CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to QI
where tonight's show is one, long
exercise in procrastination.
Struggling to meet their deadlines,
we have the purposeless Holly Walsh...
..the prevaricating Nikki Bedi...
..the postponing Aisling Bea...
..and the never knowingly premature Alan Davies.
Right, their buzzers. Holly goes...
TICKING CLOCK
Nikki goes...
FAST-TICKING CLOCK
Oh, yeah. Aisling goes...
FASTER-TICKING CLOCK
And Alan goes...
SNORING
LOUD ALARM
I do dream that noise.
Question one, of course, is all about procrastination itself.
So, I just... I'm sorry, hang on...
Ah, the elves are telling me that they haven't got around to writing
the procrastination questions yet.
So, we're going to have to use the emergency back-up questions
that I've got here, just a second.
I don't think these have ever been used.
Wow, OK.
Ah! Here we are. Ooh!
Got some questions... Oh!
What else is in here?
Oh, Alan, it's a picture of Arsenal winning the Premier League.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It won't be a picture of Tottenham Hotspurs winning it.
AUDIENCE: Ooh!
I have no idea why that's funny.
I'm pleased with my small footballing joke, there.
OK, so, instead, a question on parenting.
What's the best thing to do about a crying baby?
Call the NSPCC if it's next door.
Or move, I think, if it's next door. Yes.
Or if it's on a plane, put it in a soundproof box.
What we started doing was my son had quite bad nappy rash and we...
You clean it, just clean the baby.
Yeah.
All right, Supernanny!
How did you work out to soothe your child?
No, well, he had really bad nappy rash,
so what we started doing was, before we put him back
in his nappy, we'd get our hairdryer and we'd just blow-dry
his naked bum like this. Right.
And then that started to work too well.
Yeah, burns? No, it wasn't...
Then we realised that if we just blow-dried his balls with
a hairdryer, he would go to sleep like that.
The trouble is now I...
It sound like a very good idea.
You could rig it up on a sort of a hook at the end of the bed...
I'm thinking by myself, now.
I'm saying this out loud, aren't I?
You realise when he is grown-up, darling, there's going
to be so much trouble.
I think we have almost certainly given him a fetish.
He's going to be unable to walk past the hairdressers.
He'll be standing over... You know those Marilyn Monroe grates?
You'll never get him off!
Did you go full hairdresser, Holly?
Were you like, "So, are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?"
I have to say that things have changed very much in terms
of how we actually approach the whole thing.
There was an American paediatrician called Dr Walter J Sackett Jr,
and he basically suggested that you should ignore crying babies.
He wrote a bestseller in 1962 called Bringing Up Babies,
A Family Doctor's Practical Approach To Child Care.
And he said if you didn't ignore crying babies,
they would grow up to be socialists.
"If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand,"
"we must admit the possibility of sowing the seeds of socialism."
And, as a parent, that is your worst nightmare.
So, it was 1962, it was the year of the Cuban missile crisis,
and America was paranoid about the communist threat
from around the world.
And their solution was leave all the babies crying on their own.
But he also prescribed early feeding.
He recommended that you give
babies cereals at two days, vegetables at ten days,
meat at 14 and finally, at nine weeks,
"Bacon and eggs, just like Dad."
Can a baby digest all that? No, darling. No, it's a terrible idea.
I don't have any children so I'm just checking.
Anyway, he disliked milk intensely.
He said, "To my mind, the dairies of America constitute"
"the number one health hazard."
He recommended giving babies black coffee from six months.
That's all you want, right?
A child that won't sleep.
Did he have any children, I wonder?
He did have children. He did, yeah.
And where are they now? They're all communists.
There are other books that are even worse.
1916, A Mother And Her Child by Drs Leena and William Sadler,
they advised avoiding physical contact with infants
except when spanking.
Crying, again, should be ignored unless the baby cried hard enough
to go black in the face or burst a blood vessel.
Black? Yeah. In the face? Yeah.
At which point, a sound spanking should be administered.
Marvellously titled, The Science Of Eugenics,
who doesn't want to read that?
Written in 1920 by Dr BJ Jeffries and JL Nichols,
warned pregnant women not to look at or think about ugly
things or people or their child would turn out ugly.
And the best way to quiet a crying baby?
Gin.
You have the gin, or the baby? The baby.
Apparently it's also good for infant flatulism...
Erm, infant flatulence.
I like flatulism! It sounds good.
Maybe, erm...
It sounds like, kind of, the politics of flatulence.
I am a flatulist. Yes.
The heir to the Budweiser dynasty or whatever you'd call it,
every time a baby's born, the first thing they have is
five drops of Bud dropped on their tongue.
That's the first thing they consume. Really?
My nanny used to put whisky on my gums when I was teething
and holy water, that classic cocktail combo.
Looking forward to the drinks at the weekend.
And used to rub it on our gums, and I told that to a dentist
recently, and they were like, "It's not actually good."
Because loads of people are like,
"Oh, yeah, it's a great pain reliever."
It's that it burns your gums more so that you forget
about the pain in your teeth and you focus on the burn in your gums.
So...
MUMBLES: But it hasn't had any effect on me, so...
AUDIENCE LAUGH Yeah.
And there were lots of books around the turn of the 20th century
that advised giving babies lard baths,
so you'd put lard or butter all over the baby once a week after birth.
And then you'd spin it. Yes.
Can you imagine how much fun you'd have if you had twins
and you were like...like curling?
Whoa!
And someone would then go doo-doo-doo-doo
all the way along.
You're not supposed to wash a baby for weeks and weeks now.
They recommend that you don't let anything near it
for a good few weeks.
But that's why your baby had nappy rash. Yeah.
No, but seriously, they say...
Top and tail... Top and tail, yeah. Really?
You do the tops and the tails, and then you leave them
for about two and a half years, and then...
What is the theory behind this?
The oils... Because they get dry skin and then they get broken skin
and that's why there's so many allergies. Ah! Oh!
OK.
Right, now, Alan, I would like you to put this on, please.
Oh! Why, certainly, Sandi.
Thank you very much. Is it a hat?
It is a hat, yes.
Put that on.
Now, my question is what activity is Alan now perfectly dressed to do?
Is it a taco hat?
At parties, sometimes they get people
to walk around, put a dip in the centre and some tacos
and then you dip the them into the man's head.
Feels like a bicycle tyre.
When you do know what it is,
you'll be horrified at the thought of serving dip from this.
Is it a contraceptive?
It's exactly the reverse of a contraceptive.
It's an erection hat.
It is kind of an erection hat.
OK. Yes. So, this is...
It's not working.
Patience, everyone, I'm 52.
I am very pleased because it's for a falcon.
It's a falcon sex hat.
It was invented to save the peregrine falcon from extinction.
So, the peregrine trainer wears this hat and encourages the birds to mate
with his head.
Come on.
Come on, you, you know you want to.
Argh! Well, it's that!
So, in the 1970s, the whole species was threatened to be wiped out.
The pesticides were damaging their eggs and so a captive...
Oh, look, it works!
It does absolutely work.
A captive breeding programme was set up.
So, here is the problem.
Falcons are usually more attracted
to their owners than they are to other birds.
It's a phenomenon called imprinting.
So, when a young falcon comes out of its egg, it gets attached
to the very first thing it sees.
It could be a rubber boot or it could be an electric train,
it could be anything. How about a hairdryer?
Yes.
But, quite often, it is the owner.
So, they want to mate...
They want to mate with their carers, and the hat is invented to catch
the resulting semen.
Oh, God. It can be collected... I know, the thing you're wearing...
It's why I said you don't want to eat dip out of it.
The thing you're wearing... It's not falcon ejaculate, is it?
..it's got little tiny pockets in it.
The falcon wants to mate, and it goes onto the hat because it likes
the owner, and you can catch the semen
from those little tiny pockets. Wow!
HE MIMICS AN EJACULATING BIRD
It totally works! The 1970s, the population...
HE MAKES SNORING NOISES
..the population...
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
The population in the 1970s was down to 324, over 6,000
peregrine falcons have now been released into the US
through this programme.
Let's have a quick look at an actual video of the hat working.
HIGH-PITCHED SCREECHING
So, that noise is being made by the owner.
I'd say this is the most niche pornography.
I love how bored the guy looks!
It looks like he's knobbing a potato waffle.
That hat has seen a lot of action because it is practically
worn out in places.
It copulates into one of the indentations, the same as
you've got on your hat. It comes in a range of colours, the hat.
Comes in a range of colours? Yes.
One of the best things about a falcon.
It's one of those things where I congratulate the person
who invented it, but I never want to meet them in a pub.
Well, how'd you come up with that?
I'm going to come up with, frankly, a jizz hat for falcons.
Why don't you just get a job, Barry?!
You have two degrees, and you're living with me, I'm 84!
There must have been an incident...
LAUGHTER AND GROANING
..that prompted the idea... Yeah.
..like a falcon on someone's head, or someone's normal hat...
And they thought... "Well, if you're going to keep doing this",
"we're going to have to invent some sort of a receptacle."
Yeah, well...
Do you have to make that noise, though, to encourage?
So the UK's leading falcon breeder, a man called Bryn Close,
he uses his hat and he imitates falcon vocalisation,
and there's a marvellous photograph...
He had 80 of his falcons,
and they were photographed on a plane to the Middle East in 2017,
and there they are.
Hunting them is hugely popular, so, in the United Arab Emirates,
all peregrines on planes have to have their own passport to
combat the illegal trade.
28,000 were issued in the ten years after
they were first introduced in 2002,
and all sorts of airlines like Emirates and Qatar,
they have pages on their websites about their falcon policy.
So, with Emirates, if you buy a first-class ticket,
you may take two falcons with you.
Probably one in economy.
And Lufthansa now offers a Falcon Master -
it's a sort of a bird perch with a poo-catching tray
that can be installed above the seat during the flight.
But why can't they fly?
Yeah. Why don't they just fly?
Yeah... That is a very fair point.
Yeah, well, as you say...
Just go behind. Yes! Yeah.
"I'm going to London. See you there." Yeah!
What I love about that photo is there's an air steward
who's still insisting on going through the safety...
Would you rather sit next to a baby or 150 birds?
Oh, wow. Neither.
It depends. If I was single, I'd probably want the 150 birds.
I'd wear my hat. I'd get them all...
And you'd just see a falcon going to the loo, rather sheepishly,
with a hat, being like, "Mile-high club, here we go!"
And they did a genetic study in 2011 -
peregrines are more related to parrots than to any other Raptor,
so hawks or eagles...
And they look so different. They look so different.
They also discovered that flamingos are one of
the pigeon's closest relatives.
Oh, wow.
"Have you seen my cousin? She's not at all like the rest of the family."
But what is the closest relation to all birds?
Dinosaurs. There!
Sort of heading in the right direction.
Bill Oddie.
Bill Oddie?!
So, what's a very ancient creature that we still have?
A lizard or something like that?
It's a crocodile. Oh! Really?
Oh. The crocodile is the closest relation...
They share a 240-million-year-old ancestor. It's a...
It's a big tree that you'd have to use
in order to get from the crocodile to the birds,
but, yeah, that's their closest relative.
Right, who's wearing the crotchless pants in this relationship?
Oh, sorry, I thought we had to buzz in because it was us.
No, no, in this relationship.
I'm going to go the one on the right. Albert?
Oh, is it Victoria and Albert?
It is Victoria and Albert, yes.
Well, maybe it's Victoria, then.
It is Victoria. When do we think underwear began?
When people first started wearing underwear?
The loincloth, the early loincloth.
Certainly in Roman times, people had underwear.
But it fell out of favour for centuries, and in Britain
men got underwear, so you're talking about drawers,
knickerbockers, but for centuries women did not wear it at all.
And, when they did, finally, so we're talking 19th century,
it was crotchless. So, two separate legs
hanging open underneath and held together by a belt around the waist.
And you don't get them sewn together until 1876.
I have no idea what happened that year.
Someone went, "I am not having this breeze."
But it didn't become the norm
to have a crotch in your underwear until 1910.
But it wasn't someone's sexual peccadillo to have
crotchless panties at that point?
No, it was practical, really, as well.
Going to the toilet was very difficult when you had
multiple layers of clothing, and it would have been
considered very unhygienic.
There's very early evidence about the Roman underwear.
So, there's a fourth-century mosaic which is found
in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily.
I'd say I think it looks more like a bikini, don't you think? Yeah.
No Roman woman wanted large or sagging breasts
cos they thought it made her look old,
so you bound your chest very tightly with a thing called a strophium.
But there's a possibly even earlier one, which is from Upper Egypt.
6,000 or 7,000 years ago, it is called the Badari figure.
Do you think it looks more like it's just got a big bush?
Yeah, it's definitely a thatched pattern...
Some sort of a brick wall, by the looks of it.
"Do you want a dry-stone wall round there, madam?"
It must be tight. Look at her eyes. Yeah, she's in pain.
I remember -
and this just shows you Catholic sex education in Ireland -
one of the things the woman who came to talk to us about
the birds and the bees said,
"Erm, now, girls, erm, what you could do, now,"
"in the evening when you go to bed is take your knickers off"
"and let it all air out."
So this does make me think,
"Oh, maybe it was for trying to keep dust out."
Oh. And that's why you have underwear.
Genuinely, though, I thought that's why... Dust?!
Yeah, like if you're walking...
Back in the day, they didn't have much roads
and you'd be walking along, the dust and stuff...
Like, do you know? You wouldn't want to get it...
What if there was a dust storm?
What you'd want to do is get a hairdryer...
You could get one of those little hand-held vacuum cleaners,
couldn't you? Oh, they're good.
A car-vac, yeah. Yeah, sort yourself out.
In 2015, a pair of Queen Victoria's underpants sold for £12,000
and they were exactly able to date these pants.
How do you think they could date them?
I don't want to guess.
So, here's one of the extraordinary things about Victoria,
is the detailed photographic record of her life.
And, so, they could work out by the waistband when it was
cos she just got fatter and fatter and fatter.
She got bigger and bigger, and she got massive hips in the end.
Yes, so these are nearly 45 inches.
So, this is a waistband in this kind of region,
which means it was definitely towards the end. The waist was 45?
Yes, so, we're talking 1890s by then.
Albert was dead, she didn't care, she's just having cake...
She's just eating.
All those lovely puddings, though.
You wouldn't regret a minute of it, would you?
What would you like for breakfast?
Jam roly-poly and custard.
Victoria sponge, please, again.
And a larger pair of briefs.
Yes.
The first recorded phrase of, "She wears the trousers",
that dates back to the 1880s,
although they used to say "She wears the britches",
and then you can go right back to the 1630s.
The word "pants" is just comic, isn't it?
There's just something funny about it.
And even the word is rooted in comedy,
cos it comes from Pantalone,
who was one of the main characters in the commedia dell'arte.
He famously wore red trousers.
There he is on the left, there, and Harlequin and the Captain,
famous characters from commedia dell'arte.
And we still say pants, the plural,
because it was once two separate things.
It was separate legs.
Now, a question on pronunciation.
Who would like to hear my Katharine Hepburn impression?
Yes, please. Yes, please.
AS HEPBURN IN ON GOLDEN POND: Listen to me, Mr, you're my knight
in shining armour, and you're going to get back on that horse,
and I'll be right behind you.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Where is that accent from?
The south in America?
Oh, no, not from America at all.
Is it going to be Danish?
No, but if you were somewhere
between Denmark and the United States?
Mid-Atlantic!
Yes, absolutely right, Nikki!
It is the Mid-Atlantic.
That's not a country! No, it's not.
So, the point is it's not from anywhere.
It was so named because it was halfway between the US
and the British accent, and it was the accent in Hollywood films
before, sort of, 1950.
It was designed to be vaguely sort of British and aristocratic,
and it was thought that it sounded appropriately posh.
There's quite an earlier recording of Katharine Hepburn.
Let's have a quick listen to her.
Silk is vital to national defence.
Its most important use is for parachutes and powder bags.
New substitutes are being perfected in the laboratory to meet
the growing demand.
So, clearly, I was doing the On Golden Pond version, clearly.
They used to, in drama schools, train accents out of people. Yeah.
Like, when I went to drama school, they didn't.
Though I still have this strong English accent now.
LAUGHTER
Yeah, but they used to, like, knock off all the edges so people ended...
FAUX POSH ENGLISH: ..up speaking all of the time like this.
That's how British people spoke.
It was a thing in Hollywood films.
There was a voice coach called Edith Skinner.
She was actually a Canadian.
And, in the 1930s, she taught this as good speech
or Eastern Standard speech. You're talking about Katharine Hepburn,
you're talking about Betty Davis, Vincent Price,
and they all learned to speak that way.
Probably my favourite movie of all time, Some Like It Hot,
Tony Curtis in that movie, he pretends doing a sort of
Cary Grant impression.
It still occasionally surfaces today.
So, Kelsey Grammer used it in Frasier.
That was one of his things.
I got told that I had the worst Hindi accent that an English person
had had on film. I am half-Indian, by the way.
I am not going to be racist right now.
But I was doing films and TV in Bombay,
and I was told that my accent was...
IN HINDI ACCENT: ..totally the EP-i-tome
of a Britisher's bad Hindi accent.
And that's from somebody who used the word "EP-i-tome,"
and it's like, get your em-PHA-sis right,
and then we can talk about that.
Yeah.
You couldn't record synced sound cos there's too much noise in Bombay.
So, it would all be done in the dubbing.
So, if you make a mistake, they just go...
SPEAKS HINDI
So, it'll be done in the dubbing.
Actually, you could pretty much do anything if you could lip-sync,
but I had somebody sitting there who would deliver me
the dialogue and I was told to look into middle distance
and say things like...
SHE SPEAKS HINDI
..which means, "His steel sword is very strong."
God knows what that actually meant.
And then I'd wait and stare a little bit longer,
listen to the next dialogue and deliver it, and that's how I acted.
What kind of things were you in?
Don't you want to see them? I want to see them.
I want to see the rushes with the other person.
Well, the Mid-Atlantic accent was used by lots of villains,
so you've got Jafar in Aladdin, Cruella de Vil has it,
Darth Vader has it, the Evil Queen in Snow White...
I mean, not to be outdone, the BBC certainly had their own committee.
It was set up by Lord Reith,
and devoted to ruling on the pronunciation of words.
So there's Lord Reith on the left there,
and the Advisory Committee On Spoken English, it ran from 1926 to
1939, and that's George Bernard Shaw on the right and he was one of the
many people who advised what they thought was correct pronunciation.
So, in 1926 they ruled that ga-raj was better than garage,
although they changed their mind in 1931
and decided to recommend garage instead of ga-raj.
Most controversially, that margarine should have a soft G.
It comes from margaron, so it's Greek for pearl.
So, it was originally made from margaric acid,
so it makes more sense that it would have a hard G.
But it was very controversial, as you can imagine,
at the time, margarine.
When I worked in Marks & Spencer's, the amount of people
who asked me for the lingery department was quite extraordinary.
Yeah.
I had that with misled.
You know when you see misled written? Yeah. Yeah.
I thought it was misle'd.
Aw...
I was an actual grown-up in my 30s
before I found out that that word was misled.
Well, the BBC committee had some very strange rulings.
They pronounced that ski should be pronounced she,
so you'd go she-ing as opposed to skiing,
and armada should be pronounced ar-may-da.
And there was a big row apparently between George Bernard Shaw
and a BBC executive over whether to plant it acoustics or a-cow-stics.
Anyway, there we are.
In 2009, British Airways passenger plane was delayed
because what vital component had gone missing?
Yes?
The soundproof box for the baby.
The wings.
Yeah? Oh...
Pilot?
LAUGHTER No, no.
Not the pilot. It's not the wings.
So there was a plane due to fly,
it was 2009, from Heathrow to Mexico City -
it was missing its ashtray.
GASPING Even though smoking has been banned
on all commercial flights since the end of the 1990s,
they could not take off without an ashtray. Why?
Because people still smoke on planes.
And you've got to have somewhere to put the cigarette out. Yeah.
That is the reason.
So the captain, he was desperate.
He suggested borrowing one from another plane, even replacing
the entire bathroom door because they're set into the bathroom door,
but they were not allowed to take off
until an ashtray had been fitted on to the plane.
And there are lots of these rules.
Does anybody know why when a passenger plane lands at night,
they always dim the lights?
What is the reason for that?
If you have all of the lights on,
it reflects in the pilot's rear-view mirror.
It makes things very difficult for him if he's reversing.
So here's the thing -
when they dim the lights, your eyes get used to the fact
that it's gone a bit darker, and in the event of an emergency,
they don't want people to be temporarily blinded
by it being pitch-black.
Seems like a bit of, really, clutching at straws,
when the plane's hit the side of a mountain.
"Well, at least I can see that everyone's dead." "I can see."
OK. "Oh, my legs have come off. Brilliant."
Well, speaking of seeing things, here's another safety feature -
all windows in aeroplanes have a small hole in them.
Does anybody know why?
Glory hole.
Oh, the little one at the bottom?
Yeah. They do. What's that for?
Condensation.
Sort of.
So, there are three panes that make up an aircraft window,
and it's a way of easing the air pressure
pushing against the window, and it does also stop it from fogging up.
Aeronautical engineers would much prefer the planes didn't have
windows at all because it makes the planes structurally weaker,
but passengers don't like flying in a windowless air compartment.
Just one sunroof would be nice, though, wouldn't it?
You know how they always make you put the window blinds up
when you're landing? Again, why would... Why?
That's so they can see in if you crash.
That is exactly right. It's another crash landing thing.
They want to be able to see in... The emergency services need to be
able to see whose legs have come off. Yes.
AISLING LAUGHS This photo...
There's lots of smoke coming out of there.
The other one, the second one's going, "Where are you going?!"
"There's smoke coming out of my pants!"
She's been on a very dusty road and she's getting all of the dust out!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Yes!
APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH
"Get out on the wing - you're filling the plane up with dust!"
OK... This is Pickering's Harem.
What huge discovery did they help make?
Yes? Was it like a different type of hairstyle?
Cos there's a lot of people rocking out different ones there. They are.
The woman in the foreground has got a different-coloured bun
to the rest of her hair. Mmm.
Is it Braille?
No, a very interesting choice.
Well, because they're all working very closely.
They're definitely researching something.
It is one of the most astonishing discoveries.
It is thanks to these women the universe was discovered
less than a century ago.
So, in 1923, Edwin Hubble found evidence that a universe existed
outside the Milky Way, but he couldn't have done it without
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and that is her at the back.
And she was a member of a group of astronomers
known as Pickering's Harem.
So, basically what she did, she worked out how to measure
distance from the Earth with pulsating stars,
and when Hubble spotted one of those stars, he used her methods
to calculate how far away it was, and he learned it was much
too distant to be part of the Milky Way. It's unbelievable.
It's less than a century ago he discovered the universe,
but he couldn't have done it without her.
So, when does she get co-credit on that?
OK, so that is one of the extraordinary things.
So, Leavitt was employed by a man called Charles Pickering.
There's Charles Pickering.
He was the director of the Harvard Observatory from 1877
and, originally, he hired male staff in order to analyse all of the data
that was being collected from the observed sky, and he got so angry
with the staff because he found them incompetent,
and he said, "My maid could do it better."
And, so, they said, "Yeah, go on, then."
So, he brought his maid in and she could do it better.
In fact, she did it so well, he hired other
what were known as female computers,
or, more insultingly, Pickering's Harem.
And it's a classic thing in science, the harem effect.
It's a phenomenon whereby a male scientist in a position of power
predominately hires female assistants,
probably because he has to pay them less,
so you get more assistants for...
That's why this episode was so cheap to make.
Alan Davies' QI.
But the fact that she didn't get the credit is really important.
So, unaware she had in fact died four years prior,
the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, he wanted to
nominate her for the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics... Yeah.
..and he wrote to the new director of the observatory,
a man called Harlow Shapley,
and said she ought to be given the Nobel Prize for this work.
And he wrote back and said she'd died,
so nobody can get the prize posthumously.
And Hubble often said that Leavitt should have had
the Nobel Prize for her work... Mmm, yeah.
That we wouldn't have known about the universe,
the existence of the universe... That is astonishing.
That is incredible, isn't it?
Yeah, and also in that photograph,
the woman with the bun with two different colours,
sitting at the front of the photograph -
equally crucial to astronomy, Annie Jump Cannon.
There she is.
She developed a new way of cataloguing stars.
She manually classified 350,000 during her lifetime.
One, two... I know, honestly!
And someone comes in and goes, "Annie, are you all right?"
"Hold on, I'm just...counting stars!"
Damn you! "Got to 102!"
Actually, Hubble himself, odd character.
He claimed he'd fought a bear,
he claimed he'd saved two women from drowning,
and he claimed he'd set up a successful law practice in Kentucky.
No evidence for any of these things.
And he smoked a pipe because he thought it looked British,
which he rather liked.
He had a, sort of, fake British accent.
He had a Mid-Atlantic accent as well, then?
He did. Yeah.
He adopted a sort of fake quasi-British accent
and smoked a pipe. Mmm.
Now, I have totally run out of questions,
but I'm being told that my elves
have finally finished the procrastination questions.
So, have we got the...? There's my elf, Anna.
Thank you very much. No, no, it's fine. Better late than never.
Thank you, Anna. Yeah.
APPLAUSE
Right... When should we celebrate Procrastination Week?
Erm... Well, erm, we could do, I mean, I would say...
I need to clean my house, so...
..after that? After that, yeah.
It is celebrated every year by the Philadelphia-based
Procrastinators' Club of America.
It takes place at slightly different times each year.
Usually the first couple of weeks in March,
depends, you know, how long it gets put off for.
The club was formed in 1956.
It's 20 membership, if you're interested.
This buys you a licence to procrastinate and access
to the monthly publication called Last Month's Newsletter,
It lists upcoming events that have already taken place.
They celebrate Christmas in June, he fourth of July in January
and they have a Be Late For Something Day on September fifth.
Their motto is "Behind you all the way."
In 1966, they went on a bus tour, brandishing a banner,
Excursion To The New York World Fair,
which had closed a year and a half earlier.
They recently ran a campaign to get the late President James Buchanan
re-elected. He died in 1868.
There are lots of famous procrastinators.
The playwright, this is one of my favourites, Richard Sheridan
who wrote The School For Scandal,
he finished writing it as it was being performed
on the opening night...
..in 1777, bringing down lines to the actors
as they were on the stage.
That is quite late, isn't it? That is leaving it a bit late.
Where does it come from?
I really suffer from it.
I just always clean the house or do whatever it is.
Where does it come from in the brain, or why do we do it?
Well, it's interesting because lots of people suffer terrible shame
and anxiety about it, and one of the things that they now
think is that they're often perfectionists.
They find it psychologically more acceptable never to tackle
the task rather than to face the possibility of falling short.
To try and fail. Yeah, you don't want to fall short on a performance.
They have looked into ways to try and improve people's habits on this.
So, they did a report on the effectiveness of internet-based
cognitive behavioural therapy in improving procrastination behaviour.
The main problem with the study
was that people kept putting off doing the treatment.
But lots and lots of artistic people...
Victor Hugo, he promised his publishers he'd write
The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame and then he spent a year doing
pretty much anything else -
entertaining guests, going out for walks, having a good time -
and then his publishers told him that he had to have it
in six months, so what he did was he locked all his clothes away
and he kept himself only a grey shawl to wear,
which obviously he couldn't go out in it,
and that is how he managed to sit down and actually
get on with writing the book.
He was incapable of going out.
So the way to get through procrastination is to
just type naked in a scarf?
Apparently.
But isn't there also some sort of psychological buzz
from that doing things last minute?
That may be. I don't know. Aisling, do you find that?
Like, I love making lists, and then I love turning over a new page
and doing a new list.
Like, I've had, like, "Call man RE washing machine"
for about a year and a half, on every turn over of a new page.
And someone said to me that you shouldn't do lists,
because he says what happens is you make a new list,
and you get your dopamine hit from putting it down on the list,
which is like your happy hormone, but you don't get the happy hit from
actually doing the task. Ah.
Sometimes what I do is I put down something on the list
I've already done, like, you know, "Buy bananas".
And I'm like, "Tick!"
"You're having a hell of a day, Aisling Bea, once again!"
You're in fine company.
Leonardo da Vinci, so the ultimate Renaissance man,
he took 25 years to finish the Virgin Of The Rocks.
Is that a painting or is that an actual woman?
It's the one in the Louvre.
There's another one in the National Gallery.
The Mona Lisa took 15 years and he lived to be 67.
He actually only completed 15 paintings and a handful
of architectural designs,
and patrons going mad had to call in other people to come and finish.
I have to say, this is absolutely true.
We wrote to the Procrastinators' Club because we were
doing this question and they haven't got back to us.
Now, if you're feeling clueless, we won't postpone it any longer.
It's time for the soul-destroying chore
that we call General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
If you are settling something mano a mano,
how are you doing it?
FAST TICKING CLOCK
Yes? Man-to-man.
No, it's not man-to-man.
Ah, yes.
Hand-to-hand. It is hand-to-hand.
That is the literal Spanish translation.
So, that dates back to the 1950s,
but in fact it used to refer to a very particular Spanish sport.
FASTER TICKING CLOCK
Er, arm wrestling.
Is that a very particular Spanish sport?
Oh, sorry.
FAUX SPANISH ACCENT: It is arm wrestling.
Would it be bullfighting?
It would be bullfighting, absolutely.
It used to refer to two bullfighters in a rink competing
for the audience's attention by killing three bulls each,
and it was used to imply that they were on equal footing to each other.
Wait, so they had to kill three each before the audience
would even start watching?
I mean, I've never been to a bull...
That wouldn't be my thing, to go to a bullfighting thing.
Don't go in that top, whatever you do!
Can you imagine? It does look terrifying.
Well, his trousers look terrifying.
Do you think his arse is always that tight?
I think it's the sight of the bull.
I think his arse is acting on those trousers even as we speak.
Bull-fighters in Spain are not usually called matadors.
They are called toreros, from the Latin for bull.
Matador actually means...
Carpet layer. Yeah.
Mat to the door. Yeah.
That means killer.
If I was a fan of bullfighting, I would be an aficionado -
that is the correct word for a devotee of bullfighting. Really?
So aficionado came from bullfighting first? Yes.
Yeah. Wow. There have been a few British bullfighters.
There was a man called Frank Evans, El Ingles,
and because he was British, and it's difficult to get a bull to
practise with, you know, for a British person, he would
attack a supermarket trolley filled with hay with a sword.
Mano a mano means hand-to-hand, but speaking of hands,
what physical feature distinguishes humans and apes from other animals?
Using your opposable thumbs.
No.
So there are frogs and koalas and pandas, possums, opossums,
even birds which have opposable digits of some sort.
Lots of dinosaurs had opposable digits.
We're not even, frankly, up to the standard of other primates
in the opposable digit stakes.
So, great apes, they not only have opposable thumbs,
they have opposable big toes as well,
so the bit that makes us unique is that we can do this.
We can bring our thumbs all the way across our hand to our ring
and our little fingers, and we can also flex the ring and the little
fingers towards the base of the thumb, and that makes us dextrous.
It gives us a powerful grip.
It makes us able to manipulate tools.
And the other thing that sets us apart is brain size.
Gorillas are often larger than human beings,
but the brain is only about a third of the size.
So there are some non-primates,
so whales and elephants have larger brains than us,
but our big brains are problematic in some way.
What is the main way?
Giving birth! Giving birth!
Absolutely, yeah. It makes labour unbelievably painful.
And human babies are also helpless,
cos they have to be born at a stage when they're still relatively
helpless because if they didn't, the head would grow too large.
And then they'd be able to work out how to get out on their own. Yeah.
Just follow the trail of dust!
Now, here's a brainteaser.
What am I describing?
Known as the Great War, the poppy is used to represent...?
FAST TICKING CLOCK
Yes?
World War I?
No, just let me finish.
The main combatants were France on one side and the UK on the other.
Was it the World Cup in 1982?
It's Napoleonic.
The Napoleonic Wars were the original Great War,
and the poppy was the emblem of that war.
Before battle, so, in the case of the Napoleonic ones,
particularly the land was often empty and barren.
And, afterwards, these blood red flowers would flourish.
The reason that scarlet corn poppies do so well on battlefields
is because their seeds rely on light in order to grow.
So, if the soil is disturbed tremendously, they emerge
out of the dark earth and are exposed to the sun's light
and poppies abound. So, there was an American professor
and humanitarian called Moina Belle Michael.
She was the one who conceived of using the poppy as a symbol
of remembrance for World War I.
She taught disabled servicemen at the University of Georgia.
She began to sell poppies to raise funds for them.
And, then, in 1921, her idea was adopted by the American Legion
and later, in that same year, by the British Legion.
So, the poppy is an American idea from the Napoleonic Wars,
which is not what you would think.
Right, we'll end on a question about love and partnership.
What do opposites do?
SHYLY: Attract.
Nope. They did a survey, and there's 80% of people who believe
that to be true, but they examined the digital footprints
of over 45,000 people,
and it's really rare that opposites attract.
On the contrary, it's people with similar personalities.
So, based on likes and word choices in posts, you're much more likely
to be become friends and much more likely to be romantic partners.
That's why your partner's more likely to shag your friends,
cos they're like you.
That didn't come up in the study, but I think that'll do.
It's fine. We've all had an experience like that.
And he was my best mate!
So, here's bad news.
Dating apps are terrible at pairing up people.
No shit. No! What?
I know, it's shocking to be attracted to each other...
They can pair up murderers and victims though, can't they?
AUDIENCE GROAN Sorry, is that...?
Is that an app?
It might as well be. Are you a murderer or a victim?
I'm sort of a victim. What are you? Murderer. Oh!
We have a house deep in the woods in Denmark and I've been splitting
some wood for the stove, and I'd left the axe outside,
and my mother said to me, she said, "You'd better bring the axe in."
I said, "Why?" She said, "What if an axe-murderer happens to pass by?"
I said, "I'm going to guess, by his job description",
"he's got his own axe."
He's coming in with a butter knife and he's like, "Wait a minute."
He's already like, "I'm going to leave the axe because"
"I'm a butter knife murderer."
"I'm going to spread you to death."
They did a study and they asked participants to answer
100 questions about their own personalities and what they were
looking for in a partner, and then they sent them on a series
of speed dates, and they did a sort of algorithm based
on the answers they'd given to predict how well the dates
would go romantically,
and it was no better than chance at predicting whether two people
would be attracted to each other.
Opposites don't attract, so, if you're a procrastinator,
best to date another procrastinator, er, you know,
when you get round to it.
Well, we've been putting it off, but it's time for
the off-putting matter of the scores.
Busy on the deadlines this week with -4,
in first place, it's Holly!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In the nick of time in second place, with -12,
Alan!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Just a tad too late with -13,
it's Nikki!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And watching the last bus disappearing over the horizon,
in last place, at -14,
it's Aisling!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
That's it from Nikki, Aisling, Holly, Alan and me.
I'm going to end on a wise and witty quotation just as soon as
the elves get round to giving me one.
In the meantime, in the words of Mark Twain,
"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day"
"after tomorrow just as well."
Goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE