Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language

APPLAUSE

Good evening and welcome to QI, where tonight we are vindicating

or vilifying various visionaries.

Voila! Our vaticinators - the verily predictive Laura Smyth.

The veritably prognosticating Cally Beaton.

The verifiably promethean Nish Kumar.

And the very well-read in the tea leaf department - Alan Davies.

And their buzzers are visions of the future.

Laura goes...

I see a tall, dark stranger.

Cally goes...

I see a secret admirer.

Oh! Nish goes...

I see a bright light and beautiful music.

And Alan goes...

I see you, baby, shaking that ass.

LAUGHTER

Right. Jules Verne was a legendary French visionary,

predicting, amongst a lot of other things, he predicted the submarine

and television news.

Which of his predictions for Paris do you think were 100 years

ahead of his time?

Disneyland.

What are the famous books that he wrote?

Leagues Under The Sea. Loads Of Leagues Under The Sea. 20,000.

Yeah, 20,000. Shitloads Of Leagues Under The Sea.

It's actually on there. Vingt mille.

20,000. And Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Yeah.

But he also wrote a book called Paris In The Twentieth Century.

And it was written in 1863, but it was set in 1960,

and his predictions have been proved remarkably accurate.

He predicted burglar alarms, cars, petrol stations, the Paris Metro,

canned applause, which is quite a weird one to predict. Wow.

Fax machines, electronic music, the electric chair, skyscrapers,

feminism - which he did not approve of.

No.

It's quite unusual because I remember when the year 2000

happened and they looked back to 1900, and most people said,

"Great improvements in agriculture."

No-one spotted electronics. Mm.

And I think maybe... Well, people are doing genetic research.

So maybe there'll be huge advances in medical science.

That could be good. We could grow replacement organs.

Grow replacement organs, grow food, feed everyone.

Yeah. Feed everybody replacement organs.

I mean, there's a whole thing. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it could be good in the future.

He did predict some things that are extraordinary.

The internet, wind power, climate change.

And this is a slightly strange one.

The book also features a 152m lighthouse in Paris,

which he said would be the highest monument in the world,

and it was going to be situated on the Champ de Mars,

which is where the Eiffel Tower now stands. Wow.

So 21 years before it was built, and it was the world's tallest

building for 40 years.

What's curious about this book is that his publishers said,

"Yeah, no, nobody today would believe your prophecies."

And so he didn't publish it.

In fact, it wasn't published until 1994.

Really? Yeah. And was he on opium or something?

What was stimulating all these ideas?

I don't know, he does seem to have had... Just a visionary.

Yeah. So in From The Earth To The Moon,

which he wrote in 1865, he predicted the Apollo 11 moon landings,

I mean, so accurately.

Three men in a projectile, right?

In a... Very similar dimensions to Apollo 11, called the Columbiad.

So the name of the command module was the Columbia.

I ended up in the west of... In Iceland - the country,

not the shop. In Iceland, in the west,

the west of the country, there's a place called Hellnar.

I ended up in a blizzard.

And it's where the Journey To The Centre Of The Earth starts.

It's, like, meant to be one of the mystical energy centres

of the world. It's something like, you know, like Stonehenge

and Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina and things like that.

The extraordinary thing about his notions about space travel,

they launched from Florida, in his book, they came back to Earth

by parachuting into the sea.

He got the mode of propulsion wrong.

He thought they were going to be fired to the moon

by giant space guns.

Yeah.

It's been calculated that the barrels would need to be 60km

long and propel the men at a force of 100Gs,

which would, you know, kill them instantly.

Is there a percentage of what he got right?

Because this all sounds impressive, but if only 20% was right -

meh. Yeah. If it was a really fat book.

No, it is just a novel.

And the other curious thing is that his son Michel, who was also

a writer, he also had a go at a prediction and he wrote a short

story called An Express Of The Future.

And he talked about a transatlantic tube where trains were going

to be propelled by air, and something very similar

is now being considered.

Scientists at MIT predict that trains could successfully run

underneath the Atlantic at speeds of 1,200mph. Whoa! I know!

But wouldn't you rather go to America by train?

Well, if it's 1,200 miles an hour, yeah!

Whoosh! Yeah.

How many films could you watch in that time?

You don't want Britain running the service, though, do you?

No, I don't want to take a rail replacement bus to New York.

"I'm afraid there's a mollusc on the line."

This I did not know -

Jules Verne is the second most translated author in the world.

Really? Does anybody know who's first?

JK Rowling, surely. No.

Agatha Christie is number one. Wow!

Shakespeare comes third.

But Jules Verne was often considered a children's author.

Does anybody know why?

Did he do Around The World In whatever it was?

Around The World In Eighty Days? He did do. Yes.

Terrible translations is the thing.

So early versions, they deleted large swathes of texts, so the book

just didn't seem to make any sense.

And there are some fabulous mistranslations.

So the Badlands of Nebraska were translated

as Disagreeable Territory of Nebraska.

They took out any social and political commentary.

I was in a play once when I was at university, and someone said

the wrong line. Might have been me, I can't remember.

Someone else said another line.

And then we just carried on the play and we'd missed 20 pages.

No-one noticed. No. No-one noticed in the audience.

Everyone just frankly delighted that it was shorter.

Well, years and years ago, I was in the open-air theatre doing

Shakespeare, and we were doing Comedy Of Errors, and we realised

there's a whole section of just jokes.

There's like three pages of jokes and we realised

it really wasn't funny any more.

So I said to the director, "I'll rewrite in Shakespeare style

"these three pages." Not one reviewer noticed.

That is confident. Yeah.

"Listen, this Shakespeare needs a punch up."

One of the other problems with translation,

they had one translator who was just terrible at science,

and this translator explained that a boat made of iron would float

because iron is lighter than water.

So you talked about going Around The World In Eighty Days?

Yes. OK. How many days did Phileas Fogg take to travel

around the world?

I can't remember, I've read the book.

81! Oh. Oh, it's not an open question.

We've had an offer, I'll take it.

You're going to go for it? Ass.

81.

No. Oh, you bastard!

LAUGHTER

I rely on this crowd.

You got absolutely punked by your own audience!

What do you reckon, Laura? 80.

BUZZER

That's harsh.

79. He did it in 79 days is exactly right. Yes.

So there's a whole section at the end of the book

where he thinks he has missed the deadline by five minutes, only

to realise he has misjudged the date due to the number of time zones

that he went round the Earth.

Phileas Fogg went around the world in just 79 days.

It could have been so different if the final leg

was with Southern Rail.

On the subject of vehicles, what could be more exciting

than a rail replacement bus?

I would like them to try and do a bus replacement train,

and just get it on the road, see how we fare.

So weirdly, and without meaning to, you have given me

the correct answer. No?!

In 2016, the road between Scotland's two highest villages,

we are talking about one Wanlockhead and Leadhills,

which is in South Lanarkshire,

it was closed for a week for resurfacing.

Now, this cut off the residents of Wanlockhead

from shops and doctors' surgeries,

and they had to do a 45-mile diversion.

So there was a small... A toy train.

Well... Yeah!

It's a volunteer-run railway line which goes between the two villages.

It's a tourist attraction.

And so the workers decided... You have literally come

up with the thing. I'm in shock.

They decided to come up with a bus replacement rail,

and it completely took over the normal bus services

trips for a week.

It had a top speed of 8mph.

On one trip, a journalist reported seeing the train overtaken

by a heron.

LAUGHTER

Can I just show you, right in front of the engine,

that's the first-class carriage.

Oh, that's nice.

That does look like the Royal accommodation. Yeah.

Cos it's got actual glass in the windows.

But that's definitely more of a train than I thought.

I thought it was going to be one of those lads,

with the two lads just...

SQUEAKING

This is even... I don't know if this is better or not.

For two weeks every year,

Switzerland has a rail replacement helicopter.

Of course it does.

Classic Switzerland.

There it is. That is the rail replacement helicopter.

There are two villages, Linthal and Braunwald,

and they have a funicular railway

and it's closed for two weeks every single year, for maintenance.

Braunwald is a car-free village, so there's no roads connecting

it to the rest of the world whatsoever.

And so while the railway is out of use, for a fortnight

each year they take a helicopter instead.

And the ride takes 90 seconds. It costs £6.50.

Really? Who wouldn't do it?

I'd never be off it. "Geneva, let's go."

Oh, we're there already.

I wouldn't want that outside seat.

That's where you put your bag.

That is where they've got the luggage, isn't it?

I mean, if you put your bag in that and you get there

and it's not there, it's your own fault. Yeah, I think so.

I suspect, because I have once been airlifted out of trouble

in a helicopter, and went in the thing, it might be for people

who've been injured. Did you get airlifted in a net?

It's a long story.

I took part in a rodeo and I have no skills, so don't do it.

They used a little egg cart. Yeah. Aw!

Basically, the horse went very fast, and I didn't.

This is a wonderful idea.

In the 1890s, there was an Austrian man called Friedrich Volderauer,

and he proposed what he called an aerostatic railway.

So it's a train that is helped uphill by a hot-air balloon.

So the idea is that the train, because it's very steep,

is helped up by the hot-air balloon.

The balloon gets to the top, and a vat containing 500l of water

is taken onboard to counteract the lifting power of the balloon,

and then gravity pulls the train back down the hill.

Do we not want to make this?

You could just go in the balloon, couldn't you?

LAUGHTER

The aerostatic railway - crap idea.

If your train is cancelled, there may be more unusual forms

of transport to choo-choo-choose from.

GROANING Aw!

You couldn't have been cuter if you were sat

on that train saying that.

From funicular flops to fantasy football.

Alan, what are your feelings on Galileo managing the Arsenal?

Well, he was a very clever man. Yes.

Did he have a collection of weapons?

Is that what you're on about?

Is it the Venetian Arsenal? Yes.

Which is what, my darling?

It's ships and a sort of armoury.

Yeah. I know this because I went to Venice for a long weekend.

I had to pay £9 or 9 euros for a Diet Coke

and then a gondolier peed in my Airbnb's portal.

But I did learn about the armour.

Yes, they built ships and stuff.

And it was, like, well ahead of the Industrial Revolution.

Well, so people think Henry Ford did the first

mass-production factory with his Model T,

but this is in fact 400 years before.

So Galileo, incredible guy, discovered the moons of Jupiter,

worked out the sun was the centre of the solar system,

pioneered the telescope.

But he also managed the Arsenale, which is, as you say, Venice's

shipyard, which dates from the 12th century.

This is what it looks like today.

So the word "arsenal" just basically means place of production.

It's from the Arabic.

And by the 1500s, it was the largest industrial complex in the world,

and it employed about half of Venice's male workforce.

So Galileo spent about 20 years there, and he credits his work

there with inspiring some of his greatest works.

So what you've got is the same as making a Model T or any car

on a production line, different parts of the arsenal built

different parts of the ship,

and they were then put together at the end of the line,

and the final assembly of a ship could take just one day.

And when you think of these ships, they're just extraordinary.

And the whole complex could build 50 ships a month from scratch. Wow.

I know - it is astonishing!

And they so cared about their staff that the wine given to the people

who worked there accounted for 2% of Venice's entire budget.

Aw! Yeah. In fact, in the 1600s, they created a fountain,

a state-sponsored fountain, which dispensed wine

at a rate of ten litres a minute.

Does anyone know what this picture is?

It's obviously in Venice. Do you know what's happening here?

Something grand is going on. New doge? Someone visiting?

Venice holds the world record for the longest marriage, OK?

And that is what's happening here.

And since around 1000AD, they have been doing a service

where they are married to the sea.

They toss a ring into the ocean and chant, "I wed thee, O sea,

"in token of true and lasting dominion."

It's beautiful, isn't it?

It gets so foggy and you go down early in the morning

and you can't see anything.

And then the buildings start to come out of the fog.

It's so creepy, it's amazing.

Oh! And the food, you get these little, like, bread bites

called cicchetti. It's delicious.

And it's also the reason why I don't know anything about Venice.

Because I've been on all these tours,

but I was just thinking about the bread.

Just walking through...

I've probably heard all of that information, but in my head

I was thinking, "I'm going to have the one with the fish on it."

Right, what use is half a vasectomy?

Is it, like, with a lazy eye?

You know, you put the patch on? Is it like that?

It makes the other one work a bit harder?

It's very good for lazy testicles. Yeah.

Does that just mean every other time?

Oh!

Every other time, you're like, "Woo, baby!"

And the other time, it's like, "Wah-wah."

Are these the noises you make?

LAUGHTER

That's actually uncanny.

So are you saying for the person, it's like, every other time,

or that there's a production line of vasectomies and the doctors

are doing every other one? I don't know what you're saying.

It's a blank and not blank. Yeah, it's blank and not blank.

It's like Russian roulette, but more controlled.

No. I thought I was on a roll with that bus thing.

I know. You may have peaked, darling.

Is it like a test of optimism?

Is it balls half full? Balls half empty? You decide.

Well, in a sense, it's supposed to make you feel

a bit more optimistic. So this is a thing that happened in the 1920s.

There was an Austrian physiologist called Eugen Steinach,

and he developed an operation called Steinaching.

OK? There he is. And it was a vasectomy on one testicle only.

And the theory was it resulted in a second puberty, so that you got

a new lust for life.

Did it work? No.

No, no.

But the thing about him, he wasn't a quack at all.

He was nominated six times for the Nobel Prize

in Physiology and Medicine.

The thing that I don't like about this story,

he arranged for three men to be vasectomised in this way

without their knowledge. GASPING

Ooh, good noise! How do you do that?

That was my next question.

Yeah. What did they think was happening? Mm.

"Just lie back and relax.

"And if you feel a stinging pain in your nuts,

"that means everything's cool."

These three men were told that they were going in for some

other routine operation, and then they discovered

they'd had one half of a vasectomy.

Anyway, Steinach reported that all three of them felt

rejuvenated, and the procedure was popular for a while.

He claimed that his patients changed from feeble, parched, dribbling

drones to men of vigorous bloom,

who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day,

and indulged in such youthful follies as buying

land in Florida.

LAUGHTER

I don't know if we can believe what he reported.

He said he had Steinached himself three times.

Anybody? What?

Three times! I had to look at some diagrams to see

how that would have worked.

Is it the thinking behind sort of, you know, pruning a rose bush

and then it flourishes? Deadheading.

Yeah. Well...

But lots of customers gave it a go and thought it was marvellous.

Sigmund Freud, he was Steinached at the age of... What?

Yes, at the age of 67, because he had oral cancer

which he thought it would treat. Unfortunately it did not.

That's optimistic. It's so Freudian, isn't it?

Like, "Oral cancer? Oh, yeah. I'll take my bollock off.

"That'll do."

That's WB Yeats on the right.

At the age of 69, he was Steinached as well.

He thought it would improve his poetry.

I mean, maybe it did.

He'd already won the Nobel Prize for literature by then, hadn't he?

"I can get better!"

It does make sense with some of his later poems.

"Ooh, me ball bag."

Probably his most famous line is, "Cast a cold eye on life,

"on death Horseman pass by."

And that was written four years after he was Steinached.

Oh. I mean, I don't know. If we're talking about vasectomies,

the medic that I feel we should talk about is a Texan urologist

called Dick Chopp.

Perfect. No! That's not real.

So he gives out T-shirts that say, "I was chopped"

to his patients after, and they get two things.

They get a T-shirt and a bag of frozen peas.

Those are the two things.

If you're thinking of going to see him, I'm afraid he has retired.

I don't think anyone was. No?

So here's a question. We've talked about trains already.

How could a vasectomy bring the London Underground

to a standstill?

Ooh. Well, I imagine if you performed one on the driver.

Is that what they mean by essential engineering work?

I think so.

I think it is that. Was it if there was a row

about a pregnancy test result between the driver and his partner?

Well, it is sort of to do with the row, and it is sort of to do

with the driver having a vasectomy.

So I love this story. This is absolutely true.

2003, a train was being driven by a trainee, OK?

And there was an instructor and a senior driver.

And the two older men were discussing the rather grisly details

of a vasectomy that one of them had undergone.

And the trainee said, "I can't concentrate.

"Could you change the subject?"

Anyway, they didn't, and the rather squeamish trainee

vomited, fainted, and fell out of the cab.

LAUGHTER

Onto the track, and had to be taken to hospital with chest and head

injuries, and two London Underground lines had to be closed as a result.

Fortunately, I can tell you the train was only going at 15mph

and the trainee made a full recovery.

He fell out of the cab altogether?

Yes, onto the track. Onto the track. How?

How did he do that?

He was a trainee. I don't know.

So why wouldn't you want to try the contents of this man's freezer?

Is he a serial killer? Yeah. He must be.

Is that because the contents is severed heads?

No. He's a very, very serious Swiss professor.

Is he? I think all middle-aged blokes keep the same things

in their freezer, don't they?

One spare testicle. Yeah.

I can actually... I could tell, looking at you,

what's in your freezers.

Go on, then. Oh, this is a marvellous game.

Yeah, great.

So, you, in your freezer,

I think there's a crust from a sandwich

you saw Ian Wright discard in a bin.

Is that right?

What do you reckon is in Nish's?

Is it an unexplained dead cat?

That's what I'm going for.

So this is a microbiologist.

He's called Professor Adrian Egli.

Oh, has he got all kinds of viruses in there?

OK, it is something that we all produce.

Poo. It is.

GROANING

Come on!

No, he gets a point. A pooey fridge. He gets a point. Absolutely.

APPLAUSE

Yeah. It was a race against time between you and me, Alan.

Who was going to come up with the shit answer?

He's got 3,000 poos at the moment in his freezer...

Good for him. ..in Switzerland. It's called the microbiota vault.

And he needs more.

Why might he decide to collect poos?

I don't know, but if he gives me a pot of coffee

and a Nando's black card, I'll fill that freezer in a week.

They don't call me Twice-a-Day Kumar

because I'm sexually prolific.

Why might you want to collect poo?

Oh, is this analysing the microbiome of the gut to then heal it?

Is that what that's about? That's so brilliant. Yes, yes.

CHEERING

Beautiful, beautiful thing.

He plans to collect all the human microbes that are on Earth, in case

they go extinct in the wild.

Now, you wouldn't think that it really mattered,

but what we're looking for is the good bacteria, right?

It's vital for human health

and he's looking for a permanent vault, because there is a mass

extinction going on in the human gut.

Poos from Ethiopia, for example, show signs of antibiotic resistance,

even in children who have never been exposed to antibiotics.

So we need this.

It's really critical.

And the project is based on the same idea of the Svalbard seed vault

on the island of Spitsbergen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

So every plant in the world... Yes.

..there's a seed there? Yeah.

So he's doing for stools what this place is doing for seeds,

effectively. So Svalbard, Europe's northernmost territory,

and it's deep in a mountain, over 1.2 million varieties of seed.

And it's to protect the global food supply.

In fact, I think, did we give you a seed that we could show,

darling? Because some seeds are just astonishing.

Have a look at this. Whoa, hang on, now.

That's the severed head. That's a different question.

This is a replica, but the coco de mer is the world's biggest seed,

and it weighs as much as four newborn babies.

Oh! I know! The butt cheek seed.

Yeah. That is...

I mean...

I think I learned something about this. Go for it.

When they're covered in all their husks and things like that,

they sink to the bottom of the sea.

And when that's worn away in the water, they bob up to the top

of the sea, so people that discovered them thought they grew

from the bottom of the sea, even though they fell off trees into it.

You get five points for that brilliant explanation. Wow! Yes!

This replica was lent to us by the Millennium Seed Bank

in Surrey, which is sort of the UK version of Svalbard.

Can I tell you it is about 20 billion times larger

than the smallest seeds in the world, which are orchid seeds.

It's a phenomenal thing, isn't it? Wow.

It's just breathtaking. Beautiful.

Breasttaking.

It's breasttaking.

Oh, my God, it's so heavy. Fuck me!

I've known you a long time, and I did not know

you were a seed wizard.

I don't always let people see my seedy side.

Hey!

Now, from visionaries to vision, I'm going to play you a video

and I would like you to tell me what you can see.

The album cover for The Dark Side Of The Moon.

It's a representation of something.

Would it help if we had some cocaine?

Yes. Yes is weirdly again the right...

This never happens!

I've known you a lot of years, Nish. I've never heard

you be so bloody clever. So...

So, really, we're talking about other drugs.

We're talking about LSD and other hallucinogenics, really. Yeah.

The thing about them is that they can actually change your vision,

so that moving images leave a sort of visible trail behind them.

So you see an image where it is, but you'll also see dozens of others

in the places where it used to be.

So you know how you make patterns with a sparkler in the dark?

When you take hallucinogenics, you will see

this completely differently. It's called psychedelic cryptography,

and they make certain videos with hidden messages in them,

and they are specifically only visible to people who've taken

magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, LSD,

and they had a contest in 2023, the California Qualia Research

Institute, to see who could make the best of these videos

that are really only good for people on psychedelics, right?

That's the idea. And the winner had a message in a swirl

of circular rainbows.

And we are able to show you, without breaking the law in any way,

what it would have looked like had you been on acid.

Can you see what it says? Wow. We love you.

We love you. We looove you.

I think I've done this show a lot of times,

and I think I've got two correct answers,

both on this show, both by accident.

Finally coming to terms with it, my friend.

Welcome to my world.

So, what do you think would happen if you gave LSD to dolphins?

Oh! Aww!

Some good jumping. Some good jumping and somersaulting.

Well, in the 1960s, they thought...

"This could be for dolphins, heh-heh."

"Let's give a dolphin some LSD."

"Come here, son."

NASA were looking for ways to communicate with aliens, right?

Oh, yeah, that's what we need to do.

So they thought, well, let's see if we could teach English to dolphins

by giving them LSD.

LAUGHTER

So, there's a neuroscientist called John Lilly

and his assistant, Margaret Lovatt,

and they spent two years with three dolphins

called Peter, Pamela and Sissy.

And eventually one of them said, "Oh my God, I'm so high right now."

SHE CHATTERS AS A DOLPHIN

Well, they'd all....

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

They'd all just come off the television show, Flipper.

This is absolutely...

LAUGHTER Yeah.

So, Margaret stayed with Peter 24 hours a day.

She was gently encouraging him to mimic her.

John Lilly gave the other two dolphins LSD and played them music

and tried to communicate by telepathy,

and none of that worked.

Here's the thing about Peter and Margaret.

So, Peter was an adolescent dolphin,

with very strong sexual urges.

Oh, no.

And, for a while, they transported him backwards and forwards

to frolic with female dolphins.

And after a while, that was becoming very expensive

and very time-consuming.

So, Margaret, rather famously...

LAUGHTER No!

Yes.

Used to... No! Yes!

..relieve Peter herself.

AUDIENCE GROANS No! I know!

Oh, my God! I know!

For science.

Oh, yeah. We've all said that, ain't we?

Putting on her Marigolds...

INDISTINCT

A bit slippery, like a fish.

"For science!"

Does she just grab it and then he takes her through the waves?

"Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"

So, yeah... It's like, she got caught with a dolphin,

they're both high on LSD,

and she's tossing it off, and goes,

"For science."

That's what happened.

Yeah, I was trying to put it more gently, but...yeah.

Isn't there a machine that could have done that?

For the dolphin, yeah, but not for her.

At least he wasn't Steinached.

Now for a question about visions of beauty.

When was it considered attractive to slather yourself in vinegar

and paint your breasts blue?

Ooh. Oh. There used to be a thing,

I don't know if this is real or not,

but there was a theory that putting vinegar on your bare breasts

would stop your breasts sagging.

I don't know if it works, I got thrown out of the chippy.

But it does...

"Here she comes, Mrs Sarson's."

"Hide the vinegar, hide the vinegar, hide the vinegar."

You do it with conkers, though. Vinegar with conkers.

Oh, what? Soaking them so that they didn't...?

Yeah. So they get hard?

Oh! Yeah.

If you put enough vinegar on your boobs,

they go hard and you can bash... Yeah! Yeah!

This one's a sixer! A sixer!

Does that work with testicles?

Go for it. If you dip just the one testicle...

If you dip two testicles in vinegar, then...

You want to do them both, because if you did one... Yeah.

..the other one would just get mashed to a pulp. So true.

Steinach one, vinegar the other.

OK, we are talking about vanity in the 17th and 18th century.

Some really strange forms.

So fair skin, very fashionable.

Why do you think fair skin was so fashionable?

It is a huge problem in South Asian countries.

They sell skin-whitening powder because of the kind of residue of

like, the class system as left by the British.

There's a lot of this sort of internalised... Colourism?

..colourism. This is weirdly heading us in the right direction, so...

Oh, my God, Nish, you're on fire!

What?

So, the first thing that women would emphasise their paleness by,

they would paint delicate blue lines across their bosoms

to indicate veins.

But the thing you're talking about, this whitening powder,

both men and women used a toxic

white lead paint called Venetian ceruse

to whiten their faces.

It was mixed with vinegar... SHE CHUCKLES

..manure and arsenic.

And Elizabeth I's death may have been hastened

by the use of this Venetian ceruse.

I mean, she also used mercury and arsenic.

But Maria, Countess of Coventry, she was an 18th-century socialite.

She was a renowned beauty.

The Countess of Coventry!

But she died at the age of 27.

Poisoned, probably, by the lead.

I mean, she is very pale.

She's almost in black and white.

She doesn't look well.

She knew that it was making her ill,

and she still insisted on wearing it on her deathbed.

Does anybody know about the small facial patches?

You can just see she's got a little tiny patch

on the left side, on her right cheek.

Does anybody know what they are?

ALAN, It looks like a beauty spot.

Like a mole? Does anybody know what it is?

It's called... It's got a specific name.

Insect.

Weirdly, they were known as mouche, from the French for fly,

because they looked like a little insect.

Oh, that's working a treat.

Especially with her sunny disposition.

Cos she's got six pounds of metal on her head.

"I can't hold this for long. Paint me."

Sometimes made of mouse fur.

Really? AUDIENCE GROANS

Yes, so, if you put it near the eye, that indicates passion.

Oh, yeah, well...

Jeez!

That facial expression really offsets

the indication of passion there.

I'm getting a sort of Sir Alex Ferguson vibe.

Have I told you that, darling, that I once, at the very last moment,

stepped in for Sir Alex Ferguson at a football dinner?

I... No way. What a booking.

I can only describe the room as alive with disappointment.

That is not what people in football would call

a like-for-like replacement.

Anyway, where you place these mouches, it matters.

So here indicates passion,

here suggests coquettishness, and so on.

You can't have too many because then it looks like

you're covering up the scars from some kind of STD.

You look like a Dalmatian.

So, I've given you some patches.

Oh!

Now, you can also reveal your political allegiance by

placing it on the left or on the right of your face.

I'm going to do passion by my eye.

Where was coquette? Here?

Coquette is near the lips, yeah.

Coquettish, yeah.

I don't think you want to put it too close to the mouth,

because that indicates, "I haven't wiped my face."

Do you think it makes you look more attractive? What do you think?

I think yes. Let's have a look.

Yours looks all right.

And yours...I'm not sure, Sandi.

What? Not working? Not quite.

That is good. Have a look at this painting.

It's called Allegorical Painting Of...

Yes, so you've done exactly what's in the painting!

So, yes! I look like that?!

You do look...

So it moralises against bespotting,

so not too many.

So, possibly, that you've done...

I love this painting, which is really extraordinary.

It's from around 1650.

And what is interesting about it for the time,

it doesn't show any difference in social status

between the two women.

And it has only just come to light, came to light in 2021.

So I think it's really an interesting painting.

But it... Are they all gone? No, darl-...

Yes. Yes. Yes.

They've all gone.

I don't trust you.

Or you.

Well done. All gone, Al. All gone.

Shut your face. I don't believe that.

Oh, there's loads of them, you fucker!

That was a silly game. I didn't enjoy it.

And now for something you probably envisaged from the start,

the grisly future that is General Ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers, please.

What was the name of the very first talkie?

Yeah?

The Jazz Singer!

No. Oh!

Yes!

So, it is CREDITED as the very first talkie...

I was correct. One point.

It was the first feature-length film which had got some synchronised

dialogue, but only about a quarter of the film was recorded with sound,

so it doesn't fully count as the first talkie.

Doesn't count?!

So 1926, the year before, Don Juan, or Don Ju-an,

was the very first feature length to play sound.

It featured a score performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Until then, they had orchestras in the cinema playing live,

which I think must have been amazing. Loud.

The very first feature in which all the dialogue was recorded

was Lights Of New York, and that's 1928.

The addition of sound does something amazing to the movies.

So, it changes the audience.

Why do you think it might change the audience?

Maybe more of a richer audience started coming?

No, weirdly, poorer. Oh, really?

When you've got silent movies,

you get these cards that come up between the scenes,

and the people who were illiterate did not go to the movies...

Oh! ..because they thought it wasn't for them,

because there was reading in it.

And now suddenly you didn't need to be able to read

in order to go to the movies,

and people wanted to go and have a full evening's entertainment,

so they brought with them popcorn, which was cheap,

which had never been eaten in the movie theatres before.

They start selling popcorn outside on the street

for the people going to the cinema.

The cinemas at first hate it, because people dropping popcorn

on the floor and so on, but eventually they realise

that actually to make money they need to sell the popcorn

and the popcorn comes into the theatre.

Why do they fill it right up to the brim...Ugh!

..to make it absolutely inevitable that there will be popcorn everywhere?

I love it, then you get the bonus surprise for the end credits.

Yeah, just you get, "Oh, a bit of trou...!"

A bit of trouser popcorn while I read about who the Foley was.

I love popcorn, I just love everything about the cinema.

So, cinemas have changed.

I went to the cinema fairly recently,

and a woman came over and said, "Can I get you a drink?"

And she... Was that your wife, though, Sandi? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Just learn her name! Sorry.

She's so useful.

Despite you saying The Jazz Singer,

which is the one, Alan, that I think everybody would have come up with,

there had been other films with synchronised sound, decades before,

in fact. 1894, William Dickson directed a film called

The Dickson Experimental Sound Film.

This is an astonishing thing.

There's a man who may be Dickson,

who is the second from the left there, standing.

He played violin as two men dance.

For the very first time ever,

sound and visuals were recorded simultaneously,

but it was years before it was able to be shown publicly,

before there was the technology to show it.

And we can watch it now.

VIOLIN PLAYS

ALAN LAUGHS

Aww!

Literally...

I'll tell you what...

There's no drugs involved that day.

That is a very straight performance.

Literally the world's worst gay club.

Right, what has been done to refried beans?

Oh, they've been... Mmm... No, no. No.

Dangerous, dangerous.

They've been baked?

Good. Good. Oh, good. Yeah? Yeah?

I mean... B-b-boiled?

Yes. Mushed up. They've been mushed.

So, wait, wait, wait, wait. So wait.

I'm sitting between the answers here.

Oh! Boiled... Boiled and mushed. And mushed.

Not refried, is the thing.

So, it's a traditional Mexican dish.

It's got the pinto beans in it.

It's been boiled, fried once, and then mashed.

And people say refried beans, but it's refritos,

meaning well-fried.

Ah! It's us not understanding the language, I think.

It doesn't mean fried again.

Triple-cooked chips. Have they been cooked three times?

Yes. Yes is the correct answer.

Absolutely right.

Who invented them?

Blumenthal? Heston Blumenthal.

1993.

You parboil them in water, then you refrigerate them,

then you fry them, then you refrigerate them again,

and then you deep fry. I mean, it's a lot, isn't it?

Yeah.

While we're in Mexico, what is the difference between a taco

and a burrito?

Ooh!

One is cooked. One is crispy and one is soft. One is crispy, yes.

Taco's a half shell, burrito is a full wrap.

Taco is just a smaller burrito.

That's it. It's a burrito-tito.

That's the thing to say to a man who's had half a vasectomy.

"Oh, little burrito-tito."

Well, now, just like Jules Verne's globetrotting hero,

we've come right the way around and ended up where we started.

So my final question is, can you name any form of transport

taken by Phileas Fogg in the novel Around The World In Eighty...

..79 Days.

Balloon.

KLAXON

AUDIENCE GROANS

So, he did write about air balloon travel,

but it never featured in Around The World In Eighty Days.

Why do we think it did?

Cos it's on all the front covers.

It's the film.Ah... The film with David Niven.

So they go by automobile and by train, by steamship,

elephant, wind-powered sledge, but never by balloon.

He did write a couple of books which did have ballooning in -

Five Weeks In A Balloon and A Drama In The Air.

I was once pitched a television idea

which was to go on a transatlantic balloon race,

in which I would be in one balloon

with two expert balloonists,

and in another balloon... HE LAUGHS

..would be Tamzin Outhwaite...

..also with two balloonists.

And these things are normally designed for two people,

so they'd have to build a special cabin with me just sitting

about in one, and Tamzin sitting about in the other one,

and then they'd fly us across the Atlantic.

And in effort to persuade me, he said,

"Last time they did this race,

"only four of the six balloons ditched in the sea."

LAUGHTER

Why Tamzin Outhwaite?

Why me? Oh, yeah!

Clearly, we were expendable. Yeah.

Anyone who says Phileas Fogg rode in a balloon is full of hot air.

AUDIENCE GROANS Crash-...

Crashing back down to Earth with a bang,

it's time to look at the scores.

And they are, well, they're a vision to behold.

Back to the drawing board,

in last place, with -8,

it's Alan!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I've done nothing wrong!

With 99% perspiration, but 0% inspiration,

with -7, it's Cally!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

On the edge of greatness, in second place, with -1,

it's Laura!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Shaping the future,

tonight's visionary victor,

with five whole points,

it's Nish!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

My thanks to Laura, Cally, Nish and Alan.

And I leave you with this from American academic Warren Bennis.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees,

"a man and a dog.

"The man will be there to feed the dog.

"The dog will be there to stop the man touching the equipment."

Goodnight.

LAUGHTER, CHEERING AND APPLAUSE