Good evening,
good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening and welcome to QI, the show that tickles
the armpit of tedium with the feather duster of interestingness.
Tonight, we're taking a lingering look at love.
My guests are the lovely Josh Widdicombe...
..that love machine, Tony Hawks...
..the best beloved, Aisling Bea...
..and a complete luvvy, Alan Davies.
So, let's hear their love calls. Josh goes...
- Oh, is that my buzzer? - Yes. - Oh, I thought...
You can give another love call if you want.
I thought I was going to have to get my phone out.
What am I wearing? Erm...
LOVE IS ALL AROUND PLAYS
Oh! Aisling goes...
LOVE AND MARRIAGE PLAYS
- Ah. Frank Sinatra. - Yeah, bit negative. - Tony goes...
LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS
Oh, yes. And Alan goes...
I LIKE IT PLAYS
Wonderful.
# I like the way you run your fingers through my hair... #
It wouldn't be possible to run one's fingers through your hair,
without there being some awful rending noise.
- Yeah, an alarm goes off. - Yes.
I ought to tell you, though, because it's the L series,
there is the likelihood of one question being lavatorial.
And if it is, you can spend a penny.
TOILET FLUSHES
Very good. And if you correctly spend your penny,
when I ask the question, you get extra points. It's that simple.
Right, to get you in the mood, here are some foods for you to try.
- You should have some on your little prop tables. - Ooh.
You've got chocolates there, Josh. You've got a potato, Alan.
- Hot damn. - What have you got, Tony? - Well, I don't...
- Oh, champagne. - It looks like champagne. It could be anything.
Probably cava, knowing our budget.
You could have had a wee in here, all of you, for all I know.
You wouldn't want it to fizz, though, would you?
No, you wouldn't, mate.
You put your finger on top to stop it overflowing.
That's what I always do on the loo.
- Yes, it is. - It is? I hope it's fresh.
- I think it's fresh if you want to eat it. - I hope it's fresh, as well.
- You could drop it in the champagne. It's delicious. - I love...
- Am I allowed? - I'm allergic to champagne, literally.
- Are you? - Yeah. I can't drink it.
Oh, darling, it must be simply terrible for you.
It's not, actually.
Christopher Hitchens rather wonderfully said
the four most overrated things in the world are lobster, champagne,
anal sex and picnics.
But we don't like champagne.
What a night that would be.
Come on, they're all daytime ones.
Anyway, so, by all means, eat yours.
But what do you think they have to do with our theme?
- Chocolate... - They're sexy foods.
- Yes. - They're aphrodisiacs. - Aphrodisiacs.
They're considered to be aphrodisiacs.
Oysters have long been considered it.
- Potato? - Yes, Alan, a thousand times yes.
You can go on a date, of course, with two potatoes and a carrot,
and lay them out on the desk or the table in a very erotic way,
and tantalise people.
That's true. Two potatoes and a carrot.
Are you single, Tony, or are you...?
At what point in the date do you pull out the potatoes?
- Where's the desk? - Well, the desk, I admit that the desk on the date,
the date's going badly wrong.
Well, do have a piece of chocolate. Do sip your champagne.
- And do, by all means, have your oyster. - I mean, I do love oysters,
but one time I did get poisoning on Valentine's Day...
- On Valentine's Day, as well? - Oh!
- Oh, no, are you eating your potato raw? - Is that allowed?
Oh, oh.
OK, here she goes, here she goes, oyster down.
- It's bigger than I'm used to. - Hey.
- How is it? - Very nice.
I'm definitely going to tape this episode, I can tell you that.
- Try your chocolate. - Oh, they're very nice.
- It might have rose petals or violets. - Are you all right, Alan?
I feel horny.
Look out, Josh!
It's worked. Bloody hell, two bites!
Well, the reason that potatoes were considered to be aphrodisiac,
at one point in history, this may be something Aisling knows,
is that when they were introduced to Ireland as a major crop,
the population of Ireland increased a huge amount, but it was simply
because there was less starvation than there had been before.
Though, as we know, there was then the terrible potato blight,
and the population reduced.
- Oh, you had to bring it up. - I'm sorry, I didn't mean it.
It was a bad moment in Irish history, a bad moment.
It's fine, it's fine. I'm nearly over it.
There's still more guilt to be got out of it from us.
Carbs are the last thing you'd want before sex, aren't they?
- Make you feel heavy, you would think. - Yeah.
It depends how long you want to go on for, Josh.
Do you have slow release? Porridge.
- Slow release! Oh, dear. - About an hour and a half.
Oh, I didn't mean it like that, Stephen!
Oh! I'm going to have a chocolate and stop lowering the tone, I think.
The fact is, if you go online, not that this is the most authoritative
way of finding out, but almost any food that you put next to the word
aphrodisiac in a search field, will return a result of some kind.
There seems to be no food in history
that hasn't been regarded at some time as aphrodisiac.
There's a wonderful book
called Venus In The Kitchen by Norman Douglas,
which includes such things almond soup
and sow's vulva and trussed crane -
all kinds of extraordinary dishes, most of which are classical.
Can we go back to the second one?
- Sow's vulva. - Sow's vulva?
It begins with the wonderful words, "Take that part of the pig."
Which you ask your butcher, I assume, to cut.
Imagine going into the butcher,
"Hiya, can I get a pound of mince
and some sow's vulva.
"Big night, I think he's going to propose."
"I'm sorry, it usually comes in on a Thursday, I'm fresh out."
If you're making someone eat that,
they don't want to have sex with you.
Well, I agree, it's pretty much enforced, isn't it?
Any other vulvas?
- Very good point. - Just the sow's vulva that's a good...
- It seems to be, yeah. - Do any other animals have a vulva?
- Well, all mammals, I would hope. - Do they?
Well, not all mammals, not egg-laying mammals.
- But just about any other kind. - Do they?
I don't really know what a vulva is, to be honest.
- It's a Swedish car, Stephen. - Oh, it's Swedish car!
It's a Swedish car that's due for a cervix.
- But it's all nonsense, isn't it? - No, they exist.
- You mean, aphrodisiacs? - Aphrodisiacs, I think...
- it's all a myth, isn't it? It's all nonsense. - It seems to be.
I don't think there's any way of proving. It's so hard to prove.
If I understand correctly, it's about the brain, sex.
Yeah, yeah.
The limbic lobe in the brain sends a message to your pelvic area.
- Yeah. - Sometimes by carrier pigeon.
- And these foods, they don't affect that part of the brain. - No.
You're quite the sexy talker, though, aren't you?
Is this your opening line before you take out the potatoes and carrot?
I'm not giving any trade secrets away here tonight.
So you say, "Daphne, my limbic system is sending me messages."
Yeah, I think most people would agree that a lack of inhibition
hurries one toward the bedroom,
and alcohol, naturally, is something that would...
But it doesn't enhance the performance.
Shakespeare makes that very point through the porter in Macbeth.
Does he? I don't care.
- It increases the desire, but it mars the performance. - Yes.
The fact is, there is no proof that, as Tony rightly said,
that, except possibly the alcohol as a disinhibitor...
Galen, the Roman doctor, thought that any food that produced
flatulence was in some way an aphrodisiac.
This was believed until the 18th century,
when they thought the opposite. In Elizabethan times, stewed prunes
were so highly regarded as aphrodisiacs,
they were served for free in brothels.
You'd get them to get you up there.
- And beans... - What, like outside?
Like outside Starbucks? On a taster plate?
That's right. Have your prunes.
St Jerome forbade beans,
because he thought that they would make nuns or women extremely horny.
- Nuns or women? - They excited the...
Who knows what's under there?
They excited the genitals of women, he thought.
Frog juice, putting a frog in a blender, is...
..considered a Peruvian aphrodisiac.
- Do they have blenders? Not now. - They do now.
I assume, when they first thought of it, they didn't have blenders.
The Incans were very, very advanced, though.
- They probably used... - A pestle and mortar. - Yeah.
Do any of the active ingredients in Viagra occur naturally?
- Good point. I like that. - Whoa, cool.
That would be interesting to know.
Why? Are you worried about what that potato's done to you?
No, I'm fine.
How long does it last?
Well, there you are. Almost everything in the history of food
has been reputed to be an aphrodisiac, even potatoes.
What wouldn't you like to get on Valentine's Day?
Chlamydia.
A perfectly reasonable response.
Is that what of VD stands for? Valentine's Day?
Never occurred to me, that's brilliant,
This is probably... A few people have had this...
which is the most tragic thing you can get on Valentine's day
is the card from your mum.
- Oh, yes. - Or from my nan, in my case.
- Both! One from my mum, one from my nan. - That's sweet, though.
But it's better...
than a one-way ticket to New Zealand.
- That would be... - That would be a hint too far.
I once got on a... I'd just split up with my girlfriend
and it was my birthday and my family don't really do birthdays much,
but her family did, so I received one birthday card,
which was from my ex-girlfriend's mum.
- Oh, my goodness. - Oh, Josh. - And I've just realised how bleak that is.
Thought that was an amusing anecdote,
turns out it's actually the bleakest moment of my life.
We're all very sorry for you.
Can anyone tell me why on the Valentine's Day cards
you're not supposed to admit that you've sent it?
Cos that's the most pointless thing, isn't it?
You send... You get a card from someone,
you want to know who it is,
so you can go round and sort them out, don't you?
- "Sort them out?" - JOSH: Who are you? Ray Winstone?
- "Sort them out." - ..to your office.
- Take them to your office... - Show them... - Show them the desk.
- Get your carrot out. - Get the carrot and potatoes.
Go via the greengrocer to pick up your vegetables.
We've had a window into your life, Tony, that's weird.
The really high watermark of Valentine card sending
was a 50-year period from 1840 to 1890,
when Victorians sent each other Valentine's cards
on Valentine's Day, but they didn't just send love letters.
They sent, what you might almost call hate mail,
but they were known as vinegar valentines.
And there's... I don't know what...
Basically saying, "You are bald and smelly.
"You're not very good at DIY."
- JOSH: - You shouldn't have cut through that wire.
Not surprisingly, they're quite rare,
because people who received them tended to throw them away,
so people who collect cards value them very highly.
What did they expect to sort of get back?
They think, "This is really going to help the situation."
I'm afraid, it's the same human instinct that is about trolling -
accused of being drunk, ugly, overweight, stuck up,
all the things that trollers accuse people of.
Also, they accuse grocers of cheating their customers
and things like that. And very often they didn't put stamps on,
so that the recipient had to pay the stamp.
"Oh, what a lovely Valentine's card,"
and then they open it and it's a huge insult. I mean, it's very mean.
But we do have, I'm glad to say, this is not really a vinegar,
but it's a rather charming one, this is one with a moustache.
- This is in York Museum. - Not any more, it isn't.
Well, yeah, good point.
It's from York Castle Museum and it's got a moustache and it says,
"With heartiest greetings
"and best hopes that she'll soon get another..."
that's a moustache, "..with a man attached."
Bit of a joker, this guy.
Yeah, I mean, cos sending locks of hair through the post
is a sign of love.
It's a very old thing, but to send a moustache is quite something,
isn't it? And the little joke of...
You probably know who it was who sent it,
because he'd be going around with no moustache on.
"That wasn't me."
If you kidnapped a man with a moustache...
- Yes? - You know, then you'd send the moustache to show that you've got...
That's true! It's kinder than sending an ear.
"Recognise this moustache?"
Salvador Dali's wife is, like, "No!"
Well, that's what a vinegar Valentine was.
From love letters to l'amour.
Who did Napoleon's ex go out with next?
Are we talking about Josephine?
Well, yes, we are, but not the Empress Josephine.
Oddly enough, he seemed to have a predilection for Josephines.
Well, he had two mistresses, one was called Josephina and one was called
Josephine, neither of whom was the Empress Josephine.
There they are.
There was Josephina Grassini, who was a beautiful dancer,
opera singer, opera dancer they used to be called.
And Josephine Weimer, an actress.
So they were both very beautiful.
She looks like she's doing the Single Ladies dance.
Like she's, "Whoa-oh-oh, whoa-oh-oh."
She's showing how tall Napoleon is, that's what she's doing.
"I want one this high."
But these, as I say, were different Josephines, they were later ones.
Just before the Battle of Waterloo,
who was the British Ambassador in Paris?
- British Ambassador... - I'll leave this one to you, Alan.
- Before Napoleon escaped. - Hang on. There was Schniesberkin, Wilson...
It's kind of easier than you think.
He was the victor of Peninsular
and he'd beaten Napoleon before and he was about to beat him again.
- It's not Wellington, is it? - It's the Duke of Wellington himself.
And there's Old Hooky on the right, and there's Napoleon on the left.
And, yeah, Wellington really knew how to rub it in
when he beat someone, as it were.
- That sounds terrible. - Oh, did he go out with...?
Yeah, he went out with both of these mistresses.
He seduced both during his stay in Paris as Ambassador in 1814
and 1815, just before Waterloo, before the escape of Napoleon,
while Napoleon was in Elba, having abdicated, if you remember.
"Able was I ere I saw Elba."
- What's odd about that phrase? - It's a palindrome, isn't it?
- Yeah, that's right, exactly. - Yes. - It's a palindrome.
It's actually a palindrome, guys, so...
And Weimer was the only one who compared the two in bed,
which is extremely unkind of her.
She said, "Monsieur le Duc etait de beaucoup plus fort,"
is a lot stronger in bed.
Fort is fiercer, stronger, mightier. Yeah, better, basically.
Was there a Mrs Wellington back home who was a bit fed up about this?
The Duchess, yeah.
Yeah, she must have been, you know, unimpressed, I'd say.
Well, he famously did have a lot of affairs.
There were so many potatoes around in those days.
- There's no doubt that they were up to it. - That's right.
And after the wars ended, he was presented with Napoleon's sword,
three paintings of him and the painting of his sister,
Pauline Borghese, there she is, that's Napoleon's sister,
there with a nipple showing.
She's got something keeping her chin on as well.
Yes, she has. It's keeping her mouth from falling open. Exactly.
I think it's a mask. It's clearly some sort of a face mask,
like it's got a bit of elastic round the back.
Well, Napoleon had commissioned a statue of himself, 11 foot tall,
basically twice the height of himself.
And this was...this was bought by the British Government
and given to Wellington, along with the house they gave him.
Do you remember what it's called?
- Oh, Number One, London. - Number One, London, Apsley House.
- Oh, wow. - Oh, good house. - And it really works.
If you get into a cab and say Number One, London, the cabbie will go,
"I've always wanted someone to say that." And they will take you there.
Is that supposed to be the sculpture of Napoleon?
That is it. I know, it's somewhat idealised, to say the least.
- Oh, God. - In the stairwell of Apsley House, as it's also called.
- Where is Number One, London, then? - It's at Hyde Park Corner.
It's easier to spot in real life,
because there isn't a bloody great big picture in front of it.
- That's true. - And is the Duke of Wellington beef Wellington man?
- Yes, it is named after him. - Interesting. - And the boots.
And the boots, as well.
A lot of military figures had clothing named after them,
particularly in the Crimean War.
There was Lord Cardigan, who was in charge of the Light Brigade.
- Balaclava! - The Balaclava helmet, absolutely. And...
- The jodhpur. - Jodhpur is a place, I think. But Raglan was also...
- Dr Martin. - Raglan...
- The raglan sleeve. - Lord Bobble Hat.
- Colonel Stiletto. - Earl of Sandwich. Have we done him?
- Colonel Scarf. - Old Jock Strap.
- The Earl of Head and Shoulders. - Lieutenant Washing Machine.
Well, there were a lot, a few. So, good.
The Duke of Wellington's conquests included Napoleon
and no fewer than two of his exes.
Who would bite their arm off to get their leg over?
LOVE IS ALL AROUND PLAYS
Yes, Josh?
You!
- KLAXON BLARES - Oh, dear.
Even if we hadn't got that one ready,
you'd already reveal what a sad act you are
and we would have tagged it on.
- This must be from the animal kingdom. - It is from the animal kingdom.
And what type of animals usually have to suffer in order to
give their seed, as it were?
- Spiders are usually... - Spiders is the right answer. - Oh! Look at that.
There's a particular kind of spider...
There's the female on the left and there's the male on the right.
That's a neat packet there, isn't it?
- He's going to have a Napoleon complex, isn't he? - He really is.
Have you seen that picture of Bernie Ecclestone and his ex-wife?
It's a bit like that?
He's said to his mates... His mates have said,
"No, don't bother, she's too big for you."
He's going, "No, I can get her, you watch, you watch.
"She's no problem at all, mate."
He actually... He won't let her wear heels on a night out, will he?
She is a hundred times bigger.
And if we see him close up, you might notice...
He's Tom Cruise.
It's quite hard to see, but the front two,
the left one is curled inwards a bit,
but the right one is straight up, are actually penis legs.
- Oh, no. - What?
He has eight legs like any spider, but the front two are penises
and are charged with his seed.
I've got a couple of them down under here.
The old penis leg there.
They're called pedipalps.
And the thing he does, in order to get a better chance of shagging that
enormous female, is he actually spins some silk and ties it round
one of his penis legs and pulls, so that it basically pulls it off.
So he actually tears it off.
If he pulls it off, there's no point in having sex with her.
- No, there's one left. - Oh.
And it gives him a speed advantage. So he's much, much quicker.
So he can scuttle after her.
It all seems a most complicated life cycle.
The oddest procedure, but it's honestly true,
it's the male tent cobweb spider.
So the males that do this are 44% faster
than ones who've kept both their penis legs.
But even then, when they get the female, which is their reward,
the female then will suck them dry and discard them.
- Yeah, which... - Oh, isn't that just the way with women?
Yes, I know, poor you.
You deserve it, you're all bastards. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Her mum sends him a card.
- Is the human equivalent of this...? - Katie Price. - No.
- The octopus has a penis arm. Didn't we have that once? - Yes, that's right.
Completely correct.
I read that the eight legs of the octopus all function independently
and they don't know what the other ones are doing.
- Isn't that weird? - Yeah.
The only thing in the world that an octopus sucker won't stick to
- is an octopus leg. Which is why they don't get all tangled up. - Yeah.
- I know things about octopuses. - You do. You do.
Researchers tested the tent cobweb spider, rather meanly,
by chasing them, some intact, some not, round a little running track,
to see how long they lasted,
and the spiders with intact sex organs lasted 16 minutes on average,
but the spiders that had snapped one off, or snipped one off,
lasted up to 28 minutes, so it is a big advantage.
Once you've mated, of course, you have to bring up the children.
To that end, what are the advantages of having a goat as a nanny?
LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS
- Tony? - I think it's because they've got hooves.
And if you had a nanny that had hooves,
they couldn't sneak up on you.
Well, that's true.
The fact is nanny goats are called nanny goats
for a dashed good reason.
In the days of foundlings, who were left on church doors,
if you left a baby on a church steps, it was a foundling
and it was therefore thrown on mercy of the parish.
And it had to be fed, and of course there was no such thing as SMA
or Cow And Gate, or anything like that.
The only way they could get milk was from a breast.
So you had wet nurses. But you also had goats.
- So goats were amazing. - They'd feed on the goats?
They'd feed on the goat milk. Very good stuff, straight from the teat.
Straight from the teat?
It's better than... Until 1870 pasteurisation was invented,
by Pasteur, obviously, it was the healthiest way you could have it,
straight from the teat.
- Was the goat OK with...? - Not only OK, let me...
I've seen Josh's little eyes light up, like, "straight from the teat".
- Yeah. - "The goat was OK?" - And you say goats are OK with this?
Not only OK, you may have seen cows that are desperate to be
milked, and they queue up for the dairy in order to be milked.
Well, goats are the same, if they're ready to give suck.
- So we have here a description... - For what?!
Whoa.
You know, the phrase, Shakespearean again, Lady Macbeth.
French doctor Alphonse Leroy described it, in a foundling
hospital in France, "Each goat which comes to feed enters bleating
"and goes to hunt the infant which has been assigned to it."
So there's a particular child that it's been assigned to.
"Pushes back the covering of the bed, with its horns," like that...
- Sounds familiar. - "And straddles the crib to give suck to the infant."
It sounds like an accident waiting to happen, really.
Goat soup on the...
Can you imagine trying to get insurance for that in the NHS?
So, we just had this goat straddle a baby
and then the baby just sort of knows to suck off the goat.
- You can imagine the Daily Mail all over that, can't you? - Well, maybe.
- Maybe. - Goat Straddles Baby!
Why do they have...? Why goats? Why not...?
Well, it's a very good question. A cow is just a bit too big, I think,
to go into a little... to go over a crib.
You don't want a pat on the head.
- Hey! - Hey, hey-hey!
Hey.
13 years!
Been waiting for that.
You asked about goats, and some people thought into the 19th century
that breast milk contained not only nutrition
but the character traits of whoever gave it.
So if the mother was a loose woman and had given the baby
out of wedlock, she wasn't to be trusted to give milk to her baby
because she would be passing on her immorality to the child.
This is how mad we once were.
- How do they know what the goat's been up to? - Well...
- They thought they were a better risk. - It has to be a married goat.
It might have been an unmarried goat, you're absolutely right.
Dirty goat.
In 1816, there was a writer who compared different milks
and wrote the definitive book called
The Goat Is The Best And Most Agreeable Wet Nurse.
Others preferred donkeys,
which are thought to have a better moral reputation.
They are very noble, they carried our Lord.
That's it, in Palm Sunday. Well remembered, exactly.
Yeah, and also Mary.
Then there was the syphilis outbreak in the 16th and 18th centuries.
- Oh, then the party's over. - Dirty donkey.
And goat wet nurses were used there
and, unfortunately, though, they were used very unkindly...
What's he up to?
- Milking a goat! - Oh, OK, fair enough.
"This better be for the baby!"
I think that's a different bloke that usually does it,
according to that goat's face.
- "Hang on a minute, that's not the grip I'm used to." - Oops. Hello.
"That's a bit firm!"
Do you know what I've found mad about...?
I don't have kids, so maybe women in the audience will know,
but that, when you're breast-feeding your child,
if you are, say, in a supermarket or something like that
and someone else's baby cries, you leak, like a spider sense.
- Yes. - Is it not true? Any women have had...?
- Yeah, it's a... - Yeah, it is. - There's a bloke there going, "Yeah."
"There is, mate."
"I always leak when I hear a baby crying."
I don't even know why that's funny.
Is that true, though? It is, isn't it?
But if you have, you've presumably expressed into a pot and given it
to the baby-sitter, because that's what happens, isn't it?
Why would the baby-sitter want some?
- There was, there was... - "Thanks a million!"
- There was an ice cream shop... - Shot glasses.
- "Dinner would have been fine." - "Help yourself to anything in the fridge."
There was, for a very brief time, an ice cream shop, wasn't there,
- here in London, which sold baby...? - Yeah, breast milk ice cream.
- Human breast milk ice cream. - You say a very brief time,
- because it's the worst business plan of all time. - I guess you're right.
You try it once, I think, like incest or country dancing.
I wish that were my own.
You've not been to Devon, Stephen.
I come from Norfolk, for God's sake.
No, the sad thing about the syphilis outbreaks
of the 16th and 18th century, is that it was believed then,
and all the way up to the 19th century, that
one of the cures for syphilis, a kill or cure really, was mercury.
Which is poisonous, as I'm sure you know.
And they decided a good delivery system for babies that were born
syphilitic was to make them
suckle on the milk of goats that had been fed mercury.
A lot of goats died that way, it was very unkind.
- Did the babies die? - Probably. It probably didn't help them.
I mean, it's not good for the brain at all, a growing brain.
- It's good for thermometers. - It's very good for thermometers, I agree.
These days thermometers have little ear click things and everything.
- They've moved on. - Yes, they have.
Yeah. Just goes in the ear, ping, like that, it's so amazing.
- Or you can stick a thing under the armpit. - Or...
But more difficult.
Mmm. More fun.
- Under the tongue. - Oh, under the tongue, under the tongue.
What were you thinking?!
- Nothing, nothing. - More difficult, though, for you
to fake your temperature to get off school, though.
- You used to stir coffee with it and things like that. - Did you? - Yeah.
You were having coffee as a schoolboy?!
This was at university.
"Mother, I'm not ready for primary school,
"I'll just have this latte and stay here."
Oh, lawks.
Anyway, now to bundles of love.
Why did the Puritans want lusty young men to get into the sack?
That picture tells a story. What's...
- LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS - Yes?
I think that they... It was...
It's to do with them not having sex, early on.
Yes, you're right.
Because they were Puritans and they thought sex was evil or you
shouldn't do it, until you were married or anything like that.
- Completely correct. - So they had a thing called bundling.
- You're absolutely right. - Where they put them into sacks...
- That's right. - Or something, was it? - That's right.
So, there was getting the young man into the sack in that literal sense.
You put the man in a sack and he could sleep next to his intended,
or he could have a board between them, like that.
I mean, what kind of man can't get over that?
You've got the old hand-held drill under the covers.
He's actually looking at that and saying, "This is more over my side."
Yeah.
- And does the duvet go under the...? - It does.
You basically fit this wooden thing on once you've made the bed.
Are you sure they haven't misread the instructions to an IKEA bed?
The IKEA bundling kit, yeah.
"Your corner of the bed."
Why were they sleeping together before marriage?
Well, I think that they did want them
to get used to each other conversationally.
- That's right. - Genuinely, that was it? - Yeah.
Yeah, I believe that's the idea.
That was bundling, an American and Dutch tradition,
which Americans took to, particularly in Pennsylvania, where a lot of Dutch people went.
Teenagers in sacks has a certain logic, but frogs in underpants?
What would you do that for?
If you run out of carrots.
It sounds like a new game show on Channel 5, Frogs In Underpants.
- It does, doesn't it? - That frog is smiling,
cos of what that bloke's doing with his right hand.
Well, actually, it's putting frogs in their own underpants,
putting underpants on frogs is actually...
Is it something the French do?
To make them more appetising.
Snap a thong on it.
It was actually an Italian priest who did this.
He was quite a clever fellow.
Oh, I don't think he was.
- He had a lot of time on his hands, though, didn't he? - Well, yes.
Up until the 18th century, they didn't know what sperm was for.
And why would they? It seems so obvious to us.
So, like all good scientists, this particular fellow...
He put a frog in some underpants.
He was called Lazzaro Spallanzani.
It's the obvious next step.
So Spallanzani... Well, it is, if you think about us.
He knew that frogs fertilised their eggs outside the female's body,
so it's a lot simpler than doing it to an animal that actually shagged,
you know, like we do.
- Don't do that with your chair. - Sorry!
You spotted me.
It was an easy way of testing, because the females lay the eggs
and the males come along and the eggs are fertilised.
So he thought, "If I cover these in little taffeta pants,"
which he put on the frogs, the frogs then tried, you know,
and the eggs did not fertilise,
so he was able to make the correct assumption
that inserting the semen was necessary for fertilising eggs.
And he extrapolated that into other animals.
But he didn't just work on frog sperm.
So I would say he was clever, Spallanzani.
He also was one of the first people
to carry out artificial insemination, on a spaniel.
First person to suggest that bats use sound to navigate in the dark.
He experimented on snail regenerations -
this was slightly less kind.
He had this idea... I think it was known that snails
could regenerate their heads,
so he took quite a lot of them, 423, cut all their heads off...
- Did you say he was a priest? - Yes.
- He wasn't doing many sermons. - Quite a lot of people were priests.
A very small parish.
So 423 snails, of which a fifth supposedly grew their heads back,
which is not a lot,
but it would be a lot more than if he had done it to humans.
He also... This is a very extraordinary experiment,
he tested the power of gastric juices
by putting food in a cheesecloth bag, which he tied up,
and then swallowed and lowered into his tummy on a string
and then brought it up to see how much it had been...
Yeah. How else would you do it?
Sounds like one of those people you just would not want to get
stuck with at a dinner party.
"You did what? Oh, yeah, good."
When he's getting out his cheesecloth for the dinner.
- Tying it up. - "Excuse me."
There might be something more unpleasant still.
What horror was first shown in the film Psycho?
LOVE IS ALL AROUND PLAYS
Joshlington?
Was it someone in the shower?
- KLAXON BLARES - Oh!
No, I mean, she's in the shower, but you...
The film shoot took 30 days to film, which is very short by any Hollywood
standards, and seven of those days were devoted to the shower scene.
- Janet Leigh... - He actually got it in the first day, but he was...
- He was. - "Better get Janet back to the shower."
LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS
Yes, you're right!
- There was a toilet in the shower scene. - Yes.
- Is that it? - Yeah.
TOILET FLUSHES
It's not just that there is one, it's the first time one had been
seen flushed with the water going round.
It spirals down the lavatory.
The film is black and white, there's the murderer, we won't say who,
they or he or she is.
And it's considered a masterpiece now,
but particularly the Bernard Herrmann score which...
"Ee-ee-ee-ee..."
Didn't they make a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho?
- They did. What a disastrous idea. - Why would you...? - Colour.
- Oh, colour. - It was in colour.
There's a whole generation of people who if they are channel surfing
and they see something in black and white,
will never stop to look at it,
which is extraordinary, given that probably most of the best films...
- Not even Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid?! - Probably. Most of the best films
- ever made are in black and white. It just seems so extraordinary. - Not even Broadway Danny Rose?! - I know!
- Idiots. - Elephant Man.
Why did you point at me when you said "Elephant Man"?
"Or Elephant Man."
"Good to have you show, John."
That was purely accidental.
Anyway, Psycho was the first film to feature a flushing lavatory.
From flushing to blushing.
Why did half the brides in London go to prison?
Because it's...
LOVE AND MARRIAGE PLAYS
Because women like a bad boy.
Well, that is a syndrome, of course.
You're absolutely right, there are women who fall into...
LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS
They used to have weddings sometimes in prisons.
They did. And there was a good reason for that, we're going back...
- 150 years? - Probably even more than that, actually, we're talking the
18th-century, cos there was a law brought in to stop it happening.
Essentially, there were certain kinds of prisons.
Obviously, there were prisons where people were sent
for committing crimes.
But you were in prison, really commonly...
- Charles Dickens' father is an example... - For debt.
For debt, exactly.
The most famous debtors prisons, one was the Marshalsea,
which is where Little Dorrit is set, where Charles Dickens' father was,
and the other was called Fleet Prison.
Fleet Prison was the most popular for this.
And there's a picture of it, it had a yard,
and people were more or less free...
They went a bit far with that wall, don't you think?
"No, higher than that. Higher. I've seen them jump, they can jump.
"They can make ladders out of shoes, I've seen them. Higher."
Alan, it's because they kept losing their ball over the wall.
They could get out the top window.
Quite a lot of the people who got into debt were priests,
and they didn't get defrocked for it, it wasn't a defrockable offence,
so they didn't get cast out of the church,
so they retained their ability, their licence, to marry.
So, if you wanted to get married in a hurry,
you went to an indebted priest and, you know,
he wouldn't charge that much and it would go against his debt,
the debt that he had to pay to get out of prison.
So it all worked very nicely.
If you're in debt, how do you get out of prison?
Your family or someone eventually raises the money.
So you're basically kept as a kind of hostage,
it's a miserable business.
I mean, it doesn't look that miserable.
It just looks like an advert for, "Come to prison!"
You were pretty much allowed to mingle.
Children, brothers and sisters, a visiting day was available.
If you read Little Dorrit, you'll see that his father
was kind of the king of the Marshalsea - he had the best rooms
and he was treated as if he was a great gentleman.
- That would be worth... Think how much that property would be worth in London now. - Oh, goodness me.
For the wall alone!
Lot of outside space, it's lovely.
They don't get tennis rackets in prisons these days, do they?
They're all out playing tennis.
They don't go to the warder and just say,
- "I'm just off for a game of tennis. - It's true.
There's a person in the bottom left, are they smoking a crack pipe?
I think they are.
Fleet weddings were brought to an end by 1753 by Lord Hardwicke,
his Marriage Act, so after that most people
who wanted an irregular marriage, as it was called, went to...
Where did they have to go to to get married in a hurry?
- Gretna Green. - Gretna Green is the right answer.
The nearest they could get to.
Just over the Scottish border, where law is different.
The effect of the Act was that it got rid of this idea
of a common-law marriage. So for 250 years,
there's been no such thing as a common-law marriage,
although over 60% of people asked
if there is such a thing as a common-law marriage
believe there is. But it has no basis in law at all. No standing.
Now, it's time to clear the blockage of received wisdom with
the plunger of general ignorance.
So fingers on buzzers, please.
What should a Welshman wear in his hat on St David's Day?
LET THERE BE LOVE PLAYS
- Yes? - A daffodil.
- KLAXON BLARES - Hmm.
Well, if it's not, it's got to be a leek, right? It's got to be a leek.
KLAXON BLARES
What about cheese on toast? Is it going to be cheese on toast?
- Is it a dragon? - A Welsh rabbit.
We've been rather unfair there, of course,
because Welsh people do wear leeks on their heads,
but we're going way back to the original battle they fought
where supposedly they wore leeks to distinguish themselves.
You can see, if that's the Royal Welsh Regiment or whoever, with,
what look more like actually...
I've never seen the Queen so happy. Why is she so happy?
- She really does look thrilled. - What's that bloke said to her about his hat? She loves that.
There's something about it.
"They've all got leeks on their hats!
HE MIMICS THE QUEEN'S LAUGH
- She's probably saying... - "They're Welsh, ha-ha!"
She's probably saying, "They don't know
"that they're actually spring onions!"
They look a lot more like spring onions.
Well, there's a whole issue about whether or not they were leeks,
and Alan Davidson - close name -
author of the Oxford Dictionary Of Food...
Never liked him.
He claims that leeks as we know them didn't arrive in Britain
for much longer after the Battle of Heathfield, where the Welsh,
who beat the Saxons there,
believed that they first wore leeks to identify themselves.
In Anglo-Saxon,
the suffix 'leac' meant any member of the onion family.
So 'enneleac' was an onion and 'garleac' was garlic.
So they might have sported something like garlic, which is slightly more
light and practical than certainly a fully-grown leek.
The Museum Of Wales thinks that
actual leeks may have been brought over by the Romans.
So there's dispute, really, to be honest,
we just wanted to take points away from you.
Anyway, it's possible that the national emblem of Wales should
really be a garlic.
There's a layer of the atmosphere which protects us
from ultraviolet radiation.
What's it made of?
Hint, it has a hole in it.
- LOVE AND MARRIAGE PLAYS - Yes?
Ozone.
- KLAXON BLARES - No! What are the odds?
What are the odds?
Because it is called the ozone layer,
but it is neither a layer nor made primarily of ozone,
which is very mean of scientists to do that to us.
We wouldn't even know it existed.
It's named after the Irish family, the Zones, or the O'Zones.
- The O'Zones. - Yeah.
The O'Zones have moved in next door.
It's only 15 parts per million, ozone.
Do you know what the chemical formula for ozone is?
Yeah, but I'm not going to tell you.
- It's O3. - Oh.
Yes, it's a pale blue form of oxygen, with a very pungent smell.
At nought degrees Celsius and normal atmospheric pressure,
all the ozone in the sky would cover the earth
to a depth of just three millimetres.
Under the same conditions,
the rest of the air would make a layer five miles thick.
That's how rare it is.
And, finally, here's one for surf lovers.
Where can you find the biggest waves in the world?
LOVE IS ALL AROUND PLAYS
- Widdicombe? - Erm, Hawaii.
- KLAXON BLARES - Oh!
Dear, oh, dear.
- Newquay. - Sorry, where?
- KLAXON BLARES - Oh!
Oh, Newquay. Oh, dear.
- The Indian Ocean? - No. Well, possibly, yeah.
- Malibu. - Malibu, well...
I was just on a hat-trick, I thought I'd go for it.
There is good surfing to be had there on the Californian coast.
But let's forget coasts, let's forget Australian coasts
and any other coast.
Is it going to be a different type of wave?
It is... No, it's a water, seawater, wave, but it's underwater.
- The biggest waves are actually sub-surface waves. - Oh...
"Oh..." He's so disappointed. It was satellites that showed us.
We didn't know until satellite photography.
And there are lots of drowned surfers on them.
Well, they'd be very hard to surf,
because they really go incredibly slow, they crawl along,
a few centimetres a second, so a few metres an hour, I think.
And a tsunami, on the other hand, which is obviously a gigantic wave,
is Japanese for "harbour wave".
Because we say tidal wave, but tidal wave isn't correct,
because it isn't tidal.
Tsunamis result from earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes,
as we probably know.
In the open ocean, the waves are about only 300 millimetres high,
but with a very long wave length,
sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart.
As they approach land, the sea gets shallower,
and that's what pushes them up.
Oh. How fast is a tsunami? Because he is not going to...
He's not going to make it, I'm afraid. No, he's not.
Especially with three sharks on their way.
And what with him not having any feet is another problem.
That's really going to slow him down.
Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Well, before it gets any sicker,
the world's biggest waves are underwater.
And so, finally, to the scores, which
if you're lucky will be love-all.
Well, they aren't. They're fascinating, though.
He did run into the wall several times,
the tousled tow-headed dear from Devon,
minus 36 points in fourth place is Josh Widdicombe.
How relieved is our third placer, on minus seven, Alan Davies.
Thank you very much. Minus seven.
Pretty good.
Aisling just ahead on minus six.
Whoo-hoo!
On plus seven, it's Tony Hawks.
- Bravo. - Thank you very much.
So, it's good night from Aisling, Tony, Josh, Alan and me.
And I leave you with the last words of English essayist
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -
"It's all been very interesting."
Good night.