CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
JAMES BOND-STYLE MUSIC PLAYS
Good evening, Mr Bond, and welcome to the QI lair.
I see you are not alone. Oh, it's a very lively cat!
CAT WAILS
Tonight's little, um, episode
is dedicated to Secrets, Spies and Sleuths.
Allow me to introduce my associates on a need-to-know basis.
The hush-hush James Acaster.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The highly classified Cariad Lloyd.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The top-secret Daliso Chaponda.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And the man with no name - Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And their buzzers! James goes...
MUSIC: Theme from The Pink Panther
Cariad goes...
MUSIC: Theme from Mission: Impossible
Daliso goes...
MUSIC: Theme from James Bond
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Theme from Austin Powers
LAUGHTER
That's my favourite ever.
It's good! I'll just...
Anyway, there we go, OK.
I felt I couldn't spend the entire show stroking my pussy.
No, not the whole show. People think this show's smart.
Yeah. They're wrong. They're wrong!
What might make you suspect that someone was a spy?
DALISO GASPS
OK, I've actually got to say, I'm very overqualified
for this, right? Oh, are you? OK. Well, I've met a spy.
Have you? My father's an African politician in Malawi.
A few years ago, he was arrested.
His office blew up.
And, panicked, he asked me and my brother to find him a spy,
essentially to investigate stuff,
and all of this culminated in us meeting a spy
at Wetherspoons.
Was it Shaken, Not Stirred Saturdays?
CARIAD: What was he wearing?
He did not look like I expected -
he looked more like a heavy-metal drummer,
like long-haired, big guy, lots of tattoos.
OK, so we're possibly going a bit more trad than that. OK.
So you've got a top-secret briefcase right next to you, my darling.
If you pick that up, the thing that has betrayed a spy
is in that briefcase. So if you open that up...
Nobody has a proper briefcase any more, do they?
No, sadly. I like that noise, don't you?
Yeah. "Ker-chunk!" It suggests business is afoot.
Right. What have we got? I know I've gained
a lot of weight recently,
but is this an intervention? It's a Fitbit.
So, what happened was, in 2018, they were tracking data from Fitbits
and it made it possible to work out where soldiers at American military
bases had been jogging.
So the data came from a company called Strava, and it's used
by Fitbits and smartphones and so on to log exercise,
and they released this heat map of activity.
But it was a huge problem for places like Afghanistan and Syria
because the Army had given away 2,500 of these Fitbits
as part of an exercise plan to get people moving.
And everybody could work out where they were!
"Guys, you've got to stay secret, absolutely secret."
Wow. "But here is this GPS."
Cariad, let's have a look.
You've got a briefcase as well.
See what's in yours. I feel like the really cool kid at school.
"Brought my own briefcase, guys." Oh! What have you got?
I have got some moustaches. Ooh.
Which one do you think suits you?
Well, there's some here...
There's the smarty, the rogue, the scoundrel,
Casanova, party boy.
I think I'm a party boy.
But then, what about the Frida Kahlo? Oh, Frida Kahlo.
That's very good. Oh, nice.
The monobrow.
The top really sells it as well. Yeah, that's what I thought.
Yeah. I'd seen a monkey.
You would not draw attention to yourself at all if you had that.
A lot of people look like that in Wetherspoons.
So, this is a true story.
In 2008, an MI6 officer appeared on The One Show
to talk about recruitment, and he was wearing a false moustache.
No! And it fell off during the segment.
So the studio lights had weakened the glue and the interviewer
eventually had to point out that it was peeling off.
And he replied, "I was worried that might happen."
And he put it in his pocket for the rest of the interview.
They edited that bit out and it was obscured in the final programme,
so the viewers didn't know about it.
But don't you think that's marvellous?
James, you've got a briefcase. Let's have a look at your briefcase.
What have you got in there? I genuinely can't open it.
CARIAD: Don't pretend you didn't have a briefcase at school!
James has got loads of briefcases!
CARIAD: He's like, "Oh, how does this work?" Oh, yeah.
Hold on a sec.
I think I've changed the combination.
I'm going for 007.
Yeah. Hold on. I'm putting on gloves...
I'm not saying that your career as a spy is over,
I just think... I reckon this is broke.
Push it here. Yeah. I've got gloves on now.
OK. I really hope, I really hope you can't do this first time.
Let's have a go.
CLICK!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
LAUGHTER
And with rubber gloves on, James! Rubber gloves! I know, right?!
What is it? Is it worth it? What have you got?
It's empty.
I have... Yes. ..a notebook.
Oh, no, a passport and some staples. OK.
Are the staples meant to be in here?
Yes. They are. So, they go together, the passport and the staples.
What do you reckon?
I think that if you're a spy...
Yes. ..and you don't want people finding out your identity,
you staple your passport together.
And then they can't open it and find out who you are.
Genius! Well, here's the thing.
For years, the Soviet Union was able to catch spies due to staples.
So, American staples are made of stainless steel,
they are not in the Soviet Union.
And that meant the Soviet Union ones rusted over time,
due to moisture in the air.
And so, official Soviet passports
were stained around the staple, brown. Wow! Passports forged
in the United States by their agents
did not have rust stains, and that would make people suspicious.
Ah! That's amazing!
It's very cool, isn't it? REALLY cool! Right, Alan, your briefcase.
Do you need help or do you think you'll be able to open it?
No, I don't! Really difficult, Alan. Take your time.
Oh, straight away! First time, James!
LAUGHTER
Here's the REALLY annoying thing.
I can't close this now...!
What have you got, darling? I've got loads of fabric. It's laundry.
It's laundry. So laundry and spying.
How would you think that goes together?
Hide in the laundry basket, like they do in cartoons.
You can sew things into things, Sandi, you could sew things
into garments. Secret messages. You could. Yes.
There are lots of stories actually to do with laundry and spying.
So during World War I, Frieda Lawrence, who was married
to DH Lawrence, she lived with her husband on the Cornish coast,
and she came under suspicion because she was rather exacting
about hanging her laundry out.
And it was thought that she was
hanging it on the line in a specific way to give messages to U-boats.
It didn't help that she was German, OK?
Her father was Baron von Richthofen. Not the famous one,
but another Baron von Richthofen. There's so many.
And she received deliveries of German newspapers every day,
so they were just a little bit, you know, suspicious.
They were given a military exclusion order and made to leave the area.
Was she hanging up, like, duvet covers
with "attack at midnight" written on them?
Well... "The base" and an arrow!
"Go that way!" It's not a completely ludicrous
suspicion, James, because during the American Civil War,
there was an African-American called Dabney, and he got a job as a cook
at the Union headquarters.
And at the same time, his wife worked as a laundress
for a Confederate general, and she would listen
to the Confederate plans and then she would signal
to her husband using the washing line.
So, you know, that grey shirt is "Long Street",
and when she takes it off, it means he's gone down here.
So it absolutely has form, people using laundry.
But poor old Frieda Lawrence.
What's so secret about this?
Um, is it, like, a very low-budget, like, Bond pen?
It is the pen itself. Ah!
Yes, it is the pen itself that we are interested in.
This is a ballpoint pen. It was kept secret from the Chinese, for years.
Is it something about the way that the ink works in a ballpoint pen?
It's sort of to do with that.
It's to do with the actual manufacturer of the ballpoint pen.
So, until 2017, so, fairly recently,
although China supplied 80% of the world's ballpoint pens,
it was importing the pen tips,
because it didn't know how to make them.
The ballpoint pen needs to hold a ball in a socket,
and that's what connects it to the inkwell.
So you can see - it is a steel ball,
capable of writing for about 800 metres, I think,
and it was a closely guarded trade secret,
and China simply had neither a machine capable of making
the ball small enough, or the right type of steel that wouldn't crack
when it was cut, and in 2015, China's Premier, Keqiang, went to
a seminar in Beijing and complained that this was the big thing.
"The real situation facing us is that we cannot make ballpoint pens
"with a smooth writing function."
And they thought that the day they could,
that would make China a world-class place.
I don't see how you can reverse engineer an iPhone,
but not a ballpoint pen!
It's actually an extraordinary thing, but it's that small,
and it doesn't crack, it's the right kind of steel, and it'll accept
the ink, and so on. They can now do it, just to let you know.
It took five years of intense research.
What were they doing wrong?
Did they have a massive ball at the end?
"We've made one, but it's enormous!"
No, Chen Ping, it's no good. Go back to the drawing board! Start again!"
Get it down to a tennis ball size. "Will this do?"
But doesn't that, because you never really think about it, do you?
This tiny little ball of steel.
OK, now, you've got a fully functioning Biro,
what do you need if you want to write a...
Paper!
BLAST OF "AUSTIN POWERS" THEME
LAUGHTER
Paper!
No, I want to add a secret message! Invisible ink.
Invisible ink, exactly right!
This is a true story. In 2019, there was
a student at university in Japan who got full marks on her essay.
She was writing about ninja history,
and she handed it in with invisible ink made from soybeans.
What a ninja thing to do! It IS a ninja thing to do.
She's like, "Boom!" "I got this!" "Give me the degree. I am a ninja!"
It was the ninja museum of Iga-Ryu,
and it is the ninja art of aburidashi.
You can't get into the museum, though.
You can't find it. Impossible.
They send you a ticket to get in and it's just...
Nothing. You can't read it. Get to the door, someone throws
a shuriken in at your head. It's very difficult.
She sent her professor a message with the essay saying,
"Heat this paper up on a stove," and he did.
Did anybody ever do that as a kid? We used to write...
Lemon juice. ..lemon juice, yes.
Secret messages in lemon juice.
You can also use urine...
LAUGHTER
It's lower budget...!
If you want to do it again, you can use piss, actually!
You don't have to waste your lemons.
Make it a love letter! Send it to your betrothed.
"Heat this up!" "Mm, definitely from him! Mm!"
Can you imagine? Semen, darling?
Semen as well? Yeah.
I tell you what, though, if that's a long letter, you're impressed.
LAUGHTER
Really? How many pages, James?
"You've written a book?!"
"And you're telling me none of this was written in piss.
"I'm impressed!"
So, invisible ink not the only way to send secret messages.
You can also do it with eggs.
Does anybody know how?
Oh, the egg white. Is it the egg white?
No, with an actual egg, so, send somebody an egg.
And it's got a secret message, but how?
You can see - nothing written.
Do you have to put it in something, like, liquid?
So, it was a 16th century Italian scholar
called Giambattista della Porta,
and he was really interested in cryptography,
he was known as the Professor of Secrets,
and he used to use eggs to send messages.
So, what it is is, you leave the egg in vinegar for four hours, OK?
This softens the shell.
Then you make a tiny little incision in the shell.
You slot a small message through the incision so that the paper sits
basically between the shell and the egg white,
you then repair the cut, using some plant gum or something,
and put the egg back into cold water,
and that will harden the shell again. So let me show you.
OK, like that. And in here is a message that says...
Oh, wow! Isn't that great? Wow!
That is really cool!
Yeah! That is so cool! That is so cool, isn't it?
And he discovered that in 1584.
If you don't have egg white, you can just fill an egg with semen,
I think, it's the same thing.
It's quite a long way to send a message, isn't it?
Yes, but here's the thing.
When people are having food deliveries and so on,
if you're having eggs delivered,
nobody's going to go and check all the eggs!
That's like, do you know Josephine Baker?
She was a marvellous spy. She was a brilliant spy,
and it was all in the musical notes.
So when she was living in Paris she would just carry her music around
and if she was stopped, it would just look like music
but it was in the,
the notes were spelling out messages for the Resistance.
How would you use this to send a secret message?
That's going to need a big egg!
LAUGHTER
Someone would know the cypher.
So, E = B...
You don't need to know anything.
Oh, is it the way you fold it? Does it then make a message?
It is the way you wrap it around something. Wow!
It's called a scytale.
It's an ancient Greek way to hide messages.
All it required was that the person sending and the person receiving
had the same size stick. That's cool.
And then you would just send this,
which could be wrapped up quite small
and you wrap it around like this and it says,
"This is a scytale."
Isn't it clever?
That's very clever. I know.
I'd love it if you got it and that was the message.
And then you just had to reply, "I know what a scytale is!
"It was my idea to use 'em!
"Can you please stick to the plan?
"We're trying to bring down a government here!
"I don't need you to tell me what the equipment is that we used!"
Wow, this is so cool, right?
The rest of it just is gibberish.
It would take you a while to work out. It also says...
SHE MUMBLES GIBBERISH
That's the Danish version. It IS the Danish version!
PHONE RINGS
Oh, sorry, I'll just get out my handkerchief.
Er, hello? Yes?
No. No, Moneypenny, I've told you not to ring me at work.
Yeah.
OK. The Banker?
LAUGHTER
Who would use a secure phone like this?
Commissioner Gordon. Commissioner Gordon!
That's such a good reference. Anybody else? Who would use...?
Again, this is a totally unnecessary Chaponda back story!
But we needed one of those because we were always bugged.
Right. And the reason I know this is, in Kenya, the Malawi ambassador
happened to be a high-school friend of my mum,
and gave my mum a bunch of my dad's secrets.
Really?! Yeah.
When you say secrets, like...
He's been "calling this woman", what's going on? Oh, secrets!
Yes. Wow!
Have you ever had therapy, because...?
Is it too late to bring up? My dad is the Mayor of Kettering.
On numerous occasions,
people have tried to push him over,
and I had to meet a spy in a Harvester once.
And, let me tell you, he looked
more like a bass player in a prog band, this man.
You were OK, though? And I DO go to therapy, just so you know.
So, who might have had a red telephone? A head of state?
Yeah. President?
So, the one that we normally think of is the US and Russia hotline.
It was often called the red telephone.
It was neither red nor a telephone. What?! Yeah, I know.
I'm destroying things for you! What?!
So June 1963, we'd just had the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and it took 12 hours at that time to get messages
backwards and forwards.
They agreed to establish a sort of direct form of communication.
The very first message sent by the Americans in August 1963
read, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0."
You had to wrap it round a stick!
Why would they send that?
Because it has every letter in the world. Uses every letter!
Yeah. Which is called? Oh!
The alphabet.
LAUGHTER
They were trying to show that they could send all the letters
and that they could actually communicate directly, because,
in fact, the system consisted not
of telephones, but of teletype machines.
So there were four teletype machines in Moscow, four more in
the Soviet embassy in Washington, and the message was sent over
a 10,000-mile-long transatlantic cable.
Why is it called the red telephone, if there's no red telephone?!
It maybe just sounds better.
The 1971 system updated the use of a satellite connection,
and, most recently, they've upgraded to a fibre optic link
allowing both email and finally talking, but only recently. Wow.
There were red secure telephones in the UK. They were introduced
in the 1950s. Oh! This, and that's why I was so careful touching it,
is a real Pickwick phone. It's been lent to us by GCHQ. Wow!
So the Pickwick system was in place
and used during the Cuban Missile Crisis for secure communication,
but it was between the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan,
and President Kennedy.
And basically this would attach to the cypher unit and that sort of
mashed up the speech and prevented eavesdroppers from
understanding what was going on. What I like is the British Army,
they thought this is the way to do it.
They used to hire operators with strong regional accents
so that if anybody was eavesdropping, they thought,
"Well, they'll never understand what they bloody said!"
IN WELSH ACCENT: Listen, we're going to invade at 20 past 5, OK?
And it's going to be, oh, it's going to go mad, I tell you!
Everyone's going to be kicking off, you're not going to believe it!
Understand? All right? Ta, bye. All right, bye, bye, bye.
You wouldn't know. You'd have no idea what was going on.
Even Welsh people! We do have, and I think this is seriously cool,
we have another secure phone.
It's just over on the table cos I don't want to touch it.
It's also incredibly heavy.
It's called Brahms, and it is a portable, secure line
that comes in a suitcase.
And this is the one that was used by Margaret Thatcher
during the Falklands War.
Wow. Wow. This is very cool, isn't it?
She was able to open it, James, which was nice.
We are joined virtually now by Dr David Abrutat,
GCHQ's Departmental Historian.
Dr David is one of a very few number of GCHQ employees to be avowed.
What does that mean, David, you are avowed?
Essentially it means I'm publicly known,
and, as the department's historian, my role's to tell the story
of our organisation's history over the last 100 years.
So, tell me, the one I want to hear about is, there was
a secret line called Sigsaly. Can you tell me about Sigsaly?
During the Second World War, the British and American governments
needed to talk frequently on a secure line.
And in November 1942, GCHQ's Alan Turing went over on a liaison
visit to the States, to the Bell Laboratories, who were researching
and developing a new secure communications system,
which was called Sigsaly.
And it was an absolute monster, it weighed 50 tonnes.
It included 40 racks of equipment
and drew something like 30 kilowatts of power.
And it was certainly known by the users as the Green Hornet
because of its irritating buzzing noise on the line.
And the first Sigsaly was installed in the Pentagon in the States,
and the second was installed in the basement of Selfridges
in Oxford Street,
so certainly on the first trial run on July 15th 1943, Winston Churchill
was using this piece of equipment in the basement
of Selfridges before they put in extension lines
to 10 Downing Street, if the rumours are true.
Fantastic. Alan, did you want to ask anything?
Well, I've seen Thatcher's briefcase, and I just wondered,
did she take it on holiday? Did she carry it herself?
DR ABRUTAT: Did Margaret Thatcher ever go on holiday?
ALAN: Perhaps not!
DR ABRUTAT: The briefcase phone you've got is called Brahms,
which was developed in the early 1980s, and it was used
by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the time,
during the Falklands conflict, to communicate securely
with her Cabinet and to the senior military officers of the time.
Well, it's been fascinating.
I don't know if you send love to everybody at GCHQ!
I send love to everyone at GCHQ.
And thank you very much, Dr David Abrutat.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you.
Now, complete this sentence.
If you're invited to a penetration party, it's best to practise safe...
Safe words.
In case things get hairy. That's very...
And I'm worried that you know that!
What are they penetrating?
That's the question.
Is it a person? No, it isn't. Thank goodness for that.
You are best to practise safe cracking.
Penetration party is a perfectly innocent phrase
used by safe crackers to describe
an all-night event where they practise opening safes.
Wow! And it was invented by accident,
so there was a safe cracker who was called Dave McOmie.
He's a bit of a legend, this guy, OK. He edits
the International Safecracker magazine.
Wow. He looks exactly like I thought he would.
That's not even him. That's a general look, frankly.
Can we talk about the guy in the background
with the orange back support?
Yeah, that is worrying, isn't it?
I really want to be in the shot
where he was buying that back support, going,
"I'm going to a penetration party later.
"I'm going to need a back support for it.
"Just the best one you've got. It's a big penetration party.
"A lot of guys." "This one comes with a free matching cap."
"Oh, perfect!"
He's the only one with the headphones on! Who's he talking to?
There's someone in the safe.
IN MUFFLED VOICE: "I'm inside now. Are wearing the back support? Over."
"Yeah, but I'm the only one. I'm standing out."
So they were at a convention in Philadelphia and one
of the attendees mentioned that he had a warehouse
filled with about 80 safes, which all needed opening.
So they decided to do a masterclass with these 80 things.
Everybody got their equipment.
They spent all night, all night working on the safes.
They managed to open every single one of them.
And now it's become a thing. People have penetration parties.
But how WOULD you open the safe? Do you know the different ways?
No idea. Twice I've moved house,
and there's been a safe, big safe, in the house I couldn't get in.
And the second time it happened to me, I thought,
"I want to get rid of that." It took six men. I wasn't one of them -
I didn't have a back support. No. Incredibly heavy thing.
And to this day, I don't know what was in it.
Oh, wow. I mean, the weight of it, presumably loads of gold.
Oops!
The best thing, if the mechanism has slipped a bit, you can work
on the dial. The easiest thing is what these guys are doing here,
which is to drill a hole. I love this.
"Just use a sledgehammer," it says. That's it.
Just get in and biff it.
I might go to a penetration party and ask if they run
a course for briefcases.
"I've been struggling lately and I'm working my way up
"to a safe, but first of all, I'm only
"halfway there with a briefcase.
"I'll just sit in the corner while you do the safe stuff."
IN AMERICAN ACCENT: James, put on the back support,
strap in and watch.
There are other ways to break into secure buildings
if you think outside the box. This is a wonderful story.
In 1971, there was an activist group called
the Citizens' Commission To Investigate The FBI,
and they targeted a draft board in Delaware, and to gain access,
all they did was they left a note on the door that read,
"Please don't lock this door tonight."
No! Yeah. And nobody did.
So it completely worked.
They went in and stole everything that they needed.
That's genius! Isn't that brilliant?
And it revealed evidence of massive wrongdoing and spying
and criminal activity by Edgar Hoover's FBI,
which was then sent to journalists.
And 200 agents went on a manhunt to try and find out who did it.
And they never did find the people. CARIAD GASPS
Another way to break into a safe is to bypass the doors entirely, OK?
I love this story. 1836, the Bank of England got an anonymous letter when
the sender claimed to have access to their stash of gold, OK?
So, offered to prove it by meeting staff from the bank
in the vault at a time of their choosing.
So, time was set, the bank managers go into the vault
and they saw a man appearing up through the floorboards,
and he had been working on the sewers and he had discovered,
by fluke, that you could get up into the safe.
He didn't take anything and the bank was so grateful,
they gave him £800, which is about 80 grand in today's money,
and arranged for the vault to be made more secure.
Wow! Somebody going, "The floorboards!"
I love that he must have been standing there covered in shit,
from the sewers, being like, "See? I got right in."
And they're like, "That's amazing.
"Stand back, just don't come too near, Dave."
He could have nicked it all because they didn't know about it.
He could have taken a bar each day and they wouldn't even notice.
No idea. Anyway, moving on. How do you kick-start a Spitfire?
Hm. Oh, does it have a crank?
Do you get a glamorous lady, to get in and sort it out for you?
Well, she's probably one of the amazing women who delivered
Spitfires once they had been built. They were delivered by volunteers,
and about a fifth of them were women. Wow.
What do we talk about kick-starting now?
Oh, like, you go online and you say, "Please give me money."
"Please give me money. I want to go to drama school."
Yes. Yes. What, and then rival me in my career?
I think not. Not happening.
It's crowdfunding. It's exactly... No. Yeah.
So they needed to raise the money for the planes.
And if you raised a certain amount, you were allowed to name the plane.
What? So crowdfunded Spitfires were called things
like All The Fun Of The Fair,
and carnivals and circuses people put that together.
This is the early Boaty McBoatface, basically. Yeah.
The Dogfighter was the Kennel Club.
Unshackled Spirit was funded by British POWs
while they were being held in Germany.
That's so great! You know, the actual name Spitfire... Yeah.
..is because the engineer,
his nickname for his daughter was Spitfire.
It was actually the owner of the company.
The owner? But imagine he'd called her, like, Dumpling or something.
"I name it after my son, Dickhead."
"The Unfortunate Mistake."
"Not Really Mine, as I call him."
Takes After Her Mother. Call her that.
Yes, you know, the daughter, Ann, her nickname was Spitfire, you're
absolutely right, but the project manager wanted to call it Scarab
or Shrew. Wouldn't be the same, would it?
But the fact that POWs, British POWs,
who were being held in Germany...
So what happened was they crowdfunded via a series
of coded letters that were sent in and out of prison,
and the prisoners would instruct that Army pay be redirected
to the Swedish Red Cross, and the Red Cross sent it
to the British Army to fund Spitfires.
So they were still getting funds when they were POWs in Germany?
You still got paid even though you were being held.
They redirected it, yeah. That's incredible.
There were some marvellously inventive ways to raise funds.
There was a Kent farmer who charged people sixpence to see
the only field in Kent without a German aircraft in it.
Market Lavington, which is a village in Wiltshire, they drew
an outline of a Spitfire in the square and they asked people to fill
in the outline with coins and it hit the target in a matter of days.
Spitfires, theoretically, were priced at about £5,000 each,
so you were told eight shillings would buy a spark plug,
£2,000 would get you a wing, that kind of thing.
In reality, it's not like that. It's very much like when you sponsor
a snow leopard. Yes. You don't get a specific snow leopard.
No. Oh, really? Yeah. I did not know this, James.
So, my oldest daughter, when she was younger,
she was obsessed with sheep and I sponsored a sheep at London Zoo.
And one day, she said, "Can we go and look?"
And it was pouring with rain and I had this photograph that
I had downloaded,
and we stood in the rain with all these sheep in the petting zoo.
And she was going, "No, it's not that one, Mum."
Well, if anybody watching sponsored an African child, it was me.
Thank you. Thank you. So lovely.
The Spitfire project as a whole owes everything to one woman who I think
most people won't know about, but she is one of my heroines.
She's called Lady Lucy Houston. She's fantastic!
She knew that Britain would need a really strong air force.
She knew this after World War I, and the Government refused to pay
for the development of aircraft, so she did.
She personally paid the amounts of money that was needed
for Rolls-Royce and Vickers Supermarine to create
the engine and the aircraft that became the Spitfire.
And I think most people won't know about her. She died in 1936.
She never knew the impact of what she did, but she looked forward.
Without her, we simply would not have had the Spitfire.
I think she's amazing and I think she's really worth knowing about,
as indeed, do you know about Hazel Hill? No.
Hazel Hill was 13 years old when her father, Fred Hill,
was working for the Air Ministry, and she helped him do
the calculations that eventually showed a Spitfire could be armed
with eight machineguns and not four.
And they did the sums at the kitchen table. And she,
a 13-year-old, thought to have helped with the Battle of Britain.
And then, later in life, she was saved by a Spitfire
that she had helped to create.
There was a German plane overhead, and then when she turned to look,
a Spitfire was chasing it off. So that's nice.
And the pilot was like, "Thanks, Hazel!
"Keep doing your maths!"
At 13, she fixed Spitfires and then we're like,
"James, can you open this briefcase?" Yeah.
Er...
And then, my favourite thing about Spitfires, some of them
were transformed into beer delivery services after D-Day.
So, after the D-Day landings,
the British troops were rather low on beer in France
and so they hatched a plan to make the extra fuel
tanks for the Spitfires into beer delivery things.
And they steam-cleaned them and then filled them with beer,
although apparently still strong taste of petrol.
Fantastic!
Anyway, we're sticking with wartime
and imagine you've got your enemy surrounded, OK?
How are you going to undermine them?
My parents are so good at it. Just compare them to their brothers.
Say, "Your sister's got two kids already." "What's wrong with you?"
"What's wrong with you?" Yeah.
"Your brother's a doctor." That sort of thing.
But your enemy, how are you going to undermine your enemy?
Are you talking about literally going under... Digging?
..like in the rather brilliant novel Birdsong?
Have you ever read Birdsong? No, is it good? It's brilliant!
It's largely set in the First World War,
but there's a whole section in it where miners are trying to
dig under the enemy trenches. Well, you're absolutely right, darling.
It's military mining.
So a tunnel that you dig, for example, underneath
a target during a siege is called a sap
and it's often under the weakest part of a fortress,
like a gatehouse or something.
So you dig a tunnel and a support tunnel with wooden beams
and then you basically set fire to the beams,
it collapses both the tunnel and the target above the ground.
And it has been used for thousands of years as a crucial
tactic in siege warfare.
And we use the term sapper today to refer to a military engineer.
We say "the sappers" and it's about digging a sap,
digging a tunnel under something.
So how do you stop somebody sapping towards you?
Would you put, like, big steel things down so that they can't...?
The easier thing to do, weirdly, is to dig another tunnel. Oh.
To weaken their tunnel? Underneath theirs.
Oh. Yes.
It's called counter mining,
so you basically allow their tunnel to collapse down
and siege warfare often resulted in battles underground,
actual physical fights inside the tunnel.
But underground fighting,
hand-to-hand combat was thought to be the height of courage and
chivalry and if you fought somebody underground in one of these tunnels
and didn't kill them, there was an understanding that if you
came across them on the ground later on, you would spare them again.
You were now brothers in arms.
I'd try to fake it. Like, I meet someone, I'm like,
"Hey. wait, didn't you and me have a thing?
"It was dark down there, it was me! It was me.
"We had a thing, right?"
Henry V fought hand-to-hand in a tunnel during
the siege, I think it's pronounced Melun, in 1420 and his opponent,
a Captain Barbazan, used this convention
when they met later on and Henry was going to execute him,
and he said, "No, wait a minute, we did that fighting in that battle."
That's not in the play, is it? They should have put that scene in.
The tunnel scene.
You know St Andrews, if you go, you can see both the mine
and the counter mine under the castle,
both built during a siege in 1546. Wow. It was dug through solid stone.
That's extraordinary. Isn't that amazing? Invading Catholic forces
and defending Protestants.
How would you win a siege with just an ox and a handful of corn?
Now, so far, a lot of your... Here's what I've noticed. Yes.
Your questions are really tricksy.
Because...
..we all think it means one thing but actually you've snuck another
word in there that means something else, you've got a double meaning.
So an ox, a handful of corn. Yes.
So, an ox probably street slang for Oxo cube.
Erm... A...
..handful, I'm guessing it's not a human handful,
you're more going for like a gorilla-size handful,
it's much bigger.
And corn is the nu metal band Korn from the '90s.
So, that is what you're going for.
You play '90s nu metal, throw Oxo cubes at them, thrown by a gorilla.
Can I have the points, please?
It's about fooling your enemy.
That's another way to win, right?
Ah! You paint an ox to look like a giant corn on the cob
and then, all the villagers run at it
and start trying to turn it round and eat it
and it just attacks them and goes hog wild.
It's a legend from Luxembourg.
So, the legend is that there was a castle siege
and the people inside were running dangerously low on supplies
and they were on the edge of starvation
and all they had left was an ox and a handful of corn.
So, what they did was they fed the corn to the ox
and they killed it and they threw the innards over the castle wall,
and the enemy looked at the guts of the dead animal
and it was full of food and they deduced, wrongly, that they had
plenty of supplies and resources and so they called off the siege.
But I like that. I like being clever rather than killing.
Could have gone badly wrong though, couldn't it?
"Now we haven't even got the corn!" Exactly!
Now, it's time to slip surreptitiously into
the enemy territory of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
When you see SS, as you see here in this picture,
what does the first S stand for?
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE THEME PLAYS Cariad.
Steam?
KLAXON
JAMES CLAPS ONCE
LAUGHTER
I don't know why they don't do that on this show.
Every time someone gets it, they could look at the camera and go,
"That's general ignorance!"
I'm going to try that from now on! I'm going to give that a go.
That's general ignorance!
That's so good.
So good, Sandi!
Right. It stands for screw. People used to distinguish between ships
driven by paddles and ships that were driven by propellers or screws,
and when paddleships started to be phased out, the SS seemed
to stick around.
And can I just say, to pre-empt any letters we might receive from,
I don't know, say there was A Pedant watching, it is true to say that
two ships normally referred to these days as SS Great Western
and SS Great Eastern both had paddles, but the SS prefix
has only been attached to them in modern times.
So, in their day, they were known... This is entirely different
from the German SS, which is much more, much more...
More problematic. More problematic.
We didn't name our ships after them, as, like, a little joke!
"SS - remember those guys? That was crazy!"
Those so-and-sos! Also, the way you said,
"In case there's A Pedant watching,"
made me think there is just one guy who writes in all the time,
and it's Stephen Fry.
"I think you'll find..." And he just addresses it to you.
"Dear Sandi..."
"Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear."
Right. Where are sudokus from?
PINK PANTHER THEME PLAYS
James.
The newspaper.
I can't do them. I can do them. I can do them.
I'm number dyslexic. Is there number dyslexia?
Yeah, it's called dyscal...calc...
I can't even say it! Dyscalculus?
Count Duckula!
So, numbers switch round when you're looking at them, and do this.
So sudoku is a nightmare.
I think I need to borrow money from you.
I'll meet you in Wetherspoons!
So, newspapers, yes, but... Japan?
KLAXON
I was sure I was right! Come on!
Are they actually American?
So, invented in the United States, 1979, by a puzzle magazine
in Manhattan, and they were originally called Number Place.
I'm scared already.
A little bit of trivia, if you wrap a sudoku around a stick,
all the numbers line up in the right order.
There's a life hack.
There was a Japanese games manufacturer called Maki Kaji,
who brought them to Japan, and they wanted to give it a new name.
And he said, "My staff are pushing me to give it a new name,
"and I wanted to go horse racing.
"So I just created a name really quickly in about 25 seconds."
Now, I'm going to say it all wrong, so I think we've written it out.
What that means is numbers should be single, unmarried,
but it was too long and they decided to shorten it to Sudoku.
Wow.
And if you want to feel really dumb, they've got now these Rubik's Cubes,
which are also Sudoku.
Oh, my God. Really?
Look at that. I've never seen someone
want something so much, so quickly!
It was like, as soon as you heard about it,
I was like, Sandi's going to buy one as soon as this finishes!
There's a kick-starter, she's already signed up.
Pledge £500 - done.
I had no idea!
Nightmare. It's heaven.
But what about when you get to the last box, and you realise
you've got two eights in it? Yeah.
Yeah. And somewhere, right in the depths of it, there's a mistake,
you'll never find it, and you've been doing it for four weeks.
You get your pencil and repeatedly
stab yourself in the palm of the hand
and then smear blood on your face.
You'd only do that in a lockdown. Yeah.
It's all right. Would you like to stroke my pussy?
I'm serious. There you go.
Have a stroke of my pussy. You'll feel better.
CAT SQUEALS
Whoever is on sound duty is on the top of their game,
because you...
..you riffed that on the spot, and as soon as it went towards you,
they were like "Bam"!
And they were just... Give that person a Bafta.
People don't appreciate how good that was!
Brilliant.
It was Lizzie, in Sound. Lizzie, in Sound.
She's got a real cat, that she's... CAT SQUEALS
Sorry.
"Come here, quick, stay in the room!" And a very sharp pencil!
Right. Which makes the best espresso,
finely ground or roughly ground beans?
Well, I'd say finely ground, Sandi.
Isn't the point of grinding the beans that you expose more
of the coffee bean to the water
and you get more flavour the more fine the grind?
You would think so but if they are too fine,
they clog the espresso machine and then they moisten unevenly and they
make the drink more sour and more bitter
than if you use coarser grains. And the reason I know this,
mathematicians published a paper called
Systematically Improving Espresso -
Insights from Mathematical Modelling and Experiment.
What they found is that if coffee shops actually use slightly less
coffee than they're currently using,
so they suggest about 15g instead of 20g, it would
not only improve the taste, it would have the
added benefit of using fewer beans, so the coffee shop
will end up with better drinks for a lower price.
So don't pack it in too tightly. Don't pack it in too tight.
That's not a reference to coffee!
You just said, "Don't pack it in too tight," I know what prop's being
bought out here. Here we go. Here we go.
See how quick she is.
CAT SCREECHES
Now, in homage to one of the most-famous fictional spies,
I think we should end with a martini, OK?
So, how would anybody like theirs?
Shaken, not stirred. No?
KLAXON
So, the thing is that shaking a martini will ruin it,
and I know this cos I'm a martini fan, OK?
So drinks like daiquiris, they're shaken
and the reason for that is that the ice dilutes the sweetness.
Martinis are not sweet, so they don't need to be shaken.
They're supposed to be served as concentrated as possible.
Unfortunately we can't drink the original martinis
that James Bond is supposed to have had
because one of the key ingredients is no longer available.
It's known as a Vesper Martini. It was named after the first Bond girl,
she was called Vesper Lynd. Vespa's Italian for wasp.
Did you know that? No, I didn't.
Yes, hence the scooter. The scooter, the Vespa.
It sounds like a wasp. Bzzzzzz! Wasp. You see?
The Vesper Martini contained gin and vodka
and something called Kina Lillet.
Doesn't sound pleasant, does it? It would absorb a lot.
You don't want THAT in your martini.
Anyway, the trick is...to stir it.
Have you got drinks there for yourselves? Yes. Yes.
OK. Just, um, pour out... in tribute here.
Ooh-hoo! OK.
Do you know that Dick Van Dyke was once asked by Cubby Broccoli
if he wanted to take over from Sean Connery in the role,
and Dick Van Dyke reminded him of his British accent as Bert,
the Cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.
It was generally thought not to be a very good idea.
Well, here we go. Cheers. Cheers.
AS SEAN CONNERY: Martinis are better shtirred than shaken,
and underpants are better shilk than shatin.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
And, with that, it's the final dash towards the scores!
Top of the pack with nine points,
it's Alan! What?!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Second, with eight points,
it's James! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I couldn't even open a briefcase, and who got beat by me?!
Yes!
Third with -2, Daliso!
CARIAD: Oh, no!
And in last place with -15, it's Cariad!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
My thanks to James, Cariad, Daliso and Alan, and I leave you
with this secret sign-off from Lucille Ball.
The secret of staying young is to live honestly,
eat slowly and lie about your age.
Goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE