You both quantity and quality, and with me are a pint and a half of best, Joe Lycett.
Poonfuls of delicious, Brigid Christie.
Yards of finest, James A. Caster.
Alan Davies with Bell's Ones, as emphasised, quantities over qualities.
Joe goes...
Zero, un, deux.
Brigid goes...
Tre, quattro, cinque.
James goes...
Seis, siete, ocho.
Alan goes...
Nine.
A high-quality airline, but we don't have the quantity of money required.
What cost-saving measures could we take?
How much are trains?
We still wanted to go in the airline business.
How much would it cost to put wings on a train?
There are driverless trains.
Perhaps don't have pilots or stewards.
Gliders.
Right, why?
No fuel costs.
Well, it is fuel that we want to save.
We want to help the environment, we want to save money and so on.
So here is an extraordinary thing.
No passengers.
Well, you want the passengers...
Or luggage.
You want the passengers to be as light as possible.
Skinny people with no bags.
Are you allowed to advertise that?
Yes.
In 2013, Samoa Air were the very first airline to charge passengers
according to their own weight.
They actually did it.
They had to pay one, Samoa and Talas, roughly 29, 30p,
for every kilo that they and their luggage weighed.
Wow.
But the actual plane, you can save money on the actual plane.
I know it sounds very strange,
but white planes are more efficient than dark planes.
What?
Yeah.
Light planes are more efficient than dark planes.
What?
Yeah.
Lighter paint is literally lighter.
Dark paint on an aeroplane can add the equivalent weight
of eight passengers.
You look, James, as though you don't believe me.
It does sound like a lie.
Might dark paint be heavier, do you think?
Because it's evil?
Dark paint is heavier because it has more pigments.
More pigments. More pigments.
I was going to say pigment.
No, I was going to say pigment.
I was going to say...
All right, children. All right.
So if you look at a plane, you'll see most of them
are of a lighter colour.
Why paint it at all?
So that is the other option, is that you could polish it.
However, you do need to wash it more often to offset
corrosion, if you've just polished it.
And white paint would be cheaper, because actually
the money you'd save on fuel, you'd spend on washing.
So those are your choices.
It sounds like a headache, really.
I'm not going to open an air flight business.
Are you not?
Yeah.
But it's amazing where you can save money.
So in 2018, United Airlines switched to lighter paper
for the in-flight magazine, all right?
They saved one ounce per copy.
Doesn't seem like very much at all.
But it's £11 saved for a full flight.
You multiply that by the whole fleet over a single year,
you have saved 170,000 gallons of fuel
worth $290,000, just a single ounce of paper
on each individual in-flight magazine.
The Airlines beverage cart, in our ways half
what the old ones used away.
They've stopped duty-free sales in many instances.
Well, I've picked a few already you can get rid of.
That little tiny tray that the other trays are in,
why does that exist?
I mean, all of the food can go, because it looks shit.
I noticed on a flight I was on recently
that they weren't showing Oceans 11,
but they were showing Oceans 8, so that's three people.
Three, that's three straight away.
In the 1980s, there was a man called Robert Crandall.
He was then head of American Airlines,
and he removed just one olive from every single salad
served to their customers.
Nobody noticed, and they saved $40,000 a year.
Yeah, but I bet he was fatter at the end of it.
If he's popping an olive from everyone's plate
in every plane, that's having some effect.
I'm no scientist. No, clearly.
You could say, no hats.
No-one could really get annoyed if he said, no hats.
There's a lot of screws in a plane as well.
I reckon a couple of those.
The Japanese airline called All Nippon Airways,
in 2009 they asked passengers to visit the loo before boarding.
They calculated that a full 767 could hold
£240 of urine inside its passengers,
and if everybody boarded with an empty bladder,
they calculated they could reduce carbon emissions
by five tonnes over the course of a month.
Is that man doing a selfie while he's there?
We should move on.
How can you make money from fresh air?
Catch it in the net.
Separate it into its component parts and then sell those.
You don't need to. You can just sell fresh air.
So, in 2015, there was a man called Moses Lamb,
who lived in Edmonton, Canada, and as a joke,
he sold a bag, there he is,
a bag of fresh Canadian air on eBay for 99 cents.
It went, and when the bids for the second bag
got to 168 Canadian dollars,
he thought, hmm, might be onto something here.
He gave up his job as a mortgage broker,
and now he sells Canadian Rockies Air.
That is what he does for a living.
A single eight litre bottle costs 24 US dollars.
His company, Vitality, has sold over 200,000 units,
often to countries with very low air quality,
so he sells them to China and India
and South Korea and so on.
And if Canadian air sounds pricey,
you could have Swiss mountain air.
That's only 17 pounds, roughly, a can.
How can you prove that it's from there?
Well, you just have to believe, Bridget.
You can buy some good old British air, if you prefer.
You don't want to buy air from abroad.
You can buy air from Yorkshire, from Wiltshire, from Wales.
There's a company called Ether.
The company's founder, Leo Dewatze,
has coined the term air farming.
There he is.
It's completely pure air.
It is actually collected in Somerset
or wherever he happens to be.
It's just scooped up and sealed.
It's just a lot of money for a jar, isn't it, really?
Yeah.
Now, because we like to really go the full extra mile for you,
all our elves have been all over the world
collecting for you special fresh air.
They haven't been opened.
So, Joe, would you want to open yours, darling,
and see where you think that comes from?
Wigan.
James on the right there, collecting from Slovenia.
James?
What are you getting?
A jar.
Heavy notes of jar.
It's come the furthest, actually, though.
Really?
Brazil.
It's come from Tasmania.
That is Anna leaping there to collect air from Tasmania.
Smells less fresh than the studio does.
I'm actually going to capture some studio air,
and this will be available on eBay when the show goes out.
QI Air.
Mine is unmistakably Scottish Highlands.
What have you got, Bridget?
Sorry, are we all...
We're seriously...
I'm very good at smells.
OK.
When I was pregnant, my husband was out,
and when he came back in, I said,
have you been eating nice and spicy-flavoured knickknacks?
And he said, no,
but there was a bag in the room that I was in.
Oh!
What?
That doesn't smell good.
That smells very greasy to me.
OK.
Yours comes from the Canary Islands.
That's Mike collecting it in.
These are genuine pictures.
Right, Alan, yours.
Ooh!
What?
Someone pumped in there.
This comes from Hudson Bay,
but we didn't have the money to go all the way to Hudson Bay,
so it's a pub in West Ham.
It's the Hudson Bay.
Which country do you think has the best air quality in the world?
Britain.
Oh, that's so sweet and loyal and so wrong.
So unbelievably wrong.
It's going to be Iceland.
It's going to be Scandi, isn't it, for sure?
Finland.
Finland, it is absolutely right.
It is Finland, indeed.
Followed by, of course, the usual suspects,
all the Scandis, Iceland, Sweden,
and then Estonia and Norway.
UK's 25th after Singapore.
Oh, yeah.
And just one place ahead of Oman.
Sweden were really high,
and they still have really good air,
but they've dropped down the list
because in these countries that have lots of snow,
they have tire spikes
so that they're not all sliding around,
and they're digging up the tarmac,
which is causing some toxic air,
and they have to sort it out.
Can't even stop yourself slipping on the road.
Unbelievable.
Worst quality air in the world?
Anybody have a guess?
I went to Delhi, and the air was black.
Yeah, it's Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
Nicknamed the Manchester of India.
Worst place for pollution in London?
The North Circular.
It's actually the underground.
Yeah, is it?
They did a study at the University College London in 2001.
They found the air quality in carriages
was 73 times worse than at street level.
So if you take one single 20-minute journey
on the Northern Line,
you might as well have had a fag.
It's the iron oxide particles
caused by the grinding of the wheels and the rails
as the trains break.
So it is about the most dangerous place,
in fact, to breathe in the whole of London.
It's upset everybody in the room.
Half these people came on the Northern Line.
Well, we're lucky if they get through the evening.
So here's an extraordinary thing.
Speaking of air in jars,
there's a place called the Henry Ford Museum.
It's in Michigan.
It has a test tube which purports to contain
Thomas Edison's last breath.
There he is.
The label reads,
Thomas Edison was Henry Ford's hero,
as well as his friend.
During Edison's final illness,
this test tube was close to his bedside.
Upon his death, it was sealed with paraffin wax.
Edison's son Charles later sent his father's last breath
to Henry Ford, knowing their close relationship.
I mean, that's a weird thing to do, isn't it?
It is a very, very... Hang on, mate.
Is this the last one?
Thank you.
Also, if you just go...
OK, I'm going to get the last one.
Oh, he's still breathing.
You didn't want that when you were dying,
would you, somebody just trying to... No.
Last thing you see is a test tube in your face
and the eager eyes of a relative.
Yeah.
No, thank you.
No, I'm with you on that one, James.
Quite right.
Now, why might it be a bad idea
to remove all the dead wood from the Houses of Parliament?
So many answers, so little time.
Is it something to do with the gunpowder?
Yes, I did the gunpowder plot.
I'm with Bridget.
No.
No, it's nothing to do with that.
Is it later than the gunpowder plot?
Later.
Well, we are talking about 1834.
Up until 1826, the Palace of Westminster
kept all its financial records on something called tally sticks.
So you had a stick and you split it in two
when you issued a debt
and when the payment was made,
the two sticks were tied back together again.
But eventually, of course, paper records superseded
the need for these,
and now they've got a lot of old wood,
so they decided to get rid of it.
The obvious idea was to burn it.
So on the 16th of October, 1834,
the clerk of the works,
who's in various records called Mr Wibbly or Mr Woobbly,
he ordered two cartloads of these tally sticks
to be burned.
Mr Wibbly Wobbly?
Mr Wibbly Wobbly, yes.
Mr Wibbly Wobbly, get rid of the sticks.
No, no, no, Mr Wibbly Wobbly.
Get rid of the sticks you want.
It was just like that.
It's like Christopher Butterslip.
Yes, I've got a character act called Christopher Butterslip.
He drops everything, doesn't he, Christopher Butterslip?
Yes, he's got very slippery fingers.
His catchphrase is,
whoopsie blops.
What's his job, Christopher Butterslip?
Oh, he's a...he's an auctioneer.
That's fantastic.
This ming bars.
Mr Wibbly Wobbly decided to burn
two cartloads of these tally sticks
in the basement staves at the Palace of Westminster,
and the resulting fire burnt down
both the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
What?
What an idiot, Mr Wibbly Wobbly.
Didn't feel good about it.
He should have known.
What have I done?
Where did you entrust this job to?
Now, don't get angry.
It better not have been Mr Wibbly Wobbly.
So the chimneys had not been properly maintained.
In those, they were still talking about children
going up chimneys, and they had cut footholds into them.
There was a lot of residue,
and the copper linings of the chimneys actually caught fire,
and it spread eventually to the entire wooden interior of Parliament,
and there was no fire brigade at the time.
So everything was run by the insurance company.
It took five hours for the fire boat
to get to the House of Parliament,
because the tide was wrong.
It was the largest fire since 1666.
Turner painted several canvases of the disaster,
and Constable Two sketched it
sitting in a handsome cab on Westminster Bridge.
Did you have to rebuild the whole shebang?
Yes, that's when we get the designs that we have today,
Charles Barry and Pugin.
Big Ben and everything.
Big Ben and everything, yeah.
Well, apart from Westminster Hall,
Westminster Hall was saved,
it was only saved because the wind changed.
I know.
So here's a supplementary question.
How did the fire, the one at the House of Parliament,
affect the length and breadth of Trafalgar Square?
Oh.
It hadn't been built yet.
That's a good answer.
Even if that's wrong, that's a good answer.
I like it.
So, apart from the tally sticks
and all the stuff in Parliament that was destroyed,
the very object which defined
the imperial standards of measurement were lost.
So it meant that you had no way
of ultimately deciding
the length of something, yes?
There's a bronze plaque of all the
weights and measures in Trafalgar Square.
You get an extra point.
There is indeed such a plaque that you can see today.
The mathematician and astronomer called Sir George
Airy, he was charged
with creating these new objects.
They wanted to make sure that this could never happen
again, so the standards were
triplicated. So today you can find them
in the Great Hall of the Guild Hall
by the gate of the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich, and as you quite rightly said,
embedded in the granite at Trafalgar Square.
So if you are facing the National Portrait Gallery,
there's a sort of cafe and a bench, and actually
it's slightly hidden, and most people probably don't even
notice that it is there.
My child found it and said, what's that?
And I went, I don't know.
Shut up.
You absolute nerd.
Trafalgar Square was being built
at the time, so it opened in 1844,
so it was being built at the time.
Now, what is the heaviest reading material
in the universe?
Oh,
something by Dan Brown.
Is it slate?
Yeah, because people used to write on slate, didn't they, in school,
and say it's very heavy.
But this is an actual book, it's a book available online.
It is called Googleplex
Written Out.
It is exactly as it sounds.
It is one of the largest numbers ever named,
and it is available in print.
Well, it is theoretically
available in print.
So, let's just go through what the numbers are.
So, a Google is one
followed by a hundred zeros,
and it looks like
this, okay?
A Googleplex is one followed by
a Google of zeros,
and it is impossible to write
down a Googleplex because there are fewer
particles in the universe
than actually there are zeros in a Googleplex.
However, somebody wanted to write out
Googleplex.
A man called Wolfgang Nietzsche,
and this is just one
volume that is available to you.
It has an ISBN,
you know, proper international standard
book number, but obviously no
ISBN has been assigned to the individual
volumes since the total number of volumes
would exceed the number of available
ISBNs.
It is
literally just zeros.
It's just,
Sandy, I'm really sorry,
but the last time
I was on this show,
do you remember that I said I had something
called tryophobia where
I can't look at holes,
can you? I can't look at holes. Oh, this is a disaster for you.
I feel really
got this condition right, and it makes me
feel like fainting and getting sick and gives me
a headache. You can't look at
lots of circles that are close together.
OK, so I feel
really bad. The person who named it was
a man called Edward Kasner. Perhaps we have a
picture of him. There he is!
There's hardly any zeros in that.
Oh, it's horrible, yeah. It's OK.
Here's the thing, if you were to start to count
to a Googleplex at two digits
per second, the universe would
end before you could finish.
The EastEnders would
carry on.
If you
wanted to count to a billion, it would take you
15 years, 308 days, nine hours,
41 minutes and 50 seconds.
Isn't that fantastic? In the world
of authors, how do you think that
guy is regarded?
Do you want to see it?
When they're all getting together and all the
authors are meeting up,
some of them are discussing their new ideas
and he comes along and
tries to talk to them as an equal.
I'm working
on a new book as well. Yeah, I bet you are.
So that's the heaviest reading material
in the world. According to the Guinness Book of Records,
the smallest book in the world
is called Teeny Ted from Turnip Town.
It is by two brothers, Malcolm
Douglas Chaplin and his brother
Robert Chaplin and it is
a 30-page book carved on a
pure crystalline silicon page.
It measures just 70 micrometers
by 100 micrometers as it was
etched using an ion beam at
University in Canada. So basically it fits on
the width of a single human hair.
I know. And what it says on there,
if you read it, it says Teeny Ted from
Turnip Town, a success story
by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin, B.A.
That's how you make all the magazines
weigh less. Yes.
Anyway, you need a
scanning electron microscope in order to
be able to read this. There is a large print copy
but if you wanted a small one, it cost you about
£10,000.
I expect you could keep that if
you're really keen. Yes, please.
Oh, can I have it?
I'll read all the zeros.
Yeah, I'd love to do that. Read it while eating
a bowl of Cheerios, Bridget.
Would you not play Twister?
They're far apart. Oh, Twister's OK.
Circles have to be close together
and exactly the same size. So you could eat
a crumpet.
I don't like crumpets.
I start to get the headache
and then I think it's OK, it's really tasty
and they're not all the same size.
I always think something might have gone
in those holes. I mean, if you were that
size, that's irresistible, isn't it?
That's what you're looking at me for.
Would any part of you fit into a hole
of a crumpet, do you think?
I think it's too personal, we're going to move on.
Right, new question.
Which is my favourite quality
street? Are we going to guess
and all the clack songs will go? Green Triangle.
The whole one.
The toffee penny is my guess.
The blue one that no-one eats.
I reckon this is a trick. It's not
chocolates at all. It's not chocolate at all, is it?
It isn't chocolate. It's a play by J. M.
Barrie called Quality Street.
It's a four-act comedy and it was a huge
hit in London. It opened in
1901. It played for 495
performances. It's still done today.
It concerns Phoebe. She's in her early 30s.
She's still unmarried and her former
love, the Captain Brown, returns from
the Napoleonic Wars and she's very
worried that he won't love her anymore. So she
disguises herself as a younger girl
in order to impress him. So the theme
of staying young, J. M.
Barrie uses it again later on in
Peter Pan. The actress who
very first starred in this was called Maud
Adams. She was the first person to play the
lead role in Quality Street and she went on
to be the first Peter Pan on Broadway. In fact, I think
she played Peter Pan more than 1500 times.
She was a superstar in her day.
One of the very first actors to earn
more than a million dollars a year,
which at the time, it's an astonishing amount
of money. And she was also an inventor.
She assisted with the development of colour photography
because she wanted to be able to capture things
properly that she'd done on stage and capture them on
film. She's amazing. Probably a
lesbian.
What? Yes.
Buried next...
Oh, by the pan pipe. Yeah, you can.
She's buried next to her secretary who was
her secretary for more than 40 years, Louise Boynton.
I mean, it may just be that the secretary was
busy and booked a double plot. I don't know.
How is Wendy Darling
related to
Long John Silver?
Fictional characters.
There's an actual sort of connection.
Oh, this is annoying, this is.
Is it why, darling? Because I've been told
a fact about Wendy. Go on, then.
And I've forgotten it.
I know it's going to be that.
Very frustrating. The character
Wendy is based on a real girl
who was unable to say friend.
So she used to refer to
Jane Barry as her Wendy
because friendy,
Wendy, she used to say Wendy.
So it's called Margaret Henley.
So we have Wendy and we have Margaret Henley, the
original that Wendy was based on.
And that is her father,
William Ernest Henley, right next to her,
best known for writing the poem Invictus.
And Henley lost his leg
to TB when he was aged 12.
He was also friends with Robert Louis
Stevenson, who is the next person in the picture,
who immortalised him in Treasure Island by
bringing him into Long John Silver.
So in a way, Wendy
from Peter Pan was the daughter
of Long John Silver. That's a really
sweet connection, isn't it? I love that.
There are four streets in the UK called
Quality Street. There's one in Merstam,
so named when the two original
stars of the West End production of
Quality Street moved there. And all the other three
are in Scotland. And as far as we've been able to
work out, there are no shops on any
street called Quality Street which sell
Quality Street chocolate.
But the chocolate selection is named after the play.
John and Violet McIntosh
invented this new style of toffee
in 1936, used the characters
from the play on the packaging.
It's an arrogant advert, isn't it?
I am John McIntosh.
The Toffee King!
You should do a character
of a toffee king. Yeah, I should.
Exactly like that. A little toffee hammer.
Can you still get that?
If you can get a book
with all zeros in it, you can get a toffee hammer.
I want more sweets.
I want a fudge hammer.
Why would you have a fudge hammer? That would just make a big dent.
Quite satisfying
to hit some fudge with a hammer.
Maybe more satisfying than the toffee.
Which did a survey in 2018
and they found that chocolate selections always
have fewer of the ones that people
actually like. So they asked about
a thousand people to name their favourite.
The two most popular Quality Street chocolates are the purple ones
and the green triangles.
And these should appear by preference
eleven times in the box and they actually appear
just five to six times.
And it's the same with Heroes, Whispers, Twirls.
No wonder this country is the way it is.
The most uninspiring country in the world.
Just the green one, please.
The green triangle
that doesn't really taste of anything.
Do you not have favourites?
I'll hit the toffee finger, I'll hit the caramel.
Those ones are delicious. They're the same.
They are not the same. That's racist.
The toffee one's a lot firmer.
The caramel one's nice and soft.
Give that to an old man with dentures asking if they're the same.
I just didn't expect when I
started on this show that I would watch
James School Bridget a racist.
Absolutely appalling what you just said about toffee fingers
and caramel cups.
I like that everybody's got a
line that they draw somewhere.
Right, here we go. Which is quicker, a jiffy
or two shakes?
Two shakes of a winkle's tail,
isn't it? Lam.
Lam.
Brian used to say a winkle. A winkle.
Alan, I'd like to hear some other things
your nan said.
A jiffy or two shakes? A jiffy.
Well, it depends on the type of jiffy.
A really quick one.
It's got to be two shakes.
Well, they're both genuine units of time, so a
shake is the time it takes for one step
in a nuclear chain reaction. It's about
ten billionths of a second. I forgot to mention
my grandma's a nuclear physicist.
So a nuclear chain reaction typically takes
50 to 100 shakes.
What? God, I'm going to get
this really wrong.
Go on then. Go on then, we'll enjoy it.
There comes some more racism,
I imagine.
I think a jiffy is something to do with
light or...
Well, there are different kinds
of jiffies. Oh!
I'm afraid. So a shake
is to do with nuclear reaction, and
like lots of the terminology
derives from the Manhattan Project, which was during
the Second World War, and comes with the expression
two shakes of a lamb's tail. We don't actually know
why people say two shakes of a lamb's tail.
It's a bit like, I don't know, faster than you can say
Jack Robinson.
So different kinds of jiffies. In electronics,
a jiffy is the period of an alternating
current power cycle. So typically, that would be
a sixtieth or a fiftieth of a second.
And in physics, it is the time it takes
for light to travel one Fermi,
which you knew, presumably.
Yes, I did. It's approximately the width of a proton.
So you were absolutely heading in the right
direction. Now, what letter
did the Romans use to write the number
1000?
Oh, hang on. Q.
No? Anybody know in the audience?
N.
Oh!
Haha, you idiots.
It used to mean a thousand until the Middle Ages.
Not used by the Romans at all.
The Middle Age is called
at the time.
No, it's just only now.
Why did the Romans not use it for a thousand?
What was the reason, do you think?
They couldn't count that far. They didn't need to.
They hardly used that many large numbers.
When they did, they used an I
in brackets.
There was a monument erected in the Roman Forum
to commemorate a victory in the first
Punic Wars, and on the column,
you can see an I in lots of brackets,
and it is repeated at least
22 times. There may be more,
but it represented the
2,200,000 bronze
coin that they looted in the Carthaginian
Wars, which obviously they wanted to celebrate.
Later on, to write a thousand in Roman
numerals, they used an X inside a circle.
And later still, they used the
Greek letter phi.
Now, like an I in brackets, that's an emoji for a
butt. Is it?
Yeah, you'd be a bracket, line,
bracket. Why would you send that?
Spice up some
dying relationship.
I've just done it on a picture here so I can
see. Yeah. It doesn't
look like a bottom to me.
Then eventually they had the 8 on its
side, which has evolved into our symbol
for infinity. And finally,
the M was adopted in the Middle Ages, probably from
the Latin mile for a thousand.
So, we learn at school
to write the number 9 as
Ix.
The audience get that one as a point for the audience for that one.
But also, that rule comes from the Middle Ages, I'm afraid.
So, the Romans used a mixture
of contractions. So, they might put
one X like this, but they might also put V
and four I's like that.
And you still see it on clock faces and watches.
And actually, I think it's rather beautiful.
Can you see there, the four I's for the number 4?
And I think it's rather beautiful because
if you use the four I's like that,
so the first four numbers,
1, 2, 3, 4, all have those
beautiful I's in them, and the next
four are the only ones with V's in it, and the next
four are the only ones with X's in it. So, actually, to look at it,
it's rather beautiful.
Big Ben actually breaks this convention.
The four is I and V.
But anyway, the Romans tended to do maths
on an abacus rather than actually
write it down. But,
let's have a go at doing maths with Roman numerals.
It's actually easier than you think. We should have
some boards there with some Roman
numerals. Do we need this?
No, darling. Can you write
out for me in Roman
numerals? First of all, 16
and then below it,
the number 8, please.
Correct.
8, come on, bridge.
Yes. 16.
So, what I'm looking for is
I'm looking for 16, which is XV1.
I'll just do it with these
people. OK.
If I showed that to anyone,
I'd say, what's that? They'd go
16 because it says
16. They'll say, that says 16
and I'm not a Roman.
Good luck finding some Romans to read
that for you. OK.
So, I want you to add those two things
together. So, we've got
XV1 and V111.
So, here's what you do. There's a really simple
way of doing it. First, put all
of the letters from the two
numbers together in a single row.
Like that. Yeah. Now, what I want
you to do is I want you to put them in
numerical order, largest on the
left. So, it's going to go X
and V and V
and then I want you to simplify it.
So, V and V together makes
what in Roman? Ten.
Remove those and put an X.
Stick the X there and there you have
the answer. It is 24.
It's actually really simple.
Previously on 24.
Isn't that brilliant?
See, now I feel a bit guilty that we were
silly because I would have learnt something there.
I let him astray
to be fair. Did you?
Pow!
I'm afraid extra points
to both bridges.
Pow!
How old are you, darling?
53.
Numerals at the end of BBC programmes
in 1976. Why do you think they did that?
There's one right there. Why did they do that?
Inform, entertain, educate.
One theory is
it was to confuse the viewer so you wouldn't
know you were watching a repeat.
Another theory is that it comes from the film industry.
So physical film can degrade over time
and it makes it difficult to read
numeric values and Roman numals
are easier to read when film degrades.
But I prefer the idea that
it's fooling us all that we haven't seen
Dad's Army before.
Now, what is the biggest thing you could buy
with a quid?
Is it a whale?
Pound sterling.
Visualise the shelves in Poundland.
Don't remember any whales there.
You can get an ironing board.
Football club?
Not Aston Villa.
Chelsea Football Club.
Ken Bates bought it for a pound in 1982.
He later Bates sold the club to
Roman Abronović in 2003 for
£140 million. Today it's estimated
to be worth £1.5 billion.
Other companies that have been bought for a pound.
British Home Stores, Bearings Bank,
Reader's Digest,
Homebase. It doesn't have to be a pound.
When Rover was sold to BMW,
it was £10. But you have to have something.
It's a legal necessity in a contract.
It's got a consideration.
Something has to be paid. It used to be known as the
peppercorn, like peppercorn rent.
Bath University still pays an actual peppercorn
to the city as ground rent.
What? Yeah.
How does that work? Have you woken up?
What happened?
When you have a legal contract,
if I'm going to sell you this card,
you must give me something for it.
All right, there you are.
Actually, it's quite nice.
No, they're the old answers.
Are they physically doing it still?
Are the University actually going to...
To the city and giving them a peppercorn?
It's become a sort of ritual.
Do you think the peppercorns get used?
I like that the city might be building up to a whole mill.
The new 12-sided
pound coin. It's got a number of features
that make it more difficult to counterfeit.
What exactly might be?
Is it a weight thing?
No, it's a kind of hologram.
If you look, this is just below
the Queen's head.
Depending on the light, it either says
one or a pound symbol.
If you flip the coin,
it's a good noise from everybody.
Ooh!
That's all the forges.
Coach Zola forges in.
Ooh!
According to the Royal Mint,
it's a hidden security feature, but obviously we don't know
what it is.
The reverse of the new pound coin was designed as part of a competition.
There were thousands of entries.
People suggested... A child made it.
It was a child. 15-year-old David Pearce from Walsall.
People suggested teacups and
I don't know, rain clouds and the London Eye
and Rolling Stones' tongue and lips and all that kind of thing.
Cock and ball.
The missed opportunity.
He got his design on
one and a half billion coins
and won £10,000.
And actually, if you look very closely at the coins,
you can see DP, there it is,
at the bottom of the design.
He actually got his initials on the coin.
I like this. His response after winning
the competition was, honestly, I'm not too fussed about it all.
My friends are more excited than me.
It's just something I did once, you know.
That's false modesty.
It is, right.
Now it's time to pound our guests into submission
with the coin toss that we call general ignorance.
So, ladies, what are skid marks made from?
Zero.
Pooh.
Good to get it out of the way, isn't it?
Tyres. Rubber.
Talking about skid marks on the road,
it's actually caused by the bitumen heating up
rather than any tyre rubber being laid down.
Oh! Yeah.
So, as the car's brakes stop the wheels from turning,
the friction between the tyres and the surface
results in high temperatures
that cause the tyre to melt along with the bitumen
and the bitumen oils in the asphalt.
They rise to the surface and once the surface
cools down, the skid marks
will just fade away.
So the technical term for a skid mark is
a bituminous material smear.
That's fine. I've always wondered,
how is it possible for that skid mark
to be produced by that vehicle?
It'd be quite a swerve.
That's Mr Wibble's car.
Anybody know where the word skid comes from?
Scandinavia.
The Scandinavian word skid,
which means a stick of wood,
so it referred to the piece of wood
that used to be laid down to help move logs.
They used to use skids to move things downhill.
People who lived on Skid Row were originally the loggers.
People who hit the skids
started going downhill.
The Open University offers a course called
Analyzing Skid Marks.
Apparently an important skill
in motor crash forensics.
I do that every Monday, Sunday.
Monday's wash day.
I see, OK.
You can get different types of skid marks.
With blood or without.
A citation in the OED for skid marks
referring to stained underwear.
It's Barry Humphries in one of his Barry McKenzie
private eye cartoons published in 1968.
I've got a poster of him on my wall.
You've got a wall?
Yeah, I've got a wall.
I'm doing pretty well these days.
Saving up for some more walls.
How high is it?
It's a pretty long wall, actually.
Put a corner in it.
Trump's trying to buy it off me.
He ain't going to get it.
Anyway, moving on.
How many trees are there in this picture?
Here we go.
It's going to be one.
What did you say?
Zero.
Absolutely right.
There is one tree.
You are entirely correct.
This show is a scam.
It's called the Quaking Giant or Pando.
It looks like an enormous
grave of quaking aspens.
It's actually a single organism.
It may be up to a million years old.
It is one of the great wonders of the United States.
It lies in Utah.
It's actually a male organism.
It produces asexually.
It's reproducing new stems underneath from the roots.
Each of the 47,000
or so stems that are there
are genetically identical.
Unfortunately, it hasn't been growing
for 40 years.
It's possibly thought to be dying.
It's possibly the largest organism on earth by weight.
Is it not protected?
It is, and they're doing their best to try and save it.
But you get grazing animals that eat the new shoots.
When old trees die, new ones are not replacing them,
which is what used to happen.
But the roots are thought to be at least 80,000 years old.
Some people have suggested it could be a million years old.
I think it's the most
beautiful thing and very worth visiting
while it's still there.
Who wrote the Haydn Quartets?
Oh, no.
No?
Haydn.
Are you saying that?
Did you say Haydn?
Yeah, I did.
He said it with a sneery tone because he's foreign.
No, it was dedicated to Haydn written by Mozart.
Oh, I was going to say Ed Sheeran.
So Haydn was kind of a mentor for Mozart.
Haydn didn't actually invent the quartet,
but when he was about 18, he was asked
by a man called Baron Furnberg to come up with something
that four amateurs could play at home.
That's how string quartets began.
Anybody know why Haydn's symphony, number 45,
is called the Farewell Symphony?
He wrote it at a bus stop.
I wanted to be there!
There's a Hungarian prince called Niklas I,
and he had gone to his summer palace
and he'd brought the orchestra, but he had stayed
way longer than anybody thought was sensible.
So they asked Haydn if he could drop
not such a subtle hint.
At the end of the final adagio, each musician
in turn gets up, snuffs out a candle
on his music stand and leaves the room
until all that is left is the two violins
and apparently the prince got the message
and they went home the next morning.
That's very cool.
What type of tool is used to make jigsaw puzzles?
A jigsaw.
Get it over with.
So today, jigsaws are actually made
with lasers or rolling presses, but when
jigsaw puzzles were first introduced,
they were basically made with a... Fudge hammer.
A jigsaw.
No, not made with a jigsaw at all.
They've never been made with a jigsaw.
The jigsaw was not invented until the 1850s
and the first puzzle we would recognise
as a jigsaw was 1762.
But even then it was made with a fretsaw.
Why was it called a jigsaw?
The term first came from a London engraver
called John Spillsbury.
They were actually called dissected puzzles
to begin with. He made a map on wood
countries and it was to give children the opportunity
to learn all the different countries.
My favourite thing, I love this fact,
a jigsaw puzzle
manufacturer typically uses the same
cutting pattern for lots of different
puzzles. So if you buy two puzzles of the
same size from the same manufacturer
with two different pictures, you can mix
and match and still make
a puzzle. And there's an art professor
called Mel Andringa who uses
this to make extraordinary puzzle
montages. Have a look at this picture.
Oh, wow.
That's great.
I'd frame that.
I'd frame it and put it on my wall.
I think it's fantastic. The jigsaw puzzle was
invented before the jigsaw, which
brings us to the puzzling matter of
the scores. In last place,
my goodness, it's very good.
With minus 42, it's Alan.
Minus 14,
it's Joe.
Climbing up to third place
with minus 13, Bridget.
In second place with minus 12,
it's James, Joe, Bridget, and Alan.
I leave you with this quality quotation
from the American columnist and author
Alice Kahn. For a list of all the
ways technology has failed to improve
the quality of life, please
press three. Goodbye.