15x08 - Operations

[bunniefuu]

APPLAUSE

Hey, good evening.

Welcome to QI,

for a show which is an overwhelming
O-ssortment of operations.

And joining me in my theatre
team are, Dr No, Bill Bailey.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Dr Who, Rhod Gilbert.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Dr Doolittle, Katherine Ryan.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And...

"Doctor, Doctor, I think I'm
a pair of curtains", Alan Davies.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Pull yourself together.
Pull yourself together.

Right, let's see how
the patient's doing. Rhod goes...

FLATLINING HEART MONITOR BEEP

LAUGHTER

Oh, that's bad, we've lost one
already. OK, Katherine goes...

REGULAR HEART MONITOR BEEP

Oh, that's better,
that's much better. Yes.

Yeah, we've got it.

OK. Bill goes...

RAPID HEART MONITOR BEEP

Wow, that's... And Alan goes...

BEEP

Vehicle reversing.
Vehicle reversing.

Vehicle reversing...

They're so loud,
some of those trucks. They are!

Somewhere, the other day,
I was about 50 yards away

and it was going,
"This truck is turning left!"

"It's turning left!" And it wasn't.

I know, it's annoying.

Right, let's start with
a special operation.

How can you turn a muffin
into an offensive weapon?

I have muffins for you all.

There you are, there's some muffins,
help yourselves.

Douse it in petrol.

OK. Yes. I don't know,
just chuck it at someone?

Chuck it at somebody?
Rhod, what do you reckon?

Turning a muffin into some
kind of offensive weapon?

Just remove the "May contain nuts"
label from it.

LAUGHTER

Yeah. We're in World w*r II.

You drop it out of a plane.

Just a single muffin?

A muffin.

"That'll teach you, Germans! Yeah."

"Argh, it's got me in the eye!"

Was it poisoned,
was it presented to Hitler?

"Oh, there you go,
obst und mein Fuhrer."

It is the most bizarre thing, Bill.

During World w*r II,
flour mix was invented

that could either be eaten,
or used as an expl*sive.

LAUGHTER

And, yeah, so the mix was invented
by the Office of Strategic Services,

so that's the CIA's
parent organisation.

Wow.

It consisted of 75% expl*sive powder
and 25% ordinary wheat flour,

which is the way I like my muffins.

LAUGHTER

And if the holder was challenged,

it could either be eaten,
or you could blow somebody up.

So the early versions
made you quite ill. No sh*t!

Yeah. Yeah. I think that was part of
the problem. Yes, yes.

LAUGHTER

But, later versions,
they made it fully edible

and it didn't matter whether you had
made the flour into a cake.

You could stick a fuse into
a muffin and it would still blow up.

Have you ever done that thing
of making an exploding cake

for a children's birthday party?

It's very naughty,
but it's terribly funny.

And potentially fatal. Yes.

LAUGHTER

You make a totally hollow cake
and then you stick a balloon

in the middle
and then you ice the whole thing

and when they cut into
it, it goes, boom!

LAUGHTER

A very good idea.
That's a good trick, isn't it?

I'm very, very pleased with it.
That's a brilliant idea, yes.

Of course,
the Germans had it, as well,

they had bombs that were
disguised as a chocolate bar.

They had a mess tin
full of bangers and mash,

which in fact was exploding.

Irresistible to the British Tommy!

LAUGHTER

"We jolly well shouldn't eat this,
Roger."

"You're right, we shouldn't eat it."

"Enjoying your breakfast, Tommy?"
"Yes, thank you." Boom!

LAUGHTER

And bombs were sometimes
left in books

and were triggered
by the removal of a picture

of a scantily clad woman!

COMEDIC GASPS

"Don't remove the picture, Roger."
"I can't resist her."

Can't resist her.

LAUGHTER

Now, I am about to carry out
an operation.

What's the first question
I should ask myself?

LAUGHTER

Is there a balloon in the patient?

LAUGHTER

Should I have taken all these
selfies with the sleeping patient?

LAUGHTER

Am I sober?

Yes. Where am I?

Should I at least have
a quick look on Wikihow?

Absolutely.

LAUGHTER

So, there's a list of questions.

Is there? An official list?
There's a list of questions.

The first thing you have to
ask yourself is,

do we have the right patient?

Do we have the right patient?
Is the very first question.

Make sure you know
which bit of the body

you are going to be operating on.

I thought "location" meant
am I in the hospital? Yeah. Yes.

I'm in the shed with the pliers,
is this best practice?

LAUGHTER

If it had said "identity" and then
"location, location, location".

LAUGHTER

What are we doing in that location?

In other words, what is the
procedure that we're going to do?

And did the patient,
before they were conked-out,

say that it was OK to do this?

Ah. So these are the things.
It's really basic stuff, this. Yeah.

I thought our surgeons were
kind of ahead of this stuff.

That's the extraordinary thing.
2008, the World Health Organization,

they composed a set of 19 questions
to be asked before

and after all surgical operations,
to reduce hospital errors.

And it's called
the Safe Surgery checklist.

And it sounds really simple,

but the use of this check list
has reduced deaths by 40%...

Oh, no!

..and complications by one third.

So is that the...
So before all these checks then,

were there just surgeons just going,
"Right, bring him in!"

Yeah, yeah.

LAUGHTER

"Right, all done! Right, come on."

"Let's just tuck in, come on!"

"He looks like he could
have his leg off."

"Come on. Next!"

LAUGHTER

One surgeon who had no problem
identifying the patient whatsoever

was a Soviet surgeon called
Leonid Rogozov.

So he realised he had appendicitis,
but he was visiting

the Antarctic and so he had no
choice but to operate on himself.

Oof! So he described the pain as...

"A snowstorm whipping through my
soul, wailing like 100 jackals."

LAUGHTER

I think he wrote that
long after he was better

because I don't think you're going
to come out with that sentence

while you're...
"What's it feel like, Leonid?"

"It feels like a snow storm
whipping through..."

Yeah. He worked on himself
for an hour and 45 minutes,

and he was back at work
within a fortnight.

He worked on himself
for an hour and 45...

LAUGHTER

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Well, it's that kind of thought,
Rhod,

that led a man called Boston Corbett
to perform self-surgery.

Here is Boston Corbett.

He is famous in history as the man

who k*lled Abraham Lincoln's
assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

But he believed that he was very
tempted by ladies, and that he

didn't like this, so he castrated
himself with a pair of scissors.

Ooh!
GASPS

Oh, good action,
good action from the audience there.

In order to avoid temptation
of prostit*tes...

He cut his own testicles off
with a scissors

to avoid the temptation of...

Yes. Why didn't he just
walk down a different street? Yes.

LAUGHTER

He thought that eunuchs were
more likely to get into heaven.

Oh, my word! I like him, I wish more
men would take this path.

Every house has got scissors.

LAUGHTER

They say that delivering a child
hurts as much as having

your leg amputated at the thigh

without any pain relief.

Who has been through those
two things that could tell?

LAUGHTER

That's unlucky.
That's a bad day, isn't it?

Yeah, that's not good. Now, doctors,
what's your diagnosis here?

LAUGHTER

He'd fallen asleep on a stag do.

LAUGHTER

He was running a circus school
and his students hated him.

The world's worst.

It's a party game, is it?

Pin the sword on the nutter.

LAUGHTER

So, this is possibly
one of the earliest

anatomical drawings for medics.

He was known as the Wound Man.

It's a medieval image, first
printed in a book, 1491, in Venice.

It's all the various things, so he's
been injured, if you look there,

with daggers, he's been shot
with arrows, he's been lacerated,

he's been stung by bees, scorpions,
been clubbed in the head.

Bitten by a dog,
scratched by thorns.

Blasted by cannonballs,
he's definitely got plague

and bad spots, and he appears
to have a toad in his stomach.

So, it's, as it were,
the contents page to the book.

What a shame though, for a guy
who obviously looks after himself

and goes to the gym.

LAUGHTER

To go down like that.

He eats Paleo. Yeah.

You know, he's really healthy,
he thought he'd have a long life...

Uh-oh. Yeah,
all of those things happen to him.

He's a curious contradiction,
though,

because he doesn't look after
his appearance enough

to remove a sword from his head. No.

But he does buy his underwear
in Agent Provocateur.

LAUGHTER

Yeah. They're quite snug.

They are on the tight side,
aren't they?

Yeah. Ironically,
that's the most pain he's in. Yeah.

LAUGHTER

"It's gone right up me arse,
that has!"

Ooh. He's come back from a sort of
Civil w*r re-enactment, you know.

"So, how did it go?" "Don't ask!"

"They nicked my armour,
I'm left in my pants, look at this!"

LAUGHTER

Oh, dear.

The doctor's going to go,
"I'm going to try something new."

"Don't pooh-pooh it straight away,
it's called acupuncture.

Yeah.

LAUGHTER

They also had one for women,
it isn't just the Wound Man.

They had Disease Woman.

LAUGHTER

There she is. And...

Is Marvel running out
of superheroes?

LAUGHTER

Look over there, it's Disease Woman!

In the United States they have
an exceptionally complex system

for categorising injuries.

It's called the ICD-10 System.

The International Classification
of Diseases.

There are 140,000 detailed codes
for different complaints,

and they are extremely specific.

So they include "bitten by orca".

"Forced landing of spacecraft
injuring occupant."

"Asphyxiation due to
being trapped in a car trunk."

"Burn due to water-skis on fire..."

That's really hard!

How could that ever happen? I don't
know. That is so unlucky.

But my absolute favourite -
"hurt at opera".

Otherwise known as
the Abraham Lincoln.

Yes. The first attempts to
categorise diseases in this country

are the Bills of Mortality.

And there was a man called
John Graunt,

who was actually a haberdasher,
but he was very interested

in trying to work out the various
things that people died of.

So we're talking 16th century.
And he put together these

Bills of Mortality, and they're
great. If you have a look,

these are the different things that
people died of. They are just...

"Griping in the guts," 1,288 people
died of that, "griping in the guts".

Griping.

"Lethargy" is already my favourite.
That's a good one.

That's quite good, yeah.
"Oh, I can't be bothered."

That's the way I want to go. Yeah!

Lethargy.
Just too lethargic to live.

I quite like "frighted".
23 people died "frighted".

That's good -
"k*lled by several accidents".

I like the "found dead
in the streets, field, etc."

"What, how did he die?"
"I don't know, they just found him."

He, no, he was just,
he was just dead. Just found him.

Some of these Bills of Mortality,
they just had,

"Cause of death - suddenly."
That's it, just...

That'll sort you out. Yeah.

"Teeth and worms"!
How do you die of teeth and worms?

Two thousand, six hundred and...

I'll tell you what, Wound Man would
have read that, and he'd go,

"Yeah, I've had that,
I've had that, I've had that.

"I've had all them."
Brain surgery - new, old?

Oh, no, it's probably old, isn't it?

I don't know.
This is not brain surgery,

but it's about a doctor's
understanding of the brain.

There was a guy who got,
on the railroads,

who got, he had an accident

and he got a four-foot metal rod
through his head.

Right. Phineas somebody.

Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage. Yeah.

Phineas Gage had an accident,
pole through his head,

and they left it in,

because they didn't want to take it
out in case it k*lled him.

Yeah. And he was fine
until a train came through.

And then it affected his mood, so
they were wondering where it had,

had it damaged his frontal cortex?
Because I mean, I don't know

why they were so surprised it
affected his moods, to be honest.

Yeah. But his boss was saying
he started swearing,

his wife left him, I think.

All his friends saying,
"He's a real misery now."

I should imagine his wife left him.

He probably couldn't
get in the house. I know.

"Watch what you're doing
with your pole!" "What?" "Ow!"

He had to do a three-point turn on
the trains, just to turn round.

But we're going back much further
than the 19th century, so Neolithic.

It's probably the oldest
of the practised medical arts,

brain surgery. Would this be
trepanning, or something like that?

So, trepanning, yes. Yes.
They'd drill a hole in the head

because they want to get out the
little tiny bits of bone that have

gone into the brain when they've
been hit with a club or something.

A drill, though, how did they have
a drill in Neolithic times?

Ah, well, they would have had,
like, a chisel. What would it have

been in Neolithic times? What would
the chisel be made out of? Stone.

A stone chisel. And then the hammer
was made out of stone?

Yeah. And the bed was made out of
stone, I'm guessing?

There was a lot of stone.
There was a lot of stone, yeah.

Have you seen The Flintstones?
It's just like that, yeah.

But surely in Neolithic period,
they didn't know that your brain

was as important as it is.
Because wasn't there a time

when they thought that your whole
personality was in your chest?

Yeah, but everybody would have known
what it was to have a headache.

I don't think that's a new thing.

Can you imagine if you'd said that
to Phineas Gage?

"Yes, Phineas, we all know what
it's like to have a headache."

I think maybe a lot of your
personality is somehow

in your chest. OK, some girls
feel that. That's fine.

I like her.

I think we think from here
sometimes.

Yes, we think in an emotional
manner, rather than...

Yes, I would agree with you. Yeah.

It's a good foot above
where we think from.

Wound Man was a medieval superhero

whose superpower was having
everything wrong with him.

What would you do if you found
2,000 skeletons in your closet?

I would cancel my dog's credit card.

Katherine, what do you reckon?

I live in a Catholic
church conversion,

so it is likely there are.

Oh. Does it feel spooky?
It doesn't feel spooky.

My nana was really upset,
but it's been deconsecrated

so that you can swear in it,
and do all sorts.

I expect that happened before,
don't you?

She checked. Oh, really? OK. Mm-hmm.

Is she Catholic?
She is Irish Catholic, so, I mean...

Oh, right. And dead.

And yet she still came over
to check. That's love.

She was a little too nosy
for her own good.

So, a collection of thousands of
skeletons was discovered in Rome

in 1578, and nobody knew who
they were, and the Church thought,

"This is fantastic," because for
several decades, the Protestants had

been stealing their relics, and what
they really needed was new ones.

So, they employed psychics to try
and see if there were any martyrs

amongst them. And when they found
a likely candidate, they gave them

a new name and a back-story and they
sent them out to the churches

across Europe.

They couldn't actually sell them
as relics, but what they could do is

they could charge them transport,
decoration, induction, blessing.

They would dress them up,
they would cover them in jewels,

like this, and put them on display.

The real problem with this
was they didn't send them

with any instructions.

So it was like a flat-pack
without instructions.

Come on, put a bit of make-up on it!

So loads of the skeletons
were just... Bunged together.

Honestly, just all over the shop.

Looks like the House of Lords,
doesn't it?

Now, time for a secret operation.

What is the point of a tap
in the ocean?

That's not a real picture.

It isn't a real picture,

because in Britain, you'd have
two taps for no reason at all.

OK, I don't understand this.

So you have a... You have a hot tap
and you have a cold tap, right?

What? Yes!
Yes, well, how is that?

So you're trying to wash your hands.
Yes...

And what happens, you put it under
the hot tap, you go, "Argh!"

"Argh, argh!" And then you go for
the cold tap, and go, "Argh!"

"Ooh-hoo-hoo, oh, hoo-hoo! Argh!
Ooh-hoo-hoo!" Yeah.

How is it the British haven't
discovered there's a mixer tap?!

What is it...? What...?
It's the only excitement we get.

Oh, is that...? Did you find that
baffling when you arrived?

I still find it baffling. Yeah, no.
And I don't understand radiators.

Why you want to heat an entire house

with a small hot metal plate
in the corner.

It doesn't work!
What would you do instead?

We have forced air in Canada,
otherwise you freeze to death.

What do you have?
A four what? What?

Forced air, just same as air-con.
You know... Oh, forced air-con.

Yes. Yeah. I've never
heard the term... I'm 40...

..late 40s, and I don't...

I genuinely didn't know how old
I was then, but I've never...

I'm not going to bother sitting here
working it out,

but I mean, I'm 50 soon, and I've
never heard the term forced air.

Well, not in that context.
I love the fact...

I love the fact, Rhod, that I'm
asking you some quite complicated

science questions, and you
don't know how old you are.

I'm about 49. You're about 49. About
49. Have you just worked it out?

Yeah.

I'm so used to saying
"I'm 50 in a few years,"

I'm so used to saying that, that,
for a moment, it stumped me.

No, but the thing is, though, it is
quite good to know how old you are,

and the producer has just told me
in my ear, Rhod, that you're 48.

APPLAUSE

Is there a really easy way
to remember how old you are?

Yeah. Yeah.
Is there like a little...?

Like some kind of song I can sing,
or something? Or...

I've never needed a mnemonic for my
age, but I'm sure we can invent one.

I'm going to come back to
what's the point...?

What's the point?! What's the point?
That's the question.

What was the question? Yes.

I've written one for you. Yeah?

I've written one for you.
OK, here we go. How about like,

# What year are we in today?

# When am I born?
Just take that away

# You don't have to be a whiz,

# That's how old Rhod Gilbert is. #

APPLAUSE

Sweet! Very good.

I've just followed your
poetic guidelines - I'm 48.

Is this...
At the risk of repetition,

WHAT IS THE POINT
OF A TAP IN THE OCEAN?!

Is it so that when sea levels rise,
you can turn it off? I don't know.

So it's not actually a water tap.
It's not a tap.

No, it's a rather...
Oh, tap, oh...

And so what else could you tap?
What is another kind of tapping

that people do when they're trying
to listen in? I know.

TAPS DESK
There's a shark behind you.

Yeah. Is it a wire,

when they put a transatlantic radio
communications wire?

So, it's Cold w*r.

It's called Operation: Ivy Bells,
and it took place from 1971 to 1981,

and it was the USA wire-tapping
a Russian underseas cable.

That thing - they're moving it
into position there -

is a giant tape recorder,
and they just put it onto the wire.

Good God!
So the sailors on a submarine,

the USS Halibut, located
a Soviet cable... USS Halibut!

They located a Russian cable
off the Russian east coast,

and they moved a six-metre long
recording pod around it

to track the communications.

The thing I really like about it,
because this - we're talking

some years ago now - the device
had to be updated every month,

so divers had to leave a submarine
once a month and change the tapes.

But it was hugely successful,
it ran for a decade,

until a National Security Agency
employee of the United States

sold the information to the KGB.

Spying was a lot more hassle
back then,

when you've got to train
a team of divers, get submarines...

Yeah. Now you just need
somebody's maiden name

and their first pet's name,
and you're off. Yeah. Yeah.

Or if you're the Russians, you just
have to go and see Donald Trump

and ask him.

APPLAUSE

99% of all international data

is transmitted through
underseas cables. Good Lord!

And so you know
when we talk about the cloud?

It's actually underwater.

The cloud is underwater, Sandi?

Good Lord. That's done your head in,
hasn't it, Rhod?

Yes. How old am I again?

# Happy birthday to you... #

I'm going to write down 48
and make a badge.

There we go.

550,000 miles of cable, so enough to
get to the moon and back. And...

If you were on the moon,
and you jumped off...

Yes?
..would you land on the earth?

Hold on, hold on, what are you
doing on the moon anyway?

Well, I don't know, maybe...

Have you been left behind
by a spacecraft?

Yeah. You got an Uber,
and it went horribly wrong.

It depends which side you're on.

I just think if you jumped off
the moon, you would just fall...

..and you'd land on earth.
Yeah. No.

I don't think you'd be
in a great state.

I mean I think you'd be like
Wound Man by the time you got down.

BILL: Yeah, you would. Yes.

KATHERINE: They know about space,
this is my problem with the sea.

Right. They can tell us all kinds of
things about planets and space

and other galaxies,
they've been to the moon, allegedly,

but they've not been to
the bottom of the sea.

I've been to the bottom of the sea,
in parts of it.

Have you? Yes.

What's down there? My feet.

Now, which body part was used to
stop the Netherlands flooding

in 1953?

Yes, Bill?

Somebody put their finger
in a d*ke.

Oh!

KLAXON

No, it's been mentioned
on QI before,

the story of the Dutch boy sticking
his finger in the d*ke is a myth.

What other body part might you
put in a hole to...?

Anybody?

The p*nis. p*nis!

KLAXON

Hurray!

I was sucked into that!

I can categorically tell you
no d*ke needs a p*nis. So...

Wahey!

APPLAUSE

No, sadly 100 men just put their
shoulders against the water barrier,

that's all. So it feels...

GROANS OF DISAPPOINTMENT
I know, tame, it feels really tame.

Is that what it is? Yeah.

But there is a story of
sort of plugging a hole,

it's done in a rather more
dramatic manner.

So these were the great North Sea
floods, and there was a danger of

three million people being at risk
if this particular d*ke had burst.

And what the mayor of the town did,
he requisitioned a grain barge,

and he ordered the captain to steer
it directly at the d*ke head-first,

and it plugged the breach
and it saved thousands of lives.

So, yeah, there is a story where
somebody did something heroic, but

it was neither done with a finger
nor their nether part of any kind.

That must have been difficult,
the water rushing.

Yes. And the captain having to
decide to do that.

Trying to steer it. They could
make that a film with Tom Hanks.

Yeah.

Did you know that some British
canals have got plugs in them?

In 1978, a man called Bill Thorpe
was employed to work on

the 18th century Chesterfield Canal
- there it is, extremely beautiful -

and he was dredging the canal
to get rid of rubbish,

and he accidentally
pulled the plug out.

And when he got back to work
the next day, the canal was gone.

Gone!

Most canals were built with
some form of emergency drainage,

but he had no idea there was a plug.

Now for the mopping-up operation
that we call General Ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers, please.

To the nearest five years, what was
the average age in the Home Guard?

Yes, Rhod?

60.

KLAXON

60 is a very, very fine answer.

35.

It's 30. It's... 30.
I was going to say 30! Oh!

Damn! I went up to 35! Yes.

But 30 was my first thought!

Half of the membership was younger
than 27, and a third was under 18,

so the average age was about 30.

My dad was from Ebbw Vale,
and my mum was from Abertillery,

and they used to have...
The Home Guards in each of

those towns in the Welsh valleys
used to battle each other, you know.

What they used to have to do was
take the flag off the town hall

of the opposite town's thing.

And he said that all the Ebbw Vale
boys were up in the hills,

trying to make their way through
the kind of forests and stuff,

across to Abertillery, and then
they looked down and saw on the road

below, and the Abertillery boys were
going into Ebbw Vale on the bus.

It was incredibly popular,
being in the Home Guard.

So when they established it,
they thought about 150,000 men

would volunteer, and in the first
24 hours, 250,000 men signed up.

At the end of June, 1940, over
a million, 1942, nearly two million.

My grandfather was an ARP warden,

and I thought that was quite special
when I was a kid.

And then I looked into it, and there
were 1.2 million ARP wardens.

Yeah, it was, it was... People just
volunteered for everything.

They wanted to help.

If you put it in context, the
Chinese People's Liberation Army,

which is the largest army in
the world, has got 2.2 million men.

And we had two million people
in the Home Guard.

But they did very important work -
anti-aircraft g*ns,

coastal a*tillery,
and in fact, over the w*r,

1,206 Home Guard men were k*lled
on duty, or died of their wounds.

So not quite the comic thing
that Dad's Army shows us.

I see. Now, how many stars
are there in Orion's Belt?

Three.

KLAXON
Three. Yay!

Oh.

Five, there's five.

KLAXON
Five, no, there aren't five.

Seven, there's seven.

KLAXON
Seven, there's not seven.

It looks like three,
it's one of the most famous things.

Do you call it Orion's Belt,
or do you refer to it...?

Yeah. I mean, we have
the same solar system.

But it has... It has lots
and lots of different names,

so in Latin America
they call it the Three Marys,

the Arabic name is
the Accurate Scale Beam.

Really?
I mean, what is it going to be,

hundreds of thousands,
but looks like three?

No, it is in fact nine, is
the answer that we were looking for.

One more go, I'd have got it!
It looks like... I know.

I was going to go nine next.
I was going in twos.

I know. It was like the guy
who invented Six Up,

and he was so close
to a successful soft drink.

There are the three
that we think of,

the bright ones that you can see.

They're called Mintaka, Alnilam,
and Alnitak.

But if we take Alnitak,
it's actually three different stars.

There's a blue super giant
and two smaller companions.

And each of the three main stars
in Orion's Belt is at least

20 times the size of the sun,
and at least 18,000 times brighter.

Blimey.

But it's just far away?
It's so far away.

This is why I hate space! Why?

Because I don't have the ability to
conceptually understand

how a mathematician can go,
"Oh, well, because of this and this,

"and my periscope,
then, like, it's that far away".

I don't understand.

BILL: That's where
you're going wrong.

Using a submarine, that's the...
Using a submarine.

Orion's Belt may have three notches,

but it's actually made up
of nine stars.

Now then, one test
of a great surgeon

is their ability to concentrate
while under stress.

So, while you are answering
the next question,

you have got next to you bananas,
and you have got a needle.

So this is how surgeons
learn to do surgery.

What I would like you to do is
half-peel the banana, like this, OK?

Your needle has been
already threaded for you.

And I want you to sew the banana
back together.

I can't. I can't open it.

Can't open it?!
Monkeys have mastered this, Alan.

Darling, put it higher up,
because that looks awful.

Can't open it!

Argh!

Argh!

Before you start,
what's your first question?

Am I a surgeon? Is this the banana
you were looking for?

Yes! Have I got the right banana?

Yes. Is exactly right. OK.

So try and sew the banana
back together.

Now one of the great tests,
because the whole thing

about a surgeon is
the ability to concentrate,

I want you to tell me the name
of the food that you are holding

if it was made without
using any pesticides.

Organic banana.

KLAXON

Organic banana, there we go.
Off and running.

Oh, me thread's not enough.
Might as well go for it - plum.

Mine's a mess.

Katherine's doing
a wonderful job here.

This is where I shine
on a panel show of lots of men.

Oh, look at that!

In fact, although it's true that
organic food contains

fewer pesticides or fertilisers
than any other foods,

the answer is that none of them
contain none.

I'm afraid, if you're eating
organic food and you think,

"Yay, look at me," it has all
got a bit of pesticide in it.

I'll tell you what, I have made
quite an effective sort of dolphin

there, look at that.
Actually, yeah.

Let's put our bananas away.

That brings us to the end
of tonight's operation.

The anaesthetic is wearing off,
the gloves are in the bin,

and the panel and the bananas
have been royally stitched up,

which brings us to the scores.

And, with minus 35,
yes, indeed, it's Rhod.

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Equally creditable minus 27, Bill.

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Hurrah!

Minus 16, Alan.

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Thank you very much. Thank you.

And with an amazing whole 4 points,
Katherine!

Thank you.
APPLAUSE

It only remains for me to thank
Katherine, Rhod, Bill, and Alan.

And I leave you with this -

when the West German Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer

succumbed to a heavy cold
at the age of 90,

he did nothing but complain
to his doctor.

"I'm not a magician,"
said the doctor.

"I can't make you young again."

"I haven't asked you to,"
said the Chancellor.

"All I want is to
go on getting older."

Thank you, and good night.

APPLAUSE