Good evening and welcome to qi, where tonight,
we will be separating the saints from the sinners.
I'm your heavenly host and joining me are the virtuous Johnny Vegas...
Cheers and applause
..the blessed Bridget christie...
Cheers and applause
..the diabolical Mark Watson... Cheers and applause
..and the well wicked Alan Davies.
Cheers and applause
right, let's see if the devil really has all the best tunes.
Bridget goes... Heavenly harp
wow! That... that doesn't suit me at all. Not in the slightest.
Mark goes... Choir sings hallelujah
Johnny goes... Heavenly choir
and Alan goes... Thunderclap
music: O fortuna from carmina burana (the omen)
Finally! Is it going to do that every time?
Wouldn't it be great if every time you opened a door,
that music played? Every time you opened your fly.
Right, I think we can take our halos off.
We begin with a question about not shaving and soul saving.
Are beards good or evil?
Opening notes of o fortuna
oh, that's a bit disappointing! I want the whole thing.
It's like you're not the devil after all.
I've no idea. I just wanted to press my buzzer. Good. They're good.
Jesus had a beard, at least he's depicted in all imagery as bearded.
Yes, he is. He's famously good. Yes. Anybody else?
I would argue there's baristas.
On the one hand, Jesus, on the other hand coffee snobs. Baristas, yeah.
We're talking hipsters, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah.
So here's the thing, every major religion at some point has
had a debate about whether beards on men are good or evil.
And then there was a guy called bouchard in France in the 1160s
and he complicated things by talking about the inner beard.
Yeah. Any thoughts? You two have got actual beards.
Any thoughts on the inner beard? We're not meant to talk about the inner beard, are we?
Yeah, the whole point of inner beard club is you don't
talk about inner beard club.
Bouchard and his fellow monks, they were all clean shaven, ok?
All the lay people had beards and he inadvertently offended them
by writing a letter in which...
Frankly, it was misinterpreted as an anti-beard comment
and even, some people thought, a threat to burn their beards off.
So he wrote... Talk about overcompensating.
He wrote an entire treatise called in defence of beards,
the apologia De barbis, in which he wrote of the great strength
and wisdom beards denoted.
Now, he risks offending the monks because they don't have beards
and he said, "but they had an inner beard."
What about the inner top of the head?
Yeah, the tonsure. You could do a lattice work... so... Like a tart.
..Have nuns got inner beards? Well, some nuns had inner beards, some...
Had outer beards. ..Had outer beards, yes.
Why might a woman, a Saint, decide to grow a beard?
For equal pay? A false beard? A fake beard? A disguise?
No, so there's lots of stories in Christian tradition that
women want to ward off men, so for example, st wilgefortis,
her dad was desperate for her to marry a king
and she didn't want to, so she prayed to be made repulsive
and she immediately sprouted a beard, at which point her father...
Opened a circus.
He should have done. Instead, he had her crucified.
That is quite cross, isn't it? That's an overreaction. Yeah.
He could have just grounded her for a bit. There she is, with her full beard.
Did you see that thing with the lions,
where one of the lionesses grew a mane?
And she's running the pride. Well, good for her.
She was like, "we don't need a bloke coming in here
and messing things up..." So I'll just grow a beard...
So they thought that she was... A man.
Yeah? There's presumably other stuff on a male... on a female... Yeah, but this was...
Anyway, st wilgefortis and st Paula the bearded are two
of the most famous women who did this in order to get men...
St Paula the bearded... To get men to go away.
My grandmother used to say, "a man with a beard is a man to be feared."
But she also said to never have mayonnaise
and that didn't really pan out.
What did she...? What did she have against mayonnaise?
She told me it was horrible and I was about 30 until I dared to have it.
It's quite nice. I love mayonnaise! Yeah.
No disrespect to my late grandma, but she was way off with that,
so makes you wonder if she was right about beards.
Both your beards, are they like short on purpose?
Is that as far as it goes?
If allowed, and currently I'm not in a relationship,
I grow it as long as I can and I go on picnics
and if the date doesn't go well, I just sit at home, laughing,
picking out bits of lost food and feeding meself.
Wow! I can't think why you're single, darling!
I've never seen you with a beard, Alan. Have you had a beard? No, me neither.
Sandi laughs
a had a bit of growth once for a role, but I found I was
fiddling on with it a bit and never really wanted to go through with it.
When I was in cinderella at the old Vic
and I played the storyteller and it was a man,
so I had a fake moustache, and I so quickly got used to it.
I found myself in the wings on the second night, going, "hm, it's going rather well!"
It's day three when you find yourself tying someone to
railroad tracks and going... ♪ da-da-da... ♪
so, what do we think about moustaches?
Like them, don't like them? You can do anything with a moustache, I think.
I don't think you can do "anything" with a moustache.
Well, you can do that. Yeah, you can do that. That is true.
Bouchard, the monk who was in such trouble about beards,
argued that it's a monstrous sign and should be avoided.
And in fact, it has caused controversy in the past,
so in April 1907, all waiters in Paris' top restaurants
went on strike over the right to grow moustaches.
And the strike cost the industry 32,000 francs a day,
it was quite a thing, and it led to assaults on clean shaven
waiters who were still working.
Why do you think moustaches were banned?
Hygiene? That's the only thing I can think of.
It'd be a long moustache before it dangled in the soup. I know.
This is around the time you first get modern restaurants in Paris
and they wanted to recreate the experience of dining in an upscale
home and domestic servants were not allowed to have facial hair.
For a long time, I just associated it with geography teachers.
That and corduroy. Yeah. I was...
They're all a bit undernourished as well.
Everyone in the geography department was a bit skinny and bearded
and in corduroy... yeah. ..And they looked like they were on the verge of orienteering
at the drop of a hat.
No, there's a real kind of moustache on a teacher like that
when you walk in and you go, "divorced."
My housemate when I was at university,
he had to shave twice a day. He had just very rapid growth.
I could see if you had extremely rapid growth,
you'd just give in and have a beard. Yeah, just think, "can't be arsed."
What did he shave twice a day? Everything, or just one... Just his face.
Right. But was everything else growing at the same...
I made no enquiries about it with him. There's certain blokes and here
looks like that and then the rest of them looks like an untamed gorilla.
Sometimes you get a surprise hairy back. Someone you wouldn't expect.
Do you know what I do?
I just put loads of double-sided tape against the wall
and throw meself at it.
You go to throw the cat...
You peel her off and there's a cat shape.
The worst thing is, you realise you live alone,
you've got to ring a friend... "Can you come and get me?"
Have a look at this.
This is a very strange idea of a possible method to improve shaving.
It's a satirical print, I have to tell you, from 1749.
A horse-powered mass shaving device.
You put your face in a hole and the razors whirr around the inside.
That's a lot of pressure on one horse, isn't it? I know!
It says it can shave 60 men a minute and also oil,
comb and powder their wigs.
There'd be some fatalities, i'd imagine, if you got it wrong. Yeah.
What a way to die, though! Being shaved by a horse! Yeah.
You've got one bloke who thinks it's a peep show and he loses a nose.
It's like yo! Sushi. It is like yo! Sushi!
That's where they got the idea from. But if they...
So the blades are going to cut one fellow and then cut...
Cos they're going round, it's the same blades...
One cheek at a time, I imagine.
You'd end up with more hair if you were at the end. Off the razor?
Yeah. I don't know, Bridget, if it's possible you're overthinking it.
I... I have got that...
How would you learn how to shave somebody else, do you think?
They used to do it with cutthroat razors,
but you don't want to start on somebody's face.
On a dead person? Wow! That's... Dark.
No. Well, you know your...
It's worrying how quickly you came up with that. Yeah.
Because there's... it's quite risky, shaving somebody. Yes.
If they're already dead... The stakes are low, yeah.
I want to go to barber school, but it gives me nightmares.
I was going to say a balloon.
I know, a balloon or a corpse, whatever.
Look at all those weird dead people. It's a balloon. Do you know what?
They didn't pop along to the morgue and go, "I need to practise me cutthroat razor."
I think it's much better...
I'm sorry if you're lost, but I'm a barber in training. Yes.
"Hi. Would you like to see the body?" "That can't be daddy.
"He had a massive beard."
It would be less frightening cos those balloons,
they pop very easily.
I would have more nightmares popping a balloon with a weird face
drawn on it... you don't like popping balloons, do you?
That's your go-to answer on anything.
What's the best way to lean chiropody? On a dead person! Dead body!
Paula the bearded grew facial hair to save her soul,
but what's the best way to weigh arseholes?
No, sorry, I'll say it again -
what's the best way to weigh our souls?
Someone did do an experiment like this. They did, yeah.
The scientists in the old days weighed people just before
and just after they died. 21... 21 grams. Yeah. Yes.
It's an interesting question. Does the human soul have substance? Does it have mass?
So there was a doctor in Massachusetts called
dr Duncan macdougall in 1901 and he decided to fit a bed with weighing scales
and he got six dying patients to lie in it in their final moments
and then he recorded their exact weight just before they died
and then just afterwards.
What I like about this is first of all he persuaded six dying... six? Six, yeah.
He specifically chose people who had got conditions
caused by physical exhaustion, so things like tb, for example, because
he wanted them to remain still, so he could get good measurements.
It wasn't a flawless experiment, I have to say.
One patient was thoughtless enough to expire
while he was calibrating the scales.
So he has to stand them on the scales? No, no.
The bed is on scales.
This is quite an elaborate machine. Yeah.
He measured on subject as losing 21.3 grams when he died
and he concluded that must be the weight of the soul
and for a very long time, that is what people thought.
People thought the soul weighed about 21 grams.
So they carried on making more experiments cos
he wanted to make sure, so he got 15 dying dogs...
I mean, I don't know where you get them from.
Is your dog dying? Can I weigh it?
Well, he believed that dogs didn't have souls and sure enough,
none of them lost any weight when they died.
Didn't lose the 21 grams. I don't know, what does 21 grams weigh like?
I know if you're making a macaroni cheese for the family,
you need 40 grams of flour.
Imagine the idea that your soul weighs half as much as you
need of flour to make a macaroni cheese.
It doesn't seem like a lot.
Well, the fact is two of his six subjects didn't give any measurements at all,
but also, at the time, there was a physician called Augustus p Clarke
and he noted that there's often a sudden rise in body temperature
when people die because the lungs stop cooling the blood
and there's a subsequent rise in sweating
and that would account for the 21 grams. That makes more sense!
But he's not the very first person, so in the 13th century, the holy
Roman emperor, Frederick ii, took a condemned man
and he sealed him in a barrel and he waited for him to die... sorry!
The reasoning that when he did,
his soul wouldn't be able to get out of the barrel.
Right? And then he could then open the barrel up
and he'd see the soul, if the theory was true.
What do you think he found? Had the man gone?
Just... a trick.
He trapped a magician.
He just found a dead guy. Yeah. Yeah. There is a thing
though about the soul leaving the body in Latin America.
Has anybody ever heard of susto, it's Spanish for fright.
It's a sort of folk illness and sufferers believe
that their soul leaves the body while they're still alive.
So it's the belief that you've had something so terrible happen
to you that your soul has actually briefly departed from your body.
I've had that when I've been offered gym membership.
They have a tradition in Denmark,
in other Scandinavian countries as well, which is
that when somebody dies, you open the window to allow...
Yes... The soul to depart.
Let them go. And cover the mirrors. Oh!
Always cover the mirrors to prevent the soul from becoming trapped inside.
I remember when my hamster died, that pivotal first pet dying moment, and my mum tried to cheer me up,
saying, "I expect that pets can go to heaven, wouldn't you, Chris?"
To my dad. And my dad said, "I wouldn't have thought so." And...
He wasn't trying to upset me, he was a science teacher
and he couldn't really see a way that could happen.
Right, why should you never envy sloth lust?
Oh, look at his little face! Are these sins, or...? Well...
So it depends which way we're going.
Let's talk about sex with sloths first, shall we? Yes, please.
It'd be weird if we didn't talk about that.
I'm first in the queue for that one.
Isn't he the...? She? I don't know.
There's a look on that face, isn't there? I mean... ready!
That come to bed nose.
I would not be kicking that out. Of whatever tree you were hanging in.
That is definitely a come hither look, isn't it? Really.
So, sloth sex begins with the female
screaming at the top of her lungs that she's available. Oh! Wah!
And then the males... Four years later... yeah.
Slowly, the man comes. Did you hear that?
Before copulation takes place, he comes slowly towards her, then
it lasts as little as five seconds and that includes the foreplay.
Well, I think she's probably sorted herself out before he gets
there, hasn't she? Do you reckon?
Well... and then... What a lovely turn of phrase. I've been screaming... yeah.
Sorted myself out before you arrived.
Yes, you were too slow, I'm afraid. I've had to sort myself out.
Stopped at the pub again? Up to half the females in the area can have children
from a single male because they just think, "he's here, this one's here.
"I can't wait for another one." He's on the branch.
"He's taking too long." As they say in sloth world.
Was he on the branch? He was. I'll be ready in a minute.
Just fix me wig. Yeah. Really reminds me of somebody and I can't...
It's ozzy Osbourne, it looks just like ozzy Osbourne. It does.
Do you say "sloth" or "sloath"? Both are correct. I say "sloth".
I say "sloath". Yeah, I say "sloath" as well. I don't know...
Anyway, so the sloth itself was named after the sin.
You see them in the trees, obviously,
and they go along the telephone wires,
kind of hanging upside down, quite impressive, you know, the sort
of all-action, hanging upside down, go from tree to tree like that.
You want to be careful though, if they're above your head
because a sloth can poo one-third of its body weight in a single go.
Oh, that's so impressive!
That is amazing! That is weight loss right there!
That's 25 to 30 kilos, for me. You know... woo-hoo!
If you look at that photograph, the thing that's intriguing me
is that eye there looks like I'm in the mood for love,
and then that one looks like - did I leave the grill on?
It does!
It'd be a very different world
if animals could use appliances like that, wouldn't it? That'd be great.
If they just picked up appliances from dumps and things,
running cables up to trees and rigging up walkmans and stuff.
Take forever though, if you asked a sloth to do it.
Well, they'd burn their shirts, ironing, wouldn't they?
So let's have a quick look at the seven deadly sins.
There's pride and wrath and envy, lust, gluttony,
avarice or greed, and sloth.
Are they in order? No, not particularly.
They can put them up for you. There you go.
Pride, wrath, lust...
So which one is the woman brushing... combing her hair, then?
Lust. She's getting ready for...
Yeah, she wants sex so much that she's literally combing her hair.
Yeah. What, with herself?
What she's doing there, Bridget, she's sorting herself out. Yeah.
Going to sort herself out. For herself. Yeah.
The original Greek list had eight sins, including acedia,
so that was like melancholy, listlessness, that kind of thing.
Has saying "I'm going to love you and leave you" ever been one of the deadly sins?
It should be, really. Yeah. Or "it's not you, it's me".
Yeah, or having a mug that says "coffee o'clock".
There's a lot that's missed out by this.
Tristitia is despondency as well, on the first Christian list.
Why did they get rid of the eighth one? They kind of folded them all in together.
Pope Gregory I decided to fold lots of things in together.
Pope pourri was the... Pope Gregory I.
Pope pourri. I cannot believe there isn't a pope called pope pourri.
The most fragrant pope of them all. There should be! Yeah.
But we have now some breaking sin news.
News-style jingle
pope is about to add a new sin to the catechism.
Oh! This is true.
So that's the text listing the beliefs of the catholic church.
Anybody know what the new sin is going to be?
Is it to do with the modern world? Yeah. Uh-oh, the modern world.
Uh-oh. Is it something to do with social media?
No, it's ecological sin. Oh! Thou shalt not litter.
Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much. It's going to cover everything from dropping litter to
permanently destroying parts of the environment.
That's going to be a new sin. Wow!
I'd have gone with thou shalt not road rage. Yeah.
That's just annoying, isn't it? Just don't like road rage.
It's become part of our daily existence and it shouldn't.
And I shouldn't follow them back to their houses
and burn their garages down.
Maybe the pope will get on to that. Yeah, that'll be the next thing.
Why did this guy get so many column inches?
I know this. Yes, I'm willing to wait. Saint blokes... monks...
Saint blokes? ..Stood upon pillars. Stylites? Yes! That's exactly...
They're called stylites. People who deliberately live like that?
Yes, darling. Absolutely. People who deliberately lived like that.
The David blaines of their time.
Well, so, we're talking about a monk called simeon.
He could suffer more than anybody else.
We're in Syria, we're near what is aleppo now.
423 ad and he decided, simeon, that he
wanted to live an incredibly simple life, so he was going to
decide to live on top of a pillar, a 60ft high pillar, 2ft square, ok?
He built up to this. You don't do this...
It's not the first thing you decide. First, he entered into a monastery
and embarked on a lifetime of austerity.
Even the other monks thought it was a bit too extreme.
He dug a waist-deep hole in the garden
and stayed in that for two years. The monks threw him out.
He moved into an empty cistern for a while.
And then, aged 20, he had himself chained
into a two-square-yard roofless sort of enclosure.
£1,000 a week in London. Yes.
Eventually, he climbed a column, 60ft high,
and lived there and he became known as simeon stylite,
or the stylite, and he stayed there for 40 years.
And unfortunately, he died the year before top trumps was invented.
He sounds quite mad. Quite bonkers, darling.
He was fed with parcels of flatbread and goat's milk.
We don't really know how, either he lowered a bucket down or
small boys would climb up and give it to him.
The thing is, it had the opposite effect of what he'd intended.
He was trying to get away from the world... away from people. ..And everybody went,
"oh, I want to go and see the crazy guy who lives on top of a pillar!" Huge crowds used to come
and then he would either stand with his arms extended like that,
or he would repeatedly touch his toes with his forehead.
As many as sort of 1,200 times,
while the audience shouted out the count from down below.
And then he would defecate a third of his body weight.
I'm an avid collector.
I'd turn up and go, "where did you get the column?"
Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing about the column.
This is 423 ad when he decides to...
When do you think the column was destroyed?
How long do you think it survived for? If it's near aleppo,
it makes me think it was in one of those recent antiquity...
2016, it was destroyed by a missile. Oh! I know! Really? Wow!
Yeah, it stayed there for all that time. Oh!
And he then had lots of imitators, called stylites,
so literally pillar-dweller in Greek.
There was a guy called st simeon stylite the younger.
He spent 69 of his 76 years up a pillar.
So that means he had to decide to do that when he was seven.
He'd come down and someone would say,
"have you ever been to the cinema?" And he'd be like, "oh, shit." Aw, what a shame!
But if you're chasing humility,
he's actually built just a very tall pulpit.
He gave sermons from up there. The emperor asked his advice on things.
He was hardly ever left alone.
I've never felt closer to god. Ah... oh!
I think it became like a thing in america as well.
Well, there is a sort of spiritual descendent of it, which is
the flagpole sitting craze. In New York.
In the United States, so there was a guy called Alvin shipwreck Kelly...
Yes, that Irish guy! Irish guy. This is him, sitting on top of a pole.
It was a big craze in the 1920s and '30s
and you see how long you could stay on top of a public flagpole.
He was called Alvin shipwreck Kelly
because he claimed to have been in 62 shipwrecks in his life.
But have a look at this next picture.
He didn't just go and sit on a flagpole.
This is him on the chanin building, opposite the empire state building... oh, that makes me sick.
Oh my... ..Having doughnuts and coffee.
That's really extreme. How long did he do that for?
Well, on this particular occasion, I don't know exactly,
but he spent over two decades doing this, 20,613 hours in total,
he sat on top of a flagpole.
The thing we do know, which is very sweet, he met his wife, Frances...
Whilst falling from a pole.
She was an elevator operator, so clearly, didn't mind going up,
and she went up the pole to shake his hand and they fell in love
and he married her because she went up to say hello.
And then she plummeted to her death.
It is an extraordinary picture, isn't it?
The thing you have to think about the photograph is someone was higher up than him.
Right, what's transparent, consistently thick,
a bit of a pain and comes from st helens?
Hello, mate.
Is it a piece of glass? It is glass, absolutely.
It is the second best thing to ever come out of st helens
after our very own Johnny. And we invented... two things we invented.
Go on, then. Float glass. Yeah.
Which was floating the glass on hot tin,
so you didn't have to Polish the other side of the glass.
And we gave the world porn, because we came up with fibre optics.
You're absolutely right about float glass.
It used to be very expensive to make perfectly flat glass and this guy,
Alastair pilkington, in the 1950s, he realised
if you pour molten glass onto molten tin, then it lies completely
flat and it cools and hardens and it made it so much cheaper.
Other heroes of st helens, the first photographs clearly showing
a human face were taken by a son of st helens. Really? Mm.
John William draper and his sister Dorothy.
They worked out new ways of making what we call daguerreotypes,
they put flour on women's faces to try and get more contrast before taking the shot.
He was also the very first person to take a picture of the moon.
I never knew this! Did you know that the largest bug hotel in the world is
in your former school?
They have a bug hotel more than 80 cubic metres in size.
It's the largest one in the world.
Oh, wow! You must be proud. I've always been proud.
I'm just dead chuffed with this! What's the bug hotel? A bug hotel?
You build them and it's where bugs hide in winter.
Yes, if you have any outdoor space of any kind, it's a
really good idea to try and create a bug hotel.
Can you charge them, like a normal hotel? Yes.
It depends on what services you're offering.
If you turn down the beds at night, that kind of thing, that kind of service.
A chocolate on the pillow.
I'm just dead happy we're talking about st helens on telly!
How lovely! Thank you!
No, it's a pleasure. It is. We were innovators back in the day.
And then Thatcher!
Bloody hell! If you're as close to him as I am, that...
That was quite frightening. Sorry, sorry. One answer to everything.
That would have come out a different question and it wouldn't have been apt.
I thought he was going to deck me for a second.
I'm glad you're all right now. But is there a theatre there?
Yeah, theatre royal and the citadel, where I cut me teeth, basically.
I went and I heckled. And they asked me to come back and compere.
We had a verbal agreement, they couldn't afford to pay me,
but me drinks were free and the second gig, they're going,
"we'll give you 30 quid."
And you have to buy your own drinks! True. You can buy your own drink!
My first gigs at the comedy store, I was paid in beer. We all got...
Yeah, I know, but I turned up at 6am. Ah!
Fair enough. No, it was great. It was great. I love me home town.
You've really... ooh! Oh, I'm so... I can't... I'm lost for words.
It's lovely. Anyway, moving on, why does nobody respect the Spanish inquisition?
The Spanish inquisition, I didn't realise this,
went on for about 350 years.
Yeah, it went on for an extremely long time.
The thing about it is that it wasn't anywhere near as bad as
they had suggested. It's kind of a low level... yeah... Polite inquiry.
Well, there are lots of... More like a pub quiz, really. Yeah!
Optional form filling. Multiple choice.
Yeah, it was exaggerated. The catholic church has looked into it and said,
"we're really happy to say sorry for all the things we've done,"
and there's a few, you know, "but we didn't do this."
Torture was very much a last resort. They had rules.
You could only do 15 minutes and there had to be a doctor there and
you couldn't give anybody permanent injury and you couldn't draw blood.
Like Joe wicks' thing really. Yes, it is like a workout, isn't it?
Yeah. If you're going to waterboard them, use evian.
Ask if they want sparkling, yeah.
Most sentences were prayers and fasts and lots of punishments were
commuted - the life sentence, which was known as perpetual
imprisonment, lasted for three years.
The only people they executed really were what they called relapsers,
people who has said I'm sorry and gone off and done it again.
Secular prisoners sometimes blasphemed in prison in order
to get themselves transferred to an inquisition prison
because they thought they'd get a fairer trial. Oh!
Have you got any examples of what any of them said?
"Ooh, blast!" "He's rubbish, that god!" "Ooh, I say!"
"Ruddy catholics!" Yes. They were rather meticulous.
There was an inquisitor called Salazar frias and he did
a meticulous investigation of the basque witch panic...
Is that Jude law? It does look like Jude law, doesn't it?
But he did a meticulous investigation of the basque witch
thing and determined in the end it was all made up by the accusers.
And the actual conviction rate was incredibly low. It was about 6%, on average.
And from 1560 to 1700, they put 3,687 people on trial
for witchcraft and only 101 were found guilty.
It just is not quite the thing that maybe we all thought it was.
Almost as if there weren't that many witches. I know!
That's the weird thing, isn't it, Mark? Yes. Hm...
And being unpopular was very handy
because inquisitors realised that lots of people were using the
inquisition as a way to settle local scores
and all you pretty much had to do if you went
up on a charge of something was to say, "nobody likes me."
The accused were allowed to provide a list of anybody who had
a grudge against them.
One judge just produced a list of people that he had sentenced.
He said, "all these people hate me.
"It's not possible that I wouldn't be falsely accused."
That was the end of that.
Now, who was younger than James the younger?
James the even younger.
Klaxon
James the tiny little... yeah.
Who was James the younger? A disciple, is it?
He's a disciple, yes. Also known as st James the less,
which is not as good, is it? Imagine being called "the less"!
This is him sitting... Who's this on the end?
Is that Simon with his hand going like... oh! "Shut up, James!" Shush!
"Listen, I'm not less, I'm very much the same size as the other James."
"Don't you ever talk about anything else?"
"Simon, look at me. Look at me!"
"There's something weird on your left."
Don't look now...
So st James the younger, some people think he's
identified as one of Jesus' brothers and...
I love a relic, ok?
And for more than 1,500 years, the Saint apostoli church in Rome
had had fragments of a thigh bone that belonged to James the younger.
I mean, who wouldn't want to go and see that, right?
Fantastic!
And then, 2020, it was radiocarbon dated
by the university of southern Denmark.
Those spoilsports. Yep.
And they showed the bone belonged to the body of someone born
between 214 and 340ad. So, the body, the thigh bone
was younger than James the younger.
James the younger shouldn't be confused with James the great.
See, there was James the less and James the great. Right.
Both apostles. There must have been a rivalry between those guys.
They must not have got on, I would have thought.
What I like about James the great, is he was the son of zebedee.
Anyway, the hand of James was the sort of star relic at reading Abbey,
founded in 1121 by Henry I, and they also had fragments
of the true cross, which is... Of course. Yeah.
One of Christ's sandals.
Oh! James' hand disappeared at the dissolution
of the monasteries that Henry viii instituted,
and then it was rediscovered, well,
rather, a left hand was rediscovered in 1786.
And now it is in the Roman catholic church in Marlow in buckinghamshire,
but it's also been carbon dated and I'm sorry to tell you
it's about 900 years off. Ah. Hm. Thought to be.
So that's holy hands and holy legs,
but why might you come home from a pilgrimage with a vagina?
So, just like today, medieval holy sites did a roaring trade
in souvenirs, and people brought back badges as tokens
of the journey, and they were often in the likeness of saints,
but sometimes they were much, much weirder
and I have a replica here.
Let me show you this one.
This is a replica of a 14th century Dutch vagina shooting
an arrow on horseback.
Oh! You don't often see them do that. You don't. You don't.
I can also offer you, I have here a phallus.
I... a phallus...
Where the... I don't know if it's a man or a woman pushing
a wheelbarrow of phalluses.
I didn't think you could top st helens,
but this is really... replicas of the various badges.
What else have I got here? I've got, I've got a penis on a boat.
I don't know why.
I know, I know... We've all met those.
Tell me...
The guy on the, on the, the phalluses.
Yes, the phallus. There, on the top one, to the left.
Oh, this one, here. Yeah, it looks like he's got a penis puppy farm.
He looks like he's selling fireworks.
Laughter I...
They could be like little monopoly, erm... yep.
Oh, that would be a good idea.
Do you want to be the penis or the vagina?
Can I... you've not been buying fireworks off that bloke
with a massive cock again, have you?
Now, why might you do this?
Why might you have phalluses? Why might you have vaginas?
What is the reason for them?
Light entertainment.
Are they little fertility, good luck charm things?
Oh, yeah. It's protection from the evil eye possibly. Ok.
Ok, so if somebody's sick, you do not want to look them in the eye.
Is that a penis you're wearing?
I say! Don't look him in the eye!
And then, the other thing is that the tourist trade has not changed,
people have not changed. People buy bawdy and humorous objects,
and they sell well.
Was it ever called a vadge badge, sandi? A vadge badge?
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah. I just, I think this is a thing that can be monetized,
I might as well copyright that now. I think vadge badge is good.
Right. Now, prepare for judgment day as we enter
the limbo of general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please. All right.
Who designed this staircase?
Oh, what's his name?
Ahhh... Yes, darling?
What you're thinking of is escher...
Klaxon ..but it could be a trap. Oh!
It is a bloody trap. It's a bloody trip.
So he is the one most famously associated
with the impossible looped staircase that you would climb for eternity,
but these are the penrose stairs figure, and they were created
by a British psychiatrist and mathematician called
Lionel sharples penrose - marvellous name -
and his son, sir Roger penrose, first published in 1958.
Imagine calling your son sir Roger. Yeah, that's ridiculous, isn't it?
It's aspirational. What are you going to call him? Sir Roger.
Sir Roger. What happened is, the penroses had been inspired
by escher's earlier work on impossible figures.
They sent a copy of their staircase to him to see if he liked it.
He liked it so much that he decided to make a staircase of his own.
So, the penroses, the British penroses, were the ones
who inspired escher to do his drawing.
Richard penrose is a really interesting guy.
First of all, he won the nobel prize in physics for work on black holes.
The other thing he's famous for - this seems really unlikely,
you win the nobel prize for physics -
he's also famous for tiling. So he created a mathematically
revolutionary way of arranging floor tiles so you could cover an infinite
plane without the pattern ever repeating.
Ooh! Which is amazing.
So, more than 20 years after he came up with this pattern, penrose sued
kleenex for using it on toilet paper.
Why might they have decided to recreate this never repeating
pattern on toiler paper? Hallelujah!
Angles of grip when you're removing.
That's exactly right, darling.
The toilet paper would not stick together.
That's brilliant! You get an extra point.
Yeah, and so the sheets were less likely to stick together.
And he sued them, and the case was settled out of court.
Imagine winning the nobel prize, but also,
suing a toilet paper manufacturer. I know! It's great, isn't it?
That seems like the full portfolio career. That's everything.
Now, where would you find the largest body of water in Africa?
It's not going to be that massive, massive lake.
Is it going to be the nile?
Is the nile the largest body... Klaxon
oh!
Is it, therefore, that massive, massive lake?
That massive, massive lake.
What lake are we talking about? Is it not Victoria?
Klaxon
is it a river that goes into a lake that never ends from one, to the top
of the continent to the bottom or something? Are these all traps
and it's just someone with a massive paddling pool or something?
Yeah. No. None of those things.
Is it underground? Yes. Oh... it's underground!
It's underground! A reservoir. Underground.
It's the most unlikely place.
Sahara desert. It is exactly right.
50 points.
Yes, well done, Alan.
Very well done. Underneath the eastern end
of the Sahara lies around 150,000 cubic kilometres of water.
That is three-quarters of the total amount of water held in all lakes
in the world. It's basically a huge mass of very wet rock
and every single crevice, every nook, every cranny
is filled with fossil water, so water that's been trapped
deep underground, rather than it's part of the water cycle.
And the nubian sandstone aquifer system is the largest known fossil
water aquifer system in the world.
It spans a land area of two million square kilometres, lying under much
of Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya.
Africa was once home to the largest freshwater lake in the world.
It was known as mega Chad and it covered an incredible area
of central Africa, more than the whole of the British isles.
So if we superimpose the British isles on top, this will give
you some idea of how big this water mass was.
And then, a thousand years ago, it suddenly shrank.
I had an idea for a television series once,
where you would move britain to a different part of the world
and then discuss the consequences. You know, with climate, neighbours,
nearest war zones. It feels like quite high-budget stuff. Yeah.
I was told by quite a well-known producer
that it might work as a segment,
but not as a whole show.
Looks like I might have to podcast the bastard!
I mean, what you'd have to deal with is all the people on the island
who didn't want to move.
Yeah. "Come on. We could go to the Indian ocean for a couple of years."
"No, this is where we are."
"But you hate Europe! You don't want to be in... we can move you!"
I think it's definitely a segment, darling, I do.
Or a podcast.
Lake Chad is tautological.
Does anybody know what that...? Does it mean Chad means lake?
Yes, Chad means lake in the kanuri language.
I love things like that. Sahara desert is another one,
tautological. Canvey island,
wookey hole cave.
Pendle hill, this is lancashire, "pen" means "hill",
"dle" means "hill", and hill means hill,
so it basically means hill hill hill. Hill hill hill!
All right, I heard you. Was it,
was it named by someone who fell down it?
Yeah!
"Mind that hill hill hill!" Hill hill hill!
"You fell down the what?" "The pen." "The what?"
"The dle." "What?" "The hill." "Pendle hill?"
"What happened?"
Shouts: "I fell down it!"
Which country's air force did this plane belong to?
This is a trick. You can see a klaxon here.
Oh! It's a trick. The Germans didn't have the swastika
on their, on their plane, the luftwaffe.
Whose do you think it is?
It's going to be a Buddhist airforce. Yes! I love that!
So the great sanskrit symbol of good luck found in many ancient
cultures, the swastika.
The Nazis adopted it as a party emblem in 1920
and then as a national symbol for Germany in 1933,
but it had already been in use for two years by the Finnish people.
Really?! I was just about to buzz in with ryanair.
In 1918, a Swedish nobleman, count Eric Von rosen, had donated a plane
decorated with one to the newly formed Finnish air force,
and they carried on using it until 1945.
Maybe it was just getting a bit awkward.
"Shall we change the badge?" "What should we have instead?"
"I've seen this brilliant thing. You won't believe it.
"It's like a penis with feet."
The cross of freedom, which is a variant of the swastika,
still features today in the top left-hand corner of the official
flag of the Finnish president. And the Danish brewery Carlsberg used
swastika as a logo from the 19th century to the mid-1930s.
They dropped it, obviously, with the Nazis taking it on.
But you can still see it in the carved stone Indian elephants
that stand at the gates of the company's headquarters.
Now, what does this stand for?
Rhythmic beeping
hallelujah!
It's not sos.
Oh, ok. What does it stand for?
No, we're just going to, we're going to rule that out.
Just things that it's not. It's... It's not my home address.
It's not rsvp either. It's not rsvp. Thank you.
Well, it is dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot.
Yes. Are we confused? Does that mean o-s-o?
The thing is, it doesn't stand for sos.
Oh. If it was going to be the letters, you'd have them with a gap.
So you'd have, dot, dot, dot, gap.
Dash, dash, dash, gap. Dot, dot, dot.
It's a continuous stream.
We say sos as a convenient way of remembering what the signal is,
but it could just as easily be rendered as v-t-b and remembered
as vacate the boat. The thing is, the distress is universal,
it doesn't depend on language.
You don't need to know what the sos stands for.
We just know that that is the signal.
Before that, they used to signal c-q—d.
And then it was agreed in 1906 that they would make it simpler.
There was a big international wireless telegraph convention
in Berlin and that's where we get the sos from.
But it doesn't actually stand to save our souls.
And then they invented texting.
It took a while to catch on, actually. When the Titanic went
down, they still transmitted c-q-d.
They might just think it was sos, but it was not.
And so it's time for another sos,
sandi's 'orrible scores. Let's see who's on cloud nine and who's
in the sin bin. In fourth place, languishing in the pits of eternal
damnation with minus 22.
Oh, Alan!
He chuckles, applause
thank you. Thank you.
In third place with minus 8, it's Mark! I'll take that.
Cheering and applause
in second place with seven whole points, Bridget!
Cheering and applause Johnny!
Holy mackerel.
In first place...
Take your time with this!
He laughs hysterically
..the man from st helens, Johnny, with 13!
Cheering and applause
All that remains is we thank Mark, Johnny, Bridget and Alan,
and I leave you with a sagacious sign off from Audrey hepburn.
Make-up can only make you look pretty on the outside,
but it doesn't help if you're ugly on the inside...
Unless you eat the make-up. Goodnight.