This programme contains some strong language
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening! And welcome to QI,
where tonight we are celebrating 100 years of the BBC
in an episode that's all about television itself.
So for tonight's panel I'm using words the BBC experimented with
in 1935, to describe viewers of this brand-new technology.
Let's meet a telly observist, Greg James!
An opto-viser, Zoe Lyons!
I like it.
A looker-in, Richard Osman!
And...
..a bit of a glancer, it's Alan Davies!
Thank you very much.
Right, let's hear their TV tunes. Greg goes...
MUSIC: Grandstand THEME
Love that. Zoe goes...
MUSIC: Ski Sunday THEME Oh, perfect. That's good, isn't it?
I love the hip action there. Very good.
Like a mogul field. Richard goes...
MUSIC: Wimbledon THEME
And Alan goes...
# Tinky-Winky! Tinky-Winky! Dipsy! Dipsy!
# Laa-Laa! Laa-Laa!
# Po! Po! #
LAUGHTER
That's all we've got time for.
I thought I'd get Jonathan Creek!
Oh, would you have liked that? Yeah!
I was once doing it to myself in a shop and I had to stop myself.
Otherwise people will say, "There he is, doing his own theme tune!"
Right, question number one.
You all spend a lot of time on TV,
but who has spent more time on television
than anyone else in the world?
I feel like Richard's got a good shout.
KLAXON
It's good to pop your klaxon cherry right there. Yes, it is.
Is it the test card girl? She was always on when I was a kid.
You are absolutely right.
Are you serious?! Oh, wow!
Yes. Are you serious? Oh, wow. It is the most broadcast face
in the history of television. To be fair, Sandi,
I'm inside that clown costume, so that's me as well.
She's called Carole Hersee.
Do you know why the test card was there - what it was for?
Colour balance, isn't it?
Yeah, it's all about making sure your television, or the transmission
was calibrated... With Mr Clown on it!
"Yes, that's calibrated!" Yeah!
It's all the primary colours, that's the thing. OK!
All of the stuff was there for a purpose - the noughts and crosses,
the X there is to mark the centre of the picture...
I never knew that!
Who starts their noughts and crosses without using the centre square?!
That's what's always annoyed me about the test card.
It is estimated that Carole has been on the air
over 70,000 hours. Wow. That's eight continuous years.
And she is here with Bubbles the clown tonight. There she is!
Great work, Carole!
Wow.
So...questions that we have.
Where did you get Bubbles the clown from? He was a kit and I made him.
Oh!
Who was rude about the clown?
Somebody was rude...
So your dad, George, he was an engineer at the BBC.
Yes, and he was helping to design test cards.
And it was just decided that a child would be better than an adult
because there would be no fashion, no make-up to worry about.
Yeah. And it just happened to be that Dad had sent in some pictures
of my sister and I,
and the committee decided, "We might as well stick with his children."
You must have the Guinness World Record, surely, for being... No.
No? Because it's not something that's achievable to be beaten.
Oh! That sounds like a challenge. Yes.
I'm honestly trying my best.
I'm free for the next 80,000 days.
But you must have been incredibly famous.
People must have stopped you and gone,
"Where's the clown? Get the clown! Let's play noughts and crosses!"
No, not really. Oh, OK.
OK, well, where's the clown?
Let's play noughts and crosses!
But to anyone under 40, they must wonder what that picture is.
To us, it's literally like the Mona Lisa. It's so familiar.
I'm under 40. I know it. But only from, like, I Love 1977 episodes.
Are these the unused alternatives, the ones that are on the screen?
It was done in two sessions. These were taken in the first session.
Then they decided what they were going to make the picture up as.
And it was decided that the blackboard was a good foil
for finding the centre of the screen.
And did you go on into working in television?
No, I make period costume for the stage. Do you?
How wonderful. Wow. Amazing. I'm intrigued by the committee.
Yes, it's the BBC. There's always a committee.
Thank you so much for coming in!
Thanks to Carole Hersee!
Well, we're delighted to give her
a little bit of screen time on QI tonight
because, you know, definitely needs it. Right.
How does the BBC send people to sleep? What do you reckon?
The Shipping Forecast. Yes...
We did a fact once about - the BBC send out a signal
with the pips that set your Economy 7 heating working.
Is that right? Yes.
There's a frequency with the pips at midnight
and it starts off your Economy 7.
I'm going to put the elves on it and ask them,
and they'll tell me on my magic screen. I love that fact.
Oh, yes, it's called a Radio Teleswitch.
I'm going to give you an extra point for that!
Terrific. Very good.
So, there used to be a thing called The Toddlers' Truce.
1946 to 1957, there was no television at all in Britain
from 6pm to 7pm.
OK? And this was so that they could put the children to bed.
It worked really well until ITV started in 1955.
Why would that scupper having this hour break?
They could just plough straight through. But why would they want to?
To suck up... Get all the viewers. ..the audience. Get the viewers.
It's revenue. Advertising revenue.
It's all revenue, this business, Sandi. It's all revenue. Yeah.
They lost an hour of prime-time advertising.
And they filled it with Nationwide.
After 17 months of wrangling,
Parliament finally agreed to abolish it in February 1957.
We just went to bed when the news came on. Three-day week,
something about Belfast. Bedtime.
LAUGHTER
When I was a child, my father was a broadcaster in Denmark.
And television would come on at seven.
And then my dad would be sitting there. He read the news.
And he often did it with a pipe and he always had a telephone
because they couldn't afford to have filmed inserts.
So sometimes the phone would ring and my dad would answer the phone
and that went on for an hour of my dad just reading,
and then at eight o'clock, they would have a half-hour documentary
about the Queen's silver spoon collection,
and then the whole service would close down. My father was two-thirds
of all available television in Denmark. Wow. Wow. Wow.
He had a pipe during the news?! Yes! Sometimes a little beer as well.
I imagine him putting on different hats and different outfits,
little moustaches. Yeah. Like a big Edinburgh show.
Yeah. Just, "Yay!"
"Meanwhile, in Germany..."
Are you sure he was on TV?
He might have just been behind your television.
LAUGHTER
Did you know that there is a new online channel called Napflix?
Napflix? Yeah. It's for people to have a sleep.
Yeah, I really like this.
It started in Spain - they're keen on a siesta.
The aim is to be as soporific as possible,
but some of the TV programmes they show on it, I think I might watch.
There's a two-part documentary on the history of Scalextric.
Oh, yeah! I'd watch that!
I would definitely watch that. Yeah.
There's a film called The New York Subway Journey.
Oh, totally.
And there's this - footage of an oscillating fan.
LAUGHTER
So restful, isn't it?
It could send you off, couldn't it? Napflix. It's a marvellous idea.
Right, what do you get on the Blue Peter black market?
Oh! Hmm.
Milk bottle tops. Aww.
What do they collect now? There aren't any milk bottle tops.
Toenails.
The very first Blue Peter badge was awarded on the 17th of June 1963.
It is probably the world's longest-running
family discount scheme.
So you can get into over 200 UK attractions for free
and it makes them quite valuable. For a brief while in 2006,
they had to temporarily suspend the whole thing
because an online black market was discovered...
Wow. ..in Blue Peter badges. The Times' leader -
there's nothing better than a fierce Times leader - described it as,
"a knife to the national psyche".
LAUGHTER
Did you say "badges"? Badges?
Yeah. Wow! I've brought them.
I'll give you £5.
What did you get them for, darling?
Well, I got them about two years ago. Oh.
I got them just for going on.
And you get another one when you go on again.
I didn't know they got you into places. I didn't know.
I'd have tried harder as a child. Legoland, Madame Tussauds...
They're worth their weight in gold. But now you have to have
an accompanying ID card as well. Do you?
And they are meticulous in tracking every child
who's ever had a Blue Peter badge.
Tracking? Oh, yeah? Yes. That doesn't sound great.
Well, what I mean is that they have a card index.
The original producer of Blue Peter was... She's always known as
the legendary Biddy Baxter.
And when she was a child, she wrote to Enid Blyton twice,
and got exactly the same reply both times. "Eff off!"
She was so angry.
She's just casually sitting there...
With a lion cub. ..with a lion cub. I know. But she was so angry
about how she was treated by dear Enid as a child,
that she made sure every single child got an individual response.
And they still have this attitude of making sure that every child feels
that they are properly cared for.
You broke a world record, did you not, for Blue Peter?
Oh, maybe that was why!
LAUGHTER
I think it was a record for party blowers.
Sorry? The most toots, apparently.
You know, those things...
With an actual... I didn't...
It's Blue Peter, Richard!
It's Blue Peter.
It's for kids. Listen, the "blue" means something.
LAUGHTER
It's the flag - you can display it on a ship -
something about being in harbour.
The Blue Peter is a blue flag with a white square in the middle,
and it means a ship is about to leave port, so it's called Blue Peter.
Renowned, of course, for the things that they make.
Anybody remember the Thunderbirds Tracy Island model?
Yeah. I love this.
That's wonderful. Yoghurt pots, loo rolls and so on.
That's one apparently made by Anthea Turner in 1993, and she still has it.
Glued to her shoulder.
In the '80s, she had one on each shoulder, though.
Tracy Island is really my only childhood memory.
Did you make one? Absolutely, yeah.
Fantastic. The giant cowpat she's used for the centre part.
It's papier mache! OK. Then oil and brown paint.
And the grass is sawdust with PVA glue. It's green paint.
He's a bit touchy on the subject, I think. Clearly touched a nerve.
Definitely. Stand back!
My kids watched the new Thunderbirds
which is all very exciting.
And then I showed them some old Thunderbirds episodes and they were
astonished at how long it took Thunderbird 2 to launch.
Yeah. It took forever. Yeah.
The swimming pool took ages! "Why is it so slow?!"
And it rumbled out, being pulled on a bit of fishing wire by some...
The palm trees pulled over by someone else.
Whatever we say about telly, it really used to be so slow.
The company I used to run, Endemol, every year, we'd have interns
and we'd send them to the BFI to watch loads of '70s and '80s
entertainment shows in the archive there,
and every single one of them would come back and go,
"That was literally the most boring day ever!
"How did you bear it?"
As a child, I visited the Blue Peter studio.
Remember Petra, Blue Peter's first-ever pet? Oh, man.
Impostor. I'm just going to say the word.
Impostor. 1962, on the very last episode -
there's Petra answering the post - before Christmas...
That should have been a clue, to be fair.
Petra was a tiny mongrel puppy
and was introduced to the children as the first-ever pet on Blue Peter.
Unfortunately, her first appearance was also her last.
She died of a viral disease two days later.
AUDIENCE: "Awww!"
And the producers raced around London trying to find a dog
that looked like the one that had died. No! Yeah.
And they found one in a pet shop in Lewisham.
That's this one. Fake.
We had exactly the same thing with Alexander Armstrong.
Same thing.
True.
You found him in a pet shop in Lewisham?
Yeah, we were scouring the streets looking.
I thought, "OK. Didn't think to look there."
While we're on the subject of legendary television dogs,
lovely people, please give it up for Basil Brush!
Hello! Hello, hello, hello!
Look at this.
Look at this, eh?
Ooh!
Hello! I can't believe I'm on such a clever panel. This is wonderful.
First of all, Sandi... Yes? A point of order, if you don't mind. Yes.
Lumping me into the same category as dogs...
Yes. The last time I looked, I was indeed a fox.
I'm so sorry. Now I know this is a very intellectual show,
and you have those elves foraging away behind the scenes,
hunting for facts, so I have in fact, panel, brought along
a fun fox factoid... OK. ..for you all.
Right, here we go. Now, did you know
that there is a species of fox
that has evolved to have no ears?
Oh, I didn't know that. What are they called?
Well, you can call them anything you like. They can't hear you.
Boom! Boom!
APPLAUSE
You walked straight into that comedy corridor. Very much.
The real reason you're here, isn't it, is you're going to clear up
a little bit of general ignorance for us? Yes, I've got a question
primed for the panel, so brushes on Basils, please.
Just call me Sandi Foxsvig!
So where do urban foxes get most of their food from?
OK. Panel?
Yes, Greg? My bins.
KLAXON
Ugh!
Incorrect and hurtful stereotyping, if you don't mind.
OK. Shame on you, shame on you.
What do urban foxes actually like to eat, then?
Well, I'm more urbane, actually, than urban.
But we're not fussy. We'll eat rodents. Eurgh!
Worms, birds, rabbits, even fruit and berries,
if we're feeling vegetarian, like Mr Alan.
Or we'll eat all the meat if we're feeling like you, Miss Sandi.
So I'm quite happy to swing both ways for my stomach
in your back garden. Now, I've got to say...
Thank you for being present
at one of the most surreal moments of my life.
LAUGHTER
I mean, we do rummage in your bins, occasionally.
You can't blame us. No. You do throw away lovely leftovers
and, Sandi... Yes? ..if you don't mind me saying,
that grilled herring the other night was delicious.
So I'm looking forward to finding out what you're making for tea,
when I get home tonight!
So I'm going to make a quick exit to your back garden
down my escalator.
MAKES BUZZING NOISE
The one and only Basil Brush!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Anyway, to quote a phrase first used on Blue Peter,
now for something completely different.
Who made a fortune from the invention of television?
Rumbelows?
Was that a television shop?
Oh, wow. We really are going back in time. Yeah, it was.
You used to rent your TV,
and Rumbelows was... And there was Radio Rentals. I remember that.
Who can remember renting a television?
I rented a VCR.
Did you. Then it got stolen!
It got stolen in instalments, that was the good thing. Yeah!
So, who are we going to give credit to for inventing the television?
Jonathan...Sony?
The audience knows! The audience want us to say that.
Baird. Logie Baird.
KLAXON
You idiot!
Don't say the obvious one!
Which one of those is John Logie Baird?!
Ah...
That's Logie and that's Baird.
The one in the middle's Marconi.
John Logie Baird is famous for inventing the television,
in 1926, but he didn't get any success from it,
and the question was, who made a fortune out of the invention of television?
In fact, his whole relationship with the medium seemed a bit doomed.
When he was a lad, he was at Glasgow Technical College in 1906,
and he was very bullied because he had bad eyesight
by a boy called John Reith,
who would go on to become... Lord Reith!
Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC! Wow! I know!
Ohhhh!
But he invented all sorts of things.
Anti-rust razors. They were made of glass and they shattered rather easily.
Not what you want in a razor.
My favourite - pneumatic shoes
that inflated like balloons, for people with flat feet.
Yes, please. And a home-made recipe,
which I cannot find, for haemorrhoid cream.
I tell you what though, at least he made piles from that.
GROANS AND SCATTERED LAUGHTER
His only big commercial success was socks that you wore under your socks.
OK? Yeah. It's the Baird undersock.
He suffered from very poor circulation,
so he would get very cold feet,
and these socks were powdered with borax, an antifungal medicine,
and they kept you warmer and cleaner
and were a surprise hit in World War I for soldiers in the trenches.
Wow. The undersock. And that helped fund his research into television,
because he was often impoverished.
The world's first working television set was made from an old hatbox,
a pair of scissors, some darning needles,
bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest,
wax and glue...
I did that during the pandemic.
Did you? Yes.
Bit of grafting, yes.
It's extraordinary to think of television as a mechanical apparatus.
The disc there would have different lenses in it,
and it would rotate - each lens scanned a different part of the subject,
and it reflected light to a receiver, what an extraordinary thing.
The key thing about television, if you think hard about how it works, it stops working.
Yeah. I think. Because it's impossible.
How on Earth are people watching us at home?
It makes no sense. Especially as none of us are actually here.
Yeah. That's weird.
Of course, everybody knows he invented television in S...
Scotland?
KLAXON
You lead her to that. That's entrapment.
Sorry.
It does begin with S...
Scandinavia?
Is the Santa Cruz Valley in Trinidad and Tobago.
Of course!
Oh, that's the tennis racket church.
Isn't it? The famous...
LAUGHTER
A great place to go for a service.
GROANING
I mean... How do you think of these? I've been on TV a lot.
Can we get the clown up, please?
In 1919, he moved to Trinidad and Tobago,
because of his poor breathing.
Because of Lord Reith, I'll wager. Well, yes.
He decided, to make money to fund his television experiments,
to start a jam factory.
And it failed because it was absolutely besieged by insects.
They stole the sugar and got in the jam,
but it is here that he made his initial television prototypes,
and he successfully demonstrated the very first black-and-white television in the world,
in 1926.
There he is, demonstrating. The very first colour, 1928.
Infrared television as well.
Transatlantic broadcasting, and even 3D television.
The first electronic television,
and the other person who could probably have as strong a claim
as Baird to the invention of television is an American called Philo Farnsworth.
He looks terribly pleased with himself.
Doesn't he? He looks like a successful man.
"Hi, I'm Philo Farnsworth."
He just looks American. Yes. I've nailed this shit.
Independently came up with the idea in a chemistry class
when he was just 15 years old. It's extraordinary.
So was better than the mechanical,
the rotating discs, which Baird had invented.
There was a patent dispute to say that this man could not possibly
have invented this television,
and his old chemistry teacher found the drawings he had done
when he was 15. No! Wow. And he won the patent.
Along with a cock and balls beside it. Yeah!
"Mr Smith is a twat". Yeah!
LAUGHTER
Who bought nine apartments
just to fill them with their own TV shows?
Nine apartments? Yes.
So we're going back to videotape, back to videotape. Ah, OK.
So, a tape collection.
Yes, and it's astonishing.
It's a woman you've probably never heard of.
She was called Marion Stokes. And she's a legend in television.
She was born in 1929 in Philadelphia.
And, inadvertently, she collected the only comprehensive archive
of American TV news from the late 1970s to 2012.
Have you heard of her? No, it's amazing. It is astonishing.
She began on the 4th November, 1979, the Iran hostage crisis,
and she started recording the news on a VCR.
And her son said she hit record and she never stopped. Wow.
She's a phenomenal woman. So this is her, co-producing a show
called Input in 1967, about social justice.
She was an amazing person and she chronicled Fox, MSNBC,
CNN, C-Span, CNBC, and all of it became
a sort of family obsession.
They'd have to interrupt dinner to change the tapes.
She just carried on. She filled 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes.
Wow. My God.
Every minute of US television news from 1979 to her death in 2012.
She had to buy nine apartments to store them in... "Had to"!
"I better get another apartment."
"Marion, will you just stop it?"
LAUGHTER
I never learnt how to use my video player,
and to this day I'm really pleased about that.
Cos...useless now, innit?
I was right just to wait.
Just go, "Yeah, eventually YouTube will come along
"and all of that knowledge will be absolutely useless."
So, winning.
What I remember about VCRs, I had a dog called Bompy,
and he would just shag anything,
and I was once at the home of the founder
of the Born Free Foundation
and Bompy shagged the VCR machine.
LAUGHTER
He didn't get stuck in the little flap?
I don't believe it worked again. Anyway... Cos once they're engaged,
you know, they can't withdraw.
The barbs come out and then you're stuck there.
Oh, ow! You have to press Eject. Yes.
LAUGHTER
Sometimes there's a long bit of tape that remains.
"Oh, no, the tape's fucked! The tape's fucked!
"Gentle, gentle! Don't pull it, don't pull it!"
I can't believe I'm on a show
where Basil Brush has lowered the tone for everybody.
Anyway, she was able to buy all these apartments, Marion Stokes,
because she was an early investor in Apple.
And she made an enormous amount of money. Good noise!
Cos you never had that opportunity, did you?
On Twitter once,
I questioned how Frasier manages to have that incredible apartment,
and all the stuff that he has,
and one of the writers, Joe Heenan, said, we all sort of assumed
that he had invested very early in Apple.
In the writers' room, that was our get-out-of-jail for how much money he had.
Because he was just a radio host on local show.
You would think he'd make no money at all. Yes, exactly. Excuse me?
LAUGHTER
So of course, in the predigital age, all television networks
constantly taped over stuff and wiped discs in order to save money.
The most significant loss, which is incredible,
is the loss of the film of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What?
So images beamed back from the moon were high-quality,
but converting them for TV was complicated,
and it degraded them, and that's why we get this rather familiar
grainy look that we have today.
NASA did tape a raw high-quality tape for future use,
and then lost track of the tape.
NASA!
One of the only surviving pieces of evidence
that we actually have is a still photograph
of a screen displaying the much cleaner picture, so there he is.
That is Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the moon.
We do have a nice, crisp picture of an astronaut here.
Who do you think this is?
Peake?
It's my dad.
Oh, no! See, I knew he had a costume!
You can't do all that news by yourself without a costume!
1969. "Today they landed on the moon..."
Is there a little hole in the thing for a pipe?
Yes! Anyway...
What do dogs like to watch on TV?
Other dogs, I reckon.
If I'm driving in the car with my dog,
he loves to see other dogs in cars. Yeah.
They do that thing where they have one paw on the window, like...
Yeah.
And then he's a Jack Russell and he gets that look in his eye.
"Dog! There's a dog! Dog!
"You want some? You want some?
"Yeah, jog on."
Any other thoughts? Basil, have you got any thoughts, darling?
Yes, I'm glad you brought me back up there.
Yes. How about The Great British Bark Off?
KLAXON
Oh!
Dogglebox?
Yes, yes.
Or Gogglefox!
Even better. Dogglefox, hello.
Any more? Have you any more? You'll like this one.
Have I Got Chews For You.
KLAXON
I'm quite good at this. OK. Any more? The Chase?
LAUGHTER
KLAXON
OK, you stay down there now, Basil.
Ooh!
That was my spare hand.
Honestly, it's like a sort of bad dream.
They don't even have hands!
I know! It's very confusing.
So - what do dogs like to watch on TV? - was the question.
Humans need a minimum of 16-20 frames per second
in order to perceive what we think of as a continuous film.
Dogs need about 70 so, historically, films were presented
at 24, 25 frames per second, so to dogs it's like
a sort of series of flickering images,
but in recent years frame rates have increased on TV.
So, for example, sports programmes are up to 60 frames per second,
but we think of the original films, which are 25 frames per second,
as much slower, as classier.
We think of Casablanca and all those films as being classier.
And recently they've shot big-screen films
like The Hobbit in many more frames
and people have said, "Oh, my God. It looks like a soap opera."
So people just don't think it's classy.
Yep, people complain that the better quality it is,
the less quality. Oh, hello!
Oh, I didn't know what that was. It's a remote control.
LAUGHTER
He's going to get that stuck in the VHS player in a minute!
Where did soap opera start?
Anybody know? America.
Yeah, and...? They used to advertise soap in-between segments.
Quite right. Daytime radio.
The idea was to sell soap to housewives listening
while they did their housework.
Procter & Gamble, in fact, set up their own recording studio
and started to produce their own shows. The mother of all soap operas
is Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins.
It was an American radio show sponsored by a laundry soap,
and it starred this woman, Virginia Payne.
So in the story, she ran a lumberyard.
It ran from 1933 to 1960, and she played Ma Perkins
in over 7,000 episodes.
Wow! I know. That's amazing.
That's three days' work for me!
LAUGHTER
Why did the BBC hold out against soap operas for a long time?
They did. Cos they're shit!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I mean, I must say
that "returning dramas", as they're called, just wiped out
the early-evening sitcom, which is what I grew up with. Yeah.
The sitcom that was on pre-watershed, there was always one
on about half seven. Yeah.
Are You Being Served or something would come on,
and that was what you used to watch.
And now it's just been replaced...
Serial dramas. ..by kind of pseudo shit drama.
LAUGHTER
I'd love it if your agent gets a call from EastEnders tomorrow.
"Is Alan interested?" "Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think..."
"I'll put Mr Davis on the phone."
And this comes on six months later. They're like...
LAUGHTER
Because they couldn't flog soap?
For the BBC, they couldn't sell advertising? Yeah.
No. It was they thought it was crass.
I'm afraid they had the same opinion that Alan had. They were right.
But in 1941, they launched something called the Front Line Family,
and they did it on the radio in order to try and persuade
the Americans to come into the war.
So it was on the BBC North American Service, and the idea was to see
an ordinary family in wartime conditions. There's people dealing
with the Blitz, people dealing with rationing, men going off to war
and so on. And the BBC executive
wrote, "What we are trying to do is to drag America into the war."
And that was the whole point of Front Line.
It was a massive success,
and let's not forget, of course, The Archers, which has been running
since 1951. Here is an astonishing fact...
June Spencer - played the character Peggy in the 1950 pilot -
is still doing so 72 years later. She is 102.
And still... Wow! I know!
You'd have thought they'd have finished the pilot by now.
I know!
LAUGHTER
I hope, Sandi, she's not under the desk as well.
Yeah!
Dogs will happily tune in to any TV with a high frame rate.
They'll also watch the National Lottery,
but only if it's a rollover.
AUDIENCE GROANS
What morally dubious activity takes place
while people are watching TV?
Judging people while pulling the fluff between your toes out.
Is that you watching TV, Zoe?
And then making socks out of the fluff that's come out.
I always feel like
if I'm eating a packet of Wotsits during MasterChef,
I think, "Oh, come on." They're making this beautiful stuff,
and you're going, "These are delicious!"
I do like those. They're lovely.
Oh, yeah, they're great. Frazzles as well.
Oh, I've not had those. You haven't had Frazzles?!
You haven't had Frazzles? No. Greg, should I try them?
They're, like, take a breath!
You can't believe it, can you? She's never had a Frazzle!
The things we've been through the last two years and that was...
It's like bacon, but kinder.
I like bacon. A Quaver?
Oh, I don't like Quavers. Oh, come on!
They're delicious!
What's the matter with you?! Who likes Quavers?
AUDIENCE "Yes!"
Oh. That was more than a third.
That really had the feel of a 52/48, didn't it? Yeah!
Who likes Quavers...and Brexit?
SCATTERED GROANS
Quavers for Remainers.
So, the morally dubious thing.
2002, the head of Turner Broadcasting System, a man called Jamie Kellner,
he accused television viewers
who ignored or fast-forwarded through ad breaks of being immoral.
He said that that's the contract you make with the network.
If you watch a show, then you are also going to watch the commercials
because if you don't, you're actually stealing the programme.
Urgh. Yeah. He did say
a certain amount of tolerance is allowed for going to the bathroom,
but only if you really need to go.
Quick related question - why is Seinfeld so much shorter
than he used to be?
Is it something to do with pixelation changes?
No, but I like that you even said the word pixelation! Thank you!
No, it's to do with the speed that the programme is played,
so what they worked out is that they could put
more commercials in if they played the whole show faster.
So since 2014, repeats have been speeding up by 7.5%
in comparison to the original broadcast shows.
That gives them an extra two minutes of ad space.
And now... The commercial half an hour used to be 25 minutes,
so there'd be five minutes of ads. Now it's 19 minutes.
It's the same show. They're just playing it way faster.
Wow. They should try that with the old Thunderbirds. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
BBC's never carried advertising, but it still needed programme breaks
so they used what were called "interlude films".
Anybody remember The Potter's Wheel?
Oh, the Potter's Wheel, yes.
They also had that penis that rose right up....
..to fully erect and then went down again.
I think they only played that once.
"Wrong tape, Nigel! Wrong tape!"
"You didn't put that out, did you?"
"I don't think anyone noticed."
So what they used to do between shows,
they used to have idents or moving logos.
Remember this one? This was the bat wings one.
Let's have a look. Remember the bat wings? No.
They were proper physical objects that moved
and, in fact, this one was so delicate it only lasted
for as long as it was filmed, then it completely collapsed. Wow.
The one I remember is the globe. Remember the globe spinning? Yes.
That's my era. That and Jon Pertwee. OK.
HUMS DOCTOR WHO THEME
BLOWS RASPBERRY
You couldn't even pause it!
It just went on. Stop it! Stop it! "We can't stop it!"
Anyway, it's tiny. We have it here.
Right down the front. It's the real thing? It's the real thing.
We've got the clock as well, which is absolutely tiny.
And I don't know if you remember the moving lines,
which was the BBC Two logo for a very long time.
We've got all three here and they're absolutely tiny.
Those are all the real ones right there. Wow.
To be fair, Sandi, if they'd done the globe actual size...
Yeah.
"What a waste of the licence fee!
"The BBC have made a planet."
What size would you have liked it to be?
Well, I don't know. Beach ball? Yeah!
Open it up, fill it with Frazzles. Lovely. Done.
LAUGHTER
Now, do not adjust your set as we transition
from the frothy glitz of prime time to the gritty post-watershed drama
that is General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
The first BBC TV broadcast was on November the 2nd 1936.
How long do you think it was till they started showing repeats?
Mm? I'm going to go...the next day.
KLAXON
I'm going to say the same day.
You would be right. Yeah.
Immediately afterwards?
The very first broadcast was called Opening Night.
It started at three o'clock.
Speeches from BBC and government officials,
and then a few variety acts, and that was all transmitted live.
But there were two competing television systems at the time.
So there was Baird's, John Logie Baird, remember,
and then there was Marconi.
So that is John Logie Baird's television there on the left,
and that one is a Marconi one, where you had to sort of watch
it in a tilted mirror like this.
And there was a coin toss to decide which system would transmit first.
And Baird won - the afternoon variety show was broadcast on his system.
And then after a very brief pause, the entire cast and crew switched
over from Studio A to Studio B, and the same programme was repeated
in the evening on Marconi's system, the one on the right.
So the second-ever BBC programme was a rerun of the first!
And the third one ever was a rerun of Top Gear.
LAUGHTER
The first BBC repeat came long before Dave, and can I just say hello
to all Dave viewers watching tonight, where this episode celebrates
200 years of the BBC!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
What is the world's longest-running TV show?
Coronation Street must be up there, Sandi.
KLAXON
There it is, right up there.
The longest-running sitcom is Last Of The Summer Wine, I think.
Isn't it? Great show.
Did you like that? Loved that show. I watch it every Sunday.
I don't think it's on any more, Greg. Where are you watching that?
I've got nine apartments' worth of VHS tapes.
LAUGHTER
Is it a British one or where are we going? It is British.
The longest-running show ever in the history of telly
is a British show?!
It's an annual event. Is it the Queen's Speech?
We're heading in the right direction.
It's the Lord Mayor's Show from London.
Ahh! It's so disappointing when you get the answer.
Especially if the answer's that. Yeah!
The parade is over 800 years old.
It originated in the 13th century.
And the BBC began televising it in 1937.
Wow. That's just one year after they launched their regular service.
And it has broadcast every year since, apart from World War II.
So there's been a total of 77 instalments over 85 years.
It makes it the longest-running television programme.
Do you remember on the horse racing they used to have a Citroen
with a camera on the roof, driving alongside? Yes! Yes!
It's like early GoPro, isn't it?
Yeah, really early GoPro! You need a Citroen.
It's driving alongside the horses and the bloke...
There had to be a bloke on the top as well!
An absolute health and safety disaster now!
"It's all right - I'll go on the roof with it!"
Probably started out the window.
"It's terrible out the window! I'm too low!
"We're going to put it on the roof!" "Are you mad?!
"It's not even a proper road - it's a horse track!
"They go fast, you know, they're doing 40-odd!" "It'll be fine!"
"Holy shit!"
Just get on the car and go...waaah!
Why would you not just sit on a horse with a camera?
Oh, yes, that's so easy, Greg, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
The cameras are the size of the horse!
Strap it to his head! Strap it to the horse's head...!
They've got to keep up with pure-bred racehorses!
This poor bastard carrying a camera and a man!
I'm just offering solutions! I like that, Greg!
The car was a better idea! The car was a good idea.
It was just profoundly unsafe. Insanely, madly unsafe.
Inevitably, the driver was pissed. Everyone's always pissed
at any races after lunch! The driver's drunk,
everyone was drunk, Greg, in the '70s! Yeah.
All the time!
Another solution - another jockey on the back of the original horse,
who's trained in horses, train them up as a camera operator.
They're filming behind on the other horse.
Good idea, but what if the horse with the camera
gets ahead of himself? Yeah.
He sees the finishing line and thinks, "I can have this."
LAUGHTER
is just an empty screen
as he moves away from the horses.
"Jesus Christ, he's good! Look at the speed of him.
"He's filming it and everything!"
What you need to understand, Greg, is he's waited 50 years
to get this off his chest.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The longest-running television show began production
hundreds of years before television was even invented.
What colour is radiation?
Oh, no... Ooh! Green.
Brown.
It's see-through, isn't it? I thought it was see-through.
It's mostly invisible, colourless. It's not a colour!
You can't ask what colour something is if it's invisible! Well...
"What colour is it?" "It's invisible!"
LAUGHTER
We've reached the point in the show
where Alan's medication has worn off.
LAUGHTER
It's just kicking in.
It is commonly depicted as green in popular culture.
That is the point. But it is not green.
There is something called Cherenkov radiation... Sure.
..that is seen in water-cooled nuclear systems,
and that makes the water glow, but it's blue. OK.
And not green. Didn't I say blue in my list?
No. No. Second row, "No, you didn't, mate."
I don't think...
Probably the reason that we think that it glows green
comes from the use of radium paints in the early 20th century to make
luminous watch dials.
Did anybody have one of those watches?
Yes! Putting the light out - "Ask me the time!
"Ask me the time! Quick! Quick!
"It's gone!" I'll tell you a really terrible story.
My brother and I spent a lot of our lives growing up in hotels,
and we'd have a hotel room and we used to play this game
we called the sock game, right? Because it was just the two of us.
Oh, Jesus, Sandi!
We would turn the lights out, roll up a pair of socks,
and we would throw it at each other.
And if you hit the other person, you got a point.
And I always, always won.
And on his 50th birthday, I told him it was because I could see
the luminous dial!
LAUGHTER
Wow.
Still cross with me after all those years! Rightly so.
Yeah, quite right.
And I think on that note, it's high time for the scores.
I don't believe it!
In first place, with minus four, it's Richard!
APPLAUSE
AS BRUCE FORSYTH:
to see her nice, it's Zoe!
APPLAUSE
AS ALAN SUGAR:
you're fired, Alan.
APPLAUSE
AS ANNE ROBINSON:
you are the weakest link, Greg.
APPLAUSE
But...he foxed it up completely,
in last place with minus 20, it's Basil Brush! Thank you!
APPLAUSE
All that remains is for me to wish the BBC a very happy 100th birthday,
and to thank Greg, Richard, Zoe, Alan and, of course, Basil!
Thank you!
Here you are, sweetie.
And I leave you with the words of David Frost...
"Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained
"in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home."
People like us. Goodnight.
Say goodnight, Basil. Goodnight, Basil!