QI (2003) s16e08 Episode Script
Plants
1 CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Hello .
.
and welcome to QI, where tonight we'll be pottering around with plants.
And joining me are a pretty periwinkle, Jason Manford.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A perfect peony, Sara Pascoe.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A proud poplar, Stephen K Amos.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE And a veritable vegetable, Alan Davies.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE And for their buzzers, Jason goes Roses are red.
Sara goes Violets are blue.
Stephen goes Sugar is s-s-sandskrit for gravel.
And Alan goes That's QI for you.
Right, let us start with some potatoes.
How do you make a potato really petrifying? Here's one for each of you.
One for me.
Oh, hang on, I haven't given you any potato yet, there we go.
I think it was a trust issue.
Right, so I want to make a potato really petrifying.
How do I do that? Do you just show it the frying pan? Show it the chip pan, yeah.
AHH! - But I don't want the potato to be scared, I want the potato to be scary.
- Oh, I see.
It is actually a way in which a potato has won a battle, So it was 1943, and an American destroyer called the USS O'Bannon came alongside a Japanese submarine in the Pacific, and the ship was too close to the submarine to be able to lower its guns, so the crew pelted the submarine with potatoes.
Now, the Japanese, you'd imagine, dim light of dawn, had no idea they were potatoes, so they ran around thinking they were grenades, throwing them off the deck or basically running for cover.
This gave the American ship enough time to position itself, back away, point its guns, and it sank the submarine, based entirely on throwing potatoes.
I must say, I've been doing this job for a while now Right .
.
and that's one of the hardest leaps I've yet faced.
We could have sat here for 40 years And not got it.
And also, that is a very sad story.
Yeah.
And then, thanks to this potato, hundreds were massacred.
- Well done, potatoes! - It is a very sad story, and it's about fear is sometimes - because of the thing that is in your head - Yes.
- rather than the actual thing that you're confronting.
- What's actually there, what you imagine, yeah.
But people have been afraid of potatoes before.
So, in the 1600s, when the potato first comes to Europe from the Americas, people were afraid to eat them, and there were a couple of main reasons.
One is there's no potato mentioned in the Bible.
Yeah.
Does that still happen now? Do people still go, "Do you want a Jaffa Cake?" "No.
" "Why not?" "It's not in the Bible.
" Not people I know.
And they're what all sorts of claims about the diseases that it could cause.
Scrophula, syphilis, leprosy.
There was a sort of general belief that they resembled the gnarled hands of lepers, and they thought that poisons mimicked the illnesses that they could cause.
They were also considered a dangerous aphrodisiac.
You could go mad and murderous with lust Ooh, yeah If you ate a potato.
I always feel quite sexy after After a potato? .
.
after some chips.
"We've just had chips, come on, let's get upstairs.
" We used to take a hold-all to the greengrocers, specifically for the potatoes.
Because? Because we'd buy a lot of them.
OK.
Did you have them mashed or chipped, or how did you have them? Usually mashed.
Mashed.
Because they were boiled for so long Strange thing about the British attitude to vegetables.
I was with a friend, and her mum came round, and the mum sat there for - ooh, she must have sat there for almost an hour, and she said, "Well, must go, I put the vegetables on just before I left.
" Oh, yeah, if you can't smear them over the wall, they're not cooked.
Right, potatoes away, please.
OK, which former Top Gear presenter failed a drugs test last year, and how on earth did they get away with it? Stig? Oh, is it the white guy? Yeah.
KLAXON "Is it the white guy?" The white guy.
Five white guys.
Any more for any more? So are we just going to guess those guys' names? - You could do, it's up to you.
- It's not going to be any of those names, and they're all a trap.
- Is it all a trap? - Yes.
- It's all a trap.
Watch this.
Jeremy Clarkson.
- Is it James May? - It's a trap, it's a trap.
Richard Hammond.
Chris Evans.
Carry on.
You just bodyguarded us.
You just jumped in front and took the bullet.
I'll take the bullet.
Matt LeBlanc.
Jason, you look like you know this.
I actually do know this one, weirdly.
It's Angela Ripon.
Is the exactly right answer.
Angela Ripon CHEERING AND APPLAUSE She presented Top Gear? She was the very first presenter of Top Gear, 1977, for two years.
And then they thought, let's have Jeremy Clarkson? Yeah.
You know who they had between her and Clarkson? No.
Edmonds.
Noel Edmonds presented it for a little while.
OK, yeah, he's the gateway drug.
That makes sense, that makes sense.
Anything can happen after Edmonds.
She looks amazing.
Yeah, she looks hot.
I'd go anywhere in that car with her.
She presents a programme called Rip-Off Britain.
Ripon, Rip-Off Britain, you see? I wish she had an E on the end of her name, and then it would be Angela Rip-One.
That would be amazing.
Was it the poppy seeds from a It's the poppy seeds.
So somebody had written to say they had been fired for failing a drugs test, and they had eaten poppy-seed toast for breakfast, so for three days, she ate her way through a poppy-seed loaf, and she then tested positive for drugs, and it is perfectly possible.
So I have here a basket of - Woo! Uh-oh.
- poppy seeds.
- Actually, I wouldn't eat those - that is - Yeah.
So basically if you ate, I don't know, two or three poppy-seed bagels, - morphine would show up in your urine.
- Wow.
It can remain there for two days.
I mean, it's hard to predict, OK, because the amount of morphine can vary by a factor of 600, so some seeds might have 600 times as much morphine in them as some other seeds.
Really? Yeah, well, it depends when it was harvested, so each But you can't spot which one is the one with morphine.
Anyway, Angela Ripon tested positive for some TOP GEAR.
Oh Come on! Yes.
APPLAUSE Does anyone know why there's a pair of pants buried in my garden? They've been buried by a dog? No, I buried them all by myself, on purpose.
Is this a method in which you're trying to stop the local underwear-from-washing-line thief? No.
Are they new or worn underpants? It doesn't really matter.
Are they made out of something specific? Well, they're cotton, is the main thing.
OK.
Is it something to do with maybe the soil that is kind of working with the cotton? OK, you are absolutely heading in the right direction, and you look terribly surprised about it.
So if you want to find out how fertile your soil is, one of the thing that's advised to farmers is to bury a pair of underpants, and then dig them up a couple of months later to see what is left.
And nothing should remain if the soil is fertile, except the elastic - everything else should have biodegraded.
So the California Farmers Guild, the Quality Meat Scotland, the Government body, they launched, in 2017, Soil My Undies campaigns .
.
to encourage farmers to do this.
Wow.
So in healthy soil, so it's got the right amount of water and oxygen and nutrients for plants to grow well, life forms - so microbes and worms and insects - they also thrive, and here is a really startling fact.
Let me show you this.
So I've got a tablespoon here, and if I poured soil onto the tablespoon, there are about 50 times more organisms on this tablespoon than there are humans on Earth.
So there's about 7½ billion people on earth, so a single spoon like this is 380 billion organisms living in a single tablespoon, and the more there are, the more they'll eat away at materials like cotton, so underwear depletion is a really good indicator of how your crops are going to grow.
It sounds a little bit like the scientists are, like, last day of work, "Let's bury underpants, it'll sort that out!" "Why did I find your pants in the garden?" "I can explain "Have you heard of science?" Well, it's a little experiment If you think that's strange, how would you test to see if it's warm enough to put your plants outside? Go outside? So it's still in underpants, bottom Well, if you take them off, and you shrivel up .
.
it's too cold.
Put your pants back on! If it looks like a little mushroom peeping out of a bush Just out of interest, Jason, how's that going to work for the lady farmer? She has to bring her fella over.
She has to hire a man! How smelly your pumps are, is it that? Excuse me? What? Should one blow off, is it Is it smellier on a warm day or a cold day? It's often troubled me.
I think I think cold air Yes.
.
.
somehow let's you smell the gas more.
OK, so I think I've eaten too much poppy seeds.
I love this, but I can only describe it as a cul-de-sac of conversation, so I'm going to steer you back to the motorway of actual information.
Oh Yeah.
It's not that, then? It's not that.
So in order to assess whether it's warm enough, you've already buried your underpants, you then sit down with your bare bottom in the ploughed field, and it is called the bare-bum test And Angela Rip-One It is recommended to farmers, and if it is comfortable enough to sit on the field, then it is warm enough to plant out your crops.
I'm telling you, science funding is a sham.
They are having a laugh out there making stuff up, last day - "Take your pants off and sit over there.
" - Unbelievable! Does this initiative actually work? Are their hundreds and thousands of farmers up and down the country .
.
wearing no pants? And sitting With bum prints across their field, as far as you can see! I'm very hopeful, Stephen, that they're rich enough to have two pairs of pants, so there's one One for them, and one for the field.
Maybe that's how they get crop circles.
APPLAUSE Right, you've just soiled your pants .
.
now, why would you season your socks? Well, in for a penny Something to do with a P, isn't it? Pepper Pepper Pepper's a P, isn't it? Pepper's a P.
I'm all over this.
So, 1600s, chilli peppers are first brought to Japan from Portugal, and people put them in their socks to keep their feet warm in the winter.
Chilli peppers contain something called capsaicin - it's the active component in chilli peppers.
Yeah.
And what it does is it gives the illusion of heat by creating a sort of burning sensation, it doesn't actually give you heat, it can in fact just numb you.
What about these bell peppers? Does anybody know what the difference is between the green, the yellow and the red? Yes, yes, yes! Colour.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE CHEERING So colour, yes, but it's not the real difference.
Do people say it's the sweetness, that the green ones aren't as sweet, and the yellow ones are the sweetest? Yeah, the green is the unripe one, it's not the yellow one that's the sweetest, it's the red one.
The yellow is, as it were, on its way to becoming a red one.
So the green one's packed with chlorophyll, and it decomposes over time, and that is what gives it the orange and the yellow and the so on, like leaves turning in the winter, so the chlorophyll decomposes.
Birds can't taste chilli, but squirrels can.
Oh So in 2008 the RSPB recommended that you sprinkle your bird food with chilli, and this will keep the squirrels away.
However, what they discovered is it spurred some squirrels on.
Just like humans, some squirrels bloody love chilli.
Go on! AHHHHH! They were racing to the stuff with the chillies on.
I need a tiny tissue, a tiny tissue! Anyway, here's a weird question - why might you put chilli in a condom? Revenge.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE It's to do with elephants.
This question gets weirder.
Is it to stimulate elephants? It's quite the opposite.
Elephants have the most acute sense of smell of any mammal.
Do they? And they hate the smell of chilli, so Tanzanian farmers want to keep them away from their land, and they've tried all sorts of things.
Elephants are so clever.
They've tried putting bells around their necks, and the elephant, within 24 hours, was packing the bell with their own dung to stop it ringing.
Oh, my God.
But if you put chilli in a condom and attach a firework to it and throw it at an elephant, it explodes in a great cloud of spicy powder, the elephant hates it and goes away, but it's not harmed.
Wow.
So putting chilli in a condom is a very good way to get rid of them off your land.
Ah, but if that elephant was very clever, he'd come up the next day with a gas mask.
I think you've got to question your life a little bit when you're putting chilli in condoms and throwing them at elephants.
Just a little bit of you is going, "What happened?" What did I do with my maths? ALAN IMITATES ELEPHANT TRUMPE HE BLOWS RASPBERRY Sorry, Sandi.
What's an elephant's gas mask going to be like, for God's sake? Do they have to coil the whole trunk up? Is it on the end of the trunk, the gas mask? Right, let's put the peppers away.
So, we all know that Pythagoras loved triangles, but what did he hate? Dairylea.
APPLAUSE Squares? KLAXON Here we go I'll do this.
Rectangles? Rhomboids? Rhomboids.
Well, have a Yeah! Rhomboid.
I can't spell it! He hated something so much, it killed him.
Where are his arms? "I can only do a tiny triangle for you.
" "It's all we want.
" It's a bit sort of A bit Yoda-like, isn't it? "And it's this long, and this high.
" It's a food that he didn't like - in fact disliked it so much, it killed him.
- Pineapples.
No, it's fava beans.
So a kind of broad bean and, according to multiple sources - for example the ancient Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius - he died when a mob of his enemies torched the building that he was in, and they chased him out of it, and he got a very good lead, and he came to a field of fava beans, and he preferred to die rather than to cross over the field of beans.
His pursuers caught up with him and slit his throat and that is how he died.
Why were they chasing him? They wanted democracy, and he didn't - he believed in ruling by scholars and the elite.
So we don't know why he disliked them so much.
So one of the theories, Diogenes claimed he hated them because they caused flatulence, and that represented a disturbance of the soul, so basically Pythagoras believed that every time you farted, you lost a part of your soul.
Oh, my God, my arse is soulless, I'll tell you that.
Aristotle speculated why he hated them - either because they have the shape of testicles or because they resemble the gates of hell, for they alone have no hinges.
The gates of hell look like testicles? I've not been.
Actually, to either.
I find mathematicians very much geniuses, because I was not good at maths at school at all, so I'm always fascinated by it.
In fact, I remember distinctly my maths GCSE, O-levels, and failing abysmally, and my mum, I can see her face right now - "Oh, Lord, Jesus! How can we look our friends" "in the eyes when we tell them our son Stephen is not" "just a simpleton, but he has a certificate to prove it?" LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Well, you wouldn't have been a good Pythagorean, because numbers were absolutely essential to the whole thing, because he preached a sort of number worship.
But there are amazing thing that his followers believed.
They believed he had a thigh made of gold Thigh? .
.
which was evidence that he was a son of Apollo, that he was able to literally be in two places at once, that he physically glowed like the sun itself, and that a river once called out, "Greetings, Pythagoras," as he passed by.
It's weird that Pythagoras is one of the three things that I remember from school.
- What's the other two? - Oxbow lake.
- Oh, yeah, I remember that.
- Photosynthesis.
- Yeah.
It's like it's all gone in as osmosis.
That's the fourth.
Weird, isn't it? What is it about the oxbow lake? I remember the oxbow lake.
Because geography is so boring, and it's just like, "How'd that get there?" I've got to be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Oxbow lake? Oh, right Soyou've got a river.
So you've got a river.
It's bendy, it's a bendy river.
Bendy river.
Meander Then gradually, that erodes Erosion.
Erodes Years and years! Years and years, it takes! That's the lake.
And the river Carries on.
It cuts off here.
APPLAUSE How's that possible, you all knew what was, and I didn't, mmm? And you've got a certificate to prove it! LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Maybe different lessons for the white kids! They did say to us - they did whisper afterwards - "Don't tell the black children!" Don't tell 'em! Don't tell the black children.
If you tell 'em about oxbow lakes, where will it stop? Pythagoras hated anyone who had a pulse.
Come on, people, let's GROANING Right.
A pulse is a sort of a bean How can a passenger hold up a train with a cheese and tomato sandwich? Just leave it in a bag, in a rucksack by itself.
That's true.
Put the sandwich on the tracks.
Well, sort of.
Sort of put the sandwich the tracks.
You see, I know stuff! JASON: You were in that day, weren't you? APPLAUSE So, first, you have to eat the sandwich.
Oh.
And then how are you going to get it on the tracks? Uh-oh.
Oh, by flushing the toilet.
You're absolutely right.
So, tomato seeds have a casing that allows them to survive the trip all the way down through the human digestive system intact.
Oh, OK.
Human excrement is an excellent fertiliser.
And it has caused so much trouble because tomato plants are actually growing onto tracks in the UK from train toilets being emptied, people having eaten tomatoes.
I feel this is a really positive story of hope.
Yes.
These tomatoes, against all adversity! In Norwich - I don't know if you've been to Norwich station, it's a beautiful station.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's got a glass roof and it acts like a giant greenhouse and passengers are not doing as they're told - they are flushing in the station.
Not shitting on the platform, are they? They're leaning over the platform.
No No, they're flushing on the train in the Oh, I see! Surely it's been years since they actually dumped the loo on the No, so, one in ten trains are still dumping directly onto the track.
They say that by 2019 it will all be over.
But why does the tomato plant stop the train going? They're small plants.
Should we make trains stronger? It's a plant, grows, isn't it? If you grow one in a poo, the tomatoes are massive! Those toilets have this incredibly high suction system and every few years somebody gets their arm stuck down Their arm? Yes.
Usually, I think, getting a phone out of it.
Oh, right, I was going to say.
Not trying to get back the tomato.
In France, in 2011, it took fire crews two hours to rescue a man who'd got his arm caught down the toilet.
And eventually they carried him away on the stretcher with the toilet bowl still attached! Oh, no! Were they trying to get to him up through the toilet? "We'll pull you right through!" "I'm not going to get right through, you need to pull me out this way!" Now for the root of all Alan's problems, it's General Ignorance! Plant your fingers on your buzzers, please.
Name a root vegetable beginning with P.
Sanskrit Parsnip.
Yes! Is absolutely right! APPLAUSE That would be correct, as you've not said potatoes, because they are not roots.
The potato is part of the stem, so it's not a root vegetable.
Any other vegetables beginning with P? Peetroot.
Parrots! KLAXON APPLAUSE Wonderful story - in 2014 there was a man from Aylesbury called Don Dover, and he was so excited.
And he called news crews to his garden because his parsnip plant had grown enormous leaves above the ground.
About 7ft high, and so the crew came, he was going to dig up the parsnip, it was going to be the most exciting thing, and they filmed it, and the parsnip was four inches long.
World record for a parsnip, any ideas how big? Longest parsnip? 50kg.
No, the length.
12 inches? So, there's a man called Peter Glazebrook.
It was 18 12 miles.
Whoa! 18½ft.
Look! Look how proud he is! Yeah.
"Chin up, look at me parsnip!" That's exactly what the massive parsnip face should be.
Yeah.
The potato is not a root vegetable but the parsnip is.
Buzz in as soon as you know the answer to these questions.
What French dish can you make from these words? Violets Is it duck a l'orange? Well, let's use the word canard, as it's the one we've got up there.
Canard a l'orange.
What English dish can you make from these? Toad in the hole.
Toad in the hole, absolutely right.
What Mexican dish can you make from these? Violets Chilli con carne.
Yeah, no.
It's a trick again! It's a trick again! Chilli con carne comes from Texas.
Ah It has nothing to do with Mexico.
In Texas it's the official state dish.
But Mexicans make carne con chilli.
In 1959, a Mexican dictionary defined chilli con carne as "detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, "sold in the US from Texas to New York".
Sounds like they need some sort of wall.
Just to keep them yanks out, you know? Now, then - what do you use your palate for? Stephen's going.
Sanskrit.
For, erm Paint.
For For Taste? Taste! Don't listen to Alan! Is the palate that thing that separates the acidic taste to the salty taste to the? No, it has nothing to do with taste.
To stop your brain falling into your mouth.
You're weirdly closer! It's like a protective case.
Well, fundamentally what it does is it separates your oral and your nasal cavities, it stops you getting a mouthful of snot or a nose full of food.
It doesn't have any taste buds.
Foetuses have taste buds in their palate, newborn babies do, but these disappear within a very few months.
So it has nothing to do with taste at all.
Although we do have taste receptors in the most extraordinary places.
The genitals.
Yes.
So, men have them in their testicles.
Yeah.
People have them in their stomach, in their intestines, their pancreas, their lungs, their anus.
Yeah.
And to be honest I think that was the quarter past two to Chester.
APPLAUSE We have taste buds in surprising places, the place we don't have them is in the palate, so the idea of having a good palate is a misnomer.
There's taste buds is yourdown there now.
Yes.
Who told us this? Was it scientists? Yes.
I'm just saying! There's a theme, isn't there? And there's also taste buds in your bollocks! There you go! And so it's time for the scores.
In first place, at the very top of the tree, with -1, it's Stephen! APPLAUSE In second place, -2, Jason! APPLAUSE And hot on his heels in third place with -3, it's Sara! APPLAUSE And in last place with -97 .
.
it's Alan! APPLAUSE Thank you to Sara, Jason, Stephen and Alan.
And I leave you with this from American humourist Erma Bombeck.
"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
" Thank you, goodnight! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
.
and welcome to QI, where tonight we'll be pottering around with plants.
And joining me are a pretty periwinkle, Jason Manford.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A perfect peony, Sara Pascoe.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A proud poplar, Stephen K Amos.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE And a veritable vegetable, Alan Davies.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE And for their buzzers, Jason goes Roses are red.
Sara goes Violets are blue.
Stephen goes Sugar is s-s-sandskrit for gravel.
And Alan goes That's QI for you.
Right, let us start with some potatoes.
How do you make a potato really petrifying? Here's one for each of you.
One for me.
Oh, hang on, I haven't given you any potato yet, there we go.
I think it was a trust issue.
Right, so I want to make a potato really petrifying.
How do I do that? Do you just show it the frying pan? Show it the chip pan, yeah.
AHH! - But I don't want the potato to be scared, I want the potato to be scary.
- Oh, I see.
It is actually a way in which a potato has won a battle, So it was 1943, and an American destroyer called the USS O'Bannon came alongside a Japanese submarine in the Pacific, and the ship was too close to the submarine to be able to lower its guns, so the crew pelted the submarine with potatoes.
Now, the Japanese, you'd imagine, dim light of dawn, had no idea they were potatoes, so they ran around thinking they were grenades, throwing them off the deck or basically running for cover.
This gave the American ship enough time to position itself, back away, point its guns, and it sank the submarine, based entirely on throwing potatoes.
I must say, I've been doing this job for a while now Right .
.
and that's one of the hardest leaps I've yet faced.
We could have sat here for 40 years And not got it.
And also, that is a very sad story.
Yeah.
And then, thanks to this potato, hundreds were massacred.
- Well done, potatoes! - It is a very sad story, and it's about fear is sometimes - because of the thing that is in your head - Yes.
- rather than the actual thing that you're confronting.
- What's actually there, what you imagine, yeah.
But people have been afraid of potatoes before.
So, in the 1600s, when the potato first comes to Europe from the Americas, people were afraid to eat them, and there were a couple of main reasons.
One is there's no potato mentioned in the Bible.
Yeah.
Does that still happen now? Do people still go, "Do you want a Jaffa Cake?" "No.
" "Why not?" "It's not in the Bible.
" Not people I know.
And they're what all sorts of claims about the diseases that it could cause.
Scrophula, syphilis, leprosy.
There was a sort of general belief that they resembled the gnarled hands of lepers, and they thought that poisons mimicked the illnesses that they could cause.
They were also considered a dangerous aphrodisiac.
You could go mad and murderous with lust Ooh, yeah If you ate a potato.
I always feel quite sexy after After a potato? .
.
after some chips.
"We've just had chips, come on, let's get upstairs.
" We used to take a hold-all to the greengrocers, specifically for the potatoes.
Because? Because we'd buy a lot of them.
OK.
Did you have them mashed or chipped, or how did you have them? Usually mashed.
Mashed.
Because they were boiled for so long Strange thing about the British attitude to vegetables.
I was with a friend, and her mum came round, and the mum sat there for - ooh, she must have sat there for almost an hour, and she said, "Well, must go, I put the vegetables on just before I left.
" Oh, yeah, if you can't smear them over the wall, they're not cooked.
Right, potatoes away, please.
OK, which former Top Gear presenter failed a drugs test last year, and how on earth did they get away with it? Stig? Oh, is it the white guy? Yeah.
KLAXON "Is it the white guy?" The white guy.
Five white guys.
Any more for any more? So are we just going to guess those guys' names? - You could do, it's up to you.
- It's not going to be any of those names, and they're all a trap.
- Is it all a trap? - Yes.
- It's all a trap.
Watch this.
Jeremy Clarkson.
- Is it James May? - It's a trap, it's a trap.
Richard Hammond.
Chris Evans.
Carry on.
You just bodyguarded us.
You just jumped in front and took the bullet.
I'll take the bullet.
Matt LeBlanc.
Jason, you look like you know this.
I actually do know this one, weirdly.
It's Angela Ripon.
Is the exactly right answer.
Angela Ripon CHEERING AND APPLAUSE She presented Top Gear? She was the very first presenter of Top Gear, 1977, for two years.
And then they thought, let's have Jeremy Clarkson? Yeah.
You know who they had between her and Clarkson? No.
Edmonds.
Noel Edmonds presented it for a little while.
OK, yeah, he's the gateway drug.
That makes sense, that makes sense.
Anything can happen after Edmonds.
She looks amazing.
Yeah, she looks hot.
I'd go anywhere in that car with her.
She presents a programme called Rip-Off Britain.
Ripon, Rip-Off Britain, you see? I wish she had an E on the end of her name, and then it would be Angela Rip-One.
That would be amazing.
Was it the poppy seeds from a It's the poppy seeds.
So somebody had written to say they had been fired for failing a drugs test, and they had eaten poppy-seed toast for breakfast, so for three days, she ate her way through a poppy-seed loaf, and she then tested positive for drugs, and it is perfectly possible.
So I have here a basket of - Woo! Uh-oh.
- poppy seeds.
- Actually, I wouldn't eat those - that is - Yeah.
So basically if you ate, I don't know, two or three poppy-seed bagels, - morphine would show up in your urine.
- Wow.
It can remain there for two days.
I mean, it's hard to predict, OK, because the amount of morphine can vary by a factor of 600, so some seeds might have 600 times as much morphine in them as some other seeds.
Really? Yeah, well, it depends when it was harvested, so each But you can't spot which one is the one with morphine.
Anyway, Angela Ripon tested positive for some TOP GEAR.
Oh Come on! Yes.
APPLAUSE Does anyone know why there's a pair of pants buried in my garden? They've been buried by a dog? No, I buried them all by myself, on purpose.
Is this a method in which you're trying to stop the local underwear-from-washing-line thief? No.
Are they new or worn underpants? It doesn't really matter.
Are they made out of something specific? Well, they're cotton, is the main thing.
OK.
Is it something to do with maybe the soil that is kind of working with the cotton? OK, you are absolutely heading in the right direction, and you look terribly surprised about it.
So if you want to find out how fertile your soil is, one of the thing that's advised to farmers is to bury a pair of underpants, and then dig them up a couple of months later to see what is left.
And nothing should remain if the soil is fertile, except the elastic - everything else should have biodegraded.
So the California Farmers Guild, the Quality Meat Scotland, the Government body, they launched, in 2017, Soil My Undies campaigns .
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to encourage farmers to do this.
Wow.
So in healthy soil, so it's got the right amount of water and oxygen and nutrients for plants to grow well, life forms - so microbes and worms and insects - they also thrive, and here is a really startling fact.
Let me show you this.
So I've got a tablespoon here, and if I poured soil onto the tablespoon, there are about 50 times more organisms on this tablespoon than there are humans on Earth.
So there's about 7½ billion people on earth, so a single spoon like this is 380 billion organisms living in a single tablespoon, and the more there are, the more they'll eat away at materials like cotton, so underwear depletion is a really good indicator of how your crops are going to grow.
It sounds a little bit like the scientists are, like, last day of work, "Let's bury underpants, it'll sort that out!" "Why did I find your pants in the garden?" "I can explain "Have you heard of science?" Well, it's a little experiment If you think that's strange, how would you test to see if it's warm enough to put your plants outside? Go outside? So it's still in underpants, bottom Well, if you take them off, and you shrivel up .
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it's too cold.
Put your pants back on! If it looks like a little mushroom peeping out of a bush Just out of interest, Jason, how's that going to work for the lady farmer? She has to bring her fella over.
She has to hire a man! How smelly your pumps are, is it that? Excuse me? What? Should one blow off, is it Is it smellier on a warm day or a cold day? It's often troubled me.
I think I think cold air Yes.
.
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somehow let's you smell the gas more.
OK, so I think I've eaten too much poppy seeds.
I love this, but I can only describe it as a cul-de-sac of conversation, so I'm going to steer you back to the motorway of actual information.
Oh Yeah.
It's not that, then? It's not that.
So in order to assess whether it's warm enough, you've already buried your underpants, you then sit down with your bare bottom in the ploughed field, and it is called the bare-bum test And Angela Rip-One It is recommended to farmers, and if it is comfortable enough to sit on the field, then it is warm enough to plant out your crops.
I'm telling you, science funding is a sham.
They are having a laugh out there making stuff up, last day - "Take your pants off and sit over there.
" - Unbelievable! Does this initiative actually work? Are their hundreds and thousands of farmers up and down the country .
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wearing no pants? And sitting With bum prints across their field, as far as you can see! I'm very hopeful, Stephen, that they're rich enough to have two pairs of pants, so there's one One for them, and one for the field.
Maybe that's how they get crop circles.
APPLAUSE Right, you've just soiled your pants .
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now, why would you season your socks? Well, in for a penny Something to do with a P, isn't it? Pepper Pepper Pepper's a P, isn't it? Pepper's a P.
I'm all over this.
So, 1600s, chilli peppers are first brought to Japan from Portugal, and people put them in their socks to keep their feet warm in the winter.
Chilli peppers contain something called capsaicin - it's the active component in chilli peppers.
Yeah.
And what it does is it gives the illusion of heat by creating a sort of burning sensation, it doesn't actually give you heat, it can in fact just numb you.
What about these bell peppers? Does anybody know what the difference is between the green, the yellow and the red? Yes, yes, yes! Colour.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE CHEERING So colour, yes, but it's not the real difference.
Do people say it's the sweetness, that the green ones aren't as sweet, and the yellow ones are the sweetest? Yeah, the green is the unripe one, it's not the yellow one that's the sweetest, it's the red one.
The yellow is, as it were, on its way to becoming a red one.
So the green one's packed with chlorophyll, and it decomposes over time, and that is what gives it the orange and the yellow and the so on, like leaves turning in the winter, so the chlorophyll decomposes.
Birds can't taste chilli, but squirrels can.
Oh So in 2008 the RSPB recommended that you sprinkle your bird food with chilli, and this will keep the squirrels away.
However, what they discovered is it spurred some squirrels on.
Just like humans, some squirrels bloody love chilli.
Go on! AHHHHH! They were racing to the stuff with the chillies on.
I need a tiny tissue, a tiny tissue! Anyway, here's a weird question - why might you put chilli in a condom? Revenge.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE It's to do with elephants.
This question gets weirder.
Is it to stimulate elephants? It's quite the opposite.
Elephants have the most acute sense of smell of any mammal.
Do they? And they hate the smell of chilli, so Tanzanian farmers want to keep them away from their land, and they've tried all sorts of things.
Elephants are so clever.
They've tried putting bells around their necks, and the elephant, within 24 hours, was packing the bell with their own dung to stop it ringing.
Oh, my God.
But if you put chilli in a condom and attach a firework to it and throw it at an elephant, it explodes in a great cloud of spicy powder, the elephant hates it and goes away, but it's not harmed.
Wow.
So putting chilli in a condom is a very good way to get rid of them off your land.
Ah, but if that elephant was very clever, he'd come up the next day with a gas mask.
I think you've got to question your life a little bit when you're putting chilli in condoms and throwing them at elephants.
Just a little bit of you is going, "What happened?" What did I do with my maths? ALAN IMITATES ELEPHANT TRUMPE HE BLOWS RASPBERRY Sorry, Sandi.
What's an elephant's gas mask going to be like, for God's sake? Do they have to coil the whole trunk up? Is it on the end of the trunk, the gas mask? Right, let's put the peppers away.
So, we all know that Pythagoras loved triangles, but what did he hate? Dairylea.
APPLAUSE Squares? KLAXON Here we go I'll do this.
Rectangles? Rhomboids? Rhomboids.
Well, have a Yeah! Rhomboid.
I can't spell it! He hated something so much, it killed him.
Where are his arms? "I can only do a tiny triangle for you.
" "It's all we want.
" It's a bit sort of A bit Yoda-like, isn't it? "And it's this long, and this high.
" It's a food that he didn't like - in fact disliked it so much, it killed him.
- Pineapples.
No, it's fava beans.
So a kind of broad bean and, according to multiple sources - for example the ancient Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius - he died when a mob of his enemies torched the building that he was in, and they chased him out of it, and he got a very good lead, and he came to a field of fava beans, and he preferred to die rather than to cross over the field of beans.
His pursuers caught up with him and slit his throat and that is how he died.
Why were they chasing him? They wanted democracy, and he didn't - he believed in ruling by scholars and the elite.
So we don't know why he disliked them so much.
So one of the theories, Diogenes claimed he hated them because they caused flatulence, and that represented a disturbance of the soul, so basically Pythagoras believed that every time you farted, you lost a part of your soul.
Oh, my God, my arse is soulless, I'll tell you that.
Aristotle speculated why he hated them - either because they have the shape of testicles or because they resemble the gates of hell, for they alone have no hinges.
The gates of hell look like testicles? I've not been.
Actually, to either.
I find mathematicians very much geniuses, because I was not good at maths at school at all, so I'm always fascinated by it.
In fact, I remember distinctly my maths GCSE, O-levels, and failing abysmally, and my mum, I can see her face right now - "Oh, Lord, Jesus! How can we look our friends" "in the eyes when we tell them our son Stephen is not" "just a simpleton, but he has a certificate to prove it?" LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Well, you wouldn't have been a good Pythagorean, because numbers were absolutely essential to the whole thing, because he preached a sort of number worship.
But there are amazing thing that his followers believed.
They believed he had a thigh made of gold Thigh? .
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which was evidence that he was a son of Apollo, that he was able to literally be in two places at once, that he physically glowed like the sun itself, and that a river once called out, "Greetings, Pythagoras," as he passed by.
It's weird that Pythagoras is one of the three things that I remember from school.
- What's the other two? - Oxbow lake.
- Oh, yeah, I remember that.
- Photosynthesis.
- Yeah.
It's like it's all gone in as osmosis.
That's the fourth.
Weird, isn't it? What is it about the oxbow lake? I remember the oxbow lake.
Because geography is so boring, and it's just like, "How'd that get there?" I've got to be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Oxbow lake? Oh, right Soyou've got a river.
So you've got a river.
It's bendy, it's a bendy river.
Bendy river.
Meander Then gradually, that erodes Erosion.
Erodes Years and years! Years and years, it takes! That's the lake.
And the river Carries on.
It cuts off here.
APPLAUSE How's that possible, you all knew what was, and I didn't, mmm? And you've got a certificate to prove it! LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Maybe different lessons for the white kids! They did say to us - they did whisper afterwards - "Don't tell the black children!" Don't tell 'em! Don't tell the black children.
If you tell 'em about oxbow lakes, where will it stop? Pythagoras hated anyone who had a pulse.
Come on, people, let's GROANING Right.
A pulse is a sort of a bean How can a passenger hold up a train with a cheese and tomato sandwich? Just leave it in a bag, in a rucksack by itself.
That's true.
Put the sandwich on the tracks.
Well, sort of.
Sort of put the sandwich the tracks.
You see, I know stuff! JASON: You were in that day, weren't you? APPLAUSE So, first, you have to eat the sandwich.
Oh.
And then how are you going to get it on the tracks? Uh-oh.
Oh, by flushing the toilet.
You're absolutely right.
So, tomato seeds have a casing that allows them to survive the trip all the way down through the human digestive system intact.
Oh, OK.
Human excrement is an excellent fertiliser.
And it has caused so much trouble because tomato plants are actually growing onto tracks in the UK from train toilets being emptied, people having eaten tomatoes.
I feel this is a really positive story of hope.
Yes.
These tomatoes, against all adversity! In Norwich - I don't know if you've been to Norwich station, it's a beautiful station.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's got a glass roof and it acts like a giant greenhouse and passengers are not doing as they're told - they are flushing in the station.
Not shitting on the platform, are they? They're leaning over the platform.
No No, they're flushing on the train in the Oh, I see! Surely it's been years since they actually dumped the loo on the No, so, one in ten trains are still dumping directly onto the track.
They say that by 2019 it will all be over.
But why does the tomato plant stop the train going? They're small plants.
Should we make trains stronger? It's a plant, grows, isn't it? If you grow one in a poo, the tomatoes are massive! Those toilets have this incredibly high suction system and every few years somebody gets their arm stuck down Their arm? Yes.
Usually, I think, getting a phone out of it.
Oh, right, I was going to say.
Not trying to get back the tomato.
In France, in 2011, it took fire crews two hours to rescue a man who'd got his arm caught down the toilet.
And eventually they carried him away on the stretcher with the toilet bowl still attached! Oh, no! Were they trying to get to him up through the toilet? "We'll pull you right through!" "I'm not going to get right through, you need to pull me out this way!" Now for the root of all Alan's problems, it's General Ignorance! Plant your fingers on your buzzers, please.
Name a root vegetable beginning with P.
Sanskrit Parsnip.
Yes! Is absolutely right! APPLAUSE That would be correct, as you've not said potatoes, because they are not roots.
The potato is part of the stem, so it's not a root vegetable.
Any other vegetables beginning with P? Peetroot.
Parrots! KLAXON APPLAUSE Wonderful story - in 2014 there was a man from Aylesbury called Don Dover, and he was so excited.
And he called news crews to his garden because his parsnip plant had grown enormous leaves above the ground.
About 7ft high, and so the crew came, he was going to dig up the parsnip, it was going to be the most exciting thing, and they filmed it, and the parsnip was four inches long.
World record for a parsnip, any ideas how big? Longest parsnip? 50kg.
No, the length.
12 inches? So, there's a man called Peter Glazebrook.
It was 18 12 miles.
Whoa! 18½ft.
Look! Look how proud he is! Yeah.
"Chin up, look at me parsnip!" That's exactly what the massive parsnip face should be.
Yeah.
The potato is not a root vegetable but the parsnip is.
Buzz in as soon as you know the answer to these questions.
What French dish can you make from these words? Violets Is it duck a l'orange? Well, let's use the word canard, as it's the one we've got up there.
Canard a l'orange.
What English dish can you make from these? Toad in the hole.
Toad in the hole, absolutely right.
What Mexican dish can you make from these? Violets Chilli con carne.
Yeah, no.
It's a trick again! It's a trick again! Chilli con carne comes from Texas.
Ah It has nothing to do with Mexico.
In Texas it's the official state dish.
But Mexicans make carne con chilli.
In 1959, a Mexican dictionary defined chilli con carne as "detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, "sold in the US from Texas to New York".
Sounds like they need some sort of wall.
Just to keep them yanks out, you know? Now, then - what do you use your palate for? Stephen's going.
Sanskrit.
For, erm Paint.
For For Taste? Taste! Don't listen to Alan! Is the palate that thing that separates the acidic taste to the salty taste to the? No, it has nothing to do with taste.
To stop your brain falling into your mouth.
You're weirdly closer! It's like a protective case.
Well, fundamentally what it does is it separates your oral and your nasal cavities, it stops you getting a mouthful of snot or a nose full of food.
It doesn't have any taste buds.
Foetuses have taste buds in their palate, newborn babies do, but these disappear within a very few months.
So it has nothing to do with taste at all.
Although we do have taste receptors in the most extraordinary places.
The genitals.
Yes.
So, men have them in their testicles.
Yeah.
People have them in their stomach, in their intestines, their pancreas, their lungs, their anus.
Yeah.
And to be honest I think that was the quarter past two to Chester.
APPLAUSE We have taste buds in surprising places, the place we don't have them is in the palate, so the idea of having a good palate is a misnomer.
There's taste buds is yourdown there now.
Yes.
Who told us this? Was it scientists? Yes.
I'm just saying! There's a theme, isn't there? And there's also taste buds in your bollocks! There you go! And so it's time for the scores.
In first place, at the very top of the tree, with -1, it's Stephen! APPLAUSE In second place, -2, Jason! APPLAUSE And hot on his heels in third place with -3, it's Sara! APPLAUSE And in last place with -97 .
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it's Alan! APPLAUSE Thank you to Sara, Jason, Stephen and Alan.
And I leave you with this from American humourist Erma Bombeck.
"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
" Thank you, goodnight! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE