APPLAUSE
CHEERING AND WHISTLING
Oh!
Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-ood
evening, good evening!
Welcome to QI
for a show that tonight is all about gardening and groceries
and it's BOGOF night at QI -
four comedians for the price of two.
Cutting the mustard, it's Rob Brydon.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And taking the biscuit, it's Dara O'Briain.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Spicing things up is David Mitchell.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And playing ketchup, it's Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
But erm...
before we head over to the garden to turn over the first sod,
let's hear your buzzers. Rob goes... TINKLING
Dara goes... TILL KERCHINGS
David goes... SHOP BELL TINGS
And Alan goes... MAN: Pound a punnet! Pound a punnet!
Come on, love, got a couple of juicy ones 'ere, go on. Pound a punnet.
Thank you. Thank you.
So let's get off to an easy start.
What tools do you need for do-nothing gardening?
Er, no... no tools.
You'd think. It's also called natural gardening or natural farming.
It's an Eastern version of our organic farming
that has actually spread around the world.
You have to dig with your hands? Or persuade animals to do it for you.
Yes, persuade other animals. So you persuade a fox it doesn't want a den but a rockery?
Well, in the case... You get some fish and they desperately dig a pond before they die.
Well, fish is right. In paddy fields, they use ducks instead of herbicide.
They eat the weeds and the throttly things that kill the rice
and they use carp to help purify the water in the paddy fields.
This is like having a goat, in the nicest sense.
It's like having a goat but now the goat has been usurped.
Because the wallaby is being introducedin larger numbers
in Britain because it makes a good family pet and eats the grass.
It's more fun than a goat - more intelligent.
Better than that traditional family pet, the goat?!
Well... Yeah. Surely not!
Surely all those Christmas mornings where children go, "It's a goat!"
Its' true. I read about it in the paper.
The who breeds them says he's never been busier.
Ooh! Because they hop over the fence and run away.
You do have to have a very high fence, that's true.
You can electrify the top of the fence.
Because they are just gripping animals, aren't they? Wallabies?
That's a koala, surely?!
They're not big climbers, famously.
They're bouncers, basically. I don't mean in the sense of nightclubs.
They are of the bouncing animals.
Yes. As opposed to the gripping onto animals.
You blinded me with your biology talk!
Yeah, he's a man called Masanobu Fukuoka -
responsible for do-nothing gardening.
He invented seed balls. Are you familiar?
You make a ball out of clay, mud and various nutrients
chuck it around and it seeds.
You throw a load of seeds and some mud in a ball and then just chuck it.
And leave it there to grow? More or less!
And that's preferable to just putting some seeds...
Yes! >
You chuck it where you want it to be, obviously.
But you use far fewer seeds. It's much more economical.
Is it for planting things that were difficult otherwise to reach
from the other side of lava or something?
Surely you could just walk to the point at which it would land and just plant seeds there.
It's if you want hanging baskets but you haven't got a ladder.
So you get a basketball player and a seed ball...
Exactly. Game on.
Plus there are seed guns.
Are you familiar with the seed gun?
I'm guessing you take a seed ball
and put it into a large gun-like device
and you just shoot that mutha!
Thank you. Thank you for giving us the pre-watershed version.
Actually, it is... Gang talk!
I'm the acceptable face of gangsta rap!
There on the left is a seed gun.
It is literally a seed ball-type mud thing made in the shape of a gun.
ROB: Why would you do that?!
Imagine you were citizens of Richmond, Virginia.
And your murder rate has gone up so far, you're casting about
for some way of suggesting peaceful uses of guns.
So, you make a mud gun with seeds in it to plant flowers of hope.
Flowers arrive up in the shape of a gun.
Surely, that's... That's promoting a gun.
You could have a gangsta rapper thinking, "I'm trying to put the guns behind me."
Then, he sees the flower bed and thinks, "A gun, what a great idea."
ALAN: And how convenient - a bullet tree!
Turn your swords into ploughshares or the famous '60s image
of the hippy putting the flower down the barrel of a tank.
But guerrilla gardening is a similar thing.
Guerrilla gardening is where people take random patches of land which they don't own and garden on them.
Yes, exactly. Thank you. That's not confusing to anyone!
Did you hear me say guer-rill-aa!
That's compounding the problem for young people watching
who for years have been thrilled by the words guerrilla warfare!
Watching the news, half the time they're telling you about
the gorillas going extinct and then about the guerrilla fighters killing people!
I'll be quite glad when the gorillas are extinct, actually!
Sending the wrong message, isn't it?
In America, there were problems where people were growing cannabis on that kind of land
land on the edge... on the ramp onto a motorway.
Land you couldn't normally get to, people would use that land and grow cannabis.
You'll be disappointed to hear one anonymous guerrilla gardener planted 3,400 marijuana seedlings
in the grounds of the Californian estate owned by Rupert Murdoch.
That's tough(!)
Very irresponsible, isn't it?
There's a lot of guerrilla-ing about. 3,000 plants.
It's extraordinary. It started, supposedly, in 1973 in New York.
Vancouver is one of the places it's really taken off because
a load of compost was dumped in the street my construction workers
and a local inadvertently emptied all his bird seed onto it.
It flowered so extraordinarily that now almost any spare piece
of land is used as a garden in Vancouver.
It's a good thing, isn't it?
But, I've got some props for you,
which is more connected with the principle of the gentleman gardener,
which was a familiar 18th and 19th century pastime,
to be a gentleman gardener.
Have that or pass it on. There you are.
And on your side... Isn't it exciting to have props?
Physical, actual props. There you are.
I can see where we're going with this, yes.
So who's going to go first? Everybody's been given fascinating devices
and I've been given a bottle with the top cut off.
That was designed by George Stephenson, of the Rocket fame. The first locomotive.
And it's to do with the garden? It is. He was a very keen gardener.
What did he make most money out of, that or the train? I think...
I think the train was a bigger hit. Right. But he was a keen gentleman gardener.
I bet he was really tedious and wouldn't talk about the train in interviews
and would insist on talking about his bloody bottle. I fear you're right.
"It's the work I'm proudest of."
Yeah but it's crap, it's just a bit of glass with no top.
ALAN: It would protect seeds.
Sunlight, I think, is an important factor. The sunlight.
Cos we've got glass and what can glass do? It can magnify, Stephen, can't it? It can, Rob.
We can do fraction with it, can't we? Yes, or refraction.
Refraction. Whatever, whatever, doesn't matter.
Let's not get bogged down in that. That was silly, I'm sorry.
Oh, hello.
Well, you've found out...
It's a saw. It is.
For a gentleman gardener.
It's got a concealed serrated blade. You won't get this through customs.
You could hijack a plane with one of these.
I can't make it work, though. It'll only go that way.
That's how you start the stroke. It won't go back again.
Have you ever used a saw? Yeah. I don't think it's designed for exercise books.
No. There is that, too. David has a point.
It's for the gentleman farmer...
No!
I want to saw something now.
I... I just want to say...
These have been lent to us by the Garden Museum... It works!
It works, look. Oh, look at that. Oh, my God.
APPLAUSE
I tell you what...
LAUGHTER
I really wish they hadn't made this set out of asbestos.
Brilliant.
That is... That's a very good invention.
It's for the gentleman who's walking along and he sees an overhanging limb of a tree
or limb of a person, for that matter, and decides...
Oh, no!
What have I done?
No!
That's... Oh! It's only plastic. Yeah, I know.
And see if you can tidy it away, class. See if you can do that.
My clever psychology.
Let's see if you're clever enough to hide that saw.
Brilliant. Well, that was great fun. Have you got any more?
Well, David, what about yours?
Yes, I... I don't know. It's like... Yours, actually, is missing a piece.
The Garden Museum, to whom we're very grateful
for lending us these incredibly valuable artefacts...
This would've had a sort of hat to make it like a walking stick,
a sort of leathern thing around there.
So you hold it like that... You hold it as a walking stick
and then when you see some obtrusive weeds, and almost like a golf club, you...
Just a little hoe. You just hoe. Yeah. A little hoe. Yeah.
Not in the street sense it's used in the United States of America.
Which is the sense I usually use that syllable in. Yes, naturally.
So, talking of hoes - Rob.
SHOP BELL TINKLES Oh! That's... Oh, hello.
Sorry. A fly landed on my buzzer
and I tried to use my little hoe and...
My little hoe. It's a new sort of toy for children.
What's your little hoe for? I have no idea, other than I think it's something to do with light.
It's not bad. It actually forces a shape. What sort of shape would something in there be?
Oh, a vegetable? It would have to be a straight vegetable.
Is it for cucumbers? It's for growing straight cucumbers.
Points. And I've mended my walking stick. Yes!
Points all round for Alan Davies. APPLAUSE
There you are. That thing up there, though, Stephen,
it may well be for cucumbers
but that picture is very similar to a spam email that I get sent.
And I have to say, I'll tell you now, don't waste your money, it doesn't work.
Dara, what have you got? I am guessing that you put a mixture of seeds in of different sizes.
Indeed. Cos there are holes of different sizes.
Then if you know what size seed you need, you sprinkle it,
in the most effete gardening way imaginable. Yes.
While actual gardeners would be going, "Oh, well done, m'lud,
"that's really top quality gardening you're doing there."
"Yes, it is."
"I'm rather exhausted now. I may have to go in and have a cocktail."
"I've got a fit of the vapours from my gardening."
So do-nothing gardening is small-scale organic farming with minimal inputs.
Guerrilla gardening is prettying up the 'hood and a jolly good thing.
Now, before we move on, we'd like you to draw now...
You should have a card if you haven't sawn it in half!
We'd like you to draw the world's first novelty teapot.
ALAN COUGHS AND SPITS
Alan?! It all went... Draft in here it turns out.
What did I ask you to draw?
The world's first novelty teapot!
You were listening! That's very good.
It's gone out that side. When you asked me it was still in the middle!
Get drawing. The world's first... You mean reinventing one?
Or there is one we should know about?
This is nice. I like it when the class get on with their pieces.
Busy and quiet. The teacher sits at the front texting her friends!
Do you know that rhyme, I'm a little teapot short and stout,
here's my handle... Oh, bugger. I'm a sugar bowl!
LAUGHTER
How are you doing? Is everyone ready to show yet?
David, you look as if you've finished. Yeah, I'm very pleased with it!
Is it an Indian goddess or a crab?
It's a novelty teapot.
Oh yes! Sorry!
I thought they have a lot of tea in India and their vague goddess is a bit like that.
The best bit... The business end of the teapot is the spout
so someone might have invented one with lots of spouts.
You have to pretty much surround it...!
That thing on the front that looks like an ear is the handle.
Does it come with a cream to treat scalding and burns?!
No, but it came in a society in which the burning of various members of it
was not considered important by those in charge.
Good satirical point!
What have you got Rob?
I've come up with a thing called Handy Tea.
So, it's a teapot... All jokes aside, this could be a goer.
The finger is cocking a snook to authority, that'll appeal to the youngsters.
But the rest of it... And I've called it Handy Tea.
Which finger....? The thumb. No, unless it's the left hand...
..which has got five fingers!
You're absolutely right, yeah!
It's not anatomically correct.
Contents may differ upon delivery!
Anyway... But there's something for everyone there.
DAVID: It's very wise of you to have signed it.
If you hadn't, I'd have nicked that idea.
I'd probably leave the recording at this point to capitalise on it.
Dara? It's supposed to be an Egyptian character.
Oh, yes! I thought you wanted something historical.
The Egyptian character is doing the traditional hieroglyphic thing
but it pours out of the top.
That's very clever. Unfortunately, I can't draw Egyptian clothes so I've put him in a small tuxedo!
And a dicky bow as if he's on the way to some black tie event.
Maybe the opening of a pyramid.
And you've not only signed it but put a copyright symbol notice.
Just in case that isn't the correct answer.
Superb. Can I just say to David, I've also copyrighted.
You have to put the date if you copyright something!
Do you think I should copyright mine or...? I wouldn't rush!
Save the ink!
Alan, what have you got?
I've done a bloke with a beak...
It's a long, tall pot. Oh, yes. You can fill the feet. That's his arm.
And then it'll all come out of his beak.
His baseball cap is the lid.
The only drawback is you'll need long, thin teabags.
I think that's going to be a hell of a difficult thing to clean.
You shouldn't clean a teapot. You don't clean a teapot, David!
Under no circumstances?!
Provided you only put tea in it! If it's used as a teapot.
If you came in and couldn't find the loo one night!
Only a hunch but I sense a hypothetical situation...
This is not a hypothetical situation. I've only ever used a teapot for tea.
But occasionally if you make tea in a teapot once in a blue moon
in a vague attempt to seem more civilised that you are.
You've still got a bit of tea in it... Oh yeah, you rinse it out.
No, you don't rinse it out because you forget because you're tired
of being civilised and want to go to the pub.
You leave it there for weeks and and months.
When you look in it, it's gone disgustingly mouldy.
And it's talking to you!
At that point, the flavour you would get if you didn't wash it
from your next cup of tea is, if anything, too characterful.
What do you think the first novelty teapots might have been in the shape of?
You've probably seen them, they've become very popular.
A Toby jug or something?
Not quite that so much as cauliflowers and pineapples and things like that.
That's the classic sort but that was very early - Queen Anne's time.
Early 1700s. Mine's much better than that!
Yes, it probably is.
Anyway, we probably ought to move on.
Now, where's the best place in the world to discover an entirely new species?
The National Geographic channel.
That... may be. They're at the forefront.
Do you think you might spot something on the edge of shot
that the documentary makers haven't?
"They're going on about that monkey but that's a totally new caterpillar."
What about the Amazon rainforest, where they discover new things all the time?
ALARM HOOTER
Kent. Yes! That would do.
Kent? Kent would do. Basically, your own garden. Oh!
You may say, "There's nothing new in my garden,"
but you would be amazed.
In 1971, Jennifer Owen, a biologist, did a very long-term study
of her ordinary garden in a suburban house in Leicester.
She discovered 533 species ichneumon wasp - just that family of parasitic wasps.
15 of these had never been recorded in Britain,
4 of them were completely new to science.
In a suburban garden.
So in your garden, if you have a garden, there will be things.
Gilbert White, the naturalist, said that nature is so full and so varied
that if you want to find the place with the most variety, it's the place you most study.
It almost doesn't matter.
Just take a piece of land and look at it hard enough,
you will see things that... I'm still going rainforest, I'm sorry.
Yes but you'd have to travel thousands of miles, you'd have to park... Park?
Yes... Cos everyone knows it's a nightmare, parking.
I'm worried that my brain let me say that. "Where am I going to park, with all these trees?"
The congestion charge drives up the cost of research. Nonetheless...
How did she catch these wasps?
Did she put a jam jar with jam in it and a little hole they can't get back out of?
Cos that's what we do in our house. Do you?
Every wasp likes a bit of jam because it's sweet. They love sugary things, as do I.
You know when you find a bee and it's crawling on its last legs?
I rescue them. You give it honey.
The only thing they eat. Makes sense when you think about it.
Yeah! Yeah!
No point just talking to it. Give it honey.
They're very much a one-recipe species, aren't they? That's all they eat.
I'm intrigued because I generally give it the sole of my shoe
but er... you know.
Not to be harsh but you know...
You tread on a struggling, crawling bee?
What? As opposed to rehabilitating it?
I like honey, I have it on my porridge, you murderer.
Yeah, but... We depend on bees. We need the bees.
OK, so in future I should lure the bee back...
I'm sorry, do I get a syringe of honey? A tiny amount?
How do I feed a bee? Get a teaspoon of honey, leave it with it.
Don't tread on it. Should be a criminal offence. You should be arrested.
You should be locked up. You know where? In a hive.
Isn't it true, though, that a bee, in its entire lifetime,
makes an absolutely tiny amount of honey overall? A minute amount. It's just that there's lots of them.
So you don't have to give much rehabilitating honey to this bee
before the nation, the world, is making a net loss.
LAUGHTER That's true!
But they're not... If you only get one teaspoon from a bee's lifetime,
and to get it back on its feet. it takes a teaspoon and a half,
suddenly there's no honey at all.
This is more honey than this bee has seen in its life.
Yes. You're insulting it, apart from anything else.
It's like showing a very tired mason a whole cathedral.
Well, may... APPLAUSE
Well... Let's say that you're in between Alan and Dara.
So like Alan, you want to help the bee, give it honey,
like Dara, you also want to kill, kill, kill.
What you can do is you get what I would term too much honey
and you see the bee and you pour molten honey... No!
Hear me out. All right, OK.
And then you watch him die a slow...
Yes, I carry on with "No!"
Yes, I've now heard you out. Yes? And it's no better.
That's from the both of them. That's worse than what I did.
You're being humane, are you? Yeah, I am.
You're getting a kick out of it. I'm not drowning the bee ironically in honey.
You can't drown bees.
"You want some honey? How much honey do you want? Is this too much honey?"
Not so keen on the honey now, are you? After your lifetime making honey.
You may try and drown bees, Dara, but I will follow you...
I would never drown a bee!
He's a bee-drowner!
If there's a bee in a bath
I don't then go, "Right, get the shoe!"
Your murder is based on circumstance.
If there's a bee that looks as if it's on its way out,
and going, "Drvzzz, drvzzzz, drvzzz"...
The Swiss surgery of bee-keeping, are you? Essentially, yes!
You're trying to give them dignity. Dignitas for bees.
Dignibuzz!
It's what the bee would have wanted!
Very good. Well, thank you for that er...
interesting, fierce and, I think, productive debate.
I feel pleased with that. We're going to move on, now.
The best place, as you didn't quite point out,
to find a new species of plant or animal is in your back garden.
Who finds garden gnomes attractive?
I do. And it's lovely... It's lovely to get the opportunity to admit it in public.
Good. Yeah.
Phwoar, look at that... ALARM HOOTER
APPLAUSE
We knew you... We knew you too well, Rob.
We knew that an Ann Widdecombe gnome would immediately appeal to you.
The bikini's a little bit too small for her.
There's a little bit of overhang there.
But she's had a Brazilian which is thoughtful.
I hate when it goes out... Vile.
The sprouting gnome is not a good thing.
When did gnomes first arrive in British gardens? Do you know?
1922. Bit earlier than that, actually.
1847. And there was a strange man called Charles Isham, who was a vegetarian spiritualist,
who believed that putting ornamental garden gnomes into a garden
would attract real gnomes, that was his sad...
Did he wish to try and kill real gnomes?
No, he wanted to commune with them. Did he want to trap them?
He said, "Seeing gnomes is not mental delusion,
"but extension of faculty."
Right. It's lovely being clever when you're mental.
Yes.
This man, Charles Isham, he introduced 21 porcelain gnomes,
of which one still exists and there it is - the original garden gnome.
It's been insured for some £1 million.
The red cap, which is a feature of all gnomes, it seems -
and you may think there is a family resemblance to that chap and Doc
or one of the other dwarves in Snow White And The Seven Dwarves -
and they were based on this idea that German gnomes or dwarves
had these red caps because they were miners
and German miners wore red caps.
There were in Wastwater in the Lake District,
there were, at 48 metres, there were a whole load of gnomes set deep down for divers to look at.
Three people drowned trying to go and look for them,
so the police took them away.
And the gnome garden was put back at 50 metres this time,
just 2 metres deeper,
and the police didn't take it away.
Can you imagine why that would be?
If they took it away when it was 48 metres and three people drowned, why would they leave it?
Maybe it's a visibility thing. Good effort, but no.
It's too far for the police divers.
The police health and safety people won't let them dive that low,
so the police couldn't recover them from that depth.
That is... That is funny, actually. It is funny.
It somehow is.
Can you imagine, though, if you're able and you don't mind the risk,
why would you choose to do it in a place where instead of seeing a coral reef
or the fantastic wonders of the deep, all you can see is manky old gnomes?
I think the idea was that the lake was incredibly dull
and that people who were practising diving, it was to make it brighter and more interesting.
I've dived for a few years.
Most places are a long way, away in hot countries.
You have to fly and stay in hotels. If you want to dive here there's really very little to see.
In the dive centre in Leicester, there's a big quarry,
and they've put an old aeroplane in it and a bus. Yeah.
Of course, in Scapa Flow there's a scuttled German fleet for you to go and investigate.
Yes. Chilly. A bit chilly. At the end of the First World War, wasn't it?
The allies were all arguing about who were to get this fleet
and we wanted the fleet because we had the biggest fleet...
And Mummy said, "If you're going to argue, no-one will get the fleet."
I didn't know that we sunk the French fleet. We did, yes.
That was much to the annoyance of Charles de Gaulle
but it stopped the Germans getting it.
Also, you don't get many opportunities to sink the French fleet.
So when the French fleet is just sitting there and it's not going to return fire,
you kind of go, "It's the French fleet, it's just there! I've got to sink it.
"Never mind that we're at war with Germany, it's the French fleet.
"We will kick ourselves."
Where was the French fleet when this happened? I think it was off the coast of Morocco.
Why not sail it to England?
We said, "Sail it to England," but the French sailors refused, as they always will.
And option B was, "Let's just sink the boat, then."
Was it not explained to them that the only other option was...?
The third option was to drown them in honey but we couldn't get...
couldn't get enough honey there in time, so...
Yeah. A black chapter amongst many other black chapters
in that sad, melancholy period of history, the war, but er...
On that... On that... melancholy note,
the man who brought garden gnomes to England
did so in the hope of attracting real gnomes to his garden.
Why do American farmers, gentlemen, hate Shakespeare?
There's a picture of American farmers hating Shakespeare.
Something to do with Shakespeare caused immense trouble for American farming.
It's not Shakespeare's fault at all.
Not some farming practice that's hidden away in the sonnets?
It was an eccentric drug manufacturer called Eugene Schieffelin.
And he decided that America should contain examples
of every bird species named in the works of Shakespeare.
And one particular species didn't exist in America... Ah!
..and he thought, "Oh, I'll introduce these," and he introduced 100 to Central Park
and there are now estimated something like 200 million of them.
It's not the common pigeon, is it? No.
They come in huge flocks. Geese, ducks... Starlings. Starlings is the right answer.
They don't like them because they eat the seeds?
They eat everything... Would they eat a seed ball or seed gun though?
If you point the seed gun at them, I think they'd fly away.
What they do is, they befoul everything that they don't eat,
they're in such huge flocks, vast flocks.
I was on Brighton pier one time and they have lots of starlings there
and at dusk they do that, and it's really amazing to watch. Yeah.
And someone said that starlings come from hundreds of miles away
to join in... The flock. ..this coastal flocking. Yeah.
And they come from as far away as Germany and Poland.
A lot of the Polish ones are coming over here now and taking away the...
a lot of the British starlings' jobs.
You'll see a lot of the British just sat on the prom going, "Bloody typical."
But they're lazy, British starlings - they don't want to work.
They could and join in but they won't, will they? Typical.
You're right. The flocks are up to 1 million, some of them,
I mean, enormous flocks.
And are they just having fun or is it a way of eating?
No, in the case of fish, I know, what they're really doing is presenting an enormous fish
that sort of glistens and frightens some predators
and in other cases, it confuses and dazzles
and they're a lot safer... Starlings are basically scared of sharks
and a shark may leap up at the West Pier...
You may laugh, but when was a starling last killed by a shark?
It works. You're absolutely right. It's 100%...
"It is 100% proven that this shall keep us safe from sharks. Come on, boys."
Voom! And they're like that. So, good, excellent.
Starlings were brought to America in an attempt to introduce all the birds in Shakespeare to the US.
They're now a major pest.
Which is correct of these?
It's grocers' apostrophe. Why does this annoy people?
They're all right. Of course they're all conceivably right.
Oh, is it that obvious? It's a way of asking whether you care about apostrophes.
The grocers' apostrophe is... They put them where they shouldn't be.
They put, like, "potato's" and put an apostrophe there or something.
This doesn't bother you, does it? It doesn't bother me. It bothers me. It bothers some people.
It's not like genocide. People get incredibly annoyed and they form societies
for the protection of the apostrophe.
There's one in Dublin, I don't know if it's a grocer,
but it's G-R-O-C-E-R and then there's a comma and then the S.
And you're going, "You knew something had to go in there.
"You knew something had to go in there but you couldn't..."
And it's like... It looks like a dead apostrophe.
It looks... LAUGHTER
But this guy had printed the sign.
He'd obviously written out
and gone to a sign-printing company, who went "All right, whatever."
You'd think one of the requirements of being a sign-printing company
is having a basic knowledge of where an apostrophe goes.
They know, I'm convinced.
All sign writing companies know, for example, how to spell accommodation.
They must do. Yes!
I reckon they say, "OK, we'll do a sign for your guest house.
"Would you like our normal service
"or our deluxe, five times the price service, where we check the spelling?"
Everyone goes, "We're not going to pay five times as much for you to check the spelling."
They go, "OK. We're going to paint the word accommodation the way you've put it there,"
in the knowledge they'll have to get called back all the sooner
when the people realise they've got it wrong.
Every time you see "accommodation" properly painted and misspelt,
the sign writer knew.
He put it up there wrong knowing he'd get a repeat gig.
You can see how long he's been looking for a flat, can't you?
There are very few situations in which this is vital.
Rarely will you run in and go, "Where are the grocers?"
And they go, "Well, there's only me." "But your sign implied there was more than one."
Exactly. Exactly. You're so right.
"I'm looking for three grocers." "Yes, that's the minimum I need, not just one."
People have been ridiculing what's called the grocer's apostrophe since the 18th century.
The Oxford Companion To The English Language notes that "there was never a golden age
"in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe
"were clear-cut and known understood and followed by most educated people." Never.
So some people have, like Birmingham, abolished the apostrophe. I read about this.
Now, are there any places in America where they have an apostrophe?
They have places that are called Something's Creek. Yeah.
Dawson's Creek. Yeah, for example.
Only five places in the whole US have an apostrophe.
One you might have heard of, it's well known,
it's a tourist resort on the East Coast, very upmarket, in New England.
Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard.
That has an apostrophe and there are four others.
Dave's Vineyard.
Martha's Garden, Martha's Kitchen...
There's Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
There's Ike's Point, New Jersey.
The captions are nowhere near where the places are, as you can see.
John E's Pond, Rhode Island.
Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona.
Clark's Mountain, Oregon, and those are the only ones.
So everywhere else, they said, "Don't bother with the apostrophe, it's confusing,
"makes it not look like a place name." Yeah. It would seem so.
I wouldn't bother with "Carlos Elmer's". Joshua View works fine.
Why do you need Carlos Elmer's specific view of Joshua?
Let's get Joshua up, let's have a look at him.
We don't have to take Carlos Elmer's view. It's a fine view of Joshua.
Anyway, there you are, that's enough apostrophe-ing.
Many people are annoyed by punctuation errors in signs
but for others, grocers are at the forefront of the evolution of language.
How can you be sure that an apple isn't actually a pear,
without tasting it or opening it up?
Are some apples deformed into a sort of pear-shaped way?
There are round pears. That is a very pear-like one there.
That's clearly a pear, I think, but there are round ones.
Is it that you can't do that twisting thing with an apple?
I think pear stems do tend to come off more quickly
but there is an interesting way and that is... Ah!
Ah! Ah! One floats and one doesn't. Which one floats?
Apples float. Apples float. Bobbing for apples, exactly.
This had better work. I'm going to be so embarrassed if it doesn't.
ALAN: Oh, it's like Brainiac.
Whoa! Float! Wow, it's gone really big.
It floats. Wow! Why is that?
A pear. That's a weird looking pear.
Erm... How dare you?
That's wrong.
OK.
Ooh...
Ah! Success.
There you are. Erm... APPLAUSE
Yep, it seems that the pear is denser.
It's odd. You think of them as sweeter and lighter
but actually, they're structurally more dense.
You may try this at home and get a floating pear
or a sinking apple. Don't go to a greengrocer...
Yes. Please don't write in. Write to the British Apostrophe Society.
They'd love to know.
So if someone invites you to play a game of pear bobbing,
basically, they're trying to drown you, yes.
Walk away!
Up at Ullswater, they did pear-bobbing at about 50 metres, I think it was,
but the police decided not to do it, it was too far for them.
Invited by a load of strangely dressed dwarves to go pear-bobbing.
But oddly enough... Oh, I'm going to put this back down.
Oddly enough, the oldest variety of apple in England is called a...?
Granny Smith, Bramley, Cox?
No, a Pearmain.
That brings us onto our next question.
I went to the supermarket and all I wanted was a loaf of bread
and some milk and I came back with a small jar of truffle oil...
a pot of organic anchovy... I remember that day. Brilliant!
LAUGHTER
And a flagon of fermented essence of Vietnamese sucking goat and a small curly-headed chap.
All I wanted was bread and milk.
Early onset dementia, Stephen. That's what it is.
They're with how they put things in aisles and catch you out.
You end up with a Swiss roll you had no intention of buying!
There's a huge science to the placing of products.
There's a thing called the Gruen transfer.
Victor Gruen was considered the father of this whole business.
Apparently men buy things from higher up.
They're also more likely to pay more.
So, everyday things that women are more likely to buy are at 3-4 feet,
the more expensive premium goods are higher up.
The men will pluck those, "Yeah, that's the most expensive, it must be the best."
Cos we're stupid like that!
And women will say, that's a good price, I'll get that.
And they play different music because you're price sensitive
at different times of the day.
It's more sedate in the afternoon
but by before they close they speed up the music
in order to make you shop faster.
And also the people go, beep, beep, beep, quicker
as the music develops a beat.
DAVID: Start playing the Crimson Tide music.
People shop like their lives depend on it.
We're all victim to this.
I like to think of myself as an independently minded person
I've gone into these shops wanting four things and come out with 20.
They make them look nice, then you go home and enjoy them.
It's not like you go, "This is just tar!"
Why the hell did they make me buy this. It's still a packet of biscuits.
"Thank God I bought that nice packet of biscuits, I'll have that now."
There's an element of that.
..as if they've been foisted upon us. "Ha, ha, ha. They've bought our tar biscuits again!"
Take all the good things off the shelves, only tar from here on.
That's enough about that.
Shops have a number of tricks in order to trick us into buying things we don't need.
When you've fallen for them, you're the victim of a Gruen transfer.
And now it's time for five items or fewer of General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers.
What are trees made of? SHOP BELL TINGS
Wood! Is the right answer.
Yes, well done! APPLAUSE
You were lucky!
You see? And what is wood made of?
Erm... Er...
Carbon? Yes.
And where does the carbon come from? The earth.
The earth? Yeah.
ALARM SOUNDS Oh!
No, you'd think what makes up a tree was drawn up from the soil in nutrients... It's air, is it?
The vast majority of everything that makes a tree a tree comes from the air, yeah.
Photosynthesis, which breaks down the air, and leaves the carbon
and that's the carbon in a tree, so it is made of carbon.
But it's quite surprising, isn't it? Good.
What makes Australian spiders so dangerous?
It's their cunning and their organisation, Stephen.
The fact they're willing to put the man hours in. Yeah!
They will stalk you for weeks,
they'll look for patterns in your behaviour
and they'll strike when you least expect it.
Just as you're hovering over a poorly bee,
holding a shoe high,
one'll come and bite you in the bum.
You mean the spider is working with the bee? Yes.
The bee is saying, "There's not much longer left for me, we'll have a bit of fun here, come on, bite him."
So is it that they sort of hide in loos?
Well, not deliberately
but the only real danger they seem to threat these days
since 1981, when antivenoms were introduced all round Australia...
There are two very poisonous types, the redback and the funnel-web.
The redback's very common. Is it the reaction, the way people...?
No-one has died from a spider bite since 1981, no-one in Australia,
but people have been in accidents, which have been fatal some of them
and have caused enormous damage,
from spiders that have dropped out of sun visors in cars
and people have gone, "Uh!" like that and then crashed.
So that's their danger, now, not their venom.
And so it's time for our guests to reap what they have sown.
I'm going to have a look at the old scoreboard.
Oh, my goodnight.
It's a tie for first place, ladies and gentlemen.
That hasn't happened for a very long time,
not since all round here was green fields.
Erm...
And in first place it's the two Ds with three points each,
Dara and David!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Congratulations.
In a very... In a very creditable third place, smelling of roses still,
at minus 6, it's Rob Brydon.
APPLAUSE
And going down to the bottom of the garden to eat worms,
with minus eight, is Alan Davies.
CHEERING
Ah, dear.
So that's it from Rob, Dara, David, Alan and me
and I leave you with a quotation from Eric Morecambe.
"My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower
"and I told him of course he could,
"so long as he didn't take it out of my garden."
Thank you and goodnight.
APPLAUSE
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk
www.tvsubtitles.net