Hello...
..and welcome to QI, where tonight we'll be
pottering around with plants.
And joining me are a pretty periwinkle, Jason Manford.
A perfect peony, Sara Pascoe.
A proud poplar, Stephen K Amos.
And a veritable vegetable, Alan Davies.
And for their buzzers, Jason goes...
"Roses are red."
Sara goes...
"Violets are blue."
Stephen goes...
"Sugar is S-s-sanskrit for gravel."
And Alan goes...
"That's QI for you."
Right, let us start with some potatoes.
How do you make a potato really petrifying?
Here's one for each of you. One for me.
Oh, hang on, I haven't given you any potato yet, there we go.
I think it was a trust issue to be quite honest.
Right, so I want to make a potato really petrifying.
How do I do that?
You know, like, you have Mr Potato Head? Oh, yes.
I would get all of the facial ingredients,
and I would make it look like a serial killer,
ie, Fred West.
Wow, OK, never...
One of my big fears - I know it's quite common with a lot of people -
is a clown. Right.
So maybe to put a clown's face on a potato.
Do you just show it a frying pan?
Show it the chip pan, yeah.
But I don't want the potato to be scared -
I want the potato to be scary. Oh, I see.
It is actually a way in which a potato has won a battle.
So it was 1943, and an American destroyer called the USS O'Bannon
came alongside a Japanese submarine in the Pacific,
and the ship was too close to the submarine to be able
to lower its guns, so the crew pelted the submarine with potatoes.
Now, the Japanese, you'd imagine, dim light of dawn,
had no idea they were potatoes, so they ran around thinking
they were grenades, throwing them off the deck,
or basically running for cover.
This gave the American ship enough time to position itself,
back away, point its guns, and it sank the submarine,
based entirely on throwing potatoes.
I must say, I've been doing this job for a while now... Right...
..and that's one of the hardest leaps I've yet faced.
We could have sat here for 40 years... And not got it.
And also, that is a very sad story. Yeah.
And then, thanks to this potato, hundreds were massacred.
Well done, potatoes!
It is a very sad story, and it's about fear sometimes
because of the thing that is in your head... Yes.
..rather than the actual thing that you're confronting.
What's actually there, what you imagine, yeah.
But people have been afraid of potatoes before.
So, in the 1600s, when the potato first comes
to Europe from the Americas, people were afraid to eat them,
and there were a couple of main reasons.
One is there's no potato mentioned in the Bible.
Yeah.
Does that still happen now?
Do people still go, "Do you want a Jaffa Cake?"
"No." "Why not?" "It's not in the Bible."
Not people I know.
And there were all sorts of claims
about the diseases that it could cause -
scrophula, syphilis, leprosy.
There was a sort of general belief that they resembled
the gnarled hands of lepers,
and they thought that poisons mimicked the illnesses
that they could cause.
They were also considered a dangerous aphrodisiac.
You could go mad and murderous with lust... Ooh, yeah...
..if you ate a potato. I always feel quite sexy after...
- After a potato? - ..after some chips.
"We've just had chips - come on, let's get upstairs."
We used to take a holdall to the greengrocers,
specifically for the potatoes.
Because? Because we'd buy a lot of them. OK.
I remember being quite small, being very near the holdall,
this terrific rush of earth and mud and potato went crashing into
this old leather bag, and then we lugged it home.
Did you have them mashed or chipped, or how did you have them?
Usually mashed. Right.
Because they were boiled for so long...
Strange thing about the British attitude to vegetables.
I was with a friend, and her mum came round,
and the mum sat there for, ooh, she must have sat there
for almost an hour, and she said,
"Well, must go, I put the vegetables on just before I left."
Oh, yeah, if you can't smear them over the wall, they're not cooked!
People not knowing what to do with them
is part of the history of the potato.
So King Frederick the Great of Prussia wanted people to eat them,
so he sent starving peasants sack loads of potatoes
because he thought that would be good for them.
And they were returned with a note saying,
"These are not fit for the dogs."
And in the end, he had to force the peasants to plant the potatoes
by threatening to have their noses and ears cut off.
In fact, he's so famous for loving potatoes that, to this day,
if you go and visit his grave,
people take potatoes as a sort of tribute to him.
I like him because he was clearly mad. Yeah.
Weird. Yeah, he was definitely weird.
He was infatuated with his greyhounds.
He had Italian greyhounds.
And he was not keen on his wife. No? No.
Used to visit her once a year on her birthday.
Wow. Which meant those children must have all had
the same rough birthday, I think.
I was reading something recently, actually.
There's something in McDonald's fries that can cure baldness.
I don't know why it's specifically McDonald's fries.
I also don't know what the person was doing when they discovered it.
No. Was he drunk and just put the fries on his head?
I love this fact, Jason. It's like being with a bloke in a pub.
"Do you know that fries..."
That's who told me. "..can cure baldness?"
So, as it happens, Jason, I do know what you're talking about.
It was a Japanese experiment with bald mice.
But...it doesn't work on humans. Aw...
I mean, a lot of things start on mice,
and progress to humans, so, you know...
It's weird, actually, cos a lot of things do start on mice
and then they find out it's not replicated.
It's almost like stop testing on mice.
But look at all those mice out there with wonderful hair.
The potato, also banned in France, was banned from 1748 to 1772.
Used to be thought to cause leprosy,
so they didn't want to have the potato either.
And then there was an amazing guy called Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.
There he is. Have you ever Parmentier potatoes?
Probably. Oh, they're delicious.
They're roasted in little cubes with rosemary and herbs. Oh, yes.
Aren't they good? I love those. Named after him.
He was imprisoned for several years in the Seven Years' War with Prussia
and fed nothing but potatoes,
so realised that they're very good for you.
And he came back to France determined that he was going
to make the French eat potatoes.
And he did all sorts of wonderful PR strategies.
He sent potato flower blossoms to the King,
who was then Louis XVI, and to Marie Antoinette.
And then - which I think is the most brilliant thing -
he had a field of potatoes planted
and he placed it under armed guard.
And everybody thought, "Whatever's growing there,"
"I want some of that, because that must be really fantastic."
That's clever. And they stole the potatoes and they grew them
and they began to cultivate them.
In 1988 - it is one of my favourite facts about a potato -
researchers found that potato tubers contain benzodiazepine.
So a potato contains diazepam or Valium.
It's synthesised inside the plant.
I have no idea how much mash you'd need to eat to feel totally chilled.
I reckon, Alan, knock yourself out. Yeah.
We used to have mash AND roast potatoes at my auntie's house.
One of my dream meals - baked potato, mash and chips.
With a Parmentier chaser.
Get them in a holdall.
A mucky holdall full of filth.
Right, potatoes away, please.
OK, which former Top Gear presenter failed a drugs test last year,
and how on earth did they get away with it?
Stig? Oh, is it the white guy? Yeah.
"Is it the white guy?" The white guy!
Five white guys. Any more for any more?
So are we just going to guess those guys' names?
You could do, it's up to you.
It's not going to be any of those names, and they're all a trap.
Is it all a trap? Yes. It's all a trap. Watch this.
Jeremy Clarkson.
Is it James May? It's a trap, it's a trap.
Richard Hammond.
Chris Evans.
Carry on. You just bodyguarded us.
You just jumped in front and took the bullet.
I'll take the bullet.
Matt LeBlanc.
Jason, you look like you know this.
I actually do know this one, weirdly. It's Angela Ripon.
Is the exactly right answer.
Angela Ripon... Yeah.
She presented Top Gear?
She was the very first presenter of Top Gear, 1977, for two years.
And then they thought, let's have Jeremy Clarkson? Yeah.
You know who they had between her and Clarkson? No.
Edmonds. Noel Edmonds presented it for a little while.
OK, yeah, he's the gateway drug.
That makes sense, that makes sense.
Anything can happen after Edmonds.
She looks amazing. Yeah, she looks hot.
I'd go anywhere in that car with her.
She presents a programme called Rip-Off Britain.
Rip-on, Rip-Off Britain, you see?
I wish she had an E on the end of her name,
and then it would be Angela Rip-One. That would be amazing.
Was it the poppy seeds from a...?
It's the poppy seeds. So somebody had written to say
they had been fired for failing a drugs test,
and they had eaten poppy-seed toast for breakfast,
so for three days, she ate her way through a poppy-seed loaf,
and she then tested positive for drugs,
and it is perfectly possible. So I have here a basket of...
Woo! Uh-oh...poppy seeds.
Actually, I wouldn't eat those - that is... Yeah.
So basically if you ate, I don't know,
two or three poppy-seed bagels,
morphine would show up in your urine. Wow.
It can remain there for two days.
I mean, it's hard to predict, OK? Because the amount of morphine
can vary by a factor of 600, so some seeds might have 600 times
as much morphine in them as some other seeds. Really?
Yeah, well, it depends when it was harvested,
so each... But you can't spot which one is the one with morphine.
And, in fact, American prisoners have to sign a form promising
not to eat poppy seeds before they're allowed out on probation...
Oh...as you can tell...
That's a miserable form to fill in. Oh, because of the drugs test. Yeah.
It's also the only food, poppy seeds,
that the Ministry of Justice has entirely and specifically banned
from UK prisons. Oh...
They don't actually taste of anything. Don't taste of morphine?
Well, you know what I mean, it's not Nando's, is it?
It's not Peri-Peri...
You've got to put it in a spoon and then you've got to heat it up
and get...
I like our rather vague knowledge about... Yeah.
I got it from Trainspotting.
But if there's such a negative side to the poppy seed...
Then don't have them. ..why are they still...?
Yeah, just knock 'em on the head.
Just have sesame seeds. They're nicer, actually.
Or, like, hundreds and thousands.
Humans are not the only things that test positive.
So, in 2014, the Queen's racehorse, called Estimate,
tested positive for morphine.
Now, to be fair, the company that provided the feed said it had
been contaminated by poppy seeds. Didn't matter.
She had won £81,000 by Estimate coming second in a race,
and that money had to be given back because her horse was a druggie.
I'd like to see a sequence of photos where the next one,
Estimate's got the hat on, and then...
..the next one, they've swapped coats.
And then the next one, she's got the bit between her teeth.
And then, the last one, she's taking him round the course.
I think I'd like to see one where
she's actually handing the horse a spliff.
Her hand there doesn't look like a real hand, does it?
That does look like her hands are inside her coat
and she's just got two sticks with gloves on that she...
She hasn't touched anyone for 40 years!
She's just got plastic-glove hands on sticks.
The horse is thinking, "What is that?! What is that?!"
"I can see your hand moving over your belly!"
But horses are not the only animals with drug problems.
So there are parrots in some parts of India
which are addicted to opium.
Opium is legally farmed in those parts of India for use
in medicines, and the parrots are eating it like crazy.
And what I love is, to avoid capture,
cos they're so obsessed with it, they've learned not to squawk.
They're like, "Shh...".
That is amazing. Wow. So they want to deter them, and
they've beaten drums and exploded fireworks - they don't care.
That's a party for a high parrot! What idiots!
But it's not good for them!
So what happens is, it makes them really woozy, they fall
into such a deep sleep that they fall off their perches and die. Aw!
I know! I know!
And even worse, the ones that don't die, when the opium season is over,
they get withdrawal symptoms... Yes.
..cos there's no parrot rehab. Yeah.
And a parrot is not going to go cold turkey, right? No.
Anyway, Angela Ripon tested positive for some TOP GEAR.
Oh...
Come on!
Yes.
Definitely worth it.
Does anyone know why there's a pair of pants buried in my garden?
They've been buried by a dog?
No, I buried them all by myself, on purpose.
Is this a method in which you're trying to stop
the local underwear-from-washing-line thief?
No.
Are they new or worn underpants?
It doesn't really matter.
Are they made out of something specific?
Well, they're cotton, is the main thing. OK.
Is it something to do with maybe the soil
that is kind of working with the cotton?
OK, you're absolutely heading in the right direction,
and you look terribly surprised about it.
So if you want to find out how fertile your soil is,
one of the thing that's advised to farmers is to bury a pair
of underpants, and then dig them up a couple of months later
to see what is left.
And nothing should remain if the soil is fertile,
except the elastic - everything else should have biodegraded.
So the California Farmers Guild, the Quality Meat Scotland,
the Government body, they launched, in 2017,
Soil My Undies campaigns...
..to encourage farmers to do this. Wow.
So, in healthy soil, so it's got the right amount
of water and oxygen and nutrients for plants to grow well,
life forms - so microbes and worms and insects -
they also thrive, and here is a really startling fact.
Let me show you this. So I've got a tablespoon here,
and if I poured soil onto the tablespoon,
there are about 50 times more organisms on this tablespoon
than there are humans on Earth.
So there's about 7.5 billion people on Earth,
so a single spoon like this is 380 billion organisms living
in a single tablespoon, and the more there are,
the more they'll eat away at materials like cotton,
so an underwear depletion is a really good indicator
of how your crops are going to grow.
It sounds a little bit like these scientists are
the same people who worked out McDonald's fries cured baldness.
Last day of the work - "Let's bury underpants, it'll sort that out!"
"Why did I find your pants in the garden?" "I can explain...
"Have you heard of science? Well, it's a little experiment..."
If you think that's strange, how would you test to see
if it's warm enough to put your plants outside?
Go outside?
So it's still in underpants, bottom...
Well, if you take them off, and you shrivel up...
..it's too cold. Put your pants back on!
If it looks like a little mushroom peeking out of a bush...
Just out of interest, Jason,
how's that going to work for the lady farmer?
She has to bring her fella over. She has to hire a man!
How smelly your pumps are - is it that? Excuse me? What?
Should one blow off, is it smellier...?
..is it smellier on a warm day or a cold day?
It's often troubled me. I think...
I think cold air... Yes.
..somehow lets you smell the gas more. OK, so...
I think I've eaten too much poppy seeds.
I love this, but I can only describe it as a cul-de-sac
of conversation, so I'm going to steer you back to the motorway
of actual information. Oh... Yeah.
It's not that, then? It's not that.
So in order to assess whether it's warm enough,
you've already buried your underpants,
you then sit down with your bare bottom in the ploughed field,
and it is called the bare-bum test... And Angela Rip-One...
It is recommended to farmers, and if it is comfortable enough
to sit on the field, then it is warm enough to plant out your crops.
I'm telling you, science funding is a sham.
They are having a laugh out there making stuff up, last day...
"Take your pants off and sit over there." Unbelievable!
Does this initiative actually work?
Are their hundreds and thousands of farmers up and down the country...
..wearing no pants? And sitting...
With bum prints across their fields, as far as you can see!
I'm very hopeful, Stephen, that they're rich enough to have two
pairs of pants, so there's one... One for them, and one for the field.
Maybe that's how they get crop circles.
OK, let's try this. You are at a soil-tasting event. OK?
I want to know what you would do with these.
So that's for Stephen.
I got a special one for you, darling - I've got worms for you.
Oh, thank you. That's OK.
So, a soil-tasting event. What would you do?
Is it like wine, where you would sniff it first anyway? Yes.
You look at the colour. Yes.
And then? Put your tongue in it.
OK, no. Sit in it? Yeah, don't...!
Can I say that I didn't trust Alan not to do that,
so you've got chocolate cake.
This is the best meal I've had for years.
So you don't actually have to taste it, is the thing.
You're absolutely right, you can tell by smelling it.
A quick way to determine soil texture
would be to test it with your tongue.
Um...
You probably wouldn't put it
in a wineglass, though... But they do, they do.
At these soil tastings... They lie face-down and go...
..they do actually put it in a wineglass.
"Don't lick that - I've just sat there!"
"That's why it's warm!"
It looks like the farmers could use some sort of thermometer
to check the temperature of the soil.
Imagine that.
"Oh, I don't feel so well, I've got a right temperature." "Come 'ere."
Farmers sitting on their wives' foreheads all over the country.
There are people who do eat soil,
and it is surprisingly widespread, in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
Between 30% and 80% of pregnant women eat clay.
And there are people who are drawn to eating strange things.
It's a condition called pica.
And I read about this fantastic woman.
She's called Adele Edwards, and she lives in Florida,
and she's addicted to eating sofas.
So...she's quite specific.
She only really likes the foam cushions,
and in the last 21 years, she's eaten seven sofas.
This is such a good prank.
You know, like, when someone's got a really badly behaved dog...
"All right, I'll bring Adele round, she'll keep an eye on him."
And she's eaten the living room furniture.
Is she banned from IKEA?
She'd go mad in IKEA, wouldn't she?
Can you imagine? It'd be like Christmas.
She watches DFS ads on a loop.
"Another sale!"
"Mmm!"
"I'm going to get a La-Z-Boy! Mmm!"
She likes to complete eating the sofa?
She doesn't, like, just little bites out of lots of them?
No, and she can't do without, so if she goes out driving,
she takes some sofa with her and eats it.
There's YouTube videos of this woman eating sofas. I like her.
Maybe she's a...couch potato.
Thank you very much.
Right, you've just soiled your pants...
..now, why would you season your socks?
Well, in for a penny...
Something to do with a P, isn't it?
Pepper... Pepper...
Pepper's a P, isn't it? Pepper's a P. I'm all over this.
It's to stop you sweating? No.
It's the very opposite, and it wouldn't be that kind of pepper.
That's slightly misleading, I'm afraid.
So, 1600s, chilli peppers are first brought
to Japan from Portugal, and people put them in their socks
to keep their feet warm in the winter.
Chilli peppers contain something called capsaicin -
it's the active component in chilli peppers. Yeah.
And it's an irritant to mammals.
And what it does is it gives the illusion of heat by creating
a sort of burning sensation, it doesn't actually give you heat,
it can, in fact, just numb you.
What about these bell peppers?
Does anybody know what the difference is between
the green, the yellow and the red?
Yes, yes, yes!
Colour.
So, colour, yes, but it's not the real difference.
Don't people say it's the sweetness, that the green ones aren't as sweet,
and the yellow ones are the sweetest?
Yeah, the green is the unripe one.
It's not the yellow one that's the sweetest, it's the red one.
The yellow is, as it were, on its way to becoming a red one.
So the green one's packed with chlorophyll,
and it decomposes over time, and that is what gives it the orange
and the yellow and the so on, like leaves turning in the winter,
so the chlorophyll decomposes.
Red is the ripest. Yeah.
Some green peppers, they will ripen off the vine.
But don't put it in the fridge cos that's going to stop it ripening.
So if I had the green one in my house off the vine,
will it turn red?
Not necessarily. It depends when it's been picked
and where you store it
and all those kind of things. It might, is the answer.
It might go a bit reddy. Yeah. Go half and half, yeah.
Oh... That's a good game to play tonight!
So glad you were able to join us this evening.
It's slightly misleading, the word pepper.
It comes from Columbus,
who brought spicy peppers back to the New World in the 1490s,
So the Capsicum plants that he brought were totally unrelated to
the pepper that you would get in the pepper pot, but pepper was
a sort of catch-all term for foods that were hot,
tasted pungent, that kind of thing.
Anybody know how you would play pepper roulette?
Oh...! I remember that day...
Stephen, wow! Looking very good.
I look like Alan's stolen my money.
I think one of the ways to play pepper roulette would be to go
to a Las Vegas-themed Nigerian restaurant,
and if you had the hottest of the pepper dishes,
you will probably get a royal flush.
Well, you're not far off.
Is it when people eat things
and they don't know how hot they're going to be, they look similar.
Yeah, so there are all sorts of peppers that are hot occasionally.
There's a pepper called a shishito.
It's a pepper in Japan, and one in ten is unbelievably hot,
and people play a kind of roulette.
I went into an airport lounge - we went to India -
and they had a jar of long green peppers, you know the sort
that sometimes you can just crunch on in the Greek restaurants?
And I picked one of these up, and I noticed a couple of women who worked
there popped their heads round from where they were going in and out.
And I went like that and they went...
Did you eat it? I took the smallest nip off the end of it
and then I was like the dragons in Ivor the Engine.
Just it was the hottest thing I've ever had in my life,
and they pissed themselves laughing.
And they just put them there on the off chance... Just in case.
It's a good game.
My brothers went through a phase of ordering some off the internet,
like, the hottest, and they would trick each other into eating them
and then gradually got to a point where neither of them
would trust the other one when it came to anything.
They wouldn't take a glass of water,
they wouldn't take a tissue, nothing.
And my brother... We thought this was a bit underhand, really.
My brother went the whole hog, where he got his son,
who was about five at the time,
to say to my other brother, "Oh, we made some brownies."
Obviously, my brother was like, "I don't think so," -
even to a five-year-old.
But my mum was like, "Oh, lovely, lovely!"
And she ate one.
She was blind for 45 minutes.
Couldn't see a thing!
You know what you have to do, I discovered?
Sugar. Oh, does that stop it?
Just a teaspoon of sugar and hold it in your mouth.
It's the only thing that will work. Everything else makes it worse.
People drink milk as well.
You can really test how vegan somebody was, couldn't you,
by giving them the pepper and a pint of milk?
You could really test it, couldn't you? That is so horrible!
That is one of the meanest things I've ever heard.
It's genius, it's evil genius.
Birds can't taste chilli, but squirrels can. Oh...
So in 2008 the RSPB recommended that you sprinkle your bird food
with chilli, and this will keep the squirrels away.
However, what they discovered is it spurred some squirrels on.
Just like humans, some squirrels bloody love chilli.
Go on, Trevor!
They were racing to the stuff with the chillies on.
I need a tiny tissue, a tiny tissue!
Hazelnut milk! Hazelnut milk!
Anyway, here's a weird question -
why might you put chilli in a condom?
Revenge.
Did they do this in your school,
they used to put Deep Heat in people's jockstraps? Oh, yeah...
Wow.
And then, I remember in one particular scrum on the rugby pitch,
there was some very loud screaming...
..from a lad whose jockstrap had just settled in.
And he couldn't get out of the scrum,
and they wouldn't let him out either, those bastards.
Anyway, no. Um...
It's to do with elephants.
What?! This question gets weirder. Is it to stimulate elephants?
It's quite the opposite.
Elephants have THE most acute sense of smell of any mammal. Do they?
And they hate the smell of chilli,
so Tanzanian farmers want to keep them away from their land,
and they've tried all sorts of things. Elephants are so clever.
They've tried putting bells around their necks,
and the elephant, within 24 hours, was packing the bell
with their own dung to stop it ringing. Oh, my God.
But if you put chilli in a condom and attach a firework
to it and throw it at an elephant, it explodes in a great cloud
of spicy powder, the elephant hates it and goes away,
but it's not harmed. Wow.
So putting chilli in a condom
is a very good way to get rid of them off your land.
Ah, but if that elephant was very clever,
he'd come up the next day with a gas mask.
I think you've got to question your life a little bit when
you're putting chilli in condoms and throwing them at elephants.
Just a little bit of you is going, "What happened?"
"Why didn't I do more maths?"
Sorry, Sandi.
What's an elephant's gas mask going to be like, for God's sake?
Do they have to coil the whole trunk up?
Is it on the end of the trunk, the gas mask?
Right, let's put the peppers away.
So, we all know that Pythagoras loved triangles,
but what did he hate?
Dairylea.
Squares?
Here we go...
I'll do this.
Rectangles?
Rhomboids? Rhomboids.
Well, have a... Yeah!
A rhomboid...
I can't spell it!
He hated something so much, it killed him.
Where are his arms?
"I can only do a tiny triangle for you." "It's all we want."
It's a bit sort of... A bit Yoda-like, isn't it?
"And it's this long, and this high."
It's a food that he didn't like -
in fact, he disliked it so much, it killed him. Pineapples.
No, it's fava beans.
So a kind of broad bean and, according to multiple sources -
for example the ancient Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius -
he died when a mob of his enemies torched the building
that he was in, and they chased him out of it,
and he got a very good lead, and he came to a field of fava beans,
and he preferred to die rather than to cross over the field of beans.
His pursuers caught up with him
and slit his throat and that is how he died.
Why were they chasing him?
They wanted democracy, and he didn't.
He believed in ruling by scholars and the elite.
So we don't know why he disliked them so much.
So one of the theories, Diogenes claimed he hated them
because they caused flatulence, and that represented a disturbance
of the soul, so basically Pythagoras believed that every time you farted,
you lost a part of your soul.
Oh, my God, my arse is soulless, I'll tell you that.
Aristotle speculated why he hated them -
either because they have the shape of testicles or because
they resemble the gates of hell, for they alone have no hinges.
The gates of hell look like testicles?
I've not been.
Actually, to either.
I find mathematicians very much geniuses,
cos I was not good at maths at school at all,
so I'm always fascinated by it.
In fact, I remember distinctly my maths GCSE,
O-levels, and failing abysmally, and my mum,
I can see her face right now - "Oh, Lord, Jesus!"
"How can we look our friends"
"in the eyes when we tell them our son Stephen is not"
"just a simpleton, but he has a certificate to prove it?"
Well, you wouldn't have been a good Pythagorean,
because numbers were absolutely essential to the whole thing,
because he preached a sort of number worship.
But there are amazing thing that his followers believed.
They believed he had a thigh made of gold... Thigh?
..which was evidence that he was a son of Apollo,
that he was able to literally be in two places at once,
that he physically glowed like the sun itself,
and that a river once called out,
"Greetings, Pythagoras," as he passed by.
It's weird that Pythagoras is one of
the three things that I remember from school.
What's the other two? Oxbow lake. Oh, yeah, I remember that.
Photosynthesis. Yeah.
It's like it's all gone in as osmosis. That's the fourth.
Weird, isn't it?
What is it about the oxbow lake? I remember the oxbow lake.
Because geography is so boring,
and it's just like, "How'd that get there?"
I've got to be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Oxbow lakes? Oh, right... Mate!
So...you've got a river.
So you've got a river. It's bendy, it's a bendy river. Bendy river.
Meander... Bendy river.
Then gradually, that erodes... Erosion. That erodes...
It takes years and years! Years and years, it takes!
That's the lake. And then the river...carries on.
It cuts off here.
How's that possible, you all knew what was, and I didn't, mmm?
And you've got a certificate to prove it!
Maybe different lessons for the white kids!
They did say to us - they did whisper afterwards -
"Don't tell the black children!"
Don't tell 'em! Don't tell the black children.
If you tell 'em about oxbow lakes, where will it stop?
Anyway, Pythagoras hated anyone who had a pulse.
Come on, people, let's...
Right. A pulse is a sort of a bean...
How can a passenger hold up a train with a cheese and tomato sandwich?
Just leave it in a bag, in a rucksack by itself. That's true.
Put the sandwich on the tracks.
Well, sort of. Sort of put the sandwich the tracks.
You see, I know stuff!
You were in that day, weren't you?
So, first, you have to eat the sandwich. Oh.
And then how are you going to get it on the tracks? Uh-oh.
Oh, by flushing the toilet. You're absolutely right.
So, tomato seeds have a casing that allows them to survive the trip
all the way down through the human digestive system intact.
Oh, OK. Human excrement is an excellent fertiliser.
And it has caused so much trouble because tomato plants are actually
growing onto tracks in the UK
from train toilets being emptied, people having eaten tomatoes.
I feel this is a really positive story of hope. Yes.
These tomatoes, against all adversity! In Norwich...
I don't know if you've been to Norwich station,
it's a beautiful station.
And it's got a glass roof and it acts like a giant greenhouse,
and passengers are not doing as they're told -
they are flushing in the station....
Not shitting on the platform, are they?
They're leaning over the platform. No...
No, they're flushing on the train in the... Oh, I see!
Surely it's been years since they actually dumped the loo on the...
No, so, one in ten trains are still dumping directly onto the track.
They say that by 2019, it will all be over.
But why does the tomato plant stop the train going?
They're small plants. Should we make trains stronger?
It's a plant, grows, isn't it?
If you grow one in a poo, the tomatoes are massive!
Those toilets have this incredibly high suction system,
and every few years somebody gets their arm stuck down...
Their arm? Yes.
Usually, I think, getting a phone out of it.
Oh, right, I was going to say... Not trying to get back the tomato.
In France, in 2011, it took fire crews two hours to rescue a man
who'd got his arm caught down the toilet
and eventually they carried him away on the stretcher
with the toilet bowl still attached! Oh, no!
Were they trying to get to him up through the toilet?
"We'll pull you right through! We'll get you right through!"
"I'm not going to get right through -"
"you need to pull me out this way!"
Now, for the root of all Alan's problems, it's General Ignorance!
Plant your fingers on your buzzers, please.
Name a root vegetable beginning with P.
Sanskrit... Parsnip.
Yes! Is absolutely right!
That would be correct,
as you've not said potatoes, because they are not roots.
The potato is part of the stem, so it's not a root vegetable.
Any other vegetables beginning with P?
Peetroot.
Parrots!
So the other ones you might look at - sweet potato is a root.
Introduced to Europe in the 1490s,
so it's at least 70 years before the potato.
But doesn't that begin with an S?
Well, it depends if you are very fussy, and you are right
in the sense that it's not remotely related to the actual potato.
It's in the same family as morning glory, in fact,
which I don't recommend...
Ah, there's a root vegetable!
I do not recommend...
Feel like a root vegetable this morning?
A wonderful story - in 2014, there was a man from Aylesbury
called Don Dover, and he was so excited.
And he called news crews to his garden because his parsnip plant
had grown enormous leaves above the ground.
About 7ft high, and so the crew came, he was going to
dig up the parsnip, it was going to be the most exciting thing,
and they filmed it, and the parsnip was four inches long.
World record for a parsnip, any ideas how big? Longest parsnip?
50kg. No, the length.
12 inches? 12 inches? 12 inches?
So, there's a man called Peter Glazebrook. It was 18...
12 miles.
Whoa! 18 and a half feet. Look! Look how proud he is! Yeah.
Chin up - "Look at me parsnip!"
That's exactly what the massive parsnip face should be.
Yeah. The potato is not a root vegetable, but the parsnip is.
Buzz in as soon as you know the answer to these questions.
What French dish can you make from these words?
Violets... Yes? Is it duck a l'orange?
Well, let's use the word canard, as it's the one we've got up there.
Canard a l'orange.
What English dish can you make from these?
Toad in the hole. Toad in the hole, absolutely right.
What Mexican dish can you make from these?
Violets... Chilli con carne.
Yeah, no.
It's a trick again! It's a trick again!
Chilli con carne comes from Texas.
Ah... It has nothing to do with Mexico.
In Texas, it's the official state dish.
But Mexicans make carne con chilli.
In 1959, a Mexican dictionary defined chilli con carne as
"detestable food passing itself off as Mexican,"
"sold in the US from Texas to New York."
Sounds like they need some sort of wall.
Just to keep them yanks out, you know?
Now, then - what do you use your palate for?
Stephen's going. Sanskrit...
For, erm... Paint. Paint it.
Oh...!
For... Taste? Taste!
Don't listen to Alan!
Is the palate that thing that separates the acidic taste
to the salty taste to the...? No, it has nothing to do with taste.
It's to stop your brain falling into your mouth.
You're weirdly closer, you're weirdly closer.
It's like a protective case.
Well, fundamentally what it does
is it separates your oral and your nasal cavities,
it stops you getting a mouthful of snot or a nose full of food.
It doesn't have any taste buds.
Foetuses have taste buds in their palate, newborn babies do,
but these disappear within a very few months.
So it has nothing to do with taste at all.
Although we do have taste receptors in the most extraordinary places.
The genitals. Yes. So, men have them in their testicles. Yeah.
People have them in their stomach, in their intestines,
their pancreas, their lungs, their anus. Yeah.
And to be honest...
I think that was the quarter past two to Chester.
We have taste buds in surprising places,
the place we don't have them is in the palate,
so the idea of having a good palate is a misnomer.
There's taste buds is your...down there now. Yes.
Who told us this? Was it scientists? Yes.
I'm just saying! There's a theme, isn't there?
"And there's also taste buds in your bollocks! There you go!"
And so it's time for the scores.
In first place, at the very top of the tree,
with -1, it's Stephen!
In second place, -2, Jason!
And hot on his heels in third place with -3, it's Sara!
And in last place with -97...
..it's Alan!
Thank you to Sara, Jason, Stephen and Alan. And I leave you with this
from American humourist Erma Bombeck.
"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died."
Thank you, goodnight!