CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening, and welcome to QI,
Where tonight we're vaulting into a vortex of V-words
for a very varied show.
Vying for my attention are
the vivacious Sara Pascoe...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..the versatile Ross Noble...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..the virtuoso, Sally Phillips...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..and, voila, it's Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And their buzzers are very, very... Well, let's see.
Sara goes...
Ross goes...
Sally goes...
And Alan goes...
for playing this record
We begin with a variation on a meme.
We know what the Pope does in the woods,
but what does a vicar do in the jungle?
Is this to do with I'm A Celebrity...?
Oh? Is it, like, eat a kangaroo's bum?
Is that what they...? Do they...?
If the vicar wants to get a show on ITV2... Yeah?
..he'll have to eat a kangaroo's bum.
You could call it "Bless This Arse".
They must! They must! There you go.
APPLAUSE
How does the kangaroo then cope?
Yeah, what, without its arse? I imagine...
This is what I imagine,
and this is what I want for myself. OK. I think I know.
What, that it just falls out of you?
Yes!
You know those...? You should be a bird.
They don't have anuses.
The tea-towel holder in your gran's kitchen, where you...
You put a tea towel in, and it grips it. Yeah.
I'd quite like one of those.
For your arse?
And you could do that for the kangaroo
once it's sold its arse to ITV2.
But to be fair, you wouldn't want to use that tea towel, would you?
No, but I quite like the idea of you walking around with a tea towel,
just ready.
You just pull it through, and then, "Boomf!"
Now, I had a friend whose dog ate a dishcloth... Mm?
And when that emerged...
It's like a magic trick. That is...
All the colours.
It has to come of its own accord.
If you pull it, it will do terrible damage.
That's just a sentence that has so many connotations.
"It has to come on its own - if you pull it, it doesn't count, so..."
I thought if you did pull it, it was like starting a lawnmower.
No, if you pull it, you'll just end up with a hollow dog.
Shall I go back to the original question?
But we have come up with a really good ITV format for ITV2.
And as TV pitch meetings go... It's been fun.
...we're on barely any cocaine.
Is it to do with missionaries?
Yes! Well, sort of.
So, going far away to give blessings, where might you go?
South America? It's quite jungly, isn't it, South America?
It is South America - you get a point. Absolutely right.
There was a man called Arthur Miles Moss,
and he was vicar of the largest Anglican parish in the world.
From 1912 to 1945, he became the vicar for the entire Amazon basin.
That's a lot of arses to bless. Exactly, a hell of a lot!
Look at the size. That's a third of the continent of South America.
We are talking about Peru, and Brazil and Bolivia.
60,000 miles of navigable waterway.
He travelled everywhere by boat.
He was obsessed with studying insects,
so I'm not sure that the whole parish thing was really why he went.
Did he, like, think the insects were his parishioners?
Oh...
A PRAYING mantis?
Yes!
APPLAUSE
No, he had a passion for moths and butterflies.
He collected more than 25,000 specimens
in the time that he was there. Oh, OK.
And his drawings and notes and specimens and so on
constitute a separate collection at the Natural History Museum today.
He's got his own Amazon warehouse.
APPLAUSE
He was the first European to record lots and lots of butterfly species.
He was particularly keen on the ones that mimic predators,
so the ones that look like owls or deadly tree snakes or, you know,
piranhas, that kind of thing. That was his big thing.
Or vicars. Or vicars.
Well, on the subject of vicars,
does anyone know any other eccentric vicars?
There's plenty of eccentric vicars.
There was one of them who was into amateur theatrics, so would spend
a lot of the week in London, and he christened himself
the Prostitutes' Padre, and spent a lot of time trying to rescue girls
from future lives of prostitution.
How kind. And then he was caught in compromising situations.
And so he was defrocked,
and he went to Blackpool, and he did an act on the pier.
For a while, he exhibited himself in a barrel.
Do you know who I'm talking about? Harold Davidson.
Harold Davidson, yeah.
And then he started acting out Daniel And The Lions...
In the barrel? No, in a cage.
And then in one show, he stood on the lion's tail,
and it ate him.
SHOCKED LAUGHTER
That's a hell of a finale to a show. But...
..he wasn't quite dead when they got him to hospital.
And the doctors gave him insulin
cos they thought he was diabetic, and he wasn't.
It was the insulin that killed him, not the lion. THAT'S a headline.
"It was the insulin that killed him, not the lion."
"I'm not diabetic, and I ain't LION."
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well, there are lots and lots and lots, as you can imagine.
I'm ordained.
What?
I'm ordained as a reverend.
Which means, revere me. Church of England?
No.
No, online... Darling, have you been sold something online?
It was 35 quid.
My friends wanted to get...
..wanted to get married.
And they said they wouldn't get married until I got ordained.
Right. And they were two women,
and so we discovered that if I... SANDI GASPS
Imagine! What?!
If I did get actually ordained in the Church of England,
I couldn't marry them,
so I got ordained online at Universal Life Church.
They did have to get the registry as well, but...
Oh, I love this.
But there are lots of eccentric - particularly English - vicars.
There's a Victorian vicar called John Alington.
He was known as Mad Jack,
and he wore a leopard skin instead of his black surplice,
which I quite like,
and he liked being carried around in an open coffin.
And then he would just pop up and surprise people.
Dressed as a leopard?
He was an early adopter of the velocipede,
so the early bicycle without pedals,
and he used to ride around his hall on the velocipede,
whipping it like a horse.
How did it go...? Sorry.
Can you explain the not pedals?
Like a balance bike. Like a balance bike.
Okey doke, like the ones that very small children use?
But for big boys. Mm, but he was an adult dressed as a leopard.
There was an Archbishop of York, 1724 to 1743,
called Lancelot Blackburne.
He's rumoured to have been a pirate in the Caribbean
before taking his post. And I love this -
he once had a secret tunnel constructed so he could visit
his neighbour's wife, with whom he was said to be having an affair.
Ah, we've all done that.
We've all had a secret tunnel put in the house.
I was speaking at St Paul's Cathedral,
and I went and had tea with the vicar before,
and there's a tunnel. There's a tunnel from the house
that goes all the way underneath and comes out at Nelson's tomb,
just below the cathedral. Wow. Cool. I know, it was very cool.
Is it just for him, or is there, like, lots of vicars?
Is it like the Tube?
Is there just, like, ten vicars coming the other way?
"Morning." "Your turn."
And then... Do they just pop out of various different tombs?
Popping up, and Whac-A-Vicar? Was there...?
It is just for the person that's... Just one tunnel for one man?
I know. Just so they don't get wet
when they're doing the sermon, I think. Wow.
Nothing worse than a soggy vicar. I know...
Oh, absolute nightmare.
Anyway, this guy, Lancelot Blackburne,
the satirist William Donaldson said of him,
"His behaviour was seldom of the standard expected of a cleric.
"In fact, it was seldom of the standard expected of a pirate."
I like the sound of him a lot.
One of my favourites is Edward White Benson.
So, he was Archbishop of Canterbury for the final 13 years of his life,
and he died in 1896.
What I like is his wife, Mary.
She mentions, in her diary,
no less than 39 lesbian lovers...
AUDIENCE WHOOPS I know!
..including one Janet Gourlay, who was an Egyptologist
who she fought over with her daughter, Margaret...
Yeah!
..and Margaret attacked her with a knife!
Ooh! It's a...
Margaret won, can I just say?
She must have had a tunnel.
She must have.
LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE
Sorry, is that...?
Is that a euphemism?
No wonder he looks like that. I know.
He can hear something.
"Not again!"
HE HOOTS EXCITEDLY
Sorry, can I just be clear?
That's what you think it sounds like?
"Are you tunnelling again, Mary?
"I think she's tunnelling."
"Oh, God!"
Alan, what's terrible is you're having to imagine
what a woman sounds like when she's enjoying herself.
APPLAUSE
HE SIGHS
Once again, Pascoe, you've got my number.
The last of my eccentric vicars, Sabine Baring-Gould,
I like him a lot. He died in 1924.
Oh, HE'S heard something!
Can imagine all these women tunnelling all around him.
He's actually watching four ladies at once.
I mean, he clearly was eccentric.
He kept a live bat in an old sock in his room.
You wouldn't want it in a new sock.
Well, I'm not surprised, like,
if his missus was having it away with another lady.
You've got to take your pleasure where you can.
"Oh, you haven't put a bat in a sock again, have you?"
It's a sad story. It passed away when trodden on by a housemaid.
Oh. I know. Aww...
Anyway, he was married for 48 years and he had 15 children.
But he clearly was a little bit away with the fairies,
because he was once at a party, and he asked a small child,
"And whose little girl are you, my dear?"
And she burst into tears and wailed,
"I'm yours, Daddy!"
Now for a high-velocity question.
If light travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is really fast,
why doesn't it hurt when it hits us?
Presumably it doesn't have any density, doesn't it?
Because to travel at the speed of light, you can't...
It has... It has to be...
Isn't it the photons have to be...? AUDIENCE CHUCKLES
Shut your face!
I'm going to guess, Mr Noble, that you normally teach geography.
Yeah, I'll tell you where the light's GOING.
Surely if light can travel at the speed of light,
because it is light, it hasn't got any density.
So if it hit you, you wouldn't go, "Urgh," like that.
What you're saying is it's got no mass, right?
I mean, that's one quicker way of saying it.
What's curious about this,
this question had not been posed until the 18th century,
produced a most fantastic French mathematician-physicist called
Emilie du Chatelet.
And the reason she's in the V series is that she was the partner
and lover of Voltaire.
She concluded that light was weightless, and she reasoned that
if a particle of light weighed even a tiny amount, it would hurt you.
And she's the very first person to seriously suggest it.
What I like about her, she had this incredible flair for mathematics,
and she used it to come up with effective gambling strategies.
Um, so she used to win money at cards
in order that she could buy books and educate herself.
She's basically Victoria Coren.
APPLAUSE
They both entered a Paris Academy of Science competition.
They had to answer the question, "What is fire?"
Mmm.
And immediately you think, "That is a very good question, isn't it?"
It's me, girlfriend.
I daren't ask you to give an analysis.
"Fire" - it's a term that the young people use.
They use it about Beyonce not Ross Noble.
So we're talking about 1737, right?
Nobody had really answered such a question.
And actually, if you think about it, it's not a liquid, it's not a gas.
It's a really curious question.
Does anybody know what the answer might be?
What is fire? What is it?
It's a chemical reaction. Yes, it is.
It is a chemical reaction which occurs when fuel reacts
with oxygen and it releases heat energy.
But it's a wonderful question,
and I like that nobody had thought of it.
They didn't win - either Du Chatelet or Voltaire - but they were both
completely obsessed with each other's minds.
They disagreed often on scientific matters.
She was usually right. Yeah, I have to say.
And they were huge fans of Isaac Newton.
So, at the time, his ideas were not widely accepted in France,
and they explained his ideas.
They converted the French to the theory that gravity,
which is the force that of course dropped the apple onto the floor,
was also what pulled the planets around the sun.
So, she wrote an annotated translation of Newton's Principia,
which is still probably the greatest scientific work of all time,
and the one she wrote is still the definitive French version.
So, it was written originally in Latin.
She translated it into French.
She wrote it at the age of 43.
She was heavily pregnant. She worked 18 hours a day
because she wanted to finish it before her due date,
because childbirth, incredibly risky at the time.
She did, as she feared, die in childbirth.
And this is such a French story,
that child sadly also died afterwards,
but incidentally, wasn't Voltaire's baby or her husband's because,
you know, it was France - you know what I'm saying?
Yeah! It was just... "I'm too busy to have sex with you."
"It's just whoever's free in the hours I'm not working."
After Voltaire died in 1778, one of his body parts was swapped
for good seats at the theatre.
Which body part do you think it was?
His brain?
Yeah. It was a thing - brains and hearts of dead celebrities
were sometimes removed and embalmed and put on display.
It sounds really sort of reductive,
but you would be really fascinated when it's a genius's brain.
You'd want to have a look. His brain and heart were boiled
in alcohol to, I don't know, preserve them.
Make them tasty. Yes.
It's France, right?
It was an apothecary named Mitouart who took it out.
He showed it to lots of scientists,
and occasionally they'd remove bits and set them on fire
to see what happened. Yeah.
"Do you know what fire is now?!" Yeah!
Do we know what the play was that they swapped the brain for?
Well, so, it was much later on - 1924.
Mitouart's family gave the brain to the Comedie-Francaise Theatre,
and reports of the time say they were gifted two very good audience seats
in return, for the next 20 years.
But we don't really know what happened to the brain.
There is a rumour that it is in the base of a statue at the theatre,
but they deny any knowledge of it.
Voltaire's last words are amongst my most favourite.
So he was on his deathbed, and a priest - a proper one.
Um...
LAUGHTER Ooh!
Let me guess. Did he go,
"What are you doing with that tin opener?"
A priest asked him to renounce Satan, and he said,
"Now is not the time to be making new enemies."
That is very good. Yeah.
1778, still gets a laugh.
It's good. Good man.
Now, from Voltaire to Volts, what role can you train for
by lying in a coffin for eight hours a day?
Jacob Rees-Mogg...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I once saw a film with Ryan Reynolds,
and he was buried alive... Yes. ..for the whole film.
So, you're absolutely right, it's the art of being buried alive.
And it is called vivisepulture, OK?
And it's competitive sport.
Competitive vivisepulture. Oh, my word.
It was all the rage in the 1960s.
And one of the leaders in the field, she was an ex-nun,
so one of your people. Um...
You know, I was once on a bus with a nun, and I went, "Wow,
"what made you become a nun?" She said,
"Jesus." LAUGHTER
No, no, no. I felt really stupid. You popped up behind her and went,
"What made you become a nun?"
"Jesus!"
One of the leaders of the field was an ex-nun called Emma Smith,
and she spent 101 days in a coffin underground in Skegness in 1961.
101 days?! 101 days.
So you could pay a shilling, right?
And you could go along and you could look down a tube at her face
in a mirror, and food was passed down to her through the tube.
And she also had clo... "Zhoop!"
I love this! She had a closed-circuit television
so she could play bingo in the evenings.
Was she allowed to get out for a wee?
No, so she defecated and urinated through a hatch.
AUDIENCE MEMBER GROANS VIOLENTLY
LAUGHTER
That's upset one person.
Tipped someone over the edge. Was it the hatch?
Yeah.
That was the trouble.
You paid your money to look down the tube.
"For God's sake, don't look down the hatch."
I mean, is it like one of those toilets at a festival
where you open that lid and, "Holy shit..."
"Too many people have been in here today."
I remember when Madonna married Guy Ritchie in Bute,
they had Rocco's christening the week before,
and a paparazzo hid out in the chapel,
and taped himself into a load of bin bags
and just shat in the bin bags. Seriously?! He was there for a week.
So the week between the christening and the wedding.
And got caught, and was trying to run away...
Was it like somebody on a space hopper?
Anyway, she was down there 101 days.
There was a doctor who had an 8ft extension to his stethoscope
so he could check on her, and she practised for weeks beforehand,
lying in a coffin eight hours a day.
So, just before she went to lie in a coffin...
Yeah, she practised.
She lay in a coffin. She laid in a coffin!
Well, the really weird thing,
she had been a nun in the Netherlands, and they used
to make them sleep in an open coffin every night
so that they were always ready to meet God.
I mean, I don't think you have to be in the coffin to meet him.
I don't know, do you?
APPLAUSE
Anyway, the record was not broken until 1981,
and it was her son, Geoff, who did eventually...
The nun's son, Geoff? The nun's son...
She's an ex-nun. I'm going to go ex-nun.
That's Geoff with his toilet seat. That's not a coffin.
That's a great big room.
That's more like something like in a camper van.
Yeah, that costs five grand a month at the Edinburgh Festival.
He spent 142 days buried.
I know, it's just a very strange thing.
But the ex-nun, she was motivated, because she wanted to beat...
There was an Irishman who'd been in the news called Mick Meaney,
and he had spent 61 days underground, and she...
This is him.
First he held a wake for himself at the Admiral Nelson pub in Kilburn.
He was sealed in the coffin in the pub,
and then put out through the window,
and buried in the yard of a lorry depot.
He failed to tell his wife that he was doing this.
So she's like, "The dinner's on."
She heard it on the radio...
..while pregnant with her second child.
ALL GASP
Good noise, everybody!
Anyway, when the coffin was eventually raised,
and he was taken back into the Admiral Nelson,
he was handed a beer. That was the first thing.
And there were people who made whole careers out of it.
There's a Texan called Bill White, buried alive 61 times,
spent a total of two years underground.
He took calls to keep himself entertained,
and he ended up marrying a woman who called in.
And they were known as "Mr and Mrs Living Corpse".
Was she in the coffin next door?
A little tunnel between the two.
"Don't shit down it, I'm coming through!"
"Me tunnel! Me passage is blocked by vicars."
Two years later, she wanted a divorce.
She felt boxed in.
Wahey!
The divorce papers were lowered down the pipe into the coffin,
in which he was still...still buried alive.
She could have saved herself a lot of effort. I know!
Just a melon on the pipe.
It's the perfect murder.
There was one woman who was so annoyed by him,
she dropped her pet boa constrictor down the pipe.
SARA GASPS Beautiful.
And then somebody on cocaine went, "We could make a TV show..."
He beat the boa constrictor to death with the phone.
I mean, I'm not making this up.
This is the weirdest thing.
Would anybody here do it?
No. I wouldn't. I'd be too scared.
The idea of being buried alive is terrifying.
Yeah. It has a name. It's called taphophobia.
Taphophobia?
ALAN AND ROSS, Fear of the Welsh.
Doctors invented, 18th-19th century, lots of new ways for people to say...
So, there's a French doctor called Leon Collongues, and he listened
for a pulse by sticking a corpse's finger in his ear.
That was one of the ways.
Pinching corpses' nipples - that was to see if they were...
Make the noise again, Alan.
ALAN HOOTS EXCITEDLY
There was an Edinburgh doctor in 1903 called George Balfour,
who invented a test for life, which involved
inserting flags into the heart of the deceased to see if they waved.
The flags, not the deceased.
Right, this is in Verona.
What is it?
I've been there. It's Juliet's balcony.
I knew that was going to happen.
It's not. What is it?
It's a balcony.
Oh, we've gone down here. Oh, God!
So, this is the thing that people call Juliet's balcony.
It is not.
It was attached to the house in 1936.
Do you know what it actually is? I do. Yes.
Because I've been there as well.
So, it is taken from a tomb, isn't it?
Yeah, it's most likely a sarcophagus that was put there.
I mean, the idea was to create a building that tourists would go to
and go, "Oh, look, it's Juliet's balcony."
They've got a statue of Juliet,
and you have to touch her boob for good luck.
And so it's very, very, very... ALAN HOOTS EXCITEDLY
But hasn't it become so worn away now
that she's basically had a mastectomy?
Yes. Really? It's much smaller.
I mean, but lots of women are uneven, but...
But they don't usually have one that's much shinier.
But if you do - if a lady does have one bosom bigger than the other -
then just go around telling people that that one's lucky
and then even them up.
If one's shinier than the other,
if you bowled her, she'd swing.
I love you saying "bosom".
Nobody says bosom any more. It's such a wonderful...
I'm not going to say knockers. I'm not an animal.
So, here is the thing about the balcony.
Shakespeare never went to Italy. We know that for sure.
But Italian culture and literature
permeated all of Elizabethan literature and drama.
But the balcony was added, in fact, by Antonio Avena.
He was the director of the Venetian Civic Museums, and he thought,
"This is a great way we'll get tourists to come to Verona."
Most people think the balcony was made out of a 13th-century
sarcophagus, but it might even have been a water trough.
The thing is, Shakespeare would not have known what a balcony was.
So first of all, it's an Italian word.
And the very first written mention in English of a balcony at all
is in 1618, so that's two years after he died.
We, in fact, get the balcony scene in the 1740s when the director
David Garrick, actor-producer, gave Juliet a balcony in his production
of Romeo and Juliet.
So, Juliet's balcony is not a Juliet balcony.
It's not a balcony, and it didn't belong to Juliet.
Now, here's something I've often wondered.
What is the point of string vests?
Oh! So, Ross, I've given you a string vest.
Oh, have I? Yes. You know what, right?
When I was a kid, we went camping and this fella got very, very drunk
and fell asleep in the sun wearing a string vest.
AUDIENCE GROANS Oh.
No, but when he took it off,
it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
It was, literally...
He looked like a beautiful lizard.
He had all the little things on like that.
Yeah. What's the point of them?
If you were sort of fishing, you could catch a man.
But the only person I've seen wearing a string vest
is Howard Donald from Take That through the '90s,
and so that's how they got him, maybe, for the band.
He was just swimming upstream,
just held it out and got him, didn't they?
They got Mark Owen with a tiny little jar.
Put some jam inside.
"Are you going to keep him?" "No. Put him back for good."
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So, it was invented in 1933
by a Norwegian military officer called Henrik Brun.
What do you think he did in order to create the world's first string vest?
He adapted something else. Fishing net.
It's two herring nets.
It's a classic Scandi story....
..finding something to do with herring.
He assumed that the air trapped in the holes
would make very good insulation.
And was he right?
Yes. Yes. Yeah, it is absolutely a fantastic way to keep you warm.
They do work very well. I've worn one.
Did you ever have the string underpants?
They were very unpleasant. No, but it reminds me of a disgusting joke
that Ricky Grover used to tell.
Oh, no. No, no.
Fella goes to the doctor... Oh, we're going to have it.
"Doctor, I'm terribly worried.
"Whenever I do a poo, it comes out like chips."
He says, "Pull your string vest up, you fool."
So...
So, very good at keeping you warm.
What about keeping you cool?
I want to say also good.
Yes, absolutely right.
So, in 1955, the British War Office decided to run some trials in both
hot and dry conditions.
And they sent soldiers in Egypt different vests to wear.
"String vest trial, begin!" "Vest trial, please!"
Some poor soldier in sequins, going...
"They're going to see me!" "Are you warm or cold?"
"Are you hotter or colder?"
"I'm boiling!"
It reduces the dragging and sticking that you get with sweaty clothes.
Oh, dragging and sticking.
But what's curious is that even though it was shown
to make you feel less sticky in sweaty conditions,
none of the soldiers who had participated
wanted to wear them after the trial.
Was this a time where it was sort of...
You weren't allowed to be gay in the Army?
Oh? It would be a lot harder to pretend you're straight
if everyone's wearing a really sexy vest.
I mean, that hat's a dead giveaway.
That's not even the uniform.
He's brought that from home.
Another relative recent innovation in the vest department
is the bulletproof vest.
It's made of Kevlar, which is a thin fibre.
It's five times stronger than steel.
Bullet's going to be called Kev.
From Liverpool - "All right, la?" "Kev, la."
The other thing that's not completely bulletproof, but partly bulletproof
is breast implants.
So, if you have a breast implant,
your wound will be at least 20% shallower than usual,
but, I mean, it's not... It won't replace a bulletproof vest.
And so will your partner!
I've got Kevlar trousers.
What? Why? Motorcycling.
You can put Kevlar in the arse.
Yeah? So if you fall off, you slide down.
You know, you can get breast implants in your legs.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
I've had my tits done, and then if there's a shooter,
I just put my arse towards them.
I've got Kevlar trousers and I don't motorcycle.
What do you think I use them for?
The luge?
No, chainsawing.
Oh. Yeah. I like to cut down trees. Um...
Is that because they're taller than you?
In 2023, a 34-year-old man's lungs
were temporarily replaced by breast implants.
The guy, called David Bauer, he's from Missouri.
That's him after the operation. Fully survived.
He got an infection that required a lung transplant,
but they had to clear the infection first, OK?
So, here's the thing.
If you take the lungs out, there's a large space in your chest
and your heart is sort of flopping around,
and they needed something to keep it in place.
And they used breast implants.
They went to plastic surgeons and got information
about what size to choose. They picked DD,
and they put them in his chest until the infection cleared
and he was well enough for a lung transplant.
If he's lying in bed for a couple of weeks,
something to keep him busy with, isn't it?
So also, if I'm internet dating and they ask how big I am
and I say DD... Yeah?
And then later on they find out that's lungs.
Yeah! Yeah, that's not...
I didn't technically lie. Yeah.
I've never been on a dating app.
Is that the sort of information that is required?
Oh, God...
Where have you been for 30 years?
Married. Married is where I've been.
Stop rubbing it in me face!
They do that as well, Ross.
Is it...? You put the actual size of the...on the dating app?
You actually have to specify?
It's like when you're selling a wardrobe on eBay.
I'd open up a dating app and go, "I'd never get her up the stairs."
Yeah, put "buyer to collect".
"I'm going to need a mate to help me with this one."
Anyway, moving on.
Now, why will we never meet aliens from the planet Vulcan?
I'm not going to say it because it'll go, "Whoop, whoop, whoop,"
but they found it was a real thing, didn't they?
Eh... Spock's planet is a real...
So therefore, yeah.
So...
LAUGHTER
Yes and no.
Gene Roddenberry did, in Star Trek, have a planet called Vulcan.
Who came from Vulcan? Spock.
Exactly right. Leonard Nimoy came from there.
So, what happened,
2013, there was a vote to name Pluto's two newly discovered moons.
Moony McMoonface.
The overwhelming winner was William Shatner's proposal of Vulcan,
which was Spock's home planet.
But unfortunately, it couldn't be that,
because it already had another meaning.
Vulcan was the name of a fake planet that had already been "discovered",
so Victorian astronomers thought that they had discovered it.
It was meant to exist between Mercury and the sun.
There was a French astronomer called Urbain Le Verrier, and he said,
"It must be real," as it was the only thing that would explain
Mercury's extremely odd orbit.
They believed him. He had been right before.
In 1846, he had predicted the existence of Neptune
without ever seeing it. He'd just used maths.
He also invented the flux capacitor.
He's also got a lucky tit.
Anyway, he named it Vulcan,
after the Roman god of fire and volcanoes.
And then an amateur astronomer called Edmond Lescarbault was given
the French Legion of Honour because he said he'd actually seen it, right?
So one guy says it exists through mass,
and the other guy says, "I've actually seen it."
We now think that he must have just seen a sunspot,
and he and Le Verrier both went to their graves
believing that Vulcan was real. Aw!
But in fact, we can now explain Mercury's orbit
by Einstein's theory of general relativity.
But does that mean no planet will ever be called...?
Because I was going to... No planet will ever be called Vulcan.
Will ever be called Vulcan? Right. Because there was already,
supposedly, but it was in fact a fake.
Spock was originally meant to be a Martian, but Gene Roddenberry
changed it to Vulcan because he thought humans might get to Mars
in his lifetime and find... It would blow the gaff on the whole thing.
I know, right? ..find there was nobody there.
"No-one's going to think it's real." No.
Can anybody do the Vulcan salute?
Live long and prosper.
It was invented by Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock.
And indeed, that - live long and prosper -
the scriptwriter, Theodore Sturgeon, possibly took it from an ancient
Egyptian phrase, "Ankh wedja seneb," which translates as,
"May you live healthily and prosper." He wrote poetry, Leonard Nimoy,
and Arthur Smith did a very funny show in Edinburgh
about Leonard Cohen, in which he talked about Leonard Nimoy's
poetry as being truly...awful, and he was so annoyed about it,
he wrote to Leonard Cohen, partly to say,
"Your poetry has meant so much to me in my life, and by the way,
"do you not think that Leonard Nimoy's poetry is shit?"
And Leonard Cohen wrote back and said that he did, yes.
There's an idea for a TV show. Yes. Leonards Competing.
It's Nimoy versus Rossiter lining up.
He always joked that the kind of things TV execs commission is
Gregs go to Greggs, where famous Gregs just go to Greggs.
As long as it's got men in it.
What about Wendys go to Wendy's?
That would be good.
I'm just going to get some cocaine and, um...
Is Susan Hampshire actually from Hampshire?
Is this a pitch? I'm just working on an idea.
Because if Sarah Lancashire... Never mind.
It's just...
Just working it out. David Essex. David Essex!
It's all coming together!
Ross Noble, we gentrify Ross Noble.
Scrub him up! Yes, put you in the House of Lords.
That's a funny idea. Give him a parish.
A Noble Cause. AUDIENCE GROANS
I get a causeway, and...
A Noble Gas.
You explain other physics things to us.
I often thought it would be funny if I married Cher.
SARA LAUGHS, APPALLED
Anyway, moving on.
Mr Spock is a fictional character from a fictional planet
that shares its name with a different fictional planet.
But now for something all too real,
the Vulcan death grip that we call General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
What did most Stone Age people make things out of?
Yes, Ross?
Bone? Yeah.
LAUGHTER
Because if you were...
If the "Stone Age", right? We all know...
HE HUMS THE FLINTSTONES THEME
That's the theme of the Stone Age. Yeah.
Yeah, like, he's sat there, yabba dabba doo, right?
And then you think, "Oh, I've got to make something."
"Oh, I'll make it out of stone." It's going to take ages.
Yeah. "Oh, there's a dead hedgehog over there."
"Ooh!"
Toothbrush, please. Yeah.
So, what are we making? We're making tools and hunting equipment.
Shelters?
Oh, you don't want a bone house.
What are we going to make the structure out of? Tree. Branches.
Did they have lots of trees then?
Yes. Trees have been around...
LAUGHTER
One tree. Yeah.
Everyone has to queue up for the one tree.
I thought they... Didn't they come in in the Wood Age?
Alan is right. It is wood.
Wood is the thing. Yes, absolutely right.
The phrase "Alan is right" has been used.
The game is over.
So the Stone Age is a time when, you know, sharp stone tools
are being used, but it encompasses the earliest period
in which humans existed, and the span is phenomenal.
So, we've tried to show this.
So, if you look here, dinosaurs' extinction is 65 million years ago.
So you're telling me that you couldn't have used
a Brachiosaur's neck to make a nice hinged umbrella?
By the time the hominins turn up, then the dinosaurs are gone.
That's a very good point. Very good point.
Their bones are still around.
I know that because of the film Ammonite,
where the two lesbian fossil hunters...
ALAN HOOTS
Hang on, hang on - if that is not a TV show...
Lesbian Fossil Hunters.
I mean, come on.
But it is extraordinary when you look how long the planet has been around.
65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs first appeared.
That's relatively recent in terms of the history of the planet.
Yes, it is, and look at us.
Should be a little arrow for David Attenborough, really. Yes.
Then that's Now TV, is it?
Refined tools is when you get people making the flint tools,
but wood was obviously readily available.
Stone is much hardier, and it stands the test of time,
but in a few places where wood preservation is really good,
there is evidence it was commonly used.
So, as a good example,
there's some deposits found under a waterfall in Zambia.
And they were preserved because it was completely waterlogged.
And it shows branches with interlocking notches.
And we are talking about something that is probably 480,000 years old
and probably formed part of a rudimentary building.
Like the very first Ikea.
Yes. And even back then they were just going,
"I can't find that bit. Where's that bit?"
They've also managed, human beings, to make things out of food.
I don't know if you know this,
but the Great Wall of China has sticky rice ground into it,
and they find it stronger than plain limestone mixtures.
If you walk up there, is it worth it?
I'm just saying, Channel 5, 8:00,
Alan Davies - Is It Worth It?
That would be an amazing travel show.
I think that's the one.
This week, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
"Nah."
So, the Malian Empire, 1236 to 1670,
entire forts were made out of salt blocks, which are not flammable,
they've got very good acoustic properties...
And your house won't get attacked by slugs. Well...
So, they are looking at salt today,
architects, as a sustainable building material.
They're investigating using mycelium, though, aren't they?
Mushroom roots... Yeah. ..to...
Now, have I dreamt this?
That's YOUR show - Have I Dreamt This?
Is It Worth It? Have I Dreamt This?
And I'll do, Is This Legal?
Parenting - Is It Worth It?
OK. What is the definition of a brass instrument?
Is it valves? Is it valves?
So... Is it the embouchure? Yes, darling.
Thank you. Yes, tell me.
That's... SHE SPLUTTERS INTO HER HAND
Thought you were speaking in tongues!
The Lord is speaking in tongues.
I wonder if I can do it. OK.
SHE PRODUCES TRUMPETY NOTE Wow.
That's weirdly pleasing.
Yeah!
That's a good show - It's Weirdly Pleasing.
Sandi Toksvig's Weirdly Pleasing. Wow.
"Tonight, I'll be weirdly pleasing the Archbishop of Canterbury."
Well, it's really... It keeps going.
By vibrating the lips, so you sort of buzz into it.
So, they're literally called labrosones
or lip-vibrating instruments. SALLY LAUGHS
Sorry!
Is that ticklish? Are you all right with that?
Sorry. I see. I see.
You want to have a go? It's really nice.
No.
So, one modern-day instrument that's technically brass but not made
of brass begins with V...
To do with football?
Oh, the vuvuzela. The vuvuzela, yeah.
The wooden didgeridoo, the conch shell,
those are things that would qualify.
The world's oldest brass instrument, the sheneb,
which is possibly the first straight sort of brass-like instrument,
we go back to 3000 BC, and this is...
They had lovely suits back then, didn't they?
This is one of those astonishing pieces of recording
that you can't quite believe exists.
This is an actual sheneb that was found in Tutankhamun's burial tomb,
and in the 1930s they did a recording of it.
And this is the actual sound of the sheneb from Tutankhamun's tomb.
The trumpets of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
BUGLE-LIKE HORN PLAYS
And then the guy finished playing, and he went,
"Oh, that felt nice."
The weirdly pleasing trumpets of Tutankhamun.
Is that the first thing that Howard Carter did
when he went into the tomb?
He opened it up, he went, "We found it, lads, wahey!"
HE TRUMPETS
"Put it down, put it down."
"Is it worth it?"
Most people can't tell their brass from their oboe.
Now, let's pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off,
and see who has made a clean sweep to victory.
In last place,
feeling a little vulnerable with minus five,
it's Sara! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In third place, veering off course a little bit with one point,
it's Alan! A point! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In second place, on the verge, but vanquished with two points,
it's Ross! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So our victor tonight, with six points, it's Sally!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Thanks to Sally, Ross, Sara, and Alan,
and I leave you with the words
of entertainer and staunch atheist WC Fields,
who was asked why he was reading the Bible on his deathbed,
and he replied, "I'm looking for loopholes."
Thank you and goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE