This programme contains some strong language and adult humour
Good evening and welcome to qi,
where it's silly season with a silly sausage -
ivo Graham!
Applause
a silly so-and-so -
Holly Walsh!
Applause
a silly mid on -
Stephen k Amos.
Applause
and a sumptuous seasoning of Alan Davies.
Thank you. Applause
and their buzzers are all extremely silly.
Ivo goes...
Cartoon running sound effect
oh, I like that. Holly goes...
Cartoon arrow twangs
Stephen goes...
Cartoon bullet ricochets
and Alan goes...
Music: Looney tunes/merrie melodies by London music works & Evan jolly
woo!
It's silly season, so let's start with some silly questions.
Now, we got these by feeding hundreds of questions
taken from the qi database, which is called blue whale,
into an artificial intelligence program,
and we asked the program to come up with new questions
in the same style.
So this is artificial intelligence qi questions.
First of all, what happens if a flamingo is your wife?
People are very judgey about it. Flamingoist.
Flamingoist, exactly.
And people talk about animal husbandry a lot,
but they don't talk about birdwifery a lot.
If a flamingo is your wife... Yeah?
..Probably the best option is to dress up as an egg
so you're guaranteed to get laid.
Here's a question for you, Alan.
What is the best way to get a radiant
complexion of trousering?
Well, you need to emerge from within the trouser, sandi.
I'm not a massive fan of the qi supercomputer...
No. ..With these...
But the question that it asked over and over again,
which I am extremely keen on,
is, how many legs does the queen have?
She has one of her own legs
and then the other one's a sort of official leg.
Official leg. I reckon she's on coasters, isn't she?
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
When you see her in all those big gowns,
those official events, you never see her walking.
She sort of glides, doesn't she?
Oh, I see what you mean.
I thought you meant she was on some kind of a drinks mat.
You don't want her to Mark your table!
So, it asked over and over again - how many legs does the queen have?
And then suddenly announced, "I'm naked."
And it also answered one of its own questions.
"How did the romans?" Was the question.
And the answer was "nobody knows".
They laugh
so there's an American research scientist
called Janelle Shane, and she programmed a similar
sort of neural network to read existing love hearts slogans.
Do you remember love hearts? Oh, yeah. Those little, sort of, sweets?
So they're usually fairly tame.
But she reprogrammed the ai to do it,
and this is what it came up with.
"Loving horn", "buns, buns, buns," and "all hail the chicken".
I think they would sell like hotcakes.
Next Valentine's day, all hail the chicken.
Yeah, right.
So, she has a point in doing this.
It's not just sort of a bit of silliness.
Ai still has lots of limitations...
Ivo scoffs making love hearts -
that's the main one.
One of the things we need to look at is neural networks are prone
to something called catastrophic forgetting,
so forgetting old information as new data is fed in.
And ai also has a problem with giraffing.
Anybody know what giraffing might be?
Sticking your neck out? They laugh
getting things off high shelves?
Yes. No. So it constantly identifies things as giraffes.
Ok! Yeah. Or anything unusual.
Why might that be?
I don't know! Because it's...
Because it's stupid?
No, what it is, it's trained online,
and online people tend to post unusual things
more than they'll post a sort of featureless rock or something.
They're much more likely to post a giraffe, for example.
I hate it when people post featureless rocks.
Featureless rocks are very irritating.
Put some features on that rock, for god's sake!
Ai thinks that giraffes are more common than they are
because people, on the whole, tend to put up unusual things,
and therefore it thinks that they are more usual.
I mean, if you live in, like, Namibia or somewhere,
you might see a giraffe...
I mean, I don't know if giraffes live in Namibia. Do they?
Yes. They do? Yeah. Ok.
Let's say yes. Well, then, you're going to see a lot. Go zebra.
You're going to see a lot of them.
It's just that when you live in lewisham,
you don't see that many of them. Right.
The old Namibia-lewisham paradox.
I'd love to see one in lewisham!
I've always thought that fox hunting...
It's fine, they ban it in the country cos it's mean.
Be great in London. It'd be great to have all those guys in the red coats
on a horse, racing through. Alan trumpets
yeah.
You say that, but the foxes in London tend to have attitude.
Yeah. Know what I mean? I've come back from a gig, midnight,
there's a fox in my driveway -
cos I've got money, big house -
and as I go into my drive... They laugh
..the fox is looking at me like that,
"what? Walk around me!"
Yeah. No, they do have attitude.
We've got a fox, it comes and it sits at the back door,
basically saying to the dog, "eh!"
We've got exactly that! We've only just got a dog,
and it was sleeping on the mat by the back door
cos it's cool there, and the fox came and just looked at it.
What kind of dog did you get?
It's half spaniel, half husky.
Oh, sweet! Spusky.
It's a husky... haniel?
Does it...? Is that a thing? It's very pretty.
No, it's quite unusual.
My daughter wanted a spaniel, my son wanted a husky.
I love... by some miracle, we found one with half each.
King Solomon...
You sewed two together and... Yeah.
Oh, yeah, the front half is the spaniel.
The back half is a husky. See, that was your error.
Everybody knows they've got those fluffy little arseholes
which get really clogged up.
You'd have been much better having the front as the husky
and the back as the spaniel.
You've sewed your dogs the wrong way round, Davies!
The other two halves are in the freezer.
Holly, everybody does not know...
..Does not know that they've got a fluffy arsehole!
That's not a thing!
So, there is the thing now of ai cameras,
and they're trained to follow the ball in some football matches.
There was a match at inverness caledonian thistle
football club, and the ai became fixated
on the linesman's bald head.
And the camera would do nothing...
They laugh
it would do nothing but focus on it.
Ok, after all that ai nonsense,
here's a perfectly sensible question
written by a real-life human.
What use is a penguin erector at cucumber time?
Penguin's fallen over? Yes.
Why would the penguin fall over?
Is it because...?
Well, a, they're stupid.
And... Come on, Stephen.
You're not making any friends.
You've got a big house and you hate penguins!
If they look up at something... Yes.
..They just sort of fall backwards, don't they?
So, if an aeroplane flies over Antarctica,
they all fall on their back. No, it's a myth.
Oh, is it? It's a myth. Yeah, I'm afraid so.
But what I like is that this doesn't stop newspapers
reporting on these things.
In 2018, a Scots newspaper's reported that Edinburgh zoo
denied employing a penguin erector...
Right... Following a rumour it had hired staff
to pick up penguins who had fallen over
after looking up at aeroplanes. I believed that story!
I've told thousands of people that's true!
None of them believed you. Yeah.
Cos the reason, I thought it had something to do with making sure
that the cucumber was straight. Yeah.
Because we all love a straight cucumber.
We all love... speaking on behalf of the nation again.
Who doesn't love a straight cucumber?
No-one's ever expressed a preference!
Literally no-one!
Basically, we're talking about silly newspaper stories
and they take place in the silly season,
which in lots of countries is known as cucumber time.
Great. So, as well as being the title of today's show,
silly season refers to...
You know that period in late summer when people are on holiday
and there's not really much news around?
And it first came out as an idea in 1861.
Also known as giant gooseberry season.
So lots of outsized fruits get stories about them.
The sightings of sea serpents and mermaids,
showers of frogs.
And lots of countries call it cucumber time.
So, in the Netherlands, komkommertijd.
And in Poland and Germany and so on.
And nobody really knows why.
Because cucumbers are funny.
Apart from when they're bendy, which isn't funny at all.
No, we don't like that.
I'll tell you what's not funny - a gooseberry.
He's not impressed at all by his own gooseberry, that chap.
That's not a gooseberry, is it? It is, darling.
It's a giant gooseberry. It's enormous!
The silly season thing has worked completely on Alan,
because you've said silly seasons are times when silly stories
emerge, like a giant gooseberry.
And then five minutes later, Alan's gone,
"that gooseberry's enormous!"
But I'm slightly confused.
You're not coming across that way.
No..
Is it silly season because they're not true stories?
Sometimes they're not true,
and sometimes they're just something that might not normally
be thought of as newsworthy.
Right. Ok. It's like all the "and finallys"
get the first slot. Yeah.
So there have been some marvellous silly season headlines
from recent years.
There was the "world oinksclusive" we had.
Ooh! "The mail saves the bacon of the tamworth two."
Oh, that's about pigs. Do you remember the story?
They were called butch and Sundance,
and they escaped from an abattoir in wiltshire...
Oh, no! ..In 1988.
Oh, my god! They swam a river and went on the run for a week,
and 100 journalists tracked it across the country.
The ham swam to tamworth?
The newspapers printed full-page maps of the route
that they were taking,
and eventually the daily mail bought them to save their bacon.
Right. They "escaped" from an abattoir?
Abattoir, yeah. I mean, why didn't the others follow?
Why just two of them? Did they lock the door behind them?
"We've got to go now!
Alan snorts "now!
"Oink!
"Come on! Oink!
"All right, we'll just go - the two of us.
"Oink!"
I think it went something like...
"A little something like this."
But it's a marvellous time for publicists,
because if they've got a show that they want to promote,
this is a great way to do it.
In August, 2005, the sun reported that a constellation
that looked like Richard Wilson of one foot in the grave
could be seen by anyone with a keen eye.
But it was actually publicity for summer nights of gold
on uktv gold.
Bet he couldn't believe it.
I love these ones where they're like,
"face of Jesus found in apple" - or something like that,
or in a kfc bucket.
