This programme contains strong language
APPLAUSE
Ja. Thank you.
Good evening and welcome to QI, where, tonight,
all I have to say is night-night.
END CREDIT MUSIC
LAUGHTER
Sorry... Too quick. That's the title of the show. Can't get the staff.
Right. Tonight is indeed the night
and joining me to hold hands in the dark are, a night to remember,
it's Holly Walsh.
A night on the town, David Mitchell.
A night on the tiles, Noel Fielding.
And...
night after night after night, Alan Davies.
And their midnight buzzers buzz like this. Holly.
OWL HOOTS
David goes...
WOLF HOWLS
Noel goes...
HEAVY DOOR CREAKS OPEN
And Alan goes...
MAN SNORES HEAVILY
Have you finished?
What is the most mysterious thing you do in bed?
LAUGHTER
You regrow, you regenerate your body parts, don't you? OK, but...
LAUGHTER
That's what I call it anyway! "What are you doing in there?!"
"I'm regenerating!"
Do you mean bits that are broken,
you mend them? Is that what you mean?
Don't you grow a new liver every seven years, or something?
There's no bit of you that is actually the age that you are.
No, I think it's every ten years, you're a totally new person.
You're totally new bones, everything.
No, you don't grow gums back.
Gums recede and they don't come back.
You can't go, "Oh, I think I'm going to grow my gums long this year."
It's probably quite good that the gums don't keep growing and
growing and growing, though. Imagine having to get them trimmed.
That's going to be an extremely bloody...
NOEL: "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a gum-dresser."
Have to get head to toe in plastic, it's like CSI.
When someone comes in for a long overdue gum trimming.
AUDIENCE: Ugh...!
You've got to show them the back of their gums.
So, the most mysterious thing that we do in bed, all of us? Dreaming?
It's also related to the most mysterious thing. I sleep talk.
Do you? What do you say? Anything of interest?
I think the most memorable thing I said was I sat up in bed
and I said, "brilliant.com/awesome!"
And then I went straight back to sleep again.
Have you put brilliant.com/awesome into the internet
and seen what comes up?
Maybe it's a picture of you.
NOEL: Sleeping. A hidden camera in Holly's bedroom.
So, the most mysterious thing that we do.
It involves dreaming, it involves sorting the body out.
What is the all-encompassing thing that we do
and we don't really know why we do it? Breathing?
It's sleeping. Sleeping. We have no idea,
it is the most mysterious thing that we do in bed... So obvious.
We just don't know why we do it.
Why would you end the day unconscious and basically paralysed
and leave yourself available to attack by predators unless
there is some fantastic evolutionary benefit that outweighs the risk?
The fact is, we just don't know.
People have thought it was to do with energy conservation,
which is ridiculous because you actually don't save much energy.
Really? No, not when you sleep, no.
How many days can you go without sleep for before you die?
If you stay awake for 17 hours, it's the same as having
two glasses of wine in terms of how it would affect your performance.
Red wine or white wine?
If it's white wine, then I'll just start crying. Oh, would you?
Are you a bad drunk?
Yeah, I've never once drunk more than two glasses of white wine
and not used the phrase, "Why don't you just dump me, then?"
Even to people who you're not in a relationship with.
No, you save about 110 calories each night,
so a two-finger Kit Kat is 107, it's not a lot, is it?
That's the only energy saving? That's the only energy saving.
So, when you wake up in the morning, you can have a two-fingered Kit Kat.
Help yourself! Gratis. Totally wipes it all out, frankly.
It's a classy breakfast. Yes! "Morning, everyone."
So, the theory that I like best,
there have been some scientists at the University of Rochester
Medical Centre in New York,
and they think it's when our brains are cleaned.
And that maybe that's what's happening to us,
is that we are clearing the brain out.
There's a professor, Maiken Nedergaard.
I have instituted random Scandinavian facts,
which I call the randi-Scandis.
She's a neuroscientist, she's a woman and she's Danish.
This is a fantastic person to quote, and she says,
"You can think of it like having a house party.
"You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house,
"but you can't really do both at the same time."
That's the theory. But how much you sleep depends on
your own circadian rhythms. I don't sleep very much.
Anybody here a good sleeper? I've got a five-month-old baby,
so I only sleep in hour-and-a-half chunks at the moment.
So, have you just come for a break just tonight?
This is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
Genuinely, I went to the dentist the other day
and I had to have a filling.
And I lay back, and I was like, "I think this is the closest
"to having a relaxing time that I've had for five months."
It was so nice.
NOEL: Did he trim your gums?
Are you a good sleeper, Noel? Do you sleep well?
Yeah, I can sleep a lot, yeah.
Apparently, what you should do to find out how much you need to sleep
is you should spend a week not having an alarm clock at all
and you should let your body just wake up when it needs to,
and log how many hours.
And if you need six hours, and you need to get up at 7am,
then you know what time to go to bed.
Yes, but, Sandi, you need a wee at five...
no matter what.
Yes, it's very annoying.
And it's not like you particularly have that much wee to do.
You get there and you think, "Why have you woken me up for that?
"I would rather have just left that in the bed.
"I could have dealt with that..."
"..in the morning!"
Also, sometimes, the middle of the night wee, you can start thinking
about something stressful, or get frightened by noises in the house.
It's best just to stay asleep till it gets light.
I think, really, the solution is some sort of an apparatus
where you can sleep on the loo.
My father was in hospital
and he had a catheter fitted for a couple of weeks,
and he said he'd never slept so well for about 50 years.
The best thing that had ever happened to him.
HOLLY: It's like when you go and stay in a hotel.
They say never use the kettle because people pee in it.
No! The kettle? No! You see, I don't want to know those things!
How far away is the bathroom?
I always think that must be a man who pees in that kettle.
NOEL: I can say, on behalf of men all over the country,
we do not piss in kettles.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You've got to take the lid off, you've got to unplug it...
Those lids are spiteful. It's way too much effort.
I'm not making it up, it's a well-known fact.
I don't come on QI and talk bullshit.
I'm straight up with the facts.
NOEL: So, when you go to a hotel room and there's water already
in the kettle, that's a bit suspect. I always get rid of that.
To be honest, boiled piss is probably...
It might change the flavour of the tea, but it's not...
it's not a bacterial threat, is it?
Another thing. Never eat the chocolate on the pillow.
Oh, where's that been?!
Anyway, moving on.
Describe the night of the horrified sheep.
So, it was an actual thing that happened, November 3rd, 1888
and something happened that spooked all sheep over
a 200 square mile area in Oxfordshire.
Tens of thousands of sheep panicked, they jumped fences,
they ran for their lives. Earthquake.
Well, that was one of the theories of the time, that there might
have been a small earthquake or something dropped from the sky,
but probably what happened is just one sheep panicked.
LAUGHTER
It's possible it was very dark, the sheep just went,
"Where's my friends? Where's my friends?"
Had he just gone "Baaa!"
And then all the other sheep must've been going,
"Sh! Sh!
"He'll think he's on his own!"
Then, when he panicked, they all went, "Oh, my God!
"What have we done?!"
Do you think if a sheep can't get to sleep,
do you think he counts his friends?
I wonder what the reason was that we decided to count them
in the first place at night.
Well, it must be really boring to count sheep.
Yeah, it sends you off, yes. Well, I think you've nailed it. Thanks.
The thing is about counting sheep, they look quite similar,
so you're never sure if it's the same one coming past.
Could just be one sheep on a loop.
And they take turns.
HOLLY: I tell you what I'd love to count. Kittens.
Ah. Imagine if 70,000 kittens ran past you.
That would just be the most adorable thing that ever happened to anyone.
See, I really struggle with this. I'm more of a dog person.
Puppies!
Probably why the kittens are all running, away from a dog, I think.
I always think that cats, you know when people say, like,
"An old woman died in her flat
"and she was eaten by her cats," I mean...
What kind of world do you live in?!
Peeing in kettles and old women...? Three days.
Three days and your cat will eat your face. Yeah.
Because it will have loosened up enough for it to get purchase.
AUDIENCE: Ugh!
NOEL: What sort of show is this?
They never say that, do they? About, you know,
an aged meat on a menu, you know with a 20-day-aged beef,
they never use the phrase,
"It will have loosened up enough to get purchase."
Of course, the thing that the cats don't like,
they don't like orange peel. Did you know this? Yeah.
And spiders don't like conkers. Yes. HOLLY: What?
What, the game? They don't like the game?
Because they get their legs caught between them.
"I've got seven now!"
If you don't like spiders, put loads of conkers in your house
and there'll be fewer spiders but still some spiders.
So the best plan is to get over the fears of spiders, really.
But then there'll be, like, loads of eight-year-olds.
Hiding in corners.
Yeah, what you lose in spiders, you gain in schoolchildren with conkers.
Eight-year-olds don't like bullies,
so just keep some bullies in the house.
It's getting quite busy in the house, though, isn't it?
NOEL: Bullies, how are we going to get rid of them?
HOLLY: Parental love.
So, we need more parents...
And a school counsellor. HOLLY: Yeah. 24 hour.
NOEL: And some tenderised face meat...
Have a look at this. Here is a night to remember.
This is the 9th of November, 1874.
The New York Herald front page article reported...
AMERICAN ACCENT:.."The wild animals broken loose from Central Park!
"Terrible scenes of mutilation!"
The article described 49 deaths and 200 injuries.
There's some excellent details in it.
It included a sighting of a lion in a church and, my favourite,
a rhinoceros in a sewer.
How did they get out of the sewer?
Never mind that. How did it get in there? A manhole cover.
It must have fallen in.
But it wasn't until the very last paragraph
that the article concluded, of course,
"The entire story given above is a pure fabrication.
"Not one word of it is true,
"not a single act or incident described has taken place.
"It's a huge hoax, a wild romance."
And then it went on to ask, which was the reason for the headline,
"What would we do in New York if this happened?"
It's one of the most notorious and, indeed, accidental media hoaxes.
But, in fact, it caused complete panic on the streets.
Is that a huge risk? I mean, in zoos? Well, yes.
You'd think maybe it's something we don't need to worry about
if you've got enough cages. But in February 2016,
the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo did their annual test to see
what they would do if an animal escapes
and what they did was they got the 27-year-old gorilla keeper
called Yumi Tamura to dress up as a zebra.
LAUGHTER
There she is.
And there they all are dealing with it. So, yes...
LAUGHTER
Very fine death. Now, here's my favourite moment.
Checking to see if animal is dead. Wow.
The famous poke them with a stick.
So you feel safe, don't you?
If you're in Tokyo and an animal escapes.
I went to London Zoo recently
and in the tiger enclosure there's a platform there
and you can get up to sort of eye-level and look at this thing.
And we're standing there with the kids
and a woman came in with her little boy
and she goes, "Look at it. Lazy."
"Like Daddy." LAUGHTER
Then just wheeled him away.
My wife goes, "Drip, drip, drip."
I remember taking my son to London Zoo and he must have been
about three years old and I thought it was so exciting for him.
I was showing him the elephants and I was showing him the rhinos,
and they were doing some renovations.
And the only time he took his dummy out of his mouth,
sat up in his buggy and went, "Look, Mum. A digger!"
LAUGHTER
No-one knows why tens of thousands of sheep went crazy in Oxfordshire
on the night of November 3rd, 1888.
They may have been surprised by the fact that it got dark,
or by the news that, earlier in the day,
Preston North End beat Notts County 7-0.
I'm really trying with the football thing, just so you know.
Doing my best.
We'll never know.
OK, how would a night witch travel?
Broomstick.
KLAXON
Er...no.
I just get an Uber, generally.
It actually doesn't look unlike you.
I think I might have met that witch in Camden.
So we are heading backwards in time to the Second World War.
Is the Night Witch something military?
It is military. Is it a code thing? A plane or something?
Is it a Soviet thing? Yes, it is a Soviet thing.
It is the 588th Night Bomber Regiment from the Soviet Union
and it was an all-female unit, from the mechanics to the pilots,
and they were known as the Night Witches.
What's incredible about them -
Iots of the men didn't want them to fight,
so they were all given men's uniforms,
they were all made to cut their hair very short
and they were given rubbish aeroplanes.
So those aeroplanes you can see on the side there,
they're called Polikarpov Po-2 planes
and they're basically made of plywood and canvas.
They were just for training or for crop-dusting and that kind of thing,
so they had weight restrictions.
It meant they had to fly close to the ground,
it meant they couldn't take parachutes.
And there was sort of a whooshing noise, because they flew so low
and the Germans said it sounded like a broomstick overhead,
so they called them the Nachthexen, the Night Witches.
Amazing, actually. Of course, we had them in the UK as well.
Not in quite the same way. They weren't in combat.
I had the great privilege of meeting Joy Lofthouse,
who was 92 when I met her, and there she is.
She was part of the Air Transport Auxiliary.
We had 168 female pilots in World War II.
And Joy, amongst other aeroplanes, used to deliver Spitfires.
She looks good for 92. She does.
She does. Witches don't age.
I'm 1,000.
But Night Witches is a great name, isn't it? It is.
Night Witches, it's terrifying. Made me think about The Night Watch,
you know that wonderful painting by Rembrandt.
They did some restoration work on it and it was just dark varnish
and they had to rename it The Day Watch because it's actually,
it turns out, much brighter. Is that in the museum in Amsterdam?
It's in the Rijksmuseum.
And there's a bit of it that was missing or something.
I think they rehung it and they couldn't fit it in,
so they had to cut a bit off. SHE GASPS
And they put it in a room and it wouldn't fit, so they cut...
I mean, now, it's worth millions.
"It doesn't fit, we'll just have to take the end off.
"That bloke on the end doesn't look important."
Where is it? Did they throw it away or did they keep it?
I think they kept it.
To make one very long, thin painting for somewhere else.
For a hall. Yes, exactly.
Coming up the stairs, it would look nice. Or in the bathroom. Yeah.
So the whole thing about keeping an eye at night.
We used to have night watchmen in the UK.
In fact, walking around town at night,
night walking was illegal from 1285 to 1827 and they used to
employ night watchmen to go around the streets.
You weren't allowed to go around. Until 1827? Until 1827, yeah.
500 years, you weren't allowed to go out at night?
Well, in some places, we still have night watchmen.
So the oldest town in Denmark, which is called Ribe,
we still have night watchmen and you can hear them at night.
They have a song that they sing and every hour has a different verse,
so you can tell what time of night it is.
Also keeps you awake, so it's a bit irritating.
I went to boarding school and we had night watchmen at the school.
Did you? Yes. It was a mixed boarding school,
to make sure that no-one was going to other people's dormitories. Ah.
I was at a single sex school.
We didn't have a night watchman and they should have.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The Night Witches were the Germans' worst nightmare,
so my question is - what's your worst nightmare?
I don't have nightmares.
I just occasionally have dreams that are quite stressful. Oh, like what?
Increasingly, they involve having to do my A levels again.
For some reason, I've been busted back to the sixth form
and I have to do my A levels again. And I keep saying,
"This is ridiculous! I've been to university.
"Why am I having to do my A levels again?"
But I do have to do them again
and I wake up all stressed by it... NOEL: And have to go to the toilet.
It's quite nice because I reflect, as I go to the toilet,
that I don't have to do my A levels again. It's good news.
Are you a nightmare person, Alan?
No, but I wish I had a dream recorder.
That's boring, though, when people tell you their dreams.
They're so boring. Not other people's dreams.
I don't want other people's dreams! My own dreams are amazing.
People always go, "Oh, my hands were made of coleslaw,
"and then you were in it, and you had really big..."
And you're, like, "This is so boring!"
Have you ever been...?
When you hear someone describe their dream
and they mention someone's in it, do you sit there,
rather hoping that you're going to crop up?
But you don't always, and you sort of go,
"I've not invaded this person's consciousness enough."
Sometimes I have dreams where
I need to fight someone and I have no strength.
And I'm supposed to get somewhere and I can never get there.
And I'm impressed by all the various obstacles I can put in my own way
that I invent in the night.
Those are the most common sort of ones. The thing about being chased,
not being able to get to the toilet in time,
being exposed publically naked is a very big thing,
and how you respond to that. So if it doesn't bother you,
that suggests you are secure in real life. If you're embarrassed,
it suggests you are uncomfortable about something.
If you don't notice that you're naked, I think you have
a lack of self-awareness is what it would probably be.
Do you sleep on your left or right side?
Cos that may have some impact on whether you dream or not.
Do most people have one side?
Are you a tosser and turner?
Yeah, I think so.
Oh, my God, this is a dream and you're going to wake up
and go to the toilet in a minute. We're all in your dream!
So, what did you say? Left or right? Right.
That fits with the study that they did in 2004.
You're more likely to have disturbing dreams if you sleep
on your left-hand side, than if you sleep on your right-hand side.
So, I'm good. You toss and turn? It could be either way.
I didn't realise now I'm making a choice.
Yes!
Am I just going for rest, or adventure?
LAUGHTER
What side does your wife sleep on?
I'm not aware of her having a preference
for one side or the other. So, you have one side of the bed, right?
Yeah, yeah. Surely, see... NOEL: "Yeah, I'm not an idiot."
So, my husband makes me sleep facing away from him
cos I breathe too loudly.
NOEL: That's quite weird, isn't it?
HOLLY: Like those two in the picture.
When I got married, another thing I found out,
that it wasn't usual to put your underwear and your socks on
before you put any of your clothes on.
What, are you supposed to put them on afterwards? No, no...
Did you marry a superhero?
I get my underwear on and then I put my socks on. Right.
And then I put my outerwear on. OK. And what's wrong with that?
Well, apparently, it's weird to put your socks on before you put
your trousers and your top on.
I think your husband is telling you that things
he does are things that everyone does.
It's perfectly reasonable to put your socks on
before your trousers or shirt.
It's also perfectly reasonable to breathe while you're asleep.
LAUGHTER
The problem in your house is he keeps pissing in the kettle.
There's a story from 1821 in Paris of a nocturnal apparition.
So this guy awoke to see a creature in his room
and he thought it was the devil.
So he called for his servant and then he immediately died of fright,
and the servant chased away the apparition,
and it rather fits in with the whole zoo thing, because it turned out
it was a large ape escaped from a nearby menagerie
that had climbed down the chimney. Wow. I know!
So sometimes it's not a bad dream, it is a thing that has escaped.
Anyway...
what is the worst thing you can do on a bed of nails?
Fall from a great height. I would say so.
I'd say an orgy.
LAUGHTER
I'd say to get nailed on some nails would be a terrible thing.
Well, here's the thing.
So, I think you could have an orgy if you were fantastically
careful about how you got on and off.
Are we talking about the nails or the people?
LAUGHTER
It's about the even distribution of weight across the nails.
I did do this. Did you?
I went on a bed of nails with a contortionist.
What a night that was.
LAUGHTER
I filmed it.
And he showed me how to lie down.
It's all right if you're lying down, but he said, "Be very, very careful,
"because your instinct when you get up is to put your weight
"on your hands." Oh! Yeah.
And then that really hurts a lot.
When I was at school, one afternoon, for some reason, some
circus-skills people came round
and tried to teach us all circus skills.
I love the heavy note of disapproval in your voice.
"Waste of bloody time!"
I was seven.
You learn circus skills later.
What I needed was maths.
They came round and tried to teach us how to juggle,
we couldn't juggle.
Tried to put clown make-up on,
some of us had an allergic reaction,
you know. One of the things was a bed of nails.
They taught us how to lie on a bed of nails
and the way you lie on a bed of nails is
you just lie on it and it's fine.
But it's about getting on and off. You're absolutely right.
So, let's have a look and test this out.
You've got a very small bed of nails underneath the desk there.
If you bring it out.
I'm not going on, on the bottom.
Noel, if you would take a seat.
Take a balloon.
Take a balloon and place the balloon on the bed of nails.
Now, apply the pressure evenly.
It's actually... Clearly this is a condom.
See, that's your big problem with having an orgy on a bed of nails.
If you press down on the wood evenly,
it can withstand it for quite a long time.
Can I put some real weight on it? Go on. Burst it. Burst it.
Go on, then, let's have a go. AUDIENCE GASPS
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
You've done a lot. I'll try again. Fantastic.
Oh.
A fantastic amount of pressure.
Great, I've got condom up my nose.
Again.
Put your beds of nails away.
Let's have a quick look.
We've got some video here of a woman.
Now, look how she gets on.
OK, now watch. This is actually slightly terrifying.
So, she lies on the bed of nails and then... Oh, no.
..an anvil left over from the Roadrunner cartoons...
AUDIENCE GASPS
No! Her boobs!
I know. I know.
Anvil in the boobs is worse than some nails in the back. Yeah.
And rather pleasingly,
couple of spots which have been nicely popped there.
Maybe that's going to be the new pampering.
What, lying on a bed of nails?
Turns out, that's really good for the skin.
You just get on the nails, anvil, couple of guys with some hammers.
Yeah. Anyway, beds of nails aren't too painful to sleep on,
so long as you climb on carefully.
How can you tell if a fish is asleep?
LAUGHTER
That is not asleep. That is just breakfast.
He's still got his eyes open. Well, that is the problem, isn't it?
HOLLY: I think I know the answer to this. Yes?
It bobs on the top of the surface... Then it's dead.
..no, your parents put you to bed early and then in the morning,
it's fine, but it's just a different shape and colour.
I've heard that, with goldfish, when they bob on the surface,
it's often they're not dead.
Yeah, they sometimes get air caught inside them
and they can recover from that.
And so many viable goldfish have been, you know,
flushed down the loo as a result.
And they're in the sewers now with a rhino.
Does the fish stop eating?
No, so it's sort of the reverse of them swimming on the top.
If we had a tank of fish, you'd see them hovering near the bottom.
They go into a sort of trancelike state and if you then fed them,
it would take them noticeably longer to respond.
And dolphins and whales, they sleep by something called logging.
They shut down half their brain along with the opposite eye.
And the alert side is watching for predators and obstacles and so on.
And then after about two hours, the sides reverse.
So their brains get cleaned like 50-50. Bit by bit. Yes.
It's weird we haven't evolved to do that because you'd think
we'd have survived better if we didn't totally close down.
Well, the even weirder thing is that some animals hibernate,
but they have to wake up in order to go to sleep.
And if they don't wake up, they'd actually end up sleep-deprived,
so they wake up to go to sleep.
So it's a different sort of sleep? It's a totally different thing.
And then there are ones that just go in to torpor to avoid the heat,
that's a different thing, that's not the same as hibernation.
Things like the water-holding frog,
the western swamp tortoise, which is actually a turtle,
and the African lungfish. So they go into a torpor to avoid the heat,
aestivation. It's just a short-term drop in temperature.
Now, where's the best place to sleep on the job?
I used to sleep in the boot of my car when I was at work.
Did you?
In the university holidays, I worked for a textbook company
and I could do what they needed me to do in about an hour.
Right. I'd just go out and I'd lie down in the back of my car,
and I started taking a duvet in.
A boot duvet. I called it a boovet.
LAUGHTER
I did get asked to leave after my boss saw me
climbing out the back of my car.
During working hours? Yes.
Yes, I can see that that would have been a very bad thing.
Where I'd clearly been asleep.
NOEL: I had a job in a bakery and I lasted four hours.
What did you do wrong?
Well, the boss popped out and when he came back,
I was lying on the floor eating eclairs without using my hands.
I was just going,
"A-rar-a-rar-ar!"
I looked up and went, "I'll go."
And then he didn't pay me and my mum marched down there and went,
"He did do four hours."
"He did do four hours and then you can deduct the cost of the eclairs."
So, that's not the answer.
What is the best place to sleep on the job?
Oh, is it British Leyland in the 1970s?
Oh, was that a popular thing?
I believe that in the Cowley works in Oxford,
they had a dormitory that was discovered by the management
where they had found, like, beds and duvets.
Very much like the back of your car, but on the industrial scale.
We're talking further away.
We're talking... Space.
Space. We are indeed talking space.
Neuroscientists at Oxford University have been studying
hibernation and they've been studying hibernation of the
Madagascan fat-tailed dwarf lemur.
That's a name that won't leave the lemur alone.
No. It's just...
Look at your fat tail, you dwarf!
And they are trying to unlock the secret of suspended animation.
And NASA have spent a huge amount of money, because astronauts
sleeping their way to the stars would use
Iess water, less food, oxygen, avoid boredom.
Their hair would grow though, wouldn't it? Yes.
Their hair would grow. Here's the weird thing.
The genes for hibernation already exist in the human body
and, ironically, they're dormant.
Of course. It's something we have forgotten how to do.
The secret of suspended animation.
So, it would protect, for example, the health of astronauts.
They currently have to exercise six hours a day.
Otherwise their muscles and their bones and everything atrophies.
And some animals can hibernate for six months
without suffering osteoporosis, or any muscle wastage whatsoever.
Apparently, lots of astronauts sleep on the launchpad
because there's nothing to do.
Marsha Ivins, and that is her there,
completed five missions for NASA and she said astronauts just take a nap.
"You're strapped in like a sack of potatoes while the system
"goes through thousands of prelaunch checks
"and occasionally you have to wake up and say, 'Roger,'
"or, 'Loud and clear,' but basically you just sleep."
Anyway, sleeping in space could help us reach towards the stars.
What's the most dangerous thing beginning with N
that you could be stuck in a lift with?
Nigel Farage.
KLAXON
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
No. Not correct.
NOEL: Nitrogen. Yes. It is liquid nitrogen.
I've no idea how that happened.
APPLAUSE
Liquid nitrogen explains it,
because I'm pretty sure I've been in a lift with some nitrogen
and lived to tell the tale.
No, liquid nitrogen, it would need to be.
I like the idea, though, of you in a lift with liquid nitrogen.
When it opened, it would be like Stars in Their Eyes.
You'd come out as whoever you liked. Yes, I suppose so,
except you wouldn't come out, is the thing.
It can push the oxygen out of a lift and kill you.
So, if it is carried in a lift, it has to travel on its own.
Basically, what has to happen is somebody has to put it in
and then carefully press the button and shut the doors, and it goes up
to the next floor, or down or wherever,
and somebody has to wait for it.
Why is so much liquid nitrogen needed on so many high floors?
You can make ice cream out of it.
I'm saying, make it on the ground floor. Yeah.
Well, the cafe at Terminal 2 that Heston Blumenthal has at Heathrow,
it has to go in a special security entrance
and be brought into the lift by itself.
Oh, he's caused so much trouble just for his poxy ice cream.
It does actually make better ice cream, because it's smaller
ice crystals so it's smoother, but do you know when it was invented,
the idea of making ice cream with liquid nitrogen?
1420s or something, wasn't it?
Yes. I love the idea of that. 1420s. "What shall we do now?"
1890. 1890.
There was a cookbook called Fancy Ices written by a Mrs Marshall
and she used liquid nitrogen.
Now, what does the EU have against nightingales?
Is it the noise they make? Yes, it is the noise they make.
Why might it be?
It's too loud. It's too loud, it breaks...
They're breaking regulations.
Yes, they are.
They're breaking EU health and safety rules.
There we are, you can have a listen.
They're too loud.
Ah! Argh!
It's quite piercing, isn't it?
That's a male nightingale marking his territory there
and he can sing at 95 decibels, which is the same as a chainsaw.
And our health and safety rules for the EU say you shouldn't be
exposed to anything over 87.
But the weird thing is, they've done some research in Berlin
and they have found that birds are now raising the volume
by 14 decibels to drown out the city sounds.
They are having to. Are they really?
Yep. I've heard that. In the cities, all the birds are louder.
Noisy city birds. Yeah, yeah.
And they go out to the country, "HELLO, EVERYONE!
"GOT ANY GOOD WORMS OR SPIDERS?
"I'VE EATEN NOTHING BUT OLD BURGERS ALL WEEK."
I must say, I've never heard a nightingale song before and
I'm afraid to say I expected more.
I thought a nightingale song was, like, incredibly beautiful
and that was kind of a bit... Irritating at best.
A bit pleasant, but also a bit irritating.
Isn't there a Vera Lynn song about it?
Nightingale In Berkeley Square, absolutely right.
Indeed, the BBC's very first outside broadcast, in 1924,
that was a cellist called Beatrice Harrison and it was
a duet with Beatrice Harrison and a nightingale.
And she had noticed that nearby nightingales were joining in
whenever she was practising and so she approached John Reith
and he was rather dubious about the idea.
But in fact it was broadcast and one million people listened to her
playing along with a nightingale.
Now, night draws on.
Would anyone like a nightcap?
Yes.
KLAXON
At this point, I would like to ask whether the word "No"
is also attached to a buzzer?
And, therefore, precisely how we could fucking win?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
No, you don't want a nightcap, is the answer.
Is it a deadly mushroom or something?
Well, it's from around the turn of the 19th century.
Condemned prisoners... The judge's black hat? Is that a nightcap?
No, it's your own nightcap.
Say you were a condemned prisoner in Tyburn and Newgate,
you'd bring your nightcap to the execution
and, after having your prayers,
the hangman would pull it down over your face in place of a hood.
So your nightcap would become... Not this one because it's quite tight.
That's a tremendous incentive to forget your nightcap, isn't it?
"I'm so sorry, I don't think this can go ahead." "I feel an idiot!"
So, the nightcap as a drink, the notion of capping off the evening,
that's a different use of it.
That kind of nightcap you might very well want, but the idea that
you had a nightcap as a condemned person, that you don't want.
Although, in America, it just means
the second game of a double-header in baseball.
It's known as the nightcap.
Now, we step into the dark and stormy night of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers. Where is this cheese from?
I'll give you a clue, it begins with S.
MAN SNORES HEAVILY Alan.
Shropshire.
KLAXON
I don't know what made you think of it.
Sometimes, you know...
Sometimes you say the obvious one and then you go, "Yes."
No. Never to me.
No, it doesn't come from Shropshire. Anything else?
Begins with an S, does not come from Shropshire.
Spain, Sussex, Surrey, Scotland.
Scotland. It comes from Scotland. It absolutely does.
And it was originally called Inverness-shire Blue or Blue Stuart.
And I don't know why they thought if they renamed it Shropshire,
people would be more likely to buy it.
It was a PR job. So, is it is quite a recent invention?
It's a fairly recent cheese, yeah. Rather like Stinking Bishop.
Oh, yeah, that's like a made-up olde worlde thing, isn't it? Yeah.
It's a... 1973 it was invented. Like Hobnobs. They're quite recent.
Are they? Yeah, the Hobnobs.
Oh, that's an old biscuit, I'll have a Hobnob.
It's about something like 1981.
LAUGHER
I resent the Hobnobs' quick entry into sort of...
It's a quick biscuit to refer to in a joke.
You go, "Oh, a Hobnob," or whatever.
No, Hobnob. You're new.
LAUGHTER
Leave the biscuit references to the rich tea and the digestive.
They've genuinely... They've done the time.
It's like a bloody ploughman's lunch.
Ad executive's inventions.
And tonight's show was sponsored by Hobnobs...
to whom we can only apologise.
Stinking Bishop is actually named after the perry,
so the pear drink it's steeped in.
The pear itself was bred by a man called Mr Bishop
and he was so bad-tempered, he was known as Stinking Bishop.
So bad-tempered that once,
his kettle failed to boil as fast as he wanted it to,
so he shot it. LAUGHTER
And then he pissed in it.
Does anybody know the price of the most expensive cheese in the world?
It's called pule.
1,000 euros.
You're not far off. It is £700 a pound.
HOLLY: What's so special about it? It's made from donkey milk.
I don't know if you've ever tried to milk a donkey, but...
It kicks in the face a lot.
You have to dress as an ice hockey goalkeeper.
25 litres of donkey milk to make one kilo of cheese - of the pule.
Is it very delicious? I've never had it. It's rather crumbly, apparently,
and meant to be a delicacy. It would be at that price.
You wouldn't want to have a lot.
You wouldn't want to think, "Oh, I'm tired,"
just open the fridge, cracker... Melt it on toast. Yes.
I bought a rather nice lump of some sort of fancy cheddar
and it was in a waxy dome, you know.
Babybel. Not a Babybel...
LAUGHTER
..I'll have you know.
It could have been a very old Babybel. Like a pre-war Babybel.
Anyway... Cost quite a lot.
I thought, "I'm going to enjoy that." And then when I came home,
my wife had grated it on the kids' jacket potatoes.
She couldn't understand my indignation.
You sound ridiculous when you're in the kitchen going,
"That's a very expensive cheese!"
LAUGHTER
And she said, "It's a Babybel." Yeah.
Now, it's a beautiful morning, look, there's a rainbow.
What colours can you see?
# Red and yellow
# And... #
You're being very cautious. Purple and blue?
Something, purple and blue?
KLAXON
Orange? Not if it's early or late in the day.
You will only see red, orange and yellow in rainbows
and that is because when the sun is low in the sky,
the light has to pass through much more of the Earth's atmosphere
and only the red wavelengths will make it.
Has anybody ever seen an upside-down rainbow?
I don't think so. HOLLY: Have we all seen one?
Well, it is a thing. You can see them in the sky.
They're called circumzenithal or Bravais' arcs.
So, a rainbow is formed when light refracts through raindrops,
we all know that.
But the upside-down ones are made by light refracting through
ice crystals in the clouds. Isn't it beautiful? Cool.
It is seriously cool.
Now, when is Sunday and how long does it last?
Oh, I'm not getting into that one, someone else can do that.
Anybody else to buzz?
WOLF HOWLS Yes, David.
Between Saturday and Monday and 24 hours.
Oh, dear. KLAXON
No, is the answer.
So, it is not Sunday. It is sun day.
And it is... Is it the summer solstice?
It is the one day in the year.
Where might they be so thrilled to see the sun?
Oh, is it somewhere in Scotland?
LAUGHTER
Slightly further north.
Oh, is it when the sun appears at the end of the Arctic winter
or something like that? Yeah, it is.
It's in a place called Uummannaq in north-western Greenland.
It takes place on 4th February
and it's when the sun first appears after winter,
and it lasts for six minutes.
But it is so exciting...
Farming's going well there, isn't it?
Think of their garden.
Come on, Titchmarsh, show us your stuff.
It looks like where the Thunderbirds live.
"Why do we live here?" "I don't know."
And they celebrate that day.
The schoolchildren take the day off and they have hot chocolate
and doughnuts and so on
and they organise sites that everybody can see the sun.
I bet you they still get their tops off when it comes out, like here.
Do you think?
I think just loads of middle-aged men go out
just in their boxer shorts,
just to get a bit of a tan.
Where does that happen? In Lewisham.
Every park in the UK.
Speaking on behalf of middle-aged men,
there's no way we would strip down to our boxes in any park.
You two are really making a lot of statements on behalf of
all men this evening.
Yeah, as are you, kettle pisser.
LAUGHTER
From someone who sleeps in the boot of her own car.
Did anybody ever go to that fantastic exhibition in the
Turbine Hall at the Tate called the Weather Project,
where they just had a large sun? I did. Did you see it?
Yeah. It was amazing.
I went to an exhibition at the Tate and it was on pop art and
there was a room that was set aside from everyone else, because it
was very explicit by this artist called Jeff Koons who does
basically high art, but pornography.
And this middle-class woman and her two kids came up and the guy
on the door stopped them and said,
"This is for over 18s only, you can't come in." And the woman said,
"I'll go in and have a look and I'll come back out and tell you what I saw."
So she went into the room and she came back out
a split-second later, completely ashen-faced.
And I heard her lean down to these two kids and she said,
"What happens between a man and a woman is a beautiful thing.
"What I saw in that room is of no help to anyone."
That's what you said after the circus skills workshop.
I'm trying to get my head around long division.
I don't need this bullshit.
Don't try and tempt me with Hobnobs.
Take your unicycle and go.
Anyway, let's have a look at the scores.
And the winner with a full three points,
it's Holly!
Second place, with -8, it's Noel.
In third place with -10, Alan.
David, it's a magnificent loss, can I say?
-37, in last place, it's David Mitchell.
So, it's thanks to Holly, David, Noel and Alan.
That's all from this quite interesting night,
apart from this Neolithic newspaper nugget from the Western Daily Press.
A student who woke up after a drunken night out with the words
"Barry is a twat" tattooed on his arm
says he has no idea who Barry is.
Night-night.