CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening and welcome to QI,
where we are enjoying the Act of
Union.
Let's meet the players from QI United.
Man of the Match, Nabil Abdulrashid.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
My favourite Lioness, Victoria Coren
Mitchell.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Back of the net, it's Bill Bailey.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And everyone loves an underdog, it's
Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And their buzzers show just how united
they are.
Victoria goes...
- # All together now... #
- Nabil goes...
- # Together forever and never to
part. #
- Bill goes...
- # Come on, come on
# Let's stick together. #
- I love this playlist!
Alan goes...
- # Oh, I'm so lonely
# I'm Mr Lonely... #
- Aw! AUDIENCE:
- Aw!
- No, no, no, no!
None of that already!
- Right, let's kick off with our first
question.
- # Mr Lonely... #
- LAUGHTER
I feel that's going to run and run,
don't you?
Which is the most undesirable of all
the Uniteds?
- Manchester.
- No! Surely...?
- That... That is the easiest point
I've ever scored.
- Yeah.
You're not a fan of Manchester United?
- No, I'm not a fan of Manchester
United.
Awful organisation!
- Oh, OK.
- Evil! Actually evil!
The work of the devil!
- Actually, that's a good point. You
say the devil.
How about hell? Hell United?
Yes.
- Oh, no.
- The underworld?
- No, I am looking...
- I reckon they'd be good at football,
though,
in the underworld.
- Do you? Why?
- Hot places tend to produce really
good teams.
- Oh!
- Weirdly, Hell United is my nickname
for the school WhatsApp group.
- So there is an actual football team.
Nabil, I think you might know this.
- No, it can't be.
OK, I'm going to have to preface this
with...
I'm... I was born in London, but my
parents
had me move back to Nigeria to make
sure I learned
to speak English properly and...
- LAUGHTER
- And for that, I thank them.
- Yes.
- And most Nigerian boys heard at
home,
whenever we did something stupid -
which for me was very regular -
we used to get called Dundee United.
- LAUGHTER
- No...
- That is correct.
That is entirely correct, yeah.
It's Nigerian slang for idiot.
Dun...
- Yeah.
- Dundee United.
- Dundee United?
- Yes.
- Yeah!
- So...
- I don't know...
- Yeah, it's been around for about 30
years.
Sometimes just a Dundee.
Just a Dundee is the slang for an
idiot.
And a group of idiots would then be a
Dundee United.
And you can also just call somebody a
complete Dundee United.
Is that right?
- Yes, I singularly was a complete
Dundee United.
- Do you know why this was a thing?
- I never gave it much thought.
Hence being a Dundee United.
You don't think much.
I mean, look, a wild guess would be
that, if the team exist,
they really suck?
I mean...
- Yeah.
Well, er...
I mean, there is a Dundee United.
- There is.
- No!
- Yes. No, there absolutely is.
- Dundee?
- Yes.
- There's a Dundee and a Dundee
United.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- VICTORIA:
- I mean, wait until you hear about
the cake.
- Yes.
- LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
So they did a summer tour of West
Africa in 1972
and they played local teams, and it
was a complete disaster.
They went down to a humiliating 4-1
defeat
to a team called Stationery Stores
Football Club.
LAUGHTER
When they left the country, one
headline just read,
"Don't come back."
The manager, Jim McLean, he was new in
the job,
and he blamed Dundee's performance on
injuries
and poor quality playing grounds and
the heat and so on.
He did go on to become Dundee
United's...
- He was a great manager!
- Yes.
Longest serving and most successful
manager.
- Yeah.
- But he was responsible for the fact
that Nigerians
call idiots Dundee.
- What a legacy, eh?
- Apparently, lots of Nigerians don't
know why people
say Dundee or Dundee United.
And when they were told,
"Oh, do you know there's a team called
Dundee United?"
they said, "Why would they call them
that? Because it just..."
LAUGHTER
"It just means idiots."
While we're sticking to football,
has anyone here ever had a Leeds
season?
- As in Leeds United?
- Leeds United?
- As in Leeds United.
- You mean, a terrible time?
- No, it's another thing where another
country has a phrase
that they use to mean something that
we don't really understand.
So, in South Korea, "lijeu sidae"
means Leeds season,
and it's a slang expression.
And it's the bygone years when you
were more impressive
and attractive than you are now.
LAUGHTER
- What happens after that?
Do you go into relegation? Like,
how...?
- Er, yeah.
- You have a West Ham season.
- Yes.
- So there was a player...
Alan, you know a lot about football.
There was a player in the early 2000s
called Alan Smith.
- Yes, I do remember him.
- He played originally for Leeds
United,
and he was seen as a sort of rising
star.
And then, when Leeds was relegated in
he left them for Manchester United
and he never reached the same career
heights.
And the consensus was that he had
peaked at Leeds.
And in South Korea, the phrase caught
on.
And so your Leeds season is the high
point in your life,
after which everything is downhill.
- He once blocked a shot playing for
Manchester United, and...
I don't know who hit the shot,
they hit it so hard that his leg broke
and the bottom end of his leg was
hanging in the sock.
And it's one of those moments where
they just cut away...
- Yeah.
- ..to a pigeon by the corner flag.
- Yeah.
- "We're not going to show you that,
actually. That is alarming."
- Oh, that's what you meant!
I thought you meant they cut away.
- Dundee United!
Sorry. I'm sorry.
- Cut through the sock.
He did recover.
He was a good player. He was feisty.
- Do you know what happened to him?
- Er, no, he's retired now. I don't
know.
- He teaches children football in
Florida,
which I think sounds...
That sounds rather nice, don't you
think?
- Yeah.
Most Alans are nice in my experience.
- Don't be a Dundee United.
Enjoy your Leeds days while you can.
Now, why do we often root for the
underdog?
Why do we do that?
- It's a British thing, isn't it, I
think?
We associate that with disappointment,
don't we?
I mean, that's my motto.
- What?
- "I'm British. I crave
disappointment."
- Actually, it's a human thing,
darling.
It isn't a British thing.
And actually, our brains and our
hormones play tricks on us
in supporting the underdog
and to keep coming back in the face of
repeated failures.
If you support a sports team...
So you support Arsenal, don't you?
- I do.
- I nearly said Manchester United just
to annoy you.
ALAN GASPS
You become hormonally bonded with
them.
In fact...
- Very much so.
- Well...
- Think of the laundry.
- Yeah.
- As you watch a match, you go through
very similar hormonal changes.
- Mainly rage.
- Yeah.
- You get spikes of testosterone, you
get adrenaline,
you get dopamine, the pleasure
hormone,
when you're playing, and so do the
fans.
And after the game, so the fans of the
winning team
will continue to experience a
testosterone spike
of about 20%, and fans of the losing
side will have
the same kind of drop.
- It's also slightly human nature,
isn't it, to dislike victims?
People run out of empathy quite
quickly.
Maybe they like the underdog in a
match
cos they know it's going to be over
soon.
But if you always had to root for the
underdog,
you'd end up wanting to k*ll them.
- Yes, but there are people who
support a team
year after year after year,
even though they always lose, aren't
there?
- Yeah, but they're from Tottenham.
- Yes.
- LAUGHTER
And all letters should go directly to
Alan Davies.
But that drop in hormones that you
experience
if your team loses, it doesn't stop
people from being loyal fans.
And there's a series of terms in
sports psychology.
Let's have a look at them, see if you
can work out
what they mean.
- Oh, I've done all of those before
half-time.
- Yeah.
- Shall we start at the top? Shall we
start with the birging?
It's an acronym.
- It's an acronym?
- Yeah.
- Being irrationally responsible
for...
- Golf.
- ..golf?
- Yeah.
- It's a good thing. This is the one
they'd want.
- Oh, blimey, I'm really good.
Er...
- It stands for basking in reflected
glory.
- Oh, basking in reflected glory, yes.
- So you feel a high if your team wins
that is, neurologically speaking, as
strong as the team feels themselves.
But then, if your team loses, your
brain will engage
in patterns of behaviour that weirdly
are also strangely enjoyable.
Let's do corfing next.
- Corf?
- Corf is C-O-R-F-I-N-G.
And that stands for cutting off
reflected failure.
So basically you distance yourself
just from that one game.
Just for that one game, you go, "They
blew it that time,
"but it was the goalie's fault."
- That's a lot like my parenting
style.
- Yeah.
- The other parent's fault, that one.
Yeah.
How many kids have you got, Nabil?
- That I know of? Two.
- Wow.
- My wife, my mum and my imam are
watching this.
Oh, God!
- LAUGHTER
It'll be fine, darling. It'll be fine.
Birfing. B-I-R-F-I-N-G.
Basking in reflected failure.
So this is the big underdog headspace.
This is where you take pride in
losing.
You're standing by your team.
And then you have the final one,
coffing,
C-O-F-F-I-N-G,
which is cutting off future failure.
This is when you try not to get too
excited.
- When I was at primary school...
- Yeah.
- ..I was in Scott House.
And I, years later, thought,
"Hang on, Captain Scott..."
I mean, all due respect, he failed in
his endeavour,
came last and froze to death before he
could get home.
- Yeah.
- And this was the example.
This was the heroic name on the house,
the example to follow.
- Mm.
Well, I was in Livingstone House,
and I looked up when I was at school
how Livingstone died.
And it was burst haemorrhoids.
And I just thought...
- Blimey, that must've been...
- Yes.
- ..a big haemorrhoid!
- Going out with a bang.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
GROANING
NABIL LAUGHS
- Yeah, he did.
- There must've... There must've been
some follow-up infection?
I mean, I can't imagine the expl*si*n
itself
would take your life.
- It was on the banks of the Zambezi.
And years later, years later...
- I've never heard it called that
before.
- "You call it the lavatory."
- "I call it lavatory."
- "I'm just going to the banks of the
Zambezi."
- "The banks of the Zambezi.
"I'm just going to expel a couple of
hippos."
"Oh, no, they've gone internal!
They've come out my eyes!"
- "What a Dundee United!"
- "What a Dundee United!"
"I tell you what, I corfed all the way
home."
- Years later, I made a documentary
for the BBC
and I canoed the whole of the Zambezi
following in Livingstone's path.
- Followed Livingstone's haemorrhoids?
- Yes!
All the way down, I checked the banks
to see if there was a specific spot
that was wetter than anywhere else.
GROANING
- Livingstone's crater. Livingstone's
crater.
- Yeah.
Right, moving on.
From teamwork to teamster work -
are trade unions really just a bloody
circus?
- Oh!
- Yes.
- Yes.
- No.
- Er, wait...
- Hold on.
- Is it going to be that the first
union was...?
- Clowns?
- Circus?
- ..circus folk?
- I want it to be.
- "What do we want?"
- BILL HONKS
"We all want to get out of the same
car!"
- "When do we want it?"
- BILL TOOTS
So there is a weird connection between
trade unions
and circuses,
and it's the way in which they
advertise themselves.
- Oh.
- The official banners belonging to
British trade unions
were nearly all made by the same
company.
But the guy who made them - a guy
called George Tuttle -
he originally made artwork for
circuses,
and he used the same style and
fairground attractions
in order to make the eye-catching
images for the banners.
Remember, the trade unions used to
carry a big banners
when they were marching?
- Yes.
- It is interesting how it is very
similar.
That's partly because it was the same
guy.
So, 1837, it's the Industrial
Revolution
and the workers are starting to
unionise.
And he basically saw a gap in the
market
and he started to make banners the
same way he had
made them for fairgrounds and so on.
In the 19th century, 75% of all the
banners for trade unions
came from Tuttle's workshop,
and he would not allow his company to
join a union.
He wouldn't.
LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH
They weren't allowed to unionise until
So, you have to understand, this
started in 1837.
And the company carried on until 1967.
Anybody know when the first recorded
strike of workers is in history?
- Ancient Greece?
- Your ancient is correct.
- Oh.
- Rome?
- Egypt!
- Egypt!
A point for Victoria.
- The pyramids.
The building of the pyramids. How
about that?
- It was workers building tombs in the
Valley of the Kings,
and they staged a sit-in at the temple
because they were being paid late.
And the local government officials
sent them pastries
to try and calm them down.
And they refused to be fobbed off.
And the strikes went on for three
years,
and there were lots more strikes right
across Egypt.
Workers of the world unite!
Fine, but what about upper class
unity?
- Is it a question about Unity
Mitford?
- It is. You get a point.
- Is it?!
- It is. Absolutely correct, yes.
- Oh, great.
- Oh, wow!
- Bravo!
- So, British aristocrat.
What else do you know about Unity?
- I'm quite fascinated by the
Mitfords.
I've read many of their
autobiographies.
The Duchess of Devonshire,
who I think was much younger than the
rest of them...
- She was.
- And they're a weird mix because
there's sort of the awful one
and the mad one and the lefty one,
and then the one that's much younger.
But Debo Devonshire was obviously such
an innocent person.
And the book is full of interesting
things like,
"Yeah, we popped over and we had tea
with Hitler.
"And I tell you what, he served it
himself. So polite."
- Weirdly, I once attended a literary
festival
and there were three of us who were on
a panel,
and it was Debo Devonshire
and then the actor who starred in
Confessions Of A Window Cleaner.
LAUGHTER
It was the three of us, and we had
lunch before the panel.
- Robin Askwith?
- Robin Askwith!
It was the strangest lunch I've ever
had.
Debo Devonshire, Robin Askwith and me.
- Not the strangest lunch Debo
Devonshire ever had.
- They're extraordinary, the Mitford
sisters.
So, 1914, Unity Mitford was born in
London,
but she was conceived in the Canadian
town of Swastika.
- No?!
- Yes!
Named in 1911 after the Sanskrit
symbol.
I also like the fact that her middle
name was Valkyrie.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
- Valkyrie.
- It's written in the stars.
- I know. Devoted fascist.
And as you quite rightly say about her
sister, Jessica,
Jessica was a communist.
She was known as the red sheep of the
family.
And so Jessica's the one that is
seated,
and that's Unity at the back there.
And they didn't agree politically,
even as children.
They had to do a chalk line down the
middle of the bedroom.
And on Jessica's side, there was a
hammer and sickles
and pictures of famous communists,
and on Unity's side, there were
swastikas
and pictures of Hitler.
I mean, it's the bizarrest thing.
- Could've been worse. Could've been
Manchester United.
- LAUGHTER
But as a teenager, Unity would
gate-crash communist meetings,
heckle the speakers and do n*zi
salutes.
Even Oswald Mosley, who was the
founder
of the British Union of Fascists,
thought she was a bit much.
- Yes, he married the other sister,
didn't he?
Oswald Mosley married Diana.
- Yeah.
- And Unity shot herself for love of
Hitler.
- She shot herself just as the Second
World w*r broke out.
- Yes.
- Shot herself in the head and managed
to live for another nine years.
- Yes, slightly less nuts than before.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- I did a school play and it was an
allegory of Hitler.
It was the Brecht play,
The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui,
which is a kind of...
There he is. And...
- LAUGHTER
- ..I was Arturo Ui, which was the
Hitler character.
So I thought I'd get into character,
and I cut my hair
and I dyed it black,
and I came home from the hairdressers,
my mum looked at me and she went,
"Oh, my God, what have you done?"
I went, "Well, Mum, I got..."
And she went, "You look lovely."
And I went...
- LAUGHTER
- Only a mother could love!
- Only...
And I went, "Mum, I'm supposed to be
Hitler."
And she goes, "I don't care. You look
very smart."
- The other... Have we mentioned Nancy
Mitford?
She popularised the terms U and non-U.
Anybody remember what U and non-U
mean?
- Is it us and not us?
- Sort of. It's upper class for the U,
and non-U is everybody else.
And you could tell, apparently, if
people were middle class
or upper class by the way they spoke.
So middle class people say ee-ther
instead of eye-ther.
- What's the posh way? Ee-ther?
- Non-U speakers say ee-ther.
Tortoise instead of tortus.
Treefull is upper class for trifle.
- "You say iPod, I say string
quartet."
- And riding is what the upper classes
would say,
and the non-upper classes would say
horse riding.
- Oh, horse? Of course. What else are
you going to ride?
Badger?
- Yeah.
- "Sorry, I can only afford a badger.
"It's a working class game, isn't it?"
- Also, my experience of going to any
of these people
who've got inherited money is,
wherever they live,
it's always a sh*thole.
I mean, literally, it's just falling
down.
There's mould and nastiness absolutely
everywhere.
I mean...
- Very expensive dust.
- Dust. Exactly that, darling.
Extremely expensive.
- Imported, darling.
- Imported, darling. Yes.
- Mm.
- "Oh, no, we get our dust from the
Far East."
Right, now, Alan?
- Yes.
- Oh.
- I'm going to give you this.
- OK.
- OK?
How might it destroy you emotionally?
ALAN LAUGHS
- Destroy me emotionally?
- Yeah.
- Is it something... Oh, hello.
Oh, wow.
- It's got an on switch.
- Oh, right. You've found that.
Is it the fact that you've carved it
into the face of some figure from your
past?
- No.
It's an old Ukrainian tradition,
to give a man a pumpkin in order to
destroy him emotionally.
So it's a way of dissing him.
We're not sure why, OK?
It's possible that pumpkin was thought
to be good for virility.
And if you gave it to a man,
it suggests that he needs some help.
VICTORIA LAUGHS
- That's a complicated way of
insulting someone!
- I know! But up until the 20th
century,
it was a rural tradition.
If a man asked you to marry him and
you didn't fancy it,
you just gave him a pumpkin.
There was no big chat.
"It's not me, it's you,
"and I'm not in the right place at the
moment."
There was none of that.
Just give him a pumpkin.
- What if he ate the pumpkin and came
back,
like, "How you like me now?"
- LAUGHTER
Quite often, men would propose at
night
because they didn't want to be seen in
the village...
- Carrying a pumpkin home?
- ..carrying a pumpkin home.
- Why did they have to take the
pumpkin?
Just cos they've been given it? They
don't have to carry it home!
- What, just chuck it in the hedge?
- Leave it on a neighbour's doorstep.
- Yeah.
Just give it to the first bloke you
met in the street.
"Take that." "What?!"
- Also, does that mean the women just
grew a bunch of pumpkins
in the back garden just in case?
- I mean, we women can't be too
careful.
I think that's...
They don't do the pumpkin thing any
more.
But they do use the phrase to give a
pumpkin.
"Daty harbuza." And it refers to
rejection.
In a business deal, for example, you
can say,
"Oh, gave me a pumpkin on that one."
It just means rejection.
- I don't know why, but it feels
vaguely relevant
to tell you a story I just read in
Miriam Margolyes' autobiography,
which is brilliant.
She was on University Challenge as a
young woman,
on an all-women team,
and they were travelling on the train.
And a chap in the next seat fished out
his erect p*nis.
For younger people, it's the sort of
thing that used to happen
on public transport.
- Used to happen all the time.
- Which obviously was a quite
harrowing thing
to happen to four young women,
except one of them was Miriam
Margolyes.
- LAUGHTER
- She writes,
"My masterstroke was to offer him a
peppermint,
"whereupon he rapidly detumesced."
Anyway, the peppermint perhaps stood
for she's unimpressed
by his virility.
- Yes.
- He shrivelled away to nothing.
- Yeah.
Easier to carry, a peppermint - than a
pumpkin.
- Yeah.
- But it's still used.
In 2013, a group of about 50 Ukrainian
women
deposited a pumpkin at the Russian
embassy in Kyiv
as a way to say to Putin,
"Could you please go away?"
Clearly, he didn't.
- That went well.
- Yes.
- And weirdly, it's also in the
Spanish language.
"De calabazas" - to give pumpkins -
means to tell somebody
to get lost.
I don't know quite why it would be in
Spain
and it would be in Ukraine as well.
- Probably a Spanish guy went over to
Ukraine
and got given a pumpkin.
And he brought it back and was like,
"She gave me this!"
- Yes.
- There are all sorts of traditions
which I quite like -
wedding traditions, certainly - from
Ukraine.
The groom used to go and collect the
bride from the house,
and then he had to pay a ransom
or the bridesmaids wouldn't release
her.
And if he didn't give enough money,
they would give him a different woman
than the one he'd come for.
Some wedding traditions I don't like
so much.
South Korean weddings - some, not all
-
the groom's bound at the ankles, laid
on his back
and slapped on the feet with a dried
fish.
Is everybody at the table married?
Everybody had a good wedding?
Was it good? Did it go well?
- Yes.
- No dried fish and no binding.
- No, there was none of that.
We got married on a little island in
the middle of nowhere,
and we had a three-chicken wedding.
And the locals in Indonesia, they
said,
"We've never had a three-chicken
wedding.
"We normally just have one."
They k*lled three chickens for this
wedding.
It was great.
- There's a story about a wedding in
in the Maldives, right?
It was a Swiss couple.
And they said they would very much
like to get married
in the local language. And it was all
beautiful and wonderful.
And they uploaded the wedding onto
YouTube,
and apparently the Foreign Minister
had to issue a public apology
because the celebrant took the
opportunity
to shower them in extreme sexual
slurs.
- Oh.
- LAUGHTER
Part of the ceremony, he said, "You
are swine.
"The children that you bear from this
marriage
"will all be b*stard swine."
"Your marriage is not a valid one.
"You are not the kind of people who
can have a valid marriage."
And all the time the couple are
smiling.
- Smiling.
- That sounds like my father-in-law!
- Oh, darling, at my wedding,
as I'm walking down the aisle to being
given away,
my mother stepped in front of me and
said,
"It's not too late to find a nice
man."
Anyway, nothing unites people like a
shared hobby.
So how could we while away an hour or
two with a grasshopper
and a paintbrush?
- Does this have something to do with
kung fu?
- Er, no.
- No.
- Why?
- Well, cos, like, the old kung fu
movies.
- Oh, when there's somebody called
Grasshopper?
- Yeah, they always had the dude with,
like...
The weird guy with the long, white...
No offence, brother.
With the long, white...
- LAUGHTER
- With the long what?
Sorry, with the what?
- There was always, like, a weird guy
with long, white hair,
the sadistic teacher,
and he would call, "Grasshopper!"
- Yeah, I suddenly see you in a very
different way.
- Yeah!
- Didn't he used to have ping-pong
ba*ls in his eyes?
- We did a sketch of that with 50ps
once.
We put 50ps in our eyes and did
exactly that.
Grasshopper.
- Mm.
- I'm guessing that sketch is now
unavailable...
- It is!
It's no longer being...
- Aired.
- ..aired, yeah.
Because the 50p's no longer legal
tender.
So...
- Grasshopper and a paintbrush.
- Is it, like, you get two
hedgehogs...?
- Yeah.
- ..and you paint them green,
and the grasshopper thinks it's a
mobile lawn?
And...
- LAUGHTER
- A very, very good idea.
- I'm just thinking out of the box
here.
- Probably not that.
- You paint the grasshopper?
- No, it's using the brush to just
tickle,
tickle the grasshopper.
What might happen to the grasshopper?
- It vomits its own lungs out.
- LAUGHTER
What's...?
- It gets haemorrhoids and...
- Do they race them?
- No, you make locusts.
So locusts are not born - they are
made.
They are migratory grasshoppers that
enter a swarm mode.
If enough of them gather together and
rub against each other, OK,
they change colour, they grow stronger
and eventually they become what's
called gregarious locusts.
And you can do this yourself.
You can turn a grasshopper into a
locust
just by tickling them.
- Why would you want to do that?
- So you do it in a lab. Would take
you a few hours.
So, in 2009, scientists at Oxford
University,
they were tickling grasshoppers with
paint brushes.
- They got a grant, you know?
- Yes.
- So many scientists are wrong 'uns,
you know?
Like, how...?
What was my man doing when he
discovered...?
Like, didn't he...?
- How many things had he previously
tickled with his brush?
- Yeah.
- I guess if you think how dangerous
locusts are
and the trouble, the devastation that
they cause...
- Yeah, plague.
A biblical plague.
- Yes, but we need to know, how does
it come about?
What is it that happens in order to
create locusts?
- How would you find that out by
tickling it with a paintbrush?
It wasn't that.
- It was an art school field trip that
went terribly wrong.
- LAUGHTER
They brushed them for five seconds
every minute for about four hours.
And what it does is it triples the
amount of serotonin
in the grasshopper.
- The pleasure chemical.
- Yeah. So, if you know that it's the
serotonin,
maybe you could do something to not
allow the serotonin to rise.
- It's weird cos my childhood keeps
appearing on the screen.
- Yes.
- Because, like, during the rainy
season...
We only have two seasons.
Just rain and no rain.
- Yes.
- During the rainy season, we would
actually catch locusts.
- Right.
- And salt them, fry them and eat
them.
After it rained, there'd be loads of
them.
So you just...
- I have eaten them in Lagos.
And it doesn't matter to me how well
you cook them,
they crawl down your throat.
- Oh, come on!
- Do you like them? I can't stand
them.
- I mean, they're not my preferred
choice of protein.
- No.
- A man of my dimensions needs
something
a bit more, you know?
- Yeah.
You want a swarm of locusts?
- Yeah, exactly.
If I was there, the Egyptians would've
been all right.
But it's funny because, you know,
they're a biblical omen of bad times.
But in Nigeria, we take omens like you
should -
with a pinch of salt.
- Yes.
- APPLAUSE
Right, why do long haul flights cause
marital discord
and often divorce?
NABIL LAUGHS
- When you get yourself a seat up the
front of the plane...
- Yeah.
We'll just share.
- "You're smaller. You don't need so
much room."
- "I'll go for the first part of the
flight...
"..and the rest of it."
Is it cabin pressure?
- It's to do with something you are
particularly interested in,
which is birds.
- Birds? Oh, it messes up your
internal migratory magnet
in your brain?
- I mean, do you know a lot about
birds?
- Yeah, well, I know that they migrate
and we don't quite know how they do
it.
- Flying.
- Yeah, well, they do that.
- So lots of bird species mate for
life,
but some of them get divorced.
- Oh! That sort of long haul flight.
- A bird divorce is when a bird
replaces its life partner,
even though they are both still alive.
And one of the biggest causes is mass
migration.
The further the birds travel,
the more likely they are to divorce.
- Oh! So they do it during the flight?
"I've had enough of you! I'm sick of
you!
"I'm with Brian now!"
- "I'm off to Greenland."
- They can't find each other.
So black-tailed godwits, right,
they've got a very low divorce rate
because they only migrate between
Iceland and Western Europe.
That's the bird on the left there.
About 1,000 kilometres.
Great blue herons - aren't they
beautiful? -
they migrate over 3,000 kilometres.
They've got a divorce rate of 100%.
Literally get off the plane and think,
"Where? I have no idea!"
- That's not a divorce if they just
can't find each other!
- I've had that happen to me at
Westfield Shopping Centre.
It's very hard to find your way around
in there, isn't it?
- It is.
- I get the feeling they don't want
you to leave.
- No.
I got trapped in the car park once.
That was a nightmare.
The end of the world.
When all the barriers stop working.
- Were you in a car or just standing
there like that?
- No, I was just standing there.
- The cars behind you going, "Beep,
beep!"
- Yeah.
- "The barrier's not lifting!"
"You're not in a car, Bill."
- Yeah.
- "I'm migrating!"
- Yeah, I'm migrating.
- "Why's your hair like that, you
fascist?"
- Yeah.
- I'd quite like to migrate.
- You'd quite like to migrate? Where
would you go?
- Somewhere warmer.
- Yeah.
- Oh, I'd love that.
- Yeah.
- Eh, it's not what it's cracked up to
be, mate.
- Bill, have you heard of the Laysan
albatross?
- Er...no.
- OK, so, famous for long-lasting
relationships.
The albatrosses very committed to
their partners.
Since 1919, they've noticed that this
particular albatross
that lives in Hawaii,
the nests often contain two eggs -
even though a female albatross can
only lay one.
And this went on and everybody
thought,
"Why has this nest got two eggs in it?
So weird."
- Ocado.
- Yeah.
- Anyway, this woman, Brenda Zaun,
she's a scientist
and she DNA tested it.
And it turned out that, in many
instances,
it was two females - one from each
mother.
So there were two eggs.
And it turned out that there's a
particular Hawaiian island,
Kauai, where these birds were.
And female albatrosses are WAY more
adventurous than the males.
And they're the only ones who had
flown
to this particular island.
And that meant there was a huge
shortage of males.
And so about 30% found female
partners.
There's just rampant lesbianism
amongst albatrosses.
LAUGHTER
- Did the eggs hatch?
- Usually just one hatched.
- But how?
- In the normal...
Like, "Let me out..."
- Don't you...?
OK, look...
- LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Now, May 1st is International Workers'
Day,
but which 135 foot object did the
Merry Monarch Charles II erect
in time for May 1st, 1661?
- Er...
- The... The...
- May... Maypole.
- The maypole.
- The maypole.
- Maypole!
There we go.
About the same height as Nelson's
Column
in the centre of London.
- No!
- Mm. 169 foot is Nelson's Column.
- Good lord.
- It was on the Strand.
Huge thing.
The previous one had been torn down by
the Puritans.
They thought it was wickedness.
And...
- I slightly think it's wickedness.
- Do you? Why?
- It's a bit Wicker Man, isn't it?
- Yes.
- Weird smiling people dancing about
with the ribbons.
You know human sacrifice is coming.
- I rather like the idea of the
maypole.
First day of summer, Celtic festival
Beltane.
I think it's rather jolly. Bonfires
and so on. No?
- I mean, I'm an urban person - let's
put it that way.
It's a sort of weird pagan...
It looks friendly.
"Come, look at the pretty fluttering
colours.
"Come closer, come closer.
"Come and examine the bonfire...
"..while sitting on a chair atop it!"
- Are you OK?
- LAUGHTER
- It's just the kind of thing I fear.
- I mean, you know my wife's a
therapist?
You must come over.
- Do you not have to climb the pole to
get a ham at one point?
- Is that not a greasy pole
competition,
which is slightly separate from the
May Day pole?
- Oh.
- How do you get the ham up there?
- Well...
Er...
- It's the person they nailed up there
the previous May Day, to
become a ham in the intervening time.
- "Ham."
- Oh, yes.
Get the "ham."
Yeah.
- Anybody know when the modern use of
May 1st
as a sort of workers' rights day,
does anybody know which country it
comes from?
- America?
- It is the United States.
Absolutely right, yes.
- # America! #
- LAUGHTER
Absolutely right.
There was a huge amount of protests in
the 1880s.
The workers wanted to bring in, can
you imagine this,
an eight hour day!
In 1886, in Chicago, there was about
and somebody threw a b*mb and a
policeman was k*lled,
and four of the workers were hanged
for it.
And since then, May 1st has always
been
a day for workers' rights.
It is a wonderful thing.
- There's always a bit of a parade.
- Yes.
- And a hanging.
- Well...
- Don't mention the people on the
bonfire.
She gets very upset.
- The burning.
Which villages have you been going to
that you've felt sort of slightly kind
of nervous about?
All of them?
- Belsize Park.
- I...
- LAUGHTER
- Being an urbanite, do you just go
out...?
- The whole of Suffolk is out.
- I'm always fine if I think I could
get to the car
faster than a cow could get there.
- Do you never go to the countryside,
darling, without trepidation?
Is that...?
- I take my own barbed wire.
The weird thing is...
- LAUGHTER
- ..my husband is a really keen
walker,
so we tried to go for a walk quite
recently.
I'd read about this walk.
- "I'd read about a walk, but I didn't
like the sound of it.
"I saw the distance from the car park
to where the cows were
"and I thought there's no way..."
- No, I read about it in the paper and
we went,
but I assumed it would be along the
road.
And it wasn't. There was a bit where
you had to go across the fields.
- No!
- Yes.
- Oh.
- Are you scared of all fields?
- Yes.
- That means that you're like
Pythagoras.
- Yeah.
- Is that right?
- Well, I mean...
- Go, go. I...
- Well, Pythagoras, he refused to eat
beans
because he believed that beans
contained
the souls of the dead.
- That is exactly right.
- Which would explain the evil spirits
that escape your bum
after you eat them.
- LAUGHTER
- Yeah.
- He was being chased by his enemies,
and he almost got away until he got to
a field full of beans.
- And he wouldn't go across.
- Yeah.
So, you know?
- Yeah.
- He got put in a pack.
- Yeah.
- But...
But, yeah, because he was scared of
fields, but with beans.
So his fear was still more rational
than yours.
- LAUGHTER
- I actually grew up on a farm,
and at one point our chickens stopped
laying eggs.
So, like, my uncle came to my mum was
like, "Auntie..."
Now, don't ask me why my uncle called
my mum Auntie.
It's just a weird Nigerian thing.
Everyone older than you is Uncle or
Auntie.
So my uncle suggested to my mum that
the best way
to get the chickens to lay eggs would
be to feed them ganja.
- LAUGHTER
- True story.
- Were these chickens being prepared
for Bill Bailey's wedding, by any
chance?
- Now that you mention it!
- APPLAUSE
Grasshopper over here.
- The thing is, my mum, who then had a
teenage boy
at that stage where he hated the
world,
didn't think what could possibly go
wrong
buying a massive sack of powerful
Nigerian ganja.
And just leaving it in the kitchen,
right?
So the plus is I got to see what
chickens and rabbits
look like high, and it was hilarious.
- ALAN: Teenage boys laid eggs?
- Yeah.
- I mean, I got fried, I'll tell you
that much.
- LAUGHTER
- Ooh, boy!
- Is the Auntie thing a respect for
older women?
Is that what it is?
- Yes, Auntie.
- AUDIENCE:
- Oh!
- No. I want to be your auntie.
I think it's the most wonderful thing
in the world. Thank you.
- I've got a Viking auntie, yeah.
- There we go.
APPLAUSE
Are you sure you're going to win?
LAUGHTER
Now it's time to unite your wits for a
general ignorance
penalty sh**t out. Fingers on buzzers,
please.
- Right.
- When you are hit by lightning, where
does the lightning
enter your body?
# Together... #
- Your head.
- No. Not your head.
- Well, I was watching this
documentary about this guy who got
struck by lightning more times than
anyone else.
And he said this one time he saw the
cloud coming and he got
into his car and drove off.
But the lightning got him through the
window because he forgot...
- LAUGHTER
Roy C Sullivan is the person you're
talking about.
- Oh, I just called him Sparky.
- LAUGHTER
- I knew someone who was walking in a
lightning storm
and then lightning hit the manhole
cover in the road
and the manhole cover flew up in the
air and landed on his head.
- Well, that is the most likely way in
which you're going
to be hit by lightning.
Most likely it's going to be... Hit a
nearby tree and then kind of
bounce off in some way.
But through your feet is the answer is
the... Is most of it.
- Ah.
- People who are struck by lightning,
very rarely hit
by a bolt from above.
Only about 3% to 5% of injuries are a
sort of direct hit.
The most common injury comes from
ground current.
So it's electricity striking the
ground and then it runs
along the earth's surface and hits
your feet.
- Up through your shoes.
- What's really sad is none of these
people
end up with powers, like...
Like surely you just wait and see if
you get lucky eventually, right?
- Yeah, turns up in Times Square
levitating, with electricity
sh**ting out of his fingers.
- Yeah.
- Unless, of course, that is your
power -
getting struck by lightning.
So you have to just, like, run and hug
bad guys.
And be like, "Any moment now, Zeus.
Any..."
- Mr Unlucky, that's him.
- So, really, if there's a flash, you
should jump in the air.
- Er, I... No.
So most of it is what's called a
flashover.
When it makes contact with you, it's
the rain on your skin,
or sweat, or any kind of moisture.
It turns into steam and it expands
massively and it can literally
blow your clothes off.
- Ooh!
- Hmm.
- So lightning strikes can reach 50...
- Good times.
- Lightning strikes...
- Good times.
- "All my clothes fell off!"
- "What's a girl to do?"
50,000 Fahrenheit, it can reach.
- Ooh!
- So that is five times hotter than
the sun's surface.
- Bloody hell.
- Yeah, that's...
- Eh, it's not that hot.
- Who is more likely to be struck by
lightning, a man or a woman?
- Erm...
- Probably a man.
- ..man.
- Yes, because they're idiots.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
It's men going, "No, the golf game's
going really well,
"I'll just play one more."
IMITATES LIGHTNING STRIKE
Sad. 80% of all people hit by
lightning are male,
partly because men tend to work
outdoors more than women.
I read a story that in Britain two
women were k*lled in 1999
by lightning conducted through the
underwire in their bras, but...
..the claim has not been upheld.
Erm...
ALAN:
- Kaboom!
- Now, when did fake leopard skin
first become fashionable?
- Bet Lynch, 1980s.
- Yeah.
- Ah.
- I always thought it was the p*mps of
ancient Egypt.
- Yeah.
- Pimp it out.
- Is exactly right.
- You're really favouring this nephew
of yours, aren't you?
- I know.
- Who knew that? Who knew?
- Ah, nepotism.
It's the family resemblance that's
so...
LAUGHTER
There is an ancient Egyptian painted
stone from around...
- Oh, sh*t! I was actually right?
- Yes, darling. You were.
From around 2,500 BC, it depicts a
princess named Nefertiabet.
And there she is, wearing what would
probably
be a fake leopard skin, most likely.
They loved to paint leopard spots onto
linen.
They used to weave rosettes into
woollen garments to make it look
like the spots on an animal.
Tutankhamun's tomb has a robe with
sequins sewn onto it in order
to resemble leopard spots.
It was just a fashion thing.
- I'm now rethinking Tutankhamun as
sort of a Liberace figure.
- But it was a thing. Very
fashionable, 1700s in Europe.
Lots of people wore leopard print.
It was fashionable for both men and
for women.
- So that was their Burberry,
basically.
- I guess.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- Oh, wow.
- We've got a portrait, actually, of
John Campbell,
who was Baron Cawdor.
And it's a... Look at him there.
Doesn't he look marvellous?
It's a leopard patterned waistcoat.
It's probably velvet. It certainly is
not made of leopard.
He's, can I just say, a very
interesting guy - art collector
and a tremendous benefactor of the
poor.
1797, he commanded the Pembrokeshire
Yeomanry and
repelled the very last foreign
invasion on British soil -
when the French tried to invade in
Fishguard in Wales,
it did not succeed because of this
man.
- The dog, I think, is just going,
"Lightning!"
- Yeah.
LAUGHTER
- "Yes. Anyway, I own all of this."
"Lightning!
"Get down!"
- HE BARKS
- "There's a cow over there. We should
probably get to the car."
- Yeah.
- APPLAUSE
WHISTLE BLOWS
Oh, there goes the whistle.
Let's have a look at the final scores.
And marching into first place, our
winner tonight with
a full six points is Victoria.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Negotiating his way into second with
-7, Nabil.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
A sl*ve to the wage and third place
with -18, it's Bill.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And in last place, striking out with
-23
it's Alan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So it's a big thank you to Nabil,
Victoria, Bill and Alan.
And I leave you with this utterance
from former Newcastle United
manager Ruud Gullit after a loss -
"We must have had 99% of the game.
"It was the other 3% that cost us the
match."
LAUGHTER
Thank you. Goodnight.
APPLAUSE
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21x03 - United
Watch/Buy Amazon
Format of the show focuses on the panelists answering questions that are extremely obscure, making it unlikely that the correct answer will be given.
Format of the show focuses on the panelists answering questions that are extremely obscure, making it unlikely that the correct answer will be given.