Good evening, welcome to QI.
Pull up a pew and assemble your amazeballs
because tonight's show is absolutely phenomenal.
Our guests tonight are the puzzling Cariad Lloyd...
APPLAUSE
..the perplexing Paul Sinha...
APPLAUSE
..the preternatural Josh Widdicombe...
APPLAUSE
..and the Pope Lick Monster, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
So, can anybody tell me anything about the Pope Lick Monster?
Well, I deny everything, for a start.
LAUGHTER
And the Pope started it. No, no...
It is part man, part goat, part sheep, and it supposedly lived...
And part Catholic?
Part Catholic. It supposedly lives beneath a railway bridge
over Pope Lick Creek in Louisville, Kentucky. Oh.
It lures people to their death by hypnosis.
Come with me, yes, I have cake, come this way.
Is that how you get your ladies?
LAUGHTER
It could work.
Our guests' buzzers are a peculiar panoply of the paranormal.
Cariad goes...
X-FILES THEME TUNE PLAYS
It's a show about phenomena.
Yeah, things are going to get weird.
Paul goes...
TWILIGHT ZONE THEME PLAYS
Josh goes...
THEME FROM THE EXORCIST PLAYS
And Alan goes....
♪ Scooby-doo-bee-doo, where are you, we've got some work to do, now... ♪
Actually frightened me.
First of all, we're going to probe your psyches.
What do you see here?
That's my mum that didn't love me.
They're always about the mother.
Yeah, that's my dad that didn't love me, and that one's Alan Davies.
That third one was a bit of loo role I flushed away this morning.
AUDIENCE GROAN
That really did not take long, did it?
LAUGHTER
Number three is when smoked salmon goes bad.
Yes, it does look a bit like that, doesn't it?
So, what are these called?
Rorschach tests.
They're the Rorschach tests, named after Hermann Rorschach,
or just ink blots, we could just call them,
and he published his first ink blots in 1921... Whoa! Wow!
Why did no-one talk about how hot Rorschach is? I'm sorry...
That is one of those ones on the X Factor, he's not good enough
on his own, but they'll put him in a group.
He's so hot, I'm sorry. Yeah, he is a very good-looking fellow. Gosh.
He was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst... Sure...
..and he was looking for a way in which you could diagnose
schizophrenics, but, in fact, do we think the ink blots worked?
No, isn't that the thing, they proved that they didn't really...?
They didn't do what they were looking for,
which was a substantive test to see...analysing different illnesses,
so on, but it did allow people sometimes to tap
into the unconscious, so, sometimes it makes people talk
about things that they wouldn't ordinarily talk about.
As a GP, it's quite useful to get rid of a patient that you wanted
to get rid of. If they just come in for a cough or a cold,
"Does this remind you of your dead mother?"
Is that how you get them out? Exactly.
I would have thought it might make you stay a bit longer, I'd be like,
"Oh, Dr Sinha's ready to chat, let's go!"
If Dr Sinha looked anything like Rorschach, then you'd be...
Yeah, then I would be, and I'd have to get out.
The fact is that we do have a tendency to look at images
and try and make them into something, it is something
called pareidolia, and it's the human tendency to see
images where maybe they don't exist.
We want it to make some kind of sense.
What he was looking for was a way to look for depression
or anxiety disorders, violent criminal tendencies,
and that absolutely does not work for, but it works occasionally
to unlock things that people can't articulate,
that they do want to try and talk about.
Does anybody know where the word "shrink" comes from,
which we sometimes use, in terms of psychiatrist?
Is it about shrinking your brain?
Well, it's from a... There's a sort of pseudoscience
called phrenology... Yeah... Ooh...
And phrenologists used to claim that the shape of the skull
indicated the personality, and they could help you shrink
the undesirable qualities, is what they were looking for.
Let's have a look at the first three ink blots that we had up,
and let's see what everybody makes of them. Number one,
what do you see? It looks a bit like a train line,
that's what I'm thinking. A train line? Like train tracks.
Well, where they've entered the toilets, I don't know what that...
What I can actually see there... Yes?
Oh, God, I hope... Imagine if I found out I'm a murderer
through this, it's going to be really disappointing.
Imagine you found out? You'd have to have killed someone to...
The thing is, that isn't how it works.
However, it may work in terms of you being able to articulate something
that previously you haven't been able to.
So let's have that articulation.
Genuinely what I can see... Yep? ..is I think it looks like a cat,
in that you've got those two whiskers, and then it looks
like a bit of a cat's face below it. Right.
