Good evening!
And welcome to the QI gallery for a perusal of pictures,
paintings and portraits.
So who have we got on tonight?
Well, I've got four clues right here.
What a colourful bunch they are.
An absolute scream, Joe Lycett!
With an enigmatic smile, Noel Fielding!
Look at them Van Gogh, Hannah Gadsby!
And the apple of my eye...
..nose, mouth, in fact, my entire face, Alan Davies!
Let's have a quick picture of their buzzers.
Joe goes...
♪ If a picture paints a thousand words
♪ Then why can't I paint you? ♪
And Noel goes...
♪ I had a picture of you in my mind... ♪
And Hannah goes...
♪ You don't have to paint me a picture... ♪
And Alan goes...
We apologise for the loss of picture.
We're doing everything we can to get it back.
In the meantime, the programme will continue in sound only.
Now, does anybody want to get changed before we...
No!
I'm more than happy like this for the show.
I'm just half expecting to lift this and I'm on 8 Out Of 10 Cats.
There are some pictures you may want to look at.
Oh, right, OK.
Ta-da! I think, Noel, you look fine.
I've got to go to a Spanish funeral in a minute, so...
OK, are we all set to go?
You look really nice, darling.
Scrubbed up.
Yeah, like an undertaker, but cheerful.
He looks a bit like Donald Trump.
Here we go.
What mistake did Picasso make when he painted this?
He put lots of glue on the frame.
Yeah, they can't get their hands off.
Can't get their hands off.
"Oh, no!"
"Picasso's done the gluey frame thing again."
He left two snooker referees holding it.
Does anybody know what the picture is?
It's Marie-Therese Walter.
Yes. She was underage, but not, I don't know...
She was, she was 17.
She was underage for what?
For doing what he was doing with her.
Yeah.
He was 45 when they met.
She's Picasso's mistress.
But when he painted this,
who didn't know that she existed in his life?
Oh, his wife?
Yeah, so the mistake was, even with the picture looking like that,
his wife, Olga Khokhlova, recognised that it was somebody else.
Is that a mistake?! An affair - "Oh, my mistake."
No, the mistake was making a painting of your mistress
before she knows there's somebody there,
that would be the mistake, so... Right.
It's like going, "Oh, I'm going out to dinner"
"with my mistress... Oh, did I not say?"
So that's Marie-Therese Walter on the left there,
and that is his wife, Olga Khokhlova, and he was married at the time...
He picked her up, didn't he? Yeah.
He was like, "Come here, I'm, like, Pablo Picasso."
I don't know, she's not a horse.
Was she a horse?
I don't know.
Basically, he wasn't a nice guy.
Oh, no, he was a prickbiscuit. Yes.
That's a horse, Prickbiscuit.
Yeah.
I'd bet on that. 2-1, Prickbiscuit.
Of the seven most important women in his life,
two killed themselves and two went mad.
It's not a good track record, frankly. No.
We've got a picture of Le Reve, which is The Dream,
which also has Marie-Therese.
It's also got his cock on her face. Yes!
If you look at the one on the right, that's his penis on top of her head.
Isn't that part of her head? No.
Well, it was when he put it there.
Yeah.
Oh, no, I see, yes.
Look. Yeah.
That.
I mean, do you think, did he say, "Yeah, yeah, that's my penis"?
Or did he just accidentally...
Basically, it's an erotic thing, it's that she's dreaming about sex
as well as enjoying it.
That's terrible nap technique.
Like, if you're going to do... She'll get so stiff in the neck.
That's true. So stiff, did you say?
Stiff in the neck, yeah.
It looks like she's on a plane, doesn't it? A very small seat,
and he's the row behind, putting his cock on her head!
This is the kind of art criticism you rarely see.
"This is called Lady Abused In Economy."
So, there's a celebrated occasion when Picasso threw a party
for Henri Rousseau, and he wanted to pretend
to celebrate his genius, but actually, he intended to mock him,
but it backfired, because actually, it was a raving success
and it catapulted Rousseau into the spotlight.
But that party was an example of a Degas,
that's what it was known as in those days,
and it was a cruel joke, because Degas himself, you know,
all those lovely pictures of girls...
He was upfront, wasn't he? He was not nice.
He was anti-Semitic, he was a misogynist,
he referred to the ballet dancers as his "monkey girls",
he was not nice. And it just seems exceptional to us,
but at that time in the same neighbourhood,
you've got Renoir, and Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas,
and they all go to this party... It was the same barber! Mmm?
And the same... Yes, the same...
In photography... Yeah? ..when was the first person
to say, "Say cheese"? Because it changed everything.
There seems to be no-one...
It used to be, "Quick, get your hat and your beard!"
"Everyone you know has died!"
"Don't say that - tell them to say 'cheese' or something cheery,"
"and get a smile out of them."
Isn't French for cheese "fromage"?
Fromage, so that... So you'd be like, "Froma-a-age..."
So, maybe they WERE saying cheese...?
"Froma-a-age."
Or if it was a short cheese, like, Brie...
You might say, "Brie." "Camembert."
"Camem..." "Babybel!"
The thing about Rousseau though,
Rousseau was very nice, wasn't he, he was naive,
he was a postman, he carried on working in the post office,
and he was a Sunday painter, they called him, because he used
to just paint at weekends, he was a family man, and he was quite naive.
But his stuff is actually beautiful.
And it never occurred to him that they might be taking the mickey.
That's so sad. It never occurred to him.
But in fact, it worked out...
And he painted those beautiful jungle scenes, which are exquisite.
I think he's astonishing. Now, then.
Name a self-insertion artist.
Somebody who does a port...
Something about themselves, a self-portrait.
OK, in what way?
Someone who puts themselves into, like, the background of a painting.
Yes, and there are loads and loads of examples of it. Yeah, yeah.
And it mostly is in Renaissance art.
You get a great big picture and they think,
"I'm going to put myself in it."
So, if you look at the one on the left there,
that is Botticelli's Adoration Of The Magi,
and the camp guy in the bottom right,
that is supposed to be Botticelli,
the one who's looking out, going, "My picture, I did this."
That's the baby Jesus and he's, like, not even looking.
He's just, like, "G'day."
Yeah.
He's like, "See that Jesus? I did that."
Yeah. But he looks shifty, doesn't he? Yeah.
Don't you think that's deliberate, he's trying to make himself
detached or something from proceedings?
Cos his costume's not right either.
He hasn't coloured himself in properly.
No, he does look like he's got...
It's either that or he's about to flash.
He does look so pleased with himself, doesn't he?
Let's have a look at an another one, this is Rembrandt's The Night Watch.
And it's quite hard to see, but in the detail,
so if we can just see the one on the right,
if you see the little guy looking over the shoulder of the soldier,
you can just see one eye and a flat cap. That's Rembrandt?
It's like Liza Minnelli at the Oscars.
He called it The Night Watch cos it got so grubby.
But the actual title is
the Militia Company Of District II under The Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,
which is actually not as good as The Night Watch, I think. Mm.
That was what QI was originally called as well. Yes.
I know this one, it's in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
and it's really quite big.
And they couldn't get it all in, so they cut quite a big bit off.
Oh!
Like, about 2 million quid's worth.
They cut it off the side of it.
Imagine cutting it and then getting dragged in by your boss and going,
"Have you heard of folding?"
"Something called folding?"
"It's not going to go, it's not going to go."
"Cut it, cut it, we've got to be out of here by four."
The other one that is extremely famous is
the Arnofini Portrait by Jan van Eyck,
possibly, we're not entirely sure, that he is reflected in the mirror.
The way that it's got the fish-eye effect of the mirror
is amazing, actually, isn't it? Yeah, it's astonishing.
Do you know the story of the ancient Greek sculptor,
Fah... I don't know how to say it, I've only ever read it, so...
Don't worry. Fah-fah-lides. Yeah. And, er...
He apparently did, I think it was third or fourth century BC,
a sculpture of Athena, she had, what, a shield,
The Battle of the Amazons,
and put his own likeness on the shield.
Oh, OK. Which was desecration, and he got jailed for it.
For a self-insertion.
Here's the weird thing, is that self-insertion...
I have to say this very carefully.
Self-insertion appears to be something only boys do.
Why might it be that women artists tend not to do...
You know I'm a boy, right?
I always look at you and see the cusp.
Why is that? It's strange. Why might that be? Why is it a boy thing?
Is it... I mean, a lot of the times, only the boys painted.
It's the boys only did big group compositions.
Fundamentally, when women were allowed to paint,
they painted in smaller rooms in little salons.
Or self-portraits. Or self-portraits.
It's hard to insert into a self-portrait. Yeah.
There's not a lot of room for it, yeah.
Have a guess, if you looked at the work featured in major
permanent collections around the world, how much work is by women?
4%? It's five. It's 5% in total. Yeah.
They did a survey in 2011 of the National Gallery,
2,300 works, and a review revealed there were 11 women artists.
Well, you can assume that's women's fault.
We should just get... We should insert ourselves.
Or maybe just do better painting, maybe!
I don't know...
You ARE Donald Trump!
I'm curious to know how it feels to be on your last show.
This is a very famous poster from 1989 -
"Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women,"
"but 85% of the nudes are female."
So, the best way to get yourself into a permanent collection,
if you're a woman, is to take your clothes off.
And it took a gorilla to point that out. Yes!
Of course, it isn't just in art.
So, Alfred Hitchcock, another boy, self-inserted himself
into all his movies. I love this one.
This is from the movie Lifeboat, and he's in the advertisement,
there he is. And you get it in literature as well, you get Dante
in The Divine Comedy,
you get Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.
It's not uncommon for people to put themselves into their own books.
It is most common in what's called fan fiction
where you get something called a Mary Sue character.
This is where an author makes a character based
on themselves really heroic.
So this is by a woman called Paula Smith.
In 1973... I mean, it's not good.
No wonder we've only got 5%. Yes.
She did that on an Etch A Sketch.
She's a fan of Star Trek, so she wrote a parody story called
A Trekkie's Tale and there's a character in it called Mary Sue.
And those, in fan fiction, are these kind of characters
where you've self-inserted. But here's the thing about it.
The character usually helps to save the day,
and then, having done so, is rewarded
by some kind of sexual encounter with one of the main characters.
Of course.
I have written 25 books and so far, had no sex in any of them,
and I... I'm going to sort that out.
You need to self-insert, Sandi.
Many of the greats practised self-insertion,
although personally I regard it as self-indulgent and narcissistic.
Oh, my God, I'm so stupid that when that came up,
I looked over there.
I'm still looking over there!
That was weird, man.
OK, who is wearing the pants in this picture?
Well, that's Abraham Lincoln, is it not?
Why is he not wearing the pants in this picture?
Oh, it's not him. Like, it's a Photoshop of him...
No, a Paintingshop... A Paintingshop!
OK, this is a very, very famous portrait
of the President, Abraham Lincoln, but in 1957,
there was a photojournalist called Stefan Lorant,
and he was getting together pictures of Abraham Lincoln for a book
rather cunningly titled Lincoln: A Picture Story Of His Life,
when he noticed that Lincoln had a mole,
and in this picture, it was on the wrong side of his face.
And he knew that because Lincoln's head appears on the $5 bill -
there it is - and the head had been reversed.
And this is a very early forerunner of Photoshop.
Interestingly, the body is that of a Southern politician
called John Calhoun,
and he was vehemently pro-slavery!
So, the body of somebody who's very pro-slavery
is being used for the portrait of a man who in the end
managed to abolish slavery... It was the Russians! What?
The Russians must have done this.
Yes, I think you're right,
and we'd know that from reading Lincoln's tweets. Yes.
So, it's a composite picture,
it was done by an artist called Thomas Hicks,
and he is not wearing the pants
because it's nothing to do with his body.
But manipulating images is one of the oldest things.
So, in 1939, there's a photograph of King George VI
with the Canadian Prime Minister and the Queen Mother,
and the Canadian Prime Minister wanted to use it for an
election poster, and he thought he'd look stronger and more the man
in charge if the King wasn't in the picture, so he was just removed.
Looks like a really easy game of spot the difference.
And another wonderful one, 1942, a picture of Mussolini on a horse,
and he thought he didn't look butch enough because there was a guy
holding the horse, so the handler is, I don't know, gone,
just disappeared entirely,
so that Mussolini looked a bit more butch.
So, this is the opposite of self-inserting? Yeah.
And in some cases, actual elimination -
there's a very famous photo of Stalin
with his secret police official Nikolai Yezhov, and...
Not so secret! Well, he fell out of favour. He was executed...
Oh, then he fell in the river. Sorry.
But he was gone, he was gone from the picture and gone from...
It's a shame he didn't just put someone else in.
What, like Mickey Mouse or something? Yeah.
Now, Alan, have a look at this. What's missing from this picture?
Something interesting? I can tell you it's something enormous.
Is it a blue whale?
Yes. Is it?
There it is! It is a whale, indeed. That's better!
This is a painting called View of Scheveningen Sands
by Hendrick van Anthonissen.
And in 2014, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
was cleaning it, and they suddenly went,
"My Lord, there's a whale!"
The whale had been painted over,
probably in the 18th, 19th century, because they wanted to make
the painting more saleable, and people would go,
"I don't want a dead whale!"
Maybe that was painted by a woman and that's her self-insertion!
With low self-esteem, you know.
I'd like to imagine that that painting was painted
by a whale that was using self-insertion!
So it's like...
Is someone standing on that whale?
Yes. In fact, curiously...
A whale jockey?
Whales that were beached at that time,
all kinds of use could be made of the blubber and the oil and so on,
it was a valuable resource,
so that person would have been thinking, "Ooh, hello," you know...
Unless that was one of his shoes.
Do you know, when I get ready for this show,
I think I've thought of everything, and the...
..possibility of a small man with a very large shoe had not...
There might be another whale behind that whale,
he might have a pair of whale shoes.
"I was putting the slippers on, there was a whale there,"
"I inserted my foot in the blowhole."
It's an easy mistake to make!
OK. Close your eyes, please, all four of you.
What is the pinkest thing that you can picture?
Oh!
The pink elephants on parade in that Disney film. Oh, in Fantasia.
Yeah. I love that, that's very good.
Joe? My own soul.
Alan, the pinkest thing you can think of?
Er, I'm not giving you my first two answers.
I'm going to say pig.
A pig, oh, yes, that's nice, that's nice.
Hannah, what's the pinkest thing you could picture?
When you go into a kids' store, the girls' side.
The girls' comic shelf. Yeah, it's so horrible. Isn't it?
All my daughters went through a disgusting pink phase,
that they fortunately have now come out of.
Actually, it took 30 years. Um...
So there's a colour called the pinkest pink,
and I will show it to you.
That is the pinkest pink.
That is the world's biggest Hubba Bubba.
Er, it is a colour produced by an artist called Stuart Semple
and he has banned another artist from using it,
he's banned Anish Kapoor. So, Anish Kapoor, you might remember,
made the Orbit tower for the 2012 Olympics. Yes. Yeah.
Stuart Semple is an artist and he produced the pinkest pink
in response to the fact that Anish Kapoor had a paint called
the blackest black, or Vantablack, and he has got exclusive use of it.
And Stuart feels that no artist should have exclusive use
of a particular colour. It is an amazing black.
What it does is it absorbs 99.96% of all light that hits it,
so it makes things look like a sort of hole. Like a black hole.
Yeah, it was designed for the military, and Anish Kapoor
managed to get exclusive rights to it.
Stuart Semple thought this was outrageous,
so he sells this paint, the pinkest paint,
but you have to sign a piece of paper when you buy it
testifying that you are not Anish Kapoor.
It says here, "You are not Anish Kapoor,"
"you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor,"
"you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor"
"or an associate of Anish Kapoor."
That's brilliant. It is amazing.
Anish Kapoor did get hold of some and he painted his middle finger
with this pinkest pink and posted it on Instagram.
I thought you were going to say he self-inserted it!
Imagine if he self-inserted and it came out that pink colour.
Why does he feel he needs to have exclusive rights over a colour?
Well, that is the point that Stuart Semple is so angry about.
And he sells these on his website in a four-pack set.
There's yellowest yellow, greenest green and loveliest blue.
But all of them, you have to sign a thing saying you're not Anish Kapoor.
This pink is now in the Forbes pigment collection
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It's a library of 2,500 rare pigments.
There's some fantastic colours in there.
Royal purple, which is made entirely out of sea snails... Wow!
..from the coast of ancient Phoenicia.
Mummy brown, which was made from actual ground-up Egyptian mummies -
why do we not have it now? Run out of mummies? Yes!
It's not that difficult to make a mummy - you just need bandages.
Yeah, but you need a dead person from several thousand years ago.
In cartoons, when they unravel them,
there's usually no-one under there. That's right.
In Scooby-Doo and stuff.
You know, they'd get the bandage caught,
then they run off, there's usually no-one... Anyway.
But they all been made into paint.
Er, who is the next Rembrandt?
Who was the last one? Has there been one since him?
It's a sort of a philosophical question, isn't it?
What do we think about this picture here? Is this a Rembrandt?
Who knows? After the Lincoln experiment, I don't want to say.
Yeah, could be somebody else's body.
That is definitely Rembrandt.
No.
It didn't go off. It didn't go off!
Well, it is and it isn't.
It looks like Rembrandt...
It looks like Rembrandt. It's a classic Rembrandt portrait.
Caucasian man in his 30s, black clothes, wide-brimmed hat...
No arms. ..collar, no arms!
Moustache, goatee, slightly in profile to the right,
it's a classic portrait. But what it is, it's a 2016 project called
The Next Rembrandt.
Oh, is it, erm, a computer?
Yeah. It's done by a computer.
Well, artists and data crunchers analysed 346 Rembrandt paintings
and they created a new one in his style, not just the look of it,
but in terms of the colour schemes,
in terms of the facial structure, and the brush strokes.
So it's been 3D printed but with 13 layers of paint,
so that even the height and depth of the brush strokes
is the way in which Rembrandt would have painted,
but it's been done by a computer.
So, tell me, why do we need this?
Well, you know, why do the scientists do anything?
Just to see what they can do, don't they? Yeah.
What I love about science and one of the things we discover
all the time on this show is that a thing that you think,
"What is the point of doing that?"
You find that there is some scientific purpose behind it.
When you analyse something, how did you paint something,
maybe you learn how to preserve a painting,
maybe you learn something about... I hope they learnt something but...
Sure. I would imagine... Just another straight white man
in a painting. It's just like, pfft.
They could have inserted someone else in there.
Yeah, the computer inserts itself. Yeah.
Just a laptop.
So, who was the first person to fraudulently produce Rembrandts?
Rembrandt himself. Yes, absolutely right.
Extra point for Alan!
So, there used to be more than 650 official Rembrandts.
That's gone down by about 50% or 60%.
They can now identify the genuine Rembrandts,
and, most likely, a lot of them were him signing them.
So, in those days, students would come and study with a master.
He had about 25 students at any one time working,
and he was teaching them.
Copying was a perfectly legitimate way of teaching.
Do they still do that in art school nowadays?
Yeah, you have to... I had to copy a Monet and it was terrible.
I wrote Monet's signature
and my art teacher crossed it out and wrote, "Bob Smith".
Because he taught the artists and he taught them often through copying,
which is sort of thought to be legitimate,
and Rembrandt was constantly in debt,
so was always looking for a way to make some money.
He should have just painted banknotes, surely.
Famously, if they're doing a big canvas, they'd have teams of people
working on them, wouldn't they? "You do the trees,"
"do the mountain in the background, I'll come in and do the baby Jesus."
Yeah, exactly right, and so...
They'd have lots of canvases going on at once.
They wouldn't think of it as cheating or as anything other than...
No, because the head painter, the main one, gets all the credit.
Raphael had a whole school of young kids.
But that was a Renaissance thing.
There wasn't an artist who did it, it was a team that did it.
I think Michelangelo worked alone,
but apparently he stank.
And he was quite anti-social, so, obviously... Didn't have a team.
He had one assistant called Greg, who had a bad sense of smell.
Clothes pegs. He was mainly at Pret, getting him salads and stuff.
Imagine there was some big Michelangelo painting -
"You see the one at the back with the clothes peg on his nose?"
"That's Greg."
Michelangelo did a self-insertion.
Did you know about that one, on the Sistine Chapel? Which one?
The Last Judgment, he painted himself as a flayed skin.
I went to see the Sistine Chapel.
And all I remember is, there's somebody in the middle of the room,
there's about 200 people all going like this,
and there's somebody going, "No pictures!"
"No pictures! No pictures!"
Of course, people immediately go, "Wow!"
Why don't they let them take pictures of it? I don't know.
I was talking to Ronnie Barker's daughter, Charlie,
and she said the first time...
"No pictures!" Oh, God!
She was always saying it.
The first time she realised her dad was famous,
she was a little girl, and they went to see the Mona Lisa,
and they walked into the room, and she's standing there looking
at the Mona Lisa, and the room filled with British tourists,
and they were all looking at her dad, and nobody was looking
at the Mona Lisa. She said, that was the moment she thought, "Oh, OK."
And then they all went home and went, "I saw Ronnie Barker."
"Was he smiling? Wasn't he?"
"Why has he got no eyebrows?"
When I was a kid, I had a dog called Ronnie Barker.
You could leave that there if you want.
My dad named him and I was like,
"Oh, it's funny. Barker, it's a pun." But I didn't know...
It was named after Ronnie.
No, I didn't know Ronnie Barker was a famous situation. And...
So I thought, "Oh, I think we just named our dog"
"after Ricky Barker's dad."
And Ricky's just a guy I went to school with. And...
I even told Ricky and he was like, "Oh, did you?"
Did Ricky not know his dad wasn't called Ronnie? Yes, he did.
His name's Michael, and I kind of...
And it wasn't until I was... Years later, I was watching Open All Hours.
And he's like, "Why don't you j-j-jiggle it."
And I realised, like, "Oh, my God!"
Poor dog. It's not Ricky Barker's dad.
Oh, I've just got that - because of the bark.
It's like having a troubled child.
Now...
Joe, we have set up a Rembrandt painting to the side
of the studio, with an alarm system.
So, there you are, there's our alarm system, OK.
And what I'd like you to do is to see if you can steal it
without waking the guard.
Good luck.
Why me?
- Joe. - Yes? - Good luck.
Yes. We're all counting on you.
I'm doing yoga, so that might help.
He's very like Tom Cruise, isn't he?
Doing well, Joe.
They're definitely lasers.
That is not gaffer tape. Don't listen to them, Joe.
Keep moving.
Oh. Oi!
What the bloody hell's happened there?
Oh, sorry, mate.
Not to worry.
You get back to bed.
So here is a wonderful thing - that galleries in the United States
have discovered that one of the cheapest alternatives
to hi-tech systems is just to put marbles at the back of the frame.
And ribbons for lasers. Yeah, obviously ribbons for lasers.
And that way, if you take the painting off, they fall down,
and immediately you know that the painting is being stolen.
Why don't they just get guards who have had enough sleep?
Well, most real-life art theft is not like the movies.
It's not meticulously planned,
and it's often prompted by a lack of security.
And that seems to be a really cheap alternative.
You just put the marbles at the back, you move the painting,
the marbles fall down, everybody hears
that you're trying to nick the painting. Sounds very Scooby-Doo.
It does sound like it.
And I have to say, we don't know which galleries are doing it,
because, you know, that would give it away.
I know how we could find out.
A tough decision - you've got a painting but then you think,
"Oh, but I do like marbles."
That is true. But most art thieves don't have a specific target,
and people don't know what to do with them,
they don't know how to put it on the black market,
so only about 15% of stolen art is recovered,
and it's mainly because it sort of disappears.
Now, then. Name something less interesting
than watching paint dry.
Watching dried paint?
So it's already dried? Yes, that's a good point.
I mean, is it actually interesting? Is something going on in your head?
It's scientifically interesting.
This is another one of those things where science does something
that you think, "Why are you doing that?"
and it turns out actually to be quite useful.
These are researchers at the University of Surrey,
and what they discovered is that as paint dries,
small particles, it's like they team up and they push away larger ones,
and here is the practical application,
which, from Australia, you'll appreciate.
When you are developing sun cream,
if you can get the active ingredient pushed to the bottom,
the bit that sticks to the skin,
and the sun-blocking particles pushed to the top,
that makes for better sun cream,
and they did that by analysing how paint dries.
Yeah, they should try clothes and a hat.
Yeah, that would be a more sensible way.
Then a roof, and just wait until the... Until night?
..later in the day.
A film-maker called Charlie Lyne -
in 2016, he crowd-funded a film called Paint Drying,
and it consists entirely of white paint drying on a brick wall,
for over ten hours.
So, it is the law in this country, you cannot show a film unless
the British Board of Film Classification has had a look at it.
It costs £7.09 per minute
to get them to classify your film,
so he crowd-funded it and he made a film that was as long
as the money he had available.
He managed to raise £5,963,
and he made a film about this brick wall with paint drying,
that is 607 minutes long,
which the British Board of Film Classification had to watch...
Anyway, if you'd like to see it, it's a U classification.
Just in case...
He should have just flashed up some porn in the last second.
Or a murder, like, just blood at the very end.
But it is an offence for cinemas to show films with an age restriction
to children... "We'd like to see the paint-drying film, please!"
OK, who takes 160 billion pictures a year?
Kim Kardashian.
That's the absolute worst thing
that's ever happened to me in my life.
NASA? No, not NASA.
We are in the United States. Traffic cameras.
It's the US Postal Service. Is it?
They photograph every single piece of mail that goes through their system.
They are probably the most prolific photographers in the world.
160 billion pictures a year.
That is an astonishing thought, isn't it? 160 billion.
Hang on, have you counted how many Kim Kardashian's taken? No.
Do they keep the pictures, or do they delete them?
Well, they delete them once they're delivered.
Hang on, why do they take pictures of them?
It's part of the tracking process. She's very forgetful.
Yes, 160 billion! Do they have to go like...
There is another public body that collect pictures,
for a different reason.
In Mexico, you can pay your taxes with paintings
rather than with money.
It's called Pago en Especie.
It was introduced in 1957.
What it means is the government has an incredible art collection
of 7,000 paintings, sculptures, graphics,
all donated by the country's most famous artists
so they didn't have to pay their taxes.
You can't just say, "I'm going to give you this painting,"
like that drawing that's really rubbish,
there's a jury that decides... How much do I owe? I'll just...
Hang on...
Now, it's time for the never-ending struggle up the stairs
that is General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What is the safest way to go up and down in a building?
Fly.
Yes! I hadn't even thought of that.
Flying up and down a building - it's rarely done, I think.
I'm part crow, I can do that.
♪ If a picture... ♪
Like, on a fireman's pole thing?
Going up?
It's... It's safe, cos you'll never do it.
In a lift.
In a lift is exactly right.
Well done, Alan, exactly right.
More people fall down the stairs than die in lifts.
Loads more. So, in the United States, for example, annually,
about 20 people killed in a lift or an escalator.
About 12,000 on stairs.
You never hear of someone dying climbing up a pole.
The pole fatality statistics have not been correctly collated,
if I may be completely frank with you.
Here is the really interesting thing for me about escalator accidents.
Those involving women, OK, occur between noon and 6pm.
Those involving men happen mainly on Saturdays
between 6pm and midnight.
Anybody? The women are wearing high heels and the men are drunk?
No, the women start drinking much earlier. Oh.
When escalators first arrived, people were terrified of them,
so the very first escalator that we had... I still am!
Are you still frightened of them?
Why do the handrails never go the same speed as the...
Why can't they get that right?!
So, the very first escalator in England
was in Harrods department store in 1898,
and when it opened, they thought that people would be terrified,
so there were members of staff at the top,
waiting with brandy and smelling salts,
to revive women, and what they discovered is that women liked it
so much, they kept going down and coming back up again.
Getting another brandy. Yes!
Anyway.
What is the best investment you could have made ten years ago?
Kim Kardashian.
No, they didn't do the...
That's because it was a silly answer, Joe.
Things you might have invested in?
Really would have been great returns ten years later.
The dark web.
That's where you buy drugs, is it? I have no idea.
The Dark Web's a pub in Camden.
Is it something to do with pictures and art?
It is, darling, it is absolutely... How did you figure that out?
I've been here for years. It's gradually sinking in.
Is it a particular picture?
No, it's sort of strange.
There's an Italian artist called Piero Manzoni,
and in 1961, he put some of his poo...
In a can...in a can, there it is.
90 tin cans filled with 30g -
1.1oz - if you want to do this at home - of faeces.
There's three languages on there, but basically it says,
"Artist's shit. Contents - 30g net."
"Freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961."
So, in 2007, the Tate Art Gallery bought one of these tins
for 30,000.
Today, can each can is worth around 300,000.
Is it called daddy's brown? Is there a sell-by date on these?
Well, here's the thing, nobody's actually sure
if it has poo in it or not. Oh. Because you can't open it.
If you open it, you'll ruin the value of the thing.
And your day. Hm?
He could probably just put another poo in and seal it up again.
I just love the idea of you going, "Oh, I meant to do the beans."
Manzoni's dead,
so we couldn't get any more poo from him, he passed away.
Does your poo have DNA in it? No! Yes, you could tell if it was...
They never have it on crime shows, do they?
"We've found some poo at the scene..."
But quite often, people do poo at the scene, don't they?
I mean...
Not in a can! They don't use the poo to catch them.
No. Because I suppose that would be a less appealing episode.
David Tennant scraping up some poo and going, "We've got him!"
Don't bring it near me!
This guy here, Agostino Bonalumi, he worked with Manzoni,
and he says that the tins are full of plaster and not faeces at all.
He never shit in the can.
No, he don't shit in the can. It didn't happen.
He just write "shit" on a can,
and everyone think he shit in it. What, are you crazy?
He don't shit in the can.
It's a joke!
That's my general southern European accent.
Thank you, I like it. It covers all of the Mediterranean, that accent.
Right, what does the brown note make you do?
Poo?
It's a myth. It's a myth popularised by South Park
that there's a very low sound which might make humans evacuate.
"Screw you guys, I'm going home."
"Oh, no, it's the brown note! Argh!"
Pffft... But there's no such thing.
They'll use that. Trey Parker, he'd use that.
You can have that, Trey.
But there's no such thing. Doesn't exist.
I mean, there's lots of different sounds that are associated
with colours, so, white noise, for example.
It has all the frequencies of human hearing at the same level,
and it's used to soothe babies.
Can I just say, if you're a young mother,
a gin and tonic and the Hoover on, you can't hear the baby.
I never said you can't hear the baby,
- I said you help the baby to sleep! - Oh, sorry! Thank God they all grew up.
I always wanted a poo when I was in the library when I was a kid.
Anyone else get that? Nope. No.
Totally on your own.
Joe, back me up now.
You're on your own, kid.
I can remember sitting at a dinner party once,
and a perfectly nice gentleman said,
"Do you remember when you were little,"
"you used to play at being florists?"
And we all went, "No, really, that's not..."
You see, I would have backed that guy up.
Brownian noise, anybody know what that is?
Another noise.
Not to do with Gordon Brown?
To do with Robert Brown. So, the discoverer of Brownian motion.
Brownian motion is the random way in which the particles in a fluid
move about... He's doing a movement.
He does look like it.
What is extraordinary is that you can record it.
Have a listen to this.
It sounds like water falling, and that is the random way
that particles in a fluid move around,
and that is the noise they make, it's known as Brownian noise.
Ah! I've just shit myself.
There's another myth that standing too close to the subwoofer
at a concert could make your lung collapse.
But it's not true. So don't worry about it.
I cannot believe I've self-inserted into that picture.
If you look closely, I'm pooing into a can.
It's worth a fortune now.
What colour are these railings?
Black. Black?
They're not black.
Most railings in London are... Green.
They're green. You're absolutely right.
It's called invisible green. I mean, it's not actually invisible,
it's a dull, dark green.
It's supposed to blend in with vegetation,
but there's no such thing as invisible green,
nor is there such a thing as reddish green.
It's actually a place in Stockport, Reddish Green.
That is true. But it's what's called an impossible colour.
So you can't have yellowish blue either,
because the frequencies of the two colours cancel each other out. Yeah.
Have a quick look at these railings in South London.
They have a hidden secret.
Indeed, there is a society to protect them.
What is the hidden secret about these particular railings?
You'd find them... It's also a game of Connect Four?
Er, no, I like that.
So, you find them in areas like Peckham and Camberwell,
south-east London. There's a weird shape in them.
Yes, so what is that? Is that to put something in? No.
If you flipped them over,
they are all stretchers left over from the Second World War.
Everybody was terrified in the Second World War of gas attacks,
and they thought that steel could easily be disinfected.
And these structures were made for air raid protection officers.
And they had lots and lots of them left over, and lots of the railings
had been taken for the war effort and, in order to save money,
they took the stretchers they had left over from the war,
and they used them as railings.
So cool. I love that.
Which brings us to the colourful matter of the scores,
which are frankly a load of Pollocks!
Now, in first place, the next Rembrandt, with eight points,
it's Hannah.
What does this mean?
You won! Oh, right!
In second place, struggling to stay inside the lines,
with seven points, it's Noel!
We smashed it.
In third place, a botched Spanish fresco,
with -6, it's Joe!
And in fourth place, he may not know much about art,
but he knows what he likes,
with -27, it's Alan.
Thank you very much.
Thanks to our guests, Hannah, Noel, Joe and Alan.
Time is running out and the clock's gone all weird and soggy,
but I'll "Dali" yet awhile with this final thought
from Salvador himself.
"The reason some portraits don't look true to life"
"is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures."
Thank you, goodnight.