CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Wheyyy!
Hello and welcome to QI.
Tonight's show will be a nebulous nosebag of non sequiturs.
Nestled in next to me, we have three types of non sequitur.
Affirming the consequent, Miles Jupp.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Denying the antecedent, Deirdre O'Kane.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The fallacy of the undistributed middle, Phill Jupitus.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And getting in a frightful muddle, Alan Davies.
Hello. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And for their buzzers, we've got four non-secateurs
because one of the researchers can't spell.
Miles goes...
SCISSORS SNIP CRISPLY
Deirdre goes...
SCISSOR BLADES SCRAPE TOGETHER
..on for quite a long time. Very bad hairdresser, that is.
Slightly rusty. Phill goes...
KNIFE CHOPPING VEGETABLES
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And Alan goes...
'Cut!'
One of my dreams... I've done a lot of things in show business.
I've always wanted to be in Midsomer Murders, as a victim.
So the camera would pan round a rose bush, and I'd be lying there,
with a trug, and a pair of secateurs.
We should make this happen! Yes!
Let's start with a nun-sequitur.
How do you get urine off a nun?
Yes. I don't think that nuns pee at all.
Oh!
I know a lot about nuns.
Do you? Why's that? Because I was educated by them,
and it was in a boarding school, so I actually lived with them.
Right. And they never weed?
Never. I never saw one of them enter or leave a bathroom.
The thing is, they've got those very long frocks on, haven't they?
Very long frocks, and they might have
some kind of divine catheter or something, but they don't...
You don't see them coming out of a bathroom.
The Divine Catheter are a great group, aren't they?
Everybody at home playing QI bingo, that's "Divine catheter."
In the 18th century, women who wore the long frocks,
they used to have the equivalent of a gravy boat
on a sort of ribbon for long church services.
They actually had one of those things we were all just imagining?
Yes, they did. Yes, they did.
A gravy boat on a ribbon.
Is this urine in the picture, or is that just something...
"The gravy boat's fallen off!"
"Help me!"
That's "The gravy boat's fallen off."
Is it necessary to get urine off nuns?
It was necessary. It was the 1960s.
Oh, it was a condiment, wasn't it, nun wee?
A condiment?!
"Have you got a slightly bigger bottle of nun wee?"
Was it to test... Pregnancy tests?
It is to do with pregnancy. OK. So, women who go through the menopause,
their urine contains very high levels of hormones
that can be used to make medications to increase female fertility,
something the Roman Catholic Church are very much in favour of.
Hence the horny menopausal women. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
That's another good group.
The Horny Menopausal Women.
I love that band. What a gig!
1960, there was a medical student called Bruno Lunenfeld
and he was looking for a source of menopausal women
who would be happy to give up their urine.
So, this is one of those stories where chance takes a moment in life.
He met the Pope's nephew by chance.
And he's talking about, "Where the heck am I going to find
"a whole lot of menopausal women
"who don't mind about giving up their urine
"who are going to help with fertility drugs?"
And it was the Vatican, and he said,
"I was lucky enough to have a unique connection to an important authority
"with access to a huge supply of postmenopausal urine."
See, they've got their bag, their colostomy bags.
They're disguised as handbags, haven't they?
Boldly worn on the outside. Hiding in plain sight.
Well, here's the thing that might interest you.
Did you know that in the United States
it's now possible to rent a nun?
No, but I'd say that might be becoming a thing world over,
because there's bound to be a shortage.
Well, we're busy. We're all very busy. We're very busy.
We haven't got time to pray every day,
so the Salesian Sisters of St John Bosco,
they run an Adopt A Sister programme.
You have to give about $500 for the sister's retirement needs,
and then she will pray for you every day, saving you the bother.
Will she do light admin as well?
Obviously, do the pray, do the pray, but also,
if you could give the study a once over, that sort of thing.
Do the laundry. They're great at the laundry.
Do you think there's a thing about
Iots of women living in close cloisters like that?
Because in 1844 there was an extraordinary experience,
when a French nun began to meow like a cat, OK,
and soon, the other nuns joined in...
..and eventually, every nun in the convent
was meowing for hours on end,
and they couldn't stop.
And do you know how they stopped, in the end?
Got a dog.
APPLAUSE
A group of soldiers turned up and threatened to beat them
with iron rods. Really?!
Yup. Pack it in!
Nothing like that!
My favourite thing about nuns is the Robert Browning poem
called Pippa Passes. It was written in 1841, and it goes,
"Owls and bats, Cowls and twats,
"Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
"Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!"
And it's funny because he was under the misapprehension
that twat meant a nun's hat.
Bit of a tight fit.
"Am I wearing it back to front?"
"Have you got a bigger one?"
He said he got the word from a 1660 satirical poem
called Vanity of Vanities,
"They talked of his having a Cardinal's Hat,
"They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat".
He thought...that must mean hat.
Bless him. Bless.
Now, this is the non sequiturs show, and that's why, Alan,
we're now going to hit you with a hammer.
Bring on the nerd!
APPLAUSE
Steve is our resident nerd for tonight,
he's from the science-cum-comedy group Festival of the Spoken Nerd,
and he is going to hit Alan with a hammer.
So, the first thing is to wrap your hand in this orange goo.
If you put your hand like that for me, I'm just going to wrap it.
I'm very trusting, aren't I? Yeah!
Do you notice I'm not doing it?
Yes, I had noticed that.
If you just gently press it with your finger.
Very soft. You wouldn't think that could afford any kind of protection
against the hammer. No.
This is the point where I say don't try this at home, OK?
DEIDRE: Are you feeling anything there?
How is it? Is there any pain or anything?
A little bit.
What is it, Steve, is it silly putty or something?
It's not silly putty.
So, don't try this at home with silly putty,
cos you will break your fingers. What is it, then?
This is called D3o, it's sort of a smart material.
It's a non- Newtonian fluid.
A non- Newtonian fluid? Yes.
OK, so you're going to have to start with what is a Newtonian fluid?
So, a Newtonian fluid is...
Are you like this with your lover?
Do not answer that question, Steve.
So, Newton came up with some equations
that describe how normal liquids and gases behave,
but this doesn't behave like Newton described.
It behaves as a normal liquid most of the time,
but if you strike it,
then the molecules lock together,
and momentarily form a solid that protects your fingers.
You could make your own non- Newtonian at home?
You can. What would you do?
Cornflour and water, if you mix that together.
Which is called? Oobleck.
OK, so oobleck, after the gooey green rain
in Dr Seuss's Bartholomew And The Oobleck.
So, we have made some.
Now, we're going to try and do this as a demonstration.
I have to just manipulate...
This is a condom.
I say that because somebody had to explain it to me earlier.
She was walking around with it on her head for ages.
You should have been here when she tried to make a giraffe.
So, in here is a raw egg in its shell,
and we've got two condoms.
One which has just got water and a raw egg,
and I'm going to try and drop this from a great height.
Just...
OK. Are we ready?
Greater! Greater height.
OK, so this one is just water,
and I'm going to drop it into the QI frying pan. Am I ready?
Here we go.
Whoa, that's broken.
That was very pleasing. A very pleasing result.
So, now, this is the theory.
CHUCKLING: OK.
The theory is that this one should survive.
And there we go. The egg is fully intact. ALL: Oooh!
Fantastic. APPLAUSE
Steve!
CHEERING AND WHISTLING
But seriously, don't hit anybody at home
because you've made a bit of cornflour.
That was amazing. That's not a good idea.
Now, would you want to be pulled off by a Newark man?
Yes.
You would. You would.
Newark in the Midlands, or Newark, New Jersey?
Newark, New Jersey. Noo-wark, as they say. Ah, OK.
What they say in Manhattan is,
"The good news is there's light at the end of the tunnel,
"the bad news is the light's coming from Newark.
Very, very unfair. Very unfair, it's a charming place.
So good they named it once.
Yes. Just Newark. That's it.
I can tell you, he was the Newark steam man.
So, is this something to do with the train, your train,
he pulls you off of your carriages?
In a yard? We're talking 1868.
Two fantastic American inventors,
one called Zadoc P Dederick.
There's a name. He was going to come up with something at some point.
And Isaac Grass. And they invented the Newark steam man.
He was intended to replace horses in pulling carriages,
so what you did was you opened his jacket and you put coal in his chest
and then his top hat worked as a chimney. Ah. Brilliant.
Oh, if only Abe Lincoln had been wearing one of them
in the Ford Theatre.
Unfortunately, they were never able to make them cheaply enough
to produce on a large scale.
It did absolutely capture the public imagination.
There were loads and loads of similar ones.
Do you like them? I think they're great. Oh, wow.
This is another prototype by Frank Reade Junior.
Lots of people tried. There was a Canadian called George Moore,
and he designed one in 1893.
It was 6-foot tall, steam powered, it was an android.
It could walk 5mph, and ejected the steam from his cigar.
Journalists called him the Iron Man.
Sadly he was made of tin, but that's journalists for you.
Did he have little wheels on his feet? This one had spurs.
If you look at the bottom of his feet,
he's got little spurs to give him traction.
This one didn't work so well because he had to be attached to a pole
and basically he just walked round in circles.
He'd trip over things, wouldn't he?
Surely? Do you think horses felt in any way threatened by these things?
"Have you seen what they're doing?
"They put a hat on a chimney."
I like the idea that the horses were running a closed shop.
Yeah. "Listen, we pull the stuff."
That's their way of getting around the unions, essentially.
Yes, an equine society, I like that.
Deirdre, a better use of steam power, so...
Causing more pleasure...
for women in particular.
Are you talking about some kind of steam-powered vibrator?
I am! Yes.
Not an iron. Ohhh!
Ooh!
That photograph does look like there was an iron taken to her there.
If not flattened, you'd certainly take the crease out of it.
APPLAUSE
In 1869, OK,
the very first steam-powered... ALAN LAUGHING
Did it have a whistle on it?
HE WHISTLES
I can hear Queen Victoria now.
"Summon Mr Brunel."
"I'd like a word."
Women did go and have this done in doctors' surgeries. They did.
I don't know how anyone would have found it exciting
because there was a coal-fired boiler and a turbine, OK?
It was called the manipulator.
The manipulator! It was a respected medical instrument until the 1920s,
and certainly there was no end of women trying to get an appointment.
Right.
Queueing round the block.
People are weird about the whole genital thing.
So, in 2016 there was a study,
and they found that humans get aroused
even when touching the naughty bits of androids. OK?
So there was a... Their phones?!
APPLAUSE
DEIDRE: When they're on vibrate...
Ah! There we go.
No, so, robots. So, there was a French robot called Nao
and it was programmed... There it is.
It was programmed to tell people to touch its body parts,
and while they did this, scientists measured their skin conductance,
and when people touched what the study called
the "inaccessible regions"...
So, the buttocks of the robot,
the genitalia...
Weirdly, also the eyeballs...
People became more aroused than when they touched the hands and feet.
That's the after shot, isn't it? That robot is spent. Yes.
Absolutely spent. Yes.
All he can take is a cigarette, now. That's it.
Now for something completely different.
If a woodpecker would peck wood,
how much wood would a woodpecker peck
before its eyes popped out?
Does that happen?
Well, they hammer their heads into trees 20 times per second.
So, 15mph.
You'd think there would be burst blood vessels, damaged nerves,
torn retinas...
Why does it not...
They can't remember anything, that's one of the things.
Every time they strike the wood, they do this.
Kind of.
They have something called a nictitating membrane,
or a translucent third eyelid.
It is honestly like the seatbelt for the eyes,
holding the eyes in place to make sure that nothing happens,
and lots of creatures have them,
and they serve all kinds of purposes.
So, if you are a bird, and you are flying,
they are kind of like flying goggles,
and they keep the debris out of bird's eyes,
and also keep them from drying out when they're hunting.
Underwater goggles. So, there's a shot of a...
It's a Kingfisher, I think, diving down, there.
They're transparent, the nictitating membranes,
so they can still see underwater, but it stops them getting damaged.
The aardvark... I love this!
..closes them when it's eating
so that the termites don't bite their eyes.
Polar bear uses them as sunglasses.
And sharks, you wouldn't think a shark needs protection,
but it uses them to prevent the prey from poking it in the eye
when it's thrashing about.
Anyway, nictitating membranes, they are the norm in mammals and birds,
but giraffes don't have them. Why might giraffes might not need them?
Well... There's your answer.
The tongue! They can lick their...
Their really long tongue! Clean their own eyeball.
AUDIENCE GROANS Oh, what's that silly noise?
You'd love to be able to do that.
Can you imagine?
That and worse, I expect. Yeah.
But humans have vestigial nictitating membranes.
Where do you think they are? Down there in the corner by the nose.
Squidgy bit in the corner. It is that corner bit,
that little tiny lump. That's the leftover bit.
But you can't pull it out, it's not like a sleeping bag scrunched up?
Does it not deploy like an air bag at times of extreme stress?
You despair and hit your own forehead, and they come out...
Suddenly just got like two pink doughnuts in front of your face.
Is that eyelid thing true?
If you didn't shut your eyes when you sneezed or something,
it would... Well, it's an old wives' tale, isn't it,
that sleeping with your eyes open can make your eyeballs pop out.
Do you think that's true?
Yes.
Well, you'd be wrong. Oh.
The eye socket, that is made of bone,
so it's not connected in any way to the nasal passages,
and there are no muscles behind the eyes that contract when you sneeze,
so there is no mechanism involved in a sneeze
that could have the effect claimed,
plus, which I think is the clincher,
you've never met anybody to whom that actually happened.
I remember times at the playground when, you know,
a rumour like that would spread around the entire school. Yeah.
And some point later in the day, someone will start the old...
HE QUAVERS BEFORE A SNEEZE
And then you'll see them go...
HE SNEEZES POINTEDLY
There's actually only one primate known to have
a functioning nictitating membrane, and it's the Calabar angwantibo,
or they're better known as pottos,
and they live in the west African rainforest.
And what they do, the female signals that it's ready to mate
by suspending herself upside down from a branch. Ah, yes.
We've all been on those kind of dates, that have ended up...
Swinging out of the chandelier. I do a little bit of that. Exactly, yeah.
And the male joins her, and they both copulate face-to-face
swinging upside down. Cool.
And when they are confronted by a predator,
what they do is they roll into a little ball,
but they keep their mouth open under the armpit,
and if the attacker persists, they bite it and won't let go,
so all you see is a little ball of fur
and a little mouth underneath the armpit having a go.
Aren't they sweet?
Yeah, but I'm slightly put off by that story. Oh, yeah.
You're cute, aren't you?
SPLAT
What am I talking about?
It begins with N, feels like a snake when wet,
and caused women to riot in the streets?
Nonald Trump.
It is not Nonald Trump.
Go post-World War II.
There was a problem with getting a supply in the Second World War.
Nylon. Nylon. Nylons! Absolutely right.
Up until 1942 it had been used exclusively to make stockings,
and then was redirected to the war effort, so it was used to make...
Parachutes! Parachutes, exactly, aeroplane tyres,
tow ropes, fuel tanks, machinegun parts, hammocks,
mosquito nets, all sorts of things.
So, when the war ended, women were so excited...
This is so shallow!
..at the return of nylons that it generated the Nylon Riots
of 1945 and 1946.
In Pittsburgh, 40,000 women queued for 16 blocks
to fight over 13,000 pairs.
In Chicago, police were called to break up a mob of 1,200 women
clamouring for nylons outside the shop,
and apparently there were frequent fistfights.
There was a headline at the time...
US NEWSREADER VOICE: "Women risk life and limb in bitter battle over nylons."
Brentford Nylons!
Do they still exist, Brentford Nylons?
I certainly hope so but I doubt it. Do you remember nylon sheets?
You used to get into bed and slide out the other side. Yes!
On fire, usually.
What I like about those nylons, though, is that there's no tights,
it's all stockings. Oh, yes, they're all stocking tops.
Quite nice. That was the thing at the time.
It was all about being quite sexy,
as opposed to warm with the tights up to here.
Yes, when I was in school we had to wear two pairs of underpants.
You had to wear one pair underneath your tights,
and then another pair over the top.
I don't really, to this day, really know why. That's because...
I'll tell you why. Yeah?
That's because in the convent,
the nuns thought if you wore patent shoes
people could see your underwear reflected in the shoe.
So...
So you wore a pair on the outside for double protection. Wow!
There's nobody getting in, anyway. No, that's...
Just safer, isn't it? That's why ovens used to have two doors.
Anybody know what the first thing that nylon was used to make?
Hats. Scarves. Gloves. Gramophone records. Socks.
It was toothbrushes. Toothbrushes.
Because before then it was horsehair.
"Looking for a sexy dentist?"
But when it was made into stockings,
there were all sorts of terrible rumours.
People said that they feel like snakes when they're wet.
People were told that nylon gives you cancer of the legs.
That was one of the things. That it melts in hot water.
That if you walked past a car exhaust while wearing them
the fumes would strip them from your legs.
Yes, but what did papers other than the Daily Mail about nylons?
I read a story about a woman who wore her nylon tights
to protect herself from sunburn,
while she was on the beach, and the sun was very, very hot,
and they melted into her skin and gave her third degree burns.
Wow!
That is an awful story.
Hello, and welcome to Alan's Den Of Horror.
This week, we're going to the Bahamas.
It was actually...
It was in Blackpool!
APPLAUSE
Well, in the early days, when nylon was not so well manufactured,
then there would have been something in it.
I think now it's perfectly OK.
Now, could you please do an impression of
a trout faking an orgasm?
Oh, Deirdre's off.
It looks like you had a really bad face-lift.
Well, I was trying to be a sarcastic trout. A sarcastic trout.
It'll be the gills, it would be like... A trout faking an orgasm.
Is that it? Yeah, I'm done.
Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, the river moved for me as well.
Anybody else want to show...
You do a fine line in animal impersonations.
Well, I'm not sure. I feel like I'd have to move my tail.
I'm sure the tail...
I don't believe anybody is stopping you.
If you've just tuned in...
..that was Alan being a trout faking an orgasm.
The mouth open, and the tail wiggling.
APPLAUSE
So here's the thing. Female trouts do fake orgasms, OK?
When two trout prepare to...spawn,
they quiver rather violently
before releasing egg and sperm respectively.
So they did a study on this, 2001,
and they found that 69 out of 117 pairings, so it is quite a lot...
Ironically. Yes, ironically, 69.
..females did not release her eggs
despite going through the quivering motions,
and tricking the mate into releasing his sperm.
So, why would she do this?
It allows her to save herself for a better trout. The one.
It also allows multiple males to deposit sperm on her
before she releases the eggs. So, you know when you open a trout,
you can see if they've got eggs in, you know she was a faker.
But also what I like about it,
there's got to be a thing of trout etiquette, she's just going,
"No offence, honestly, you tried," she says to the boy. "But...
"Yeah, that wasn't quite up to scratch."
You don't think of trout being choosy, do you, but they must be.
Yeah. I didn't know they could talk.
So as this is non sequiturs,
this doesn't lead me to wonder,
why was Squirrel Nutkin such a lying bastard?
I should know this cos I've been to the Beatrix Potter Museum.
Have you? Where is it, the Lake District somewhere? Yes.
It's quite good.
If you like Beatrix Potter, it's amazing. Yeah!
So we've been talking about lying, faking orgasms.
It's to do with colour, is it? DEIDRE: Is it because he was ginger?
Well, Squirrel Nutkin as you rightly point out was a red squirrel,
but most other squirrels tend to pretend that
they've buried their food to trick potential thieves.
They dig a hole, they pretend to put a nut inside and cover it up,
all the time, the nut is actually still in their mouth.
And then they also re-cache,
so they bury nuts and then they return to them soon afterwards,
dig them up and bury them somewhere else.
They sometimes do this five times with the same stash.
But they did a study in 2008, almost a quarter of all squirrel burials,
that's of food at some sites, not of each other...
..were faked. It's too late, you said squirrel burials so now...
They're gorgeous but they're like...
They're mainly unmarked, but you do see little headstones occasionally.
But here is the thing, there's been a debate since at least 1884,
and it rages on, whether squirrels remember where they hide their nuts
or whether they just hide as many as they can
and then return to a likely place.
Define "rages."
Well, there have been studies...
..since 1881.
There was one in 1991, a study done at Princeton.
Two...
So, they don't have a conclusion.
No. The thing is, it rages on.
It rages on.
Anybody know what kinds of nuts squirrels eat?
Do they like the caramelised ones you get on trolleys on...?
they love a mini pretzel as well, they love a mini pretzel.
A snack selection. Yeah, Bombay mix, they like.
It is true, anything they can get hold of, is the truth.
Acorns, if oak trees are nearby,
walnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, almonds.
Anybody know where the bulk of the world's almonds come from?
Kent.
The Garden of England.
No, it's California.
80% of the world's almonds come from California.
It uses a tremendous amount of water.
Enough to supply 75% of the state's human population
just to make the almonds.
So, 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond.
What? What? I know. It's incredible.
Would they not be better sending that water to Las Vegas,
which is about to dry up?
Yes, there are serious issues about it.
Forget the almonds, maybe. Well...
I don't know if the beekeepers would say so,
because you need 1.7 million colonies of honeybees
to pollinate them all,
so that is 80 billion bees to pollinate the almond trees,
and so beekeepers, they make money by renting out bees
to pollinate the trees in California,
and I can tell you the cost.
It's one cent to rent one bee for a month. So...
I can rent a nun...
..and a bee. Yeah.
The bee is better value at the one cent, I'd say.
And a steam powered manipulator if you know the right guy to go to.
Well...I don't want to distract my nun.
There was a fantastic story about a squirrel in 2015.
A squirrel got locked into the bar of Honeybourne Railway Club
in Worcestershire for the day, OK?
It got drunk,
and caused £300 worth of damage.
So the club secretary, a guy called Sam Boulter,
he said that all he could find was broken glass
and bottles knocked off shelves.
There was beer all over the floor,
there was money and straws scattered everywhere,
and he found the culprit hiding behind a box of crisps
Iooking, he said, "unsteady...
"..and worse for wear."
And now it's time for a game of Pin The Tail On The Numbat.
So you've got a card with a numbat on it
and a tail and the other team,
you can just watch, so you could have a cup of tea if you like. Oh!
So you've got some tea things. Oh, lovely.
However, you're going to have to be blindfolded.
This is QI so this is the blindfold that you're going to wear.
Who do you want to do the pinning?
OK, so... These are weird.
But Phill is going to wear that as his blindfold.
These particular goggles mean that the person wearing them
sees the world upside down.
Oh, weird. OK? So, if...
Oh, my goodness.
If you want to have...
Oh, I haven't been like this since my 18th birthday.
If you want to have some idea at home what that is like,
we can flip the picture on the monitors.
That is what Alan is currently seeing.
And he is just going to give it a go.
I can't see the thing.
Where is it? So... DEIRDRE: Wrong side of the board.
There it is. There.
Oh, I can't... Oh!
There's the zebra crossing.
Does it make you feel unwell, Alan? Yeah, it does.
Hang on. Oh, this is really awful.
Hang on, I think I've got it now. OK.
I'll go the other way. This is hard.
I'm going to put it there. Well done.
APPLAUSE
Right, Phill, pour a cup of tea for Deirdre, please.
I've never wanted you more.
Later, my darling.
You look like a...
mammal that hangs upside-down.
APPLAUSE
Phill is going to pour us a cup of tea...
YES, I AM!
I'll just sit back so as not to get the third degree burns.
Yeah!
Sugar, upside-down Irish lady?
Just the tea. Oh, good.
It's really weird.
Oh, Nelly Furtado.
Oh!
Mummy
So that's it upside down.
To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left.
I don't know, don't talk to me!
Yes.
What does it feel like, Phill?
Glastonbury 2000.
APPLAUSE
Oh, oh, oh...
Are you getting used to it?
Well done. Just... Go for it. Yes! Yes.
Yes. Yes!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Fantastic.
So, here's the thing.
What is extraordinary, in a sense,
the goggles are actually correcting your vision,
because your eyeballs, of course, deliver upside-down images
to your retinas which then are inverted by the brain.
So upside-down glasses actually show you the image
as it originally is when it hits your retina.
That was...just...
Can I buy these?
I imagine you could probably have those.
Don't wear them when you're driving, will you?
If you wore them for a sustained period of time,
the brain would adjust to the new vision.
You just would learn to function with it.
It would take you a couple of weeks.
And then it would take you a full day
when you took them off to readjust.
And there's some thought that new-born babies,
it's possible they see the world upside down for a very short period
before their brain learns to flip the image in the retinas.
I mean, we do know for certain that babies see things
in much more detail than we do,
so a baby that is less than six months old can recognise
different monkeys just by their faces alone.
And as we get older, we can only do that with human faces,
it's called perceptual narrowing.
We lose that gift quite early on.
They also have the capacity to learn four million languages or something, don't they?
Yeah. But they just don't bother.
They can't be arsed. Eventually they can barely speak English.
I like the idea of playing Pin The Tail On A Numbat, though.
Anyone know where they are? Where do they live? Numbats?
Australia? Australia. Small Australian marsupial.
They eat 20,000 termites a day.
They're generally rather quiet but if they are disturbed,
they make a tutting noise.
"What did you do that for, Craig?"
"I'm trying to sleep off my termites."
But they sleep for as much as 15 hours a day.
They have the most ingenious way of protecting their burrow.
They climb in headfirst and then they reverse out,
they've got rather a tough bottom
and they reverse out till it wedges the entrance shut.
Yes.
It prevents MOST predators wanting to come in.
And they've evolved so much that as they reverse out of their burrow,
they go... LORRY BEEPING
"Numbat reversing. Numbat reversing."
Right, let's put your props away, please.
Goodbye, numbat!
Go down into your hole.
Now, for a question on nutritional networking.
What's the first rule of fat club?
Well...
..I'm not allowed to say.
Don't talk about fat club?
SIREN WAILS
CHEERING
APPLAUSE
Do we think it's a real thing, fat club?
What do you reckon, Deirdre? There probably is a fat club.
Well, there were, is the thing.
They existed all over the United States in the late 1800s
and the early 1900s.
My brothers!
To be a member, you had to be at least 200lb.
So that's, what is that? 14st... Lightweight.
14st 3. And if you weren't heavy enough to attend,
you were not allowed to come in.
14st 4.
What's that? 200lb.
Yeah, you're right. If you're on 14st 4 and you go to the loo,
you might come out at 14st 3.
It was really popular.
The New England fat men's club had 10,000 members at its peak.
The meetings involved really huge meals,
followed by physical activity such as leapfrog.
And then we all gather round the defibrillator.
"My turn!"
Britain had them and if you didn't weigh enough, in Britain,
you had to pay a fine to charity.
We've still got them, they're called schools.
GROANING AND SHOCKED LAUGHTER
Satire, come on!
And the French had them, they were Les Cent Kilos.
100 kilos is 220lbs,
so it was slightly more demanding entry requirement.
Did people join them for fun, or was it sort of a status thing?
It was thought that if you were wealthy enough to be that fat,
then you were an important businessperson,
so when they had the presidential race in 1908,
between William Taft and William Bryan,
they were both obese,
and in fact there was a Chicago senator at the time who thought
there should be a law that you had to weigh at least 200lbs
to hold political office,
and the idea was that it was a big country, it needed a big president,
is what they said, so...
You could buy lots of things for obese people at the time.
You could buy a spring-loaded roller-skate,
and the boost provided by the spring depended on the weight on it.
So a 150lb person could get moving at 6mph,
but a 200lb person would reach 10mph.
The fatter you were, the faster you would go.
And if you were under 100lb, the skates just...
Nothing. Nothing happening. Do you not feel that this is just a way of
exterminating the fat?
If you weighed 300lb, you went at 70mph...
..into an oncoming train.
There's an extraordinary thing about food.
There was a study in 2015.
They found that men eat twice as much
when they are in the company of women. How weird.
Do you think it's true?
Why is he eating so much? He doesn't want to talk to her.
Is that what it is?
You see those, don't you?
It's disconcerting when you're at a table
and you really think, "that couple next to us haven't spoken yet."
My wife's very attuned to it.
If we sit next to one of those couples that don't talk,
it ruins our meal.
"Will you say something, please? My wife wants to listen."
I love it when you hear a single sentence then you don't hear
the rest of the story. You think, "What the hell was that bit?" Yeah.
So I was in a restaurant and I just overheard the one thing
from this other table and it said,
"Well, we sold the foot spa when Barbara had to give up waitressing."
It's irresistible, isn't it?
What's happened? Well, the running costs of a foot spa,
I mean you've got to be able to afford it, don't you?
But also, HAVING to give up waitressing.
Because she was in, for instance, prison.
Yes. I'll never know!
The first rule of fat club is that you have to be fat.
And now, the bit of the non sequiturs show
where nothing follows.
General ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
Who's in charge in a pack of wolves?
Miles? The one in the hat.
Is there not one?
Yeah. They used to think that a pack of wolves had an alpha male,
who's won through a contest or a rivalry or something.
In reality, most wolf packs are just families,
and the leaders of those families are the parents.
The concept of the alpha male was popularised by a wildlife biologist
called David Mech in the 1960s.
He has spent the rest of his career
trying to convince people he was wrong.
Yeah. It was based on a study of captive wolves
where normal behaviour goes completely out of the window.
Why isn't the caribou anti-wolf strategy
working as well as it might?
So, they've got an anti-wolf strategy,
cos wolves will take their young.
Is it changing climate?
Well, the caribou is the North American version of the reindeer.
Uh-huh. So, they thought, oh, there's loads of wolves here,
we're going to move, and they moved to a different part of the world
where...
"Caribou gone."
..black bear live. Ah.
Oh, dear.
Yeah. They've avoided the wolves,
and are losing even more of their young to the black bears.
To bears? Yeah.
Let's go and live in this tiger enclosure.
That'll get rid of those midges, won't it?
There's no such thing as the alpha male, there's just mum and dad.
Do an impression of a gun with a silencer being fired.
Pfff.
SIREN WAILS
APPLAUSE
Phill?
(Bang.)
Er... No.
They cannot eliminate the sound of a gun.
They don't even call them silencers these days.
They're called moderators in the UK, suppressors in the United States.
They can easily be heard if used in public,
so criminals never bother with the silencer.
So they were very cocky when they came up with the name silencer,
weren't they? Well...
It was invented by a man called Hiram Percy Maxim in 1902,
and he was the son of the man who invented the machinegun.
Oh.
Hiram Stevens Maxim. He was an American,
but he came over to Britain and did lots of his inventions
in West Norwood in Surrey in a garage
which belonged to my great-grandfather.
Field John Jackson Trickett... Excellent.
And he and Sir Hiram worked together,
and what I love is when they were working on the machinegun,
if they wanted to test, they wanted to warn the neighbours,
they used to put an ad in the local paper to say...
.."We're going to test the gun."
And Maxim also created peaceful things.
He created the captive flying machine,
which is an amusement ride you can still ride in Blackpool.
The nuns would have loved it.
And that was built by my grandfather Field Trickett.
And it's still going today.
What did Tommy Cooper wear on his head?
Let me... CHOPPING
Thank you. A fez.
SIREN WAILS
APPLAUSE
No, a fez comes from Turkey, his came from Egypt.
It's called a tarboosh. And they're slightly different.
A fez is a little bit shorter than a tarboosh.
It's a bit wider at the base...
It can affect your gait. It can affect your...!
They are very, very heavy hats.
Always bend at the knee.
Apparently, Cooper was entertaining the troops in Cairo
and he'd forgotten his helmet that he always wore onstage,
so he swiped it off a waiter's head.
And, this is a lovely story, later in life,
he tried one on in a Cairo market
and the seller, who didn't recognise him, said, "Just like that."
And Cooper said, "Why did you say that?"
And the seller said, "Because every single English person
"who ever comes here..."
"..tries one and says that,
"and you're the very first person who hasn't said it."
Strictly speaking, of course, it shouldn't even be called a hat,
it's actually a cap because a hat has a rim, and a cap has no rim. Oh!
Now, to finish off, a spelling test.
You'll see a series of true facts on the screen
and I want you to buzz in as quickly as you can
to tell me which is the correct spelling, A or B.
So let's have a look.
Which one is correct? A is correct.
A is correct, very, very good.
OK, next one.
"Cut! " Yes. A.
A is correct. Very, very good.
And let's look at the next one.
Yes? B. You think B is true?
SIREN WAILS
No, nobody died.
No. A horse died, didn't he?
Nobody died, but somebody was dyed, is the truth of it.
So it's often claimed that an extra was trampled underfoot
in the Charlton Heston film, not true.
But a man was dyed, D-Y-E-D on the set.
They had a pond and the water was too brown and murky,
so they put loads of blue dye in it.
And during one of the battle scenes, an extra fell in and...
..was dyed blue.
And generously, MGM kept him on the payroll
until he returned to his normal colour.
And that brings me to the scores.
Oh, well. It's rather magnificent. In first place,
with an astonishing two points,
it's Miles!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In second place with a very creditable minus 2, Alan.
Oh, thank you.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
With minus 5 in third place, it's Phill.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Deirdre, the nuns would be proud.
Minus 16!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It only remains for me to thank Deirdre, Phill, Miles and Alan
and I leave you with this from the Sunday Correspondent.
Jack Rains, a candidate for governor of Texas,
has come up with his own ten-point educational plan
to combat innumeracy and illiteracy in the US.
When someone pointed out
that his plan actually only contained nine points,
Mr Rains replied, "You just pointed your finger
"and emphasised the problem we're trying to resolve."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE