Welcome to QI, where tonight's show is rather Ruff and Reddy.
At the ready, Tom Allen.
Hello.
Good and ready, Zoe Lyons.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Ready for action, Susan Calman.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Their buzzers are rough stuff. Tom goes...
LOUD SCRAPING
Ooh. What's that?!
It's a concrete brick being dragged.
Oh, dragged up, like, with a wig and a dress?
High heels.
Of course.
I have to put up with that every morning! Every morning.
Susan goes...
HIGH-PITCHED METALLIC GRINDING
And Alan goes...
DOG WOOFS
Oh, "ruff, ruff," you see.
You should see the other guy, Sandi.
What's happened to your nose? Come on.
I tripped over my own feet,
and I suppose, at my age, that is a fall, isn't it?
Yes.
Log the time and date and then the frequency of future falls.
Yeah. Did a social worker come round
to see if you needed any handles anywhere?
Actually, my wife is a nurse and it was really interesting to see her
go to complete and utter pieces.
If there's any silver lining to this cloud, the peas that have been
in our freezer for the last 15 years, got used.
Has anybody ever been in an actual fist fight?
Um, well... No!
Why do you think I'm wearing this neck brace?
No, but I've been doing boxing lately and... What?!
Yes, Sandi! You wouldn't believe it, but I have.
And I'm very good at it...
..so the man I do it with says.
Right. I thought we might start with a little bit of soup to begin.
So you've each got a bowl here of beetroot soup.
So, what I want you do is, I want you to demonstrate, please,
how to eat this bowl of beetroot soup
without getting your ruff all red.
Ooh, that...seems to be very wise.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Zoe, I think you've definitely nailed it.
I think that is the... Whoa!
I bought one of those La-z-Boy sofas... Yeah.
..and I can eat completely horizontal.
OK, well, they didn't have those sofas in Elizabethan times.
What they did have, in fact, was a spoon specifically for eating...
Are you just going to drink the whole...?
Do you like beetroot soup? I love all soup.
Yeah, but be careful with beetroot, cos, in the morning,
you'll think you need a colonoscopy. Oh, yes.
It's a terrible thing. See if that's any easier.
This is a ruff spoon.
So, ruff's were... Actually very small.
Do you like that? Hm. It's rather lovely, isn't it?
There's more wobble with a longer spoon.
Oh, do you not like the longer spoon, then?
I find it more difficult.
And what about if you fed each other? Would that be easier?
Oh, yes! Oh... Oh, yes!
SHE LAUGHS EXCITEDLY
I don't know if that would be easier.
This is like... Oh! I think that's rather beautiful!
I think... Yes.
APPLAUSE Yeah, I think that's rather lovely.
It's like Lady And The Tramp. Oh.
No! It's gone all down Susan's ruff.
Oh, Susan, I'm sorry. Tom!
But the sight of you slurping, that was
so disgusting that I kind of dropped the spoon.
So, they were ubiquitous in high society...
Oh, Susan, for goodness' sake! Susan, I'm sorry.
We're talking 1560s to 1620s, but everybody wore them -
women, men, young people, old people. Dogs.
Well, dogs still do, in a funny sort of way, don't they?
The big cone. Yeah.
Throw a biscuit in the cone, drives them mad.
They will not rest. They will not rest! No.
I saw a dog walking down the seafront the other day
in one of those massive cones, and it was a really, really windy day,
but he was walking with the wind at his tail
and he was going along quite happily.
I thought, "Yeah, well, wait till you turn round, mate!"
So, the biggest ones were worn by Elizabeth I,
because, frankly, nobody else had the money to be able to.
How big? How big did she go? Oh, look at...! Wow!
They were enormous.
So you have to imagine, it's up to seven yards of cloth,
so imagine at least between Susan and Zoe,
that kind of length of cloth.
600 pleats and soaked in starch,
so unbelievably difficult to wear.
You did it with something called a goffering iron,
and this is what it looked like. Wa-bang! Yeah.
Wooow!
Well, I think once you've done the ruff,
you think, what shall I do now?
But a modern theatrical costume designer takes about three hours
to set a ruff. It shows how wealthy you are.
Yeah, and literally looking down your nose at people, aren't you?
Yeah. This would be the worst part of it,
because I already struggle. The other day, I took off my bra
and there were biscuits in it.
I'm sorry, biscuit pieces or you were hoarding?
I'd eaten some shortbread,
and when I took off my bra, it was like bonus biscuits. I ate them.
If I was going to pick a biscuit for you, it would be shortbread.
It's difficult enough for me to eat without...
I always slitter on myself. What?
You what? Slitter on yourself.
Slitter on yourself? You eat...
There was a rule against that at boarding school.
The starching was brought in... It was a Dutch speciality.
It was introduced by immigrants into this country.
Sorry - somebody can't keep their spoon in their bowl.
Have you got soup all over the table as well?
What about if you get just a big straw...?
Or a reed, you know?
HE SLURPS
Yeah, some reed would work well, wouldn't it?
Eurgh, soup through a straw!
Eurgh!
Well, it'll come to us all, Zoe!
I've had a fall.
Did you get these on Tudor airlines?
Under your seat in case of an emergency.
You might have to sit on this
if you'd had some sort of operation... Yes.
..presumably involving that very implement.
So, there was a Dutch woman called Mistress Dinghen van den Plasse,
and she came to London in 1564.
She used to give lessons in how to starch ruffs.
She charged £5, which doesn't sound like a lot,
but it was £1,500, equivalent, today.
And then if you did the extra starch-making module,
that was another pound, so that was 300 quid.
So even just to learn how to do it was fantastically expensive.
Now, you've all got white ruffs on,
and the paintings often show them as white,
That you're better than us?
No, I'm a prostitute!
And/or from Scotland. Oh!
Oh...
I'm just putting it out there.
Prostitutes wore blue ruffs?
So, one of the reasons why we have lots of white in paintings
is because of successive restorations,
but, in fact, there were lots of colours of ruffs.
They were principally pink or saffron yellow.
Queen Elizabeth I did not like blue
because they were associated with what used to be called
Winchester geese, which is prostitutes.
Why were they called Winchester geese?
Because the Bishop of Winchester owned so many brothels.
So, if I wore it to come down to London town, I would have been
a Scottish whore, basically?
Because I would have worn a blue ruff.
That's quite unfair, I believe.
Well, the big question is, what did prostitutes wear in Scotland?
Yeah. It must have been very confusing.
Yes. "Are you a prostitute?" "No, I'm just Scottish."
That's the name of my autobiography.
It was started by Philip IV of Spain.
That's just a collar.
Well, he just wanted to dial back on the ostentation.
The ruff had become such a symbol of upper-class idleness
that they thought they'd better dial it back a bit.
And in Britain, we had another successor to the ruff,
and that was the piccadill.
And where do we remember that in London?
Oh, Piccadilly Circus.
Piccadilly Circus - absolutely.
There was a place called Piccadilly Hall
that was owned by a man called Robert Baker,
and he provided piccadills to people.
And what were Scottish prostitutes wearing about this time?
Just so I know, Sandi, so I can go back home and just say,
"You'll never guess what I found out on QI -
"it's what Scottish prostitutes wore."
And ruffs, of course, as we said, still worn
by dogs and - very strangely - by ministers of the Church of Denmark.
I don't know why.
I thought you were going to say Scottish prostitutes!
I tell you, you go out in Glasgow any night of the week,
you can tell them a mile away - you really can.
While we're on the subject of prostitutes,
who wants to hear about some "ruff" sex?
I am talking about the rough sandpaper...
Sorry, I'll say it again. Not rough sand...
You said it with some degree of relish.
I did, yeah. She did! I did.
That was one of the sexiest things you've ever said on QI.
Nothing I like more, I find more of a turn-on than carpentry.
No... Um...
Which is weirdly true.
A ruff sandpiper, is what I meant to say.
This is nature's most gender-fluid bird.
So, you can see they've got the ruff a bit like
the sort of Elizabethan ruff,
but this particular bird, there are three types of male
and they differ in mating behaviour.
So the one that you've got on the left there
is called a territorial, or an independent male.
They've got the dark neck ruff and they make it stand up.
The satellite males, they've got the white neck ruff.
They will, frankly, go after any woman who will have them.
And then we have the faeders.
The faeders look identical to females and they will very quickly
have sex with a female who hadn't spotted that they were coming.
But they also are quite happy to have homosexual pairings
with the independent and territorial ones.
That's fantastic. Yeah.
Right, ruffs off, soup away!
Just pop those down there.
Right. Name an animal that will attack... Dog!
I think, extra point to Alan.
I mean, he was fast. Do you not think? He was.
What do you think, audience? Extra point to Alan?
CHEERING
Yeah.
APPLAUSE
One!
Ready? Name an animal...
Horse!
Name an animal that will attack anything red.
Bull.
KLAXON BLARES
Ah...
Why do you think that?
Because I've seen clips of those dreadful matadors,
where they wave the red and then the bull goes for it.
Yeah, it's the movement, not the colour, that is attracting...
Really?! Yes, darling. I know!
They're not bothered by any particular colour.
It just gets irritated by the cloth-waving.
It would be a nightmare in a curtain shop, wouldn't it? Yes.
I'm surprised that's not a saying, isn't it?
"Like a bull in a curtain shop"?
The one animal which does see red in both senses
is the tiny little robin.
And huge, they're huge as well!
10% of robin deaths are due to fractured skulls
from altercations with other robins.
I thought it was when they were stapled to Christmas cards. Yeah.
So there were some experiments done by a man called
David Lack in 1943, and he showed that a robin would attack
a stuffed robin placed in its territory.
But the robin attacked, and the head came off the stuffed robin,
and the robin carried on.
He began to wonder how little stuffed robin you would need
in order to prompt this particular response.
So he mounted various body parts on trees and so on,
and he found, as long as red feathers were present,
the robin would attack.
A headless, wingless, tailless, legless, bodiless bundle
of red feathers was still a legitimate target... Wow.
..as far as a robin was concerned.
In fact, the robin would sometimes attack a tomato
left on the bird table.
I bet the Nazis were terrified, weren't they? I know!
So robins can't look in mirrors, then, clearly?
Cos that would just set themselves off. It would.
They'd be like, "Oh! Oh! What are you...?! Come on, then!
"Come on, then, now. Let's have a go!" Exactly that.
You'd think the red breast is something to attract before mating?
Yeah. It isn't that at all. It's a warning to stay away.
So a robin's breast gets bigger and redder with each year,
so the bigger and redder the breast, the more fights it's had.
And you don't want to...
It's like working with...
It's like working with children!
You just said "big and "red" and "breast" together
and it set me off. Yeah.
And "bigger every year"! See her round the pool.
Look at that - big, red breasts. Wahey!
Do you think that robins come back to your garden year after year? Yes.
Oh, yes, they love it.
Well, they don't last very long.
So only 25% of newborns get through the very first year,
less than 1% make it to the age of five.
The lifespan is about 1.1 years for a robin,
so they don't actually live...
I thought it was the same robins coming back to my garden,
fat robin and thin robin. Yeah.
No. No? Not a thing, I'm afraid.
Well, no, probably the robin you know is dead.
And so is the other one! Yeah.
Sorry about that. Jesus Christ! Happy Christmas!
Jesus Christ! She was really quite harsh there.
"No, it's dead, Susan." It's dead, Susan.
I was a terrible parent.
"No, the gerbil died." Now...
On the subject of animals being able to see in colour,
how do tigers get away with being orange?
That seems an extraordinary colour to be, does it not? Ooh!
Such a bright colour, you would imagine impossible
to sneak up on your prey.
I think being a tiger probably puts other animals off.
Yeah. Yeah, it's that. You can choose your own outfit. Yeah.
I mean, they can pretty much have neon lights, high heels
and party hats on and still be a tiger. Yeah.
are orange-green colour-blind.
So they've only got two colour receptors in their eyes,
they are dichromats.
Now, we wanted to try and recreate the jungle for you, so...
So, if you imagine that the tiger is hiding, right?
Look, can you see, it's hiding? You can see it hiding there?
So, this tiger seems very louche. You can see him cos he's orange.
Look at his eyes - he's not out to get anything!
No, well, but, when you...
He's out to complain, maybe in his local Pret a Manger.
I want you to see what a deer would see,
because they cannot see those colours - orange and green.
So there's what we might be able to see. Yeah.
But what they would be able to see is a slightly fuzzier picture. Oh!
It sort of would blend... I know.
And, in fact, it wouldn't even be that green.
It would be more of a sort of muddy colour,
so that the thing would hide.
So, you might think to yourself -
have you ever seen pictures
of American deer hunters, for example,
and they wear those bright fluorescent orange vests?
They wear those so that
Dick Cheney doesn't shoot them.
But also because... There they are,
and you'd think that surely all the quarry will see them,
but of course they can't, because they are trying to shoot deer,
and deer cannot see orange and green.
The friendly garden robin - redbreast by name -
headcase by nature.
I'll pop him down there.
Let me just put the rainforest away as well. There we go.
Right. What's red and black and a complete racket?
Ooh, Dennis the Menace falling down the stairs!
That's so sweet. I love that. Extra point.
Thank you, Sandi!
Sorry, do you get extra points for being cute? Yes!
Yeah, good luck with that!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Black and white and red all over - I know that one.
What is that? Newspaper.
What goes black white, black white,
black white, black white, black white?
Is it a nun falling down the stairs?
Table tennis rackets. Oh...
They are, aren't they? Wonder why!
Any shape, any size, any weight,
but they have to be red on one side and black on the other.
Sorry, any size, did you say? Yes.
If you wanted to, you could play with an enormous... Are you serious?
Yes. So the rule is... Why wouldn't you?!
Because it's difficult. You can't spin it and...
No, cos the ball's tiny. That's why I'm really bad at it.
Get a tea tray and a broom handle.
Just a massive... Any weight and any size?
Yeah. Any weight, any size...
You'd have a lightweight one that would be 18 foot in diameter -
that's what you'd have.
And just stand at the other end of the table. Yeah.
And just, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum!
But the red and black thing - anybody know why?
Oh, is it so they can also be used to park an aeroplane?
I'm going to say something now,
and it's something that someone said to me once and...
You can spin it differently depending on the different side...
Yes. That's what I was told at the youth club. Is correct.
Oh! Susan!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So, they introduced this rule in 1986
because players were using rubbers
with different characteristics on the different sides,
and the opponent needed to see which one you were using in each shot.
What happened was, in 1980, there was a player called John Hilton,
and he won the European men's singles title,
and it was a shock result.
And the reason it was a shock result is that he was only
But he had one of these combination rackets and nobody could work out
which side he was using, and what they needed to do was to see
which side you were using, because it mattered to the opponent.
But what we really want to do with our rackets
and we can see that they have
one red side and they have one black side. Oooh!
Now, what I want you to do is hold your rackets red side up,
like this. OK?
Smells funny. Oh, it does! Oh, yeah!
You could get high as a kite. Oh! Yeah.
What is that? Glue?
You don't need to know what I was doing in the back of Kwik Fit.
But it wasn't quick and it didn't fit!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Have we got any balls? No, we're not doing that.
We are going to toss them in the air, so that the rackets spin over,
and I want you to catch it red side up again.
Oh... Oh, OK. OK?
Argh!
So, mine's come up black.
Black.
Can you...?
LOUD DRILLING
Oh, sorry!
Mine keeps coming up... Black.
It's black every time. It's black every time, Sandi! Why is it?!
So you cannot do it. Fundamentally, you cannot do it.
If it starts red, it will end up black.
Whoa, it's so weird!
and it lands the opposite side each time.
Does anybody know why? Because of the smell.
It's like toast and butter, cos it's heavier on one side.
No, so you'd think it was something to do with air resistance
or gravity or the weight of the thing.
There's an American theoretical physicist called Richard Feynman,
and he was asked if anybody could explain this in a simple way,
and he thought about it for a bit and he went, "No."
It is called...
And I'm going to pronounce it wrong, cos it's a Russian name.
It's called, near enough, the "Johnny Bake-Off" effect.
He was a Soviet cosmonaut,
and he was up in the Salyut 7 space station in 1985.
He spun a wing nut in order to remove it from a threaded bolt,
it spun right off the bolt, it continued to spin
after it had come loose, and it suddenly flipped over
and started spinning in the opposite direction,
and then it flipped back to the original orientation,
and kept flipping from one to another.
This had never been seen before. Let's have a look at a video.
It is the most bizarre thing.
So there it is. Look at it. Wow!
It's in the air in the... It's simply spinning.
And then it starts to spin the other way
and then it spins the other, and it spins the other way like that.
Now... But is it paired with a wing nut in another galaxy?
This would work with a tennis racket as well.
It's to do with it having an axis here,
and an axis here, and an axis here.
And this one is the one that we sort of
don't think is going to come into play.
But it's weird, isn't it? Yes. It is weird.
So let's put the tennis rackets away.
OK, here are two squirrels. There they are.
Which of these is the most recent?
It's the grey, isn't it? Uh, oh.
KLAXON BLARES
Oh!
Zoe, what were you thinking?
See, I knew that was going to happen.
That's why I didn't say anything, Zoe. QI trap, right there.
So it is absolutely true that the red squirrel is native
to Britain, whereas the grey one is North American.
However, the native reds were regarded as an absolute pest
and they were hunted pretty much to extinction
in the 18th and the 19th centuries.
So, in order to restore the population,
..and Central Europe, and we now know, from DNA studies, that's where
most of the reds that we have have actually come from.
so the reds are, in fact, the modern interlopers
and not the native species.
The greys, I'm afraid, outlast the reds by quite a long chalk -
they're better at problem-solving,
the greys also carry a terrible pox virus
which the reds have no immunity to
and the reds get really stressed.
He looks stressed, though, doesn't he?
He does look stressed.
He's like, "Hey, Brian, how you doing?
"Things aren't going well at work.
"I've mislaid a couple of nuts.
"I don't know what's going on.
"I think my tail is thinning."
The result is that we now have about 2.5 million greys
I think they're mostly, actually, in Scotland and in the north.
In the islands, so... In big blue ruffs! Yeah.
So there's some on Arran, for example, that you see,
but mostly on the islands,
cos in Glasgow, for example, it's just grey squirrels.
There's a lot of people eat them now.
I was going to say, can you eat them?
There is a restaurant in London - I can't remember which one it is -
they do a lot of game
and very occasionally they'll have squirrel on the menu.
There's nothing to stop you eating a squirrel at all.
This kind of thing of eating locusts and bugs and things like that,
about finding alternative sources of protein...
I've tried locust. That is not pleasant.
I had a locust bhaji,
and it was one of the worst things I've had in my life.
What's a "badgie" ? Well, it's like an onion pakora thing,
so it's an Indian dish. Oh, did you mean bhar-ji?
A "badgie". Oh, I...
Sorry...
I honestly...honestly thought you said "budgie".
When she said "badgie", I was thinking like a badger,
but you wouldn't call a badger a "bar-ger", would you? No.
RP ACCENT: I ran over a "bar-ger" the other day.
It was delicious.
Because... You need to remember the BBC is funded,
you hear all sorts of voices on the BBC,
RP accent: "I had a locust bhar-ji."
Is that better? I just misunderstood, forgive me.
Was that more understandable?
Forgive me, it's my mistake - not yours. "I had a locust bhar-ji..."
I'll do the whole show like this now.
He hasn't understood a word I've said.
"I had a locust bhar-ji the other day and..."
The thing is, darling, you don't need to do that,
because when we put this show out, we'll use subtitles...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
You are such bastards!
No, we're "bar-stards", we're "bar-stards".
So this is the Ruff and Reddy show, but what's red and roughy?
It's mine.
Can I tell you something in an incomprehensible accent?
Well, why ask now?
When I did Strictly Come Dancing, the one thing that I had to do,
and I wasn't told to do it, but someone said to me,
"You know they film it in 4K?"
And I was like, "All right..." "And you wear a leotard."
And I thought, "Got it."
What they were saying was, "Please do something."
Because the first time I got to the fitting I was wearing shorts,
and so I had to go for the very first time, at the age of 43,
for a bikini wax, and it was the most terrifying thing
that's ever happened in my entire life, it really was.
It was exposing and strange, and afterwards, I was so cold!
To be fair, Susan, if somebody suggested you have a wax
if you're wearing shorts... Yeah...
"These are going to get shorter, babe, and I think..."
"Unless we are transporting tarantulas, I think..."
Isn't it one of those things that
when you've been married for 17 years,
and you just kind of stop caring
cos neither of you is going to find anyone else,
so you just kind of let it all kind of join up.
Well, it's also knowing what's in vogue
if you haven't been on the "market" for a while, isn't it?
Cos, you know, I've been with my partner for 20-plus years,
and back then, it was plaits and beads.
A sort of Willie Nelson, if you will.
So did you...? I mean... OK.
Did you go...? What's the thing - Bermudan? What's the thing?
Bermudan!
Bermudan?
A Bermuda Triangle where everything disappears.
There's a ship disappeared up there!
Pilots walking out.
"What year is it?"
1942?
The things I've seen!
What's it called? Brazilian! Brazilian!
Not Bermudan Triangle - Brazilian!
So, the Hollywood's nothing, the Brazilian's the strip,
and there's something where you just go,
"Just make me a bit, like..."
The Macclesfield.
Deal with that!
Moving on...
Enough! Enough!
The question was, what's red and roughy?
It is... No, but we are heading in more of the right direction.
We're heading in to the animal kingdom.
A red animal. Why are we looking at this picture, then?
Well, it was meant to spark conversation, and weirdly it did.
I know about a red panda.
OK, no. So we're... It's fish, right?
Don't know why... It's fish. Um...
Red snapper. Red snapper. Red snapper.
No, it's called the orange roughy.
Oh! Oh... Oh, so it's not red, then?
Well, it is actually red. It's weirdly...
These questions are shit!
What's red and roughy? Nothing at all, it turns out!
A smooth, orange fish!
The orange roughy is the answer.
How about if the question had been, "Tell us about your pubes"?
"You've got to do 15 minutes on your pubic hair. Go!" Go!
This fish caught on in American restaurants after 1979,
when they changed its name to orange roughy.
Do you have any idea why they might have changed its name?
Cos all the other fish were also called Dave.
No. Its original name was slimehead. Well...
Oh, yeah... Yeah.
It's about 30 inches long, it's a member of the perch family.
30 inches?! Yeah. How big is 30 inches?
2.5ft. Yeah. Big! Wow! It's a very big fish.
And they are extremely long-lived...
I mean, assuming that they don't get eaten.
The average lifespan is more than 120 years.
No way! No way!
There were two caught recently near Tasmania
and one off New Zealand - turned out to be, we think,
about 250 years old, meaning they were born in the late 1700s,
so at the same time as the first Europeans arrived in the area,
is the age of these fish.
How do they age a fish, Sandi? What do you do?
You cut through it and you count the rings.
Yes. You're very nearly right.
So fish have something called an otolith, so we all have otoliths.
We have one in our ear system which enables us
to basically stay balanced.
So we can tell how old the fish is
It's a bit like tree rings you can count.
That is amazing. It's amazing. Well, this is the really sad thing,
because if you eat an orange roughy in a restaurant,
there is a likelihood that your lunch
is older than your grandparents.
Well, you should eat the older thing first. Yeah.
If you've got two pots of hummus, you'll eat the one that's... Yeah.
So then you eat the fish, and then you eat your grandmother.
Can you date every fish? All fish can be aged.
All fish can be aged by their...? By their otolith.
That's amazing! I know. It's so extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah.
It doesn't work the same in humans.
Our otolith stops growing after about a week.
And then, in fact, it deteriorates as we get older
and it's why old people sometimes have balance problems,
is because their otolith is deteriorating.
Zoe, that's why you fell over. That's it.
I'm like an old slimehead.
The other fish that kind of goes in and out of fashion is the mullet.
Like the hairstyle.
It looks so surprised, doesn't it?
What - the mullet? Yeah.
It looks like it's previously gone into something very hard and flat...
and the reason that they liked it -
the fish changes colour when it dies,
so if you bring a mullet to the table alive
and watch it suffocate, it...
AUDIENCE GROANS
This is extraordinary. I'll have that grilled.
Actually, I've changed my mind.
I'll have the tofu. But there's extraordinary stories.
Martial has a story about somebody who sold a slave
for 1,200 sesterces
and spent the proceeds on a 4lb mullet. Wow.
Yeah. I know.
But the mullet haircut actually comes from
a Beastie Boys song.
Oh, really? Mullet Head, the New York hip-hop group.
Say that again, sorry, Sandi.
The New York... BOTH: Hip-hop group.
Does hip-hop not sound right out of my mouth?
No, it's fine - I just couldn't understand it
cos of your accent!
Anyway, one final red fish - the red-lipped bat fish.
It walks on those pectoral fins rather than swims -
and this is the bit that made me so happy -
there is honestly nothing on the internet that you can't get.
You can get a cuddly toy. Aw!
Oh, wow.
let's make it into a cuddly toy.
Yeah, it looks like it could talk at any minute.
"Hello!" Cheap children's television.
"Hello, children!"
It looks like he's had his lips done.
Or a wax. It's about to say,
"Give us a tab, will you? I'm gasping for a tab."
Do you want that for one of the children? Yeah.
They'd love that. OK.
Do you have children, Alan, or is that just a random...? No.
How do I know when you are "reddy" for sex?
When I'm finished at the buffet!
Is it, you hear the Antiques Road Show music?
Anybody know what being raddled...? Raddled is?
Now, I sheared a sheep recently...
Oh! Oh, Susan! Why?
It was Sunday, I was...
If you can do that, why can't you sort out your pubes?
Yeah.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I was... Sorry. Extra point for Alan.
I was hand shearing a sheep on Skye...
On the island of Skye or the television channel?
On the Isle of Skye. Not Sky!
I've got my own series on Sky just shearing sheep.
And it's something to do with sheep, isn't it?
Yes, it is. It's ewe, as in E-W-E, rather than "you". Oh! Oh, OK.
So it's to do with something called reddle.
It's a pigment which was originally made from ochre,
so it has a sort of reddish tint,
and it's been used for centuries by shepherds to tell
whether or not the sheep have...been mated. There's the way to put it.
Right. So what they would do... Oh, yes!
..they would smear this stuff, this ochre, this reddle, onto the chest
of a ram and then release him into the flock of ewes to have his fun.
And as he worked his way around... Oh, no...
..you could see, if you look at...
She's got it on her nose!
I mean, that's not criticism...
Well, there are three of them. I mean, there's not... Yeah.
So, nowadays the technique has been refined.
and then green on the second week and red in the third.
You can tell which ewe... She's got blue and yellow!
Yeah. And red. She's been very busy.
But it helps you work out when the lambing is going to happen.
There's even a harness now -
where they put a sort of crayon or something - they put on them.
There it is.
It very much reminds me of a trip I once had to Berlin.
Look at those genitals.
Thank you!
Look at the size of them.
That is... What am I looking at?
The genitals. Whoa!
Surely that's a pair of baby's feet in socks.
What's happened there is a baby has gone up the back of the sheep.
Oh, yes. I think it's that.
Its feet are hanging out.
I don't know if any of you can remember one of my favourite books -
Return Of The Native, Thomas Hardy.
There's a character in it - Diggory Venn -
he's a reddleman. That's not him - that's Thomas Hardy.
So, he's a dealer in reddle, and he's got his skin stained all over,
and it was a sort of semi-magical figure, like some sort of devil.
And the word raddled -
to mean old -
comes from the same red dye,
so it's - you've used too much rouge make-up
or you've got a red countenance
because you've had a lifetime of overindulgence.
It's exactly the same as, um...
As shagging sheep. I don't know what else to say about that.
OK.
Just, eh...
We're not going to be able to keep this a secret, are we?
That's what you brought that boy on for!
Yes, I did.
No expense spent.
Here is my question -
who has an unhealthy obsession with redundant technology?
A luddite. A luddite of some kind.
Redundant technology?
What kind of technology might that have been if it had not been a man?
It looked like a fax machine.
Fax machine, yes.
Well, it's certainly true that it cannot be hacked,
so it is used in... People who want to be off the grid, man.
It is the NHS. They are still the world's largest purchaser
of fax machines,
although they have been ordered to be phased out in 2020,
so it remains to be seen...
Who are they sending faxes to?
I would imagine... Each other? Each other, I would imagine. That's it.
Didn't football transfers used to have to be done by fax?
Yes, the fax had to get through
to headquarters of the FA by the deadline.
Yeah, but they've got some online platform now, presumably?
Text - we've signed him for 80 million.
Ping! Ping!
Still huge in Japan, faxes,
and pagers were very big in Japan.
They closed their final pager service in 2019,
and a Tokyo funeral company
set up a memorial
so people could lay flowers and pay their respects to the... Aw.
To the end of technology. Wow.
I know. But with the pager also still going strong
in the NHS, still, yay we still...
Yeah, doctors get paged, don't they?
Yeah, 10% of the world's pagers are in the NHS.
80% of hospitals still use them.
Apparently the reason is that reception is very reliable.
Other things that have gone redundant - cheque books.
Certainly the use of them
gone down by about 75% in the last... Public telephone boxes.
I would say landlines.
Landlines, cassette tapes,
What do short people stand on to kiss?
I know!
Each other. Each other.
And there's one branch of Blockbuster Video still open.
Where? In Oregon.
It's a long way to go. Wow.
And I reckon we are probably the last generation to stand at a till.
I reckon that will go. You'll just
go into the shop, you'll take your things and they'll know somehow.
Yeah. I don't like that,
cos I like someone's job to be
to count it up and ask me for my money,
and then I give them my money
and it's all very clear that I have paid for things.
You pay in cash?
Yes, I do.
I think this is a really important and fundamental issue.
Not everybody wants to use technology in their lives.
I like to have the interaction of speaking to someone.
Sometimes that lady at Morrisons is the only person I speak to in 24 hours.
I like to go and I say, "How are you doing?" "I'm doing fine."
"Jammie Dodgers again?" "Yeah, it's a Thursday."
And I like that.
Do you pop them in your bra?
Does the lady at Morrisons do that?
"Shall I just pop them in there, Susan?
"Tins in there, Jammie Dodgers in your bra."
Now get ready for rough weather.
We're heading in to a perfect storm of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
How can you tell the difference
between a raspberry and a blackberry?
LOUD DRILLING
Yes, Zoe?
Uh, flavour!
Do you know what? Can I just say, we discussed this,
a lot of highly intelligent graduates,
We went for something really clever, but...
It's flavour, isn't it? They taste different.
They are different, look at them!
Has one got a hole in the middle,
so you can place it on the end of your finger?
That is the correct answer.
But, you can't do it by looking at them,
because you can get a black raspberry - that is a thing.
Oh! So you can't tell by looking at them,
but you're right about the hole in them.
So, when you pick a raspberry, the middle,
the stem, or the torus, pulls out.
But when you have a blackberry, it does not. But it's the flavour!
Yes! Surely, it's the flavour!
All right, nobody mentioned flavour!
Oh, I feel so foolish. Um...
So here's the thing with raspberries.
If a raspberry bush needs to disperse its seeds
by encouraging animals to eat them, why does it have prickles?
Surely you would want the animals to come and eat and disperse.
DRILL
It wants a particular sort of animal who isn't put off by a prickle.
Correct. Wow.
You are nailing the raspberry-blackberry.
round them and they are the ones that will take the seeds long distances.
That is what the bush wants.
If you get a bear, a large mammal or something, they digest the seeds
and then dump what is left in a single pile of manure
and they don't disperse the seeds.
Or they make them into jam and sell them.
Very well done, Zoe, you scored highly on that particular
soft fruits section. I like a berry.
What about a currant?
I'm not fond of currants, I've tried them...
OK, moving on.
Honestly, it's like being in an old people's home.
A blackberry with no middle is simply a funny-coloured raspberry.
When it comes to sauce, I know what I like and I like what I know.
What is the key ingredient in Sandi's Good Old Fashioned Ketchup?
Yes?
Is it tomatoes, Sandi?
So, ketchup, originally made with mushrooms and anchovies and oysters
and nuts and other things but not tomatoes, not tomatoes at all
until the 19th century.
People were rather suspicious of tomatoes because they thought
they were poisonous, so people didn't eat them.
But there were a lot of tomatoes around... I love tomatoes.
I love tomatoes.
But, like, tomatoes from about 30 years ago
when they tasted of tomato.
Do you remember the old tomatoes, back in the day?
Everything tasted better. It tasted better.
It tasted like raspberries, funnily enough.
But making actual tomato ketchup takes forever
and so when Heinz launched their own version in 1876,
it was marketed as a time-saver.
"Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household."
They no longer had to make ketchup.
They put in a sort of thickening agent, it's called xanthan gum.
And it makes ketchup into that gloopy stuff, what we call
non-Newtonian liquid, so it's thick in the bottle
and then it becomes briefly liquid when you pour it out.
Anybody know where you should hit on the bottle when you...?
Shake, shake, ketchup bottle, none will come and then a lot'll.
LAUGHTER
With all these healthy eating fads going on,
it can feel like you're constantly playing "ketchup".
GROANS
We're losing them, people, start the car.
Are you ready for the scores?
Let's see. Oh, yeah. Can't wait.
So, in fourth place... I mean, a long way down.
With -13,
it's Susan! Yes!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Come on!
In third place, with -5, Tom!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Thank you, thank you.
In second place, with 5 points - Alan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And that means the winner, with a full 6 points,
So, it's thanks to Tom, Susan, Zoe and Alan.
And I leave you with a fact by American clown Red Skelton,
that's roughly true.
AS RED SKELTON: "Did you know that when van Gogh cut off his ear,
"He actually went blind?
"Because every time he put his hat on, it slipped down over his eyes."
Thank you and goodnight.