"Well, the basic idea came out of the fact that I had a big feud on a TV show where a religious fundamentalist kept saying," ""Oh, you want to ban Christmas."" "I said, "I don't want to ban Christmas, I love Christmas."" "So I thought, why not put on a huge Christmas spectacular for people who might not believe in God?" "If you believe in God that doesn't matter either - it's mainly about science and the..." "Just the majesty of the universe." "BAND PLAYS" "And so it started from a small thing and now you see one act going on and doing bizarre songs or just strange comedy and the next moment Ben Goldacre's talking about the placebo effect and Brian Cox talking about, again, the majesty of the universe" "and footprints from three million years ago." "I used to describe it as being the Royal Variety Show placed in a matter transporter with the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures and this is the mutation that comes out." "APPLAUSE" "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nine Lessons And Carols For Godless People." "Would you please welcome your host, your curator - it's Robin Ince!" "APPLAUSE AND CHEERS" "Every aspect of nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe." "Theophrastus was right." "Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to non-existent knowledge and envision a cosmos centred on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition." "They avoid rather than confront the world." "For those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries." "Hello!" "That's the agenda for this evening." "This is..." "Those first words were by Carl Sagan." "Carl Sagan is one of my heroes." "Tonight, basically what we're doing is celebrating the majesty of the universe and MOST of the things in it." "There are so many wonderful people - we have scientists, musicians, comedians coming on to talk and..." "Science shows are fantastic, but I don't know how many..." "Do we have any scientists in?" "Have we got any particle physicists in?" " A FEW SHOUTS" " Excellent!" "Here's one for you." "Two particle physicists walk into a bar...or do they?" "Maybe not in this universe." "Well done." "That's the first tick, as an audience you got that." "When you do science in comedy clubs sometimes the audience are sitting there going, "What's he on about?"" "Whereas when you do it with a science audience they go, "What's he on about?" ""He doesn't understand the theory at all!" ""This is rubbish, rubbish I tell you!" And I have had these incidences..." "I did a gig in Exeter and at one point someone very near the end of the show went..." ""Drosophila!" "Why don't you do any material about the fruit fly?"" "And I came back with this, which I thought wasn't a bad comeback." "I said, "Well, the trouble with doing observational material about the fruit fly is, of course," ""it's used for experimentation due to the random nature and rapid nature of its mutation," ""therefore any observations about it on a Tuesday become irrelevant by Sunday."" "And it got very little that night, very, very little." "So, tonight, as I said, we're celebrating lots of things." "It is a fantastic world and I do get very, very excited by the wonderful things." "Just the bizarre things." "I love, for instance, evolution." "I love the theory of evolution." "I think it might have been the system that was used." "Edgy choice, which possibly means this can never be sold to America, but let's not worry about that now." "The theory of evolution is fantastic yet we still live in an age where things are a little bit strange." "Like a while back I saw Vivienne Westwood give a lecture about global warming, right?" "It was good and she was trying hard, but there was one thing she said that did annoy me a bit." "I was backstage with Ben Goldacre and both of us are quite good at being tetchy, right?" "And at one point Vivienne Westwood went," ""I think the problem nowadays is a lot of people read too many books."" "Yeah, yeah, I know, that is..." "That is the biggest issue in the United Kingdom, I think." "When we see the end of civilisation, who shall be the main culprits?" "Those idiots who were in the library all the time!" "They spent so long reading they forgot to go out and drink blue drinks and be sick in a bin - fools!" "As I said, I'm very, very happy to have just such an incredible mix of people on tonight and the first is someone I've been working with for years." "He has become Death, the Destroyer Of All Worlds - by which I mean he works at CERN - please welcome Professor Brian Cox!" "APPLAUSE AND CHEERS" "I want to talk about the things I find most beautiful and wonderful about the universe." "The first is the size and scale and beauty of the universe as revealed to us by space exploration and astronomy and cosmology." "This is one of my favourite pictures." "It was taken on my first Christmas Eve in 1968, a very famous picture as Apollo VIII went round the back of the moon for the first time and saw Earthrise." "And whatever you think about the cost or the difficulty or the reasons for the Apollo program, many people have cited this picture as being the picture that really was the birth of the environmental movement, because for the first time we saw our planet not as something that was eternal" "and, well, impossible to damage in a way, but as a beautiful and fragile crescent rising over the moon's surface." "This is another wonderful picture, I think, which again reveals that fragility of the Earth from space." "This is Saturn backlit by the sun, so you see the majesty and beauty of Saturn's rings." "But the most remarkable thing about this picture is the little moon in the top, or it looks like a moon, in the top left-hand corner." "You see it there blown up, a little spot of light between the rings." "That is a picture of our planet taken from 750 million miles away, captured by chance in the photograph." "I think one of the remarkable things about the Earth is the further away you get and the smaller and more fragile it looks the more beautiful it becomes." "But, of course, the universe is much bigger than that." "This is a picture of the night sky, the constellation of Orion, and a few years ago now the Hubble space telescope took a picture of a piece of sky, which is actually the piece of sky you would cover" "if you took a five-pence piece and held it 75 feet away, so you imagine how tiny that piece of sky is, and this is a zoom in to that piece of sky." "From Earth if you looked there with the naked eye it's absolutely black, so there are no stars visible in that tiny black piece of sky, but the Hubble opened its camera for, well, thousands and thousands of seconds and it took this picture," "which is absolutely full of detail and structure." "It's called the Hubble Deep Field Image, and pretty much every point of light in that picture is a galaxy." "There are over 10,000 galaxies in this tiny picture of that tiniest piece of sky, each one with, well, on average, 100,000 million stars like our Sun." "The most distant galaxies in that picture are over 11 billion light years away, which means the light from most of those galaxies began its journey to our eyes before the Earth was formed." "So the universe is big and beautiful and I think..." "But the most remarkable thing for me is when you take those two pictures, so the beauty and simplicity of the universe as revealed by particle physics, and put it together with the scale and size of the universe revealed by cosmology," "because we get then is a story." "13.7 billion years ago, the universe began." "After about, well, a billion years or so, it was cold enough for the first stars to form and on one planet, and only one planet that we know of at the moment, life evolved about what, 4.5 billion years ago?" "And only three million years ago our ancestors left the first footprints in the mud flats of Tanzania in the Rift Valley of Africa, and three million years later left their footprint on another world." "And we built this civilisation, this astonishing achievement that can be seen from space." "The great Carl Sagan said that these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years." "What a remarkable picture revealed by particle physics, astronomy and cosmology." "Now, there are people at the moment who say that, well, we can't really afford to do this, particularly in the current economic climate." "You may have seen our government and its quangos last week cut the funding for particle physics and astronomy, particularly the young people to do it." "I would refer them to one of my heroes, Sir Humphry Davy, who was one of the great scientists in the 18th and turn of the 19th century, who through just exploring the minutest detail, taking delight in the wonder of the universe," "built Britain's industrial heritage and, well, laid the foundations for that wonderful civilisation." "He said that there is nothing more dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer." "Thank you." "APPLAUSE" "Professor Brian Cox!" "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Steel." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERS" "So, I've never failed to be..." "Be depressed when I hear people talk about science being complicated and boring, because it's fascinating." "Not just because it's about little squiggly figures, but it's a social idea of science, you know?" "But they make it boring at school and they make out that all the scientists must have been important people with wigs and English people with quills and stuff like Isaac Newton." ""Haha, methinks, indeed, yonder apple hath fallen..." And it wasn't like that." "Isaac Newton was gay, you know." "He had a gay Swiss boyfriend for years." "It changes the whole way you think about him, doesn't it?" "Once you know that you imagine him saying things like, "Oh, because of gravity I can't help but go down" " "on a body with a large mass."" " LAUGHTER" "But..." "But on the other hand, see, I'm not..." "I'm not antireligious in another way because I think there's something brilliant about religion." "I think I would like to be religious if you could get over the bit where you have to believe in God." "I quite like the idea of thinking that there's something bigger in the universe than you, and it can make a lot of people feel sort of very confident about campaigning against injustice and stuff like that." "It's just that, I mean, the Christian church in this country just, they don't sound passionate enough about it." "Like the Thought For The Day thing that happens on Radio Four in the morning." "It's pathetic." "You believe in a God, go for it!" "Don't give it all this bollocks they do where they just talk about whatever they've done the day before and then shuffle Jesus in there somehow." "You've got to do better than that!" "Oh, last night I was watching the latest episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and as some poor, hapless restaurateur found himself once again on the wrong end of Mr Ramsay's ribald invective" "I thought to myself, "Isn't this a little bit like Jesus?"" "LAUGHTER" ""Because Jesus, too, went out for supper one night" ""and that turned into a bit of a nightmare." ""Good morning!"" "But I don't like the sort of..." "The side of atheism that is condescending towards religious people." "I'm not a fan of that." "You know, "Oh, they're all stupid, how can they believe in all these stupid little Guru Nanak-y," ""Mohammed moving mountains, it's all just rubbish!"" "Because I think, well, no, you know, I understand why people come from that sort of idea, and also therefore don't have a go at a specific religion - usually it's Islam now, isn't it?" "People like having a go at that." "I saw a headline in the newspaper that said "these Muslim women wear the veil to threaten us"." "I did think, "Oh, come on, how pathetic do you have to be to be threatened by a veil?"" "It's made of cloth!" "Is it... "Oh, some of them have got serrated edges." Really?" "I mean, are these really the people threatening us?" ""Oh, you go down the city centre and there they all are, the Muslim women" ""draped over the benches there sicking up their mango lassis, threatening us."" "I..." "So I don't like it when individual religions..." "They're all equally mental, I mean that's..." "That's all right." "And I mean..." "And, of course, the thing is that, I know I'm not the first person to point this out, but this has fascinated me." "That little bit, and I know it's only one bit of radical jihadist Islam that has that idea that if you are a martyr to the cause then you are rewarded in Paradise with the 72 virgins." "I do think, "Oh, you haven't really thought that through, have you?"" "Because once you get past a certain age, you'd rather have someone with a bit of experience, wouldn't you?" "These poor sods, they commit the ultimate sacrifice and then they get to some celestial little Paradise VIP bit specially for them, and then they get some teenager yanking them about!" ""Oww!"" ""Sorry, I've never done this before."" ""Be a bit gentle, will you?" "I was blown up on a bus this morning!"" "So..." "So, in a sense, I'm not sort of anti-religious, I'm anti the sort of the..." "The social side of what creates those mystical ideas and I think that the ideal way," "I'll finish with this, the thing that would sort it out really..." "It would be brilliant if religion could just sort itself out the way most football fans have now." "Because football fans used to go down to football matches and get in fights and scraps and it doesn't usually happen now." "People go in opposite sides of the ground and shout and scream at each other and then they have a pint afterwards and it's like it's all got out of their system with the chanting, and that's what religion will be like eventually." "Jews will be able to go down to mosques and go," ""You're damned and you know you are," and it'll just be..." "Everyone will just do it through chanting." ""Can you hear the Trappists sing?" "I can't hear a fucking thing!"" "Thanks very much for listening." "APPLAUSE" "Now please welcome to the stage one of Britain's greatest singer songwriters, it is Mr Robyn Hitchcock." "APPLAUSE" "# What you call God" "# I call evolution" "# What you call faith" "# I call Mum and Dad" "# They drive you mad" "# Your mum and dad" "# They're what you had or never had" "# We evolve and it breaks my heart" "# We evolve and we fall apart" "# What you call faith" "# I call it pollution" "# What you believe" "# Is going to kill us all" "# And if Jesus was alive" "# Would you give him a high five" "# We evolve and thank life for that" "# We evolve." "Is the world still flat" "# We evolve. # APPLAUSE" "Thank you" "When I was at school I kind of went off science because..." "I was really into it until I was 13 and then the first physics lesson was holding a peanut under a test tube full of water to find out the energy of a peanut and I love snacks, but, nevertheless, that was kind of the end of it." "And I told a teacher about this recently that went, "We don't do that any more due to nut allergy."" " LAUGHTER" " They use a marshmallow instead, a more interesting flame." "But there is a problem about the dry nature of science and I'm going to bring on a friend of mine," " Ben Moor, who is going to help me illustrate this." "Ah, yeah, why not?" " APPLAUSE" "Let's have a round of applause for Ben Moor." "Because I saw..." "I saw a review of a TV show." "It was a comedy science show and they actually said the comedians do very well with the dry subject of science, just that idea that everything, everything in the universe, the dry subject of everything." "Dry, dry science." "So, here are a few dry, dry scientific facts." "There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy and more galaxies in the universe than stars in this Milky Way." "Dry, dry science." "Remove all the empty spaces from the atom and the human race will fit in something the size of a sugar cube." "Dry, dry science." "There was a time when there was no time." "Dry, boring science!" "Boring, rubbishy science." "At the end of every seven years, every brain cell in your head is different to the one you had seven years before." "Boring, brain-based, rubbish science." "Man's impact on the Earth is such that a fossil record of its tenure would appear to be a comet strike." "Dry, rubbish science." "Shortsighted male African orchid beetles accidentally have sex with orchids nearly all the time." "Dry, rubbish, orchid shagging facts." "There may be an infinite number of universes where this show is happening in an infinite number of ways." "Some of them it may be shorter, some longer." "Everything that makes a banana makes up a human being, it's just a different order of As, Cs, Ts and Gs." "Boring As, Cs, Ts and Gs." "Macaque monkeys in experimentation will forfeit food in exchange for pornography." "LAUGHTER" "Stupid, boring, wanking monkey facts." "We all are made of star stuff." "Our atoms were born in the cauldron of stars." "In you, you've got the atoms from stars." "Rubbish, boring," " dry science." " APPLAUSE" "So, sorry about that." "Thank you very much, Ben Moor." "I'm going to quickly tell you one of my favourite things when we did the show last year and" "Richard Dawkins was pacing up and down, getting ready." "He was slightly nervous." "I said to him, don't worry, they'll be a lovely audience and then suddenly two teenagers walked in wearing T shirts saying, "Richard Dawkins is God."" "LAUGHTER" "He turned round and went, "Oh, no, that means I believe I don't exist."" "LAUGHTER" "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage one of my favourite scientists, Simon Singh." "APPLAUSE" "What I'm going to talk about is something that's a bit controversial because I think this is going to be some of the most convincing evidence that God actually exists." "It's something called the Bible Code." "The idea behind the Bible Code is that there are coded messages in the Bible." "Let me show you what I mean." "What you do..." "The way they're coded is you get rid of the spaces, you get rid of the punctuation so you just have a string of letters and then you start lighting up letters." "For example, you could light up the first letter and jump five spaces." "That gives us the word, "Ibno." That's not a word." "LAUGHTER" "So, you start somewhere else, that's maybe the 30th letter and you jump every 27 spaces." "That gives you E-A-E-D-A." "That's not a word." "If you read it backwards it's not a word." "But if you keep on doing this..." "A chap called Michael Drosnin wrote a whole book called The Bible Code." "If you keep doing this with the ancient Hebrew texts, if you do it with the Torah, you begin to find words." "Not just words, but combinations of words that spell out predictions that have now come true." "This is absolutely true." "So, for example, here is one section of Bible Code." "Hitler, evil man, slaughter," "Nazi, enemy." "All encoded in the ancient Torah." "It's true, it's true." "You also have the death of Kennedy." "To die President Kennedy in Dallas." "In a separate section we have the marksman, the name of the assassin who will assassinate is Oswald, all encoded in the Torah." "And also touching on science as well as current affairs." "We have Newton and gravity." "Now, this is absolutely true." "It's undeniably existing in the ancient Hebrew texts." "But a mathematician, a hero of mine, Brendan McKay, an Australian mathematician, started looking at these Bible codes and started thinking, "Well, maybe it's just a coincidence."" "Drosnin said, "No." LAUGHTER" "He said, "If I find one prediction," ""that's a coincidence." "If I find over 200 predictions and they've all come true, that's the hand of God." "And McKay continued to protest, but Drosnin said, "If you think this is so easy, if you think this is just a coincidence" ""get another book, see if you can find predictions in another book using my technique."" "In fact, he challenged him to find predictions in Moby Dick." "So, Brendan McKay, being a mathematician, willing to put his ideas to the test, started looking for coded messages in Moby Dick." "And this is what he found." "This is a section of text from Moby Dick." "Get rid of the spaces, get rid of the punctuation and this is the coded message." "Letters in a straight line, equally spaced, this is what we find." "We find the word, "Trotsky", running right up the middle." "Not only do we find the word, "Trotsky", we find the word, "Ice", because Trotsky was killed with an ice pick to the back of the head and the word, "Hammer" and, "The steel head of the lance" " "a clear description about the death of Trotsky in Moby Dick!" "There are over 200 predictions in Moby Dick." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "This is just a coincidence." "There are so many letters in a book, a million letters in Moby Dick, a million starting points, a million ways you can jump around." "Thousands and billions of different combinations with so many possibilities, you will find everything in any large book." "Anything that has or hasn't ever happened." "Everything that will or won't happen." "This is just a coincidence." "Now, coincidences can be lovely, but the question is are they real and important or are they just whimsy?" "My favourite coincidence is from Shakespeare's Hamlet." ""To be or not to be"." "If we take this very famous quote, if we rearrange those letters from Shakespeare's Hamlet we end up with the following anagram." "In one of the Bard's best thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero," "Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "You can say, "How weird is that?" "Shakespeare wasn't just a brilliant writer, he was a brilliant puzzler!"" "There is nothing weird about this." "Shakespeare wrote so much stuff that this is bound to happen eventually." "It is not weird." "The only weird thing is that somebody bothered finding this." "LAUGHTER" "I mean, this annoys me because people still continue..." "Well, I should stress one point here, I'm not having a go at religion." "This is not anti-religious, it's about the way religion is used." "Not antireligious at all." "In fact, earlier this year I joined the UK Reincarnation Society and it cost me 500 quid, but I thought what the hell, you only live once." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "The..." "Now what's annoying is these ideas can continue to be sold and published in books." "This is from Bible Code II and it predicts all the events of 9/11, except the book comes out after 9/11." "It's just data mining." "But the wonderful thing is, and I'll leave you with this, Brendan McKay, the Australian mathematician, continues to find more predictions within Moby Dick, richer predictions, just to show how easy it is to find predictions in any book, and this is my favourite set of predictions." "There are lots of them in here." "They all relate to somebody whose life was foolishly wasted in an accident involving power and velocity and is mortal in these jaws of death." "The person is" "Lady Diana, Princess Diana, Princess of Wales." "And encoded in here, there are lots of references to that tragedy." "So, for example, we start off..." "I'll light them up one by one because there's so many of them and I'll leave you with this." "The first one is "Wales", down here, because she was Princess of Wales." "Backwards here is Diana." "We have her full title here, Lady Diana running right down the middle." "How did she die?" "Well, it was a skid on a road." "Meeting at the D. Quite important." "The name of the driver, you may have forgotten, was Henri Paul and the other person in the car of course was Dodi, Dodi, Dodi, Dodi." "Thank you very much, goodnight." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the band - well, they already are centre stage - but to have a song of their own, please welcome Martin White And The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "# Outside these walls the very slings and arrows of misfortune soar" "# Our minds are on much higher things" "# We leave these troubling trifles for" "# Those few of you who'd cry and ball and grieve... #" "It's time that people who aren't committed to a religion or a belief in God can come out and..." "And celebrate..." "Celebrate togetherness." "# No News presents current events... #" "There's no silencing myself tonight." "This is proper high church nerdery." "If you don't see much science in this show it's because the TV people have cut it out." "# Please shut up, don't discuss the outside world... #" "People like me have a reputation for being a bit Scrooge-like at Christmas and for not having any sense of fun, so I hope this will dispel that illusion, which is assiduously fostered." "# Spare our souls from hell and smut... #" "I think you need to go out there, "I'm mad as hell about science funding!"" "That's what you need to do." "No, I'm just going to say it's useful because our country is too irrational, in my view, without doubt, and this is..." "The march of rationality begins here and then sweeps across the green fields of Britain." "# .." "Fight in the Crimea #" "# What's the latest news we'd heard... #" "My best friend is a science geek and I told her I was doing tonight." "She wasn't interested in coming to watch me perform, and I said to her, "Oh, right, OK," ""there's a bloke called Simon Singh on", and she leapt up from her maths masters and put on her coat and came with me and as I walked past her shelf, I saw a stack of Simon Singh books." "That's the other thing that science lecturers don't get is heckling." " Yeah." " I've not had that yet." "Apart from when someone goes, "Call that maths?" "!" ""Add that up in your head, did you?" "!", etc." " Exactly." " I might come and do that next time you lecture." " Yes." "I thought it was something entirely different." "I thought I was doing someone's bar mitzvah and that must have been here last night, so obviously I had to change some of the material, but, you know, I'm professional." "# Please come in but kindly shut up" "# Don't discuss the outside world. #" "APPLAUSE" "So, very quickly, I'll just tell you a joke that two teenagers told me when they came up to me on a train." "They went, "We saw you on Buzzcocks, you were all right." And then three of their friends joined and we were kind of in this bizarre reverse paedophile situation and..." ""Shoo, shoo, I'm an old man." "We are children!"" "And I was reading a book by Richard Feynman and they said, "What are you reading?"" "And I said, "It won't interest you." "It's a book by Richard Feynman."" "They went, "We love physics." Which was brilliant." ""Do you want to know a physics joke?"" "I went, "OK." They went, "Why are physicists rubbish at sex?" ""When they find the momentum they lose the position and" ""when they gain the position they lose the momentum."" "Please now welcome to the stage another absolutely fantastic comedian and it is Shappi Khorsandi!" "APPLAUSE" " Hello, everyone." " AUDIENCE:" "Hello." "This is delightful." "I was so excited to be invited to be a part of this because throughout my career I've been described as the Muslim comedian, Shappi Khorsandi, and I've never been brave enough to tell people that I'm not," "because you never know what nutcase will go," ""She's an apostic, kill her!"" "And so I feel in a safe space tonight to go, "Oh, thank fuck for that." "I'm amongst my own."" "And my..." "My path to, I don't know, non-believing," "I guess, wasn't a difficult one." "My father..." "My father's an atheist and when I was a kid, I went to a Christian school, but in the '80s, they just called them "school", and..." "And he didn't know how Christian it was, and I went to Brownies and my dad was fine with it until he found out it was a Christian organisation." "He thought it was an after-school club for Asian kids." "So I knew nothing about religion growing up." "For ages I thought Muslims and Jewish people don't eat pork because pigs are so cute!" "And I thought that Rabbi was a plural for rabbit." "It's not." "And my..." "My best friend at school was a Jewish girl and she had a piece of ham by accident..." "I did it." "I was only eight...een." "And she's, like, "Oh, my God, my rabbi's going to kill me!"" "And I was, like, "Why, have you not cleaned the hutch?"" "And I used to try and tell my parents about Christmas and I wanted to celebrate Christmas and they'd be like," ""Old man breaks into the house, creeps into your room, empties his sack?" "You're not having Christmas."" "And so when people of say to me..." "I met these Morris..." "I didn't meet these Morris dancers, I went to a summer solstice festival because I was told that I wouldn't be able to conceive naturally, and these Morris dancers..." "I didn't know it was paganism, I thought it was just middle class men with bells on their shins." "They plucked me out of the crowd and did this mad dance on me and they got all excited." "They were like, "Oh, you're Iranian, you're a Zoroastrian, you are a fire worshipper like us."" "And I was quite impressed because most people think Zoroastrians were worshippers of Zorro." "And they did this dance on me at the end of it." "The head Morris man went," ""That was an ancient fertility dance and if this young lady is not with child within a year" ""we're going to bring her back next year and do it all again properly."" "Within a year, I had my baby boy in my arms." "Don't look so worried, they didn't rape me, but..." "When my baby boy was born, the midwife came around with a little clipboard and she'd goes..." ""What's the ethnicity of your child?"" "And I looked at him and said, "Well, if I had to guess, I would say he's half otter, half squirrel monkey."" "She said, "We need to know for our records." I was like, "He's pink, do you have a box for pink?"" "She goes, "Where are his parents from?" I said, "We're both Middle Eastern." ""I'm from Iran and my husband's from Nottingham."" "And she goes, "So he's mixed race?" What does mixed race mean?" "It means nothing." "All of us, if we looked in our DNA, we're a mishmash of all sorts of different people." "I don't think you should call anyone mixed race unless they're obviously mixed race." "Like a mermaid." "If you see a mermaid, you can go, "Obviously someone in your ancestry got drunk on a beach," ""fucked a fish and now here you are, sitting on a rock crying." I don't want to get all politically correct, but mermaids are a seriously misrepresented minority in Britain." "You only ever see the very beautiful ones, you never see the ones that got the fish's head and the human legs." "Merry Christmas, everybody, thank you very much." "That was Shappi Khorsandi!" "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage the fantastic rap guide to evolution, please welcome to the stage" " Baba Brinkman." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Check." "Yes, I am a rap artist." "Don't panic." "The way this works is, I got approached last fall by a Professor of Microbiology who asked if I'd write some raps to help celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday." "So, all winter I sent him copies of my rap lyrics and he came back with corrections, which means my hip-hop show is peer reviewed." "So when I first started writing these evolution raps back in January, early drafts of my script were quite simple." "They weren't so complex." "One of my early drafts for the rap sounded like this." "Yo, yo." "The origin of species ain't no faeces, dog." "Believe me." "Woof." "But that was all I could think of, so then I was like, damn, this really needs to be rewritten!" "Aometimes people ask me, how does your show get written?" "Like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "And how do I generally develop my lyricism?" "Like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "And how did human beings ever learn to do anything?" "Like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "And evolution is really just kind of an algorithm that goes like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "So the genetic code of every living creature was also written like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "The genes are like a text with 100,000 pages and revisions occur in the random changes that come from mutations and when they see the light, that's the performance, that's the phenotype." "And natural selection, well, that's the feedback side." "That's about who survives and whose genes catch rise in the next generation." "A rap performance like this is the best illustration for the way that descent with modification works." "Because the performance is necessary to change the words to decide which have an impact and which to send back to the drawing board." "In fact, I just did that when you failed to react because any line can change and mutations occur when I improvise on stage because up until this moment everything I said was off the page, but now it's time for me to switch it up and do a little freestyle section." "I'm going to try to make it specific so that I can beat your cheater detection." "Yes, I might be a bit of a tough act to follow at the Hammersmith Apollo, that's why the interval's next, but I'm a massive apostle of science." "Yeah." "That's the way that it goes." "This is me just improvising trying to say what I know." "And when I make a mistake, that's just me rocking the rhythm and trying to introduce a little bit of mutation into the system." "I might just come with these freestyle ciphering flows." "Simon Singh found some nice stuff in my rhymes with the Bible Code." "He's been analysing them, I've been jumping them out and surprising him." "But you know I'm kind of the best at this." "I'm not a geneticist but I kind of understand the things that they've been expressing like every human being on this planet is relatives, which means every relationship is relatively incestuous." "Which this couple demonstrates." "Nice one, excellent." "Yes, indeed, this is the way that I'm rocking the rhythm." "This is what you call agnosticism." "Rationalism." "But, man, all of these critics have been pissing off Robin Ince talking about, ooh, godless liberals." "Well, come on, there's more to godless liberals than that." "We've got quantum physics and we've got ideas about evolutionary altruism, OK?" "And some people might try to say humanism is the new religion." "But it's not because our ideas are open to revision." "See that's the difference right here." "I'm trying to speak this stuff clear." "And if you like that idea, then you can make some noise back to me." "I'm just trying to scream it out with a lot of audacity." "CHEERING" "Yes, science does figure things out." "Actually not just mysticism." "I'm trying to flip into this rhythm." "Yes, this is me introducing more randomness into the system." "But this is my little concept, it's kind of simplistic, it goes like this." "Performance, feedback revision." "So if you want to know about evolution, this is the definition." "Like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "If you want to check it out again, I've got CDs, you can get them." "Like this." "Performance, feedback, revision." "So, anybody here can use this concept to learn how to do anything if you want." "Performance, feedback, revision." "So, say it with me." "Performance, feedback, revision." "Thank you." "APPLAUSE" "Baba Brinkman, ladies and gentlemen!" "So, a quick physics joke." "You may well know this one." "Ben told it to me earlier on, he's a friend of mine." "Ben said, it's a joke about Heisenberg." "Heisenberg's speeding freeway and a policeman pulls him over. "Do you know how fast you were going?"" "He says, "No, but I know exactly where I am." There we go!" "Thank you very much." "And I have..." "I've read too many books." "This is the trouble." "You don't learn more when you read books." "You learn three things more, but you also find out how much you didn't know you didn't know to start with." "The pie chart of the amount you know becomes less and less with each book." "It is a problem." "I am fascinated by those who doubt evolution." "There are certain people who deny the theory of evolution and are considered intellectuals." "This might be snotty, but I don't believe you can be an intellectual and deny the theory of evolution." "If you deny any idea of the theory of evolution, that's fair enough, but everything gained by the scientific method and learning and rationalism are also out the window." "Should you be on trial for murder and say, "Can I have a trial by jury?"" ""No, I'm afraid not." "You'll have to have a faith based trial." "Sorry."" "People just come and look at your face and go, "Yeah, I think she done it, put her in the gibbet!"" ""I'm really poorly, can I have some medicine?" "I'm afraid not." "The scientific method was used." ""Instead, we've got this man." "He dances over you and waves nettles." ""We found that to be the second best treatment."" "My favourite arguments against evolution..." " A woman called Ann Coulter..." "  GROANS" "Correct panto reaction from that area there!" "She wrote a book attacking the Theory of Evolution." "This is one of my favourite attacks." ""There's no transitional fossils." " "There's loads, they're just over there." "Well, I can't see them."" ""Turn round." "No, I won't." "I win!" That's basically how that works." "My three favourite arguments which are in Ann Coulter's Godless Church Of Liberalism." ""They say you can believe in evolution and you can believe in God." ""You can believe in Spiderman and you can believe in God," ""but that doesn't make Spiderman true."" "LAUGHTER" "Here's another one to enjoy." "There are currently 13 species of finch in the Galapagos Islands." "Guess how many there were when Charles Darwin was there." "Yeah, 13." "Yeah, evolution too slow for the neo con, ladies and gentlemen!" "But my favourite one is this, if evolution is true, why doesn't a worm evolve into a beagle?" ""Come on, worm!" "Lazy, lazy worm." "No wonder I lose Crufts every year."" "The next person who's going to come on..." "I almost said act, I think that would be wrong." "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor Richard Dawkins." "Last night, I tried reading a pastiche of PG Wodehouse that I'd been slaving over all week." "It fell a bit flat." "I think people don't read PG Wodehouse any more." "So I'm going to be absolutely deadly serious this evening and do a couple of readings, a few readings from some of my books." ""A celebrated film star places four quartz crystal clusters" ""in the four corners of her bathtub every time she takes a bath." ""This doubtless has some mystic connection with the following recipe for meditation." ""Each of the four quartz crystals in the meditation room" ""should be programmed to project gentle, loving, relaxing crystalline energy" ""towards all those present within the meditation group." ""The quartz crystals will then generate a field" ""of positive crystalline energy surrounding everyone in the room." ""Language like this is a con trick." ""It sounds scientific enough to bamboozle the innocent." ""Programming is what you do to computers." ""The word means nothing when applied to crystals." ""Energy and field are carefully defined notions in physics." ""There is no such thing as loving or crystalline energy, whether positive or no." ""Pseudoscientific drivel like this is a disturbingly prominent part of the culture of our age," ""but isn't it all just a bit of harmless fun?" ""If people want to believe garbage like astrology or crystal healing, why not let them?" ""But it's so sad to think about all that they are missing," ""the real world properly understood in the scientific way" ""is deeply beautiful and unfailingly interesting." ""It's worth putting in some honest effort to understand it properly," ""undistracted by false wonder and prostituted pseudoscience." ""For illustration, we need look no farther than crystals themselves." ""In a crystal like quartz or diamond, the atoms are arranged in a precisely repeating pattern." ""The atoms in a diamond, all identical carbon atoms, are arrayed like soldiers on parade, except that the precision of their dressing far outsmarts the best drilled Guards regiment," ""and the atomic soldiers outnumber all the people that have ever lived or ever will." ""Perhaps a prodigious school of fish is a better image." ""Each fish in the school is one carbon atom." ""Think of them hovering in space, keeping their distance from each other" ""and holding precise angles by means of forces that you can't see, but which scientists fully understand." ""But if this is a fish school, it is one that to scale would fill the Pacific Ocean." ""In any decent sized diamond, you're likely to be looking along arrays of atoms" ""numbering hundreds of millions in any one straight line."" "Thank you very much." "Ladies and gentlemen, the next musician on this evening, in the '90s, he was in one of my favourite bands, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine." "Please welcome to the stage Jim Bob." "Before I do this song about an industrial dispute between the angels and God," "I just want to tell you a quick thing that you might not know about the angels." "They really can't stand Robbie Williams." "LAUGHTER" "# Outside a cathedral near the axis of evil they march" "# Their picket line forming the shape of a proscenium arch" "# They switched off their halos and started working to rule" "# All the cold-blooded killers had the keys to the city today" "# They came for our children and nobody stood in their way" "# I turned on the TV to see what the world had to say" "# And a spokesman for the angels read a list of demands to the press" "# While a schoolboy took a bus ride With explosives gaffer taped to his chest" "# No kissing, no hugging No tender and loving caress" "# The management, the unions and the mediators sat down for talks" "# The bus bomb exploded As the fairies came out in support" "# And newspapers headline a story in bold black and white" "# Angels strike" "# Angels strike" "# There's no-one to check you To guard or protect you tonight" "# All the paedophiles walk from the chat rooms out on to the streets" "# Where God-fearing rednecks with scissors cut holes into sheets" "# This stay of celestial action could go on for weeks" "# While burning, looting, raping, shooting, earthquakes and hurricanes" "# Angels strike" "# Angels strike" "# There's no-one to check you To guard or protect you tonight" "# Angels strike" "# A-Angel" "# Angel" "# Angel. #" "Thanks very much." "Oh, we have so little time." "Oh, this is one thing that I must tell you about." "I have a son and he's about to be two years old very soon." "And this is part of the magical nature of the universe and of genetics the fact that when I look at my son I love him more than anything else in the world." "And I just find him..." "And I think he's better than all the other children, right?" "But I know that's just genetics, right?" "But, equally, the weird thing is it turns out he is better than all the other children." "I've seen some of the other ones, they're ugly and rubbish and stupid, right?" "They are!" "My son this week was just marching around the house going, "Matador!"" "I know that, underneath it all, the reason that we love our children more than anything else is because they are a vehicle for our genes, but I have stopped putting that on his birthday card." "There's a fascinating thing, if any of you have children, there's this great thing where sometimes you look at your child and you can see your genetic heritage." "I, for instance, have very small thumbs, right?" "Quite stumpy thumbs." "And my son has quite stumpy thumbs." "And I sometimes worry that he'll get bullied at school because any kind of anomaly, that may happen." "But the weird thing was even though I have really stumpy thumbs," "I wasn't bullied at school, because, fortunately, I had a speech impediment." "A brilliant distraction." "And..." "I couldn't pronounce my Rs, how lucky for me being called Robin and..." "Every day it would be, like, "Let's go through the names." "Michael, Peter, R-r-robin."" "Everyone goes, "R-r-robin, R-r-robin," like that." "Then they'd get worse because I knew I was doing it, because they kept pointing it out, so the "R-r-r" would become longer and longer." "So, by the time I was 15, it was like, "Michael, Peter, R-r-r-r-r-robin."" "And then, when I became 16 years old, when I was 16 one day, without knowing it, it just vanished." "It went, "Michael, Peter, Robin," and within half an hour, another boy came up to me and went, "Bloody hell, you've got weird thumbs!"" "LAUGHTER" "I'm very quickly going to read one of my favourite scientists, who is Richard Feynman." "He was a brilliant, Nobel Prize winning physicist, also expert bongo player and safecracker, right?" "Which to me is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the scientific world." "This is one of the reasons that I started to love science again." "It's a small piece from the Horizon documentary called The Pleasure Of Finding Things out, and I'm just going to give you a little bit." "I kind of do an impersonation of his voice, but often, halfway through, it becomes Mr Magoo, so I'm sorry about that." ""I've lost a tiny particle, I can't find it at all, I'm blind."" "Anyway, but..." "It might not happen." "So, here is my Hanna-Barbera scientist." "The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out." "I have a friend who's an artist and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with too well." "He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is."" "And I'll agree." "But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is, but you," ""as a scientist, you take it all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think he's kind of nutty." "That's the first thing I like." ""Kind of nutty" is underused in scientific debate." "If you're ever having a chat, I don't know, to... to, you know, a spine wizard, or to..." "Maybe there's a homeopath going, "As you can see, the water still has some of the bits in it," ""so we keep diluting, then there's none in it, then we bang it" ""on the Bible a few times and the water is very brainy and remembers" ""the thing and your flu's gone." "It's very clever." ""What do you say, scientist?"" ""I think it's kind of nutty."" ""Is that it?" "Yes, we're dealing with a lot of other things, as well."" "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "And it keeps being beautiful, because it continues, first, the beauty he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe." "Although I might not be as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower, but I can see much more in the flower than he sees." "I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty." "There's the beauty at a smaller dimension through the complicated actions of the cells and other processes." "That the colours have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - insects can see the colours, so does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?" "I don't understand how with the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower, there is any subtraction." "It only adds, I don't understand how it subtracts." "And that to me is the beauty of it, that science really does add, it really does add things." "I have some friends who, sometimes they're of a religious bent, sometimes it's not even that, they say, surely if you understand why a flower has become like a flower, doesn't that ruin the magic?" "I think if we lived in that world, that would not be a good world." "If we lived in a world where you took your child to a doctor and said," ""I'm worried, I think there's something wrong with the kidneys,"" "And the doctor went, "Oh, right." "Probably just cut him open and rummage around a bit." "What?"" ""We'll cut him open and rummage around."" ""You do understand how human beings work, don't you?"" ""Not really." "I think it ruins the magic."" "Then these would be bad times." "But a man who is now going to give his own particular side to the world of science, please welcome to the stage Dr Ben Goldacre." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Hi." "Look, sorry, I talk a bit quickly." "Somebody on Twitter last night said it was like being skull fucked with my data cock." "I wanted to talk about the nocebo effect, which is like the evil twin of the placebo effect." "It's the amazing ability of the mind to make you feel really, really rubbish." "The placebo effect is where you take a sugar pill get better." "Except the placebo effect isn't just about taking a sugar pill and getting better, it's about the cultural meaning, our beliefs and expectations, and this has been demonstrated with studies comparing one kind of placebo against another." "We know, that if you take two sugar pills a day instead of one, you get better faster from gastric ulcers." "And that is an outrageous finding." "We know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective form of pain relief than a sugar pill, not because either do anything physically to the body, but because it feels like a much more dramatic intervention." "We know that fake knee operations improve knee pain and fake angina operations improve angina." "We know that pacemakers improve congestive cardiac failure after they've been put in, but before they've been switched on." "So this is some properly outrageous findings, right?" "And I was kind of over it, but then, earlier on this month I was giving evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee for Science and Technology, which is the ultimate middle-class name-drop, and they said, "We understand you don't think homoeopathy works any better than placebo," ""but do you think it has any physical adverse consequences?" ""Do you think homeopathy pills actually harm people?"" "I said, "No," obviously." "But then, the homoeopaths on the panel who came after said," ""No, no, homeopathy pills, they can have side effects."" "And that seems crazy, but they were going, "No, no," ""they're so powerful, they can have positive effects and side effects."" "I looked into this and firstly, interestingly, they're wrong." "Actually, when a homeopath is wrong, that's sort of dog bites man." "There's a study comparing the number of people reporting side effects if they're getting real homoeopathy pills against sugar pills and there's no difference." "But what's mad about this experiment is it shows that people get side effects when they're just taking a sugar pill." "So people studied this in more detail and the side effects that you get are those that you expect to get." "So then people start doing these sinister studies, going out of their way to try and make people feel really shit, and I'll tell you about three." "Firstly, asthma." "Take 100 people with asthma, sit them down and put a saline nebuliser on their face." "A saline nebuliser is this thing that makes a mist of salty water that you inhale, and if you've got asthma, it'll just do nothing at all." "Sit 100 people down, switch it on, nothing happens." "Sit 100 people down with asthma, put a saline nebuliser on their face, tell them it's an allergen, switch it on, bang, half of them have an asthma attack!" "Next study." "The puking study." "They put people inside a rotating drum designed to make you puke." "They gave them all sugar pills, to half of them they said," ""We're putting you in the rotating drum, but we'll give you an anti-emetic." They didn't puke." "The other half, they said, "We've been doing studies on this drug it's really effective," ""but it has this side effect that it makes you want to puke, so we're trying to work out how much" ""it makes you want to puke and we're going to put you in this machine that makes you want to puke" ""and we'll give you the puking drug." And those people puked." "The third is a study on Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant." "This was a big study and they divided people into six groups, OK?" "Half the people got the real muscle relaxant, half the people just got a dummy sugar pill and they were told one of three stories." "Either, "We're giving you the muscle relaxant," or, "We're giving you a sugar pill,"" "or, "We're giving you a stimulant that'll make you feel uptight, it'll make your muscles tense," ""improve your reaction time and we'll measure how tense your muscles are and what your reaction time is."" "The results of this experiment were properly insane." "Three things." "The people who got a dummy sugar pill but were told they were getting a stimulant, they were really uptight and tense and had faster reaction times." "The people who were given the muscle relaxant, the real muscle relaxant, but were told it was a stimulant, were even more clenchy and uptight than anybody else and that's probably because of something called the active placebo effect, because they'd taken this pill, then they could feel it working." "They're thinking, "I've got the real shit this time, this is really kicking in," and that potentiated, that enhanced the effect of their beliefs on their body." "It wasn't just enough to overcome the relaxant effect of the drug, it was enough to turn it on its head so they were actively, properly, more tense." "The most insane part of this whole study, the people who were given the muscle relaxant, but were told they were given the muscle relaxant, had higher blood plasma levels of the muscle relaxant than any other group," "because something about their belief that they had been given a muscle relaxant was enough to perpetuate the presence of the muscle relaxant molecules in their bodies." "Properly insane, and that is the amazing scientific research into the nocebo effect, and that is, without question, eight million metric fuck tons more interesting than any flaky, made-up facts purported by some flaky, New Age, pill-peddling quack." "Merry Christmas." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dr Ben Goldacre!" "Now, please welcome onstage, we've already had the author of The Selfish Gene, we've already had the author of Bad Science, now the author of Talking Cock, it is Richard Herring!" "APPLAUSE" "Thank you, lovely to be here." "What I want to do for you tonight is..." "I've recently rediscovered the first stories I ever wrote when I was six years old." "These are genuinely real things, I haven't made these up." "It's a delight to discover these things and I think, the child, the father of man," "I think religion and science, they share the..." "They both start in the imagination." "I think that's where they both start, have that in common." "There's a lot of philosophy in here accidentally, as a six-year-old." "The first story I wrote in this book is called The Man That Could Fly, and I can see you're immediately going, "Men can't fly, this is ridiculous."" "Just bear with it, don't let your rationalism destroy you." "Once upon a time there was a man, and he could fly with armbands." "And one day he flew to Australia, and another day he flew to a desert, and another day he flew to Paris, and another day he was ill and couldn't go away." "And another day he flew to the sun, but he got burnt up to pieces." "The end." "It's like a reworking of the Icarus myth there, I don't know if I did that..." "Though in my version he gets to go on holiday first, which is kind of nice." "Before his hubris destroys him, he gets to go to Paris, that's quite nice, isn't it?" "The next one is called The Man Who Was Never Born." "Again, I can see you immediately shifting in your seat." ""How can a man never be?" Just wait." "Wait." "Once upon a time there was a man who was never born and nobody saw him, because he was not born." "And he ate food from people." "The end." "You know, I quite like..." "Because that's basically..." "It says a lot about me." "That guy is invisible." "If I was invisible, I would eat food from people." "I would use that skill." "So, the child is the father of man, definitely." "This one, this is a bit derivative of myself, this one is a bit derivative of The Man Who Was Never Born." "When you're an author, you hit a good idea, it's difficult to move away from what you're known for." "This is called The Plant That Never Ghrow." "Grow is spelt G-H-R-O-W, as we all know." "Once there was a plant and it never ghrow and a man had planted it and he did not know he had it in his garden." "The end." "It's quite nice." "Quite philosophical, that one." "And that one's illustrated." "There's a picture of three flowers, and then a seed, and that's the one that didn't grow." "This is called The Four Men Had A Fight With The Men Of Phise, which is my favourite..." "The Men Of Phise, I think, are the Pharisees." "I was quite obsessed with Jesus as a child and I saw the Pharisees as bad men." "The enemies of Jesus." "I saw them as a group of men who went round with machine guns, shooting everyone." "I was obsessed with Jesus as a child, though I was quite sceptical." "I was quite obsessed with the first page of the New Testament," ""Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah and his brethren..." We all know it." "Yeah, OK." "But I remember reading that and getting to the end where it goes," ""Judas begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who was called Christ."" "And I was going to my mum, "But Joseph isn't Jesus's dad, is he?"" "So, if Jesus isn't related to Joseph, he isn't related to any of those people." "There's a mistake on the first page of the New Testament." "As an eight-year-old I realised that, so I was a rationalist." "The Four Men Had A Fight With The Men Of Phise." "Once there were four men and a lot of men of Phise and they had a fight, and most of the men of Phise died and all of the men died." "Which is quite a brave authorial move there." "I have killed, this is just the first page, I've killed the titular four men." "They're dead, the eponymous heroes." "It's a brave stroke." "And they saw a lot of men, the men of Phise, and they had a fight and a lot of the men got killed and the rest ran away, and they went on, the men of Phise, they saw some more men of Phise," "and said, "Will you join us?" and they did, and they saw a man and he had a gun, and one of the men of Phise got shot, and one more of the men of Phise killed the man, and they went away and killed all the men they saw." "That's the first sentence there." "It's..." "It's..." "It's important if you're going to be a writer, make the first sentence something that grabs people's attention." "It's quite..." "And it goes on - until they saw a monster, and the monster killed a lot of men of Phise and a lot escaped, and it was a difficult life for them." "Suddenly, after all that killing, we care for these murderous men." "They got too old to kill anybody and they all died except one, and he is still alive on this day and he is being careful not to be seen." "The end." "Which is kind of lovely." "Thank you." "It's a little moral." "I'm not saying I'm better than Jesus, but that is better than any of his parables." "If you're a bad person, that's what will happen." "You'll have to hide away." "Thanks very much for having me." "You've been terrific." "Goodnight." "APPLAUSE" "This is the final act." "This is what I've been waiting for all week, so please welcome to the stage, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "I was walking in the country the other day." "I'm not a rambler, but I just couldn't remember where I live." "And I was in this village, right, in the High Street of the village, and a mobile library came round the corner, took the corner very sharp and knocked a man down, and he's lying in the street, screaming in pain," "and the driver leaned out the window and went, "Ssshh!"" "This epitomised what Mr Golden and I are looking for in life." "Yeah, thanks very much for keeping up." " It's been a long night, you know?" " I've had two shaves." "But also at this time of year, there's a lot of..." "There's a lot of pressure on everyone and there's a lot of bluster and volume and noise everywhere, you know?" "So this song, hopefully, will act as an antidote to that." " RECITING:" " Through the fury and the storm" "Keep me still, keep me warm" "Give me calm, give me peace, give me quiet." "When the noise begins to grow" "Stroke my brow, so I'll know" "That I have, amidst the riot" "Peace and quiet." "# When the thunder starts to roll" "# Let your spirit take my soul" "# Give me calm, give me peace, give me quiet" "# Let me pray through the day" "# And the night, so I'll say" "# All I need" "# Is a diet of peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet is my creed" "# Peace and quiet's all I need" "# Give me calm, give me peace" "# Give me quiet" "# Take your noise and your strife" "# Leave me here with my life" "# Oh, dear friends, you should try it" "# Peace and quiet" "# So let's all clap our hands" "# Praise the Lord for his stance" "# What a world of calm" "# A world of peace and quiet" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "Everybody!" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# Peace and quiet" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# YEEAAAH!" "#" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Thank you very much." "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET!" "# PEACE AND QUIET, YEEAAAH!" "#" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail - subtitling@bbc.co.uk"