And then you've... Then the rest of it doesn't look like a cat.
It could be a cat if it's roadkill.
Yeah, Josh, yeah, that's murderer, if you see a cat.
It's called murderer. Yeah.
Well, it is known as the sex card.
It has the most reported sexual answers. Oh. Oh, dear.
But also lots of people see it as an animal skin or a rug,
that's extremely common.
So, let's have a look at number two, Cariad?
I can see two girls looking at each other.
Well, it is sometimes referred to as the mother card.
Women and children are often seen in that blot.
I think it looks like two people.
It's two rabbits yelling at each other. Yeah.
Number three, common responses to this blot,
what does anybody else think?
It's surely the rear view of two gorillas high-fiving each other.
Oh, yeah!
This might come back badly on my psychology,
but can anyone else see, like, a screaming rabbit?
No, but I can hear one.
The Silence Of The Rabbits, the unsuccessful working title.
Apparently this card can also induce a variety of sexual responses.
Oh, there you go. As I said, can anyone else...?
A silently screaming rabbit. We know a lot about you, Josh.
They did do Rorschach tests on senior Nazis at Nuremberg
and they asked experts to pick out the war criminals
and it is impossible to do so.
I love the way they thought, "These Nazi war criminals,
"what we need to check if they're bad guys..." Yes.
If they come in dressed up as a Nazi...
..there's your first clue. Game over, yeah.
Let's just check, we will make sure than this bit of ink.
Yeah, give him his fair dues.
Show him the ink first before you judge him.
Let's just see.
The Rorschach test has long been used as a personality test,
but I don't know what people see in it.
Where's the weirdest place to feel another person?
Loughborough? Yeah! Loughborough's good. I don't know.
I was going to say Salford, I don't know why!
Bognor Regis.
Is it on your body? Does it begin with a P?
Is it perineum? Oh!
No, but I like your workings.
I love that you didn't wait for the answer to any of those questions.
We really saw the thought process, the whole way through.
From a doctor's point of view, it's probably the middle
of your gut, because that would suggest that you've gone too far.
Oh...
One way or the other, you've gone too far. That's very unpleasant.
Can you go in both ends? Like, you know when you're building a...
Oh, like when they met at the Channel Tunnel halfway?
When you... Exactly!
And when you're on the beach and you're building a sand castle
and you put a tunnel in.
Where would you meet in the body if you did that?
That's a curious question.
If two people met, hand-in-hand, in the middle of me...
Yeah?
..would I definitely have to die?
Or could I survive that?
I don't know, but your GP would definitely be struck off.
OK, so, the weirdest place to feel another person,
for example, would be on Mount Everest or on an expedition.
It's something called Third Man Syndrome and it is the sensation
of the presence of an extra, unseen person.
So, the weirdest place you might feel another person
is when there's actually nobody there.
It happens in extreme situations.
The most vivid are experienced by adventurers.
In 1933, there was a solo attempt to climb Everest by a British
explorer called Frank Smythe, and he got within 1,000ft
of the top and he had the strongest sensation
that somebody was with him, so strong that he broke off a piece of,
I don't know, Kendal Mint Cake, whatever it was, and he handed it,
or tried to hand it, to this other person.
Probably the bloke holding the camera.
But Ernest Shackleton reported exactly the same sensation
in his book, South. That's really weird.
He says, "During that long and racking march of 36 hours"
"over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,"
"it seemed to me often that we were four and not three."
So, there was a sensation of there being somebody else along.
And I don't know if you know TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland,
it's in there, it's inspired by Shackleton's experience.
That's Gandalf. Shaft!
It did feel a bit karaoke, that, didn't it?
Yeah, yeah. TS Eliot karaoke. I want to do it.
♪ Who is the third who walks always beside you
♪ Only you and I together
♪ But when I look ahead
♪ Up the white ro-o-oad
♪ There is always another
♪ Walking beside you! ♪
So, why do you think it might be?
Why? Because of ghosts.
Oh, there's a bloke on Everest who just keeps turning up.
No, it's possibly a coping mechanism of the brain to provide comfort.
Or ghosts.
Or it's ghosts.
But some people think that's why we think there are guardian angels,
why some people have imaginary friends,
that it's to do with a sort of coping mechanism.
The other suggestion is that there's a certain swelling
in certain areas of the brain and that could trigger hallucinations.
If you have the Third Man Syndrome,
it doesn't seem to cause you any difficulties later on,
although they do think there have been some accidents
mountaineering which we might blame on the Third Man Syndrome.
Guys going, "Come this way, come this way."
"Give me your ha-argh!"
But the electrical stimulation of the temporoparietal junctions
of the brain, so, the sort of bits back here,
these parts of the brain,
they're hugely important in how we interpret all the stuff
that comes into our senses.
Why might you, bearing all of that in mind,
why might you be more likely to see God
wearing one of these? Ooh.
Do you want to have a look? Yes.
Now, can I just say that we made this? This is not a real one.
I can see Dennis Bergkamp.
Why might you be more likely to see God wearing one of those?
Well, because it's not a very good crash helmet
so you could easily die?
Is it stimulating a bit of your brain?
Yeah, a minor electrical stimulation, no more than the,
sort of, electrics in a hairdryer, or in a phone set, or something.
Is it on? Yes.
This is it. This is heaven. It's exactly like it was down there.
I think this one needs a battery, nothing's happening at all.
No, it's called a God Helmet. It was invented by Stanley Koren,
a technologist at Laurentian University in Canada,
and a neuroscientist called Michael Persinger,
and it interferes with the brain's function,
so it was used in experiments to see if it creates the sense
of a religious experience, and some people said that they felt,
when they had it on, they were in the presence of God.
You'd be unlucky, I think, to put that on and get the wrong sort
of religious experience. Yes.
Yeah, what would be the wrong one? When you wake-up circumcised or...
I'll tell you what, if that happens, you've put it on the wrong end.
Have you seen that documentary about Ayrton Senna?
Yeah. It's a really brilliant film.
And... He was the Formula 1 guy that had a terrible accident?
He died in a crash. Yeah.
But he is unarguably the greatest ever driver,
but his rival, Prost, the Frenchman, was a bit frightened of him
because Senna believed in God.
OK. Senna believed that God would look after him on the track.
And Prost thought this was an unreliable safety system. Yeah.
So he thought it made him more dangerous.
Oh. Because he had a kind of confidence about himself? Yeah.
Well, this guy here, this is the neuroscientist,
Michael Persinger, his theory is that religious
and mystical experiences are actually caused by
disruptions of the brain, so, it's actually some kind of
electrical thing that's happening.
Now, that may be that actually what we can do is we can
artificially produce exactly the same thing,
but that there are real religious and mystical experiences,
the truth is we don't know.
The thing is with this, is this a snapshot,
like a freeze-frame? Yeah.
In other words, could this person be plummeting at a terrific rate?
These wings don't work!
Catch me!
And then really about to hit the ground.
I thought I saw a third angel!
Now, does anyone here glow in the dark?
Oh, I used to! Oh!
You've just remembered?
I didn't expect the question to come up.
So, what happened? Well, when I was younger... Yes?
Is this about Ready Brek?
My hair was a lot blonder when I was a kid
and we used to... Every birthday, we'd go to Newton Abbot Laser Quest.
And not just my birthday, all my friends' birthdays,
so that's four times a year. Wow.
But they how UV lighting in it, so my hair glowed in the dark,
so I was a sitting duck for shots.
I'm going to take a guess looking at that picture
that the answer to the question "Do we glow in the dark?" is not no.
Is NOT no?
No. OK. That's how to avoid a klaxon. Very well done. Yeah.
Just going to unpick that.
Human beings do glow.
There was a Japanese study in 2009
using special hyper-sensitive cameras
and they found that human beings are bioluminescent at levels
1,000 times less than is detectable by the human eye, so we do glow.
But I'd like a study done in a country that hasn't suffered
major nuclear accidents.
So, they photographed five volunteers for 20 minutes
every three hours inside a dark room for three days straight
and they found that the light was brightest in the late afternoon.
That's when we expend the most energy.
And the brightest part of the body, I think you can see it
on there, was the cheeks followed by the upper neck
and the forehead and all living creatures produce light.
It's a side effect of our metabolism that we produce it.
There was a battle called the Battle of Shiloh
during the American Civil War and the soldiers reported that
they had glow-in-the-dark wounds
and these wounds seemed to heal faster than normal
and it wasn't until 2001 that they solved the mystery.
The soldiers were hypothermic.
These were the ideal conditions on the battlefield for a bioluminescent
bacterium called Photorhabadus luminescens to get into the wounds
and it is not that it helped the soldiers to survive because
it actually produces antibiotics and hence its nickname, Angel's Glow.
And two teenagers, Jonathan Curtis and Bill Martin,
took top prize at an international science fair for discovering this
and it is a bacterium that lives in the gut of the nematode worm.
They're incredible in themselves, nematode worms.
They're incredibly microscopic.
Can you imagine how mad that would be on the battlefield, like...
Oh, people... "My wound is glowing." Yes, I know.
It would be bittersweet, wouldn't it, when you go, "Ow! Ooh!"
Now, then, what's the most terrifying thing about
Anne Robinson?
LAUGHTER
Where do you start?
Do you know what it is? She's behind you.
You've got Third Anne Syndrome.
It's her wink.
You find that terrifying?
There's no need to wink in society, unless you're telling someone
you don't believe what you're actually saying. Right.
So, at the end of The Weakest Link, when Anne Robinson says,
"Join us again tomorrow for The Weakest Link." And winks,
what she's actually saying is,
"I hope you die in the next 24 hours."
Is it that she's sitting in fire and not burning?
Yes, I'm going to give you a clue.
So, it is quite cold here in the studio,
in fact, I think this studio is possibly haunted, so there is...
CRASHING, LAUGHTER
I genuinely jumped!
APPLAUSE
You've let your gender down.
I know. Josh jumped, too!
You didn't see Josh.
He jumped as well! Old big head jumped as well.
I genuinely...
As it fell, I thought, "What are the chances of...?"
"Oh, wait a minute."
So, one of the most famous poltergeist cases
was the Stockwell poltergeist of 1772.
So, there was a Mrs Golding of Stockwell, and she was terrorised
by a presence that smashed crockery and moved furniture.
One of my favourite books of all time, this is not my copy
because I'd never be able to carry it around,
is the Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds
by Charles Mackay. If you haven't read it,
I really recommend this wonderful Victorian book.
It's not one for the Tube, though, is it?
Sandi, that looks like your bed.
Sorry.
I...
And I am a small person, but...
I don't think you should tell people that you know that.
"Mrs Golding, an elderly lady who resided alone with her servant,"
"Anne Robinson..."
Oh.
"..was sorely surprised on the evening of Twelfth-Day,"
"1772."
250 years old!
Her surgery is amazing.
She looks really good.
That she can wink at all...
If you asked me to guess and put a ballpark on it...
She looks great.
"She was sorely surprised to observe a most extraordinary commotion among her crockery."
"Cups and saucers rattled down the chimney,"
"pots and pans were whirled downstairs, and every room"
"in the house was, in a short time, strewed with fragments."
It turns out that all of this only happened when her servant was there,
and her servant was called Anne Robinson.
And she had tied horse hairs and wires to objects in order
to scare her employer.
And it says, "Anne, it appears, was anxious to have a clear house"
"to carry on an intrigue with her lover and resorted to this trick"
"to effect her purpose."
One of the reasons I don't believe in ghosts is that my gran said
that when she died she was going to haunt me
if there was such a thing as ghosts and she hasn't.
Maybe she's busy.
Maybe she has and has come back as Adam Hill.
Of course, there are lots of instances where people
are just mucking about, like Anne Robinson was.
1804, Hammersmith was terrorised by a ghost impersonator,
so much so that a £10 bounty was offered to whoever caught the ghost.
And there was a man named Thomas Millwood,
who was on his way home, unfortunately he was wearing
the clothes that were common of his bricklaying trade,
linen trousers, entirely white, washed very clean,
a waistcoat of flannel, apparently new, very white,
and an apron which he wore round him,
and he was shot by Francis Smith who was out ghost-hunting with a friend.
But the huge publicity meant the culprit came forward.
A man called John Graham, who was an elderly shoemaker,
and he had been pretending to be a ghost by using a white sheet
to frighten his apprentice.
Classic!
I mean, that is route one pretending to be a ghost.
Why do we wear a bed sheet?
What is the reason for it?
Why is that a thing that we all think,
"Ooh, yes, that's to do with ghosts?" I don't know.
I'll tell you why. Yeah?
♪ Scooby-doo-bee-doo... ♪
It probably dates back to the 16th century.
So, people couldn't afford coffins, so all that used
to happen, they'd be wrapped in... In a shroud.
..a winding sheet, yeah, a linen winding sheet,
knotted at the head and foot, and placed in the grave,
so, we have a notion that it's...
Coming back from the shrouds. Yeah.
Churchyards - favourite haunt of phony spirits.
The Dutch Renaissance theologian Erasmus wrote of a country vicar
who fastened candles to the backs of crabs and he used to let them
wander around at night in the churchyard, telling people
that they were witnessing distressed souls in purgatory.
All those distressed crabs.
I really thought you said camels
to the backs of crabs, so I was, like...
Candles, sorry. That makes it more... Four sturdy crabs... Yeah.
The camels were furious, weren't they? "Oh, for God sake!"
"We're going sideways again!"
18th-century London was terrorised by Anne Robinson.
Well, that was such a fantastic question,
let's see what the audience think of it.
Yes!
That was wonderful.
So, my next question, who invented that wave?
Ah.
I've seen the show before, it's not Mexico. It's not.
I think it was popularised, I might be wrong, in the Mexico '86
World Cup and that's what...
Ah-ah-ah. I...
Too late. The referee's decision is final.
VAR, I need on that...
What if it wasn't a person at all?
Oh. Is it a country you're looking for, or...?
No, it is in the world of nature.
The Mexican wave was invented by giant...
Barley in a field.
That's the name of the album.
No, it was invented by giant honey bees. Wow.
It is an astonishing thing to look at.
It's called shimmering and it acts as a defensive mechanism
to warn off predators.
So, each bee flips their abdomen upwards in turn, creating a shining
pattern and it confuses and deters hornets and it forces them to chase
individual flying bees rather than jumping
in and having, basically, a bee buffet.
I think it's an incredible thing to look at.
They're called Apis laboriosa, they're the world's largest bees,
they're 1.2 inches in length. Oh, that's big.
And they live on trees and cliffs in the Himalayas,
and they can make hallucinogenic honey
out of pollen taken from rhododendron plants. Wow.
It's collected by teams of Nepalese men who descend cliffs,
look at that, harnessed to a ladder by ropes, and a single comb
can contain more than 60,000 bees.
Whoa. It's a beautiful thing.
So, a Mexican wave did not originate in Mexico but,
as you say, it was really the '86 World Cup that made it popular.
But its actual origins, we're not really sure.
Possibly in the '70s, in the United States.
Yeah, I think in America they done it... Do you think they do it
quite a lot? Yeah, because their sports go on forever
and they get epically bored. Yeah.
So, they find something to do.
Anybody know what the dab is?
Yeah, that's that thing, isn't it?
No, Alan's doing it. That's a dab, isn't it? That's the dab.
You need both arms, otherwise it looks like you're just hiding, Josh.
Half-heartedly dabbing.
It was like I was being taken into court, wasn't it?
So, the dab, invented... Where are we going to head?
If it was bees that did the Mexican wave, what do we reckon?
Is this the natural world again? It is the natural world.
Victoria's riflebird. This is stunning.
Look how proud he is of himself.
Indigenously, it's known as the duwuduwu.
It is the Australian bird of paradise.
It's going... ♪ Da-na-na-na-na da-na-na-na-na Batman!
♪ Da-na-na-na-na da-na-na-na-na Batman! ♪
Oh, man, if a robin flies in now, it's going to be amazing.
What we love is that the male does this incredible ritual and if the
female is interested, she responds with a raspy call of, "Yaas?"
And then they dab together.
All the birds of paradise, they all do different things,
so they don't all dab. There's one that does the macarena.
Yeah.
Until you've seen a peacock Riverdance, you haven't lived.
When did the human dab begin?
Hip-hop. Yeah.
It absolutely begins in hip-hop,
so artists that have been suggested as possible originators of the thing
include Skippa Da Flippa, for example,
Peewee Longway, Jose Guapo... Yeah, yeah.
Rich The Kid and Migos, although, I mean, you'll know Migos
from his hit track Slippery featuring Gucci Mane, of course.
The controversy was cleared up when OG Maco called out Migos
for saying they were the creators,
when actually it was Skippa Da Flippa, so I think that covers it.
People said the show would change when Stephen Fry left but it hasn't.
Now, please take a look at some phenomenal people at the pinnacle
of their field and I want you to guess the records held
by our prestigious guests.
So, let's start with the woman on the left,
what do we think? She holds a world record.
Is there any clue in the picture?
Er, no.
It's nothing to do with cooking at all. Is it a sport?
It is to do with sport. Is she a long jumper?
No, it is a little bit more niche.
She holds the women's record for fastest marathon
in a toilet roll costume.
Four hours and 54 minutes at the 2017 London Marathon.
73 world records were attempted, 39 were broken,
including fastest marathon runner in a sleeping bag,
fastest dressed as a swimmer,
a star, a crustacean, an elf, a fast food item, a telephone box
and a witch.
Nicola Nuttall there, bottom left, from Pendle in Lancashire.
She broke the witch record.
She finished five minutes quicker than last year when her record
was annulled cos her skirt was deemed too short.
Do you know what would have been brilliant? If she turned up
at the start line and Mo Farah was there dressed as a witch.
"Oh, for God's sake!"
"Oh, I texted you. I told you I was doing this."
"You said you were coming as a lobster!"
The second one is called Martin Brady and his name, Brady,
holds a clue to his world record.
Do you know what bradycardia is?
I do, has he got the slowest heart rate?
He has got the slowest heart rate in the world,
logged at 27 beats per minute. What?!
Oh, my God, how is he still alive?
So, the average male heart rate's 72 beats per minute.
You can actually lower your own heart rate, do you know this?
You can use something called the Valsalva maneuver.
Yes, it's the breathing, isn't it? Yes, so take a deep breath...
ALL INHALE
..then strain the muscles of your abdomen,
as if you are producing a large...
..thing. Oh, about time. ..a bowel movement.
Hold the pressure for five seconds and then let go
and if you do it a few times, it will trigger the vagus nerve and
that is the bit that is responsible for controlling your heart rate.
You can also close your mouth and pinch your nose shut
while pressing out, as if you're blowing up a balloon,
and that would be the other reason to do it.
Oh, my ears have popped!
Have you ever used it for medical reasons
to try to get somebody to slow their heart rate down?
Have you ever... Usually you use medication, really.
Classic doctor.
Have a pill. Have you tried two paracetamol?
Valsalva - he was
a 17th-century physician and anatomist from Bologna.
He's the person who coined the term Eustachian tube.
He was an old fellow... He's not as fit as Dvorak, is he?
He liked to taste bodily excretions to diagnose disease.
He wrote, "Gangrenous pus does not taste good, leaving..."
"..leaving the..." He's right. You can't argue with him.
"..leaving the tongue tingling unpleasantly"
"for the better part of the day."
ALL GROAN
It reminds me of Michael Winner's restaurant reviews in the '70s.
Let's have a look at our third record-holder.
Now, here's an astonishing thing.
That is Stephen Wildish
and he beat Mo Farah.
Whoa. And what did he beat Mo Farah doing?
Most corn consumed. No.
Yes. Sack race.
He held the world record in 2014, 39.91 seconds.
In 2017, Steve Wildish smashed that in just 26.3 seconds.
What's the distance, sorry? 100m?
It's 100m, yeah.
So, he had tried earlier in the year but his sack
had been deemed too small.
LAUGHTER
Do you know what? I say!
In this weather, I've had the same problem. Yeah.
APPLAUSE
So, the man who beat Mo Farah substantially is in our audience.
Please welcome Stephen Wildish. Oh, lovely.
I mean, how did you know, Steve,
that you're good at doing a sack race?
I was unbeaten since school, so I did all the school races and...
Right. Did your mum say, "Ooh, my boy is very good at sack racing."
Yes, she used to film the sack races at school.
Are you allowed to put your feet into the corners of the sack
and kind of run along, or do you have to jump? You have to jump.
You have to jump? Yeah. OK.
Would you mind having a go for us and showing us your technique?
Yes! But, wait, we have to have a competitor, so I feel the only
person I know who's been and reported at the Paralympics
is Josh Widdicombe.
I would like Josh to go. Yes!
Don't let us down, Josh. I won't.
I won... I didn't do the sack race, I did a race at school called
the Dressing-Up Race. Oh, yeah!
I won two years in a row. Really?
I left primary school undefeated.
I now want to see Mo Farah doing the Dressing-Up Race,
but there we are.
So, please be careful, both of you.
Darling, you have to hold the sack.
Have you got any tips?
I use one arm out, a bit of balance.
Whoa. OK.
Ready, boys?
Imagine if I win, how amazing this will be.
If you win, darling, you'll be the world record holder.
Oh, my giddy aunt. On your marks... Come on, Josh!
..get set, go!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Thank you, Stephen Wildish.
I'll tell you what, though. Yeah?
About ten metres in, I thought...
I didn't...
I dared to dream.
Yeah, you did.
I saw the headlines.
I thought, "This is it! This is my moment!" Yeah, world record.
I could see you were keeping a bit back for the final...
I thought, "Finally, I've found my thing."
But you hadn't.
Right, moving on, how many crimes could you commit...
..with one of these?
Lock picking, do you think you could do lock picking?
No, it was to do with a German criminal so elusive that the German
police spent two years hunting what was known as the Phantom
of Heilbronn, also known as the Woman Without A Face.
