CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening and welcome to QI.
Tonight, we're tiptoeing through our quiet episode.
Pray silence for the tight-lipped Jimmy Carr...
QUIET APPLAUSE
..the soundless Sara Pascoe...
QUIET APPLAUSE
..the muffled Andrew Maxwell...
QUIET APPLAUSE
..and the unspeakable Alan Davies!
LOUD CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Their buzzers are all appropriately quiet.
Jimmy goes...
BUZZER:Quiet!
Sara goes...
BUZZER:QUIET!
Andrew goes...
Will you be quiet!
And Alan goes...
BUZZER:Oh, do shut up.
LAUGHTER
That's very polite, wasn't it, really? "Oh, do shut up."
Now, how long before a silence becomes awkward?
SCATTERED LAUGHTER
LAUGHTER
SCATTERED LAUGHTER
LAUGHTER
OK, it's about now, I think. I think it's about now.
So, they've... That could have been a whole hour!
It was horrible, wasn't it? It is horrible.Ah, ga, ah, ah!
I think it's really awkward
when you can hear your own stomach gurgle.
Especially if it's a gig.Yeah.
That's always a sign, "Oh, this isn't going my way."
Yeah. That's not a good sign!
I think comedy's quite a lot like sex.
If they haven't made a noise for a while,
change what you're doing.
APPLAUSE
You could say that about parenting, as well, actually.
Yeah.Oh!
2011, the University of Groningen, which is in Netherlands,
discovered that a pause in conversation
becomes awkward after four seconds.Oh.
And after that, people start to feel anxious, they feel rejected.
I don't know, I read a really interesting thing by,
it's an American research company called the Love Lab,
and they basically looked at thousands and thousands of couples over the years,
and they came up with a theory on call response.
If you're sort of having a silence with someone, with your partner,
and you're looking at the paper and you go, "Oh."
And they don't go, "What?" Then it takes...
..it takes, like, seven good things to make up for that one bad thing,
cos people feel so rejected by that response.
It's that, it's exactly that. It's about feeling rejected,
cos the reason that we like good conversation
is it helps us feel good about ourselves.
We get dopamine, don't we?
Like, teenage girls who stay on the phone for hours and hours
have really, really high levels of dopamine,
like they've, like, completed a PhD.
I always think, like, as comedians, we're like drug dealers.
But the drug we deal is endorphins, and you've already got them on you.
We'll just help you release them.
Do the Irish mind silence, darling?
Well, it's never happened.No!
We have yet to meet the awkward moment.
I suppose after about four seconds of silence in Ireland,
you'd bring in a wink, at least. Yeah.
Just to keep things moving along! Yeah, exactly!
Or, "you know, yourself."Yeah.
And a bit of pointing maybe, you know. Oh, yeah.Yeah.
There he is, over there. It's good, those phrases
that kind of break the silence that don't really mean anything.
Like, I've spent a lot of time in Ireland and it's always,
"Fair play to you." Yeah. Doesn't mean anything.
Well, it means fair play to you.
I had a silent moment, me and an old Irishman.
It was really raining hard outside and it was just me and him alone
and I tried to make conversation,
I went, "It's good weather for ducks."
And I was expecting him to go, "Oh, yeah, yeah, very good."
He just looked back and went, "Bad weather for dust."
APPLAUSE
Some cultures have a different attitude.
So the Japanese have a concept, something called haragei,
and basically it means belly talk.
And the idea is that you use a prolonged silence
in business negotiations.
And they're content with an average silence of about 8.2 seconds,
so twice as long as we are.
So I think it's very much a cultural attitude to it.
Maybe that's why, especially in dating,
you do feel the silence a lot,
because usually the instinct is, he's awful.
A couple of bottles of wine and two years later, there you are!
Hey! "Let's buy a flat."Yeah.
Well, isn't that the theory, when you look at someone,
you either, you either want to kill them or you want to...
Yeah, if you're looking someone directly in the eye,
it's either kind of sexual or aggressive,
after about three seconds.
It's one or the other, you can't... Not both?
It's not neutral, Alan.Oh.
That's sexual.
APPLAUSE
Damn it! Too easy.
How about if I do it?
Just aggressive.
But does it count when you're on the other end of the phone
and you're negotiating and you don't say anything,
you put the phone down and walk away like they do in films?
And they get back there and the person has tripled the offer.
You can throw an argument in your favour. I had a friend of mine
who did a lot of negotiating and he had a pronounced stutter
and somebody would say, "I'd offer you 3,000."
And he'd go, "F-F-F-F..."
And they'd go, "OK, four." And he said, "I was going to say fine."
I've got a friend that whenever she changes jobs,
they always come with the offer for the new job,
and she says the trick is you don't read what the offer is.
You just get the e-mail and you write back and you write,
"I'm very disappointed."
But you can't look at the offer because sometimes the offer
is really generous, and they always come back with a better offer.
That is the phrase I use with my children all the time.
I go in the other room and laugh.
But I was thinking about the dopamine thing
that you said, you know, one of the things that we now know
is that particularly talking about ourselves
triggers these neural rewards in the brain.
Talking about yourself? Talking about yourself.
And the subjects who were in this study were even offered money,
and they turned money down in order to carry on
talking about themselves, and apparently,
they still felt good, even if they knew nobody was listening.
Well, what talking to yourself is like...
Talking to yourself in the, commonly, in the bathroom.
Sometimes my kids walk past and go, "Who are you talking to?"
What do you talk about in the bathroom?
How to get out.
There you have it, scientists have found you can't even pay us
to shut up about ourselves.
What's the one sound you really can't ignore?
Oh, babies crying.
I think that is true for... I don't know, is it true for boys?
I was going to say Wu-Tang Clan.
What? What is that?
Wu-Tang Clan Killa Beez On The Storm.
No?
Wu-Tang Clan, you know. Method Man. RZA.RZA, Method Man.
Ghostface Killah?
You know Ghostface Killah, Sandi.
Keep going till we get to Gangnam Style.
Gangnam Style, I knew I knew you from somewhere!
I would say our fridge makes a noise if you leave the door open.
I never hear the fridge until the noise stops.
That sounds like a trailer for a horror film.Yeah.
The Silence Of The Fridge. The fridge lands on your head!Yeah.
Don't leave the door open.
Everything I own warns me all the time.
I used to have a microwave, when it stopped it went, "ping."
And now it goes "beep, beep, beep, beep, beep..."
Is it reversing?
"..beep beep beep."
But it keeps reversing forever,
forever more, until there's a power cut.
Do you think the people making white goods for your house
have seen you on this show?
My car bleeps, if I'm in reverse it bleeps
and if I'm near something at the back it bleeps.
It does a different bleep if I'm near something at the front.
It's got three bleeps... Who's letting you drive?!
And then, on top of that, my wife's next to me going,
"This car's making too much noise!" Then all the kids go,
"Oh, what's all this bleeping?"
Can everyone shut up? Shut up!
I can see the thing behind, I can see the thing in front!
I know I'm in reverse, I put it there myself!
APPLAUSE
Sadly, on his 234th show...
..Alan Davies had a complete breakdown.
Yeah, but the dopamine, I just had the dopamine.
Everyone heard you, yeah.
Anyway, I wasn't talking about any of those things.
Is it the sound iPads make on planes?
Technically, we are talking about the one sound a child cannot ignore.
Oh, ice cream van.
No.Oh.
It's the sound of a woman's voice, is what we now know.
So children tend to sleep through fire alarms and so on,
they tend to sleep through them.
It's partly because they sleep more deeply.
I read about this, so they were going to have a smoke alarm
that had a voice coming out of it, if it was in a child's bedroom.
Yes, absolutely right.
There is a really strong response to a maternal voice,
and that is why there is going to be
a new kind of smoke alarm with a female voice.
So they've been testing them.
I don't know if this would do it for me,
it was a woman's voice going, "Wake up, the house is on fire."
No, you want a bit more urgency.
I think that might be better than the alternate.
My mother was an incredibly sweary woman,
and I think if she'd recorded a fire alarm,
it would have been just filth.
It would have been like a pirate was doing it.
Dundee University, working with Derbyshire Fire and Rescue,
and they tested smoke alarms in 2017 on sleeping children,
and it is astonishing, the difference.
The woman's voice will wake your child up 86 to 91% of the time,
whereas a tonal alarm, just over 50%.
Apparently, incorporating your child's name into the recording
makes no difference whatsoever.
You could call a little girl Frank and it wouldn't make any difference.
I think, if you use your child's name, that's when they ignore you.
Yes, that is true. They hear their name and think, "Uh-oh."Yeah.
Why that thing when they use your full name?
If I was ever referred to as James, it would...
"Oh, I'm in a lot of trouble now." Yes.
What are your middle names?
Anthony Patrick.
And do they sometimes use the lot? And then you're really in the shit.
ANDREW:I think that's called a judge,
you're in court.
APPLAUSE
Getting sentenced... "James Anthony Patrick Carr."
"You are a habitual criminal."
"You have been caught once again."
"No signs of remorse."
So children can ignore these alarms
but the ability to ignore noises is not unique to humans.
So they have discovered that mice also have a noise-cancelling
function in their brain. What noise might mice want to cancel out?
Other mice.Well, sort of. heading in the right direction.
Other mice having sex.
Because they apparently do it all the time.
Really, is it very loud?
I have no idea of the volume.
I'm not there, creepy, outside the nest.
No, it's the sound of their own footsteps,
because, imagine, it would be very annoying.
I think you're thinking of the little mouse with clogs on.
I think that's a nice sound.
But if you're a mouse and you're really close to that sound,
you can't hear predators
so they actually cancel out the sound of their own...
Have you seen the new tinnitus app?
Sorry?So if you have a ringing in your ears constantly,
what it does, basically you listen to it and you get exactly
the same ringing in your ears on the phone,
and you listen to this thing, and you practice turning on and off
the phone and eventually your brain learns to turn off
the tinnitus in your own head.
If that is true, that is the most brilliant thing.It's genius.
There is a phenomenon where people can hear things which are not there
and that is called musical ear syndrome
and that's when you hear music that isn't there.
It's thought it's the brain trying to compensate
for sensory deprivation.
Robert Schumann, the great German composer,
he reportedly heard entire symphonies in his head
from which he did originally draw inspiration
but eventually he was released from his job as a conductor in 1851
because he couldn't distinguish the music in his head
and the music he was conducting, which if you're a conductor...
..not going to go as well...
Isn't there a story about Paul McCartney and Yesterday,
that he was humming Yesterday, it came to him in a dream,
and he was humming it for three days going, "Who wrote this?"
And it just came to him fully formed in a dream.
Oh, my God.
I was in a shop and I realised,
and I wasn't sure how long I'd been doing it,
that I was humming the theme tune to Jonathan Creek.
Waiting to be recognised!
What a way to draw attention to yourself!I know!
How loud was the hum?Really loud.
Schumann was quite mad by the end.
He just heard one note, it was an A.
A single, tortuous... He'd left the fridge open.
Do you know, this is one of the things where people become human.
Unfortunately, he did end up in what used to be called a lunatic asylum,
and his wife, Clara, they had seven children.
She got hold of their friend Brahms
and Brahms used to go round and do childcare instead of composing.
He did write a lot of lullabies, to be fair.
Isn't that the thing with van Gogh and Paul Gauguin
that van Gogh's really famous paintings of the sunflowers,
he painted them to do up the room for Paul to come and stay.
He was in the pit of despair living in southern France
and Paul Gauguin came to stay.
My elves tell me it is entirely true
so that's a very good fact, you get an extra point.
APPLAUSE
Sometimes our brains block out sound that is there
and hear sound that isn't.
Sorry, what was that?
Oh, thank you very much, Alan. I picked it out myself.
What's the most...?
LAUGHTER
What's the most dangerous thing to do in bed?
ANDREW:Tell the truth.
APPLAUSE
Anybody else?
Reverse cowgirl?
KLAXON
Really? Really?
They had that locked and loaded?
There was some suggestion you might say that, darling.
Is it a particular favourite?
Yeah, how did you know?
So we're looking at the past,
we're looking at particularly the Victorian era.
So something that is dangerous to do in bed in the Victorian time.
They would have had candles and things, to light themselves to bed.
Yeah, exactly right. Gas lamps and things.Candles in particular.
Oh, candles, yeah.Why would you take a candle to bed?
To read?I suppose, reading in bed. To read, yeah.
Reading, the silent killer. It was not thought to be a good thing at all,
because it was burning as you drifted off.Yeah.
There's a most fantastic summary of fires in London from 1833 to 1866.
So in those days, all fires were dealt with
by the fire insurance company.
And they kept meticulous records.
So, here's a quick snapshot of 19th century London life.
"One death from a fire caused by a jackdaw."
No details provided, that's it. Don't know what that was.
Another caused by a monkey.
Two attributed to smoking in bed.
Three to sewing in bed. Anybody?
12 to lightning.
But the figure that tops all of these is 34 lethal fires
caused by reading in bed.
In fact, exactly equalled by the number of fires started by cats.
Has anyone ever actually damaged their eyes reading by torchlight?
I don't know because it used to be a thing.
I was told that every night of my childhood.
"You'll damage your eyes!"
I think it's a myth, darling. Under the covers.
I used to read with a torch as well and neither of us have glasses.
Who's speaking now?
It's your fire alarm.
When I was at university, there were two students
who wanted to go off grid.
They wouldn't even wear shoes, for some inexplicable reason,
and they wouldn't have electricity or gas or anything,
and they'd use newspaper for loo paper, and candles,
and they knocked a candle over in the toilet and burnt the house down.
It's sad because it was a beautiful old house on the beach
but it was funny.
Maybe it wasn't their fault, maybe it was spontaneous combustion.
Or a jackdaw.1,255 fires attributed to spontaneous combustion.
Used to be a thing that Victorians were terrified of.
I was obsessed with that growing up, the idea that fat was like wax
and the wick was inside and that's why it was so quick,
but it's kind of stopped happening since the internet
because there would be a video of it now.
Someone with their phone would have gone, "Oh, Nana's burning."
Various examples over the years,
Lord Walsingham found burnt to a crisp in his bedroom in 1831
but it is probably because he was reading in bed.
Is this the bottom of him burnt?
That's it.
Reading in particular for women was regarded as dangerous.
Women reading in solitude, it gave them rebellious, fantastical ideas.
It was novels, specifically.
There were very, very worried because novels were in
the third person and might make people too empathetic,
and thus weaken the nation.
Another common hazard in the 1800s, of course, Christmas trees.
Now, I dispute this. In those days,
Christmas trees were lit with real candles.Yeah.
Now, I am Danish. For the last 60 years,
I have had Christmas lit with real candles,
and so far, not a flicker of a fire.
Just don't set the tree on fire, it's not complicated.
But apparently, it was so great a risk in this country
that insurance companies wouldn't...
So you've got the candles on the tree?
Special candle holders that hook onto the branch like that.Yeah.
And you just make sure, when you put the candle on,
that there isn't a branch directly above, that is the key to it.
Honestly, I've never known this to happen,
but insurance companies refuse to insure people
against this particular thing.
And in fact, there was a spate of patents
for self-extinguishing Christmas trees, for a while.
There was an American called Leonard Deyo,
he filed a patent in 1947, and it had a hose
that ran up the trunk and had a sprinkler system
on the top of the tree, that you could use to prevent this.
I think, as long as you remember to take the jackdaw out at night...
Yeah!
Perhaps the lack of a jackdaw is why we've been so successful so far.
Has anyone ever done a poem about jackdaws and back doors?
Cos if they haven't, I'm going to do one before the end of the show.
Yeah, you write... It sounds so like a back door.
You're right, the jackdaw and the back door does sound like some kind of...
They go together.Yes, they do.
Right, you do that, we'll do the next question on our own.
Jackdaw, back door,
lack more, smack whore.
That's where I've got to.
What's the...?Seashore, seashore...
Crack whore.
I'm thinking... Crack whore is what I'm thinking, isn't it?
Yeah. What about be poor?
Be...no, be poor? No, it's got to be...
Why am I joining in?
She sells sea shells
down by the crack whore.
Here comes a jackdaw flying in the back door.
You carry on, darling.
I've never been happier. Dopamine, dopamine. Dopamine, dopamine.
Hacksaw.
Oh!
APPLAUSE
Oh, my goodness!
Hang on, I'm looking at Jimmy. Tax law.
APPLAUSE
You're very good at this!
In all fairness, I don't pay tax either, but I don't get caught.
Right. Erm...
What would you hear at the most peaceful place in Britain?
SARA:I reckon dogging.
They, honestly, they're ruin... they're ruining the countryside.
We've got rights!
You've also got houses.
ANDREW:I think the answer is builders.
Builders?Builders. Cos that's what happens.
In all the most beautiful places in the land,
all you can hear is builders.
Well, that is not the case,
because we are looking at the most peaceful spot in Britain.
It's been officially declared, the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
It is a region of Northumberland National Park.
It's been left alone since 1911.
23% of this national park
is owned by the MOD and is used for military training.
So, remarkably quiet, unless a tank is going past.
Yeah, or they're firing things at you.
There's one of them down in Lulworth Cove in Dorset,
where there's a tank firing range.
And there's massive traffic signs that just say,
"Warning, sudden gunfire."
I mean, I don't know about how the rest of you live,
but all gunfire is sudden for me.
Yes.
I always wonder, with that sign that's a triangle
with falling rocks, and it just says "Falling Rocks." Yeah.
That might as well just say, "Be lucky." Yeah!
While you're driving along doing that...
..that's when you hit things, isn't it?
SARA:You'll get little beeps just as they come just above your car.
There won't be a beep, that's the annoying thing!There's no beep?
There'll be no beep from that. You've got a beeper up there.
There won't be a roof beep!
ANDREW:Does anybody else, when you go through one of those,
you know, the height inhibitor into a certain car park,
you're in a car and you know you're going to fit into it,
but do you...?Yeah.
You know, I'll tell you what my one is.
I'll be driving along on the motorway,
and there'll be fog
and I'll drive like that.
Just in case the fog is in the car.
There's a big sign saying, "Fog".
If you can see it, it's not that bad, is it?
Other quiet options,
does anybody what Teesside Airport train station is near?
What it's near?
Well, this is the thing, it is not anywhere near Teesside Airport,
for two reasons. One is it's a mile away from the airport.
And the other thing is the airport has been renamed
Durham Tees Valley Airport.
There's one train a week. It's on a Sunday, 14:56.
It is one of our ghost stations.
Those stairs just go up and up...
So they announced in December 2017 that the footbridge would be closed,
and apparently it would save �6 million if they did so
until 2022, because that's how much it costs to maintain it,
and in fact most of the tickets that are bought
to Teesside Airport Station are purely bought by collectors
because there's no point in going there
and now they've closed the footbridge as well.
There are quite a few of these ghost stations.
There's the Leeds-Snaith line.
Monday to Saturday, there is one train a day.
Apparently, it is easier to maintain a minimal service
than go to the expense of closing down an entire line.
This is going to be a godsend to doggers who have lost their licence.
You've just given them a whole new option.
They think the reason they keep it is people would be upset
if it was closed, which I love as a British reason.
I'd be upset and I've only just heard that it existed.
If you're in the United States and you wanted complete quiet,
you go to a place called the National Radio Quiet Zone,
it's in West Virginia.
It's a 13,000 square mile patch of land
where all electromagnetic radiation is banned
and it's because it's where the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
is and they don't want any interference with it.
All the vehicles that they use around the area are relics
from the 1950s or '60s, or trucks with diesel engines,
because the spark plug in a modern petrol engine
might cause some interference.
Microwave ovens are kept in special metal cages,
people use phone booths in place of mobile phones.
It's like a real glimpse into America's future.
Who here likes total silence and who finds it disconcerting?
I had a situation where I was flying back from Portugal
on quite a well-known bargain airline.
And then I had to go straight off to do some work,
so I wanted to sleep on the, almost three hours on the plane.
And the other side of the aisle seat there was a Portuguese lady
and her two/three-year-old son who had an iPad,
and the iPad was on and it was going,
"BING, BONG, BING, DING, BONG, BONG, BONG, DING, DING, DING!"
I love that game.
Sounds like he was doing pretty well.
That's actually one of the Wu-Tang Clan's most famous songs.
I had a brand-new set of headphones
but I couldn't converse with this lady, so I went to the crew,
who were also Portuguese, at the back, and I went, "I've got these headphones,
"I really need sleep and I'm very happy, he can keep the headphones.
"Totally understand, I'm a parent myself, keeping kids distracted,
"but I really need sleep." He went, "No problem, no problem."
He goes down there and he snatches the iPad off her and goes,
"No! No! No!"
And then he takes the iPad and he bonks over the head with it...
Oh, my goodness!
Then he turns around to me, he went, "Enjoy your flight."
APPLAUSE
And then a lovely three hours' sleep.
I was just trying to sleep while there was a lady and a child crying.
Wow, that's one way of dealing with it, isn't it?
Now, how do you quell a carnivorous plant?
By quell, so do you mean sate it or stop it wanting?
Stop it...well, stop it being able to actually function.
So let's have a quick look.Oh, OK.
Let's have a look at a Venus flytrap, OK?
So you know the theory behind the Venus flytrap is...Fly away!
Fly! Run for your life!
Fly!
Have a look at a video of it actually functioning,
cos it is the most extraordinary thing.Yeah, it's amazing.
So watch it just closing up now.
So there is the fly.
Oh...
I mean, that's creepy, right?Yeah.
But if you wanted to make it stop working,
you would anaesthetise it, exactly as you do human beings.
So you can gas them with ether,
you can swab the roots with lidocaine.
And what'll happen is, it'll just stop working.
The fly will land there, but the thing won't close down.
And it is found that the electrical impulses in the plant
have temporarily dropped to zero.
It is exactly the same effect as what happens to us.
So a plant would be exactly the same reaction
to an anaesthetic as a human? Yes, exactly.
I find that stuff extraordinary.
You know this fentanyl stuff that's 1,000 times
more powerful than heroin as an opiate,
and drug dealers are selling fentanyl
but they're having to cut it with heroin to take the edge off.
It's like trying to defuse a bomb by flying a plane into it. It's mad.
Carfentanyl is even stronger.
This is my own personal brand of fentanyl.
It's really good, you don't pay VAT on it.
APPLAUSE
Whether you're a cop or ambulance personnel,
when they pick up somebody who's OD'd from carfentanyl,
they've got to wear extra-thick gloves because if you just touch
skin to skin, you'll OD. Through your skin?
So why does anyone take it?
I think it's very moreish.
We don't entirely know how anaesthetics actually work.
We do know that something like lidocaine works by stopping
local neurons signalling to the human brain,
but it also seems to work on plants.
And the truth is, we don't really know how anaesthetics work.
Can I just show you something
which I hadn't seen before, but maybe you have?
I'd never seen a Venus flytrap in flower,
and actually, they're rather beautiful,
cos you only ever see it when it's looking sort of slightly vicious.
But isn't it rather lovely? ANDREW:Wow.
That's...terrifying.
I think it's rather beautiful.
They gassed all sorts of other plants, as well.
The effect is the same, they all just went straight to sleep.
Has anyone asked why they're up to this?
They're trying to work out how anaesthetics work.
It wasn't like a group of flies got together...No, it wasn't!
"Something's got to be done about this, flies!"
"We should shut them down!"Yeah.
One of the interesting things that they found out really recently
about pain and the brain is that if you think about colours,
it distracts your brain from the part of your brain
that's getting the messages about being in pain.
So something quite good, if you don't have any pain relief,
if you think about colours, one at a time.Yeah.
People with hypermobility, so double-jointed people,
appear to be resistant to sort of topical creams
and to being injected by local anaesthetics.
AUDIENCE:Oh!
I know, that's quite strange, isn't it?
Three times more likely, a hypermobile person,
to report that a local anaesthetic is not effective.Not working.
I know you're still talking, but I can't stop looking at that.
I'm aware you're speaking, but who cares? Wow!
He does these amazing YouTube yoga tutorials.
I can't help feeling, I mean, I know it's just a story,
but I think a radioactive spider's been involved there.
In general, whether you're animal or vegetable,
anaesthetic will put you to sleep.
Now, who would use a Quaker gun?
Well, not a Quaker. They're famously pacifists.
They are famously pacifists, and so is the gun.
It's to scare something away, then?
Yeah, look at that gun. Rather than hit them.
It's just a log, painted to look like a gun.Oh.Oh.
Oh, it's like someone has it in the jacket, has the gun in the jacket
and they go, "Yeah, I've got a gun." Yeah.Yeah. "Have you got a gun?"
So during the American Revolutionary War, for example, in 1780,
there was a Colonel William Washington and he managed
to convince a loyalist commander and 120 of his followers to
surrender from their barricaded barn by pointing a painted log at them.
Just a pine log.
That must be a terrible way... Yes, you must feel awful.
..to lose a battle.Yeah.
"Oh, they didn't have a gun after all. Aah!"
Ah, just killed...killed off by the Arts and Crafts army.
But the Americans did it as well in the Second World War.
So the Mitchell B25 bomber did not have any guns at the rear,
so they just painted some broomstick handles and stuck them out the back,
so that the Japanese thought, "I'd better not come from behind,
"because they've got guns at the back."We did the same thing here.
We had inflatable tanks all along the south coast. That's right.
The Allies had inflatable tanks and they used them in North Africa
to confuse the Nazis.I don't know that they were inflatable, darling.
No, no, they were literally, they were like...Like a bouncy castle?
Yes, yeah! And to show that they had a sense of humour about it, too,
the Germans dropped wooden bombs on them.
Well, I knew that we had fake stuff,
but I did not know that it was made... I mean, like a...
Honestly, like you just...? SHE PUFFS
Yeah. Like a girlfriend.
I think, darling, that they were made of canvas,
if I'm honest with you.
Still pretty funny for a Nazi to send, like, a wooden bomb back.
GERMAN ACCENT:"Just there back at the base, just carving away,
"This is going to be funny."
Don't do that accent with that haircut.
APPLAUSE
It's not... Not a good...
Either one. Either one is fine.
But when you combine them, I feel it's dangerous.
Anybody ever been to a Quaker meeting?Yes.
Did you go to a silent one?
Yes. Waterford in Ireland is the Quaker capital of Ireland.
Everybody is just silent
until somebody gets taken by the Holy Spirit
and then they stand up and offer up a prayer, and that's it for an hour.
There's no hymns, there's nothing else.
The thing I've discovered, which I didn't know,
because I thought all Quaker meetings were silent,
is it's only 11% now of Quaker worship.
There's an awful lot of people going to what's called "programmed".
I love the silent, unprogrammed worship. I have to say,
not as much as a group of young Quakers in Nottingham.
In February 2018, they released, it was a big hit, a silent podcast.
They broadcast an entire 30-minute meeting for worship,
and it just featured audible shuffles, creaking chairs
and the turning of a Quaker Advice & Queries pages. That's it.
I could have just taped one of my audiences.
And now it's time to whisper our way
through the calming quietude of General Ignorance.
How good are you at multitasking?
Excellent.
KLAXON BLARES Excellent?
OK.
Here we go. Oh, I see.Yeah.
I didn't know I was going to be tested on it.
You just volunteered yourself, OK?
So I want you to take this stack from here
and recreate it exactly the same on this one,
and you have to move them one at a time, OK?Oh, great.
But while you're doing it,
I want you to recite the alphabet backwards.
Ooh!
Well, I can't do that anyway.
Ah.
I mean, I don't think I can do it forwards, like.
A, B...
No, no, so you don't understand how the game functions. Um...
Are we going to find out that Andrew's a toddler?
Just took them off and put them on the counter!
And said, "A, B..."
A, B, C...It's not backwards, though, is it? No, no, no!
I can't do it backwards.
No, Z! Z!Backwards, Z.
And put them on the middle one! No, no.Andrew, Andrew, Andrew...
ANDREW:All right, OK. Listen to me.Righto.
Start again, move the whole thing that way.
This is more annoying than my microwave!
OK, here we go again.
Z, Y...
Keep them on the post. Go backwards. ..X...
Move them one at a time. No! Middle one.
What's wrong with this one? No, don't help him!
I love this, cos as I said...
Z, Y, X, W...
..V...
AUDIENCE: U! U!
OK, you're not supposed to get any help.U.
Don't pretend you can do this.
So why did you say...?
Why did you say that you are good at multitasking?
I'm a man and I like to brag.
What they found is, doing tests at Stamford University,
people who consider themselves to be good at multitasking
actually do worse at performing multiple tasks
than people who preferred to focus on things one at a time.
It's one of those strange things.
But anybody else think they would be better at it?
I mean, than THAT, yeah.Go.
The fact is that what we now know
is that the brain is pretty much incapable of focusing
on more than one thing at a time... Yeah.
..if it requires a level of thought.
I mean, walking, you can do and do something else at the same time.
But the task that... But that's the...
I did a course years ago in neuro-linguistic programming,
and the idea was that your conscious mind
can hold, like, five things in it. Mm.So if you think about,
"How do my feet feel at the moment in these shoes? How's my breathing?"
And you think about "What I'm having for dinner this evening,"
and then the first thing's gone -
you can't remember how your feet feel in the shoes,
cos your conscious mind doesn't do that much.
But your subconscious mind... Doing two things at the same time...
Automatic things, yeah...if it's done by your subconscious mind,
then yes.Yeah. If it's breathing and walking.It depends what it is.
So singing, which is an auditory process,
is easy to combine with riding a bicycle,
because that is a motor process.
They utilise different brain processes.
It's when you've got a thing that really requires single focus.
It's called a bottleneck. Like voting.
Yes, exactly like that, exactly like that.
When you're multitasking, what your brain's actually doing
is switching back and forth very fast between the tasks.
So, really, it would have been better off to do it one at a time.
So why's there a thing about men not being able to multitask
and women being able to? No, but it's kind of reverse sexism,
that essentially it was invented by men to go,
"No, no, no, you should do all the housework,
"because you're able to kind of, like, look after the baby
"and do the dinner AND keep the kitchen clean."Yeah.
It's like ads. You know, the ad is always a massive suburban house,
and the husband can't put in a light bulb.
The amount of ads that, over the last 30, 40 years,
is always, "Oh, George! Hur-hur-hur!
"Oh, he's useless, isn't he?
"Anyway, buy this."Yeah.
But, yeah, and also it is insulting to men.
There's no consensus at all...No.
..as to whether men or women are better at multitasking.
But multitasking actually causes a temporary ten-point decrease in IQ.
It's about the same as smoking marijuana
or missing a night's sleep, if you try and multitask.
You're much better off doing things one at a time.Yeah.
It seems there's no such thing as a multitask master.
Right, everybody gets a banana.
I want you to show me how a wild monkey would eat this, please.
Oh, I reckon I know this. ANDREW: I know.
Yes? Oh.
- Upside down. - Whoa.
Oh, that's very good.
How am I doing? KLAXON BLARES
How does that work?!
I think monkeys in the wild don't, in fact, eat bananas.
ALAN:Yeah, I'm with you.
Oh, cos they don't have access to bananas, yeah.
It's like the way polar bears don't eat penguins.Yeah.
Cos they don't like chocolate biscuits.
APPLAUSE That's it.
You're absolutely right.
Wild monkeys do not eat bananas at all. Why is that?
There are no bananas in the wild. Correct, absolutely right.
It's a domesticated plant, the edible banana.
And there's only one left, isn't there? What, banana?
No, one type of banana. There was... That's right, it died out.
Yeah, it died out and there was one place that had them,
and that now caters everyone.
Well, there are some bananas that grow in the wild,
but they are not particularly...
A banana plant takes nine months to grow...Yeah.
..nine months to produce a bunch of bananas and then that's it finished.
And it's technically a herb.
These are all correct facts about bananas,
but the wild banana is oval, it's not remotely sweet,
it's not particularly edible.
Monkeys do not tend to eat them.
They do like to eat them in the zoo.
Let's see how.
There is a monkey eating it in the zoo.
They seem to eat it any way they like -
they bite into it, they pierce the skin, they just...
He just wants to get it down him, doesn't he?
Doesn't really care. They do love human-engineered bananas.
They've been known to raid plantations.
They are actually seen as a bit of a pest.
But Paignton Zoo in Devon
has stopped monkeys from eating bananas now, because they're too sugary.Mm.
And they cause gastro-intestinal problems.
And here's my favourite banana fact.
Enid Blyton's nephew Carey Blyton
wrote the song Bananas In Pyjamas.
I know it's a bit random.
As we were doing songs and I didn't know any of them, I know that one.
I know, "Let's all go along the Strand, have a banana,"
it's because they used to have a fruit stall
right at that end of Charing Cross.
You know, Des O'Connor couldn't walk when he was young,
very tragic childhood, which he recovered from,
but his autobiography is called Bananas Can't Fly
because his father would hold a banana when encouraging him
to recover the use of his legs and say,
"You've got to come and get it, it can't fly."
And it was a rare thing to have a banana,
and then when he recovered and he was able to walk,
he went down the shops and got run over - and that's a true story!
That's a wonderful story.
Where was the fruit stall in, did you say the Strand?
There is a really old kind of London Cockney song.
Yeah. You used to be able to, I've got a friend that wrote a book
about pineapples and you used to be able to rent a pineapple on the Strand.
No-one ate pineapples. It was a sign of wealth.
They had them on Lambeth Bridge in the architecture
and it was a fashion item. Women dressed up like pineapples.
I heard this lovely story about sailors coming home
from being away for months and months at a time,
and the wives would put a pineapple in the window and it would signify,
my husband is home, no gentleman callers, please.
Absolutely.Someone told me that stately home thing,
the big pineapples on stately homes, is kind of a gag alluding to that.
Gateposts with pineapples on to show the lady was permanently virtuous.
Kind of cute.I know.
I'm not getting one.
There was a woman that died in pineapple as well, in London.
She died in pineapple?
She bathed in pineapple and the acid killed her.
Right, moving on.
What did the first sneeze sound like?
Atishoo.
KLAXON BLARES No, not...No, not "Achoo!"
No. Achoo is different.Yeah.
Atishoo is different from achoo. I'm not having that.
You've pressed the wrong button. No, I think...
Everything about sneezing...
"Atishoo!" It's not the same as "Achoo!"
That's a different sneeze.Yeah.OK.
Everything about sneezing is adorable. The way that people...
Their eyes kind of glaze over, like they can't concentrate for a second.
The worst thing is when it goes away.
When you think you're going to sneeze and it goes,
you've been robbed of it.You think,
"He'll be back, and it'll be even stronger."
I don't think you make any noise when you sneeze.
I think it's a socially learned thing.
You're absolutely right, it's an affectation.Is it?
So you could go, "Yahoo!" Yeah, well...
..deaf people who have never heard the affectation
do not make the sounds that the rest of us make when we sneeze.Oh!
So "atishoo" or "achoo" or, in German, "haschi",
"hakshon" in Japanese, the Filipino is "hatsing".
The Polish say "apsik".
We all have a noise that we make, but we've learnt to make it.
Apparently, if you have never heard a sneeze before,
what it actually should sound like is a heavy breath,
as the deep pre-sneeze breath is taken,
and then a sharper, faster sound of air being released.Ahh-huh...
But we make that noise because we think we're supposed to.
Hic!It's what a sneeze sounds like. That's a great fact, isn't it?
It's a really great fact.Yeah.
WHINING SNEEZE
I'm so sorry.
That's a great sneeze, do that again.
Alan's come down with something.
Very poorly. That was several years ago, darling.
Still battling. You may need some W-40.
There's also a different cultural response to how we sneeze,
so we tend to say bless you, that tends to be the thing.
The Burmese say, "Understood."
I don't know why. The Chinese say, "Duo he dian shui,"
and it means, "Drink more water."
The Portuguese cry, "Little Saint,"
the Serbians say, "Go away, kitten."
The record for the longest fit of sneezing
belongs to a British woman called Donna Griffiths.
She began sneezing on the 13th of January 1981,
and she had her first sneeze-free day...
..977 days later.No!
She sneezed an estimated one million times.
Worked in the pepper factory, I believe.
Yeah, I'll just be clear that's not her, OK?
That's just a very nice random person.Stock image sneezer.
Stock image of person sneezing. Yeah.
And at school, did you have that thing where everyone was like,
if you sneeze eight times, it's the same as a whole orgasm?
Did you? No.No. OK. Yeah.
That was a thing at school, just like, "Oh, three! Five more."
Yeah."Five more."
What do you say when it happens?
Because the Koreans say...
Get out my away, kitten!
I think when you orgasm, I think it's nice to say,
"Bang goes the dynamite!"
Or, "Whoopsie daisies."
It's really time to finish.
That also works.
There's the most fantastic game,
which is played on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue,
which was coming up with sentences that work
both in the kitchen and in the bedroom.
So things like, "Ooh, it's a bit dry, do you have any cream?"
Or, "I prefer your mother's," that kind of thing.
Wow.
"Do you fancy a roast this Sunday?"
That's it!
"Just stick it in for 20 minutes
"and I'll get you the free garlic bread." Um...
All of which leaves us clamouring for the scores.
And I can tell you, in fourth place, with minus two,
which I think is very creditable,
it's Alan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Minus two.
In third place, with minus one, Sara!
APPLAUSE Thank you. Thank you.
In second place, with a full three points, Andrew!
APPLAUSE
In first place, with seven actual points, it's Jimmy.
How? What did I say? CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Right, it's thanks to Andrew, Jimmy, Sara and Alan.
And I leave you with this quick quotation from Mark Twain.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels.
"If a man should challenge me,
"I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand
"and lead him to a quiet place
"and kill him."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE