for draw has this,
to drag a criminal at a horse's tail or on a hurdle or the like to the
place of execution, formerly a legal punishment of high treason.
They used to behead them, as well.
You could be hung, drawn, quartered and then beheaded, as well.
Well, that would be for quite a serious offence.
Yes, that would be quite a lot.
And then your testes would be made into a desk toy.
I want one of those.
Finally, here's really a deep question for you:
Captain Nemo's submarine was called Nautilus.
How many leagues under the sea did she dive?
Yes, Jimmy? 20,000 Leagues. 20,000. Definitely did! Definitely did?
Definitely did, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Have you read it, or seen the film?
I've seen the poster.
Yeah, no, so here is the thing,
the 20,000 leagues refers to the distance that they travelled,
and not the depth.
Oh... So, imagine, a metric league, 4km,
so 20,000 leagues is 80,000km.
The diameter of the Earth is 12,742km,
so 20,000 leagues would be six times the diameter of the Earth.
Well, they went too far, and they had to come back.
Yeah. The greatest depth that is
mentioned in the book is four leagues,
that's 16km, but the deepest part of the ocean is only 11km.
It's known as the hadal zone and more people have been to the moon
than have been to the hadal zone.
The underwater pressure at that depth,
it's about eight tonnes per square inch.
So how many people have been down there?
Three. And when they come up, they're like Lego mini figures.
It's what happened to me! I used to play basketball for a living.
Which brings me to tonight's league table of scores, but of course,
in this PC world, it's not about winners and losers,
it's about everybody being equally fabulous,
so the prize for the most positive attitude goes to Gyles.
Tidiest desk, Jimmy.
Terrific. Neatest colouring in, Sally.
And waggiest tail, Alan Davies.
So, here's to a peaceful night from Sally, Jimmy, Gyles, Alan and me,
and I leave you with this question - would a simple, politically-correct
policeman's computer be an easy-peasy PC PC's PC?
Thank you, good night!