So, between 1993 and 2009, the Phantom of Heilbronn was held
responsible for over 40 crimes.
There were six homicides, there was a school breaking, there was
a car dealership robbery, and her DNA was found continuously
at the crime scene and they could not work it out.
There was a 300,000 euro bounty placed on her head.
They even consulted fortune-tellers and diviners,
trying to work out who this woman was and the papers declared it
the most mysterious serial crime of the past century
and they did two years of investigation,
only to find that this person did not exist.
So, the DNA...
Was it somebody in the forensics team?
It was the factory making the cotton buds.
Oh, my God.
So, they used to take DNA samples, the crime team,
with the little cotton bud,
they had been contaminated with the DNA of the women
who actually made the cotton buds. Oh, that's amazing.
And the reason the Phantom had only done crimes in Bavaria
and not in the surrounding region
is cos they got their cotton swabs from somewhere else.
The Bild newspaper ran the headline,
"Are the heads of our police stuffed with cotton wool?"
What I like about them is that, the people make them,
they explicitly print, "Do not insert inside the ear canal."
Yeah, you can cause a lot of damage.
Yes, but it's probably the only product whose main purpose
is precisely the one they explicitly rule out.
Well, that's not where I put them.
There's some awful DNA on that.
I heard a radio programme, and this doctor was saying
that people get addicted to putting them in their ears and even
when someone has had ear damage and it's affected them
and you get more infections that way, they'll then go back
to that patient and they'll be like, "I'm doing it again."
But, am I right, Paul, you're not supposed to remove ear wax,
it's there for a purpose? No, it can build up
and cause conductive deafness,
so you've just got to be very careful with it, that's the point.
And addiction to ear buds can...
Can kill. Well, can kill.
Timpanicide, I believe it's called,
killing somebody by perforating their eardrum. Yeah, yeah.
I made it up. Oh.
You done it good.
APPLAUSE
I'm so gullible.
But the Phantom of Heilbronn, I love this story because it reminds me...
Has anybody seen The Phantom Of The Opera, the musical?
In the original book, in Gaston Leroux's original description,
he has a full-face mask,
so why might he have a half mask in the musical?
Kept bumping into the set.
No, he couldn't sing. He keeps popping up in the play in different
places and you're supposed to think he's like a phantom.
"Oh, look, he was there and now he's over there."
It's a blindingly obvious there's more than one of them
to the point where it's irritating. It's taking the...
Take your masks off. There - Dave's up there and Phil's down there.
Stop pissing about.
"Oh, how did they do that?" He didn't do that!
The only thing that kept me awake was getting annoyed.
You must be great fun during Cats.
"They're are just people dressed as cats. They're not cats."
"It's not even a real train, they're on roller skates!"
Do you think your generally challenged by theatre?
I would love Alan to get a theatre critic column.
"They walked on, pretending to be people they weren't. I left."
"Why are we sitting here? Godot is not coming."
"He never shows up."
Now, it's time for the point of no return journey to Hades
that we call general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Please show me your best poker face.
Your best poker face.
Wow, that is...
LAUGHTER
Cariad looks possessed.
I nearly mooned you there.
None of those, if I may say so, are any good.
What do you think should be a good poker face? Some neutrality.
No, so, they have studied all sorts of poker faces and most effective
thing is a positive expression.
So, if you're smiling and looking cheerful,
these warmer expressions will lead your opponent
to make greater mistakes.
Do not date any of these people. There's a warning.
That's a hell of a Tinder photo, that. Yeah.
The thing you don't want to use in poker is anything aggressive
cos it makes people feel more aggressive towards you.
And what you don't want is the RBF... Anybody know what the RBF is?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, resting bitch face.
Resting bitch face. It is.
It's a term for the slightly angry or aggressive default expression
that some people have.
Do you have that? I can do it. Yeah.
It's like... Oh, yeah. That's it.
Boys can also have resting bitch faces,
but they have a different name for it for boys.
Anybody know what it is?
It's RAF. It stands for... Resting angry face?
No, resting arsehole face.
Yeah.
There's a portrait of Louis XIV.
It's supposed to be the prime example of resting arsehole face.
Anyway, there you are.
The best poker face to pull is a trustworthy smile.
What is the fastest creature on land?
X-FILES THEME TUNE PLAYS
That man in the sack. The man...
Wait a minute. I'm sorry I forgot your name.
She... You might have meant me!
Oh, no.
Unbelievable!
I haven't quite finished before you buzzed in. Sorry.
What is the fastest creature on land, relative to body length?
OK?
So... Yes. TWILIGHT ZONE THEME PLAYS
I'm going to say cheetah.
I just wanted to join in!
Oh. So, yes?
Is it you?
Definitely.
It is a small thing.
It is a small thing. It's got to be on land, it's not jumping...
No, on land...cos a flea jumps.
Yeah, so relative to its body length,
what is the fastest creature?
So how many lengths of itself would it cover more quickly? Yeah.
It's called a Californian mite, so it is a tiny, little thing,
it's the size of a sesame seed.
They have been clocked at speeds
of 322 body lengths per second. OK?
Now, that's only about an inch, OK? But if you imagine your body
and how fast you would need to go, 322 lengths of your own body
per second, it is the fastest creature on land.
The previous record holder was the Australian tiger beetle
and that was a paltry 171 body lengths per second.
I was hoping you were going to say
the Australian model Elle MacPherson.
You said the cheetah, so, the cheetah is phenomenally fast,
57.8mph, but 16 body lengths per second.
Whoa, lazy.
Yeah.
So, 300 lengths of its body...
Yeah, in a second. But that's only an inch, you see?
Yeah. That's an inch, is it, Alan?
APPLAUSE
Usain Bolt, all right?
He does five body lengths per second. Wow!
He's taught, though, isn't he, Usain Bolt?
It also depends how you measure it
so cos he's standing up like that, maybe his body length
ought to be from between the chest and the back, that distance, maybe,
would be fairer, but even then it's 20 body lengths per second,
so, strictly speaking, that makes him quicker than a cheetah,
but nowhere near the speed of a Californian mite.
Californian mite. They are amazing - many, many more females than males
and there are some mite species where there's no males at all,
as far as we know.
When can we go, Sandi?
Actually, there's lots of species with no males.
Lots of insects, snakes, fish. No mammal's so far discarded the male.
Just saying.
When it comes to racing on land, cheaters never win
but the mighty mite might.
What the German phrase for the phenomenon
of encountering your perfect double?
Oh, you only live once. Let's enjoy ourselves. Doppelganger.
Is it not German?
It is German but it isn't a doppelganger,
it's doppeltganger...
Doppeltganger...with a T.
Both the words come from a German novel from 1796
called Flower, Fruit And Thorn Pieces
or The Married Life, Death And Wedding
Of Siebenkas, Poor Man's Lawyer.
Sounds like a cracking read.
He uses the word doppeltganger with a T for your lookalike,
and doppelganger is the name of a meal
in which two courses are served at the same time.
If you see your own double,
it's traditionally an omen of ill portent.
Yeah, it's supposed to mean you're going to die, isn't it?
Yes, it dates back to the ancient Greek idea of the shapeshifters,
the psychopomps, so it was possible that a psychopomp
that was going to escort you from... Sorry, a psychopomp?
It's called a psychopomp, and sometimes they come as you,
not always, they can come in different shapes.
So the Grim Reaper.
There are lots of religions with traditions like this.
The Persian Zoroastrian tradition, the deceased are led across
the Chinvat Bridge by the psychopomp Daena.
If you've been wicked, the bridge will be very narrow.
If you've been very good,
the bridge is very wide and you go to the House of Song.
I like Zoroastrianism, actually, it's one of the world's oldest
extant religions in which men and women are treated exactly the same,
so they've got six immortal beings
and three are feminine, three are masculine.
They don't have any female clergy at all.
They do recommend you have sex three times a month.
That's the only knowledge I have of Zoroastrianism.
That's it. Three times a month?
You say that like it's a lot or a little?
Do you know what? I'm going to leave that for the viewers to decide.
And that brings us to the extremely familiar phenomenon of the scores.
In first place, with a practically perfect ten,
it's Alan!
CHEERING
In second place, with minus 5,
it's Paul!
APPLAUSE
In penultimate place with minus 6,
Cariad.
APPLAUSE
And, bringing up the posterior, indeed, falling over in his sack,
with minus 12, it's Josh.
CHEERING
I'd like to thank Paul, Josh, Cariad and Alan,
and I leave you with this to ponder.
British neuroscientist Adrian Owen was told of a girl
that was in a coma but was still aware of her surroundings.
Her mother visited her every day and played the same Celine Dion
album on repeat for months.
It was, she thought, her daughter's favourite album.
The girl was one of the few to recover from this state
and her first words to her mother on waking were,
"If I ever hear that Celine Dion album again,"
"I will kill you."
Have a phenomenal night, goodnight.
CHEERING