"CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Hey!" "Hello!" "hello! me!" "while other quiz shows are snogging behind the bike sheds." "we're celebrating genius David Mitchell!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Dara O'Briain!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Graham Norton!" "CHEERS AND APPLAUSE" "Alan Davies!" "CHEERS AND APPLAUSE" "But before our SWAT team of swots and Dara goes..." "BELL" "O'Briain!" "David goes..." "BELL" "Mitchell!" "Graham goes..." "BELL" "Norton!" "And Alan goes..." "PING!" "Bob?" "LAUGHTER that's..." "APPLAUSE could you press your buzzer again?" "BELL" "The doctor'll see you now!" "LAUGHTER so I'm going to give you a bit of help." "you should have a bit of tissue somewhere near." "ALAN:" "I can't see anything!" "No!" "Have you got tissues anywhere?" "Yeah." "I want you to stick a piece of tissue up your left nostril as if you had a nosebleed or something." "very good." "two of you have." "I'm going for real penetration." "I can feel that up there." "now say something intelligent." "LAUGHTER" "Er..." "A squared equals B squared plus C squared." "That's very good!" "If... you know." "excellent! your right nostril or both?" "My arse." "Oi!" "but I've never kept a note of which it is." "some people do keep notes of how people breathe." "it does alternate." "It has a periodicity of four hours." "and what's completely weird is that you answer questions on different types of subject better according to which side you're breathing through." "Am I going to asphyxiate at about half past 12?" "that's a good point!" "You can breathe through your mouth if you want to. of what shift work our nostrils are on? like my tax return." "I'll wait till the more creative right nostril comes on at about 4pm." "now?" "you should be good at visual and spatial things." "you should be better at verbal things." "but you've probably heard of the study in '89 called Unilateral Nostril Breathing... that old thing!" "Quigley and Lynch." "So why don't all sports people constantly block their left nostrils?" "you've probably seen what a lot of sports people do." "I guess." "And often they snort drugs as well. they're also at their most verbally dextrous?" "Indeed!" "Mine!" "what have you got?" "What have you found?" "I think I lost the end." "Ohhh!" "won't it?" "eventually." "You'll cry it out at some point." "Are these going on eBay?" "yeah." "I think I've already left my mark. a higher score on the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory." "don't block the right nostril." "So that's why now... aren't you?" "you've blocked the right nostril." "It's terribly sad." "LAUGHTER" "I'm going to ask you a question that will test your visual-spatial." "OK." "It seems the quickest way to improve verbal reasoning is to shove a tissue up your left nostril." "Let's see how they've worked." "Consider... an N-dimensional hypercube and connect each pair of vertices to obtain a complete graph of two to the power N vertices." "Colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black." "the smallest value of N for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single coloured complete sub-graph with four vertices which lie in a plane?" "Six!" "That is exactly what people used to think." "LAUGHTER" "APPLAUSE That's amazing." "further!" "most graph theorists thought the correct answer was probably six." "I can only apologise." "But... how dare you!" "to keep up with the graph theory?" "It's probably only eight or nine hours a day you're devoting to it now." "I've got Graham's number." "Six?" "no." "Ah!" "We don't have that sort of relationship." "You've not got that sort of relationship!" "Graham's number." "But it's bigger than six." "Ofcourseit is ." "It is so ... really big number. 17." "Do you know what?" "It's even bigger than that!" "all right... couldn't make enough ink to write it out. which is really strange." "Why would it end in a seven?" "!" "Turn it into an eight and then it's a bigger number!" "which is huge." "I made it an eight at the end." "will you?" "OK." "I'm worried about what might come out when I pull it." "it seems - imagine the cube with lots of different dimensions what is the fewest number of dimensions so that you end up with at least one single coloured square with the same colour diagonals? that enormous number." "is it?" "The greatest mathematical minds in the world just don't know what the answer is. and they're really hoping nobody checks." "What they do know is it ends in a seven." "what music can you play to your children to make them brainier?" "I won't be lured into saying any of the major classical composers it makes them smarter." "Absolutely right." "We had a little forfeit lurking behind the screen that said Mozart because people seem to have it in their heads that they read somewhere once in some newspaper that... you could slap him!" "now!" "Spoilt little brat!" "he was touring at that age." "He was dragging his arse. albeit they were clubs run by the crown heads of Europe." "the Bourbon Club and the Hohenzollern Club." "There is no evidence at all that playing Mozart to a baby makes it more intelligent." "I thought you were supposed to play natural sounds because the noises of contemporary life are destructive and create behavioural difficulties." "That's why you mustn't have the television on until they're four or something like that." "my friend!" "You train them to like television as quickly as they possibly can." "they're kind of coincidental." "my friend." "But is there music that makes them cleverer?" "there was some study which has since been debunked not to children. a baby that you're not playing Mozart to in the hope that the child is stupider." "We'd like to test your child by denying him any intellectual stimulation and hoping that he turns out dumb in the end." "We'll look after it 24 hours a day for the next six months to test this." "and we'll give you money." "Ah! they'd at least learn that." "That's true." "And could count potatoes." "that was vital." "we'd better go to America." "Finished!" "Do you know about the English Mozarts?" "Do they mean anything to you?" "McFly?" "LAUGHTER very popular." "one was Thomas Linley." "He beat Mozart by playing a concerto at an earlier age even than Mozart did." "Linley fell into a lake while boating and was drowned when aged 22." "Pushed in by Mozart." "it's all very impressive to say he played a concerto aged whatever." "do you know what I mean?" "and they were the sensation of the age." "The other was Samuel Wesley but he banged his head and suffered from mild brain damage for the rest of his life." "Tripped by Mozart." "there seems to be a pattern emerging." "playing Mozart to children makes them more intelligent." "how about dumbing them down?" "Why are exams so much easier for youngsters these days?" "Dara." "Thank you very much." "or are they simply marked more generously? but you've a tendency to presume that you have a very stupid generation of kids in this country." "Proof!" "yes!" "It is a horrendous Catch 22 if you're a 17-year-old. it still is defying the point of the exam." ""You're all great academically!" "Everyone can be professor of Latin!" "Share the professor of Latin's salary between you!" "it should be done by a percentile." "Which is how it used to be done." "and what's interesting about the IQ test so they have to normalise. retarded." "Well..." "Because they would have an IQ of 70." "My great-grandfather signed his marriage certificate with a cross so..." "Was his name Xavier?" "I don't think it was!" "perhaps he should have used a pen." "surely. but that's not why it's called Mensa. but they realised their magazine looked like some special-interest gay porn!" "I'm not being filled with confidence that this is being run by geniuses!" "It represents the round-table equality of Mensa." "there's no elitism at Mensa." Erm..." "I'd like to set up a society for people who have an IQ of under 70 and then go and try and sell them pyramid schemes." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE you cannot be executed for a capital crime." "and therefore Flynn has often had to go... and he can save lives by doing that." "I'd have thought." "but they're taken as children." "They're not smart enough to throw an IQ test!" ""I'll put a circle here... you're dead!" "It's kind of the reverse of the sort of eugenicist argument that where they're letting the stupid live." "young people find IQ tests easier than their parents because apparently they're exposed to more problem solving in their life." "how would you create a genius?" "Is there a way of ensuring a genius?" "Breeding two geniuses together... exposed to lots of vitamin D from the sun... then." "tell us about your theory of eugenics! and stopping people from breeding if you think they might have stupid or feeble...?" "People farming!" "Nazism." "isn't it?" "is a thing that... quite respectable antecedents and liberal points of view before Nazism who believed that eugenics may be a good idea." "yeah." "Bernard Shaw and many others. her fun fact about herself right?" "LAUGHTER And her other fun fact was she hadn't told her husband that her father was a serial killer until after they were married! Do you think maybe your husband would have been concerned about having children given that there's a serial killer in you somewhere?" "he's been through similar things - his father committed suicide. and you thought that was a good gene pool to be splashing around in!" "You would give birth to a child who kills himself lots of times." "it's terrifying!" "how long..." "Was it before the speeches?" "LAUGHTER this might be worth catching." "This may explain why he went with orange." "The only one with plastic cutlery at the wedding reception." "Why are they wheeling your dad around with a cage over his face?" "you'd have a "Come as a serial killer" themed wedding." "who was one of the great geniuses?" "Da Vinci." "Da Vinci is exactly the man I was after." "they knew how astoundingly great he was." "actually..." "Was an idiot." "That's awful!" "and he decided he wanted their child to be like it sort of worked." "There's Leonardo dying." "they realised how great he was." "What's Rodney Bewes doing in the background?" "it's defo Rodney Bewes!" "He does look like Rodney Bewes." "is he? suddenly to discover that Rodney Bewes was immortal." ""And today it emerged that actor Rodney Bewes has been alive for as long as time"?" "Given the things we've been talking about where I'm pretending to know" "I actually really don't know who Rodney Bewes is." "Oh!" "Do you remember The Likely Lads?" "we didn't." "James Bolam..." "I know who he is!" "And Rodney Bewes." "They played a couple... right!" "The chance of me meeting him in the future are very high. and we talk about Leonardo." "you actually!" "and we've arrived at Rodney Bewes!" "That's the wrong direction!" "I didn't even know who he was!" "Don't blame me!" "You're so right!" "Graham." "I was wafting in the rarefied air of Leonardo." "The stink bomb of Rodney Bewes was exploded over there." "Rodney Bewes looks older there than Rodney Bewes in our present time so I think travel back in time using the futuristic technology of pulse checking." "What's this weirdo Rodney Bewes doing?" ""It's so embarrassing." "Why's he holding his hand?" "Leonardo was such a genius he predicted the Likely Lads." "LAUGHTER" "He wanted James Bolam and Rodney Bewes has turned up." "it's Bewes." "The one on the right has definitely got his hand on his head for that reason." "We ordered John Cleese and Connie Booth." "who's this dick?" "LAUGHTER" "Seriously?" "Rodney Bewes?"" "You brought Rodney Bewes here as a doctor?" "!" "that one." "don't make it Matthew Kelly." "Lord." "I've now got a horrible feeling that the Brian Blessed on the end has had his head sawn off." "He's had his brain taken out." "AS BRIAN BLESSED:" "That is no longer Brian Blessed!" "He's turned into somebody else!" "APPLAUSE" "I wanted... who was brought up to be a genius and actually kind of was. leaving 20 works behind him." "Pushed out of a window by Michelangelo." "Or possibly by Mozart." "Working in tandem." "Yes... it all makes sense." "Yes." "yeah. what can you tell me about the Last Supper?" "Mitchell!" "Did he sort of paint it..." "Is the reason it's peeling so badly is he didn't listen to the people who were experts in that kind of painting?" "I know best" so he slapped it on randomly." "it's decaying a lot worse than other sort of frescos like that." "it started to fall apart." "He painted it onto dry plaster instead of on wet plaster which is what a fresco is." "it was used as a..." "Dartboard." "it was used as." "wasn't it?" "You should be able to see Christ's legs but they just added a door so it was probably vandalised there." "exactly." "he will not listen." "Exactly." "Did he paint people in that he knew?" "in his case." "It was obviously a thing that used to be done in Renaissance art." "They're fussing about "I had the pitta bread but I didn't have any wine so I don't see why I should pay as much as Peter." "Luke had that!" "I'm not paying for that!" "he is..." "This is the last bloody supper I'm going to." "LAUGHTER he didn't actually make any real contribution to science at all." "Or did he?" "it wasn't a forfeit but it just wouldn't have worked." "isn't it?" "I did drawings of spaceships when I was about five and I'd be embarrassed if somebody had said I had invented interstellar travelling." "what's the fuss?" "because his curiosity was so wide-ranging." "Machines of war and in anatomy and so on." "the reason he didn't contribute to science is he did is that he wrote a mirror writing diary which was also in code that wasn't by which time almost everything he'd discovered which had already been independently discovered." "but he's considered the prototypical genius or archetypal Renaissance man." "Submarine?" "Did he come up with the submarine?" "I'm not sure." "The Beatles." "kitchen." "A big fish looking in." "A man waving." "practically thinking." "if everyone could roll their tongues for me." "Very good." "Get a close-up on Graham." "LAUGHTER What the hell?" "!" "I think it's supposed to be an illustration of  a child of two geniuses may not necessarily be a genius." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE I don't know who says that." "roll your tongues." "Where does that gift come from?" "If it is a gift." "Where does that ability..." "I literally can't do it." "A fish." "and you gave an answer!" "that it's genetically handed down." "Some people can do it and some people can't." "you'll be able to do it." "like asparagus and urine." "Does it make your urine smell?" "mostly women don't have them." "Can you put your hand up if you've never noticed the effect of asparagus in the smell of your urine?" "ALAN:" "Weird." "GRAHAM:" "You've never noticed?" "DARA:" "I've never noticed that. and then you're peeing and it stinks." "They used to call it..." "Other diners are pointing at you." "You should be doing that in the toilet." "It stinks and he's doing it in here. the housemaid would take down the chamber pot like "eew"!" "maybe " "I find the smell of urine quite distasteful anyway." "no." "Believe me... you need to see someone." "I don't." "There's something wrong with you." "You've got a disease!" "It presumably doesn't make you go "Argh"?" ""I'll not drink that." "that would be something else." "I feel." "I'll leave you alone because I've just done it into a toilet." "I was flavouring stuff." "that would be different." "Sugar Puffs made it smell of Sugar Puffs to me." "Anybody else?" "SOME AUDIENCE MEMBERS:" "Yes." "good." "Nice not to feel alone!" "and it's only in recent years that it has." "and they have all got exactly the right little bodies that do the right things." "He's still fuming." "I think people are a lot more interested in their wee than they'll admit." "That's certainly true." "I think is a general rule." "but there's an element of... that. books." "I'm always fascinated by." "books..." "I would be a fascinated man." "LAUGHTER but unspoken." "who is bored?" "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "You know what that means?" "It means when someone is reading." "if they go like that... they've just let one go." "It's true." "It's odd." "We laugh at it and yet it's an obsession from the cradle onwards virtually." "the fact is a lot of these strange things like tongue rolling don't come from our parents." "It doesn't follow you can if your parents can." "Which was the first animal to be cloned?" "Well it can't be..." "It's not Dolly the sheep then." "you're right." "You have all been so good at avoiding the honey traps." "but it's not." "no." "We have to go back to the 1880s for the first cloning." "it was a sea creature actually." "it was a sea urchin." "There's one." "This was a German called Dreisch who did it in 1885." "cloned a salamander. and the noose was made of the hair of a human baby." "He used it as a lasso just to separate." "Isn't that marvellous?" "That's fiddly work." "It is very fiddly work." "There must have been lots of times where he used to go..." "SHOUTS" "Could I please have another baby's hair?" "Go back to the baby. "Argh!" "madam." "All the people trying to keep him calm. "Would you like another..." "I DON'T WANT ANOTHER COFFEE!" ""Do you want me to have a go?" "Dolly the sheep was the one you cleverly avoided." "But why Dolly?" "do you know?" "It was named after Dolly Parton because the cell came from the mammary glands." "Correctly correctington." "sir." "Excellent." "APPLAUSE" "It would be quite easy to palm off any sheep as being the clone of another sheep." "We can just get another sheep and say there it is." "yes." "that's because they're genetically identical. because the first cat to be cloned was called Rainbow and her clone was known as CC." "There." "They just didn't put the effort in did they?" "They went to all the pet shops for that little faker." "They could at least have sent the guy who they sent to get the kitten with a photo." "Not just get any cat." "The little kitten is called CC." "Points if you can guess what that stands for." "Cat clone?" "or sort of wittier." "Say?" "AUDIENCE:" "Copycat." "you see?" "Very good." "it was part of a larger project to clone a dog." "LAUGHTER" "Missyplicity named after a dog named Missy." "The world's first cloned dog from Korea was called Snuppy." "Then they ate it." "LAUGHTER" "the point is the first animal to be cloned was the sea urchin way back in 1885. including the first cloned cats which look nothing like each other." "it doesn't take a genius to know that it's time to look for some general ignorance." "if you would." "How old are you?" "LAUGHTER" "BELL Norton." "How old do I look?" "BELL" "How old do I feel?" "It just shows you the effect of this game though." "and all four of us think that's something but I've been made so uncertain that name or address." "How can this possibly be a trap?" "I am 37." "no points for that." "ALARM BLARES" "But that's not wrong!" "you are!" "GRAHAM:" "We should all do it." "BELL 34." "eh?" "34." "ALARM BLARES" "You don't want to do this." "46." "ALARM BLARES" "ALAN:" "I'm not doing it." "LAUGHTER but that's not how old you are whenever I touch you." "how old is that arm?" "Is it as old as that?" "something like that?" "DAVID:" "Is it five years we replace our entire selves?" "that's right." "DARA:" "Your cells regenerate." "Your red blood cells last only 120 days." "1.5 years." "GRAHAM:" "Hurry up!" "LAUGHTER" "Give it a chance to recover." "so all of your bones." "isn't it?" "it is! rather than a brand new one." "So they're replaced with second-hand ones?" "no." "I'm thinking of trading in my eight year-old Mazda for an eight and a bit year-old Mazda." "yes." "It's all rather unfortunate." "An adult's body may turnout somewhere between seven and ten years old though some cells are much younger." "And 98% of the 7 billion billion billion atoms in the human body are replaced yearly." "I think some of my socks are older than I am." "That's a marvellous thought." "I feel I should defer to them." "they're not human." "This is bacteria? more than ten times the number of human cells." "Isn't that interesting?" "all the cells in your body are around ten years old." "How did the Church of England originally react to Darwin's theory of evolution?" "They weren't happy about it." "They weren't happy about it!" "I don't think." "Nobody really got it for a while." "OK." "but when he published it was a massive bestseller." "and he was a gigantic figure of his time." "He was one of only five people not royal to be given a burial at Westminster Abbey." "They absolutely understood his greatness." "The surprising thing is the Church of England were not that worried at all." "But for many years most churchmen had encouraged people to believe but if there's anything it's that it shows nature doesn't care." "Yes. but the true understanding of evolution also shows that nature is completely horrific." "That was the major part the Victorians hated because they loved the countryside and birdsong." "This is Alexander's All Things Bright and Beautiful." "And instead they're locked in a vicious struggle for survival where all... hard life." "where they're quite stress-free." "it's a life they wouldn't expect in the wild. just a little bit?" "I miss a dog pushing a pram." "LAUGHTER but an elephant counting... Call Me A Nancy!" "Aren't you? This is the elephants last chance at a career in show business." "and then a shot of the elephant staring at a big pile of ivory." "LAUGHTER" "You're a sick puppy." "Or maybe some piano keys?" "LAUGHTER" "Get someone to play for him." "me?" "!" "my granddad was in show business as well." "So The Origin Of Species was widely respected by mainstream churchmen at the time of its publication." "From one controversy to another." "What kind of pet did Charles Cruft have?" "come on!" "I mean..." "A cat." "Yes!" "Very good." "He did indeed. and he went into business with a man called Spratt who made dog cakes." "Dog cakes!" "like a biscuit really." "but a dog cake is mad?" "!" "I thought you meant a cake made out of dog." "That would be mad." "Dog biscuit sounds like it's for dogs and dog cake sounds like it's got a lovely layer of dog in the middle." "sorry." "But he sort of founded the business" "Charles Cruft." "It got bigger and was hugely successful until he died in 1938 and the Kennel Club took over." "the dog food sponsor" "RSPCA and a dog charity all withdrew." "So this year Crufts was broadcast live on the internet for the first time. where they don't seem to be aware of it." "What you do is you lift up the cat and essentially..." "Fluff it." "you make it do Superman." "All cats in the show just have that cat look of... or whatever." "They just look...disinterested." "The other side of Crufts not being on the television is that isn't it? it would be pretty much Crufts." "Or men playing golf." "I don't understand why golf's on television." "I love watching golf." "I'm absolutely passionate about it." "But what are you watching?" "The golf." "LAUGHTER is it?" "APPLAUSE" "but he didn't care for dogs." "how many brains did the man with two brains have?" "Two." "Yes." "LAUGHTER" "That's brilliant!" "APPLAUSE" "It's so cruel!" "He's wise enough to spot a double bluff." "This is a technique of the bully." "did you think I was going to hit you?" "I wasn't going to hit you." "I've just lifted my hand to stroke you." "HE WHIMPERS that's exactly what we do." "The fact is that Dr Michael Gerschwin has proved that we all have two brains." "Your gut has an enteric nervous system and it's the only part of the body that can operate the thing we call the brain." "but it operates separately." "In that sense we do have two brains." "How bright would our stomachs be in the animal kingdom?" "Would they be cleverer than an octopus?" "I think they're just good at one thing and that's preparing poo for exit." "it's the gut." "the colon." "according to the latest thinking." "stop writing." "geniuses." "Time to mark your papers." "Graham Norton." "APPLAUSE" "David Mitchell." "APPLAUSE" "Dara O'Briain." "APPLAUSE with today's geniuses of geniuses of genius is Alan Davies with four points!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "David and Alan." "I leave you with our genius Leonardo da Vinci's favourite joke. to which the painter replied but his children by night." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"