"Go-o-o-o-od where tonight we're gallivanting round the globe with G for Geography." "Jimmy Carr..." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING me?" "Jo Brand..." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Rob Brydon..." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Alan Davies." "APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING let's hear their global warnings." "Jimmy goes..." "THUNDER CLAP" "Rob goes..." "SHIP'S HORN you do." "Jo goes..." "AIR-RAID SIREN" "And Alan goes... Woodford Green." "veering strangely." "occasionally Rockall.' 000 British car journeys each year?" "ALAN:" "Radio One." "Very good." "000 British car journeys..." ""Are we nearly there yet?" "put the hood back on your head." KLAXON BLARES" "I'm sorry." "You were barely warmed up." "SatNav sending you down into a field." "000 insurance claims for serious road traffic incidents or accidents are put down to SatNav these days." ""Where would we be without SatNav?" "LAUGHTER Thanks for that." "That's added value." "That's very good." "Yeah. they had to be rescued off the roof of it by helicopter cos the SatNav directed them down into a ford." "but how much of a div would you have to be to actually see it ahead of you and drive into it?" "you go down a lane and the lane turns out to be... cos cars have got headlights." "I know." "It's a fair point." "She's got a very persuasive voice." "She has." "I call her my "Navigatrix". you get SatNav but you print it out into a booklet that you can just flick through." "What would you call it?" "er..." "Satlas." "Maybe..." "A satlas?" "A satlas." "What I don't like about SatNav is when it interrupts the radio. always at a crucial moment. the reason that we never had children is..." "Turn left in 40 yards." "generally." "Have you been asked to do one of the...?" "if you did that voice of a little man trapped inside a box." "yes." "Do your man who's trapped in a box or your American radio set that you've swallowed." "Ready?" "Where are you?" "I don't know where you are." "Somebody get me out of here." "Isn't that brilliant?" "APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH" "Stephen." "John Cleese does one..." "I thought that was an urban myth." "he does." "You can record it onto your own SatNav." "You can also do that." "I've done it on ours." "Oh! "Go left!" "Go left!" "here!" "No wonder there's so many accidents." "Apparently the favourite SatNav voices are Nigella Lawson... the ones I've got are Billy Connolly and Julie Walters." "Billy Connolly?" "Yeah." "He's done it?" "I know!" "see if you can have a guess." "Nick Griffin." "JO:" "Brian Sewell?" "Right." "You all know Simon Cowell..." "JIMMY:" "Hitler?" "Cath..." "I think he'd have kitsch value." "Catherine Tate." "Are these impressions?" "They're not... surely?" "straight on" and they fiddle about with it." "and Baroness Thatcher is there." "right." "LAUGHTER and er... with free Dale Winton voice and alerts"." "park the car. perhaps the most extreme one was a Syrian lorry driver transporting luxury cars from Turkey to Gibraltar" "600 miles out of his way. obediently followed it and was trying to drive into the North Sea when he was stopped." "a lot of villages' lives are ruined by being cut-throughs. which basically goes..." "In Welsh language?" "just a Welsh attitude." "A Welsh approach to life." "Or death." "get ready for it." "here it comes." "you've missed it." "do a U-ey." "Do a U-ey." "ah!" "attach a hosepipe to the exhaust and just end it all." "And that's a very popular one. apparently." "who is to the right of Genghis Khan?" "THUNDER CLAP" "Yeah?" "It's just quite funny." "every taxi driver I've ever met?" "girl." "Mrs Khan." "there were 500 Mrs Khans." "500?" "!" "He married 500." "isn't it?" "they recently did a test of Central Asian males and they found that 8% of all Central Asian males which may well be Genghis Khan." "000 years' time they'll be talking in the same way about Russell Brand?" "LAUGHTER It's highly possible." "being one of 500." "At least you'd only have to have sex with him every year and a half." "but he might've chopped your head off afterwards or something." "as you know." "in a weird kind of way." "who is on the right?" "you mean buried alongside him?" "Yeah." "Is he buried with relatives or with victims or plunder? no-one could know." "So this gave them a real problem." "000 people were killed to keep his burial place secret." "All the slaves who excavated the grave were killed by soldiers and then all the soldiers who killed the slaves... until they suddenly realised they were in danger of killing everybody who knew where the grave was. OK?" "So what they..." "This is really unpleasant." "A suckling baby camel they killed in front of its mother right?" "And then they took the mother away and they buried the baby camel next to Genghis Khan." "So that's who's to the right of Genghis Khan." "And every year..." "Ah!" "I was going to guess that." "Every year... cos it knew exactly where its little baby was." "It's very sad." "JIMMY:" "That's a nice story(!" ") Yeah." "Thanks for that." "I might tell my daughters that tonight to get them off to sleep." "I've got a lovely story about a camel." "So then the camel died..." "JIMMY:" "Then the camel died..." "And then no-one knew where he was buried. acted like a sort of 13th-century SatNav guiding people back to his tomb." "how did the teacup change the course of Chinese history?" "Did they used to have tea just in their hands like that before?" "you might almost say..." "We'll have to invent something for this." "that it was a disadvantage." "It held back the course of Chinese history." ""Cuppa?" "Yeah." "we've got nothing done." "Unlike the Europeans..." "Is it because or is it because they invented it and they didn't invent other things that would have come before it? hence calling it China." "But we had problems..." "We also liked wine which they never drank in China. and we developed a technology for containing wine. came telescopes and microscopes." "intellectuals and scientists had an extra 15 to 20 years of reading and active life glass - and the Chinese had no glass made in all of China from the 14th century right up to the 19th century." "And no mirrors either." "And therefore no mirrors. the one thing they couldn't do..." "And electronics used glass for valves and so on." "a lot of them prefer coffee." "Yeah!" "Go figure!" "What did they do for a window?" "They used paper." "Huh!" "Yeah." "Paper is rubbish for a window." "It's wet and you can't see through it." "that's another thing..." "Dark houses!" "either." "These people are useless!" "What about lanterns?" "Turn the lantern out in the dark." "They had Chinese lanterns." "that's the worst invention yet." "They probably let off a few indoor fireworks." "They had fireworks." "They had fireworks. and those tin foil ones with the cardboard lid." "Yes." "they were way ahead in some areas." "They clearly were." "that's China and glass." "The course of Chinese history changed by their preference for tea James Wyld installed a 60-foot-high scale model of the Earth and the seas and the mountains built to scale." "What was the best direction to see it from?" "What about from inside?" "was it made of glass?" "but from inside." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "It was one of the wonders of the age." "between 1851 and 1862." "I visited several times and never met with anyone who wasn't delighted with it or didn't find it most instructive. about sort of between 10 and 11 o'clock." "yeah." "Yeah? one of the odd things about the way maps and projections are..." "A globe is an accurate representation of what we think the world is - it's round." "is exactly the same." "if you were to take a piece of paper right." "That's kind of like how..." "But it would look identical if you took the same piece of paper and looked at it when it was concave rather than convex." "then?" "it came down after 12 years." "whoever owned Leicester Square." "How utterly pedestrian." "The lease on the ground on which it stood." "So high rents in the West End?" "It sounds like a brilliant thing to build again." "Wouldn't it be wonderful?" "It's a very successful..." "It was there to coincide with the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. someone pointing like that." "But it's a very fine..." "Top hats." "And tops hats." "We'll all wear top hats to go inside the Earth." "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "There he was." "A man called Wyld." "His Great Globe in Leicester Square." "viewed from the inside." "Let's try something simpler." "Where did the Arctic Highlanders get their cutlery from?" "Sheffield." "That's where you get your cutlery from." "KLAXON BLARES" "Hey!" "from Nordic..." "JO:" "IKEA." "KLAXON BLARES" "Northern...?" "that's the clue." "Arctic Highlanders was the..." "Do you mean Eskimos?" "yep. he was the first European to encounter... they thought they were the only people on the planet." "They didn't know there were any other people in the world." "It's very much like that in Essex." "Is it like that in Essex?" "they'd never seen anyone else." "But they had cutlery." "Metal cutlery?" "Metal cutlery." "Where did it come from?" "Where did it come from?" "Aliens." "Aliens is not a bad idea." "Was it one of the guys that went up there to the North Pole and just left a bunch of stuff and they found it?" "was the first European ever to go up close to the North Pole." "I'm talking a long time ago." "Look." "See?" "before anyone had been to the North Pole." "And they had proper knives..." "Pretty proper." "They were a mixture of bone and metal." "Was it mail order?" "But they didn't have the technology..." "Did they excavate them or something? they had no knowledge about iron ore or anything of the kind." "And they thought they were the only people?" "The only people on Earth." "So it's a real puzzle." "But they had cutlery." "Not from a box from Sheffield that got washed ashore." "Not an abandoned Ford Escort?" "No." "It was still 1818." "It was just... is it because the North Pole is magnetic and... when... that's where it ends up." "Drifting shipwrecks." "No." "You were closest with aliens." "Ah!" "Was it meteorites?" "Jo Brand." "Points there." "that's two I've got right." "to them." "So that's what they knew them as. metal flakes and they attached bits of horn as cutlery." "supposedly?" "no." "JO:" "Ranulph Fiennes?" "I would have preferred it if it was Ralph Fiennes." "We're talking about 1880." "1880?" "1890s." "Queen Victoria." "an American." "Peary." "There he was." "He was a rather..." "He was a yeti." "He was a pretty horrific figure." "He went to these same people 000." "didn't he?" "Took some children." "He took six of whom four died of TB instantly." "One of them survived and was brought up by an American couple. as a skeleton in the Natural History Museum in New York." "On display." "and Peary refused to do anything about it." "But reluctantly gave him enough money to carry home." "It wasn't till 1993 that the remains of those Inuits were sent back to their homelands." "That's horrific! I know him." "That's awful!" "It is." "It's a horrible episode in the exploitation of a native peoples. to a degree." "riches and ambition." "He was psychotically ambitious." "most people believe he didn't get to the North Pole himself he would have had to have gone at a speed that no-one has subsequently ever gone on Arctic exploration." "The Dog and The Woman. 40 years after the last person who spoke it died?" "A confidence trickster?" "A teacher...?" "A parrot?" "Yes!" "Jo Brand!" "That is good." "Brilliant." "JO:" "Amazing." "You are rocking!" "You are absolutely rocking. apparently. "and it knows..." JIMMY:" "How did it talk its way out of that?" "It had 40 words in the language which von Humboldt wrote down and learned." "we can't know how accurate it was. and they made guesses as to what the 40 Ature words might be." "then?" and that sort of thing." "Humboldt." "I find that kind of stereotyping rather offensive." "So you're saying that all gay people are like "cheeky boys"?" "no!" "When are you going to let up with your relentless gay bashing?" "APPLAUSE" "How many words can a parrot learn?" "Do you know?" "182." "That's good and specific." "but the odd thing is why they speak at all." "Why is it that they do mimic humans? where they can go..." "PUTS ON "MAN-IN-A-BOX" VOICE no parrot in the wild has ever been observed mimicking another bird or another animal." "There are birds in the wild that mimic..." "There are birds that do." "..Noises." "but parrots don't." "In the wild they have their own screech and they're satisfied with that." "They don't imitate other birds." "They've never been observed to." "And that is rather a shock." "Do you have the answer to this?" "I hope so." "I don't." "no." "It's a real question." "Humboldt apparently learned Ature from a parrot. for a quick-fire round." "What do Mongolians live in?" "SHIP'S HORN it's like a "yult" or a "yat" "Do you mean a yurt?" "that's the one." "Rob." "and Mongolians would not be pleased if you called their "ger" a yurt." "indeed." "Now we know." "They don't call them that." "That's where they live and it means "home" in Mongolian." "Where in Holland is the Dutch city of Groningen?" "Is it not going to be in Holland?" "It's not in Holland." "It's in another one of the Netherlands." "Yes." "You're very smart." "There are two provinces called Holland and they're both south of where Groningen is." "you see?" "So there's two places called Holland?" "Yep." "The country's called the Netherlands all the big cities are." "it's in the Netherlands." "The photo you showed looked like Guildford." "It did a bit." "That famous shot of Guildford." "couldn't it?" "So easily." "If it didn't have a big sign saying "Groningen"." "I felt." "Yeah." "That's the giveaway." "They have a pub that claims to have been open non-stop for ten years." "it could be Britain." "Exactly." "Exactly." "Are you suggesting we have more in common with our European neighbours than otherwise? think that's a bad thing." "hear." "Quite right." "Quite right." "Very good." "we're all the same." "LAUGHTER very good. an eighth of the country's land mass." "Us calling the whole country Holland is like them calling Britain East Anglia." "but they don't." "What is quite interesting about Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire?" "Is it to do with the height above sea level?" "but you're so much in the right area." "Is it the height below sea level?" "Is it not flat and it hasn't got a church?" "It's not that exactly." "Is it the highest flat bit?" "but it's the sea." "Think of the sea." "You're in Derbyshire." "I know this!" "It's the point in Britain that is the..." "Alan." "LAUGHTER" "I won't have you competing for Sir's favour." "You are both very good boys." "you can't be more... 70 miles is..." "Nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast." "Which perhaps makes Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire the very middle of the country." "Anyway." "Which language is the Spanish national anthem sung in?" "I'm going to go for..." "Am I?" "I'm going to..." "THUNDER CLAP" "Is it Spanish?" "N-n-n-no." "KLAXON BLARES is it?" "Catalan?" "Is it Catalan?" "KLAXON BLARES" "Is it Cas-Castilian?" "really." "Castilian is classic Spanish." "Can you just remind me?" "by a parrot?" "Ature." "It's not that one." "BUZZER: 'Rockall.'" "LAUGHTER" "I didn't say anything." "Don't be aggressive." "is it instrumental?" "well done." "but they have one of the oldest tunes called "La Marcha Real"." "It's the only national anthem with no words." "The old ones were dropped after the death of Franco in '75." "But then they were inspired by visiting Liverpool fans called "Carousel"... 'ey!" "Don't talk rubbish." "It is!" "so the Sp..." "LAUGHTER having fallen foul of several Spanish regions. for being too nationalistic." "What?" "For a national anthem for..." "For a national anthem." "Duh!" "we sing together with different voices and only one heart." "Do you hear in the countryside" "The roar of those ferocious soldiers?" "They come right here into your midst" "To slit the throats of your sons and wives." "Which is...quite aggressive." "I don't know if you know that." "Of course I know the sixth verse to "God Save The Queen"!" "I have to sing it all the way through." "Is it about going up to Scotland and killing everybody?" "Lord grant that Marshal Wade" "May by thy mighty aid victory bring" "May he sedition hush" "And like a torrent rush rebellious Scots to crush God save the king." "yeah!" "LAUGHTER" "I'm sorry." "The oddest one is back to our old friends the Dutch." "The Dutch national anthem." "It's still the Dutch national anthem." "William of Nassau scion of a Dutch and ancient line" "Dedicate undying faith to this land of mine" "A prince I am undaunted of Orange ever free" "To the king of Spain I've granted a lifelong loyalty." "In the Dutch national anthem they say they've granted a lifelong loyalty to the king of Spain." "The most deferential anthem ever heard! but that's a long time ago." "The Spanish national anthem is the only one which officially has no words." "they were rejected for being too patriotic." "ladies and gentlemen. but in last place with minus 28 points it's Rob Brydon." "APPLAUSE" "Not good." "Jimmy Carr." "sort of a winner." "Sort of the first of the winners." "Who can it be?" "Who can it be?" "Who can it be?" "In second place with minus ten is Jo Brand." "APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH" "And he breasted the tape at the very last minute" "Alan Davies." "WILD APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "it only remains for me to thank to wish you all safe onward journeys." "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Goodnight." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"