APPLAUSE
Good evening, and welcome to QI
where tonight we are swanning around Sideshows,
Stunts and Scavenger Hunts.
Phew!
Let's meet the fairground attractions.
Roll up, roll up, it's Rosie Jones.
APPLAUSE
The wild man of Croydon, Nish Kumar.
APPLAUSE
Behold, the freak of nature that is Gyles Brandreth.
APPLAUSE
And the star of Ferris Wheel's Day Off, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Right, let's hear how much fun you're all having. Nish goes...
CIRCUS MUSIC PLAYS
You can't help yourself but start doing that, can you?
No, you've got to bounce to that.
Rosie goes...
CIRCUS MUSIC PLAYS
Gyles goes...
CIRCUS MUSIC CONTINUES
And Alan goes...
CLOWN HOOTER
How did this woman pick up men?
Oh. Ooh.
Is it going to be with her teeth or something?
Well, you're heading in the right...
Am I? Oh. Heading in the right direction, yes.
This is one of the great acts of all time.
Ah. Gyles?
It's a strong woman of some kind.
Yeah. It's the very first female body-builder.
The first female body-builder. Yes. And doesn't she look,
if I may say so, are we allowed to make personal remarks?
Or will I have to apologise on...? She's dead, so I think it's fine.
Oh, fine.
She was a fine figure of a woman.
She's called Katie Brumbach, aka the Great Sandwina.
And if we pull out on this picture, we can see that she's...
There's rather more to her than we had first anticipated. Oh.
And what I like is, her act involved picking up her 5ft 6in husband
and twirling him over her head.
I think it's a fine way to make a living.
Sorry, I feel like I need to say it...
Yes?
She's fit.
That waist, those arms...
Oh, the things she could do with me.
Ooh!
Well, she's an extraordinary woman, she was born in Vienna,
she was the daughter of a strong man and a strong woman in the circus.
She was the second of 16 children.
Wow. Her father could reportedly lift more than 500lb
with a single finger. What? Wow.
I know, right? She starred in the Barnum and Bailey circus.
And in her spare time she became the Vice President
of the circus's suffrage movement. Oh, wow.
And her husband Max would tell a story,
I suspect it's a tall tale, that he met her when he took on
the challenge of wrestling her with the hopes of winning 100 marks.
And when she threw him to the ground, they immediately
realised that they loved each other.
And that there was a good double act in it, I think.
Have a look at this picture,
we've got her underneath a human bridge. There she is.
Whoa. Oh. No.
Basically, she's a good egg.
Yeah. She was a good egg, she was a feminist,
she was a suffragette and she did good works for the cause
of strong women.
And she was fit.
Exactly.
You know we're all stronger than we realise?
I learnt this when I was a very little boy,
because I was born in Germany after the Second World War,
the late 1940s, not a lot of work for the circuses.
And my parents engaged a couple to look after me,
as a sort of nanny and governess.
And they were strong people from the local circus.
So almost the first things I learnt were to walk the tightrope,
and to stand on my head, and to be a strong baby.
We can all do this experiment now.
Put your hand on your head. OK.
Like this. Oh, wait, I've got to find my head. OK.
Now, with your other hand, attempt to lift your arm off your head.
From underneath, just push with this hand.
Please do this at home if you're watching.
You can't do it, can you? No.
You really cannot do it.
The strongest person in the world, that strong woman, could not
lift my hand from my head.
It's all done with mechanics.
They're not particularly strong at all.
That's the trick I learnt when I was two and I'm pleased
after all these years to be able to share it with you now.
Someone told you that when you were two?
Yes.
And you remembered it?
Yes. How?!
I treasured it. Yeah.
I don't...
Never ask Gyles a follow-up question.
Sandwina herself had two children and, in fact, her first,
Theodore Roosevelt Sandwina, when he was two,
he weighed 3.5 stone - 50lb.
He could pick up a 25lb dumbbell. Wow.
Sandwina actually got her name,
because her real name was Katie Brumbach, she got it
from the very first male professional body-builder.
Oh, Eugen Sandow. Yes, indeed, darling.
Yes. There he is, look at that.
I mean, there's a use of Blu Tack.
Hang on, are we just, like... How did you know that?!
Because he was my great-uncle's godfather.
Not, frankly, that he looked... He didn't come to the christening,
I assure you, dressed like that.
Gyles, I've wanted to ask you this for a long time
and I want you to give me a straight answer.
Are you quite literally Forrest Gump?
No relation of any kind, but Eugen Sandow and my great-great-uncle,
I've got that generation right, they knew one another.
He was incredibly famous.
Even today the Mr Olympia competition,
the trophy is a statue of Sandow.
The legend has it that Eugen Sandow and Katie Brumbach once had
a competition to lift a 300lb weight and she won.
Wow.
And so she referred to herself as the Great Sandwina.
But this guy, he could do a somersault holding
a 24-kilo dumbbell in each hand.
He would sometimes lift a dumbbell that had a huge sphere on each end,
and when he put it down,
a grown man would walk out of each of the spheres.
I mean, he could lift a grand piano with an orchestra of eight on top.
Is he enormous? It's hard to tell there.
I think he wasn't that big. And the leaf isn't that big. OK.
Now, Gyles... Yes?
Tell me, what's the best way to win a nonstop speaking competition?
Oh, look. Oh, look, there you are.
There's a picture of me in younger and happier days. Hm.
Making the longest speech in the history of the world.
I spoke on that occasion only for about three-and-a-half hours.
Oh. I then broke the record again, speaking for seven hours.
Then for eight hours, then for 11 hours,
I shared that record with Nicholas Parsons.
And eventually I retired when I'd spoken nonstop
for 12-and-a-half hours.
Do you actually make notes, or do you just...? No. No.
You had to do it without notes, without repetition
and keeping the audience there, that was the challenge.
And also staying there through the night. Hm.
And I... Could you have a wee, darling?
That's the whole problem. Hm. I knew I'd need to go the loo.
But this was for a charity and they supplied me
with an appliance that you strap around yourself.
It's given to field marshals.
And babies. I know.
It's a full size, for field marshals on cold parade grounds.
Old men. It's a sort of tube thing.
Isn't that uncomfy?
Well, initially, but it's quite exciting, actually,
as the evening wears on.
Do you know, it's very funny, they said, "See if Gyles can be
"persuaded to reminisce," and you were.
Well, nonstop competitive speaking is a sort of lesser-known sibling
of the dance-marathon craze.
There was a thing in 1928 called the Noun and Verb Rodeo
and it took four days.
And you could say whatever you wanted, as long as
you spoke for 22.5 hours a day.
Could you do that, do you think?
Yeah, oh, certainly.
Don't start, I mean...
But wouldn't that be exciting?
We could do it here and break a record
and do something useful for a change.
But repetition was allowed.
There was one woman who repeatedly recited the part of Lady M
until she passed out.
Another competitor used his words to propose to a fellow player
who used her time to explain why she wasn't interested.
And a third said something so offensive they had to have him
arrested for "loose talking".
In fact, as far as I know, the longest speech is a filibuster
in the United States Senate. Yeah.
Which was a man called Storm Thurmond of South Carolina,
US Senator, in 1957.
And he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
It's a record that still stands. Wow.
But he's not my favourite person,
because he spoke against the Civil Rights Act. Yeah.
What a prick. Yeah.
What... Yeah, yeah.
It's like one of those Olympic records where
the person was on steroids. Yeah.
Like, it definitely should come with a big old asterisk. Yeah.
I mean, don't speak ill of the dead, apart from him.
Yeah.
You know, I'm going to say it
right here, right now,
I think I can beat that,
because all I need to do is say,
like, four sentences.
All right.
Absolutely, that is one of the ways of doing it,
just take it very slowly indeed.
But for me, the challenge, really, was keeping the audience awake,
as you can imagine, because that was the rule,
they had to stay.
Sorry, I'd drifted off, I wasn't listening, but you were...?
So, lots of competitive crazes in the United States.
The late 1930s, swallowing live goldfish was a competitive craze.
Oh. This guy, whose name is Lothrop Withington,
he was a freshman at Harvard, he said he settled his stomach
with some mashed potato before he swallowed.
Yeah, don't do this, OK?
It's not nice.
And also, in this country you'll be, I think, arrested and banned
from keeping animals.
The young man who brought the goldfish looks a bit put out.
He does look a bit put out.
"Well, no-one said anything about this." Yeah.
"They said, 'Have you got a fish?'
"I said, 'Yes, I've got Geoffrey and I'll bring him in.' "
What I love is, this guy looks so sort of trendy and everything,
so I had a look to see what happened to him later in life.
There's a terrible interview when he's an old man,
interviewed about his collection of antique spoon moulds.
And you just think, "Oh, you were so exciting
"in 1939, now look at you."
But it was a craze, and the final record before it was banned
was a student swallowing 210 fish in one sitting.
Another swallowing phenomenon of the era is one of my favourite
Vaudeville acts of all time, the great Hadji Ali,
the Great Regurgitator.
So, this guy, he was billed as the Egyptian Enigma.
And one of the things I like about him is,
he was Judy Garland's favourite Vaudeville act, OK?
So he would swallow... "I love him!"
"I think he's fabulous."
He would swallow increasingly improbable things and then reproduce
them in an order specified by the audience. Oh, brilliant.
So he could swallow 50 hazelnuts and an almond and bring the almond up
at the moment requested by the audience. No!
Yeah. And his greatest...
"What a great show.
"I love nuts." "I love the almond."
Why in all these pictures do there have to be three men in suits
who appear to have nothing to do with it? No, they don't.
To bulk out the crowd. Yeah.
His greatest trick, right, he would swallow some kerosene,
then some water, then he would regurgitate the kerosene,
set it on fire, regurgitate the water from six feet away
and put the fire out.
How do you discover you're good at that?!
This is Le Petomane in reverse, isn't it?
It is, exactly Le Petomane in reverse, yes. Yeah, yeah.
Le Petomane was a similar period, I think.
Yes, I think it's about right. A similar vintage of act. Yeah.
And he was somebody who broke wind, out of his backside -
Le Petomane could blow out candles at a distance.
Well, darling, he could do the whole of the Marseillaise, apparently.
Oh, yes. Yeah.
You can do that.
No, I can't do that.
I can't. Look, all... Look, OK, Rosie and I spent
a lot of 2018 and '19
on tour together and I... All that would happen is,
I'd have a Nando's slightly too close to the show and unfortunately
there wasn't as much privacy in the dressing rooms
of the regional arts centres of the United Kingdom.
And so, just every so often I'd hear Rosie go, "Can you not?"
Why does Nando's make you effervescent?
Because I have it extra hot and with a Coke.
And the whole thing goes a bit Petomane Kumar.
You cannot imagine the stench.
Oh. Nonstop speaking and goldfish swallowing are both forgotten sports
and possibly should stay that way.
Are some of my other records on your list?
No, darling, what are your other records? Oh, well...
Oh, I can't believe I asked you that.
The longest ever screen kiss?
You?! Me.
Were you alone?
The record was held for many years
by Regis Toomey and Jane Wyman,
the first wife of Ronald Reagan. Yes, indeed.
In a film called, You're In The Army Now in the 1940s.
They had an osculatory marathon that lasted about two-and-a-half minutes.
And I thought it would be rather fun to see if I could beat this
on screen, and be in the Guinness Book Of Records again
for the longest sustained screen kiss.
And this was in the 1980s and I was on a programme called
TV-AM with a lovely presenter, Anne Diamond.
And she agreed on Valentine's Day to give it a go.
And so we began kissing, the clock was ticking,
but these were the early days of TV-AM and we had a mission
to explain, and unfortunately, about two minutes into our kiss,
we had to go live to Moscow
for coverage of President Brezhnev's funeral.
You killed Brezhnev?
And it was felt inappropriate.
They wanted to put the picture in the corner of the screen. Yes.
But actually, as Madame Brezhnev was weeping and the body
was being put into the... They felt this was inappropriate.
Anyway, so we did not break the record on that occasion.
But a year later, I thought, "I'm going to do it again."
So here we are on Valentine's Day
and there is the lovely Cheryl Baker from Bucks Fizz.
I remember. Well, she's still lovely, she's still brilliant.
Anne said no?
Anne said two minutes was enough.
Anne said, "How's the Russian President, before we start?"
Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I have held the record
for the longest ever screen kiss with Cheryl Baker.
APPLAUSE
Thank you. Thank you.
Have you done screen kisses, Alan? They're so awkward.
Yes. I had to do a sex scene in a train toilet with Lesley Sharp.
Brilliant, brilliant actress
and very nice to do a sex scene with.
But it wasn't a real train toilet. It was a studio set,
and to get the idea that the train was moving
they had a light outside the window, and a spark with a board,
just passing it in front of the light, and that's all I remember.
Very heightened passion and just the other side was a man just going...
Now you can't have sex without a man outside your window.
About two years after that I would call him and say,
"I might be in luck tonight, can you be at 330..."
Right, Gyles obviously finds speaking easy
but now onto speakeasies.
Which of you would have made the best bootlegger?
I want to say Rosie Jones. You would be right.
Oh, really? Why might that be?
I think she just gets away with a huge amount because she looks like
butter wouldn't melt in her mouth,
but let me tell you, it would, and it does.
Is it not to do with making illicit alcohol, then?
It's absolutely to do with making illicit alcohol.
But why would a female.... Do better? Yes.
Is that cos I'm a cute little lady? It is.
And I'm like, "Alcohol? No!"
It's the reluctance of officers to search women. Ahhh!
It was thought inappropriate,
even to search cars with women in them,
and lots of women, hard to believe, took advantage of this,
and they reckon female bootleggers outnumbered men by five to one.
Really? Yeah.
In some states it was illegal for women to be strip-searched
so they would provoke officers by saying,
"Oh, it's hidden down the bra," or wherever
and threaten to sue the officers...
I don't know why I suddenly turned into...!
You're like, "Oh, it's that man with the police..." I know.
The sworn enemies were two prohibition agents,
called Isidor "Izzy" Einstein and his partner Moe Smith,
and there they are.
They specialised in costumes, so they would turn up as
German pickle-packers, Hungarian violinists, or whatever.
My favourite is that several times Einstein,
who is the one on the right, went into a bar and identified himself as
a prohibition agent and the barman and thought it was hilarious
and let him in.
To be fair to those two gents, if they were going to disguise
themselves as anything, it would be "people who are too drunk at a bar".
But wait until you see some of the disguises...
I love the one on the right. GYLES: Oh, yes.
That's very Some Like It Hot. Yep.
Anybody know another country that enforced prohibition?
Iceland - banned all alcohol in 1915.
So for 20 years they didn't have alcohol at all.
In 1935 they legalised everything except strong beer.
And full-strength beer was only legalised in 1989. Really? Yeah.
They come late to a lot of things.
I think I'm right in saying they didn't allow television
on Thursday nights until quite recently.
They wanted people to read books on Thursday nights.
Have a drink and read a book.
One of the things they did do was once a month,
particularly in Reykjavik, they would turn out the streetlights
and somebody would give a lecture on the National Public Radio
about the stars that evening and the lights were turned out so everybody
could see the constellations clearly. Oh, wow.
That's so... I think that is a really lovely thing. That's amazing.
I was a guest of the Prime Minister in Iceland and my wife and I went.
We were staying with the Prime Minister and her wife,
so just the four of us in their equivalent of Chequers.
We were shown up to bed by the Prime Minister.
"Here are the spare towels, here is the bathroom.
"If you get up in the night, don't touch the red button."
"Oh, what happens?" She said, "The SAS will come."
What career skills can you pick up at a funfair?
Funfair? So not a circus, more a funfair,
more rides and coconut shies, that sort of thing.
Exactly that, my darling.
For your career as...someone who throws things?
I think the fact the woman is riding a machine is a bit of a clue.
It's flying. What? I know, it seems extraordinary.
The first ever plane-themed funfair rides were invented
to train pilots to actually fly a real plane.
There was an American engineer in 1931 called Lee Eyerly
and he invented a device called the Orientator.
It was a small model of a plane and it could tilt and turn and roll
whilst stuck in a Y-shaped...
This is an extraordinary picture,
because this is Amelia Earhart in his training machine.
The Cuban government ordered five of them to train their air force
and it is the only five that he ever sold, Eyerly. Wow.
Nobody else was interested, and then a friend of his convinced him
that actually it would do better if he turned it into a carnival ride.
It was renamed the Acro plane and it sold ten times as many
as when it was a training simulator.
Is it the same for driving a car and dodgems?
Exactly the same, darling, yes.
Just go for it,
hit anybody, I think, is the way forward!
I do have a particular interest in these plane rides because
the machine gun inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim -
that's him with the white beard.
He built a fairground ride with gondoliers which spun.
It sort of flew by virtue of a centrifugal force.
And his captive flying machines are a Blackpool ride,
still operating today - possibly the oldest fairground ride in Europe.
And the guy who built it for him is the guy in the other bowler hat,
Field Trickett, and that is my great-grandfather. Oh, wow!
You're turning into me! I am, darling!
I mean, you and the Prime Minister of Iceland, you and your grandpa.
I know, it's very exciting.
Right.
Which is easier to do, get a sonic boom out of a potato,
unboil an egg or eat your own umbilical cord?
Oh.
Hm. Hm.
Is that what an umbilical cord looks like?
Not the one in the middle.
Have you not seen one? No. No.
I was forced to cut the umbilical cord... Yes, yes. Oh, no.
..of my...well, I say unborn children, recently born.
It's quite tough.
Very sharp little scissors. Yeah.
You know our friend Brian Blessed?
Hm. He cut an umbilical cord with his own teeth.
Why?
Because he was, this is a true story, and were he here, he would
tell it to you more concisely.
He was on a walk
and a lady was giving birth, and in some discomfort.
He went to the rescue, with his beard, ready,
and tickled her through the last moments.
And the baby was born and he realised he was alone,
somehow the umbilical cord had to be cut and he bit through the umbilical
cord with his teeth.
And I think he keeps a little bit of it in a sort of jam jar at home.
Please stop!
So we're talking about
the University of Chicago's scavenger hunt.
It is possibly the most challenging scavenger hunt on the entire planet.
The challenges have included building a nuclear reactor
and getting yourself circumcised.
Both have been achieved.
It's the gold standard of scavenger hunts, frankly.
It's fiendishly hard,
first of all because they don't tell you what the list is,
you have to find the list yourself.
And there are about 300 items
to either find or do a quest each year.
So over the years, the challenges have included unboiling an egg.
Now we've done this, Alan, we did unboil an egg on the show. Did we?
How does one do that?
What you do is, you inject urea into the egg.
Piss?!
Yes, darling, I said urea just to be nice, but, yes.
I used another four-letter word that I thought made me look cleverer.
What it does is, it breaks down the bonds of protein
and then you have to spin it.
Do you remember that? No, OK.
Wait, did you two wee on an egg?
We had people for that.
OK.
Because I was going to say
I missed that episode.
Somebody had to get a potato to break the sound barrier,
somebody had to get a live lion, tiger and bear
into the same place on campus.
And one person had to eat their own umbilical cord,
which they did manage, because it turned out their mother
had kept it as a souvenir and he put it in an American cake
called a Twinkie and ate it.
Wow.
Um... Sorry, but why?
You ask that question because you're not a boy at university.
Nobody's found a way to get the potato
to break the sound barrier yet.
Although, do you know how McDonald's make their French fries?
Which I've just discovered.
They fire them at 75mph through a grid of knives that chop them.
What?! Oh! Yes, I know.
That's good, isn't it? Quite exciting. A rather good fact.
Anyway, the building a nuclear reactor, 1999, a pair of physics
students at Chicago earned 500 points by building a working nuclear
reactor in their dorm, using scrap aluminium and carbon sheets,
and it was capable of producing high-grade uranium.
What?! So, we're going to try and get you guys to do something.
You should have two balloons.
This is not exactly a nuclear reactor, but you know,
just to start simple.
I want you to take your two balloons, or tell me how you would,
take your two balloons and turn them into a pair of slippers.
I'm going to go ahead and assume... Yeah?
..it isn't just a case of wham your feet in?
Putting your foot into the balloon? Yeah, just straight in the balloon.
No. OK. Because it will break.
Do you chop your foot off?
Chop your foot off, chop your foot off!
Chop your foot off and put it in a blender?
And then you pour it into there?
How can I say this? No.
Right. It's never a good sign when she goes quiet for a bit.
Yeah, just having a think there.
I mean, you'd have to be desperate to win, Rosie, for that.
I'll do it!
Let's have a look at how you do it.
OK, this is a very straightforward trick.
So you blow the balloon up and get the friend
to just hold it like that.
And then let the air out.
Oh.
Isn't that clever? That's brilliant.
Yeah. Oh, that's good. What attractive slippers they are, too.
They're perfectly nice, aren't they?
It's a good job I didn't ask you to make a nuclear reactor.
And are you into this sort of thing? I was just...
I love puzzles and games. Love them.
No, no, I was brooding about the circumcision thing. Oh...
I think it was boys only, darling.
Recently, Mothering Sunday, I saw some flowers in the window
of a shop and I went in and I said, "Can I have some flowers?"
And they said, "No. We don't sell flowers."
I said, "There are flowers in the window."
They said, "We are a circumcision clinic.
"What do you expect us to put in the window?"
So the scavenger hunt as a sort of an idea
was the brainchild of a marvellous woman called Elsa Maxwell.
She was one of the great party hostesses of the 20th century.
And there she is in the middle, there she is with Cole Porter.
And she threw the very first one in Paris, in 1927.
And the items included, somebody had to get a black swan
from the Bois de Boulogne park.
Do we get a bonus for knowing who the other fellow is?
Is it your grandad?
No, it's a man called William Lada.
Who? Well, that's all we know about him, apart from
he liked to smoke cigarettes.
So you had to get a black swan from the Bois de Boulogne,
a shoe of the music hall star Mistinguett...
Do you know about Mistinguett? I do know about Mistinguett.
She was a great favourite of Maurice Chevalier.
She was, in her day, the highest paid female entertainer in the world
and hardly anybody knows about her now. Wow.
They had to try and get a shoe of hers,
a red pompom from a sailor's hat, and so on.
And riots, riotous scenes across Paris ensued
because of this thing.
And the police came to interview Elsa Maxwell and said,
"What on earth are you doing?"
And then she named the guests at her party and it included
the Chief of Police's nephew and the Mayor's son.
That was the end of it.
The University of Chicago scavenger hunt stunts are usually
completed by a bunch of...
..undergraduates.
What looks like a scrotum and loves doing press-ups?
Oh! Nish!
Can I just say, I do not enjoy press-ups,
so I don't know where you've got that from!
Yeah, that's ridiculous! Any other thoughts?
It's going to be something from the animal kingdom, is it?
Something wrinkly and undersea?
Underwater, certainly.
It's the pleasingly named Titicaca water frog.
That's my favourite... Ah!
It's nickname is "the scrotum frog".
There it is. You can see its skin looks much too big.
If you're looking at your scrotum and you're seeing eyes,
go to the doctor.
If you're looking at your scrotum and it's looking back at you...
Yeah, it's looking back at you!
Well, this frog spend its entire life in the water
of Lake Titicaca, which is between Peru and Bolivia,
12,500 ft above sea level, so there we are there.
It never leaves the lake,
so it goes for its whole life under the surface.
Oh, is that why it's all shrivelled up, as it were? It's partly that,
but there's relatively little oxygen in the lake.
So the frog's huge skin surface allows it to absorb as much
oxygen as possible through the skin.
If it ever needs extra oxygen, it has two options.
It can surface briefly to breathe through its tiny lungs,
or it can do press-ups at the bottom of the lake.
What?
To disturb the water around it
and so there's more oxygen which can reach the skin.
How cute is that? It just thinks, "Oh, I'm a bit out of breath."
SHE PANTS
The frogs came to fame in 1968 when Jacques Cousteau visited
and he estimated at the time
that there was about a billion frogs in the lake.
In one lake?! What?!
Well, you're talking about two million acres of lake,
so it's a lot of lake.
Now there is possibly as few as 50,000 left. No? Aw...
Yeah. It's such a shame.
Pollution, humans hunting them for food,
invasive trout eating their tadpoles and so on.
And they're trying to work out how to save them.
People eat these, do they? Are they a delicacy? Apparently so.
Denver Zoo just hatched their first-ever scrotum frogs in 2017.
Oh, wow.
Do you remember the poet WH Auden had a face lined, absolutely covered
with lines, like a crisscross?
Noel Coward said, "Picture his face.
"Now imagine his scrotum."
I have a sort of scrotum aversion, I must say.
Well, finally we've found something we have in common.
Well...you remember...
..our mutual friend Maureen Lipman's wonderful line.
"What's the worst thing about oral sex?
"The view!"
Now, um...
Here's a bit of a spectacle - how do you think
a fight between a submarine and a stallion would go?
A stallion's a horse.
Yes. A submarine is a submersible ship. Nothing gets past you.
They rarely meet.
So, there are a couple of instances where they have met.
So, 1915, there was a British submarine which fought
and lost a battle with Turkish cavalry.
What?! Yeah.
So, British captain, Lieutenant-Commander
Martin Dunbar-Nasmith...
Oh! Not your godfather?!
But Dunbar-Nasmith, did you say?
Now, you're going to think I'm inventing this...
I'm afraid that submarine might have sailed, Gyles.
This man was born on 1st April 1883.
He won the Victoria Cross. Yes.
And I know about him
because I live in the house in which this man was born.
What?!
How?! How?!
It's true. It's absolutely true.
How?
And anyway, he was a great man.
And he had many adventures in submarines. Yeah. He was heroic.
He was extraordinary, but on one occasion, in 1915,
he was attacking shipping outside Constantinople Harbour,
and the Turkish cavalry unit appeared on a cliff nearby.
They spotted the sub and started attacking and started firing.
And the submarine had to retreat.
So he was beaten back by the Turkish cavalry.
But horsemen aside, he was an exceptional captain.
At one point the crew - and this is such a good idea -
captured a Turkish sailing vessel, a dhow, and they tied it
to the sub's conning tower to act as camouflage.
And so when they were approaching enemy vessels,
people thought it was just a Turkish dhow approaching.
And then they worked out that when they weren't attacking people,
they could use the captured boat which was attached to
the conning tower to go up and stretch their legs.
But he also had, apart from resourcefulness,
Nasmith had a tremendous reputation for gallantry.
So he always used to present boxes of chocolates to any women
travelling as passengers on Turkish ships that they'd captured.
He just thought that was polite to do that.
I feel like we've really breezed past the fact
that this whole show has turned into like a posh white version
of Slumdog Millionaire.
There's the film they should have made.
Yeah, a film called Posh White Millionaire.
It must have been extraordinary on the submarines,
though, cos navigation was incredibly basic.
So it was too risky to surface with the periscope
most of the time, so the crew found their way
by bumping along the bottom of the sea
and trying to match the bumps with the contours on the map.
And ammunition was so limited,
if you fired a torpedo and it missed its target and it floated
in the water, somebody would swim out and get it and bring it back.
They baked bread daily in an electric oven,
but they did not have enough electricity to both power the oven
and to run at full speed, so you had to choose between bread or speed.
Oh, bread!
I know.
Horses were actually transported on submarines in the same year.
Do you know about that? Oh, I bet they loved that.
They were taken from Britain to the Battle of Gallipoli
in the Dardanelles. Ten horses at a time in a submarine. Wow.
It was 16 days to get there, they stopped
for a couple of hours in Malta so the horses could stretch their legs.
Wow! Yeah.
That's not the only time the Navy
and the cavalry have fought each other.
So, the Battle of Texel took place just off Texel Island,
which is north of Amsterdam.
1795, French and Dutch were at war and it was winter,
and when the Dutch invasion fleets - about 14 ships -
when they dropped anchor on a strait just off this
port of Den Helder, the water froze and trapped them in place.
And the French cavalry got wind of this and they approached overnight,
and they put cloth on the horses' hooves so that no noise was made
as they approached over the ice,
and the Dutch woke up to find themselves surrounded
on the frozen ice by the cavalry.
Wow. And they surrendered immediately.
What do you think would happen if two submarines
battled each other underwater?
Is it like battleships?
What, you think they're both out there, "D3."
Oh, damn it!
You win!
The real problem is, until recently, it was very hard to tell how
deep the other sub is submerged because they're... Oh, really?
They don't know where it is? No, exactly.
But it has happened - 1945,
the British sub HMS Venturer met the U-864 off a Norwegian island
and they fired six torpedoes pretty much at random,
and unfortunately the German sub dived to get out the way
and accidentally went into one of the torpedoes.
Although, can I just say, the Germans had the right idea.
Not all their U-boats were engaged in deadly activities.
They had the submarine U-1231
and it was a North Atlantic travelling off-licence.
It used to go around and... The party boat! Yes!
It delivered booze to the other U-boats.
Right, it's time to enter the horrible hall of mirrors
that is General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Which country are ponchos from?
Mexico.
KLAXON
Shall we go through other countries? Let's do lots of countries.
Central and South America? Bolivia?
Bolivia, no. Portugal? No.
Peru. England.
England, I want it to be England. Ah, of course.
I want it to be England. Is it Denmark?
No. Give us a clue. What did you say?
Peru. Is correct. Yes!
Oh, my God!
This is the greatest moment of my life!
Yes!
You knew that, right? It wasn't a guess?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
She's got a few follow-up questions about how you knew it.
No, no, no.
It's not all about me.
Lots of claims about who invented the poncho.
In the West we most associate it with Mexico today, but the first
came from Peru's Paracas Peninsula.
You knew all this. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I'm really bored now.
Blah, blah, blah.
So the oldest recorded poncho is about 2,500 years old.
Initially for nobility and embroidered with a shamanic...
If they're recorded, I mean, in what...?
Well, it's very difficult to find fabric in archaeology.
There's a problem with women's craft generally in history that
a lot of those things just perish and disappear.
The ones that we know about, the oldest recorded ponchos,
they come from preserved "mummy bundles" of Paracas. Oh, really?
And the bundle would be multiple layers of highly embroidered
fabric and textiles.
I mean, it could be as much five-foot high
and seven-foot across.
Frustratingly, I've just remembered a story from my travels.
No-one cares.
I care, Nish.
This is why your chat show is never going to take off.
Most famous poncho in the world?
Clint Eastwood. Of course! Of course.
For his Spaghetti Western trilogy.
He still has it.
He's had it for 55 years and never washed it.
That's... And what about the poncho?
Hey! He's about 100 years old, I think.
He's still working, though, isn't he? Still carrying on, yes, I know.
Just like Alan. Right, uh...
Now, what's the highest British mountain?
This is not going to be the one we think it is.
What do you think it is? I think it's Ben Nevis.
Then it's not going to be that.
KLAXON
Is it Richard Osman?
It's Richard Osman standing on Ben Nevis.
What country did you speak of?
So, I said British mountain, but I did not say inside Britain.
No. Hmm.
In a territory, a territory? Ah, very good.
Yes, British overseas territory? So...
The British overseas territory of South Georgia has Mount Paget,
which is 2,935 metres above sea level,
so twice the height of Ben Nevis.
The British Antarctic Territory contains
Mount Hope, 3,239 metres.
Bit of a vexed question as to whether or not it's British,
because there's only four other countries which
recognise it as such.
It's certainly the highest mountain that Britain claims to own. Sure.
Mount Hope got a boost in 2017 - they remeasured it.
You know how children keep growing?
Yeah, Mount Hope, they found that it was 377 metres taller
than they thought.
Wow, that's quite a lot.
Did they stand them up against the fridge in the kitchen? Yes.
No, to be fair, 1936, when they first measured it,
they used dog sleds and simple tools.
In 2017, they used satellites, so...I think it's fair,
it's fair enough.
Even excluding the mountains in the British Antarctic Territory,
there are so many higher peaks in South Georgia and Saint Helena
that Ben Nevis doesn't even make the top ten British mountains.
Whoa. Sucks to be you, Ben Nevis.
But here's a thing, Ben Nevis, right,
so there's some volunteers, 2006, they're picking litter off
the slopes of Ben Nevis, and they suddenly came
across a church organ, OK?
Yeah, quite near the summit.
It was entirely by itself.
This is obviously...
Obviously...
I love the fact that we're so gullible.
We were like, "Whoa!"
Whoa! Whoa, that's massive!
That's so massive!
So, there was a local Highland Games athlete called
Kenny Campbell and he said he carried it up the mountain
for charity in 1971.
It took him four days.
When he got there he played Scotland The Brave,
and then he couldn't be arsed to bring it back down again.
Well, I don't blame him.
Someone else can go and get it.
"I'm not bringing that down again!"
Now, where's the biggest fire in the solar system?
ALAN'S BUZZER
Yes, darling? Is it the sun?
KLAXON
Oh!
The sun isn't on fire.
It's not on fire. Is it not? No.
The sun's not on fire?
So what it does, every second, it uses up 700 million tonnes
of the hydrogen inside it in a reaction which produces energy
and light, but it's a nuclear reaction, not a chemical one,
which is what fire is.
And that applies to all the other stars
that we can see, too.
That's a lot of hydrogen. It's a lot of hydrogen.
I'm worried about the amount of hydrogen.
It used to be that oxygen levels were higher on Earth
than the 21% that they are today,
and it's a good thing that it's not higher,
because if it was 25%, for example, then even
wet plants could burn.
And so in the Late Palaeozoic era, the levels were 30% to 35%
and there were frequent catastrophic fires.
So you don't want too much of it.
But the reason that there seems to be, as far as we know,
no fire in the solar system anywhere other than Earth, is that fire
requires three things.
It requires oxygen, it requires heat and it requires something to burn.
And there just isn't enough oxygen elsewhere.
The only reason there's a meaningful amount of oxygen on Earth
is photosynthesis, right.
So there's no oxygen without life.
So if there's no life elsewhere in the universe,
there simply can't be any fire either.
You seem to know a lot, Sandi.
Can you tell us, when is the world going to end?
Tuesday.
No, but I mean, is there going to be a cataclysm?
Possibly, darling, but in a million years and, I mean,
you'll still be working, but I...
Blah, blah, blah.
Which brings us to the scores.
Scavenging for scraps in last place, with minus 16, it's Nish.
Boom! Oh.
APPLAUSE
Minus 16.
In third place, with minus 8, it's Gyles.
Hey.
APPLAUSE
In second place, with minus 5, Alan.
APPLAUSE
And in first place... Hey!
..with a positive 6 points, it's Rosie!
Yes!
APPLAUSE
My thanks to Rosie, Nish, Gyles and Alan,
and I leave you with this schooldays sign-off from Eric Morecambe.
"When I was eight, I ran away with a circus.
"When I was nine, they made me bring it back."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE