APPLAUSE
CHEERING AND WHISTLING
Well!
He...llo, there!
Hello, there, hello, there, hello
and welcome to QI,
where tonight we'll be looking at all manner of hoaxes, hokum,
hucksters and hogwash
and to help or more likely hinder us,
a veritable horde of hornswogglers.
With ten top tips to increase your manhood, it's Sean Lock.
- APPLAUSE - Thank you.
And joining him,
the esteemed president of the Bank of Nigeria, Danny Baker.
APPLAUSE
By his side, professor of hoaxology at the university of the internet,
David Mitchell. APPLAUSE
And believe it or not, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Now, in keeping with our theme tonight,
one of our buzzers is a hoax,
so see if you can tell me which one of these buzzing calls is not the mating call of a deer.
Sean goes... DEEP ROARING NOISE
Danny goes... ROARING
David goes...
AGONISED ROARING
And Alan goes...
- SCOTTISH ACCENT: - "Hullo, dear!"
Now, starting as we mean to go on, we've actually hidden...
- Is it Alan's? - Yes, well done.
I thought it was Danny's. I was going to say Danny's, right up to...
Now listen, you've got hoax cards here, jokers to play,
because, in keeping with the theme, there will be one question which is a hoax.
You play your hoax card and you get extra points.
If you play it and it isn't a hoax, you lose points,
but don't have your hoax cards unspent at the end of the game.
- What happens? - Well, I'm not going to tell you.
Can we play them more than once?
Er, you could, possibly... No.
- Oh. - I don't think this format has been worked out in enough detail.
You should have decided whether we can play them more than once, that's crucial.
I was being generous, it was foolish.
For the pilot of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,
did somebody go, "And if we get one wrong, that's OK, is it?" "Yeah, that's OK.
"Oh, hang on."
How many lives do we get?
Can you just do it or do you have to say something?
You could say, "That's a hoax," that would count.
- You can't just go, "I did that, you just didn't see it." - No.
You have to make it manifest. Oh, God, I had no idea this whole thing would be so complicated.
I don't know about you, but I'm doing it on the first question, then none of us lose out.
If we all do it, we all lose points and then it's just done.
LAUGHTER
We don't have to spend the show going,
"Use my hoax card?" What do you reckon, guys? You in for that?
We're all going to say yes, but we're all going to not really do it.
- It's game theory. - I might use it, but when I'm using it, it might be a hoax.
Oh, no!
I can see I've made a terrible rod for my own back here.
Well, erm, anyway, let's see what happens.
There's some characters behind me, shifty looking characters.
What were they up to last night?
This isn't a hoax.
They were all definitely up to something last night.
- Thank God we didn't do that plan. - LAUGHTER
Were they cottaging? They were cottaging.
LAUGHTER Sean Lock!
They were all out cottaging, it was a really touch night's cottaging,
and they go, "We need a pint after that."
They were brewing.
They were up all night making a picnic table.
LAUGHTER
Before you get too insulting, they're in the studio tonight.
I just thought I'd warn you.
- DANNY: - They were winning the Mr Handsome contest. - That's more like it.
Were they harming horses?
You know when people harm horses, slash horses?
- No! - Do they slash...? - But it was a night-time covert activity, like slashing horses.
- Goats. They were slashing goats. - No. Let's...
Let's assume we wouldn't invite into the studio people who maim animals.
Were they pretending to be gas men
and thereby stealing the property of aged people?
LAUGHTER
No. If I told you that this was in Wiltshire, would that help?
Cathedral stealing.
LAUGHTER
Grave robbing. Grave robbing's always...
They drew something rude on Stonehenge.
- They drew something rude on Stonehenge. - Crop circles! - Oh, Alan, well done.
Crop circles. Absolutely right. APPLAUSE
There they are.
The equipment needed for crop circling, a plank with rope,
but what was the crop circle we commissioned them?
- A QI symbol. - A QI crop circle and they did it for us
- and it's rather impressive. - QI is run by aliens.
- Would you like to see it? - I certainly would.
- Well, let's have it. We went to the expense of having a travelling aerial shot. - Oh!
MUSIC: "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner.
- What do you think of that? - Hoax!
- We did! - That's real? It looks like the Led Zeppelin cover.
Oh, you've failed, I'm afraid, it was real.
Almost within half an hour of it being completed and the dawn rising,
we were contacted by people...
Someone wanted to know, "Is it real or is it man-made?"
To which the answer is... Er, both.
I ask that about sandwiches all the time.
But it's a rather marvellous example of a breed of phenomenon
that has been going since when?
- Is the farmer here tonight? - We recompensed the farmer. It doesn't actually do much damage.
How many mice were frightened in the making of that?
- We can't tell. - I bet this is older than we suspect.
- It's actually very recent. - Is it? - It is, really, yeah.
- '80s? - Well, '70s it began and it got more and more refined.
- There was a man called... - Like Pizza Express.
There were a couple called... Yeah.
Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted that they'd been responsible for almost all of the crop circles.
They used to be on the news every summer.
There would be aerial shots
and people called cereologists believed these were the work
of people from outer space
or from magnetic forces from ley lines, all kinds of nonsense.
They'd do things like they'd do a crop circle and leave a couple of scorch marks,
from where the engine blasts off back into space.
Where are our three here? Is that John Lundberg?
There you are. There's John.
Can you tell me how you did yours?
What's the most technological item you need?
We need a stalk stomper, which is a plank of wood and a loop of rope
that you put under your foot to flatten the crop
and to mark out the design, you use surveyor's tape,
so they're very simple techniques and very simple tools.
What about your spaceship? What spaceship do you use?
I'm saving up for one but the fee I got for this, it's going to take a while.
So how many do you do a year in the season?
Er, we don't say how many we make,
but we've made hundreds over the years.
And are there still those who refuse to believe that it's all hoaxers like you?
- They've been ringing your production office. - That's right.
Are there people who've ever thought that graffiti on train lines was done by aliens?
- It's as logical. - Yeah.
- Well, the lines in the Nazca Desert, which are... - Very good.
The Nazca Lines, which they say can only be seen from space, which is not true. There they go.
- SEAN: - Yeah, we can see them from here.
LAUGHTER
The great fraud Von Daniken who wrote Chariots Of The Gods and all those books in the early '70s,
he said they were runways for ancient space crafts.
And Carl Sagan said, "Hang on, these people come millions of light years across the universe,
"and they need runways? What, are they in B-52s?"
What do they need runways for?
I've been there, what's extraordinary about that place, it's one of the driest places on the planet,
in Southern Peru, just above the Atacama Desert,
and because of this man Daniken,
people came from far and wide on motor bikes and they churned the place up.
Some of these are only about 10 centimetres deep, the lines,
and they've stayed like that simply because it hasn't rained for decades,
and centuries in some parts in that part of South America.
So every line you can see around there is some hippy who's gone.
It's now banned, going there, but they're splendid.
If they're not very deep and they've stayed because it doesn't rain,
maybe the people who made them didn't want them to stay that long,
they were just pissing around and would be rather embarrassed.
The same way as, you know, if you were on the beach at night, bit pissed, you write the word "dick".
Imagine you went back 2,000 years later and it was still there,
you'd be mortified. People were sort of worshipping it.
LAUGHTER
That's absolutely right.
- John Lundberg, thank you very much indeed. - Thank you.
There you are.
In the States, it's quite popular, not as popular as here,
- but the second biggest crop in the States is marijuana after corn. - Really?
Yeah, in America.
In certain states in America, there are huge areas of it.
It's very difficult to know how to get rid of it. Sorry?
The cauliflower is in decline.
Is it? I like cauliflower.
- I love cauliflower. - If you wanted to please me,
- make me a cauliflower cheese and I'd be a happy person. - Very well. - Thank you.
It's gone down from 33,000 acres to 28,000 acres in Britain.
Really? Very good!
- Has there been a decline in demand for cauliflower? - Yeah.
- People are stupid, aren't they? - They are stupid.
They don't know how to cook it, they think it doesn't taste of anything because they boil it and it doesn't.
Also, if you break off a bit of cauliflower and look at it.
- A floret. - A floret, it looks like a tiny albino tree. - It does!
I so agree.
If you're on a low-carb diet, you can mash it and it's a good substitute for mash.
- SEAN: - I do it, I like to do it.
I like to do it in a bin with loads of other rubbish all round it.
And it all piles up round there and then you leave it out
and the magical men take it away in a van.
- LAUGHTER - I've never opened the fridge and gone,
"Oh, there's a cauliflower in there!"
I've always opened it and gone, "Christ, there's a cauliflower in there, we have to cook it."
There's always the bin.
- DAVID: - That's how I react to a rat.
"Oh, Christ, we're going to have to cook it."
I do like it, but it's a pain. It's a pain in the neck, isn't it?
I don't think I've ever seen how it grows, is it the centre of a plant?
- What, cauliflower? - Yeah.
You are an urban boy. Could we have one conversation, rather than three?
- LAUGHTER - You have to cook it twice?
You have to cook it twice! Cauliflower? You have to...
You cook it, boil it, then put it in another dish and cook it again with the sauce.
It's a nightmare.
- LAUGHTER - It's such a demanding vegetable.
It just wants so much, it's all about time. It wants to spend time with you before you eat it.
Well, thank you, Nigella.
LAUGHTER
Anyway, yes, far from being proof of a more intelligent life form,
crop circles can be made using a plank of wood, some rope,
a couple of coat hangers.
But conversely, would you believe that they put a man on the moon?
- Who? - NASA.
Oh. NASA. Yes, I believe so.
- You believe that? - I believe it, yes.
Good. That's all. That's the end of the question, really.
- But you probably know that a lot of people don't believe it. - I sort of believe one thing.
- Uh-oh! - Yeah?
I kind of believe that they might have done some mocked-up fake photographs.
Really? Why?
Because someone convinced me of it...
- Yeah? - ..by talking about the angle of light and the shadows.
But then I did an advert with Patrick Moore,
and I said, "So, Patrick, did they land on the moon?" and he looked so annoyed.
He explained how he had helped map the moon for NASA
and the landing site was partly his idea
and if I ever spoke to him again, he was going to be sick in my eyes.
It... They are rather tired of...
Buzz Aldrin might have punched you.
- Buzz Aldrin punched someone... - Did he? - ..because he got so tired of these conspiracy arses.
Actually, I think it was a television documentary about...
There have been several.
"This photo couldn't possibly have been taken on the moon.
"It was obviously taken in a studio."
You've got me started now but there are a lot of conspiracies.
6% of Americans believe that man didn't land on the moon
but 25% of Britons believe that they didn't, a quarter of our nation.
- So we're... - Not convinced, apparently. - That's so depressing.
The flag. It's one of the things I read...
The flag is another thing, yes. There it is.
Well, obviously, they've starched the flag so they could get a good photograph of it.
They haven't stiffened it. It's rumpled.
There's no breath of wind out there, obviously, cos you're in space,
which is a vacuum.
What there is, is movement. If you impart movement to something, it doesn't stop for a long time.
There's no resistance against it. So they unfurled it and it moved back and forth.
People said, "Ah! Breeze!"
As if, A - they would be stupid enough to fake it
and allow the take that had the breeze in it to go out.
But if you went to the moon,
the least you'd expect is a flag moving a bit strangely.
You know what I mean?
You're expecting to meet the Soup Dragon. "OK, he's not there."
The flag moves a bit strangely... I can go with that.
Why isn't one of them holding up a camera?
The one taking the picture is reflected in the visor of the other and he's not holding a camera.
- Like that, you see. - Ah. - That's because they didn't put the camera up in front of their visor.
- They were mounted. - You couldn't imagine them getting a camera out.
Click, winding it on with gloves...
I will just say though, in defence of the people who suspect there might be something afoot,
- the track record of the American government in terms of deceiving its population... - Yes!
- ..isn't great. - Ah, but... - If you were a little bit dubious, I wouldn't blame you. - No, Alan,
400,000 people were employed on this thing, plus the 12 astronauts,
and if the Americans have a bad record on doing covert things,
but a worse record on getting found out.
The president can't keep a secret of where his penis is!
Do you seriously think that they would...?
Look at Clinton there, you know.
If they can't even keep a secret of banging an intern in the White House...
Well, no. And of course, in the old days, she would have just disappeared.
LAUGHTER
But she didn't, and we know what Kennedy got up to, it's just...
I tell you one thing, I think NASA killed Michael Jackson.
- That's a fact. - Right.
I do, I believe they killed him because he died last summer, yeah?
He died in about July last year.
He died the same week... It was the anniversary of the initial moon landing, of the first moon walk,
right?
- LAUGHTER - They resent the fact that anytime anyone puts "moon walk" into Google,
it comes up with him sliding backwards with a hat on.
And not the billions they spent going up to do a moon walk.
They hated that and they killed him.
LAUGHTER
And I believe that's a fact.
I don't think NASA would get organised to kill him,
but I think it might have been Buzz.
Cos he's clearly a very angry man.
He's gone to the moon, it was pointless.
People don't believe he went there.
It was pointless.
Of course he's going to kill someone.
LAUGHTER
- I'd like to go to the moon. - Would you? - I'd love to do that.
Two other things, in case people are saying, "You haven't mentioned the clincher."
One was the idea that below the lunar module that landed
there was no crater or sense of disturbed dust.
The fact is, the engines cut off and it hovered down
and it very quickly landed.
And unlike in science fiction films,
it doesn't send out spears of flame as it descends.
That just didn't happen.
And because it was designed by geniuses
and not people tapping away at the internet who've got to go to work in the morning. Who do you trust?
We are in trouble as a species
if people refuse to believe in things they couldn't actually do themselves.
So true! That's so true. The other one was the footprints.
"There's too much moisture because look how clear they are,
"only caked mud could do that."
But you can do that with flour. It's very fine ground
and it's a vacuum again, it coheres.
And the other thing with the mirrors that Apollo 12 astronauts put on the moon,
which are now used for bouncing lasers off
for detecting, for example, how far the moon is away from us.
You can make incredibly accurate measurements
because of mirrors on the surface of the moon.
Perhaps for me the clinching one is that America's enemy at the time,
in the space race, was the Soviet Union and not once did they suggest that America hadn't done it.
- They never said, "No, we know this was hoax." - Yeah.
The fact is, for every ill-conceived argument
that the moon landings were a hoax, there's an explanation to put our minds at rest.
Now for something closer to home.
How would you make your house the most famous house in Britain?
- That's easy. - Yeah?
You murder lots and lots of people, dismember them
and bury them in the garden.
- That... - Marry the Queen.
- You marry the Queen... - Yes?
..and you say, "No, love, you're not living in those palaces any more."
You're living in 3 Ironside Crescent, Carlisle.
OK. Those would work. Those would work.
Some sort of spectacular suicide?
- Mmm... - I suppose the murdering people would work better which I think is sad.
- But this... - Like in the film Up, you tie loads of balloons and your house goes...
Oh, that would be sweet.
This was a bet that took place in 1810
between Samuel Beasley and Theodore Hook,
that Hook could make any house he chose the most famous residence in London
in one week.
He had a week in which to do it.
He prepared over the week,
- but it all happened in one day. - I've heard of this. - Yeah?
He started ordering goods, all kinds of different goods.
4,000 different tradesmen and services
in all the commercial directories all over London.
He ordered chimney sweeps.
First thing in the morning, there were 12 chimney sweeps arriving.
And then more and more and more and more arrived.
It became absolutely gigantic.
12 coal carts, there were cake makers, doctors, apothecaries, surgeons, lawyers,
- priests... - We've all done this, haven't we?
..hat makers, haberdashers, boot makers, butcher's boys,
a dozen pianos arrived.
The governor of the Bank of England turned up to see what the fuss was about.
It was in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street,
and er... There it is.
- That sign doesn't fit that bit of wall. - It doesn't really.
I suppose if they put it the way it would,
- you'd have to read it in portrait... - It's back to the drawing board.
- They've got that all wrong. - Or just chill out about the whole thing.
- You'd have folded it round, mate. - Yeah, that'd be nice.
HE CHUCKLES
- So it's like going on the internet and ordering the lot? - Yes.
- I'll have everything. - Exactly.
And the poor woman, whose name was Mrs Tottenham, was besieged.
- So he didn't live there? - No! He chose...
He just chose this house. That was the point of the bet.
"I can make that house, 54 Berners Street,
"the most famous house in London."
- They used to have great bets. - People don't make bets like that any more.
In the Regency period, in the early 19th century,
particularly in the clubs, Brooks's and White's in St James's - staggering bets.
£3,000 bet between Lord Alvanley and a friend of his,
on which raindrop would get to the bottom of the...
And £3,000 in those days was... It's almost impossible to imagine.
You could have a servant for £10 a year.
You know? So, I mean, £3,000 is an estate, it's a country house with thousands of acres.
This is how bored people were before television.
Basically.
Theodore Hook bet a man called Beasley
that he could make 54 Berners Street the most famous house in London.
What conclusion did the great biologist Stephen Jay Gould draw
from a lifetime's study of fish?
- Oh. - Yeah? - They haven't got any legs.
Is that his lifetime's study?
- No. It wasn't a study of - a - fish.
- He was... - "After a while, they smell."
He was a bit thick and he just stared at them and went, "They haven't got any legs."
Starfish don't have brains. It's the Louis Walsh of the aquatic world.
They don't have brains, they're starfish.
And they're not really fish, to be honest.
The word fish is in there, which qualifies them, I think.
Is a starfish a fish? Is a jellyfish a fish?
Is a cuttlefish a fish?
- Is a seahorse a horse? - But the starfish...
There's a division, isn't there, in the world
whether it should be down to experts in biology whether things are fish
or whether it should be down to menus?
- Yes! - For example, a crayfish comes under fish on a menu...
He looks like he's reading the sell-by date on that fish.
- The small print. Is that him? - Yes, he's dead now.
He won the Nobel Prize, he was a palaeontologist and a biologist
- and he came to the conclusion, which is? - They can feel no love. - No, that they...
That there is no such thing as a fish.
Fish has no biological meaning.
- There is just... - So I'm absolutely right. Go with menus.
But on a menu a fish is not the same as shellfish or seafood, is it?
It often comes in the same bit and separate from puddings.
- Things that live in the sea. - Fish and pudding are different.
How can something not be something?
Something can't be not be not something.
If you've created a something, then something has to be that something
otherwise you haven't created a something,
so it has to be a fish if there is the idea of fish in the first place.
I swear there's a philosophy lecturer somewhere who said...
That's an ontological argument. Of course, we use the word fish.
But biologically speaking, a salmon is more related to, say, a camel
than it is to a hagfish.
Like, there are lots of things that fly.
A bumblebee flies, a vulture flies and there are flying lizards.
They're not all birds
but we call things that swim in the sea fish
and actually, biologically, evolutionarily,
they have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all.
They are more closely related to us than to each other.
- A friend of mine claims to be allergic to all seafood and fish. - Right.
Is that possible?
Freshwater as well as seawater?
Yes, so everything from a prawn via plankton to a trout is a no-go area,
he says, and I think he's just fussy!
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
Some people say, "Oh, no, I'm terribly allergic to shellfish",
then order scallops cos they don't know it's shellfish.
They eat it and they're fine.
Nobody ever says they're allergic to starters, do they?
What do elasmobranchs taste like?
It's basically sharks and things like that...and rays. Manta rays and things like that.
Rays can be very tasty.
- Oh, yeah. Skates. - Skates, lovely.
Skates with black butter and capers - wow! Stop it at once!
So after a lifetime's study of fish,
biologist Stephen Jay Gould concluded there was no such thing as a fish.
And while we're at it and under the sea, how many fish are there in this photograph?
That's got to be a trick question by the way you set that up.
Oh, yes...
Well, given that there's no such thing as fish...
CLAXON SOUNDS
APPLAUSE
That's so unfair!
Stephen Gould, where are you when I need you?
Deeply unfair.
- Well, you see that shell on the right... - Yes.
..along the top of it is a long, fish-like thing with an eye...
that's actually part of the shell.
This mussel actually makes a thing that looks like a fish so that another fish
comes along and its own parasitic larvae explode into the fish and live in its gills
and are dispersed and grow. We've got some film of it. This is it.
The two eyes of this thing that looks like a fish...
- Ew! - ..and this puff of larvae go off into a fish that looks like it might be a tasty morsel,
but it's just bits of flesh that have grown up on the top of the...
- That's clever. - It's very clever.
There was just one fish, the other example was of animal mimicry deployed by the broken-rays mussel.
So from one skilled hoaxer to another...
What did Nostradamus get right?
The hat. The hat. He got the hat right. The hat's good.
The big, big mistake - the green coat with the brown hat.
It's crazy. The hat looks cool.
- Who is he? - Have you not heard of Nostradamus? - I've heard of him. I've no idea where he lived.
His name was Michel de Nostredame. He lived from 1503 to 1566.
He was a Provencal apothecary
and he did many things, including writing hundreds of quatrains,
these four-line verses.
Were they deliberately obtuse?
I'm aware there'll be headlines on it,
but why were they so obscure?
He was a mystic and I suppose he... Who knows? He got drugged up
and he just wrote down a four-line verse of whatever he saw.
- He was a chemist. - An apothecary.
- He had access to all kinds of crazy hooch. - Exactly.
- So he published a book of, essentially, gibberish. - Yes.
- And a lot of idiots... - Because even the people now
who said, "That predicts Hitler or that predicts 9/11,"
would think, if you'd bought that in 1530,
that's not good value for money
because all the things it's predicting won't happen for ages
and so what it is, then, is nonsense.
In fact, it's only ever any use to predict something just after it's happened.
Yes, because then people go, "Wow."
But one thing he did do that is genuine and this was the question,
is he did a fantastic recipe for cherry jam.
He read other books and one of the books he read was about jams.
And his cherry jam recipe, we are assured today,
- is still as good as it ever was. - Really?
That is the thing Nostradamus did that is provably, demonstrably and repeatedly true.
He also made aphrodisiac jams
made of sparrows' brains and all that sort of thing.
- But generally speaking his cherry jam... - Was a triumph. - It's something he got right.
- I might make some jam... - Yeah.
- Why not? - Know what you need? Fruit. - Sugar. - And sugar. - Pectin.
No, I'm not going to make nice jam.
- Fair enough. What sort of jam are you going to make?
- Horrible jam. - There could be a market in that.
- Cinnamon sticks... - Sean's horrible jam.
You don't know what I've put in this stuff.
It's up to you. Lottery jam, I call it.
Sean's Bingo Jam!
One jar in every hundred is AMAZING!
The rest of the time, it's instant vomit as soon as you open it.
Anyway, yes, when Nostradamus wasn't predicting stuff,
he was busy compiling a rather excellent collection of jam recipes.
- Now? - Who's the most famous person to have been beaten... Hello?
Do you think that's a massive hoax?
Yeah. Hoax.
JINGLE PLAYS Oh! You're wrong.
Oh.
Davies, you idiot!
That was entirely true. David's... Got your's left, you've...
- No, I did mine. - Oh, well. Anyway.
It was too late, the question had finished.
No! No, no, no.
- It was too late. - You stopped me.
So who was the most famous person to be beaten by a machine at chess?
- You get double points if you can name the machine. - Me.
- Are you the most famous person? - Yeah, I got beaten by a Hoover.
- Is that right? - Yes.
Somebody left it on and it moved the pieces around and it still beat me.
That's how bad I am at chess.
The key thing in the question is not most famous chess grand master.
- It could be Marilyn Monroe or... - It's not a famous chess player?
No. Very well worked out.
- There is... - The Queen.
- Garry Kasparov, the great grand master... - He lost to... - Deep Blue.
- But that wasn't... - The Queen is the most famous person in the world.
Did she lose to a ZX80?
This was someone who was more famous than the Queen in his day
and was bigger than a Queen, as it were!
Had a higher rank than queen.
Jesus.
Jesus...?
Jesus isn't really a rank.
He's famous, though, Jesus.
- It's a rank. - "I am Jesus."
- "I outrank you!" - He's more famous than the Queen, though.
- Yes, that's true. - You can't handle the truth.
Jesus Plays Chess sounds like an indie band
or it will be.
- Napoleon. - Napoleon is the right answer.
Do you know what the machine might have been? Famous in its day.
- Was it some sort of clever wind-up automaton? - It was an automaton
and it was unbelievably clever.
It was called the Mechanical Turk
and the Turk was made of machinery
and you would open the doors, rather like a magician, showing it was empty,
though in fact, there would be a man inside who was a chess master.
He would manipulate the machinery to make the Turk pick up and move the pieces.
So it was a genuinely astonishing piece of machinery
that unfortunately burned in a fire in 1854.
Napoleon rather fancied himself at chess
and of course, being Emperor, I daresay nobody ever dared beat him,
so he was extremely annoyed to be beaten in 19 moves
by this machine.
So, yeah. And many others were beaten, you might like to know.
Benjamin Franklin, who was in Paris at the time
as ambassador for the newly formed United States.
What was the deal with it?
- They were unaware that there was a grand master inside? - Yeah. - OK.
They thought it was a machine. Charles Babbage was beaten by it.
He's the father of computing. He invented the difference engine.
Maybe if he'd known there was a man inside,
- he would never have invented the difference engine. - Exactly.
But it was the sensation of the age, a remarkable thing.
By 1989, a magician rebuilt it - it cost him 120,000 to build a version that worked.
The name of the man who invented it was Wolfgang Von Kempelen
who lived from 1734-1804,
and he did it to impress the Empress Maria Theresa.
And it sure did. It impressed everybody. It's rather wonderful.
The Mechanical Turk.
A manned automaton that beat Napoleon at chess, amongst other people.
Now, what's the best way to give a squad of American soldiers
the screaming heebie-jeebies in a plane?
- Snakes. - Snakes might do it!
That's a pretty good way.
The point is, you want to research people panicking.
Is this a cash prize?
Is that it?
It could be...
When they were trying to test - how can we test the evacuation procedure? -
so they get people in a plane and turn some lights off
and so some fake smoke but it's obviously not crashing
and so now everyone evacuates in an orderly way.
When this actually happens in a situation of real jeopardy,
it's a massive fight and loads of people die.
So in order to properly fake the conditions of jeopardy...
- Right. - ..they offered, the first one that gets out gets 20,000.
And then suddenly everyone's panicking and screaming and it's like there's a real...
Actually, because they're soldiers, you don't have to do that.
Basically you can just do what you like with them.
So what you do is, you hoax them. You put them up in a plane
and you get the pilot to shut off one of the engines,
and act very well going into a helluva panic, so the soldiers genuinely think they're going to die,
and then you give them forms to fill in, cos what you're interested in
is how humans perform under extreme stress.
The forms are basically, "Who do you want to leave your money to? Fill in these forms, you've got 20 seconds",
and you might be surprised to learn that people are crap under these conditions.
They just write drivel and they're no use at all.
What was the point of doing this? I don't see that anyone's learned anything from that experiment.
Just seems unnecessarily cruel.
You learn how people respond under genuine stress. You may say...
They panic and they shit themselves.
But, yeah...
I think I'm going to play my Joker about that...
JOKER CACKLES
So sorry...
- But I just... - Nostradamus' jam was... - I don't know why
- experiments remind me of... You know elbow-licking? - Yeah.
- Can a human lick their own elbow? - No. It can't be done.
CLAXON SOUNDS
- Oh! Hello. That's interesting. - OK.
Because you got some points a few times ago when you were here...
On the very first show!
It was, actually. Did you know that it's impossible
for a human being to lick their elbow?
We have someone in the audience, if you'd put your hand up, who can lick
- their elbow. Put your hand up if you can lick your elbow. - Higher!
There you are. What's your name?
- Selena. - Selena.
Selena is now going to, I'm afraid, have some points deducted from you,
Danny Baker, by licking her elbow.
I said a human being, not some kind of freak!
As you can see, she's a charming human being! Let's have a look.
That is a woman licking an elbow! Did you see that, ladies and gentlemen?
APPLAUSE
That's brilliantly done!
Is there a... Is there a reason for this?
Can you do both together like that?
Is there a reason...? Have you always been able to do it or you were dropped as a child?
- You can just do it? - Yeah.
- I'd have it looked into, it's not right. - Shall I do the other one?
It does mean we will have to deduct some points from you.
Oh, well, on the repeats, I'll look forward to that on Dave.
Before it starts, "The following programme has an erroneous score."
Well, we like to get these things right.
In 1962, the US army devised a series of experiments to put the fear
of God into soldiers to test their form-filling skills under stress.
But enough hoaxes. It's time for some general ignorance.
So, fingers on buzzers, if you please.
- Are there hoaxes...? - How can you tell...?
- ..in the general ignorance? - No. - The Joker's gone?
- None whatever. - We've missed the hoax, haven't we?
- We missed it. - You will find out.
How can you tell if someone is lying?
"Hello, dear!"
Sweaty palms, their pulse starts racing,
their heartbeat goes faster, their sphincter...
If they clench up their sphincter...
Let's suppose you haven't got a finger on their sphincter... DEER BELLOWING
..and you aren't holding their hand. Yeah?
- What they've said turns out not to be true. - Yeah.
APPLAUSE
Yay!
That's how you can tell they HAVE lied.
That doesn't work either. It might be that they thought it was true, and they were just idiots.
It tells you they HAVE lied, it doesn't tell you they ARE lying.
How about if they begin the sentence with...
"The Liberal Democrats have a lot in common with us."
Very good.
- Hello! - "Hullo, dear!"
They work for an estate agent's.
APPLAUSE
Oh! Is there a bitterness behind that?
No, it's just an observation.
- Is it something physical? - It is but not tactile. You can't touch them.
Is it the thing, and I fear claxons,
but is it something about whether when they're just about to think about it,
they look up left instead of up right
or up right instead of up left or something like...?
CLAXONS HOWL
- Yes! You were right to fear claxons. - Yeah, I was.
- I think I know what it is. - Embrace the claxon. - I'm trying to.
As they're about to deliver the crucial detail, they go,
"Yeah, well, it's about, ooh, er..."
"l-l-l-l...
"Let me... T-t-t-t-t-t-t...
"About ten. About ten, I reckon. I mean..."
Sean, you are more right than David by a long way.
The point is it's very hard to see if someone's lying.
There's nothing in the body language or the face or the eyes,
nothing in the nose touches, the things that people think are to do with it.
It's all to do with how they're speaking.
- Is this why it's easier to tell if someone's lying on the phone than face to face? - Exactly so.
They tested over 20,000 subjects,
showing them videos of people telling the truth and lying.
They found that people performed no better than chance.
Not only that, so-called experts -
polygraph operators, police investigators, judges and psychiatrists,
returned the same result.
But if you do it just on sound alone, people are much more accurate.
About 73% accuracy listening to lies.
So the thing to do is shut your eyes.
- Is that man going to shoot him? - It's a very early polygraph.
- It does look rather bizarre, doesn't it? - Right. "Name?" "John."
"Wrong." Boom.
Presumably that means it's easier to dupe the deaf than the blind.
- Which isn't what you'd think. - No, it isn't. That's true.
Having said all that I've said, Dr Ekman, a leading researcher, claims
that 50 out of 20,000 people do have a natural ability to detect lies
by actually looking at expressions.
It is very, very few people.
He named them the truth wizards
and they're able to read micro-expressions that last milliseconds
in ways that others aren't.
So, there you are.
Most people can't tell if you're lying,
but they'll have a better chance if they focus on your speech.
What's the one thing you know for sure about oranges?
- They're orange. - They're orange?
CLAXONS GO OFF Oh! That's the problem.
There are red ones and most of them aren't orange, in fact.
I know. Supermarkets have to make them orange a lot of the time.
In warm countries, oranges are actually green.
And there you can see how green they are.
The interior part is orange, but supermarkets tend to use a gas
to "de-green", as they call it,
to take the chlorophyll out cos we shoppers prefer to see an orange skin.
I'm a sucker for when they have variations...
Me too, but most punters would like their oranges to be...
I've worked in orange groves and they were orange.
- Where was it? - It was in Israel, on the kibbutz, and I worked in the orange groves,
got the sack...
LAUGHTER
..fell asleep when I was meant to be mending irrigation pipes. That's not a good story.
- And they were orange. - Yes? - The little blighters were orange.
All of them. There wasn't one little green bugger amongst them.
They do grow orange but in the really hot, humid countries they're green,
and in deserts and in places made-up like the kibbutz.
- Tell you something about oranges. - What's that?
They're not the only fruit.
They're not the only fruit! Good literary remark, that.
Do you know where the word comes from or what the original word was?
- It's naranja. - Naranja. That's the Spanish for orange.
The original naranja is Sanskrit
and what happened, as words do, it loses the N.
So you get an orange, a "norange",
and we think, "Oh, that 'a norange' must be 'an orange',"
but in fact it was a norange, like a nadder was a snake.
The French say "orange", don't they? It should be called a nanorange.
- Just a norange would do. - A norange?
- Norange juice. - Norange juice, yeah.
That'll do it. Well done.
Should an apple be called a napple?
No, it doesn't work with apple.
There must be... A napron, for example.
- A nau pair. - No, that's just silly.
But er...
It works with a nadder. That's now become an adder but is was originally "a nadre."
An adder. Right.
And an ick name.
Your ick name, nickname, it became a nickname
but it was originally an ick name.
- What's an ick...? - It became a nickname. - Right.
A nickname is a name you give someone that isn't their real name, Sean.
- What was it called before? - Ick name.
What does that mean, an ick name? Where does that come from?
- That's not a fruit. - No! Arrgh!
APPLAUSE
Oh, man.
Heaven help us all.
Oranges are not necessarily orange
and there's a good case for saying that they started as greens.
What do swimming pools smell of?
- Hmm. - Children.
Probably true.
- The answer I suspect you're looking for... - "Hello, dear!"
..is chlorine.
CLAXON SOUNDS Ow!
They will do if you put chlorine in them.
You don't smell the chlorine.
In fact, if there is that smell that we don't like,
the way to get rid of it is to add chlorine.
- Chlorine reacting with the child's urine. - Yeah.
Chloramines are formed by sweat and urine and faecal matter
and lots of other horrible things in swimming pools added to chlorine.
To get rid of them, add chlorine.
So before I make up your scores,
I should tell you that not one of you managed to identify the hoax
because the idea of the hoax was itself a hoax.
There was no hoax. GROANING
APPLAUSE
This... This is an outrage. This is like the end of Lost.
It's endearing how much it matters to them.
So everything you heard was as true as trousers.
So the winner tonight...
Wow! A-ha!
The winner tonight with an impressive minus one is Sean Lock.
- APPLAUSE - Oh, I won? - You won.
- And... - You won this discredited show.
..second with an improbable minus 13, is David Mitchell.
APPLAUSE
- Yeah! - Yeah!
Third with a pretty good minus 14, Danny Baker.
APPLAUSE
You grassed me up! Grassed up by the elbow-licker!
And last with a surprisingly convincing minus 38, Alan Davies.
- Thank you very much. - APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Thanks to David, Danny, Sean and Alan. I leave you with an observation from Will Rogers.
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.
Thank you and goodnight. APPLAUSE
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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