Do you know, I was one of those.
So... Someone found your face?
No.
Sunday sport ran a picture,
and a full-page story. A picture of you in the Sunday sport, sandi?
Well, no. What it was... Holly laughs
..they claimed to have found my face on Meghan markle's knee.
There you are.
I've never been so pleased!
It's like the turin shroud all over again. That's amazing!
Who's on her other knee?
I don't know who I'm sharing with.
Is it Alan? Alan on the other knee.
Do you think we could escape and be tracked across the country,
and then eventually bought by the daily mail?
It does beg the question, sandi, if she were to kneel down... yes.
..Would your face hurt?
I mean, that's literally, like, one of the questions I've got in here.
If Meghan markle were to kneel down,
would sandi toksvig's face hurt? I don't...
2010, the sun made a really big splash about a donkey
that was being made to parasail by its Russian owner.
They were very upset,
and so they had a big campaign and they decided to buy the donkey.
What I love about this story is that they did buy the donkey,
but they had been tricked by the owner
and rescued the wrong donkey.
Oh, no! I know.
What are the chances that donkeys don't all look exactly alike?
August, 2001, there was a man called Philip Peters,
and he returned to his parked car, ok?
Now, he had parked it in a perfectly legal place.
But while he'd been gone, contractors in west London
had winched his peugeot off the ground,
painted two yellow lines underneath it,
put it back down again, and he'd got a ticket.
Wow! Yeah.
We once did an episode of Jonathan creek,
and the scene was Jonathan creek gets a clamp off...
A very dramatic plot!
Very dramatic. I had to lie down and fiddle about with keys.
Anyway, the prop department had put a couple of fake yellow lines down,
and the traffic warden came along and gave us a ticket. No! Yeah.
Did you get a ticket?
I parked a car and they painted the lines underneath the car
and we got a ticket, even though we pulled out,
took a photograph of our car,
took a photograph of the gap where our wheels were,
and then we had to spend about four months
going to a small claims court, trying to clear our name.
So the same thing happened to you as happened
literally in that...?
I didn't get winched up, because in lewisham they're quite lazy,
but they just painted round it. In Namibia, it's very different,
obviously. Did you have to pay in the end? No, we won.
But the whole thing was so stressful.
I should say, I didn't realise we were meant
to bring our own stories.
I once swam up the thames with a couple of pigs
and it was very dramatic.
I had to take a day off work.
I don't think of pigs as swimmers, do you?
No, in Swiss family Robinson,
the pigs swim from the boat to the shore.
Oh, in that case, I'm completely sold on the story.
If it's in the Swiss family Robinson.
What's the Swiss family Robinson? Um... how old are you?!
To be fair, it was written in about 1838.
Now, in British tabloid slang, what is an fmd?
An effing something. Yeah.
Feapon of mass destruction? They groan
imagine a middle-aged man is reading in bed and he turns to his wife
and he turns a page like that in the tabloid and goes,
"fuck me, Doris, have you seen this?"
It's known as an fmd...
..In the tabloid press.
Now, which pointless c can be found off the coast of cornwall?
Is it the silent c in the word scilly,
of scilly isles? Darling, very good.
Oh, thank... You got a bit overexcited.
I thought you were going to have an asthma attack.
I was remembering a holiday to tresco in 2005.
Did you have fun? I had a terrific time.
Wonderful. I fell off a quad bike and cried.
Listened to a lot of James blunt. Great time.
So, the scilly isles used to be spelt silly, as in s-i-l-l-y.
There was no c in it.
But the locals added the c around the 1570s
because the word "silly", at one time,
it meant sort of happy and blessed,
but it had become the word that meant foolish,
and they didn't want to be described as such,
so they put the letter c in.
The scillonians, as the islanders are called,
refer to the isles of scilly, or just scilly,
but not the scilly isles.
I'm going to give a shout-out to the Turks head on st Mary's.
It's literally the best pub I've ever been to
in my whole life - as far as I can remember.
What were you doing in the scillies? I was making a documentary.
I recommend it. It's worth the trip. I love the...
Have you been, darling, to the scilly isles? No. Stunning.
Absolutely stunning. Or, as they say, "scunning".
Yeah. According to legend, king Arthur fought
his last battle and was buried between cornwall
and the isles of scilly, in the mythical kingdom of lyonesse.
Looks like him being taken from the Turks head, doesn't it?
"I-I've had a marvellous time."
"I will finish my documentary tomorrow."
The story goes that there used to be land connecting cornwall
and the isles of scilly,
and then it was swallowed up by the ocean in a single night,
about 1,000 years ago.
And there are people who claim, if you listen very carefully,
you can still hear the bells of lyonesse's
140 submerged churches ringing underwater.
What, so there's a whole island that went under?
Well, it isn't true, darling. Water has separated cornwall
from the isles for longer than britain's
been separated from France. You provide us with these little thrills
and then you take them away. I know. Just steal it from you.
We were separated from France?
Yes, darling. So britain and Europe were linked
by a landmass, doggerland... What is this wizardry?!
Yes. Until it was flooded,
about seventh millennium bc.
Wow! I tell you something that can be found in the area -
in the waters there - which I do think is amazing,
is the salp, s-a-l-p.
Anybody heard of salp? I love this.
So it's hollow, it's jellyfish-like,
barrel-shaped, it's transparent, it's a sea creature.
So it's a group of animals known as a sea squirt,
but basically it's the size of about the palm of your hand.
It occurs worldwide, but in britain it's mostly found in the water
around the scillies and cornwall and so on.
Basically, it's a tube with an opening at either end
and it moves by jet propulsion,
so it pumps water through itself by contracting bands
of muscle that ring the body.
When they swim together, it's a bit like synchronised swimming -
because each member of the chain continues to function
as a separate individual, but they swim with their own rhythm,
but at a really steady pace together.
We've got some film showing them doing this. Oh, lovely.
It is. Do you not think that is miraculous?
Oh, it's like a murmuration. Yes!
Of used condoms.
They laugh
they're often described as jellyfish, these salps.
But the truth is that salps and humans are actually
more closely related to each other than either is to a jellyfish.
Because the salp larvae have spinal cords.
Next time someone's having a go at me for getting off with a salp,
I'll say, "I'm more like this than
"that's like a jellyfish, thank you very much.
"It's not the same as getting off with a jellyfish.
"Look at the spinal cord!" Yeah.
It's only the young salp that have spinal cords.
The adults never... Oh, great!
You're going to get double bad nicked for that one. Oh, god!
That's no way to view new species.
"I wonder what they'd be like as a sexual partner?"
Imagine if you had a hollow pet,
and then you could keep things in it.
Is this your next dog, Alan?
I'm thinking of getting a salp.
Half husky, half salp. Half salp!
Still got the lovely, fluffy hole at the end, though?
They groan
they reproduce in alternating generation
of clones and individuals.
So a solitary mother gives birth, asexually,
to thousands of young clones, all female,
which then form chains.
And these chains are then fertilised en masse
and they swim up to the surface through clouds of sperm
deposited by chains of men.
I mean... What?!
Not men. Males. Not men. Males.
Male salp.
To be absolutely clear.
Yeah, sorry. Ivo goes for a swim, and then suddenly...
No! ..Half salp, half ivo.
"Here come the salp! Oh!"
Each female clone then has a single female offspring
before turning into a male. I mean, it's just very interesting.
There was rather a good Attenborough thing on the other day
where all these fish gather and then the sperm is awash...
There was sperm everywhere in the sea
and they're all fertilising.
And then these giant stingray-type fish
come in and eat the sperm.
And it only happens once a year at a particularly high tide
when the moon's in the right place,
and they just happen to know it's going to happen.
But you can understand it once a year,
cos once you've had that one time, you think...
Yeah. I mean, part of me thinks, are they thinking,
"yeah, it's the time when we get the sperm!"
Or are they thinking, "oh, no, sperm day.
"And I have nothing to eat the day before.
"Take something sweet with you, because it's very, very..."
They laugh
anyway, we should really love salps.
I am slightly obsessed with them. I do. I love them.
I already love them.
But the other reason is that they help with carbon capture.
This is a weird thing to think about.
Their faecal pellets are very large and very heavy,
and they sink down to the seabed -
as indeed do the dead salps themselves -
and take thousands of tonnes of carbon with them.
Because apparently nothing eats a dead salp.
Just when you thought salps couldn't get any more sexy. I know.
Lots of things will eat a live salp.
Nobody wants to touch a dead one.
It's not a thing. Goodness me.
Apart from ivo. Getting off with a salp and then watching it
race its own poo to the bottom of the ocean.
What a treat!
So you're thinking you're going to get off with it until it dies?
Yeah. Well, at least till it loses its spine.
They laugh
"I had to leave her. She was spineless."
"I saw her emerge from a cloud of sperm and I thought,
"'that's my salp.'" Oh!
Now, these are five s words which are going to come up on the screen.
Can you rank them in order of silliness?
Who wants to have a go? Alan, have a go.
Skunkpoople's the most silly word there.
Skunkoople is very silly, yes.
I mean, I know what a shart is,
but I don't think I want to say it out loud on television.
What is it? Use the expression "faecal pellet".
Sandi laughs
when you, yeah, you think you're going to be doing a fart,
but you actually faecally pelletise your pants.
Yep.
It's a... it's a...
You pelletise?!
"I've pelletised my pants again."
"I suspect you've pelletised your pants.
"You wanted to do a skunkpoople,
"but you've sectoried."
I don't fart, so I couldn't shart. You don't fart? No.
I've only ever farted three times in front of my husband.
But they were all sharts. No, once I was very ill.
Second time, I sort of tripped on the stairs
and it was out of shock.
And the third time, cos he was telling me off in the car
and the timing was too perfect.
Right, let's have a quick look.
The correct order for these words is...
Of silliness? ..Skunkoople...
That's the silliest, yeah. ..And subvick are both silly.
Sectori and suppect are not silly. No.
And shart, its status as a word is undetermined,
as to whether it's silly or not.
Because it sounded rude and might amuse people for that reason,
rather than its silliness.
So these were researchers in 2015 at the university of alberta.
They were trying to establish whether you could objectively
measure the silliness of words,
and participants were shown various computer-generated nonsense words
and asked to rate how humorous they actually were.
And the results were remarkably consistent.
Made-up words tend to be measurably funnier
the more unusual their combination of letters.
So the less you expect to hear certain letters together,
the more amused you're going to be by them.
And once they figured the pattern out,
researchers were able to predict whether test subjects
would find a word funny with an accuracy of about 92%.
Subvick and skunkoople were classified as silly,
along with quingle, probble, finglam and wook.
I've no idea what I'm saying. I could be saying terrible things!
Anyway, sectori and suppect are not silly
since they're more similar to actual word forms.
I actually thought, sandi, it could be a little
trick you were playing on us.
I thought they might be Scandinavian words.
No, no. Scandinavian words are all terribly sensible.
Sectori sounds very Latin.
That sounds Italian, doesn't it?
"Eh, you, sectori!"
"Donde esta mi sectori?"
I mean, that's Spanish, but, you know?
You say Scandinavian words are quite sensible,
but the things in Ikea have all got quite sort of strange names.
I've got a theory about Ikea, right?
At night, what they do is they write out price tags, right?
And then they throw them in the air in the dark.
So you can get tealights for £500 or a sofa for 50p.
You can make up Ikea products -
if you just go down to the bottom and say,
"I'm looking for a bonk or a skicklefluff."
"I'm looking for a shart." They'll look for it for ages.
I need a subvick and a suppect. Here's some more slang.
If you need to convince somebody that you're not a robot,
there is another silly word that you should use.
Does anybody know what it is?
One that would suggest that you are a human.
It's a really silly, childish word.
Is it a flubble? Flubble?
It's poop. Ah!
I hate that word. Yes! Poop?
The americanism of a perfectly good poo.
Yeah, look, 2018 study by cognitive scientists at mit,
1,000 people were asked to come up with the most human word
somebody could say.
Different participants were shown pairs of words
taken from the list that the original 1,000 people generated,
and were asked which word in each pair was chosen by a computer
and which one was chosen by a human.
In fact, they were all chosen by humans,
but the word they most often believed had been selected
by a human was poop.
Anyway, moving on.
How can you make sure that nobody takes you seriously online?
I think it's very difficult.
I put a tweet out, because it was heavy lockdown,
and I ordered a bicycle. Mm.
So I thought, very funny, humorous.
I went, "new bike has arrived, the seat is so high.
"However, my testes get a good workout." Yeah.
In my mind, quite funny.
Somebody wrote back to me, "have you tried eBay?
"Get yourself an inflatable seat."
Some people are quite literal-minded.
That's much nicer than the shit I get when I post a tweet.
Are people mean to you? Yeah!
I don't do any of it, so I don't know.
You're wise. It's pretty unpleasant.
Apart from Stephen, who can post any old rubbish about his balls
and just gets sent to eBay.
Sandi laughs
er, so there's a thing called poe's law,
and it's an Internet truism.
So, however ludicrous a statement you make on the Internet,
if it doesn't include a smiley face, somebody will take it seriously.
And it's named after somebody called Nathan poe.
So if you had done the thing with the bicycle
and then added a smiley face, it would have been fine.
Ah! I'll tell you what, sandi.
Yes, darling? You're missing nothing.
No. Really, honestly.
Do you do the...? I went back on Twitter
after a few years off it because I'd published a book,
and I've had lots of nice comments and stuff about my book,
which is very gratifying,
but if you dare to venture an opinion
on any subject whatsoever... Anything at all? Yeah.
..Someone will be after you.
Oh, right. So the most famous example of this
was the Twitter joke trial.
So there was a Twitter man called...
Twitter user? Twitter man? Twitter man's good.
Twitter man called Paul chambers, and he wrote,
"oh, crap, Robin hood airport is closed.
"You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together,
"otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky-high."
I remember this, yes.
He was charged with sending a menacing message.
That really was apparently not...
No, but he lost his job and so on. Yeah, he did.
But if he had apparently just added a simple smiley face... yeah.
..At the end, everybody would have thought, "just kidding."
There are other sorts of laws a bit like poe's law.
There's Parkinson's law -
work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
There's sod's law -
the worst possible outcome always happens.
And sod's law... a slightly less extreme American equivalent,
Murphy's law, which is anything that can go wrong
eventually will go wrong.
But what do you think this is? Muphry's law?
What do we think that is? So, I talked about Murphy's law.
Anything that can go wrong will eventually...
The law of typos? It is.
If you write something which points out a spelling
or a grammatical error in somebody else's work,
there will be a similar error... Oh, yeah.
..In what you've written yourself. It is just a thing.
Yeah. The one that's extraordinary is the cobra effect,
which is where the consequences of an attempt to solve a problem
actually make the original problem worse.
Oh, god, that's my life. Thank you.
So, the story is told - possibly apocryphal, but it's been told
since the 1870s...
Every sitcom plot ever created. Yes, absolutely.
So, there was a 19th-century scheme to rid Delhi of cobras
by placing a bounty on them.
So, what happened is people started breeding cobras to claim the bounty.
So the scheme was cancelled.
Then people had all these cobras, so the farmers just released them
into the wild, and there were then many more cobras by the end.
The problem was worse than it had been in the first place,
and it's called the cobra effect.
Do you know what the Barbra Streisand effect is? No. No.
There was an aerial photograph of her house online
and she wanted to have it removed.
Now, she launched a $50 million lawsuit against a guy,
he was a retired software engineer,
and he had taken the photo to document coastal erosion,
but she didn't want people to know it was her house.
Well, before the lawsuit, nobody knew it was her house.
The photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by her lawyers.
And after that, thousands of people, thousands!
We've pixilated it, just to save any upset.
I've got a law, I think. Walsh's law. Yeah?
The smaller the hand, the creepier it is. Ok.
I've got small hands, they're quite creepy.
Are they creepy? I think so. Why do you think they're creepy?
They just sort of a bit like...
They're not quite the right size for what they should be.
Do you know dom irrera, the American comedian? Yeah.
He's talking about watching porn with his wife,
and his wife goes, "now, that's a cock."
And he's going, "they've all got tiny hands.
"The girls have got tiny hands.
"They seal their mouths together,
"they've got tiny mouths and tiny hands."
He's so funny.
I clearly am watching the wrong stuff.
Have you got a law you'd make for yourself, darling?
Graham's law - no showers ten minutes before leaving the house.
The amount of times I've made myself later by having a shower,
had to break into a run for a train
and then being sweatier and dirtier than if I hadn't had the shower...
In the first place. Yes, cursing myself...
It's a bit like the cobra effect, you've made the problem worse.
Anybody else?
There is a law called Stefan's law. Right?
If anyone is into physics, you know this.
I'm not into physics or anything, but I do know that there's something
called Stefan's law, and I took it upon myself to find this out.
And basically, what this law does is it measures the heat
coming off a black body.
Is that right? Yeah. So I'm guessing right now, you're all sweating.
There's a thing about oxygen readers... what are you doing?
You know you get these oxygen readers on your hands?
Oh, is that...? I didn't know what you were doing.
Sorry, yeah. For years, they've been giving...
Can you stop doing the mime?
Holly, it's the combination of the disgusting mime
and your creepily small hands.
For years, they've been...
They've recently found out that
they've been reading black people's results not right,
because it's to do with light penetrating skin,
and they give really incorrect...
Because they obviously tested on white people, not on...
That's terrible. Sandi's just found out about racism.
I know! What? What?!
I think I would like a law, Amos's law.
It would be to ban your elderly parents staying with you
for longer than three weeks.
And I'll tell you from my personal experience, my dad did stay with me
for four weeks, over the recent lockdown, and he's 82,
and I had no idea, in all these years, that he is a bell end.
Because he...
Did you never wonder where you got it from?
Don't you criticise me with your small hands!
He put the heating up to lava, for example, and I'm like,
"are you not burning in my house?"
I like watching real-life murder documentaries, that's my thing.
And I got him into it.
If you watch them, you know that they have re-enactments with actors,
and at the end, the final shot is the real accused in a courtroom.
I was watching it one day with my dad, and my dad went,
"oh, look, they've got the wrong man.
"He wasn't the man we saw earlier."
Just go home!
What would you have? Like, an alarm go off?
A three-week thing and then suddenly, "whooooo!"
"You've got to leave, old man."
Anyway...
What's the downside of being sucked in a salt mine?
Oh, god.
A lot of men would say it doesn't matter where they're sucked.
Wow. I wasn't aware there was a downside of getting sucked anywhere.
Do you not think it looks like his wife was just there a minute ago,
and he's going, "darling? Darling!"
This is in Havana, in 2005, it was after hurricane Wilma.
And you can see that the water is swelling down, probably
down into a drainage system there.
So, it's worth thinking about how water can make that swift movement.
This is an absolutely true story.
Lake peigneur, which is in Louisiana,
was a shallow, freshwater lake and it sits above...
Well, it sat above a large underground salt mine.
So, in 1980, there's an oil company and they're drilling in the lake
and they inadvertently bored a hole straight into the mine,
and the lake water drained into the hole - a bit like the photograph
we saw at the very beginning -
it created a 400-metre, in diameter, whirlpool.
It sucked in the drilling platform, 11 barges, a tug boat,
many trees and 65 acres of the rip Van winkle botanic gardens,
including all of their greenhouses.
From one drilling!
Did all the people get away?
Everybody was absolutely fine, remarkably. That's extraordinary.
Not even the people working underground got hurt.
What are the rip Van winkle greenhouses?
No, the rip Van winkle botanic gardens, in Louisiana.
Who's rip Van winkle? Are you serious?
I'm very sorry. Oh!
Rip Van winkle is a wonderful American tale about a man
who goes to sleep and sleeps for... You don't know this story?
No. Watch that, and read Swiss family Robinson.
Yes, I've got a lovely lockdown night in ahead of me.
Well, you're fine, I'm doing porn and sharting.
The flow of the canal, which normally drained the lake
into the Gulf of Mexico, reversed.
It sucked sea water into the lake and fed this terrible maelstrom,
which then became a 50-metre-deep waterfall,
and the water then erupted upwards through the mine shafts
in the form of 400-foot geysers.
And remarkably, nobody was injured,
including 55 miners who were working underground.
But what was a three-metre-deep freshwater lake is now
a 400-metre-deep saltwater lake.
Do you not think that's extraordinary?
That is extraordinary. It sounds mythological, doesn't it?
It sounds like those sort of maelstroms that you hear about.
I mean, there are genuinely natural whirlpools which exist
in some seas and rivers.
Norway has two of the biggest - saltstraumen and the moskstraumen -
but the number-three slot is taken in the hebrides, by corryvreckan.
There we are, there's the corryvreckan. Oh, look.
They did a documentary in 2000, a television documentary,
they threw a mannequin into the corryvreckan with a depth Gauge
attached to it, and it came to the surface some distance away.
It had been dragged along the bottom at a depth of 860 feet.
Wow. In fact, there's a story, George orwell...
Do you know who George orwell is?
I do know who George orwell is, thank you.
George orwell almost died in corryvreckan.
He was living nearby, he was writing 1984.
He decided to take his three-year-old son, along with some
nieces and nephews, out on a boating trip past the whirlpool.
And they got sucked in and capsized and just about managed to swim
to a small island, where orwell tied his shirt to a fishing rod
and waved it about until they were rescued.
And now for some silly misunderstandings,
it's general ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
How many seasons are there?
Oh... gah...
Be very careful.
First time on the show - four seasons!
Ah, yes!
Yeah, it's a rite of passage. It's a rite of passage!
Yeah. It really depends where you live, and it also partly depends
on who colonised you in the first place.
So, the UK will recognise four seasons, haven't always done so.
We once just had summer and winter.
The English language didn't have sort of established names
for spring and Autumn until about the 16th century.
What did they call four-season pizzas then?
Yeah, weirdly, didn't have
four-seasons pizza in the 16th century.
Did they just call them two-seasons pizza?
Where's the fun in that? So, how many seasons are there, sandi?
Well, it depends where you are.
So, south Vietnam, there's three.
Hot and dry, rainy, cool and dry.
Parts of the United States, sort of the southwest,
they have four seasons for historical reasons,
because the colonies, where they came from, they had four seasons,
so they rather imposed it.
The traditional hindu calendar's got six seasons.
I hope all of these places have their own qi and everyone's
getting it wrong there as well. Yeah.
There might be four seasons, or three, two, one, six.
Even none at all - it all depends.
What's the most popular Volkswagen?
Cartoon bullet ricochets yes? Polo.
Polo. Holly there with the Polo.
Cartoon gunshot it's the beetle.
Any more for any more?
Cartoon gunshot oh, it's a golf.
Cartoon gunshot passat.
Cartoon gunshot scirocco.
Cartoon gunshot kombi bus.
Oh! Oh! No.
So, we're measuring by the number of items sold,
rather than by the value,
and vw sells more sausages than cars.
So, I have some here.
These are Volkswagen originalteil,
"the original part".
They're curry-flavoured sausages they originally produced
in vw factories to feed the staff.
They became so popular, they're now sold by them for ten Euros a pack,
and they're given as gifts in vw dealerships in 11 countries,
but not in the UK.
When you buy a car, you get given free sausages,
and the vw base in wolfsburg has got 30 butchers on the payroll
and they produce these. Do you not think it's wonderful?
These are original Volkswagen sausages.
But I've got you something, Alan, that I think you're
going to really like, which fits in with the sausages
but yet vegetarian. Is it a live pig? No.
So, this is marvellous. This is about corporate sausage tie-ins, ok?
There is a football club called bedale afc.
They're a non-league football club and they're from north Yorkshire,
and they have a sausage sponsor,
a local sausage company called heck.
And in 2017, they took to the pitch, emblazoned...
Ooh, I like heck sausages. ..Emblazoned, the kit -
this is the one on the right -
with hundreds of sausages, and pink shorts.
It was described as the wurst football kit ever.
Managed to make the news as far as Turkey and Canada.
And then, in 2018, they looked like hot dogs.
That's the next one along.
2019, it was bangers and mash.
And then 2020, each strip featured a big carrot for a vegetarian thing.
They've got one more they're thinking of,
which is to do a toad in the goal strip for the goalie.
But we're very pleased we've managed to get hold of, for you, look,
darling, sausage and mash kit for you. With peas, darling. I love it.
So, I hope that that works for you. I love it.
Yes, I think it's rather fine, isn't it?
Those four lads don't look very happy about it, do they?
Vw's wurst product is a bit of a banger, if we're honest.
Audience groans yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
How should you handle rare, old books?
Oh, in white gloves, the...
No. Not at all. Why not at all?
In the British library, it's all very dim
and the light and the air temperature and all that...
Yeah. But in fact, on your hands, you should have nothing at all.
You should have extremely clean, but naked, hands.
I like the phrase "extremely clean butt-naked hands."
Butt-naked hands.
Butt-naked hands?
Butt-naked hands!
So, organisations like the national trust, the Smithsonian
in the United States, the British library and so on,
they don't approve of white gloves because you lack the dexterity
and the tactileness of fingers,
so you're more likely to tear a page.
And they're slippery, so you might drop the book
if you've got gloves on.
And also, there are tiny fragments of pigment more likely to stick
to the material of the glove than if you've just got your skin.
But you definitely shouldn't do this.
No, that's definitely a mistake.
And gloves can also retain dirt.
Also, you look like a creepy mime artist.
It is quite creepy, isn't it?
Yeah, so just stick to snooker refereeing.
Just keep your hands butt-naked and get on with it.
One group of people who do tend to wear gloves
are Japanese police officers.
Any thoughts as to why that might be?
Sushi. It's all that comes... Sushi!
Oh, is it shoving people on trains?
They love that, don't they?
So, there's an interview in 2010 with an officer
who had been in charge of security at Beatles concerts.
So, the band visited in 1966, and he says he introduced the rule
because they had to manoeuvre lots of screaming young women, and he
thought it was inappropriate for them to do this with their hands.
So, it dates from screaming fans of the Beatles in 1966.
Wow. The Beatles' legacy, it's just so diverse.
It's so diverse. Japanese police officers.
Now, here's an easy one.
Ignorance of the law is...?
Cartoon arrow twangs
not an excuse.
But it should be an excuse. Well, it can be, that's the thing.
I mean, it's a terribly well-known legal axiom,
but lots of legal systems... Why is there a badger?
What's going on?
It's toad of toad hall. Oh, it's toad of toad hall.
I couldn't see toad in the dock.
So many legal systems, including ours, have recognised exceptions
which slightly erode the principle.
In fact, the Germans, the French, the Austrians, they have
criminal codes explicitly recognising a defence
of a reasonable mistake of the law.
In South Africa, as long as the accused is genuinely
ignorant of the law, that is a defence.
I think that's fair. There are laws in this country,
which are called strict liability laws,
and it doesn't matter whether you knew or not, then you are guilty.
So, things like speeding. But that's clear, that's clear.
Yeah. But did you see, in 2020, there was a woman who got a parking
ticket because she was giving cpr to a dying man in a car park,
and she overstayed by 12 minutes and got a £100 car-parking fine?
It's like when people have to pull over for ambulances and they pull
into a bus Lane and then they get a ticket. They get a ticket for that,
yeah. Which brings us to this silly thing we do at the end of the show
of giving everybody meaningless scores.
So, in first place, captain sensible tonight -
well, I'll be damned - with minus five, it's Holly!
Second is the slightly foolish, with minus six, it's Alan! Second!
Third is the pretty dopey, with minus 13, ivo!
Tonight's silly-Billy, with minus 27, it's Stephen!
It's thanks to ivo, Holly, Stephen and Alan.
And I leave you with this silly sign-off from the French epicure
anthelme brillat-savarin.
"Burgundy makes you think of silly things,
"Bordeaux makes you talk about them,
"and champagne makes you do them."
Cheers and goodnight.