Applause
Hello. Welcome to qi, where tonight, we're seriously sexed-up.
Stark naked underneath their clothes are:
The sultry suzi ruffell...
Cheering and applause
..the sensual Sara pascoe...
Cheering and applause
..the stimulating ahir shah...
Cheering and applause
..and old sexy pants himself, Alan Davies.
Applause, wolf-whistle from audience
my face!
Let's hear you giving me the come-on. Suzi goes...
Music: Let's get it on by Marvin gaye
♪ I've been really tryin', baby. ♪
Oh, right.
Sara goes...
♪ I believe in miracles. ♪
♪ Where're you from?
♪ You sexy thing sexy thing, you. ♪
Ahir goes...
♪ sexbomb, sexbomb uh-huh
you're my sexbomb sexbomb
♪ you can give it to me when I need to come along. ♪
He's still got it, hasn't he? He really has.
And Alan goes...
♪ all by myself... ♪
laughter
aww!
♪ Don't wanna be
♪ all by myself... ♪
I tell you, after...
♪ any more. ♪ Yes, all right!
Laughter
just rubbing it in. After several months of lockdown
in a family of five with a dog... Yeah.
..That's just a fantasy!
Who struggles to speak to people of the opposite sex?
Sara: Oh, is it the qi elves?
Laughter
oh, "who doesn't?" Would be my answer.
Yeah, well, there is that. Let me rephrase it.
Who seems to speak a different language to the opposite sex?
Mane khabar nathi, uh...
That's fantastic. And I'll speak Danish! Yeah!
But actually, interestingly, that is a sort of clue.
So you say something to me. Uh-huh.
Sandi speaks Danish
ok. That is a clue.
I think that a war has just broken out between India and Denmark,
and neither of us...
No, finally, a peace accord.
After many years,
the upset over butter has been solved.
It's called ghee!
Oh, sorry! Oh, we've started it again.
So the ubang people of Nigeria,
they have separate language variations for men and women.
So it's a farming community, a population of about 11,000 people,
in what's called the cross river area of Nigeria.
And they have a wonderful creation myth which states
that there were two people, first two people on earth,
a bit like Adam and Eve, ubang and iwame,
and god gave them a language each.
And the intention was to give all tribes on earth two languages,
one for each sex, and then god ran out of languages.
You know how that happens?
Or it's possible that he made one more language than he made tribes
and thought, "I cannot make another tribe." Oh!
Do they say that it makes things easier?
Do they prefer it that way?
They don't find it confusing at all.
And if you have a look at some of the words, for example,
some of them are completely different
and some of them are rather similar.
For example, let's have a look at the word for clothing.
The women's word, ariga, and the men's word, nki,
are very, very different. But then, if you look at the word for book,
koshang and oshang, they're rather similar. Yeah.
Apparently the women's version is easier to pick up.
They do less puns, which I like. Yeah, ok. Very good.
But all children grow up speaking the female language
and the boys transition to the male language about the age of ten.
What, so on your tenth birthday,
your dad takes you to one side and says... "Now, my boy."
.. "A yam's actually an itong." Yes, yes...
No, from about the age of three or four,
they begin to be teased for using women's words.
But by ten, you would not dream, if you were a boy,
of using any of the women's words.
And they don't have any gendered pronouns.
Their word means both his and hers, and they don't assign gender
to words, you know, like the French will do.
Actually, about a third of the world's population
speak a gendered language,
where inanimate objects are male or female or...
I really love that. Do you? Yeah. I think it influences
how people think about the thing they're talking about.
And it makes you think of them as, like, nice gentlemen and ladies.
Like, "oh, mrs teapot." Yes!
"Oh, mr coat-stand."
In German, bridge is "brucke" and it's feminine,
so they tend to describe Bridges with feminine stereotypes
like elegant or beautiful and fragile.
In Spanish, it's puente, which is masculine,
so Spanish speakers will use words like long and strong and dangerous,
that kind of thing, and it really has an impact on how people think.
Yeah. The women's bridge in London is the Waterloo bridge,
which was completed by women in the second world war,
and that's the strongest bridge.
Which is terribly pleasing. Very pleasing.
So English is a germanic language, used to be grammatically gendered,
but it sort of faded over the years.
We still have metaphorical genders, so ships are sometimes known as she.
And people refer to their cars, often, as women. Yeah, yeah.
Or their guitars. I'm thinking of the same kind of guys here. Yeah.
Laughter
a survey of people that own,
you know one of those robotic vacuum cleaners? Suzi: I've got one!
Is it a boy or a girl? He's called Victor the vacuum...
He! Two thirds assigned it a gender and three quarters called him "he".
Ahir: Do you think it's the legacy of the Henry?
I think it's cos he wanders around aimlessly,
consuming everything he sets his eye on.
And he sometimes gets stuck in the corner. So, yeah. Yeah.
What's the sexiest thing you can do with a sausage-making machine?
Oh.
Suzi's buzzer plays
is it doing like what they did in ghost, around it?
Is that the sexiest thing you can do?
So one of you's doing it and then there's someone behind you,
sort of doing it...
And what's really nice is if you do something sexy
and then breakfast is ready. Exactly!
The casing is the important bit. Not a condom?
Yes, darling, a condom is exactly... With a sausage machine? Right, yeah.
So the us condom industry began in 1883.
There was a German Jewish immigrant called Julius schmid, and he was...
I mean, it's a terrible story. He was virtually penniless.
He was hobbling around on crutches. It's quite dickensian in a way.
And he was working in a sausage-making factory,
and he started selling the animal intestines as condoms.
I mean, who thought that's the next progress?
Wow. I want a Hamilton about that guy.
Laughter
a great set with all the intestines... yes!
Anyway, he was arrested in 1890
because peddling in contraceptives was illegal.
But couldn't he just be like, "this, officer?
"This isn't a contraceptive!"
Yes, it's a delicious snack! Yeah.
This is in america? In america in the 1890s. Brilliant.
He changed the name of his products to "French goods and medicines".
French? Cos the French are sexy!
And then by 1918, condoms become legal
and by then, he was already king of the condom.
The sheaths in the 18th century were made of...
This is horrible, just warning, this is quite unpleasant.
They were made of sheep's guts, so they needed to be... yes.
Is that... who wants that coming at them? Nobody.
So a sheep's guts, soaked for a couple of hours before use
then tied on with a ribbon,
and then washed, dried and used again.
Yeah. I know you think it's gross,
but that is a lot better than a kid you don't want.
Laughter
it's eco-friendly, as well, I suppose. Yeah.
So I thought I'd have a look and I thought,
I wonder what other things you can use a condom for?
And I love the Internet cos there was a list.
Anybody have any thoughts of what you might use a condom for,
other than the purpose for which it was designed?
Well, keeping things dry, like, for example, your phone. Yeah.
Or your watch. I'm always dropping mine in the loo. Yeah.
But you would look weird, getting that out of your pocket. Yes!
"Ah! Missed it!"
Ahir: Or, like, you thought your phone was vibrating,
but it was actually just ribbed.
Very good for opening a tricky jar.
Oh! Oh!
That is a good tip. Yeah.
Suzi: My nan always had trouble with jars.
It's also very good for retrieving things from the toilet.
If you drop your phone and you haven't got it in a condom,
you could use the condom to put your hand down the toilet.
Yes, cos people don't like to put their hand in the loo, do they?
Here's my two favourites. Sneaking booze in anywhere.
A good condom will hold up to six pints of alcohol.
They're going to find that if they search you, though.
And this one, which is my favourite, came off an American website -
you can cook a delicious meatloaf.
Yeah. In a condom? Yeah.
You put the meat in the condom and tie it and boil it,
and it apparently, like, boil-in-the-bag things... wow. Yes.
Boil-in-the-bag. Yes, you could. I know. See?
Are there things that people use when they don't have a condom?
There was a rumour at my school
that you could use a crisp packet.
Yeah. Or a tesco's carrier bag. Yeah.
So clingfilm, sandwich bags, crisp packets.
I don't know if you'd turn them inside out, or the salt,
who gets the salty side. They groan
speaking of clingfilm, who suffers from the shrink wrap effect?
Erm... oh.
♪ Sexbomb. ♪
It's the hip-hop remake of honey, I shrunk the kids.
I love that! Shrink rap. Yes.
I'm going to give you a point, but it's wrong.
You don't care, do you? No!
A point's a point. Let's take it! Yeah.
So in 1995, the reichstag building, which is in Berlin, of course,
was wrapped in 100,000 square metres of silver fabric,
two weeks by two artists called
christo javacheff and Jeanne-Claude denat De guillebon,
the married couple who worked under the name of christo.
The building was not in use at the time.
Couple of people just in there... Yeah. "Help!"
What was the artists' reason?
They described it as "autobiographical", apparently.
There is another thing in terms of the shrink wrap effect,
which I do think is very interesting.
Palaeontologists have really struggled to tell
the sex of a dinosaur by its fossils, ok,
because pretty much all the tissue has decayed
over the millennia and so on.
And when artists specialising in prehistoric animals have drawn them,
they've rather assumed that the skin is tight on the carcass, ok?
So it gives them this sort of slightly skeletal,
slightly menacing look.
If you think about, there seem to be no fat dinosaurs, do there? Yeah.
And lots of dinosaurs had feathers, some might have had bulging muscles.
So you get this effect, and there's a wonderful book
called all yesterdays, and it has a look at
what we might think modern-day animals would look like if
we only had the skeletons and we did the sort of shrink wrap effect.
So have a look at this one. Would anybody know what that might be?
A hippo. It is a hippo. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, my god.
It's fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. And it's about how
we cannot possibly know what things might have looked like. Yeah.
Except that does look like a hippo!
But you think about hippos, they're sort of enormous, aren't they?
I love hippos.
There's one in the zoo in Spain, where we go on holiday,
and it's 3,000 kilograms.
I can hardly believe it!
Oh, on holiday, I can totally believe it.
Laughter
just a little bit more tapas, you know what it's like.
And have a look at these, see what you think these are.
Oh, flamingos...
Ostriches? Swans.
Swans!
Actually, I think that is what a swan's soul looks like. Yeah.
My dog fights a lot with swans and they always win,
cos that is what's underneath those beautiful wings. Bit scary. Yeah.
Those arms are amazing!
I saw a completely black swan the other day. It was beautiful.
I'd never seen one before. I think they're quite...
Well, I think they're quite rare, I don't know.
Quite rare here. I sent photos to all my friends,
so I hope they were rare.
"Sandi's seen a swan."
"Did it fly off with her?" "No."
Now, how did Elon Musk sex up the space suit?
♪ You sexy thing. ♪
When you're that rich, everything's sexy.
Is this about actually sexing them so that women
had the right space equipment?
Well, that certainly has been a problem throughout
the whole of space exploration, because space suits on the whole,
particularly the ones that you use to go outside of the spacecraft,
they only made them in medium and large.
They did not make any in small
and therefore no woman was able to walk outside the spacecraft.
No small woman. Now I'm just imaging sandi in a massive space suit.
"I'd love to be able to see something."
I believe the moon's out there.
"Come on, please, are there any swans?"
You could do a puppet show
inside the helmet. Yeah.
Punch voice: "Hello, boys and girls!"
"Argh, argh!"
When NASA sent the very first female astronaut into space,
Sally ride, so it was 1983, first of all the engineers
thought she'd need a make-up kit and were worried about
putting that together. And then she was preparing for
her inaugural flight that was going to last seven days and they said,
"um, we've got you 100 tampons,
"would that be the right number?"
Even though we speak the same language, sometimes
we can't communicate, can we? On the subject of bodily functions
in space suits, I know that the first American man in space
was a guy called Alan Shepard, and he was only supposed to be
going up for a very short amount of time,
so there was no way for him to urinate in his spacesuit
and the launch ended up being delayed for five hours,
so the first American man in space went up there in
a suit full of his own piss.
Oh! Yeah.
Anyway, back to Elon Musk, ok.
The question was about him sexing up the spacesuit.
Is it something to do with the avengers?
Yes. What do you think it's to do with the avengers?
So, it's something to do with making astronauts look like superheroes.
Look sexy. Yeah. Mm. So, he got someone sexy... yeah.
..To design it.
You're absolutely right. It was a Hollywood costume designer,
a guy called Jose Fernandez, who did work for franchises
like the avengers, gremlins, Batman.
And when he was asked to do it,
he thought SpaceX, which is the Elon Musk aerospace company,
was a film. So he went, "yeah, yeah, sure."
And the goal was to make the space suit look more like a tuxedo.
Er, because...
Who looked at Neil Armstrong
and thought he was insufficiently formal?
"A wing collar, really?!"
And Fernandez used to design daft punk's costumes.
And he used the designs for that to help him design the helmets.
So is that it? Yeah. Oh! But these are for walking about
inside the spaceship, these are not for going out into space.
To be fair, the astronauts do now look harder, better,
faster and stronger.
The earliest suit, it was actually designed
for sea floor scavenging, was the diving barrel,
invented in 1715 by John lethbridge.
This is an extraordinary thing.
It pretty much is just a barrel laid on its...
Got to just get in that! Yeah. Just get in!
And it's got a section cut out for the person's hands
to reach through, and you breathe
because, of course, there's a big bubble of air trapped
inside the thing, and he was able to reach depths of 22 metres
for up to half an hour, and by the end of his life
he'd recovered so many valuables from shipwrecks,
today it'd be about £20 million's worth by going down...
And what about that is not sexy?
I know, yeah. The thing about the designer John lethbridge is
he's reported to have had 17 children. I think he's just trying
to get away. You could understand that, couldn't you? Anyway, that's
the original, look at the original drawings for the thing.
That is amazing. Why would your mother-in-law
give you one of these?
Oh, because she's finally ready for the home.
This is the last straw.
Happy Christmas, Sara. All right, Mary.
Is it because she knows I'm in training for
world's greatest potato peeler?
Why do you say that?
Cos it looks like a really difficult-to-peel potato!
Ok. So, I will not be able to say this correctly,
and my apologies to anybody Peruvian -
pusi qachun waqachi.
It translates, the name of this potato, to
"make your daughter-in-law cry".
That is so mean.
Yeah. So, we're talking about the cusco region of
the Peruvian highlands, and a future mother-in-law gives
the bride-to-be these potatoes,
and if she can successfully peel them...
Yes, quite right.
Applause
that is clever.
..Then she will make a good wife.
I mean, how annoying is that, right?
But you'd be a lovely wife.
But there's about 4,500 varieties of potato,
of which 2,500 are in Peru.
And 25% of Peru's agricultural gdp comes from potatoes.
I mean, it's a big industry. Those have got "skin-on fries"
written all over them. Yeah!
There's a restaurant in Lima called central,
and they have 50 different ways to prepare spuds.
My favourite is the Danish preparation called 50-50.
Do you know what that is? No.
Yeah, 50% butter, 50% potato, mashed together.
Anyway, they have two expressions
in their inca language, hok wayk'oy - I apologise -
"one cooking" and hok yanoy chika, "one cooking so much",
and they're basically units of time of day.
A bit like we'd use an hour, I guess,
but they would time things by potato boiling.
Oh! I think it's rather nice.
Some very old recipe books have spells in them
and they think it's the same thing, that by the time you've said
the whole spell, the ingredients are ready.
That's a wonderful way of doing it, isn't it? Yeah.
And particularly for oral societies. Yeah. 13th-century Peruvians
and Bolivians were naturally freeze-drying potatoes.
So, what they would do is they would leave the spuds outside
exposed to warm and then to freezing temperatures,
and then stamp out the water in between.
It's basically instant mashed potato that can be stored
for years without going off.
Presumably discovered by accident, I would imagine.
Yeah, someone definitely woke up and went,
"ah, you know what? I've left the potatoes out."
Yeah. "Just make it work, just make it work." "It'll be fine!"
Does anybody remember smash? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It goes black when it rots. What, smash does?
Yeah. I was a very dirty girl at university, and also poor,
and that's how I know that.
Not all science experiments come from wisdom. No.
It's still extremely popular, sells over 100 million a year.
What is it? Smash. Oh, my gosh. Have you not had it?
You know like coffee, freeze-dried coffee? Yeah.
So you put it in a jar and then hot water.
It's like that but it comes up a bit like mashed potato.
There was a time, I think, when they thought that
anything that was real could be improved upon,
so fake everything was the order of the day,
and that was one of the things.
There was granulated tea for a while. Yeah. What?!
People were like, oh, teabags take too long. Yeah.
Yes, this was the '80s.
"These teabags take too long, I've got cocaine to do
"and industry to privatise!"
It was heady times.
But look what we achieved.
I know, right?
Who couldn't perform without an audience?
I mean, I would say me, but Edinburgh 2012 would, er...
You know? Me, my mum, my auntie and the critic from the Sunday times.
I once did a show with Helen lederer and Tony slattery
and there was one person in the audience
and we had a long debate as to whether or not to do it or not.
Did you? We did. It was my mother-in-law
and she'd come specially. Afterwards she was like,
"you went through with the performance, very impressed by that.
"Now if you can peel this..."
I was booked for a fundraiser once for firemen
and it was in a field near the fire station.
And no-one was in the tent,
so they made me start without anyone in the tent,
cos they said that when people hear that there's something
happening, they'll come and look in. Oh, my...
And because it was a fundraiser, I did do it,
but all that happened is that people would periodically just look inside
the tent and go, "oh, god!"
But no-one goes, "oh, brilliant, I'll go and listen
"to that mad woman talking to herself."
"Oh, brilliant, part way through an anecdote, count me in!" Yeah!
What was the place, darling, we went to a festival
and there was a completely empty field?
And I went to the toilet and when I came back it was full.
Latitude. Latitude festival. There was nobody there
and I just thought, well, nobody's coming. I went to the toilet,
came back, 5,000 people had turned up. Alan had texted everyone -
"toksvig's about, and she's had two ciders."
"She's in the loo, come out now!"
"She's got that swan anecdote."
So, who couldn't perform without an audience?
It's not a comedian.
So, we're talking about sex.
Oh, sexual performance. So, people who like being watched,
like, as a thing. Like camming or something.
Like what? Camming. When you...
This is my version of smash.
Gather round children, let me tell you.
So you get hot water...
And so some people make their living from having
a webcam at home and people give them money,
and they do those things in their room.
And some of it can be quite mundane, like folding or ironing.
It's mostly not.
But it can be absolutely anything, and you spend time
with people just through your webcam all day.
Where do you find this? Just... There's a thing called the Internet,
actually. It's really taken off, sandi.
So, I said to my son the other day, I said, "darling, people keep saying
"there's porn on the Internet, but I can't find it."
He said, "mum, just type in the word 'porn'." And I said, "oh, I don't
"think I could be that bold." He said, "maybe it's not for you."
Sandi, what were you putting in before to not be able to find it?
Well, I don't know, I just thought it just popped up all by itself.
It only pops up if you've already been on it. Oh.
It doesn't just seek out...
Yoo-hoo!
My mother is a retired primary school teacher
and when they brought interactive whiteboards into the class,
she was trying to teach the children about the victorians,
and so went on Google images and typed in "prince Albert,"
and out of this interactive whiteboard...
Even I know what that is!
It's like, "close, close! How do you make it close?!"
Yeah, and then pop-ups.
Prince Albert is the closest we've got
to somebody who couldn't perform without an audience.
So, is it like a thing where, for royalty, you had to prove
that you've consummated the marriage? You had to be watched.
Yeah. It's the weirdest thing. So, Henry vi was king of england,
1422 to 1461, and his wife Margaret of anjou,
they took more than eight years to produce an heir.
And there were all sorts of rumours that he was impotent
or that she kept refusing. A lot of sheep going missing?
Yeah. Yeah, I think that condom on his desk looks uncomfortable,
but, er...
They've discovered new evidence to suggest that courtiers had
to accompany them to bed to make sure that they did the deed.
But there also could've been a lot of confusion,
because historically, and sometimes even now,
when people don't explain to children properly what sex is
and why it is, people got married as virgins
and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Mm.
Anyway, the Chamberlain of Henry vi used to stay in the room
while they were in bed together. On his phone.
They did finally have a baby, Edward,
but it was thought to either be a bastard or a changeling.
People used to believe that it was a fairy or
a devil child swapped in.
And then Henry had a complete nervous breakdown.
She's very interesting, actually. She's left to rule the kingdom alone
for the next couple of decades and it's, in fact, her political
decisions that lead to the war of roses.
She's well worth reading about.
They were married, actually, for a year before they met.
Did you know that? No. No!
Yeah. So, the Duke of Suffolk, who was Henry's adviser,
went over to France, 1444,
and married Margaret in his place,
which used to be called a proxy wedding.
That's the most Indian shit I've ever heard in my life.
Well, tell me, what do you think about this?
Because it wasn't just weddings that were conducted in absentia.
Mary tudor, who was the sister of Henry viii,
her marriage to Louis xii was consummated by proxy.
Do you know about this? Consummated? Consummated by proxy?! Yes.
Consummated by proxy. So, the Duke of longueville,
who was, at the time, a French hostage in england,
he acted as a stand-in for Louis for the consummation, right?
So, there's a whole lot of spectators
and Mary gets her clothes off and she climbs into bed.
And then the Duke takes off his stockings,
doublet and hose from one leg,
puts his naked leg in under the bed clothes
and touches her with it, and everybody applauds
and that counts as having consummated the marriage. Wow.
I don't understand straight people at all.
Why would you stop halfway through sleeping with someone?
The interval. Laughter
it's weirdly correct.
Ah! Ah, yes, please!
The safety curtain comes down. Yeah!
And then a little old lady comes out to sell ice cream!
I like that, that you thought that.
But why might you have an interval? Why might there be a...?
I mean, for snacks? Snacks? Yes.
So, the tyranny of the eight hours of sleep, which we have now, is
a relatively modern concept. In the medieval period,
people had two-phase sleeping patterns.
So they'd wake up around two, three o'clock in the morning
and they would use that midway break for praying, for eating, for sex,
for studying, for writing poetry or whatever. That was the part of your
day where you actually got to do anything that was just for pleasure. Yeah.
Because you worked so hard and you had to work with daylight.
My dad sort of does that. He gets... He'll go to bed quite early
and then wakes up about three,
then quite often takes my mum a cup of tea, and I said to her,
"doesn't it really annoy you that you're being woken up?"
And she went, "no, I always like a tea."
All laugh
but it was called split sleeping
and it was very common, sort of, 17th to the 19th century,
and then it kind of faded away.
But there's a new thing that has sometimes been suggested,
polyphasic sleeping. There was an architect
and inventor called buckminster Fuller,
and he managed to reduce his sleep in total -
there he is - to two hours in every 24.
It's really bad for you. It's very bad for you.
He did this by having a half-hour nap whenever he got tired,
so every six hours he'd have a half-hour nap.
Yeah, and he absolutely talked gibberish and had mice
and cats in his peripheral vision, but other than that,
he was doing really well. So, buckminster Fuller believed that...
So, particularly in the 1940s, that if people slept less,
it would shorten the war, because thinkers would be able
to spend more time thinking and so on. He thought it would shorten
the war? Because clever people would be able to come up with
a better plan. He had a system, which he called dymaxion,
which is a sort of portmanteau word -
dynamic, maximum and tension -
and some of the stuff is brilliant, darling. If you don't know him,
there's a design he did for a car, which I still, if this car
was available, I would absolutely buy it.
I don't think it ever got made. There. Is that it?
Yeah. The dymaxion car.
You would look adorable in that car, sandi.
Isn't it great? Yeah. I think it's fantastic.
It's still better, I think, to have the wheels at the corners.
The idea was to maximise efficiency. He gave up after two years,
because nobody else was awake when he wanted to talk to them.
Doesn't your brain clean itself when you're asleep?
That is exactly the problem, darling,
and it interrupts your circadian rhythms, your body clock,
and it can really affect your health.
You become psychotic really quickly. Yeah.
And the thing with modern people, especially with stress,
is that people feeling tired all the time,
it's like, you're not crazy, you are, your body isn't actually
getting rest when you need it.
Well, Salvador dali was always worried that he was too tired in
the afternoons and he didn't like wasting time napping,
so he used to do this thing. He used to sit in an armchair with his arms
hanging over the side like that and he had a heavy metal key in his hand
and an upturned plate on the floor. He could go like that
and then go like that until he nodded off
and dropped the thing and it landed on the plate.
And he said it was enough,
that jolt, to give him a bit more energy. Hm.
Is that how the clock ended up being bent? That's exactly how, yeah.
But micro sleeps, that's exactly what they say,
is that even if you can't have a nap, just that exact little
thing that he's describing, that little doze.
The thing that I like is
the idea that that jolt dates back to sleeping in trees.
So you'd wake up with a start to grab the branch.
So you don't fall out. You don't fall out of the tree. Yeah.
My kids, when we went to latitude,
we all stayed in the caravan, and they all fell out of their bunk beds
within 20 minutes of one another. Did they?
And two of them were low down,
but my daughter was up high, and we watched her fall out.
And it took ages. Laughter
anyone know who that is on the right? Is that descartes?
It is descartes, absolutely right.
Oh, you're a clever pants, aren't you?
You just knew all of the facts about sleep!
But they were boring. That was very impressive.
You're both really showing up my four gcses here.
Anyway, descartes, the philosopher Rene descartes.
He would always sleep until midday,
and it's something we think now called delay sleep phase type.
It's a sleep disorder that throws off your circadian rhythm.
Lots of people experience it temporarily,
so students pulling an all-nighter, for example.
But one in 500 people have it as a permanent condition and they just
don't seem to be in the right frame with everybody else.
But if... isn't that sort of all relative, right?
Like, it's not the right frame for everybody else,
but it is the right frame for him. So, I don't know,
why does it need to be a medical condition?
Why can't he just be like, "I love sleeping in"?
Yeah. No, I think it's absolutely fine, unless you're meeting somebody
for breakfast or something, you're right. It's got to be
the thing that works for you. "I sleep, therefore I am."
As they say in advertising, sex sells, right?
Yes! Klaxon
no!
Darn. No!
"No!" is correct. So there was a study in 2020,
they asked 200 Italian men and women to watch ads
and see if sex really does sell.
And apart from a very, very small group of men who were identified in
further analysis as having "higher hostile sexism", the participants...
They sound fun. Yes! Whoo!
They should do like a really quick test, where you can just, like,
dip something in their drink... Yeah.
People don't respond better to sexualised ads.
Yeah, because the theory has always been, not that you would
automatically buy a product, but you're more likely to notice the ad
and spend more time with your eyes looking at it, and then the ad can
then do its secret work while you're looking. Except that the truth is,
people forget to notice what the ad is for. Sure.
And just go, "oh, sex!" Yes, exactly. "I remember sex!" Yes.
Usually a pair of women's legs would go across
the screen, do you remember those days? In nearly every ad,
a little woman walked and then you'd go... yeah.
And then it'd just go, "smash."
Women on the whole reacted more
negatively and they didn't care for it. Yeah.
It made them less likely to want to buy the product,
but the men were unaffected either way,
it didn't impact on their buying intentions whatsoever.
But the brain instinctively is distracted by the sexualisation
and doesn't pay attention to the product.
Anybody remember cadbury's flake adverts were rather risque?
In the bath? Yeah. I did... at my first-ever stand-up comedy set,
one of my hilarious routines...
..Was I had a flake and I took it out of the wrapper
and I put it in a condom. Right.
And at the time, if you remember, in the '80s,
there were a lot of ads about condoms,
because people were extremely terrified of aids, rightly.
And so I put the flake in the condom,
wrapped it back up and then peeled the flake
and it had a condom on, that was funny.
That got a laugh. But then -
this is where I had a lot to learn - I ate it.
Oh! You ate the condom?
I tried to and I couldn't swallow it,
I chewed it for a bit.
And then the laughter kind of went a bit, "ooh." Yeah.
Did you find that on the Internet
when you searched other things you can do with a condom, sandi?
They stopped doing it after about 2010. It was polarising opinion.
Yeah, chocolate adverts who...
..When they're advertising to women to eat chocolate
for pleasure, shouldn't use models.
They should be realistic. I think that's the thing,
because you never think, "oh, that looks nice,
"I'll do that when I'm in the bath." Yeah.
I want someone crying, eating a Mars bar, and me going,
"I could get onboard with that." Yeah.
"I'm so lonely. Ow, ow, ow! But now it's all right." That kind of thing.
I don't know if you remember, there was a woman called Janis Levy,
she was a former flake girl, and she hit the news again in 2008,
because it was reported that she'd died. And they published her
obituary and nobody was more surprised than she was,
because she was perfectly fine
and she'd been confused with another flake girl,
Marilyn crossley, who'd passed away.
But it's like, it's like when a person of colour,
they get... Whoever's putting the, you know, the assembly together
of the article, uses the wrong photograph of someone.
I've been Paul chowdhry twice.
Yeah, I mean, but, like, so literally...
I've been Jen brister once.
But it's so crazy, but because it's different jobs,
that person goes, "here's my article about ahir shah,"
and someone else goes, "brown man. Got it."
It's very nice that you think that they're googling "brown man".
I would have gone for a shorter and more aggressive word.
Do you remember Abercrombie & Fitch used to have a topless man
outside their shops to try and help them sell?
And the people inside were dancing. Yeah.
Sandi, did you ever go inside?
They were dancing but they weren't allowed to speak to you.
So, if you went over and said,
"oh, do you have this in, like, a proper size for an adult?"
And they'd be like, "hey, I'm not here to chat."
Anyway, they're starting
to phase out these sexualised adverts. Good.
Like the quote from the Austrian economist, Joseph schumpeter, who
said that a picture of the prettiest girl in the world will,
in the long run, prove powerless to sell a bad cigarette.
That's very good. I think that's impressive. I like that.
But they've historically sexed things up anyway.
So there's a thing in their company history that their famous brand
Hollister was named after its founder, John m Hollister,
and he was an adventurer who settled in California
and he created the label in 1922,
and that's what's on the logos, the date and so on.
The whole company started in 2000.
There's no such person. You know the moleskine notebooks,
they're sold as the notebooks of, I don't know,
Hemingway, Picasso and chatwin and so on? Yes.
They were founded in 1997.
What?! Ok, now I am angry.
I don't give a shit about Hollister, but I've got a lot of moleskines.
Ok, haagen-dazs, the name haagen-dazs doesn't mean anything.
Apparently it was supposed to sound Danish to imply,
I don't know, sort of high-quality craftsmanship, but that umlaut...
It's a made-up word? ..We don't have a letter like that
a with an umlaut on top, we don't have it.
But it was created by new yorkers living in Minneapolis.
What's so special about your bottom?
I think I might know this.
Oh!
Are they unique? Like a fingerprint. Yeah, in what way? Ooh!
It's why people sit on photocopiers,
because it's like a fingerprint.
It is, exactly. You're giving away too much personal data if you sit on
a photocopier. Yeah, yeah. That is absolutely correct.
I need to make some phone calls, can we pause the...?
So, scientists at Stanford university have developed
a smart toilet,
which is able to work out who's sitting on it by taking
a scan of your bottom.
Oh, whoa!
And apparently your anal print is unique.
So it's got a little camera inside and what it does is,
it scans the anal lining, also known as the anoderm.
Ok, sandi, you've told me how, now tell me why.
Because if you'd know who's going in the toilet,
what you can do is you can analyse the excretion,
so, for the quality, the timing, the speed and so on,
and it is a very, very good way of developing
an individual health profile for each user.
Will it also, like, tell them off if he's on there for too long?
Yeah. Will it just be like an alarm, like, "that's 45 minutes"?
What happens if you hit the lens? Yeah.
I stayed with my father-in-law
a couple of years ago and I went into the toilet
and it was all dark, and as I approached the bowl,
it lit up and he has disco lights in
the toilet that change.
And I had to buy one, I've now got one that hooks into the toilet.
And that's why there's always 5,000 people every time you go to the loo.
This toilet is still in the experimental stages
and the first thing is that people would have to be comfortable with
having a scan of their arse every time they excused themselves. Yeah.
It would have to be really sold as, like, why this is beneficial.
Well, the advanced institute
of industrial technology in Tokyo are developing
a car seat that recognises the bum print,
if you like, of the driver in the seat
and it won't let the car start if you are somebody who doesn't match
the bum of the person who owns it.
What if you put on a lot of weight?
Then you'd have to walk everywhere, you'd lose the weight,
back into your car. Back into the car!
But the car that I drive,
it knows whether it's me or my wife driving.
But I think it's to do with
the phone connecting up in some way. Ok.
Yeah. Or that she can see over the steering wheel.
Laughter
and with that, it's time for the pain in
the bottom that we call general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
What shouldn't athletes do
the night before a big sporting event?
Intro to 'let's get it on' have sex.
Klaxon
no, there's no evidence that having sex affects your performance,
and, in fact, if anything it probably makes you more relaxed.
Lots of comics have that as well, before a big gig,
because it's relaxing.
Are you shagging pre-gigs?
No, not immediately before,
like, "ladies and gentlemen, please welcome..." Laughter
no, but like, say, the afternoon of, or, you know...
The late Paul hunter, the professional snooker player,
was very much down in the interval of the final of
a major tournament, and afterwards said that,
"oh, yeah, did plan b during the interval,"
because he came back from really far behind and won.
And him and his fiancee later revealed that b stood for bonk.
And they just shagged in the interval, and he was like,
"right. Ready to go and play some snooker!"
What's interesting - they've done lots of studies on this -
they've done almost all the studies on male athletes.
The key thing is that you're well rested.
Drinking, not a good idea,
taking drugs, staying up late - none of those things.
And the wonderful old manager,
Casey stengel, of the New York Yankees,
he says, "it's not the sex that wrecks these guys,
"it's staying up all night looking for it."
Yeah, I think that's where it came from, is that was, especially
with teams of men, when they were told, "oh, it's bad luck to do it beforehand,"
that is what they meant is,
don't go out, stay in your hotel room, be rested for tomorrow.
Oh. Yeah. I mean, apparently the olympic village is, like, you know.
Yeah, loads of stds, they have to have special doctors.
2016, the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro,
they gave away 450,000 free condoms.
Yeah, just... were they the old-fashioned ones?
Yeah, it was a little cage. There was some connection made,
wasn't there, between a build-up of testosterone
and a kind of release of aggression in competitors?
That's what I heard about boxers. Yeah. Yes.
Foreplay only improves match play.
When were the first same-sex unions in england?
♪ Sexbomb... ♪
er, it's going to be something a bit like 1167 or something.
Not quite as early as that.
1168!
Laughter
so, it's the golden age of piracy. Oh.
It was a practice called matelotage,
and it was a union between two male pirates
and they would share their wealth.
They often exchanged rings, gold rings,
to symbolise their union,
they would put a clause to pass all their belongings on,
their inheritance, if the person died.
You get it about the 17th century.
And on paper it looks like it's about economics,
but there is a book, can I just say,
by historian b r burg, called sodomy and the pirate tradition,
and he said it's a relationship with clearly homosexual characteristics,
and that's despite the fact that the death penalty was in place at the
time for homosexuality. There's a famous case of this,
John Swann and Robert culliford,
who'd sailed under captain kidd,
and, I mean, they sailed for ages before settling down -
I think it's quite sweet - in neighbouring homes in Madagascar.
Since the days of piracy,
same-sex couples have been saying, "aye, aye do."
Who introduced britons to
the idea of clean-shaven nether regions?
Oh. Is it Brazil?
Klaxon
can I just say, I shared that picture in confidence?
Laughter
that big toe looks like a sort of model for
a sourdough pizza or something, it's very unpleasant. I'm right here!
Sorry! We've mentioned before, darling, that we know that
the Brazilian wax was actually invented in New York in the 1990s.
Oh, curses! Oh! Was it something that happened, like,
because people wanted
to prevent, like, lice and stuff like that?
Ok, so it's really interesting,
because it's such a long time ago. When Julius Caesar -
this is how far back we're going - invaded britain -
so we're talking about 55, 54 bc - he described
the inhabitants as completely clean-shaven from head
to toe, save for the head,
so they kept their hair long and the upper lip and so on.
And there is a Welsh clergyman
and historian called Gerald of wales,
and in 1188 he confirmed,
"britons were shaving their bodies and even their heads,
"to allow them to run more freely through forest groves."
Yeah, my pubes really slow me down. Yeah.
Because they catch. It's one of my big regrets, actually.
You could have been zola budd. I know. Yeah.
Could be like velcro on nettles. Yeah.
He said that the Welsh were "most particular about shaving
"the lower parts of the body." What did they shave with?
Because it's difficult enough nowadays with fancy things.
Well, if you have a look at the stuff that's been discovered from
the ancient Egyptians, I mean, there are proper gold
and copper razors that have been found in their tombs.
Yeah, but they still look like you're going to have a lot of rash and cuts.
Well, around 2018, there was an extraordinary step forward,
which you just think, "really? 2018?"
The razor company Billie made news by becoming
the first women's hair removal ad
to show actual body hair being removed.
And if you think about it, every advert, pretty much... hm.
Yeah, is a shaved leg being shaved.
..Is an already shaved leg having another shave.
Yeah. And then it makes you feel like a real freak, like,
"oh, I actually want it for hair." Hmm.
Why should you be careful about hair removal if you're a cyclist?
Oh, because you're supposed to think that you are supposed
to do hair removal to be more aerodynamic,
that's quite popular, isn't it, with cyclists?
Hm. Or swimmers. Is it now considered doping?
No, you actually need it, it protects against friction,
and it also helps to remove sweat from the rider's skin.
Oh. But swimmers remove their hair, don't they?
And their coats. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah. And boots, yeah.
Phelps still wearing his coat and boots. "Take your coat off!"
"Duffle, get the duffle!" "Take your coat off!"
"Yeah. Leave the hat, leave the hat."
"Just leave it there, it doesn't matter where."
Brazilians should really be called the Welsh wax.
How often do men think about sex?
Ok, I'm going to say... ♪ you sexy thing... ♪
..six times a day. That's my estimate.
No? Suzi: I'm going to say every three seconds. Wow!
Ahir: I'm going to say somewhere between
six times a day and every three seconds.
Three seconds is so fast that you couldn't even have finished about
the time you were just thinking about it before you started again.
I mean, you'd never get any sleep, I think is the thing. Yeah.
No, and there is no time then to think about football.
But presumably there isn't that much difference between
women and men with this. Well, there is a slight difference.
So, the Ohio state university did a study on this,
the researchers in 2012, they gave out,
you know those sort of clickers, there's like a golf tally.
Like, "you can come in, you can come in, you can come in, we're full."
Yeah, exactly, one of those. They had three things on it
and you had to click one for sex and one for food
and one for sleep, so there were three different sort of buttons
on it. On average, men thought about sex 19 times a day,
only once more than they thought about food. On the whole,
women thought about sex ten times a day,
but food 15 times. But the interesting thing,
the best predictor of who logged
the most frequent thoughts about sex were people who were
the most comfortable with their sexuality.
So, the more comfortable they were about sex,
the more they thought about it. Like all of these people,
terribly anxious about it, I think, terribly anxious about themselves.
Ah, the bookish little teenagers.
They did a different study in Germany, participants,
male and female, were texted seven times a day
asking what they'd been thinking about recently. In the daytime,
people thought about coffee, checking emails, watching TV
much more than they thought about sex. And sex only became
a dominant thought somewhere around midnight. But even then...
Who's still awake? Yeah. I know, right?
I'm in the first phase of my sleep at that point.
And even then, it came second to
the thought that, "I wish I was asleep," so, you know. Oh.
If you claim you think about sex every three seconds,
you're statistically an outlier, possibly an outright liar.
Now that we've put that to bed, it's time for the scores.
In last place, locked out of the bedroom with minus 16,
oh, it's Alan.
Applause locked out of the bedroom?!
In third place, with minus six, it's suzi.
Applause
in sloppy second, but with a positive seven, ahir.
Applause
and the winner with a full eight points, it's Sara.
Applause
my thanks to ahir, Sara, suzi and Alan.
And I leave you with this
sex-related sign-off from Tracey ullman.
"As I get older, I just prefer to knit." Goodnight.