Applause
seagulls squawk
ahoy, there!
And welcome to a bright and balmy episode of qi down by the briny.
Joining me for a saunter down the shore tonight
are a supersized strongman, Lou Sanders.
Applause
a seven-stone softie, sindhu vee.
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a sun-kissed stunner, ed gamble.
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and stomping on everyone's sand castles, Alan Davies!
Applause
before we dive in, let's hold our seashells to our ears.
Lou goes...
♪ we're all going on a summer holiday... ♪
sindhu goes...
♪ sand and sea... Oh, nice.
♪ Sea and sand. ♪
Ed goes...
♪ lazin' on a sunny afternoon... ♪
Alan goes...
♪ I wanna have sex on the beach... They laugh
♪ come on, move your body... ♪
I mean, lower the tone.
So, these photographic cut-out boards were invented
in the 1890s in Cairo.
Photographic studios would cut a hole
in an actual ancient sarcophagus, right,
so that tourists could pose as an ancient Egyptian mummy.
And the idea caught on, and eventually they thought,
"we haven't got enough ancient sarcophagi,
"so we'll make a few fake ones and then you could be the sphinx
"and so on," and the idea took off.
This particular photograph is one of my favourites.
It shows the archduke Franz ferdinand,
the one who went on to spark world war I
by being assassinated in Sarajevo.
Anyway, it's him on holiday in Cairo.
That looks like my dad in a sleeping bag. Yes.
Laughter
the big question, Alan, for you - hats on or hats off?
I keep thinking it's going to fall. Yeah.
It looks nice on you. You look very dapper.
Well, that's very kind. Very Maurice chevalier.
I'm enjoying your sun hat as well. Yeah, it's going.
That's it. There we go.
Can I just say, I've never seen you two flirting before
and I really enjoy it.
Do you know? Neither of us has been out for a year.
It's worked wonders for our relationship.
Anyway, on with the questions.
Where in mainland britain is closest to French soil?
Has cafe Rouge got a garden?
That's...
That's the only place.
I mean, I've driven past.
I-I don't know.
Any other guesses?
I'm happy just to say Dover.
Klaxon
come on, let's get this going! Sweet of you to get us started.
I like that. Let's get it rolling.
It's qi, baby! I like that very much.
Ok, I'm going to give you a clue. French lieutenant's woman.
Anyone remember where it took place?
Lyme Regis.
After decades of coastal erosion washing away all the sand
at lyme Regis, they had to basically rebuild the beaches,
and 30,000 tonnes of sand were shipped
from northern France.
So I guess you could say that the closest bit
of French coastline that you can enjoy is in dorset.
First of all, they had to remove groynes.
All the old groynes. Ed laughs
I've had to do that before. You've had to do that?
What do you mean? There was groynes in the sand?
Do you know what a groyne is?
I do actually know this from gcse geography.
It's the barriers all the way along the beach.
Stops the beach getting swept along.
Yeah, it comes from the Latin "to grunt"
and apparently it used to look like a pig's snout.
I don't think so. Do you think so?
What, my groyne? Or...? They laugh
I wasn't...
I wasn't going to go that low, but...
She was going to keep to here.
Or, for me, that high.
Then they added shingle to add some ballast
to stop the whole beach washing away.
The whole lot was shipped over from northern France,
and they thought about lots of different kinds of sand.
But it was the wrong colour, it was the wrong size -
you know, everything about it wasn't right.
And then they got 6,000 tonnes of Norwegian rock
brought over to strengthen the cliffs.
And so the town's new sea wall is also constructed
out of Portuguese and Chinese granite.
So it's a Portuguese, Chinese, Norwegian, French seafront.
It would've been great after Brexit if France had gone,
"all right, then. We're having lyme Regis back.
"We'll have lyme Regis, thank you very much."
As well as being created, beaches can spontaneously vanish.
So there was a violent storm off the coast of county Mayo's
achill island in 1984,
and it washed away the entire beach.
There was a 300 metre beach, called dooagh beach,
and the local community woke up one morning and it had entirely gone.
What was in its place, though?
Just rocks and pebbles.
And it was terrible for tourism. It was just awful.
And then, in 2017, there was unusual tidal activity
and it all washed back again. No, it didn't!
Yeah, it did. It all washed back again.
And all the jobs started up again, and all the tourism.
And then, in 2019...
Yeah, gone. No!
In Denmark, sometimes the beach is like this
and sometimes the beach is like this,
and you never know which one you're going to get. Yeah.
And where is David Blaine when this is happening?
They laugh
where did it go?
Well, I mean, it just erodes, and it is a serious problem.
In fact, because of it,
there's a thing called the coastal protection act 1949,
and you're not allowed to take any pebbles or sand from UK beaches.
Oh! You can be fined £1,000.
You could be forced to return all the stuff.
Because we have to protect them, because, frankly,
the ocean's taking enough.
Do you want to have a word with the props manager?
I don't know where... They laugh
and also now, if we need more sand, the French will say "non".
But the Italians are even more fierce about it.
You can get six years in prison.
In fact, in 2019, the security services at cag-liari airport,
I think it's called. The one in sardinia, anyway.
Cagliari. Cagliari? Cagliari.
They confiscated 200kg of sand from tourists
in a couple of weeks.
Just taking the sand home? Just taking the sand home.
Yeah. Like, in a container. Like, as a personal souvenir.
Well, I think we all accidentally take a little bit of sand home.
Yes, but if it's all of us, you know - beach gone.
But I just mean, if you're going for a swim
and there's sand washing around,
we're all accidentally smuggling some.
Oh, do you mean in your orifices? Yeah. Yes.
In your groyne?
In your pig-snouty groyne?
Alan snorts
I've got loads of sand. "I'm sorry, paolo,
"I took some sand home in my snout!"
But what is really amazing,
if you look at sand samples under a microscope,
look at the variety of materials
and shapes that it comes in.
So, when you look at sand, it looks quite homogenous to the naked eye.
It does. Don't you think that's like a cheese board?
But you can see detail within the tiny particles.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Nature is quite good in the end.
I... Laughter
if you take nothing else away with you,
take that thought.
What are the main problems with living in a sand castle?
You get too much sand in your loo-loo la-la.
In your loo-loo la-la?
Yes, loo-loo la-la and groynes.
There we go.
I like loo-loo la-la. Did your mother call it that? No, no.
The kids came up with it. Loo-loo la-la?
Loo-loo la-la. And they'd run around saying loo-loo la-la.
And then my mother started singing it one day in the kitchen.
♪ Loo-loo la-la... ♪ I was like, "no, no.
"That's not... no."
We don't sing that. No, we don't.
Just don't.
So there's going to be one, is there? A real one?
What, a real problem?
A real sand castle.
Like, liveable with rooms?
We may get to that.
But first of all, we're talking about creatures
that live in sand castles.
What? I know!
There are sand castle worms, ok? Ooh!
Yeah, they are called -
and I probably will mispronounce this -
phragmatopoma californica.
So they live along the californian coast
and they live their entire life in castles made of sand,
which they build themselves. Ooh!
They are fantastic.
So, picture on the left, there - that is a single sandworm.
And the tentacles that it's got on its head -
that's those things you can see sticking out like that -
they sort through grains of sand.
And so they select ones that are the suitable size,
and then they secrete a compound from their body, which honestly,
it's a sort of underwater glue.
So then these other pictures are a whole lot of them.
Each little hole, each little tube is a single sand worm,
and then they all live together.
Audience: Wow. Yes, wow! I know, right?
What's import... Thank you.
What's important for us is that this cement that they secrete,
it's like an underwater glue,
and it might be that it has amazing medical applications. Wow.
It might be the sort of thing that can glue bones back together
instead of using metal pins.
I tried to get worms once.
You tried to actually get them? Yeah.
To make yourself lose weight? Yeah.
Ok. And I put a piece of raw meat... Lou laughs
..on my bum.
Bacon wrapped in bacon?
W-What was it, darling?
Nothing happened.
No, what was the meat?
I can't remember. I was only about 11.
Chop? Was it a chop?
Oh, a lovely lamb chop on the bot?
You'd hope so, wouldn't you?
It's interesting to know, Lou, that you're vegan,
but your bottom isn't. Yes!
Do you know, in the tour De France, years and years ago,
before they had lots of sort of medical things and so on,
the gentlemen on the tour De France used to put a steak
down their trousers to stop it rubbing, right,
when they were bicycling.
And then it was fully tenderised when they got there,
then they'd cook it for their supper.
Oh, no. Urgh!
That's my gift to you. Wow.
You'd have to keep an eye on it
to make sure you got your steak back again?
Yes, you wouldn't want your friend's steak, would you?
Oh, boy!
From your friend's loo-loo la-la.
That's not... Yeah.
No.
Anyway, each of these worms is about an inch long
and they live in tunnels about six inches long,
but they can live in a city.
And they're amazing. They're constructed on the shore.
And so what happens is, they're underwater at high tide,
but they're exposed at low tide.
So, during low tide, they kind of hunker down and they seal up
cos they don't want anything to get them.
But when it's high tide, they pop their head out
with these lovely little tentacles and fish.
They go fishing for microscopic food that's happening past
and grab grains of sand to improve the home.
What do you think the main problem these worms might have,
given that they never leave the tunnel
and they always face outwards?
Is it going to the loo?
Yes, darling.
Do they gradually fill up their tunnel?
They would. If they just defecated, it would just be full of poo.
So they don't defecate? No, they do.
But it's so clever, ok?
It's the sort of thing a little boy goes, "oh, I want to do that!"
Ok, they have a rectum at the end of the body like most animals,
but there's a long tube that comes halfway up the body,
it poos on its own back
and then it simply shrugs the faecal pellet up its body
and out the tube.
I'm quite envious of any creature that can come up
with a pellet like that. Yeah.
I'd love to have a faecal pellet. Yeah.
It would transform lavatory design, wouldn't it,
because it would be more like marble run
or something like that.
You could have some fun with it. You could just launch it off.
Yeah. Do you think you could teach yourself to fire it
and maybe set targets up in the bathroom?
Well, I think after a while, there's bound to be...
There's bound to be competitive pelleting, isn't there?
Ed, dare to dream.
How far can it go, though? They laugh
anyway, they are astonishingly interesting.
So some squirt sperm up into the water
and some squirt eggs up into the water, and larvae are created.
And then what happens is they can smell the very cement
that holds the sand castle city together,
and they go back to where they came from.
Sandi, do you think nature's actually quite good
in the end as well?
I'll be honest, Lou. I'm coming round to it. I am.
There is a human who lives in a sand castle,
and his name is marcio matolias.
He's also known in Rio de Janeiro as king marcio,
and he's a sand sculptor.
He makes his money from tourists, and also from a used book shop
which he runs from a three-square-metre castle
that has been his home for over 20 years.
And it's made of sand? It's made of sand.
That's his... Where he lives.
He lives inside that sand castle.
His main problems are the elements -
so his castle can collapse if there's a very heavy storm.
It gets unbearably hot in the summer.
It's got no toilets and he hasn't got a tube.
You know, he can't do the... Thing.
So he has to go to the fire station if he wants to...
They're all right with that, are they?
Apparently. It costs a dollar each time he goes. I don't know...
He's saving a lot on rent, I suppose.
He's lived rent-free for more than 20 years.
Doesn't the sea wash it away?
The trick is to build it above the tide Mark. Right.
In the lay-by off the a4.
I'd worry about bullies coming and kicking it down.
Well, it's funny you should say that.
Because probably the very first reference to a sand castle
being kicked over - arguably in the iliad,
which is the seventh century bc.
Homer described Apollo, god of the sun,
demolishing a Greek stockade, and compared it to
a child kicking over a sand sculpture.
So we haven't really matured, have we, darling?
Anyway, we thought we'd get you to make your own sand castle
or sand sculpture, so you've each got a tray of sand.
Here we are. Like this. Ooh!
And there's a bucket of water you'll need as well. Yes.
Ok, it needs to be really wet.
That is the thing.
Have you not got a bucket of water?
Yeah, but I don't really want to get messy. Oh, I see!
I quite like a prissy child.
I took my daughter out - she was seven.
The whole class, we all went and had burgers.
There was a little boy who was very particular.
I said, "do you want a burger, darling?" He said,
"I wonder if the chef might do a salad?"
Laughter
so that's it.
Yes! Oh, sindhu's doing fine work here.
I'm just going to tip all mine in there.
Oh, you're just going to go crazy for it, yeah.
But apparently the wetter it is...
The guy who lives in the sand castle on the beach in rio
has to keep wetting it otherwise it collapses.
Oh, no. What? What?
Mine looks like rather a nice dahl.
Does it feel nice? Does it feel like a nice...?
All I'm trying to do is get all my sand in the bucket. Right.
I think I made mine too wet. Oh, a bit too...
Sindhu's doing very well.
Well, I mean, I am from the country of Taj Mahal.
I have a lot to live up to here. And I go to Brighton now and again,
so a lot of pressure on me as well. Ok.
Oh, it just looks like my bucket's got the shits.
Oh.
Has it not come out?
It looks like it didn't make it to the fire station.
Just put a bucket over it. Oh, no, no.
Right, I think, let's have a look.
Sindhu, do you want to describe what you've made here?
Well, it's a house.
There's some really nice parents that live on this floor... right.
..And they've had a fight...
Oh... So now they're building two separate houses.
Wow. It's like a soap opera.
Yeah, yeah.
Can I just ask sindhu, how's your marriage? Is it all right?
I've been married 23 years, Lou, no-one is going anywhere now.
Ed, what have you made, my darling?
Mine is a satirical piece about climate change.
Yes, it looks like a breast implant.
It's also a breast implant. Ok.
Oh, Alan you got some out the bucket. Creating a mezzanine level.
Lovely. Lou, do you want to describe yours?
It's just sort of classic piece, really. Hm.
Oh, hang on.
Oh, that's it. Yeah, I think I'm going to...
Lou's the winner. Lou's the winner.
Ok, let's put the sand castles away, shall we?
My favourite childhood memory was building sand castles
with my grandfather, until my mum took the urn from me.
I'm here all week.
Where would you slip on this swish ensemble?
That's where it went.
Ok. Well, not on the beach,
judging by how pale the model is.
Yes, darling.
In the olden days over here on the beach.
Yes, exactly that. Really? It's a woman's wool bathing suit.
It actually dates from the 1870s in the United States, but women
in the 19th century were expected to bathe in full-length dresses,
gowns made of thick material that didn't become
transparent when wet.
And they quite often used to have weights in the hem.
They didn't want it to float up, right? There's no point in having
a dress on and it suddenly goes up like that.
So you've got weights and woollen material.
How many women just drowned from that? Thousands.
Yes. Thousands and thousands. All of that changed in the 1900s.
There was a wonderful woman called Annette Kellerman.
She was an Australian swimmer.
She became one of the very first women to publicly wear
a one-piece bathing suit. This is not a picture of Annette Kellerman.
This is women having their suits
measured to see if they were allowed to be on the beach.
You can see why they weren't allowed that, because it is very erotic.
Quite risque, isn't it?
Well, Annette Kellerman, the very first time she appeared
in 1907 on a beach in Massachusetts, wearing a one-piece suit,
she was arrested for public indecency.
The judge was very sweet about it. He said,
"yes, I can see it's more comfortable for swimming."
So after that, she had to wear a cape to the edge of the shore.
The guy you've got to watch out for is the guy who volunteers
to measure the swimming... To do the measuring.
Yeah, yeah. It's Alan! He's got the same hat as Alan.
All right, I'll do it. She's a really interesting
woman, Annette Kellerman. She's really worth looking at.
She was born in 1887, and she suffered from rickets
as a child, and so she was sent to have swimming lessons
in order to improve.
It was kind of physiotherapy, and she was so good at it
that she started appearing in competitions and giving
performances in Melbourne.
She would dress as a mermaid and swim with fish in an aquarium.
I mean, it's a living.
Is that her? That's her. Yeah, isn't that extraordinary? Wow.
She became a movie star, actually,
in the United States and she performed all her own stunts.
She once dove 60 foot into a pool full of crocodiles.
Oh. She was the very first person to appear nude in a Hollywood movie.
This is her in a movie called a daughter of the gods.
It was made in 1916.
It was the very first film that cost $1 million.
It took 20,000 people to make this film.
It took eight months, and we don't have a copy of it any more.
Oh, no. But isn't she beautiful?
Yeah. You see, just out of frame there's the guy
with his measuring stick going,
"I'm not sure this is regulation."
"No, I don't think it's any good."
The modern bikini -
any idea when that turns up? When do we first get the bikini?
'60s? No, earlier than that - '46.
Oh. This is not actually a bikini. This is called the atome.
So this is the French designer Jacques heim, and he designed
the atome, which is this one. Advertised as the world's
smallest bathing suit.
And then a man called Louis reard said his would be smaller
than the world's smallest bathing suit,
and he called it the bikini after the bikini atoll.
So it's all to do with the atomic bomb
that they were experimenting with.
Nuclear tests were done on the bikini atoll.
So bikini - it just means "coconut place" in Marshallese.
Do you know this particular bikini reminds me that when I was eight
years old, I came home from school and my mother was serving us lunch
in a bikini, and we said, "well, why are you wearing a bikini?"
She said, "because I can't wear it outside. It's not modest.
"It's so beautiful so I'll just wear it in the house."
So...
She just wore her bikini all day, and then when my dad got home
she changed and I said, "why don't you have your bikini on?"
She said, "because it's very immodest.
"He will have a shock and heart attack," and we were like,
"oh, we don't what that." What a secret weapon to have.
"I've had enough of you."
Exactly.
But it was exactly like that, you know? Frilly bikinis.
Polka-dotted frilly bikini.
Well, let's have another question.
How do Germans spoil your Spanish holiday?
By showing up.
Gasps
they always want to hog the places.
Klaxon
has some research been done and it turns out it was us?
Yes, that's part of the truth.
It's to do with mr Hitler.
To do with mr Hitler and why the Germans spoil your Spanish holiday.
So, he is responsible for the fact that you have to change your watch
every time you travel between britain and Spain.
What happened was, in 1942, general Franco -
he switched Spain from greenwich mean time to central European time
to match Berlin's clocks in solidarity with Hitler,
and bumped the whole country forward an hour.
And the result is that Spain is not in its natural time zone.
Not the worst thing that Hitler's done.
No, no, darling.
So the one that would maximise the amount of sunlight during the day
is not the zone that Spain is in.
There are many parts of Spain that are west of greenwich, and yet
it's an hour ahead.
And so during the summer on the west coast of Spain, the sun
is directly overhead at 20 to three in the afternoon,
which makes no sense at all.
Would he mind if we put it back?
Well, I don't know why they don't.
It just would make sense, wouldn't it?
Call me. Call you. Lou in charge.
Now, the idea that - since you first came up with the idea -
the Germans might hog the sun loungers by getting up early
and placing the towels upon them is not true.
It is something that has been lodged in the British psyche since 1993,
and it's due to a carling black label ad.
They ran an ad where a British person threw a towel from his room
to a lounger, and it skimmed across the pool like a bouncing bomb
to the theme of the dam busters.
So the Germans are very upset that this continues to be a thing.
So in 2014, they did an investigation - bild newspaper -
into it, and they claimed, according to their observations in Spanish
resorts, the British are by far the largest culprits for doing this.
Though when they interviewed one British holiday-maker,
they insisted it's the French.
Right, who invented sunbathing?
I don't know much trivia, but...
I thought that was it.
I know nothing.
Nothing.
But my mother said once, she said, "you must go to school
"with the umbrella because you are very dark.
"Sunbathing is only allowed by the lady who would do it.
"She was coco Chanel. Coco Chanel -
"she could do sunbathing because she was so fair.
"Not like you, over dark. Take the umbrella."
So I had to go to school with an umbrella.
Well, it is often thought that coco Chanel invented suntanning
but, in fact, she didn't really originate it.
It was the sun newspaper.
It was the sun newspaper, yes, that decided it was the thing.
There's a wealthy American socialite couple called
Gerald and Sara Murphy.
This is a wonderful picture of Gerald and Sara on the left,
and Cole Porter, who's one of their friends, and a woman called
Genevieve carpenter, who just seems to be there to hold Cole up.
And they went to the French riviera in the 1920s, and they became famous
as party and holiday hosts.
Up until then, people had only gone to the riviera in the winter,
and they persuaded the hotel De cap to remain open for the summer.
And everybody came.
So Zelda and f. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso,
Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter in the picture there,
and they invented the idea of beach time and sunbathing.
They used to get everybody to come for picnics,
and they used to start games on the beach.
It's so weird to think it had never happened before.
People had gone to the beach to go swimming, but they hadn't thought,
"we'll just stop for a bit."
Why was it unfashionable before then to have a tan?
Why do you think that was?
Because it showed you worked outside.
Yeah, that you had what could only be described
as a lower-class job. You worked outdoors.
Anyway, coco Chanel is worth talking about because she's often said
to have sort of single-handed... There she is on the left.
She came back from a mediterranean cruise.
Crazy coco. Crazy. Came back with
a tan in 1923 from a cruise and everybody went crazy for it.
But she's really probably just putting the icing on what
was already chic, and it was chic because of the woman on the right.
This is the world's first female global sports celebrity.
She was a tennis player called Suzanne lenglen,
and she played in short sleeves.
I mean, look at that. In 1919, she had a deep tan.
She was the only female player to serve overarm.
She drank cognac between sets.
I know.
And she won 241 titles during her career.
So if you think, you know, at this very moment, Serena Williams
has got 98 titles -
Suzanne lenglen, 241.
And part of the reason why wimbledon is where it is now
is that the former courts, which were on a place called
worple road, could not cope
with the number of fans who came to see her. Wow.
I know. She's amazing. And then tanned skin became all the rage.
Right, now, I want you to imagine you're all at sea.
Would you prefer the screw or the paddle?
Who's on the boat?
Screw. You're going to go for screw. Yeah. I'll take the paddle.
You'll take the paddle. Yeah. Screw is correct.
So, we are talking about ships. After the napoleonic wars, britain
was, I mean, undoubtedly the world's foremost naval superpower.
But you're still talking about wooden ships propelled by sails.
And then passenger ships began to move towards steel and they began
to move towards being steamships.
And the Navy soon followed, and the question was,
which was going to be the best for these boats - was it going
to be the paddle on either side or the screw propellers?
So they had a tug of war -
I love this - between two virtually identical ships - hms rattler -
which had a propeller - and hms alecto - which, as you can see
on the right there, had a pair of paddle wheels. 1845.
They tied them together with a rope, they set to full power.
No contest. Absolutely none.
The rattler - boom, backwards.
Wow. She pulled alecto at 2.7 knots and the screw propeller
after that tug-of-war became the standard way
to propel naval ships.
In fact, you can see the propeller itself -
if you're a geek like myself -
on display at the ss Great Britain museum in Bristol.
And so then they started doing the same with electric trains
and steam trains - having tug-of-war competitions to see
which was better.
Which do you think's better - electric train or a steam train?
Better in what sense? Stronger.
Oh. It might be a steam train.
I'd like it to be. Could be an electric train.
You could give the steam train a head start,
and still you would be able to pull it backwards.
But a steam train will always sound better.
Electric trains are so utilitarian,
whereas steam trains are chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka.
And you can cook your breakfast on a shovel.
That's what I always like about a steam train. You can't do
that on a circuit board, can you? No.
Do they clean the shovel first?
No, these are working men.
They'll eat a sooty egg now and again. Who cares? Yeah.
Now, where's the one place you're guaranteed not to meet a shark?
Claire's accessories.
That's a horrible picture, isn't it? I'm just looking.
Oh, it's jumping into a shark.
What a way to die. Look at his arm.
He's just had his covid jab.
It's not fair, is it?
I'm free...! Munch
ok, so there is a particular type of shark. Where would you not expect
it? You would not expect it in Claire's accessories. Dry land.
You would not expect it on dry land.
Well, there is a particular shark known as the epaulette shark.
Its real name is hemiscyllium ocellatum and it's named
because if you look on the shoulder it looks like it's almost got
a military epaulette. And that can get out, can it, and walk about?
Well, you find them off the coast of Australia, you find them
off the coast of new Guinea, but you also find them on the coast.
They're about two, three foot long and they use their tail
and their pectoral fins to shimmy along the seabed.
So have a look at them underwater and see them moving along.
I think it's just very slightly creepy.
Oh. Doo doo doo-doo doo-doo. Isn't it weird?
They don't come out of the water, do they? Yes.
So they are also able to crawl out of water and over the sand
to access tidal pools.
So this is an epaulette shark walking on land.
Oh, you wouldn't want that coming at you. Would you? No!
How far can they come up the beach?
Are they going to like, get in your car and stuff?
Yes, there's nothing they like better than to drive a hire car.
And suddenly they speed down to the water's edge
and 20 more of them get in.
"Come on, boys!" A few doughnuts and then bugger off into the town.
No, they don't go that far because they want tidal pools, so they eat
worms and small fish and crustaceans.
They find them by shoving their heads into the sand,
and then they filter the food out through the gills.
Oh, what are they like?!
The result is they can become stranded in rock pools overnight,
but they can withstand severe oxygen deprivation by basically putting
the body into a standby mode.
The good thing is, darling, if one came towards you
they have very little interest in humans.
And they didn't look very big.
No. You could just punch one in the face.
Yeah, they might give you a little nip if you accidentally trod on one,
but so would I.
The place you're definitely going to find a shark -
there's an area of the pacific ocean called the great white shark cafe.
You don't like sharks?
I love sharks, but it's still scary. It is quite scary.
2002, scientists at Stanford university found out that sharks
go to this particular spot in the pacific ocean.
They go there every single year.
Nobody could work out why. It seemed to be a sort of virtual desert
as far as shark food was concerned.
And it turns out that there is food there, but it is much deeper
than our satellites can see.
And these light-sensitive animals, things like squid and phytoplankton,
small fish, they live in an area just below where the light
can penetrate.
And a scientist at monterey bay aquarium, Salvador jorgensen,
says it's the largest migration of animals on earth,
but it's a vertical migration that's timed with the light cycle,
and we didn't even know it was happening. Oh, wow.
I know. It's amazing.
To point out one further place that you are likely to find sharks,
this is alongside bikini pageants in trashy movies.
Ok, this is a much understudied phenomena, right? Oh, yeah.
Super shark, ok, as an example.
"An offshore drilling accident releases a giant primordial
"shark threatening to turn a bikini contest into a bloodbath."
It has that fantastic strap line, "bikinis, bullets and big bites."
Before we all start laughing, this was my directorial debut.
I had a lot to learn. Yes.
Can you see on this picture there are bikinis,
but they're behind the shark? Like, they are there.
And then there's avalanche sharks, which was made in 2013.
A major avalanche on a ski resort wakes a prehistoric snow shark
that was buried deep under the snow,
threatening a bikini competition.
Ok. Both of these films, if you're thinking of watching them,
incidentally, are rated as one-star.
Out of 1,000 stars.
Has anybody ever seen a shark and bikini movie in that genre?
I've seen one where the sharks have learnt to come onto the land, so...
I think it's called sand sharks.
They swim under the sand and then leap up and kill mainly
women in bikinis.
Dramatic music
waves lap
hang on a second.
What's that over there in the water
circling ominously?
Oh, my god, it's...
It's general ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
Applause
I've said it a lot over the years.
I just thought I'd make it a bit more exotic.
What's this puffed-up puffer fish full of?
Poison. It is full of poison. What else?
Is it sea water, sandi?
Is it sea water? Yes, it is.
They inflate themselves by swallowing water from around them
into their stomach, which inflates them.
Bit like me when I learned to swim.
Look at its eye - its eye and its mouth -
and then what's happened to the rest of it?
I think it's lost its arms and legs.
It's completely evolutionised down to really the basics.
It's really saying, "go away. I'm terribly frightening."
"You should have seen me a million years ago. I was amazing.
"This is all that's left."
It's got no rib cage... amazing. ..And it's got elastic skin.
And when they let themselves go, do they go...
They fly backwards through the ocean.
Go!
And then they're just a tiny... Like an old sock with a massive eye.
Why would you have to burp a pufferfish?
Burp it, as in, like, a baby or...? Yeah, like that.
Oh, to show it you care.
So, if they inhale while they're out of water, they can get air in
and they can't get rid of it themselves and they'll be stranded
floating upside down. So, for example,
if you're trying to get them from one tank to another,
for a brief moment they're out of the water,
they may get air in their system
and you have to help them or they'll die.
So you have to burp the pufferfish and basically you have to hold
its head underwater and then just gently squeeze the stomach.
You could put it under your colleague's pillow
on his seat as a prank.
Nature's whoopee cushion.
I love that. You said poison, did you not, sindhu? Yeah.
Famously contains an extremely potent tetrodotoxin.
It is the second most poisonous vertebrate on the planet, second
only to the poison dart frog.
And sharks are the only creatures that are immune to their toxin,
so a shark can eat one whole.
Anyway, it's not the fish
that produces this poison - it's the bacteria that lives inside it.
And rather famously, the Japanese delicacy, which is called fugu,
requires specialist preparation to render the pufferfish safe
and, as a consequence, because it hospitalises about 50 people a year,
the Japanese emperor is banned from eating it.
About a half dozen people die in a typical year.
I think it'd be quite easy just not to eat it.
Just not have it. Yeah. I've never tried it. I believe it's delicious.
And apparently they did try and make some non-poisonous pufferfish
by breeding them without the bacteria being present,
but it just didn't taste the same.
Isn't that the strangest thing?
And you have to be careful.
It's found in the liver, the ovaries, the eyes and the skin.
I mean, it's a big workaround for a chef, isn't it?
You know, delicacies, what can you say?
I know, right?
What could you drink if you were shipwrecked
on an untouched Caribbean island?
Yes, ed?
Coconuts.
Klaxon uh-oh.
No, why not? Why no?
It's untouched, it has to be touched.
That is correct.
You could not drink coconut milk or coconut water because coconut
trees, palm trees, are from Asia
and they are not found naturally in the Caribbean.
It's an invasive species.
It competes with local trees.
They suck up the water.
They don't really provide much nesting for birds.
They damage the soil.
Leaves are not nutritious to native animals, and although coconuts
can drift from one island to another
there are no currents to get them
from the pacific to the Caribbean without human help.
So it came because it was a way of taking water on board ships
was to take coconuts with you.
But they are wonderful, coconuts, because in the one thing you get
this high-calorie food, you get drinking water, you get a shell
that you can turn into charcoal to cook on,
you get fibre that you can turn into rope.
You can use the whole thing to act as a float
if you're in the sea, you know. You can disguise a bear as a lady.
Yes. Yes.
Horse noises.
They are terrific for horse noises.
I mean, for years and years, there would have been people playing
with coconuts who'd never seen a horse.
And then one day horses turn up. Yeah!
They'd say, "these animals can do
"an amazing impression of the coconuts."
The mutiny on the bounty, actually, was triggered
because captain bligh accused the crew of stealing coconuts.
I mean, they're really valuable and beautiful things.
Where is the world's longest mountain range?
It's underwater. Yes.
Alan, you used to be the silly one on this show.
Yeah, then you lot turned up.
You never would have got that series one.
You're absolutely right - it's the mid-oceanic Ridge.
It's an enormous system of underwater mountains.
It's pretty much everywhere.
If you look at that, it's the arctic through the Atlantic
to the antarctic, Indian and pacific oceans,
and that all links up together.
It's about 40,000 miles long.
So if you think about one of the great mountain ranges
that we can see, like the andes,
that's about 4,300 miles.
This is 40,000 miles and it zigzags across the entire planet.
It looks like the globe's had a terrible accident.
Or a massive railway.
If we could see it, it'd be the most prominent topographic feature
on the earth's surface.
What's really the point, though?
You know what I mean? Like, why...?
What's the point of an underwater mountain? Yeah, what's it up to?
Are you not enjoying nature any more, Lou? No, no.
I just think. Come on, let's have a look at you.
You pull the plug out - amazing.
So an enormous amount of tectonic activity happens along this Ridge
that's really important.
There was a woman oceanographer called Marie tharp.
She was an American, and she discovered the Ridge.
She discovered it in 1952.
Despite not being allowed to go to sea on any of the expeditions.
Wow. So the Navy rules were men only,
so what she did was she took all the measurements that the men
brought back from sea, and she said - this is her own words -
"I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities.
"It was a once-in-a-lifetime, a once-in-the-history-of-the-world
"opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman
"in the 1940s."
And every time she mapped out the measurements, she found this huge
rift in the middle of the ocean.
And all her colleagues said it was just girl talk
and it was nonsense. What's the point, basically?
And then they realised that it was the earth's largest physical
feature, and she did all this sitting at a desk
and not out at sea.
It is an enormously important discovery.
We know almost nothing about the world's biggest mountain range,
but what we do know we owe to Marie tharp.
Right, step right up.
What does this machine test?
Strength.
Klaxon
what? Yeah, no. Kinetic energy.
Oh, no, I like that. I don't know what that is, ed.
He has turned very clever. He has!
I just said the words, I don't know what it is. Don't worry.
It's a traditional fairground or pier attraction.
It's known as the high striker, the strongman game, strength tester.
It's actually a test of accuracy, ok?
The key is to maximise the force exerted on the mechanism by hitting
the exact centre of the impact button flatly and squarely
with the mallet.
So there's a website called the art of manliness, and it recommends
using the same action as for splitting wood with an axe.
Now, you should have a mallet,
so now what we thought we'd do is that we'd get you to have a go,
and then we'll add the points that you gather on the machine
to your score for the show today.
Ok, who wants to go first?
I'll go first. Ok.
All right. Go and try it out.
Now, it is possible... This game is not rigged -
the one we're showing you - but they may have been rigged
in the past, so sometimes they would set it to an easy mode
and somebody weak-looking would come along and strike the bell with ease.
Right. Whack it, ed. Whack it.
Whoa.
70. Oh, that was 100, surely?
No, it was 70. Ok.
Is it fun?
Not, like, loads of fun.
Laughter
right, sindhu, are you going to have a go? Well done, ed.
Applause
so when they rigged it, they would set it to easy and some
weak guy would hit the bell, and then a big, strong bloke
would say, "oh, I could do that if that weak guy can do it," and then
they'd set it to hard and he'd get, like, an embarrassing low score.
And then the men would all be pumped up and want to have a go.
Come on, sindhu!
What did she get?
A generous 50, I'd say. A 50? We're going to say 50.
Well done, darling, congratulations.
Take a run up.
Shall I?
Oh, you missed it completely!
You're an actual menace.
Here we go. Super Lou!
Oh.
Again.
That was worse.
No. Ok. Alan?
Add them together.
40.
It couldn't have been. It wasn't 40.
Ten!
50.60.50.
I'm going to give you 50. Thanks, sandi. So, in...
I don't hit things professionally.
Oh, go on, give it a whack, sandi.
It's very satisfying. Will you hit it for me?
It is very satisfying. Guy, will you give it a go?
Come on, come and do this.
Go on, guy, you've got this.
Come on, guy.
Oh!
Wasn't that great? That's amazing. Incredible.
Oh, well done, guy, I love that.
Well... I smell a rat, a stinking rat.
Wow. It looks like the sun's going down, so we better call it a day,
pack up the deck chairs and take a look at the scores. In last place,
all at sea, it's sindhu with 42.
Applause
next, with 45 points, it's Lou.
Applause
with 53 points, it's ed!
Applause
with 58 points, it's Alan.
Applause
but taking top prize tonight with 100 points, its floor manager
extraordinaire guy smart. What?!
Applause
Thank you to sindhu, ed, Lou and Alan, and I leave you
with this observation by American motivational speaker Bob moawad.
"You can't leave footprints in the sands of time
"if you're sitting on your butt, and who wants to leave butt prints
"in the sands of time?"
Goodnight.
Seagulls squawk