APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to QI.
Whether you like sweet or savoury,
there's something for everyone tonight,
as we serve up a sensational selection of Sugar and Spice.
Let's meet some real sweeties.
Sweet as a nut, it's Rose Matafeo.
APPLAUSE
Thank you.
Sweet as pie, it's Alice Levine.
APPLAUSE
Short and sweet, it's Jason Manford.
APPLAUSE
And you can bet your sweet ass it's Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Let's see if their buzzers are sweet or spicy. Rose goes...
# Sweet home Alabama... #
Alice goes...
# Sweet dreams are made of this... #
Jason goes...
# Sweet Caroline
# Ba-ba-baaa! #
Oh, I just want to carry on. I like that.
Uh, and Alan goes...
# Colours of the world! Spice up your life
# Every boy and every girl! Spice up your life
# People of the world! Spice up your life
# Ahhhh... #
Oh. Wow, you all did a dancy thing.
I once did a show...
Is she called Mel B? I did a show with her.
She is called Mel B. It depends who you're talking about.
Anyway, it was charming.
What's sticky and well worth stealing?
A friggin' nice stick. I don't...
Wow.
But, like, a good stick,
like the best stick you've ever seen, Sandi.
OK, you said "stick", I thought you said something else entirely.
Wow. Wow! You're not going to have a...stick.
Stick. A stick. Sorry, I... Stick! Yeah.
Wait, hang on. I'm having an identity crisis. No, it's fine.
No, you said stick. Friggin' nice... Did she say "stick"?
I agree. When, my son, if we go for a walk,
he finds the best sticks, like,
and he will hold on to that stick to the point...
My wife won't let them in the house, because they've been outside,
so he will leave it on the doorstep.
And, the next morning, when his stick is still there,
it's like the PlayStation 5 has been delivered.
It's like a box to a kitten, a stick to a kid.
Oh, they love them. Wait till you get him a toy. I know.
Oh, there's a bloody forest out there, help yourself, mate.
It's like Toys R Us. It's a weapon. It's a friend.
It's a companion. Exactly.
I love a stick. Rose knows.
Like a stick, OK. She knows.
I've forgotten what the question was.
So, sticky and worth stealing?
Jam. Sort of. It's a kind of...
I'm going to say Post-its,
because you don't ever buy that kind of thing, do you?
You just steal that from work. Just from the office.
Oh, yeah, that's good. That's the problem with the work I do.
I never go to an office. Ah, yeah.
No stationery-stealing. Be a good idea.
What's that?
For a website, where you could buy some stuff,
but there was a shoplifty corner.
That's such a good idea.
And if you...
if you avoided being detected by a couple of windows
and you could get into the shoplifting room,
you could nick a couple of things and get away with it.
That's such... Let me write this down. I'm so sorry.
Because the fun of nicking something is gone at the moment, isn't it?
No-one's nicked anything for ages.
I've never shoplifted in my entire life, though. Have you shoplifted?
Oh, God, yeah. Really?
I haven't.
Are you kidding? As a schoolboy, it was an absolute rite of passage.
Oh, my God.
I remember I had friends who had an aquarium
and they'd go in the pet shop
and just get weeds out of the fish tank.
I stole a Kinder Egg when I was about 13.
I felt so guilty that I actually took it back
the next day and put it back on the...
Alice, have you shoplifted?
I think you know the answer to this. Alice...
I'm such a goody two-shoes, I haven't.
So the three women have not shoplifted,
I'm just putting it out there. Rose has committed many crimes.
Yeah, yeah, I've committed fraud.
I've been to jail for fraud, but that's a clever one.
Were you the person at school who got other people
to nick stuff for you? 100%. A real racket.
"Go in there and get me something!"
Or if you don't, I'm going to beat the crap out of you.
Rose went straight for Ponzi schemes. 100%.
$200 billion Ponzi schemes. 100%.
OK. So, we are going for something sticky,
but it's something you could put on pancakes.
Oh, syrup. Maple syrup?
Maple syrup. So, over several months,
from 2011 to 2012,
there was a group of thieves and they stole 3,000 tonnes
of maple syrup from Canada's global syrup reserves.
I mean, who's not glad that those exist, right?
Oh, my gosh. It became known -
and I love this title - The Great Maple Syrup Heist.
Ooh, wow. Good name. I know. Does what it says on the tin, doesn't it?
"What shall we call it?!" Incredible.
I feel like there have been other heists,
but they just stole a sachet or something, so...
When does it become a heist?
When it's enormously valuable.
This is the most valuable heist in the whole of Canadian history.
So Canada produces 80% of the world's maple syrup.
90% of that comes from Quebec alone.
And they have a strategic reserve of about 160,000,
or more, barrels, which are worth $1,800 each,
OK. It's quite a lot of money.
And this is controlled by
a group called The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers,
the FPAQ. Great bunch of lads. I know, such fun at parties.
They sound like a laugh, yeah. And they keep control of the supply.
And the reserve is only checked once a year.
So the thieves went into the place and what they did was
they systematically removed some barrels,
temporarily replaced them with empty ones,
syphoned out the syrup, refilled them with water
and replaced them. Perfect crime, OK. Yeah.
Because nobody knew until a syrup inspector...
I mean, the job of dreams, I think.
A syrup inspector went and had a look,
climbed on a stack of barrels and nearly fell,
because of the empty ones, weren't strong enough
to take his weight. And he raised the alarm
and, in total, 9,000 or more barrels had been emptied of maple syrup.
Wow. Worth $18 million.
"Ring the alarum bell."
When is Guy Ritchie going to make that film?
I know. I want to see Jason Statham doing a Canadian accent.
Yeah. Floating in a tank of syrup.
It's thought, apart from the money,
that the crime was motivated partly by bad feelings towards the FPAQ,
the people who control...
ALAN GASPS Yes. And low blood sugar, probably,
because have you ever been hangry?
When I've got a food mood,
I just have to eat there and then.
Like most of these crimes,
there came a point where they should have just stopped.
Yeah. If we steal any more syrup, someone's going to notice,
when they climb on the barrels.
Let's stop at a thousand barrels, what are we like?
Are we greedy people? Yeah. Hm.
What a quote, "With most crimes,
"there's a point where you should stop."
Where does maple syrup come from?
Maple tree?
It's called the sugar maple.
Ah.
And Quebec is currently the world leader.
Isn't nature amazing?
Look at that, they've got...
They grow with a bucket on the side ready for you.
They're milking trees. It's like they want you to have it.
Do you not think he looks like he's in a...
I don't know what he thinks he looks like. He thinks he's in a catalogue.
"Man from C&A."
I do suddenly want to buy some overalls for some reason.
Dungarees is the way forward.
It is actually very interesting,
I've been when they tap the sap.
It usually starts running in about March,
because the warmer temperature makes pressure inside
the tree increase, so the sap -
which is basically just sugar and water -
is squeezed - how can I put this nicely? -
out of any open orifice.
And it takes 40 gallons of the sap to make one gallon of syrup.
Oh, my gosh. So it's a lot.
But it's not a European invention,
it was made in the Americas long before
the Europeans turned up,
usually by women from what we call the First Nation tribes,
who tapped the sap and then they collected firewood
and boiled the sap to make spirit.
Sounds like a Danny Dyer game show. It does, yeah. Tap the Sap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, let's tap the sap."
EAST LONDON ACCENT: "Tap the sap, come on."
"'Ere comes a bucket."
He doesn't know the rules of it.
In his ear, "Shout tap the sap, Danny."
"Which direction?" "Any way you like, we've got you covered."
Maple tapping, not limited to humans.
So squirrels have been seen systematically biting...
Stuck to trees. Stuck, like that.
"What's happened?"
Systematically... They never know their limits.
"Oh, my gosh, my nuts are stuck."
Sorry, Sandi, I went too far with that.
No, we're just... I'm trying to think where to go from sticky nuts. Um...
The bathroom.
Yeah. They systematically bite into maple trees to allow
the sap to flow. But here is the really clever thing,
they don't just lap it up there and go,
"Yay, I got the sap to flow." They leave it and return,
so that once the water has evaporated,
there's a higher concentration of the sugary sap.
Clever.
Thanks, squirrels. Isn't that great?
Clever squirrel. Yeah, lovely.
Yeah, I thought, "Hm, good on you. Team players. I know.
Explain to me how adult liquorice works.
All liquorice is adult liquorice, because only adults like liquorice.
Correct. Yeah.
And I think sometimes mums pretend to like it just
so there's something in the house that nobody else is going to eat.
You've never been to Scandinavia, we just all love liquorice.
You love liquorice.
And we are going to try some, OK?
The thing that makes it adult is that it is extremely salty.
The flavour comes from ammonium chloride,
which the Finnish people call salmiakki, OK?
The Scandinavians say the stronger
and saltier the better, and I absolutely agree.
So you have a little bowl like this.
Try it. If you don't like liquorice... Who likes liquorice?
I like liquorice. I like liquorice.
I don't know if I like salty liquorice. This is adult liquorice.
Ooh. Oh, my God.
Huh? How good is that?
Boy, oh, boy.
That's disgusting. Actually, actually...
Coming around, Sandi, I'm coming around.
Isn't it good? Alan spat his out.
My spine feels weird. What's happening?
That is... Do you like that, Jason?
I think once you get over the initial shock...
The disappointment.
Yeah, it just becomes disappointing, yeah.
You just become steadily more depressed.
Yeah, it's all right. There are health implications.
Really?
Thanks for telling us now. Phew. I made the right call.
Too much ammonium chloride is bad for you,
and so the European Union wanted to set the cap
at 0.3%.
But liquorice is, like, ten times that much,
salty liquorice.
And there was a genuine fear that the people of Scandinavia,
the Finns in particular, would leave the EU
if they messed with their liquorice.
Oh, God. You know.
A Sami-exit. Yeah.
So an exemption was made for sweets and ice cream.
It just has to say "Adult liquorice, not liquorice for children" on it.
Right. Do you have to have ID to get it?
I don't think you need to worry about children
accidentally eating this. I mean...
It's incredibly resistant to saliva.
Yeah. That's a good quality in a man, I think.
ROSE GROANS
Be a good thing to put in a personal ad. Oh, my God...
"Wanted - man, incredibly resistant to saliva."
Oh, my God...
"Able to tolerate adult liquorice. No other qualities necessary."
I hope this doesn't become a thing now.
I don't want to start seeing...
Every time you come on QI, we give you a shit sweet.
Sweet and... Yeah, sweet and sour jelly babies.
I don't want to see this.
That's sort of like jerky, isn't it, really?
What, oh, do you like...? I like jerky.
I think jerky is absolutely lovely. Not when you're expecting a sweet.
Yeah. It's like a Jaffa Cake,
but it's got chicken tikka masala inside.
But it has been so popular for so long
that it was found in Tutankhamun's tomb.
In the tomb, Sandi, in the tomb.
Yeah. Let's bury it, while he's going,
while the lid's open, put the liquorice in.
It's incredibly resistant to saliva.
Better seal it up, quick.
Ancient Romans used it for bladder problems,
kidney stones, ulcers, all sorts of things.
Oh, it's medicine, yeah, it tastes like medicine.
It tastes a bit like medicine.
But medicine when it's... You know when you're a kid
and medicine is actually quite nice? It's like strawberry and banana
and then, about 13, they go, "Oh, you can have chalk now."
Do you know what I mean? It's that age of medicine.
The English physician Nicholas Culpeper -
so we're talking 17th century -
recommended taking it against coughs,
growths in the eye and ulcers on the genitals.
I mean, it already tastes like it's been
rubbed on someone's genitals.
What is the town in the UK that we link with liquorice?
There's one town in West Yorkshire.
Towns in West Yorkshire. Bassett?
P. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Pontefract.
Pontefract. Of course it's Pontefract.
Pontefract cakes, absolutely right.
So it's extraordinary that it's in Pontefract,
because the plant is native to Southern Europe
and Western Asia.
Probably arrived in Pontefract in about
the 16th century via Dominican monks.
And, by the 1920s, there were ten liquorice factories in the town.
But they're all sweet liquorice, they're not...
They're the sort you like.
No-one's come in, like, "Lads, have I got an idea for you."
"Imagine it was this product that we've been selling millions of,
"but it tastes like shit. Imagine that. Imagine. Huh, huh?"
I love it, I'm just saying to you.
Not a single convert in the house, Sandi.
I know.
Anyway, which head of state did the Spice Girls sleep with?
Well, I'm nervous to say this, but Nelson Mandela?
KLAXON BLARES
Yeah. It's...
Yeah. It seemed too obvious.
I also sort of think we'd have heard about that.
Do you think? It feels like a big story, you know.
He said, which is pretty shocking,
that it was the best day of his life when he met the Spice Girls.
Was it? How?
I met Nelson Mandela?
Did you? When I was three. In New Zealand.
He came to speak
and all of the crowd, like, surged forward
and I was sitting on a barrier and it kind of pushed me
and I was next to my brother.
And so I started crying and he came up to me
and he was, like, "Why are you crying?"
And I was, like, "My brother pushed me!"
To Nelson Mandela.
And then he was like, "Oh, don't cry." And tried to comfort me.
My mum was like, "Do you know who that was?"
And I was like, "No, I don't, I'm three years old, right?"
"Rose, he has bigger fish to fry." Yeah, exactly.
So the best day wasn't that day that he met me.
That's very upsetting. What were you saying? Sorry.
So we are slightly misleading you.
Mel B's child has obviously just farted.
Oh, yes, yeah. Which one's Mel B, Sandi?
Yeah, come on, Sandi. Point out the Mel B.
Oh, yeah, you met her, didn't you?
Mel B is the one wearing a crocodile. That's right, yeah.
Right, so we're talking China. We're talking China,
the spice girls of ancient China.
So these were the concubines who slept with the Emperor.
Oh. What a job. And we're calling them spice girls
because, in the Han Dynasty China -
so we're talking about 202 BC to 220 AD -
the Emperor's concubines would live in a pepper house.
So, basically, you've got mud and plaster on the walls
and it's mixed with Szechuan pepper.
So the spice, it's really nice,
it provides a sort of warm and fragrant atmosphere,
and also the plant is a symbol of fertility,
because it has so many seeds.
And even today, they throw it sometimes as confetti at newlyweds,
sort of in rural areas of China.
Szechuan pepper? Szechuan pepper, yes.
It's basically the dried berries of the prickly ash tree.
Anyway, you get the sensation, right.
It's not really spiciness,
it's like a tingling, numbing sensation.
So we're going to try it, OK.
So, having gone for the liquorice,
what I want you to do is to take one and to bite...
Just one... No, not the whole thing, darling, you'll die.
Oh. Yeah.
Well, why would you put all of them in there?
Why would you risk that?
I wanted to give you choice.
I was about to... No.
..down it in one. I was...
Oh, my God.
Last time we saw Jason Manford...
So bite it and let it cover your tongue.
May I advise you not to swallow it?
This is the worst game I've ever played, since the liquorice game.
Yeah, so...
So bite it and then let it cover your tongue,
and you should get a sensation
which is called paraesthesia and...
Are you all right, Jason? That's...
I... I...
GARBLED: I think I've had a reaction.
You know what this feels like at the moment? Hm?
It feels like, you know sometimes you see something on the carpet
and you think, oh, it's a bit of a nut or something,
it's a bit of a crumb of food. Yeah.
And you pick it up and put it in your mouth.
And you think, actually, that isn't food. No.
That's come out of the dog's arse or off the kids' shoes or something.
Who let the rabbit in the house?
What do you think, Alice?
It is really citrusy.
Yeah. Is it nice?
It is actually kind of... It's not unpleasant.
Not unpleasant. It's almost got the tingle of something menthol-y.
Yes. And it gives you just this kind of...
It's almost like a tiny little vibration.
It reminds me of... There's a cafe near me
that hasn't been decorated for 60 years.
It reminds me of their loo.
The surface of my tongue now feels like it wants
to leave my body, is that what happens? Yeah.
It's really fizzy, isn't it?
It's like putting your wet tongue on a battery.
Ow. Hm, yes.
So they did a test to see, how many vibrations
is it actually causing?
And what they did was, they got 28 volunteers
and they were kitted out with little tiny vibrating tools.
And they were asked to adjust it until it matched
what they could feel on their tongue.
And Szechuan peppercorns make lips vibrate at 50 hertz,
which is the same as a cat's purr.
Really? Are you eating them all now?
I've had them now. Finished. Have you eaten the lot?
Yeah.
Are you swallowing them?
Who said that?
Your insides are going to be vibrating at 50 hertz. Yeah.
When did you learn to fly? What's going on?
Oh, my God, wow. Hey, I tell you what,
when you have a couple, woo!
Now we're talking. Woohoo!
He's having a good time now.
You have a little line of blood coming out of one nostril.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you currently experiencing
the last third of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
You're just flying through space? Oh, wow.
Zingy and sherberty. Wow, yeah.
Right, uh...
Jason is struggling now!
No. "It's 3.47pm,
"Jason has had a whole bowl of peppercorns."
Grandad?
"It's four hours since Jason had the peppercorns."
I don't do drugs, like, but that was the nearest...
To doing. ..I've come to it.
Yeah. I can actually see the back of my head.
New question -
what did the original Peter Piper pick?
A pickled pepper. Pumpkin.
KLAXON BLARES
Oh.
Not pepper. What else?
Pumpkin. Pumpkin.
Do they have pumpkin in New Zealand? Is that a thing?
They have pumpkin, yes,
but also, weirdly, in New Zealand, we eat pumpkin
and, apparently, here, you guys feed them to pigs.
You're from England, I assume.
Definitely.
Do you eat pumpkin? No.
Why not?
I've got too many pigs to feed.
So our best guess is that it was a real person called -
behind the tongue-twister -
a one-armed French horticulturist called Pierre Poivre.
And it's a really interesting story.
So we're talking 18th century.
So he began his travels as a mission... Are you all right?
Yeah, I'm fine, yeah. Yeah. You're sweating.
I'm just thinking of all the mistakes I've made in my life.
You appear to be having the menopause, darling.
Oh, yeah, I'm... I'm having everybody's menopause. Yeah.
Why didn't you give him a little bowl of ayahuasca? Yeah.
I just... Don't give me a full bowl of anything
and then say, "Do not eat the full bowl."
Because I will do that. Oh, my God... The future...
Bring on the Starbursts.
Who's this guy now? What's going on? This guy, yeah.
He wasn't interested in peppers at all, he was involved...
He's the Pied Piper. Well, he... No.
He was involved in the spice trade -
he was interested in nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves, not peppers.
So he started his career as a missionary in China.
I don't know what happened,
he was wrongfully arrested as soon as he arrived. Who knows?
Been there, buddy. I know.
Been there. So what he did - I like this -
he taught himself Chinese to defend himself in court.
And when the mission ended, he sailed back to France,
but there was a skirmish with a British ship
and he lost an arm to a cannonball.
And we've all been there. Worst holiday ever.
Yeah. Had to rest up in Indonesia.
Wow. And then he hatched a plan to smuggle spices
because, in the 18th century,
it's sort of hard for us to believe,
spices were the tradeable commodity.
Some of them were worth more than gold
and the Dutch had complete control over spice distribution.
And they went to extreme measures to make sure they had this monopoly.
So, for example, they'd get nutmeg seeds
and they'd douse them in lime before they exported them,
so that they wouldn't sprout, so that you couldn't grow your own.
And smuggling seeds was a crime, punishable by death.
But he transported more than 3,000 plants into Mauritius
and the Seychelles and Reunion, and began growing them.
It's one of the reasons why we have spices that we can trade
so easily today. This is... Because nutmeg was used,
wasn't it, to preserve meat on the ship?
Yeah. I mean, spices were really important.
And I know a little bit about this,
because I went to the Island of Banda in Indonesia,
which was exchanged for what is now
the island of Manhattan in a property swap.
Is that David Jason? It looks like him.
That's him, that's Peter. Spitting image.
That's Peter without either arm, frankly.
"I've got loads of nutmeg. Yes, come in, come in."
Have you seen those videos of, you know, like the cinnamon challenge?
You know, when people have a teaspoon of cinnamon?
When they snort it. Because you can't swallow...
A teaspoon of cinnamon? A teaspoon of cinnamon.
I've never tried. And I think it works with nutmeg, as well.
They are incredibly resistant to saliva.
That's the one thing about this. Deeply resistant to saliva.
But you have to be... You have to be careful with nutmeg,
because it contains a compound called myristicin,
and it can cause hallucinations.
It's extremely - it's profoundly untrustworthy.
It can cause hallucinations in high doses. Really?
So it's a really, really bad idea. "Where's Jason?"
"He's on a bad nutmeg trip." Yeah.
No, darling, you can get all sorts of side-effects.
You can get anxiety and fear and sort of hostility and feeling like...
I think I might have been on nutmeg my whole life.
It's... I did nutmeg at Glastonbury, it was crazy!
Yeah. So the nursery rhyme that we were talking about
at the very beginning, darling,
that was very first published in 1813
in Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain
and Perfect Pronunciation.
And it has a tongue twister for every single letter of the alphabet.
So here is the one that we think is based on this character,
Pierre Poivre.
But this is the S series,
so we've got the rhyme for S. Who wants to try?
Let's do it. Do it, Jason? Go for it.
Sammy Smellie smelt a smell of Small-coal.
Did Sammy Smellie smell a smelt of Small-coal?
If Sammy Smellie smelt a smell of Small-coal,
where's the smell of small coal Sammy Smellie smelt?
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Wow.
I'm having the same sort of surge of rage that I used to have
when one of my siblings would get praised
for doing a simple task... Yeah, yeah.
We also have a... All right, whoa, whoa.
..that I haven't been asked to do.
What are you clapping that for? He's just read it.
All right. Hey, all right, Billy Big-Balls, you have a go.
Yeah, go on, then. Sammy Smellie smelt a smell of Small-coal?
It's on the bloody screen.
All of it. I had to do all of it.
Did Sammy Smellie smell a smelt of Small-coal?
If Sammy Smellie smelt a smell of Small-coal,
where's the smell of Small-coal Sammy Smellie smelt?
APPLAUSE
I don't want applause! It's reading!
Well done, Alan.
OK, no, that's terribly impressive, darling, well done. Oh, my God.
Do you know what Small-coal is? No, and care not.
Anybody? Extra point. I imagine it's tiny coal.
It is. For a tiny fire in a tiny house.
It's what they used to call "slack".
It's coal about the size of hazelnuts. It's to start the fire.
But I am terribly impressed with your articulation.
Peter Pepper nicked a nugget of nibbly nutmeg.
What makes my ice cream...?
Some of those words began with the same letter!
There's 40 years in the business. 40 years to achieve this.
That's craft, that's stage craft, right there. That is stage craft.
That took my breath away. Extraordinary.
The same letter at the beginning of the word.
Thank you, darling. It is 40 years! CHUCKLING
What makes my ice cream taste like shit?
Maybe it's your bad attitude, Sandi.
Maybe you're putting liquorice in it! Maybe!
KLAXON
That looks tasty, has that got cornflakes on?
It looks actually quite good. That does look nice.
It's in a toilet bowl, but I'll get over that.
Is it shit? Has someone put shit in, in the ice cream?
Well, so, mammalian and bird faeces get their smell
from a high concentration of a molecule called skatole.
So it's a thing that we all produce in our digestive tracts,
and the people who produce too much of it have terrible halitosis.
Anyway, at very low concentrations it has a sort of sweet, floral aroma.
Like, I don't know, orange blossom or jasmine or something.
And so it's used in the ice cream industry as a flavour enhancer.
It can either smell great or it can smell terrible.
And it's also used in perfumes. Yeah, like your own farts. Yeah.
But it's used in perfumes and colognes, as well,
flavouring in cigarettes.
The name is the Greek for dung.
Anybody heard of something called "castoreum"?
It's taken from the glands found near the rear ends of beavers. Oh...
It gives depth to vanilla and strawberry flavours. I'm sure...
Rear end of a beaver? Yes, I know.
Isn't that the beaver? A beaver's beaver?
Is it a beaver's beaver? Yeah. You're thinking,
"This strawberry ice cream is lacking something."
That's it, a bit of beaver. "Get me a beaver." Yeah.
Get me a beaver's beaver! "Turn it around!
"Turn it around, this is the bit I'm interested in."
CHUCKLING
"Now this will be some interesting ice cream."
"It's got a bit of a beaver gland in it!"
"Hello, Walls? Do I have a solution for you!"
LAUGHTER
In Sweden, there is a drink - it's actually rare to find it these days -
called Baverhojt, and it's a liqueur flavoured with castoreum.
It was traditionally drunk by beaver trappers.
Again, a job I hadn't thought of.
MUSIC: TINKLING VERSION OF GREENSLEEVES
Ah. Anybody? What is that approaching? Anybody? What is that?
"Oh, Mum, can I have a pound?" What is it?
It's the ice-cream van! It's the ice-cream van!
Sorry, no, I've got to say, that is the most terrifying soundscape
of an ice cream van I have heard... Yeah. That's what it used to be.
So in the UK what would happen is,
if you'd just got out of prison, you were allowed to be an ice-cream man.
And it was the only way you were legally allowed near children.
Wow. Yeah, that's how it used to work.
And so they would have that music,
it was actually supposed to be a warning but, weirdly,
we all lined up and we waited to meet the weirdo
giving us ice creams.
It was brilliant.
Do they not have ice-cream vans in New Zealand?
No, they absolutely do, but not with that
child-catcher-esque sort of doomful like... Yeah, it was a bit.
Do you know what the tune is?
Greensleeves. Yes.
So, why do ice-cream vans play Greensleeves so much?
It's a banger. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, er, it's...
It's something to do with Henry VIII, it must be.
It is to do with Henry VIII. He invented ice cream.
No, ice cream was invented about 200 years after he passed.
Oh, Henry VIII never had ice cream? No, he...
If he knew that he hadn't had ice cream, he'd behead someone.
Yeah, he'd be so cross. "You mean I haven't had ice cream?"
"It hasn't been invented." "Kill someone!"
So, we're going back to 1958,
and there was a man called Dominic Facchino.
And he had been to the United States and seen ice-cream trucks
and he thought it was marvellous.
And so he decided to start his own venture,
he started it in Birmingham. The Mr Whippy ice-cream van.
Mr Whippy, we've got Mr Whippy in New Zealand, yeah. Mr Whippy.
And he chose it because he was a huge fan of Henry VIII.
And the King was credited with composing the tune. He didn't.
Ah, no. No, he didn't compose it at all. "I wrote that!"
Yeah, it was not him. "OK, sir."
"Yeah, all right, sir, yes."
The real composer's in the Tower.
"I've got an idea for a very, very cold fruity dessert, as well."
"In the Tower!" Yeah.
And another nod to Henry is Mr Whippy's hat,
which Facchino intended to be based on a Tudor hat.
So, if you look at... Told you, straight out... No way!
Straight out of prison. Straight out of prison, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My friend's mum used to tell her that
when the music was playing it meant they'd run out of ice cream.
A common ruse. That's a clever mum. Yeah. But it works, it does work.
You wouldn't bother running down
the street after it. If they haven't got any.
When I was a kid, there was two ice cream vans.
There was Mr Whippy and there was Meski's.
And my dad, who was a staunch sort of socialist,
verging on communist, to be fair, said we weren't allowed Mr Whippy's
because Margaret Thatcher
was part of the scientific team who created... That's true, Mr Whippy.
..Mr Whippy ice cream.
And he disliked her so much we weren't allowed Mr Whippy ice cream.
They always have, like, bootleg cartoons painted on them,
don't they, ice-cream vans? Yes, yeah. Yeah.
And you think, if Disney just chased them down,
they wouldn't really need to make any other money.
That dodgy-looking Goofy on the back of there. Yeah.
No, we can make millions from suing you. We're getting it.
So the question is, why don't ice-cream trucks
update their soundtrack? Why do they not have, like,
a Spotify playlist or something?
Copyright? You don't want Ed Sheeran suing Mr Whippy.
Imagine, who would we choose? We love them both.
Greensleeves is surely out of copyright. Yeah.
That's one reason. One of the reasons is that it's cheaper.
The older tunes are... It's unmistakably an ice-cream van.
That's the other thing, darling. It's that people know what's coming.
It's not just some car with their window down playing loud music.
Beginning of lockdown,
I read that Greggs the baker
were going to do home deliveries,
and I got excited because I love a pasty from there,
but I slowly realised that what they meant was, like,
on one of these apps, like the delivery apps. Yeah.
I thought it was like a Greggs van, like an ice-cream van. Turn up.
And you would just be, like, sat in your living room
and then you would hear the Greggs van music playing
and you'd run to your wife, "Can I have a pound?
"The Greggs van's here." And she'd be like,
"I've got pasties in the freezer." "They're not the same!"
But unfortunately that's not a business that they've done.
You've got pasties in the freezer?! Yeah, they sell them at Iceland.
Look, I'm not going to keep plugging these things!
I feel so sorry for your children.
Come in from a long day of playing with sticks and they say,
"Can I have an ice cream?"
"No, you can lick a frozen pasty like your dad."
If your ice cream smells like shit,
someone's overdone the skatole.
What kind of person gives away their starters?
I sometimes have a starter for pudding.
I'll have an avocado prawn to finish. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Love it.
Really? Yeah. Starters used to be terrible in Britain.
I don't know about New Zealand, but they used to be terrible in Britain.
You used to get, "Would you like the orange juice?" The fruit juice.
The fruit juice. Yeah. What do you mean?
And it would come on a little thing.
And it would be the only time in the year
that you would get squeezed orange juice.
I'd feel really swizzed at that. Vile. Or you get...
We all had scurvy.
..half a boiled egg with some salad cream, that's a very nice starter.
Oh, yeah, that's a nice one.
When they've taken it out and put it back in again?
No, not even bothered with that. Literally, just half a boiled egg.
No, not the starter course of a meal. What other types of starter?
Oh, well, then you misled us, didn't you, Sandi? Once again.
That is literally my job.
I can't keep giving you second chances.
Is it like a sourdough? It is, exactly right.
I had a lot of that in lockdown.
Jason is there, absolutely right.
So sourdough gets its sour flavour from Lactobacillus bacteria,
so that's introduced to the bread via... It's called a starter.
It's basically a mix of flour and water, which is left for a number
of days until wild yeast and microbes from the environment have grown.
People, like, pass them through the families, don't they?
Well, this is the thing, darling,
people pass them on and are slightly obsessed with their...
I'm that person. Are you? Have you got a starter?
I do have a starter and I did give it away in the first lockdown.
It's a lot of work.
It's the same with scobies, with kombucha, right? Yes.
And people become really obsessed with it. Really obsessed.
In fact, you can tell whose starter it is,
because you get particular bacteria on everybody's hands, right.
So you can usually match a starter to the baker
if you were able to test the bacteria on the hands and the bacteria on...
I'm riddled. I'm absolutely riddled.
You're riddled with the stuff. Yeah.
Theoretically, you can keep the starter alive forever and you
just keep feeding it flour and water, and pass it down from generations.
S, it's possible that bakers could be using the same starter
that their great-grandparents used. I'd love to be at that will reading,
where it's, like, someone gets a house,
someone gets a car. "I got a... I got a what?"
Do you know what's even... "Great!"
..even odder, I think, is that people name their sourdough starters.
So there's a series of names, Jane Dough.
Joan of Starch. Aw.
Fred Farter the Bread Starter.
John McEndough.
And Clint Yeastwood. Yes. Great one, love that.
Very good. Yeah.
So, what is stressful for a sourdough enthusiast about holidays?
Well, you wouldn't be able to take it with you?
You wouldn't be able to take it on holiday with you.
You'd have to fridge it, which is quite stressful.
You can't. Ooh, can't, no. What if it starves while...
You look like you could care about sourdough people?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Imagine you came home and your sourdough was dead.
If you put it in the fridge it goes to sleep for a bit, but the
chances of it coming back as it was, will it have the same memories?
Will it be as fun? No.
So there are now sourdough hotels.
Oh, my God. Yes. Finally! Finally, thank you.
Yeah, at last. There's a man called Martin Mayer
who runs the Vuaillat Bakery in Zurich,
and he started his sourdough hotel because he went
on holiday to South Africa and he took it with him, his starter, right,
and he was worried about it in the heat in the car all the time.
And so he developed a hotel, and each starter is put in its own compartment
and the staff are told how the person wants their starter treated.
And, apparently, owners come and say goodbye
and are visibly thrilled when they are reunited. Wow.
It's 49 francs a week, if you want to put your sourdough in there.
That's not bad. Did you not take to baking, darling, in the lockdown?
That didn't happen? No. I've just... What is happening here?
What about these simple questions, Alan, you've eaten sourdough,
you know nothing about the process of making it.
Out of the 706 people in Britain who make their own bread,
four of them are in this room?
People take it so seriously.
So there's a man called... He's a Belgian baker called Karl de Smedt,
and he's a sourdough librarian.
This is his sourdough library. No, he's not.
Yes. That's not a job. It is a thing. I'm sorry.
If you go to the Jobcentre and go, "What have you been up to?"
And go, "I'm a sourdough librarian. Anything coming up?" No chance.
He travels the world collecting interesting sourdough starters.
Wow, that's... He's currently got 125 in his library.
Anyway, this is a very sad thing,
I just need you to feel bad for Karl De Smedt.
He's since developed an allergy to flour...!
Wow.
Oh, Karl...
Do you know what the difference is between ordinary bread and sourdough?
Taste, price? No, it's the yeast.
So most bread uses a single species of commercial yeast.
Sourdough, it takes it from the air, from the baker's hands,
from the environment and so on.
But it is the oldest form of leavened bread, sourdough.
I mean, there's astonishing stuff, if you went to Thebes,
if you went to some of the ancient Egyptian sites,
you can actually find 3,500-year-old bread.
And what is amazing about it is you can see the handprint
of the baker in either side of the bread.
3,000 years old? 3,500 years ago, yeah. Really? That's the kind
of bread that my mum would just go, "No, that's fine!"
It's fine. "That's fine. Just scrape it off!"
"Cut the green bit off." "Scrape it off!" Yeah.
And with that we stumble into the sweet
and sour swamp of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Where does the UK get most of its sugar from?
Yes? # Sweet dreams... #
Morrison's?
Morrison's.
Good answer, yeah. I think it's a very good answer. Yeah.
Anybody want to name any other places?
Hm.
No? What's a country, OK? What is a country...?
Just generally?
# Sweet Home Alabama... # Just any country,
it comes from a country?
Does it come from a country?
A country other than the UK? Yes.
No. What?
Yes. So not... I thought that was foolproof.
No. You went...
You went wide and were wrong.
No. Over 50% is supplied by the British beet sugar industry.
And the rest is from the EU,
and then there is a bit of cane sugar imported,
but the majority is grown in the UK.
On the topic of Britain and sugar,
do you think we're eating more or less than we used to?
I think we're probably eating less.
Yeah, it sort of depends on what you say what we were used to.
So there was a significant increase in sugar intake
starting around the 1950s
and it reached 47.3 kilos per capita in 1961.
But it has been declining.
Today it's about 35.2 kilos of sugar per person.
But the sweeteners, anybody use sweeteners? No. No. OK.
Saccharin, the first artificial sweetener,
roughly 300 times sweeter than table sugar.
And Splenda, which is sucralose, 600 times sweeter.
There's a new one called Neotame,
10,000 times sweeter than sugar.
My nan loves it, loves a Sucral in her tea. Really? Yeah.
Yeah, my gran has a couple of... She's 97 and she has -
I think she has something like two or three sweeteners.
And she's 97. Yes. Doesn't matter, does it?
She's already living on borrowed time.
She can have whatever she wants.
She could start crack tomorrow if she wants to, at 97.
"Well, do you know, I fancy a bit of crack, actually."
Help yourself. Fine, 97, knock yourself out.
Most British sugar is home-grown.
What did William Wrigley Junior start a company for?
# Alabama... #
It's chewing gum?
KLAXON BLARES
Oh, I was totally going to say that. I'm so glad.
Yeah, I, oh...
Alan? Chewing gum was a kind of accidental by-product
to something, wasn't it, that they were trying to make?
Well, chewing gum has been around for thousands of years,
because people chewed on birch sap and all kinds of bits.
He actually started a company selling soap, in 1891.
But he believed - he had a philosophy,
everybody likes something extra for nothing.
So he started offering baking powder as a promotional item
and that was such a success, he just went straight
to baking powder.
And then chewing gum became his freebie.
And soon the chewing gum was more popular than anything else.
And by 1892 he was just selling chewing gum,
and these favourites, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint there,
1893, they had become the absolute favourites
that they I think still are.
That's incredible that the branding is pretty much the same.
Hasn't really changed, has it? Not really.
By 1909, Wrigley's Spearmint was the best-selling gum
in the US. And he did this brilliant thing,
he collected all the addresses from American phone books
and sent a packet to every single home.
And then everybody knew about Wrigley's. And the rest is history.
But to talk about people chewing gum forever -
in 2019, scientists at the University of Copenhagen...
Globe...
They managed - this is astonishing.
They managed to sequence a complete genome of a human being
based on the saliva from a discarded piece of chewing gum
which was 5,000 years old.
Wow. It came from the Island of Lolland.
Lolland is just south of Copenhagen
and so they named this girl who had eaten this piece
of chewing gum Lola, they called her, after Lolland.
And they deduced from this one piece of gum
that she was lactose intolerant,
she suffered from gum disease, she had blue eyes,
dark skin, dark hair
and had recently eaten a meal of duck
with hazelnuts, from that one piece of gum.
Wow. Do you not think that's astonishing?
And she wasn't brought up right if she stuck that under a bus seat.
That's amazing.
But I just think that's incredible. That is, that's so cool.
That's phenomenal, wow. It's very cool.
Anyway, this is an artist's impression of what we know about her.
Can you name any South American countries due south of Mexico?
Brazil?
KLAXON BLARES
It's going to be none of them, isn't it? Argentina.
KLAXON BLARES
What, so what is it? There aren't any?
Chile.
KLAXON BLARES
What do you reckon, Alan?
Well, it feels like there can't be any, then.
There aren't. The whole... OK, it must be twisted around.
Yeah, so, so when you look at the map,
the whole of the South American mainland is east of Mexico.
Indeed, 99% of it is east of Florida.
The only exception is Easter Island,
which does politically belong to Chile.
So you could have said Chile and we wouldn't have... I did say Chile.
Did you say Chile? Yeah, so scrub that, I was right. Yeah, sorry.
KLAXON BLARES
One way to remember that South America sticks out like that
is to sort of imagine it on its side
and then the Americas look uncannily like a duck.
If we can swivel that round like that.
Oh, wow. That's very cool, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, it helps that you've coloured it in.
Yeah. I think that is true.
Yeah. A lot of things can look like a duck if you colour them in.
You may think it's quackers,
but all of South America is east of Mexico.
OK, imagine you work for British intelligence,
who can you tell?
Well, anybody, but then you have to kill them.
KLAXON BLARES
What?
Wow.
Are you in my head now?
KLAXON BLARES
No, it's not the answer. Anybody else?
Your mum?
You could tell your mum. Yes, you could tell your mum.
How many people do you think you could tell? Two people.
It's not actually a number, darling. What?
It's the people that you feel it's essential for you to tell
in order for you to be able to carry on with the work.
So you just started seeing a guy, like, for two months
and you're, like, "I just want to tell him."
Yes. And then, I...
And then you get assigned an agent handler to discuss
the pros and cons of making an informed decision
as to whether or not you should tell.
Really? Yeah. So they'll check it out.
The general advice is to tell close family members or friends. OK.
There was an MI6 employee who was invited by the BBC
to be interviewed, and he told them that the interviewer
was the sixth person he had told.
I mean, I'm not saying it's the same thing,
but I didn't tell anybody I was on the Masked Singer.
So, you know, that's pretty good. Were you on that?
Yeah, that's pretty good isn't it? What were you on it?
I was an 'edgehog. You're the sixth person I've told.
LAUGHTER
And now she has to die. I know.
I didn't even tell my daughter, and on the night of the final,
when it was happening, she was watching it at a friend's
and all her friends were going, "That's your daddy."
And she was going, "I think I would know if my dad was on a TV show."
As it came off, she was livid.
Was it stressful not to tell anyone? No, it's great fun.
The only time it backfired was, I was on the phone to Alfie Boe,
who's, you know, brilliant opera singer, good friend of mine,
and I said, "Have you been watching this Masked Singer?"
He said, "Yeah, every Saturday night, I keep getting
"loads of tweets off people saying, 'Are you the hedgehog?'
"So I thought, I'll watch it, see what everyone's going on about.
"I watched this hedgehog singing and I thought to myself,
"'I'm not that shit at singing, am I?'"
Oh, wow. And I was, I was on the phone to him, I was like,
"Yeah, well, maybe the costume's really heavy or something!"
That's very good.
There's a marvellous story about Rupert Murdoch. So he was furious,
he was told that the former News Of The World editor,
Rebekah Brooks, couldn't take a call
because she'd gone to the furniture store, which is called MFI.
And, apparently, her PA had misheard her
and she'd gone to an MI5 meeting.
I think if you work for MFI, you shouldn't tell anybody.
Speaking of concealing your intelligence,
it must be time for the scores.
In last place,
as useful as a chocolate teapot,
with minus 28, it's Alice.
APPLAUSE
Scoring some brownie points in third with minus 24, it's Alan.
APPLAUSE
A super sugar-daddy in second,
with minus 20, it's Jason. I'll take that, I'll take that.
Second will do me.
And one smart cookie in first place,
with minus 19, it's Rose.
CHEERING
That's all from us tonight. My thanks to Alice,
Jason, Rose and Alan.
And I leave you with this savoury sign-off.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck,
talks like a duck,
probably needs a little bit more time in the oven.
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE