This programme contains some strong language
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening and welcome to QI,
where tonight we'll be weaving a web of words.
Let's meet our cunning linguists.
The wryly articulate Michael Odewale.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The widely read Cally Beaton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
A winsome windbag - it's Gyles Brandreth.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And words fail me - it's Alan Davies.
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
Their buzzers tonight are wordly, wibbly, wobbly.
Michael goes...
# Do wah diddy, diddy dum, diddy do... #
Yeah!
Cally goes...
# Da-doo ron-ron-ron, da-doo ron-ron... #
Giles goes...
# Dooby-dooby, mm, dooby Dooby-dooby, mm, dooby
# Dooby-doo-doo... #
And Alan goes...
# Ska-badaba-doo
# Bi-doodly-bab-bi-doodly-do-do
# Belibab-belibab-belibab-belibab- belibab-belab-beli-doo-doo... #
LAUGHTER
I love that. Love that.
So, talking of silly words,
what's the worst thing to wake up to?
Is it a wobbulator,
a wood pussy or feeling absolutely womblescropt?
Wow. Yeah.
Wood pussy - that sounds like an ethical,
sustainable sex toy that got rejected.
Do you know the name Havelock Ellis?
He was a pioneer sexologist.
Oh, yes, of course! He was the sex therapist.
In 1897 he wrote a big book about homosexuality.
And a couple of years later he wrote a book about autoeroticism,
in which these three words feature.
The wobbulator was to assist you,
the wood pussy was to inspire you,
and the womblescropt is how you felt afterwards.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Gyles, I think you need an OnlyFans.
I mean, that was... Yeah! LAUGHTER
It's educational.
I have to say, the whole lot
sounds a bit like menopause, as well -
or midlife dating. Yeah, wood pussy sounds a bit
not-lubricated, doesn't it? It does.
LAUGHTER
Wood pussy is a word from 1899.
It is North American slang for a skunk.
OK.
LAUGHTER
Ooh, look at that pose! I know.
Is it trying to pretend to be something else?
Yeah, I think so. Is it giving a signal? I think so.
Either that or it's being beamed up by an alien.
An alien ship run by tiny rodents from another galaxy.
What, just...? SHE IMITATES UFO BEAM
I love that. What if that was the case, though, Sandi?
What? What?! The aliens who come to Earth
in ships are tiny and furry and really, really small.
And they're not interested in all the big mammals -
only the tiny ones. They only want the skunks.
And they're off being probed and no-one cares.
LAUGHTER Have you...
Have you recently incurred a knock to the head?
So, I grew up in New York and we had these striped skunks.
They're very common in North America.
It comes from an Algonquin word meaning "urinating fox".
And that's because of
the extraordinary way it sprays this stink behind.
Anybody know what you do if you've been sprayed by a skunk?
Tomatoes.
Is what everybody thinks it is, and it doesn't work. Oh.
So, people used to take a bath in tomato juice,
but in fact, it's just that it smells stronger,
briefly, than the skunk.
And then, once the tomato juice wears off...
# Bi-doodly-bab-bi-doodly-do-do... #
LAUGHTER
Lynx.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I mean, I'm going to give you a point because that is so true.
Let's come on to the next word.
What about wobbulator?
What do we think about wobbulator?
I do know this word, I think. Oh, dear God.
LAUGHTER
I think it's going to be a word to do with the early days of radio
and trying to get the waves working properly.
"How are you doing on the wobbulator?"
You are correct.
Wow!
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
In the very simplest terms,
it is a gadget that is able to make noises.
So, it looked like that.
But in these modern times, we have created our own,
which now looks like this.
What it can do is,
it can send out infinite sound frequencies within a certain range.
So, it can make very low sounds,
it can make very high sounds, and every sound in between.
So, I just turn it on here.
WOBBULATOR WOBBULATES
So, then you can make these...
Ooh, Doctor Who is arriving. LAUGHTER
Well, funnily enough...
Do you want to have a play, darling? You can make... Yes, I do.
I thought you might.
The BBC sound department used this for entertainment purposes,
and used it to create the Doctor Who theme tune.
Oh, did they? Yeah.
So, the woman in this photo - that's Delia Derbyshire.
She produced the Doctor Who theme tune in 1963.
That's her working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
in Maida Vale in London.
And she is the mother of electronic music,
influencing Pink Floyd, The Chemical Brothers,
Paul McCartney - lots of people.
Fabulous woman. This is a reproduction of the wobbulator,
which was designed by the technologist Nina Richards
for the Delia Derbyshire Day charity for Doctor Who's 60th anniversary.
Do you want to have a bang on that?
What I don't know about playing with a little switch on a board!
LAUGHTER
How familiar are you at your age with radios, Michael?
Yeah, I'm familiar. You are familiar?
They are, like, yeah... But I'm aware of them, yeah.
Cos you probably haven't ever tuned a radio.
You've just gone on your phone and...
Yeah, I just kind of use... I've never really tuned one, though.
No. No.
Siri, tune the radio. Exactly.
On my radio,
I can still get the Light Programme and the Home Service.
Oh! You don't even know what they are. I don't know what that means.
I was just... LAUGHTER
I was happy for you, though.
He's easily pleased, Michael.
I had a crystal radio when I was a little boy.
Fantastic. And I had a torch with three colours.
Oh, that's cool. Happy days. Happy days.
LAUGHTER
Red, yellow, and when I wanted to frighten myself,
I put on the green.
LAUGHTER
Anybody got a follow-up anecdote? No.
OK, let's move on to womblescropt.
I love the Wombles. Yeah. Is it to do with the Wombles?
It's nothing to do with the Wombles.
Who was your favourite?
Orinoco. Oh, yeah, Orinoco. Orinoco - cos he was an idiot.
LAUGHTER
They're wombling free in Wimbledon still.
Yeah? The Wombles are the wood pussy of our generation.
Really? That's right.
I understand, like, one in three of your sentences.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Now, here's the thing, Michael,
if you want to sit closer to me, that's fine.
I spent five years doing a podcast with Susie Dent.
Ah, yes. And she loves these old words.
And she would say, "I'm feeling a bit womblescropt this morning."
And I'd say, "Does that mean you're feeling a bit queasy?"
And she says, "Yes, probably more indigestion than being hungover."
Yeah, it is absolutely correct, darling.
You do get two points for that.
APPLAUSE
I will send them to Susie Dent,
and I'll show you a picture of her later.
LAUGHTER
So, it's indigestion,
but particularly after drinking - after excess.
Can I just tell you about one of my favourite studies?
This was one of last year's Ig Nobel Prizes.
So, it was for womblescropt worms.
And it was the chemists at the University of Amsterdam.
And they figured out, if you flush worms through a maze,
the drunk ones take longer to escape.
LAUGHTER
I wonder why this happened in Amsterdam.
So, these are sludge worms,
and they are found in the sediment of lakes and rivers, and so on.
And what they found is that the drunk ones initially would go limp, right?
And they'd be less resistant,
and they would float through the maze.
But it turned out that they got stuck on corners and pillars
along the way,
a bit like drunk people latch onto lampposts.
So, they were going, going, going, and they were just like...
SHE GROANS GROGGILY
And so they took longer.
Let's look at some other words.
Anybody want to pick a word from there?
I quite like woodener. Is that like an Edwardian Viagra?
What is that? LAUGHTER
Ah, that's very good. Any thoughts?
Well, Daddy Woodentop was woodener than Mummy Woodentop.
Yes. Woodentop...
When I'm telling you later about the Wombles... Yeah.
..I'll show you. I've got some lovely old Woodentop annuals.
OK. Michael...
..say no. Say no.
I'm just asking for Angela. I want Angela.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Oh, it worries me that you know that. Now...
So, no, it's a knockout punch, a woodener.
So, it makes the target seem to be like an unmoving plank.
It's from the early 20th century. A woodener.
Michael, pick one.
Weequashing. OK, what do you reckon?
Is it toilet-based? No.
It comes from one of the Algonquian languages.
So, that's North American, like Cree or Blackfoot,
or Delaware or something.
Mm-hm. Does that help you?
Like a... Like a tribe? Yes, darling.
Like a Native American tribe. OK.
Yeah, it's a Native American tribe. No?
LAUGHTER
It's the spearing of eels from a canoe by candlelight.
Oh, wow. LAUGHTER
That sounds like it's making it disproportionately difficult. Yeah.
So, unlike fish-spearing, where you actually stab the thing,
the eel spears are designed to hold the eel between the tines.
So, this is a... Wow.
You can see how Havelock Ellis would have been interested in
all this sort of stuff, can't you? Yeah, yeah.
What other words have we got?
Alan, do you want to choose one?
A wheeple is a wonky steeple.
It's a wonky something.
Is it a dyslexic nun's wimple?
"There was this dyslexic nun..."
It's the beginning of a Barry Cryer joke. I like that.
Something man-made. A wheeple. Is it a garment?
No, it's a very feeble whistle.
CALLY: A wheeple. MICHAEL: Oh!
A wheeple, yeah.
It's 18th-century Scottish... Do you know about Jiminy Cricket?
Of course! I've heard the name.
# Give a little whistle... # GYLES WHISTLES
Can you do a proper whistle? MICHAEL ATTEMPTS TO WHISTLE
No, I'm not good at it.
So you are, in fact, a person who does a wheeple.
So, the people most prone to wheeples,
apart from Michael, are astronauts.
In 1999, the Nasa astronaut Daniel Barry
discovered he could not whistle in a spacesuit
because the air pressure inside
is 3.5 times lower than normal atmospheric pressure on Earth,
and so there's not enough air molecules to blow through the lips.
So you just do a wheeple.
I never could whistle until I got a dog.
And I love my dog so much
that I realised another range of communication would
be denied between us if I didn't learn to whistle.
So my wheeple turned into a whistle
because of a little wire-haired dachshund.
Oh, I love that.
And if the dachshund could speak, it'd go, "Shut the fuck up!" Yes.
LAUGHTER
If it had longer legs, it would go like that.
LAUGHTER
I think we've got one word left on our list, Gyles.
Wherry-go-nimble.
Is it a kind of jackanapes? A wherry-go-nimble.
It sounds like a Victorian hen party.
Off for a wherry-go-nimble.
Well, after you've been to a hen party,
you might have this. It is...
It's a loosening of the bowels. Oh!
What sort of hen parties have you been going to?
LAUGHING: That's not...
It's diarrhoea, basically. One of my worst things.
Oh, I love it. What, diarrhoea? Yeah.
Just ONE of your worst things? Yeah.
It's one of my worst discharges. Is it?
Oh, it's not one of my worst discharges. No?
Not even in the top three. No.
Well, if you two might discuss that later.
All right, moving on.
What is the use of handwriting now that we've all got computers?
Everything. I mean this seriously. OK.
You can't write a love poem on a computer.
If you want something from the heart,
it has to come through the hand.
I really believe this.
But I don't think you're far off, Gyles,
because the thing is that the movements
that you do in handwriting
require you to process information actively.
And that means there are many more links
between regions of the brain which process information
and the ones responsible for memory, for example.
So I think you're right. I think there is an unlocking
of creativity when you use handwriting.
Do you handwrite anything, Michael? Yeah,
I mean, I like, you know, like love notes, you know.
Exactly. "You up?" you know, send that by...
LAUGHTER
How old were you when you first began to practise your autograph?
Uh...
Must have been about four, I suppose.
But not because I thought of it as my autograph.
Oh, didn't you develop it? Most people, I think,
will have developed their autograph over the years.
Worked out the full name.
For an Alan - one L, two L's, all this.
No? I feel the male psyche is fascinating.
I know, isn't it? I was always writing people I fancied names,
that's what I was doing. Yeah, I spent lots of time doing that.
Did you practise, Michael? Did you practise writing your name out?
Just my autograph. Just normally, like, in detention,
you know, just be writing your name down.
Were you a naughty boy? A little bit.
It's getting more exciting by the minute.
Practising my signature came into its own
when I signed the largest cheque in the history of this country.
When you were the Lord Commissioner of the Treasury?
I was the Lord Commissioner of the Treasury
and I signed a cheque for £137 billion.
What did you buy?
Social security payments, first quarter.
Every bit of government expenditure
has to be signed off by a Treasury minister,
and I was the junior Treasury minister -
the Lord Commissioner of the Treasury who had to do this.
They explained to me with these big cheques,
the billion-pound cheques,
you'll be doing them with the head of the Treasury.
I said, "Who's that?" They said it was the Queen.
So I would go down the Mall with the government chequebook
to sign these huge cheques with the Queen,
our signatures together.
And the first time, I wasn't sure what the etiquette was.
You know, I didn't want to patronise her
because she was a woman saying, "After you."
Or indeed pull rank, because I was the elected one.
Anyway, she was... LAUGHTER
She was holding the pen
and she seemed to think she should sign first,
so I let her. Big loopy handwriting, Elizabeth R,
and then I put mine underneath - almost as big,
but I know my place and... LAUGHTER
And the last time we did this, this was the cheque for £137 billion,
it was she who told me it was the largest cheque she had ever signed.
And she said, "You know,
"the way the government insists on the two of us signing these cheques,
"I can't help wondering which of
"the two of us it is the government doesn't entirely trust."
Somebody dies without making a will,
what's a fun way to decide who gets what?
Ooh. A race.
Yeah, that's a good idea. The money's over there.
Go! Go!
What do you reckon? I don't know.
Whoever loved them most and you just kind of go from there.
You've had no dealings with the law, have you? No.
I feel very bad about this. Oh, do you, darling?
Well, because over the years,
I have inadvertently killed a number of people.
LAUGHTER
I have just realised the Queen is no longer with us.
Oh, dear! When I was a child, I was
in the choir at Holy Trinity Brompton,
and we were paid a shilling a week for services,
two shillings for weddings, but five shillings -
I'll tell you what they are later -
five shillings for funerals. So we wanted funerals.
We were little boys who wanted death in our midst.
So, during the prayers, we would eye up the congregation
as we were praying through our hands like this.
And we'd focus on the frailest looking member of the congregation.
And then we would all simultaneously pray for this person to die.
And God loves a young entrepreneur.
Because week after week,
these old buggers fell off the perch.
Many of them unfortunately dying intestate because they...
Without a will. Without a will.
So that is the point. So I feel guilty
that people do die without leaving a will.
But if they were old and frail, by then they really should
have had wills. They should have known better.
They weren't like... If Michael didn't have a will,
it would be more understandable
than - no offence - if you didn't have a will.
So...
I've got stuff. I've got like Tamagotchis. I can give...
I got valuable stuff.
Have you made a will?
I've not made a will. No. In the UK,
if you die without a will, your assets automatically will go
to your spouse or to your civil partner or,
you know, apportioned to your children if you have any.
So we're going to South America.
In the indigenous communities like the Aymara people of the Andes,
so Ecuadorians, Salasacans, the Canelos,
they traditionally gambled for the deceased's possessions
in a game with dice called huayru.
So they use dice which looked like this,
made from the bones of donkeys or llamas or oxen and so on.
And what I like about this, they play the game at the wake, right?
Yeah. So the person has died, there's no will
and then they play with these dice to work out who's going to do...
So they put the coffin beside the players,
and it's believed that their spirit will reach out
to affect the game, to affect the rolls and so on,
and that means that their intentions will be honoured,
even if it hasn't been written down.
I think this is a fantastic way of doing it.
If somebody from the Salascan community dies
without getting married, what they do is they place a chicken
or a cockerel by the coffin to stand in for the would-be spouse,
and the dead person's hand is made
to touch the chicken so that they are married.
And the idea is they then have a companion in afterlife,
and afterwards the chicken gets to live with the bereaved family,
and then it gets a funeral of its own when it dies.
AUDIENCE : Aw! Yes, I know, aren't we weird?
We're aw-ing a chicken.
So they let the chicken die of natural causes?
Yes. They don't eat it. They're not fried.
No, no, no. Add some seasoning. Yeah.
I mean, suddenly you're making it sound very tempting.
Yeah, it does sound good. In India,
there's a group of people who eat their own relatives.
They eat them... Well, actually,
they eat their grandparents when they've died.
I don't know what to do with that. I'll be honest with you, Gyles.
I don't know what you wanted from me from that moment. I can't lie.
What happens is this, you see, they actually... The grandparents die.
They put them into the river, and then the fish eat them.
And then the children and the grandchildren eat the fish.
It's to carry on... Michael, you don't have to believe all of it.
Stay away from the man on your...
It's gone to one in five. one in five. I've got you.
What do you think a holographic will is?
Oh, is it like in Star Wars?
Carrie Fisher comes up and says, "I'm leaving you half the house."
LAUGHTER
"You're getting..." Maybe just does a bit of pointing.
"You're getting nothing. You're getting nothing.
"I'm giving it all to the cat."
So, a holographic will is one that's written entirely by hand,
and it can be problematic,
because it doesn't have the right terminology.
There's a very famous court case.
It's called Thorn and Dickens in 1906,
and it was a three-word holographic will,
and it just said, "All for Mother." OK?
And it's often used as an example of the importance
of clarity in documents.
The man's widow claimed that Mother referred to her,
that they used to refer to each other
as Father and Mother, and his actual mother challenged it.
But in the end, the court ruled in the wife's favour.
But you can see how it's complicated, right?
You just think, what does that exactly mean?
What words spring to mind
when you think of a steamy, blowing room full of male strippers?
Members of Parliament.
LAUGHTER
It's a question about weaving. Weaving?
Yes. These are all terms from Victorian cotton mills.
Now does that help anybody at all? Can you say the sentence again?
The steamy, blowing room full of male strippers.
A spinning jenny. I remember learning about those...
Is the only thing you know about weaving. That's it. Yeah.
What is a spinning jenny? Something about a loom.
You didn't have to do it yourself...
Because you've got Jenny to do it.
There's steam in the room? There is, yes.
So, here's the thing about cotton - is that you need
to keep it artificially hot
and moist in order to keep the threads from breaking.
This is very, very important.
And it's one of the reasons why Lancashire,
for example, was very famous for cotton weaving
because it often rains and the air is very damp.
But first of all, they have to smooth the raw cotton
by passing steam through it.
So this is in the blowing room. Then there is the carding room
and then there is drawing and roving.
This is what's happening here.
But you mentioned male strippers and these are girls. Yes.
So stripping was seen as a man's job because it required more strength,
and the women on the whole did the weaving.
But why do you think there was so much kissing going on in...?
Kissing?! Just bored, innit? Yes.
APPLAUSE
It's a technique. It's a delicate technique
for plucking of something that needed to be plucked.
I mean, you're heading in the right direction.
So I don't know if you've ever seen a shuttle.
I do a lot of weaving myself,
and I have many of these old shuttles.
You do a lot of weaving?! I do, darling.
And so you get an old shuttle,
and the thread has to go through the eye of the shuttle.
And so the easiest way to do it was to suck it in.
And it was called kissing the shuttle.
When your wife said, let's do some kissing the shuttle,
she didn't think you were going to get a loom, Sandi.
She's from Lancashire.
I didn't understand anything she was saying.
But once industrialisation kicked in,
then kissing the shuttle became incredibly unhygienic.
The government set up a shuttle-kissing committee
in order to deal with it.
It had to be banned because it was unhygienic.
But the machinery was so loud,
in order to get their point across to each other,
they would exaggerate the mouthing
and the miming and the lip reading, and it's known as mee-mawing.
Mee-mawing? Mee-mawing. Yeah, and every mill had its own dialect,
even though this is... You're mouthing words
and people were able even to have private conversations
by holding their hands over their mouth like that.
And I know this because my wife's family all mee-maw,
and I went to a party at a working men's club,
and it was a bingo and karaoke night,
and the bingo and the karaoke was happening at the same time.
And they were all having these long conversations,
but they were mee-mawing to each other.
You have married very well, haven't you?
They're absolutely the most glorious people.
And Debbie's Auntie Betty came up to me and she looked at me
and she went... SHE MOUTHS
Which was, "You're off the telly."
But we get a lot, we get a lot from weaving.
The word rocket that we use comes from weaving.
It means the bobbin. It comes from an Italian word, rocchetto.
It's the cylindrical shape.
And shuttle. We use the shuttle like trains, for example.
So things that are going very fast backwards and forwards.
What's the biggest thing you've ever woven?
I once did a complete tapestry of the story of The Wizard Of Oz.
What?!
The Bayeux Of Oz.
LAUGHTER
Who was with William Wordsworth when he wandered
as lonely as a cloud in a field of golden daffodils?
Was it Alan Titchmarsh?
Wandered lonely as a cloud. There's stuff about that, isn't there?
There was jiggery pokery around how that got written and when.
Well, some people think he originally wrote,
"I wandered lonely as a cow," which I rather prefer.
Yeah. But who do you think he was with?
Gyles knows. I think I do know.
Yes, darling?
He was with his sister. Is right. Yeah. Absolutely.
He was ALWAYS with his sister. OK.
Even when he was with his wife, he was with his sister.
It's quite a strange relationship.
His sister was the meaning of his life in many ways.
They were brought up, I think, separately.
Yes. And when they came together,
they really became almost inseparable.
They loved one another, I think in a perfectly lovely way.
They loved gambolling across the moors together, the hills -
this all happening in Cumbria, Lake District -
and then he got married and that created a bit of tension.
His wife was called Mary. Is that right?
Yes. So she's called Dorothy.
And Mary became a friend of Dorothy, but in a nice way.
LAUGHTER
He got a better artist to do his drawing.
Yes.
LAUGHTER
But it is quite a strange relationship.
The night before he got married to Mary,
he allowed Dorothy to wear the wedding ring.
And in the morning he took the ring off Dorothy's finger
and she refused to go to the actual ceremony.
And when she learned it was done,
she became, as they say, insensible.
And she never married.
That dog's got stories to tell, hasn't he?
But... So, the story of the poem -
they were exploring Ullswater together,
Dorothy and William, 1802.
So this is the lovely footpath... Isn't that lovely?
..from Gowbarrow down to Ullswater. Isn't it beautiful? Beautiful.
And she wrote about it in her diary,
which he would have read because he was...
MICHAEL: So this is where he did his sister? Is that what we're saying?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
If that's what you're into,
what you need to know about is Lord Byron. OK!
Is this your specialist subject? Well, Lord Byron,
I think possibly did have it away with his half sister,
who was called Aurora. There's no evidence that the act
of darkness took place between Dorothy and William.
But what you should know is all of these poets, they were constantly
bickering with each other. Because you mentioned Lord Byron -
William once badmouthed the works of Alexander Pope,
who was another poet, and he was seriously admired by Lord Byron.
And Byron was so angry, he renamed
William Wordsworth William Turdsworth, so...
But she talks about the fact that they were in Gowbarrow Park
and saw daffodils close to the water,
so it was definitely a thing that they did together.
But he becomes quite a grumpy old man,
because originally... Look at this place, it's fantastic.
And when he was young, he said,
everybody must have access to this place,
equal access to nature and so on, and he wanted the Lake District
to become a sort of national park and everything.
But then, as he got older,
he got very cross with the working class invading the place by train.
And also he'd become a sort of tourist attraction.
People used to go and knock on his window
when he was sitting and they wanted to go, "Hi, you're Willie Wordsworth.
"Hi!"
But anyway, wonderful poet.
If you haven't read it, The Prelude. Oh!
Oh, it's magnificent. It's one of the greatest poems ever.
This poem, basically, it tells the story of his poetic awakening.
And it's almost the story of his life.
And he and the people around him, they really invented
our modern view of the world,
our view of childhood and nature. Would you not agree?
I would. I mean, the way he talks about nature,
both being in awe and in fear of it is just magnificent.
But did he write that or did Dorothy?
I mean, that's a very good question. And we'll never know.
But the opening of The Prelude is so beautiful.
It talks about a pinnace, which is a kind of ship.
"She was an elfin pinnace, lustily,
"I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
"And, as I rose upon the stroke,
"My boat went heaving through the water like a swan."
Isn't it magnificent? Wonderful.
Or...filth.
LAUGHTER
"Rose upon the stroke?!"
"Plunged." I spend my whole career trying to get us back on track.
Now for a question
about some very famous books with no words.
I'm going to show you a picture of our live studio audience.
Let's settle this once and for all. Where is Wally?
One point to the first person who can spot him on the panel.
Alan was first. Have you seen him? Can you...?
There. You see him? In the hat. Put your hand up.
There he is. OK. Oh! OK. How did you discover him?
I mean, you were the first. It was quickest. Stripey top.
But also, I'd spotted him before you asked and thought, why...?
Why is that man wearing a hat?
How annoying for the fella behind him.
You can take it off. One of our wonderful elves, Joe.
These are these books, they were published in 1987,
Where's Wally? and its books by an illustrator
called Martin Handford.
But what I love is that somebody has done
a mathematical calculation
as to the quickest way to find Wally,
and it's the optimal search path
for where he is going to be in any picture.
Can we put the graph over the top so that we can see?
It's a WAL-GORITHM.
It looks like the way to Uranus, doesn't it? Yes, it does.
It has sold more copies,
these Where's Wally? books than Winnie-the-Pooh. Has it?!
I know. And in the beginning there was no Wally in them.
OK. There was... LAUGHTER
I know. It was just something that was added in
to give the reader something to do. Did you have these books when you...?
Yeah, I caught them. Nobody asked, How is Wally?
So, making sure... You're good?
You're good, Wally? Yeah.
I'd love a whole book of Wally's thoughts.
Just, "Jesus, I can get no peace.
"Every time I go out it's, 'THERE'S WALLY!'
"I just came out for some fags."
"WALLY! WALLY!"
"No-one gives a shit about me. No-one...
"..literally no-one cares."
Only Michael, the first person who's ever thought
of how Wally is. You know.
So, this is the optimal search path.
If you have a look that has been calculated by a data...
I love this - a data analyst has sorted this out, Randal Olson.
The white line is an approximation.
But these books, called swarming picture books -
books with lots and lots of pictures full of movement -
they've been really popular since the 16th century,
and probably the most famous of these wimmelbilders
is Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden Of Earthly Delights,
painted in the early 1500s.
And if we zoom in to the bottom right-hand corner,
one of the hidden features of the painting
is a naked woman with a small piece of written music across her bottom.
That's Cheryl Cole.
LAUGHTER
The earliest tattoo.
GEORDIE ACCENT: Right, that says Girls Aloud.
But what I love is that somebody thought,
"Oh, I'll see if I can play that."
Yeah, there's a woman called Amelia Hamrick,
she's a student from Oklahoma Christian University,
and she recorded it on a combination of lute, harp and hurdy-gurdy.
And she called the piece the 500-year-old Butt Song From Hell.
LAUGHTER
We don't have a copy of it,
but apparently she described it as not very good.
We have these books in Denmark, but everybody uses a different name.
Where's Waldo? is the American version.
That's the American version. So in Denmark it's Find Holger.
So, Holger is the person and find, to look for.
Willy in Norway, Charlie in France.
Apparently Waldo in the United States,
it was changed because Wally - the publisher
thought it sounded too much like Wallis Simpson.
No! Yes. And for a while, the first Where's Waldo?
was briefly banned in the United States
because one page had a topless sunbather.
Ooh! She now wears a bikini.
Quite right. That's Martin Handford, who did all the drawings.
He's terrible at it. He's right there. Yeah.
Absolutely right.
I know.
Are you going to share with us the myth,
or is it the truth about the origin of the phrase Where's Wally?
Are you talking about the story from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival?
Is that not true? Well, I mean, it's such a good story
that I think it probably could be true. Share.
So during the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival,
somebody called Wally got lost in the crowds.
There are people who say it was actually a dog called Wally
Anyway, either way, people started calling Wally during the festival
and it began sort of resonating through the festival,
and people took it up and it became repeated
at British festivals for years afterwards,
because there's nothing we like better than an old joke.
We love an old joke. I am Spartacus. Yes, exactly that.
You're supposed to say that after me.
Anyway. Go on.
I think you're fine. Yeah.
Honestly, we don't really know.
And I think the potential for altered minds
at a festival may mean this is misremembered.
Isn't it funny that they always draw glasses
as if the whole eye...? As if the eye...
Yes. Right in the middle. Does Homer Simpson have that,
or have I imagined that? Oh, no. He... What?
He put glasses on with eyes on, didn't he?
Yeah, but that... So he could sleep
when he was on jury duty and it looked like he was awake.
You have a busy life, don't you?
And now for a question about...about...
Oh, what the hell is it called? You know, when you...
What's the thing when you can't remember a word?
Tott. What? Tip of the tongue. Yes.
Tip of the tongue syndrome.
What's it called in sign language?
I mean, that almost looked offensive.
Tof - tip of the finger syndrome.
Ah! Yeah. Really? Tip of the tongue, tip of the finger syndrome.
Oh! It's lovely. Do you ever have it happen to you? It's really...
I mean, it's... I think it might...
I can't even remember what I'm trying to say. What's the question?
At this stage in life, the brain fog...
They say it's the nouns that go first.
I forgot the word for polyamory today.
The other people in the bed didn't care, but...
I did care, but I had to get up.
There's a very... I was right down the bottom.
It was the most, most wonderful old Barry Cryer joke.
There's two old men sitting chatting at the kitchen table,
and the wives are just obviously busy washing up.
And bloke says to the other bloke, he says,
"Oh, I went to the most fantastic restaurant last night."
And he says, "Oh, yeah, what was it called?"
He said, "Oh, what the hell was it called?
"What's that thing? What's that lovely-smelling flower with thorns?"
And he goes, "Rose?"
And he goes, "Yeah. Rose, what was the name of that restaurant?"
LAUGHTER
Anyway, people use placeholders when they can't remember a word.
So, there are some fantastic words that have been used over many,
many years - washical, which is like whatchamacallit.
Yeah. That's good. There is a whangdoodle.
Oh, a whangdoodle! Thingum-thangum is very good.
From 1684, thingum-thangam,
Oojah capivvy, do you think?
Oojah capivvy... Don't know. You said that in quite an Italian way.
I did. ITALIAN ACCENT: Oojah capivvy!
Yes. Did you read about the lady who had a stroke
and woke up speaking with an Italian accent?
There's a black lady on TikTok. Yeah.
Really?! Now we're talking. Exactly.
If I may say so, you up. Yeah.
LAUGHTER No, no. No.
I don't think that one. Not the two of you.
If the chemistry is right, then, you know.
But... Yeah, OK. Go on.
Me not up? No, you're not up.
Stay down, stay down. Stay down.
LAUGHTER
There's some great Dutch ones, actually.
What do these mean? These are all sort of place words
that you use when you can't think of a thing.
BOTH: Huppeldepup.
Zamazingo was Turkish. Dingskirchen.
I like dingskirchen. It's German for when you forget a place
and it just means thing-church. You know, what's-her-name?
Yeah. What about the remote control?
Would you call the remote control for the television,
just call it remote control? Or do you have...? Some thingamajig.
Sometimes I call it thingamajig. Yeah.
Thingamabob. Yeah. Which one do you want?
I mean, there are several normally lying around the house.
There is that. TV Licensing in 2016 did a survey and they found that
people in the UK have over 100 words for the remote control.
After remote, the second most common was doofer, zapper, clicker,
flicker, thingamajig and whatchamacallit.
In Oxford, it's the thing. In Wales they call them panic buttons,
and Wolverhampton - the turny-over machine.
In Holland, lots of the houses
have floor-to-ceiling glass windows, big glass.
And there's a tradition you don't shut your curtains in the evening.
And one of the things that the youths of the neighbourhood used to
do, where my parents-in-law used to live, is they used to just go by
with remote controls and change the channel.
Now it's time to horse around with some General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please. What feature can BBC viewers turn on
to let them read exactly what I am saying?
Subtitles, I'd assume.
Exactly.
So subtitles translate speech from different languages, right.
So you can be watching a Korean programme,
and then you can watch it in English,
or you can read it in English.
What is the thing, if I want somebody who speaks English
to exactly see written down what it is I'm saying?
Closed captions. It's closed captions.
You're absolutely right. But don't trust them, Michael,
because they're often done by a computer.
Yes. I know this because when I was watching
the replay of Margaret Thatcher's funeral...
Yeah.
When I was watching this, it had these closed captions,
and when they got to the bit where the voice-over was... I read it.
It said, "The Archbitch will now speak."
LAUGHTER
That was an error. That was an error.
How long ago do you think that they were
able to put written speech on to a film?
Oh. 1972. Long time ago. It is a long time ago.
1872? No, I'd say before. I'm going to say the 1930s or something.
No, 1903. 1903!
Yes. Before my time.
I mean, just.
Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1903 -
Edwin Porter's - had inter-titles between the scenes.
And then his 1907 film College Chums, he managed to...
I have to say, this is really impressive.
This is 1907. Look at that embedded into the picture.
Don't you think that's...?
Looks like a Wes Anderson, doesn't it? It's brilliant.
I think it's really impressive.
"Darling, yes." What's he saying, "Darling..."
"Don't darling me." Oh, they're having a row in text!
"Who was that girl you were with in the park today?"
No! What was the problem with using text in pictures like this in 1903?
Going international? Maybe? People couldn't read. Yes.
The high degree of illiteracy. Yeah. It was a serious issue.
I'm just worried the first-ever dick pic's
about to fly across the screen.
It was 1909 that the very first were put at the bottom of the screen.
That's when we get the closed captions.
The words on your screen are captions,
subtitles are subtly different. Now, you may know
that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster,
but the person who created it, Victor Frankenstein.
What qualifications did he have?
Was he a butcher?
Do you know, of all the things we thought you might say...
LAUGHTER
I remember years ago going to see Edna Everage live,
and she said to somebody
in the audience, "What colour is your house, darling?"
And the person said, "Beige."
And there was a really long pause, and she went,
"Yes, you forget about beige, don't you?"
She'd obviously got a joke for very single colour.
Not that. I've got nothing for butcher.
Nothing. I've got nothing at all.
Well, it's not going to be doctor, is it?
No. It isn't doctor. We don't get him to be a doctor
until he's first portrayed in a romantic play.
He has no qualifications whatsoever.
Oh, he's an influencer!
LAUGHTER
So, Mary Shelley wrote the book in 1818.
Can I just say this is one of my favourite stories of
all time about misunderstanding something.
So part of her inspiration for Frankenstein came -
and this was in her own introduction to the book -
from a belief that pasta could come to life.
Pasta? Yes. So she discussed an experiment
which was performed by Erasmus Darwin,
who was Charles Darwin's grandfather,
in which, and this is quoting her, "preserved a piece of vermicelli
"in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began
"to move with a voluntary motion."
And she had misremembered the word.
Erasmus Darwin claimed to have reanimated vorticelle,
which are tiny, wriggly, worm-like creatures,
and not vermicelli, which is pasta.
During the Cold War, if you crossed the Berlin Wall
coming from East Germany,
which country would you end up in?
West Germany?
You're going to be in West Berlin, right?
And the thing about West Berlin,
it wasn't legally or constitutionally a part of either West or East.
Was it in the Soviet Union at that stage?
It sort of weirdly wasn't anything.
So you get the partition of the city.
It's divided between the US, the UK,
France and the Soviet Union by the Yalta Conference in 1945.
But the West was run by France, Britain and the United States
as a completely independent territory.
It wasn't officially part of any country.
It was sort of a no-man's land.
I wish I'd known you were bringing this up,
because I've got at home a bit of the Berlin Wall.
Oh, so have I. A little fragment of it.
Did you go? Yes. We took our children,
thinking this was going to be... It was too important not to go.
And we went with our children and we helped...
There were lots of East Germans
and West Germans were helping pull it down.
And so there are lots of souvenirs everywhere.
And each of our children took a souvenir home.
It was extraordinary. 1990, it was.
I'm glad we've kept our bit, because they may be putting it
up again soon and we could take it back.
LAUGHTER
There's technically a bit of East Germany that still exists.
Anybody know where it is?
It's in Cuba.
Ah! 1972, Fidel Castro gave one of the Cuban islands to East Germany
as a gift for their communist alliance,
and it was called Cayo Blanco del Sur.
And Castro renamed it Ernst Thalmann Island.
So Ernst Thalmann ran the German Communist Party
in 1925 to 1933,
and when the Berlin Wall came down, nobody mentioned the island.
So strictly speaking, still East Germany.
Michael, you have been just wonderful.
I just want to apologise for the seating arrangements.
This is my best friend now. Yes.
Aw! Lovely man.
Thank you. Now, I'm afraid the writing is on the wall,
as we come to the matter of the scores.
Our winner tonight, well, I'm lost for words -
six whole points - it's Cally!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Finally, I've won!
In second place, as good as their word,
with four points, it's Michael!
Yay! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In third place, on the streets, with one point,
Alan! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In last place... Oh, dear. It's a complete write off.
Minus one, it's Gyles!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE We did well.
So it's a big thank you to Michael, Gyles, Cally and Alan,
and I leave you with the last words of the poet Dylan Thomas.
"I just had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's a record."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE