One's loyal subjects. Colin Lay. Queen's shilling. David Mitchell. Queen's uniform. Sarah Millican.
Doom of the stool. Alan Davis. Queenly quartet. Sarah Goes. Colin Goes. Love a bit of Scandi
music. David Goes. Goes. About the royal. It doesn't smell. You're off and running.
They're edging his first delivery slip. Right, yes. Was that an Australian accent? Oh, come on!
I've been working on that since you were last here. Really? They don't open their teeth up. They, they, they, they.
I've busted my crown, you see? I'll go over to the side. What can you talk about the royal mean? There was something weird about
George III's wee. I think maybe it was purple and then they thought he had porphyria. Yes. And then now they think he didn't have porphyria,
but they were definitely saying there's something up with this guy's wee. Yeah. Also, he's gone mad. Yes.
That is entirely correct, but I am heading in a different direction. Why might a royal person say wee? Our first person plural?
It is the majestic plural. It's known as nosism from the Latin, nose, for wee. It's the idea that the royal person,
instead of referring to themselves as I, in fact, says wee. Implying there's more than one of them. Yes, well,
we can trace it back to Henry II, and it used to mean God and I. That's what it really comes from.
We've got Henry II there and his successor, Richard I, and it's Richard I that introduced the motto,
Dieu est mon droit, God in my right, and that remains the royal motto ever since.
It's got your crown on it, it's got your crown. I like to think this is like a working crown.
This isn't like a parliament opening coronation crown. This is a crown. Daily. Yeah, you can wear it all the time.
You can go into battle. Yeah. Going to get a paper and some fags. Yeah. Going to the garage at 3am for munches. Yeah.
The Queen doesn't actually use the pronoun one as much as you would think. They analysed all her speeches since 1952
and she uses I six times more often than she says one. It's a parody, really, of how she speaks,
because it isn't. Unless she got bored of it. Yeah, one's not doing that anymore. Must be boring being Queen, so it just makes it a bit.
It must be quite dull, do you not think, constantly having to open and close things?
I don't think, to be fair, you mean opening as in launching? Yeah. I don't think she closes many things.
When BHS went under, I didn't know. You're in charge. The whole approach to pronouns can be quite complicated.
So the very first Qin emperor, so the guy who unified China, his guy called Shi Huangli,
and he announced when he became emperor that the character, Chen, which was the normal singular
pronoun, so I, was for his imperial use only. And it meant everybody else had to come up with other ways of...
I am Chen. I am Chen. People used to refer to themselves often as you, meaning this foolish one,
or not refer to yourself at all. In terms of things that you might refer to yourself if you're
in charge, Kim Jong-il, he had more than 1200 titles with which he used to refer to himself,
including Heaven Sent Hero, Guardian Deity Of The Planet, and my personal favourite,
Eternal Bosom Of Hot Love.
1102, Deluded Maniac.
This is a great title. In Swaziland, Queen Mother Of King Musquati III has enjoyed the title of
In Lo Vucasi, The Great Shi Elephant. I think I'd like to be that. Don't you think it's a good title?
No. Sometimes I just want to feel like when I'm in the bath. Who chews the Queen's food?
Beef eaters.
Bacteria.
Oh. Yes, I think we're going to accept that, except that we are in the land of honey.
It's a bee. The worker bees. The worker bees? The worker bees are the other bees.
It's not all the other bees because they divide up into lots of categories. So there's lazy
ones as well. There are drone ones, there are scout ones, there are worker ones.
There are product development bees, aren't there? Yeah. They've achieved very little recently.
I mean, it is just honey, isn't it? Yeah, it's just honey.
Unless it's Manuka honey and then it's 15 quid. Yeah. What are those bees doing?
But when you compare them to KitKat, I mean, there's orange KitKat berries. I mean,
they've really worked on the product development compared to honey is just honey.
So worker bees, they pre-digest the Queen's food because she doesn't have
the necessary glands to digest it herself. Even more unpleasant than that, they have
the power to put her on a crash diet. What? Yes, I know. So she gets really big and heavy.
She's too heavy to fly and when they want to swarm, which they do once a year,
they put her on a crash diet so that she loses a third of her body weight and so she's ready
to take off. Is there a committee or something? There's some level of management that goes,
you know, the Queen's getting a bit porky. Well, you generally don't know how these
decisions are made. So, for example, choosing a new Queen, they seem to select rather randomly
a bee at the larva stage and they give it a special diet different from all of the workers.
So these are Queen cups. These are new Queens being developed. Most larva are fed honey and
pollen by worker bees, but occasionally one is fed only royal jelly, which is a sort of
protein that's secreted from the glands in the worker bees' heads and this one is elevated
to royal status and becomes Queen. But I like that you asked the question because the
truth is we don't know. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. So we used to think it was the
royal jelly that made the Queens develop differently and we now think it's not what
she's fed but what she is not fed. So the fact that she does not get pollen and honey like the
others, it actually makes her ovaries grow large while the other reproductive organs, the ones
that get the pollen and honey, they actually shrink. It's a terrible life actually because
when it comes time to get rid of her, she's sick or she's unproductive, she's not having
any more babies. The workers kill her by balling her. Oh, I don't know if I want to know what
that is. No, that's not what I think it is. No, a large group swarms tightly around her.
It's better than I was thinking. It raises her body temperature until she is fatally overheated.
I love that we're all feeling sorry that it is Queen Bee. But actually we say Queen Bee,
since Aristotle's time it was always assumed it was a king. It took until the 1670s
there was a Dutch scientist called Jan Svammerdam and he dissected a king bee under a microscope and
rather shocked to discover the size of the ovaries which represent a quarter of a mature
queen's body weight. He also learnt this great thing. If you remove the queen from the hive on
a stick, all the other bees will follow you and this is a beekeeping trick that people use now
and the most bizarre use was in the 18th century in show business. There was a beekeeper
called Daniel Wildman and he had a honey shop in London and he promoted it by riding horses
standing up while wearing a beard of bees. And that made people buy from his shop rather than
just thinking he was mad. It's pretty startling if you have a look. This is not him but these
are other people who have the skill of getting bees to do as they please. Did they all have
honey shops as well? They were just selling tickets in the end because there was a woman
called Patti Jones so she was the wife of the inventor of the modern circus Philip Astley
and she used to perform horse riding stunts but she used to have a swarm of bees on her hand
imitating a lady's muff. I mean a hand warmer. So do I. Who has sex for 15 years and gets
licked to death by their own children? It's got to be an insect. Is it something like a
like a termite? It is a termite. You're absolutely right. Yes.
Just to be warned even if you like insects I think this is a bit gross okay. And I don't really like
insects. I accept they're necessary. Yeah they are necessary but this is honestly a yellow pulsating
mass. So the termite queen just like bees is the only fertile female in the colony and she
gives birth to all the rest but unlike other insects mates for life and I mean literally.
So after choosing a king spends 15 years incessantly mating to produce the nest colony.
She produces one egg every three seconds. No. I know. So over a quarter of a billion in her
lifetime. It's like a paintball machine. So you can just see her head at the front and that is
her body and that her egg producing organ becomes so massive that she's rendered entirely.
There she is. I know she's played by Olivia Colman in the film.
Producing eggs the whole time. She grows to be too large to leave the cell. She can be a
hundred times the size of the other termites. Is that the king there on the end? No that's her.
The black bit at the end there. That's her. The rest is egg producing organ. I said it was gross.
Is she having sex and producing an egg at the same time? Yes so she's endlessly shaking. She goes
through about five to ten kings in her lifetime. I think they just get exhausted. I mean does she
do it the same way every time? Like do they have to experiment with the sex life to keep it
fun? No I think she just gets rid of the king and she can't move so her babies tend to
her. They feed her, they clean her, they drink the secretion that she sweats. Look at
this. I did warn you it's revolting but when she has outlived her usefulness so she's not
producing enough babies anymore the children surround her and they lick her to death. They
literally suck the fluids and fats from her body. Who would have thought that there was such a
disgusting story behind something as lovely as a termite?
But here's the weird thing when she dies gradually the whole mound dies away. So they
lick her to death and then everybody dies? Well what you need now is to start a new termite mound so
what'll happen? What I need now? No I mean when she's died you need to start a new mound and
so what happens is once a year virgin queens will fly out of the mound and they'll land on
the ground and they instantly shed their wings so they never fly again and they meet a king and
they go underground and they start a new mound. And how quickly can she change the king?
Well does she have to wear them out? Yeah I mean so in her lifetime she'll go through
between five and ten kings. As one king finishes does she sort of go quick I need another one.
Talking about royalty there was a study in 2018 and termite workers you have to understand
termite workers are generally blind. They perform a kind of curtsy when they can scent
royalty so there's a wax coat like substance that is over the king and queen and when the
workers smell it they pause and start shaking. Look see them shaking because it's
almost like a curtsy like being in the presence of their leader. Anyway moving on what's wrong
with the queen in this picture? Nothing at all. Oh no it's kissing her hand. Sorry.
Did you think that was a clean shaven gentleman?
Is she dead? She is dead. This is Innes de Castro so we are back in the 14th century.
She was the mistress of the then future king of Portugal Peter the first. He had a wife
called Constance and she died. It was very sad so he immediately moved Innes in and they had three
illegitimate children. Now his dad was still king then Alfonso the fourth. He was furious so
he had Innes killed. Well obviously Peter didn't like this very much so he caught two of the
killers and he had their hearts torn out and pulverized before him while he ate dinner. So
quite cross I mean on the whole quite cross. Six years later he became king. He announced
that he and Innes had secretly married. He dug her up and yes and placed her on the throne
and forced the court to swear allegiance to her and kiss her hand. So she's not only dead
darling she's been buried for six years. Well in which case they've done a great job. Yeah
she looks pretty good. Yeah absolutely I mean I look worse than that many days.
This is a magnificent coffin which you can still see it's at the monastery of Alcobarca
but there's a modern Portuguese expression agora Ines é morta now Ines is dead. It basically
means it's too late you can't turn back now but there she is finally linked by her children
well it's such a horrific story lots of people thought it was a myth but in fact
there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is in fact a fact but actually in this
country we had a similar sort of thing so in 1667 230 years after Catherine of Valois
she was the queen consort of Henry the fifth died her tomb was disturbed they're doing some
renovations in Westminster Abbey and after that if you paid a little bit extra to your tour guide
they would take you to see the corpse it became a sort of tourist attraction
and Samuel Pepys took his wife and daughters to see it and this is really weird he wrote in
his diary I did kiss her mouth reflecting upon it that I did kiss a queen that this was my
birthday 36 years old that I did first kiss a queen she was 230 years dead
it still counts
if it was his first queen was it his first corpse though maybe he couldn't say it was
his first corpse because he's already done that so he had to say it was his first queen
awkward yeah yeah oh the corpse thing oh that
is that the dead uh I would suggest that that's a wooden car it looks wood yes
oh yeah if that's her dead body it's had work yeah yeah there have been a couple of
instances of royals who were crowned before they were born uh king louis the tenth of
france he died on the fifth of june 1316 he was succeeded by his son uh john the first
but he wasn't born until the 15th of november so he reigned for five months in utero did
did they have a coronation well he died five days after he was born so he was
yeah but I mean in that dynasty he's the one who reigned for his whole life
he must be the only king to have reigned for five months longer than he actually lived
yeah innister castro was a bit of a stiff you know even for a royal now
what would you have to do to a mannequin to get yourself arrested
have sex with it for 15 years and then lick it to death I would say that if it's your
mannequin that would not be a legal issue would it if you want to pump it for years and years
and then lick it to bits then that's fine as long as it doesn't belong to marks and spencers
and you're not doing it in the winter so if that happens to me I can say David said it was
fine yeah I've said I promise you that you will not have a legal problem have you trained
in any way in in the legal fraternity no no I have no training but I am right
that's all it takes yeah so different kind of queen we're talking about drag queens
1941 there was a drag queen called Julian El Ting he was arrested simply for pointing
at a mannequin so this is really hard for us what with well that's him on the left and
that's him on the right as well and it's impossible for us to imagine but he was one
of the highest paid actors in the world in his day he was paid three and a half thousand
dollars a week so that's nearly sixty thousand dollars now in 1912 he had a Broadway theatre on
42nd street named after him everybody loved his drag act he was always doing lots and lots
of costume changes but then after world war one there was a spate of morality laws and
men were banned from dressing as women and shortly before his death he was reduced to
performing in a tuxedo with a mannequin next to him dressed as he would have done when he
dressed as a woman and he was arrested in a Los Angeles nightclub for simply pointing
it was thought to be too much in what year was that 1941 41 yeah so they banned drag acts yeah
they banned drag acts when it started after the first world war and then it increased and
increased to the extent that in 1941 he was arrested for simply pointing at a mannequin
I know it's bonkers isn't it in wartime drag acts would have been very helpful
yeah for morale I know it's different from moral grounds but on morale grounds more drag
police yes in terms of morality probably the worst story about cross-dressing was a man called
William T Sloper he was on the Titanic and he was invited into one of the lifeboats by an
actress he had just met that evening Dorothy Gibson when only a third of the lifeboats
were filled to capacity the whole women and children thing hadn't kicked in he did survive
he got to the United States and he refused to talk to reporters because he had said
he would give just a story to his local newspaper and one journalist took umbrage at this and wrote
an article anyway and invented the notion that he had in fact escaped because he was dressed as
a woman and it wasn't true at all but he lived under the curse of this accusation for
the rest of his life there was somebody who did escape sort of by cross-dressing a
steerage class passenger called David Buckley he made his way into a lifeboat and then all
the men were ordered off but a woman he was sitting next to threw her shawl over him
and he stayed in the lifeboat and he did survive but I don't think it's strictly
speaking cross-dressing just was covered with the thing it's where cross-dressing meets hiding
yes now who was the first queen to get a Brazilian oh Cleopatra why do you think
she used to bath in milk she was up for stuff ass's milk yeah not even normal milk no she
married several of her brothers she was a you know what we'd call now a weirdo
no it is not a Brazilian husband we are heading indeed to Brazil if that helps
I had to have this picture explained to me when I first saw it well we know more about
you than we thought we did I'm in the same gang as you honestly I thought it was caramel I had
no idea we're going to 1807 we are going to Portugal the crown prince Dom João Napoleon
is approaching and he takes his entire court including his queen Carlotta and he thinks
let's go to one of our colonies and they head off to Brazil so they go off in a convoy of
ships from Lisbon to Brazil 10,000 people go with him and it's unbelievably overcrowded
and hygienic and a lice infestation breaks out so in order to get rid of the lice they
all including all the women they have to shave their heads they have to throw all their
powdered wigs away and cover their heads in pig fat now they're about to arrive in Brazil they
want to make a bit of a stir but they've got bald heads and pig fat I think that'll that'll
do the job they arrive at a place called Guanabara Bay and Carlotta and all the other
royal women emerged with their bald heads covered with improvised turbines and apparently
so the story goes the Brazilian women thought this was the height of European style
and it became the local fashion the problem is that Brazil is full of a wonderful African
Brazilian population and I would have thought that the turban thing would have come
from that part of the world originally but we don't know so they were bald everywhere then
are you worrying about it's growing me when it's caught in this one looks not unlike David
Mitchell I think she looks a bit like Marty Feldman yes cross with David Mitchell
this is building up into quite the compliment whether the story is true or not about the
Brazilians there is a long history of commoners imitating royals there was a man called Guillermo
duke of Manchua he was a hunchback so we took a 16th century and so all of his courtiers
put humps on to compliment him you've got to judge that carefully yeah it might look like
you're taking the piss yes the princess of Wales Alexandra she had a limp because she had
a stiff knee joint and it became fashionable to limp in the same way it was known as the
Alexandra limp isn't there a thing about waistcoat buttons as well what's the thing about waistcoat
buttons in Britain you're supposed to leave your bottom button of a waistcoat undone and
i'd heard because of some fat bastard some fat bastard yeah some king who couldn't do all
his buttons up so everyone went around with leaving some of their buttons undone like yes
just normal it's just really stylish and you had to have food around your mouth and all down
your tie yeah the waistcoat buttons is true edward the seventh when he was prince of wales
oh her husband her husband in fact yeah here's another interesting fashion for
royals louis the 14th he had a fashion that courtiers should have one long fingernail
why was that my husband's got one special toenail for scratching his eczema it's awful
isn't it
in this show you and i are in danger of ever sharing
and you seem to be fine with that though that's yeah as long as he
he keeps it to himself i'm all right right yeah yeah he hasn't really has he now
he's only told me quite recently and we've been together for nearly 15 years
so there's nothing i can do about it now is what i'm saying yeah except maybe pay
more attention in the future so the one long fingernail what do we reckon
is that as cain that he's leaning on or is that the fingernail
no he didn't have the fingernail so it was the courtiers everyone else had to have the
yes is it to do with his anus let me just get that out of my head
what's it doing in your head
oh my goodness
away from this show
pulsating termites with a fingernail up louis the 14th's ass now
so he's in this in this reality he said i want any of you to be ready yeah there's no telling
who i'm going to ask now to stick their fingernail up my aida i want you all to grow
it i don't want it to be a specialism i want to say you now no so he decreed that nobody was
allowed to knock on his door so instead they had to scratch really gently with one finger
and so it became a thing that you grew a fingernail especially to scratch on the king's
door and it really rather suggested you had the king's ear i know weird rules honestly
would have been better off if they'd done it up his ass i just think
anyway moving on what was your best chance of seeing the queen's ass in the 18th century
asking really really really nicely she's standing underneath some sort of a vacuum
those are bees i think if you send a big parcel you have to get the biggest stumps
yes that got the ass on oh what the stamps yeah like because you see more of it on the stamp
so you're saying that stamps are like those things that they used to have peanuts on
these pumps and the more expensive the stamp the more of the queen you think
i'm gonna send a really big parcel we'll see the whole of it is it a donkey yes it is
not the queen's bum is it it's not the queen's bum this is queen charlotte she was the wife of
george the third george the third absolutely right and she's very good he's very good
yeah i'm tickling it out of him yeah an anus full of facts anus of fact
actually the working title of my memoir but it wasn't donkey it was a zebra was known as
the queen's ass given to her by the governor of the cape in south africa in 1761 it was a
wedding present he sent a pair he sent a male and a female unfortunately the male no stamina
died on route but the female arrived only a year late for the wedding but hey and it was a
very popular attraction lots of people never seen one before and she had stables at buckingham
gate and george stubs the great painter produced a marvelous large painting and apparently
she bred it i mean not say not her personally but apparently they painted white stripes on the
backside of a male donkey to persuade her to mate with it and it worked and gave birth so
what would that be a donkey and a zebra a donkara donkara zebri it sounds like a condition
it's a zebroyd you know he can't sit very well he calls me zebroyd
for 18th century technology
it does look like a donkey in leggings doesn't it donkeys in tie
i use it to the same technique for breeding your race horses some stallions will only mate
with mayors of a particular color i wear a george clooney mask quite often
on my bum you understand
the very first giraffe to arrive in britain was again it was a present to royals it was sent
in 1827 was a gift from egypt to george the fourth i like this the ship that it was
transported and they had to cut a hole in the deck at about the same time egypt gifted
another giraffe to france and it was called zarafa it became so popular it created a craze
in paris for having your hair done a la gira so not like hair like horns yes more like horns
that's not i would say the most noticeable thing about a giraffe
that was their takeaway thing oh yeah notice the little horns i'm gonna have my hair done
like that it's got a four meter neck of the most astonishing tongues i went to a
feeding station once where you would go up into a tower and feed the giraffes and honestly it's
terrifying was it a tower for everybody else so just for you
willis but the second has received lots and lots of exotic animals two sloths from brazil two
pygmy hippopotamuses from liberia a crocodile from zambia an elephant from cameroon six
kangaroos from australia thank you and a pig from fiji which decided to remain on fiji
why fiji sent a pig maybe they don't have many giraffes there yeah we expect a giraffe
but we haven't got one so embarrassed we can't send her a pig she'll have a pig
we've got a dog collar a hound tether a game noose and you've got the horn what game can
we play what noose have we got a game noose oh a noose that's up for anything
well let's just try and work it out uh what might you do with a game noose so that's the
third one is it where you know you don't want to shoot pheasants but you might encourage them
to commit suicide you sort of say maybe i mean you're a pheasant what is there to live for
you know anyway there it is i mean to be honest yeah if the pheasants killed itself it's not the
same thing as eating it having shot it is it you could probably make an argument that it's
like a vegan pheasant it's kind of what david is talking about is about pheasants but you
want to be able to carry them home like little soft handcuffs or something well i think before
you put it around its neck darling and carry it home on your belt it's like a pheasant clip
exactly darling yes where the hell am i going to put my pheasant i know i've got my game noose
yeah so all of these things come from one game a dog collar a hound tether a game noose and a horn
from somewhere around 1470 this game is it a sex game depends how you play it i suppose
let's not limit ourselves is it cards it is absolutely gods uh so the world's oldest
full set of playing cards it's called the hoffier hunting pack it's currently at the
metropolitan museum in new york city what's the top one looks like a balloon whisk so instead of
the suits that we have today if we go through them the dog collar on the bottom and then the
game noose and then the horn and then a hound tether okay there weren't any rule books until
the 17th century so we don't know what kind of games they would have played but this would
have been one of the first packs to have a queen in europe they originally had no queen
they had a cavalier on horseback instead but around the 15th century they start to swap them
out and start to have a queen we're not really sure why it may be that there's a slightly
biblical influence so if you look at the queen of hearts there she's got the name judith from
the books of judith then the queen of diamonds was called rachel the favorite wife of jacob
the queen of spades was linked to the goddess athena clubs i think they ran out of ideas
okay so this was the name for the queen of clubs have a quick look and see why you think
she might have been called this it's regina it is regina it just means queen but lots of
things have changed in games because the queen in chess was originally the vizier so the sort of
advisor the minister the chess board was a battlefield and then it eventually became the
royal court so you get the vizier the infantry the cavalry the elephants the chariots they
become the queen the knights the bishop and so on in the 15th century it was thought
inappropriate to promote a piece that you had more than one queen on the board why might
there some queen who didn't like even the suggestion that there might be another queen
and banned the practice it's thought to symbolize adultery oh yes and in monopoly when did they
start having the little dog and the hat that is a very good question they were in fact all
just charms off a charm bracelet oh i know sorry yeah that's a shit answer sorry
i don't know sarah but let's hope one day somebody finds out they'll just edit the bit
out where i tell you okay i believe they were charms from a charm bracelet
yes yeah i just popped into my own anus now it's time for the short walk the chopping
block we call general ignorance fingers on buzzers please what's the oldest object in
the crown jewels is it the queen it's not a bad guy i'm sorry i turned the volume right
it's an old spoon yes you are absolutely right it is an old well most of the crown jewels
were lost at the civil war so almost everything is post civil war and there's the odd thing left
well the anus speaks there's only a very few things from before that so from before then
so it's late 12th century so it's a 10 and a half inch long anointing spoon it's one of only
four things that we have which predate the restoration and the other three are some 17th
century swords it's from about the time of edward the confessor you get a set of coronation
regalia which gets passed down from ruler to ruler but then of course as you say the
monarchy was abolished and the new government decides to melt everything down but there was
a guy called mr kinnersley he was the yeoman of charles the first's wardrobe and he bought
the spoon for 16 shillings about 11 days wages at the time so it's not a complete fortune
and when the monarchy was restored uh he returned the spoon did they give him 16 shillings
or no he just gave it back he just returned it what a lovely gesture yeah now what's the
best thing to eat to help you with your hay fever is it an antihistamine that would be
the best thing yes but what is the thing people often think they say well this is a
the klaxon one yeah people say honey but it isn't you're absolutely right it's a long-standing
myth that it would help with hay fever why might you think it would help with hay fever
get the bees on site uh the idea is it's got pollen in it and it desensitizes you
to the pollen that's in the air in fact it's not going to help you at all it's really nice
honey i love it on toast or
porridge i like it on porridge i never understood why you would put it on a carrot
who puts it on a carrot people put it blaze it don't they oh i thought you meant like
yeah it's uh just to make it you know easier i don't know what to dislodge a particularly
hard fact
back to honey uh the vast majority of seasonal allergies they're caused by wind pollinators
that release the pollen into the air and bees generally pollinate plants that need insects
so the pollen you get in your honey isn't pollen that's giving you your allergies why is
some of it runny and some of it hard it depends on how you treat it after it has been gathered
not the bees choice not the bees don't go as i said the product development section they've
come up with nothing no peppermint flavored honey no strawberry honey you get clover honey
and lavender honey you do get some kind of yeah do you what you've never heard anybody more
disinterested it's like none of you have heard of jam that's the problem
uh eating honey won't help your hay fever who wrote the queensbury rules the marquis of cream
he endorsed them he did not write them they were written by a welshman called john graham chambers
so he founded the amateur athletic club he's probably famous for the fact that he rode beside
a man called matthew webb anybody know what matthew webb did he was in a sketch double act
sketch double act yeah he was a really funny one he was really really funny
yeah
matthew webb first person recorded to swim the channel in 1875 you said the first person
recorded does that mean that the people did it and just didn't tell anybody
i mean we don't know do we because they didn't tell anybody yeah just kept it quiet yes like
the moon who knows how many people have been popping up to the moon it wasn't columbus that
discovered the americas the vikings went there ages ago the vikings probably went to the moon
yeah i read the other day after columbus discovered america well he didn't but when
well when he went there there were 55 million native americans and within a hundred years
90 percent of them were dead yeah mainly from disease it's pretty astonishing that much
worse than i had yeah not to mention nearly all the bison yeah carnage of that
oh i've been i'm just it's the way i mourn the suffering
some of my facts are attracting flies
i think the strangest adoption of the queensbury rules boxing was a sport
um it was called horse boxing and it was the invention of a guy who entered
in berlin an african-american boxer called bobby dobbs and it is it's essentially a boxing match
but but you just sit and punch each other
horse while the horses have a little chat yeah
can you think of a quicker way of making horses despise humanity
in 1912 it was demonstrated as a tournament in germany and they thought of putting this
into the german army's you know proper officer training the new sport will be
valuable for the soldier on horseback in time of war as when he loses his weapons he will
have to fall back on his natural means of defense it didn't work out as a sport anybody
know why can't hold the reins horses did not want to stand still uh the marquis of queensbury
didn't make the rules what were tarot cards invented for uh is it tell in the future
no it isn't at all what they really are they're like an extra fifth suit to the pack is is really
the idea and lots of people want to trace it back to ancient egypt and the occult and
kabbalah traditions and so on there's no documentary evidence whatsoever to support
the idea of using it for divination until about 1760s in france before that they like trumps
in a game and then they were also used as an aid to creating a story and even then what
you think each card means it varies tremendously depending on what tradition you follow and
once had my tarot cards read i was quite an old virgin and uh and and she got the conclusion
of the reading i was well aware of that and i got the naked card and i got really excited
thinking what's gonna happen and she just kept saying it's new beginnings it's so frustrating
that they don't mean what they didn't look like they mean i just had a cock on it
i've had somebody explain it to me and they say well the death card doesn't necessarily
means death that means a change yeah at the end of a stage in your life okay you've got a
card system that's well it's the death card don't why do you have to complicate it you
know that's death right it upsets people that's really we don't have the card then
change it for the new job card
yeah
you're going to be moving house sometime in the next 12 months yeah
which brings us to the final fanfare of the scores in first place oh with a sovereign
eight it's sarah second place with minus one it's david third place with minus seven
fourth place with a magnificent minus 25 it's alan
we need to thank sarah david collin and alan and leave you with this queenly quotation
when edward the seventh was asked if his mother queen victoria would be happy in heaven he
replied she will have to walk behind the angels and she won't like that good night