"(Applause)" "Well, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello." "and welcome to Ql, the show that puts a song in your heart, a tune on your lips and a hum in your pyjamas." "Joining me for tonight's special music edition are..." "Sean Lock, Mark Gatiss," "Linda Smith and Alan Davies." "So, let's tune-up, ladies and gentlemen, please." "See how you're sounding." " Sean goes..." " (d Beethoven's Fifth)" " Mark goes..." " (d Handel's Water Music)" " Linda goes..." " (d Vivaldi's Four Seasons)" "And Alan goes... (d Twinkle Twinkle Little Star plays on toy xylophone)" "Well done." "Very good." "Excellent." "First question this evening is what kind of music do snakes like the best?" "What do they find most charming?" "(d Handel's Water Music)" " Mark?" " Kraftwerk." "The really vicious, German electro-pop." "Can you imagine those "fakirs" playing it...?" " Those what, excuse me?" " Fakirs." "Oh yes, right, fair enough." " You're quite right, they are, all of them." " (Drum roll and cymbal crash)" "Thank you, thank you, sound department." "When you say they like it, not like they like it, they go out, they buy it, they put posters up on the inside of their baskets." "When you say like, you mean... (Mimics flute)" "(Sean) Yeah, Kraftwerk." "(Stephen) Just a second..." "Good heavens, it works!" "The hood right back ready to pounce." "That was like an X-rated lt Ain't Half Hot Mum." "It was rather." "Well no, the oddity is actually that snakes don't respond to music at all." " lt's simply the sight of it." " They just like the sight of it." "Yeah, because if you do it without playing any music..." " They don't respond to music." " You're right." " So you could be doing that on anything?" " Yeah, or just making no noise at all." "It would still sway backwards and forwards..." "They don't have ears." "You're sort of right, until recently that was exactly what was thought." "They don't appear to have any, but in fact when you go inside, they've now discovered, they do have otic nerves and a whole system which responds electrically to sound." "is that snake alive, or is it a model one?" "I think it's actually a dinner, it's a snake in a basket." "It's just come back from holiday in Spain and bought one of those donkeys, those straw donkeys out in Spain." "When I was a kid, there was a rattle snake on TV every week." "Every week, in something, there was always a rattle snake." "And nowadays there's never a rattle snake on TV." "It was like a big thing in the 70's." "Well you didn't even see one, you just heard one." "It was the most terrifying noise of my childhood and I grew up in Loughton!" "Good, well there you are, that's the point." "Snakes and hearing." "Now, onto a nursery rhyme." "The nursery rhyme says, "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle."" " But what have cats got to do with violins?" " Cat gut?" " (Alarm)" " Oh dear." "Oh dear oh dear, no." " Not that, then." " Not that, no." "Cat gut has never gone into the making of violins." "It was a myth that was put about by..." "By dogs." "It was considered very unlucky to kill a cat in Medieval times." "They're made out of sheep gut, and the people of..." " Sheep really get it all." " Don't they just." "They've got low self-esteem, I think." " They allow themselves to be bullied." " They do allow themselves to be bullied." "In Australia, they discovered that sheep possess morphic knowledge." "They found that sheep managed to get across the cattle grids by lying on their backs, holding their legs up and rolling across them." "So they were like a little furry ball." "And sheep were doing it at almost the same time, completely, you know, thousands of miles away," " the other side of Australia." " People don't know, that's why it's called morphic resonance, or morphic knowledge. lt started with tits." "Blue tits seemed to discover, in different parts of Britain, to peck open the silver top of a milk bottle, within a week of each other in Scotland and in England, without any tit having done it before." "They were too far away from each other to have communicated." "And this theory arose of what's called, as Sean said, morphic resonance." " Cats and violins." " Oh cats and violins, yeah." "The people who had the monopoly, as it were, put it about that it was made of cat gut, knowing that their rivals would never dare kill cats, and they wanted to kind of keep it secret." "The same families have run violin string-making for over 600 years." "But now, of course, there's nylon and steel added, though people still say the old sheep gut is still the best." "I thought it was something to do with the cat's penis." "Did you?" "Isn't it a strange shape, like the shape of a violin, or something like that?" "is it a really strange shape?" "What would be the shape of a female's orifice?" " Well a violin case." " (Stephen) A violin case." "Haven't they got a really strange shape?" "That's why they scream." "They screech so loudly when they're..." "Cats' penises are barbed and have a bone in them," " so yes, they are an unusual shape..." " Yeah, they've got a bone, that was it." " Yeah." " Cats can choke on small bones." "So you wouldn't want to fiddle with them, and that's the connection with the violin." "(Applause)" "Now, we're still musical, as we hope to be all evening." "What kind of music do spiders like?" " (Sean) Well I reckon..." " Yeah?" "They've got eight legs, they'd appreciate a one-man band." "You know..." "(Mimics guitars, trumpets and drums)" "They'd kind of appreciate that all-round entertainer." " (d Handel's Water Music)" " Etcetera." "Kylie Minogue." " Why is that?" " Spinning Around." "Oh Spinning Around, very good." "You could have said Andrew Lloyd Webber, I suppose." "Ah, actually, on a similar note, mightn't it be Cliff Richards?" "Because isn't his real name, Cliff Richard rather, beg your pardon, Webb." " lt is, his real name's Webb." " (Alan) Marty Webb." " Marty Webb. lt's all just beginning to..." " l don't think spiders are that into puns." "I reckon they like flies, stuff like that." "Bit of cheese." "I'll tell you an interesting fact about spiders, the huntsman spider, which, well it's a fact everyone knows, it doesn't actually build a web, it's the only spider with lungs." "(Stephen) Oh I like that." "So you can get it a birthday cake with a candle on." "What a sweet thing to think of!" "What a nice way of thinking!" "What do spiders do to flies?" "They wrap them up in a web, like in Lord Of The Rings." "(Stephen) Yeah, and...?" "And then take them off, wait till they've softened up a bit and then they eat them." "That's the odd thing they don't eat them, they drink them." " They drink them..." " They squirt them with acid that dissolves them into a sort of liquid." "Flies, when they land on your food, they immediately vomit on it." "And then they tread about in it, like that, get it all mushy and then they digest that." " That's quite rude, isn't it?" " (Stephen) lt is." "But they listen with their feet." "Their eight feet." "And they have a penis on their head, that's on the end of a little feeler, that's where their mating organ is, the males." "(Mark) They're just a mess, aren't they?" "(Stephen) They're all dick-heads!" "They have eight eyes as well, most of them." " Spiders have eight eyes and eight legs?" " Yes." "The answer to this question is it does seem to be classical music, because they did an experiment and they found that in the University..." " Who are they?" " University of Ohio, in this instance, is they, or are they..." "The University of (beep) all else better to do." "Formerly the polytechnic of (beep) all else to do." "Domestic spiders were subjected to Bach, techno, which I believe is some kind of modern music, and rap." "For techno and rap, they built their webs as far away from the speakers as possible." "And for classical music, close to them." "Someone close to me told me about music called tesco." "Do you know about that?" " No." " lt's a blend of disco and techno, it's rather sweet and it's called tesco, and now they have tesco evenings in certain nightclubs." "It's a type of modern young person's dance music like two-step UK garage, for example, which is my particular favourite." "These would be nightclubs right on the edge of town." "Another bizarre experiment on spiders, and this I think will fascinate you, was conducted by NASA, a really extraordinary experiment, in 1995, to see how spiders reacted to drugs." "So behind you are some of the results." "We have two webs, one produced on LSD and one produced on caffeine." "You have to match the drug to the web." "I bet the worst one is caffeine, on the right there." "That's what you reckon, yeah?" "The other one looks like a bullet through glass" " on Callan opening titles." " You're absolutely right." "The extraordinary thing, and nobody understands why, is that when you give them LSD, they make even more geometrically perfect webs than they do in nature." " lt's absolutely perfect." " They can see spiders everywhere." "Well, or they can see humans, probably, going, "Oh it was a bad trip," ""l saw humans floating in front of my eyes."" "And that jangled mess on the right is caffeine, the world's most popular drug." "80% of all human beings take caffeine at least once a day." "There's an exhibition at the British Museum at the moment and it's about healthy living, or life and the things we do to ourselves." "And there's an exhibit with 14,000 pills in it, all sewn into a big mesh, to represent the pills that an average first world person takes in their life." "That would last my Nan about a week." "Not content with that, we kind of push our gear on spiders, for some extraordinary reason." ""You try it now." "l don't want coffee."" ""Try it, we want to see what you do." "We want to see what you do."" ""Ooh!" "There, look, you're weird." "Thanks!"" "There'd be a lot of loud laughing flies if they saw that." ""Oh I can fly straight through it, it's great."" "But we have another one for you, and you have to guess the drug." "Let's have a look at this next one." "There we are, what would that be" " as a result of?" " (Sean) Lager." " Any other thoughts?" " Marijuana." "Marijuana is the right answer." "Mary Jane, or cannabis, or whatever else you like to call it." " Because they couldn't be arsed to finish it." " Exactly." "Good." "Now, listen to this piece of music by the Mamas and the Papas." "d Monday Monday d So good to me" " d Monday morning... d - (Stephen) Lovely." "Now that, as I say, is the sound of Monday Monday by The Mamas and the Papas, but what colour would you say Monday is?" "(Toy xylophone)" " Yes?" " Blue." " Blue." "Because of...why?" " lt just makes me think of blue." "Well that's right, most people, they think of days of the week, assign a colour to them." "Wednesday's kind of green, Thursday is brown, Friday is black." "Ah, now you see Friday is dark blue to me and Thursday is sort of reddy, deep red." " Tuesday is maybe yellow." " l have a yellow Tuesday." "Saturday is red." "Sunday is sort of bluey, purple." "Monday is white to me, for some reason, but there you are." "Have you done a spider experiment at NASA, you two?" "Do you not have any sense of colour...?" "No, I would say, a Monday I think of as a period of time which has to be endured until Tuesday comes along." "Don't expect the Poet Laureateship to be handed to you on a plate." "It's a little bit bitter." "If Monday makes you think of blue, does blue make you think of Monday?" "It makes me think of mould." "It's not thought either, I mean that's to say it's not thought in the sense of rational analysis." "It's as if you see the colour in your head." "Well, we'll move onto this..." "I'll play you a chord of music, like so... (Piano chord)" "..which some of you with perfect pitch might know was D major." " D, F sharp, A.." " Lime green I had there." "You had lime green?" "Anybody else had a colour?" " No." " No?" "I tell you what I heard, I heard a sound." "Yes, I know, I know." "Anyone hear a sound?" "Anyone, or just me?" "Please, God, not again!" "I just thought of all those sound men going, "Yes."" "It's true, because he's really doing well, let's try it again." " "Phew"." " (Piano chord)" "He's going, "Ah ah ah, I'm the boss!"" "(Piano chords)" "He's very good, that sound man." "He's very good, a round of applause." "(Applause) lf l do it, will he do it for me?" " See..." " (Piano chord)" " Yes, with one finger as well." " (Piano chord)" " l wonder if he'd do it for me." " Move up the scale." "(Piano chord)" "The fact is, there is this condition, synaesthesia, which is quite common, in which people genuinely see a colour when they hear sounds." "Rimsky-Korsakof, for example, saw that D major chord "boing", or... (Piano chord)" "There's Rimsky-Korsakof." "He saw it as a glorious sunny yellow." "And Liszt would say to orchestras and completely baffle them," ""No, no, please gentlemen, bluer, bluer."" "Julian Asher, who's a neuro-scientist, who also has synaesthesia, he tried to explain it, because he had it as a child, and he used to get taken to concerts by his parents, and he used to assume that the lights went down before the concert" "so that you could see the colours better as they came off the orchestra." "He just always assumed that, because he assumed, as you would, that everybody had the same experience, that when they heard music they saw colours, right in front of them, for real." "And Rimsky-Korsakof wrote down..." "Well so and so going up from F, we have E major... (Piano chord)" "And that for him was bright blue." " And F major." " (Piano chord)" " (Alan) Red." " Bright green for him." "But this is interesting, E flat major..." " (Piano chord)" " Magnolia." "Miserable grey for him. lsn't it interesting." "It's very common indeed," "E flat major, for singers, it's their most common chord." "It's quite odd, that photograph, cos he's not like he's posed for it, it's not full-on, it's like he's coming out of somewhere and someone's taken a sort of Victorian paparazzi snap of him." "It's probably CT camera, a Victorian CT camera which is a bloke with a big cloak." "Moving along the street." "Now, in 1988, lady and gentlemen, in 1988 Warner Communications, as there was, paid John F Sengstack 28 million dollars for the rights to a single song." "I just want to know what it was." " (d Vivaldi's Four Seasons) - 1988." "Yes, Linda?" "A bit pricy." "It was, it was." " They reckon they'll do very well out of it." " (Alan) National Anthem." "It was not the National Anthem, which is not in copyright." "Was it the theme to Button Moon?" "What a lovely idea." " lt wasn't that." " (Sean) Hokey Cokey." " Happy birthday." " Thank you, Mark Gatiss, it was indeed Happy Birthday To You, which was composed in 1924, by a couple of old biddies." " 28 million dollars?" " 28 million dollars." "They make about two million a year out of it to 2030." "What did people sing in 1923, for goodness sake?" "You brought the cake out and everyone just stood about in a slightly awkward silence." "Which is infinitely preferable than having that bloody song sung at you, I bet." "d You're older, you're older, you're older d" "Yes, it was written by these two old things, and Irving Berlin included it, with the words Happy Birthday To You, which they didn't write, nobody knows who did write those." "He included it in a 1933 musical, so they sued and won, and retained the copyright." "In theory, if you sing it in a restaurant, you owe Warner Brothers money, because that's counted as a public place." "You'd have to be very honest to phone them up and go," ""There was a birthday last night, how much do I owe you?" ""And I hummed a few bars of Let lt Be as well."" "Happy Birthday was the first song to be sung in outer space, by the Apollo 9 crew." "Do you know what the original song was written as?" "What the lyrics were?" "They weren't "Happy Birthday To You"." "It was a Death Row song." "d You won't be alive tomorrow d d Don't bother making your bed d" "A really really good idea for Ainsley Harriott would be Ainsley's Death Row Dinners." "Don't you think?" "Cos he's so jolly." "No, originally it was written as a teacher's song to sing to their class, Good Morning To All it was called." "And then it became Good Morning To You, and then Happy Birthday To You." "That's its history." "Anyway, what was the most disastrous composition of the man who gave the world the Wombling Song... d Remember you're a womble wombling free d Wombling in the rain d - (Alan) Mike Batt." "..and Non-stop Wombling Summer Party?" " ..who, as you rightly say, is Mike Batt." " All of them." "Yes, but one of them was particularly, and rather amazingly, disastrous." " (d Vivaldi's Four Seasons)" " Not one of those I've mentioned." " Yeah." " Was it the 'Wombling (beep) ing party'?" "It was actually a financial disaster." "(Sean) d Free Myra Hindley... d" "On hang on, Mark." " Free Myra Hindley?" " lt didn't take off." "d Free Myra Hindley, come on!" "d" "Whoa, no, he didn't go that far." "No, it was on an album, he had a track which lasted a minute and it was complete silence." "It was called A Minute's Silence." "He was sued by..." "Who would sue him?" " Cage, John Cage." " John Cage, exactly." "Author of Four Minutes Thirty Three Seconds, the famous 1952 composition of complete silence." "What a load of rubbish." "But, there are two reasons why we shouldn't feel sorry for Mike Batt." "One is he actually put One Minute's Silence, Batt/Cage." "So...uh!" "And the second reason is he wrote the campaign song for William Hague's '97 campaign." "So whatever shit is flung at him, he deserves." "I heard..." "One of the best ever links on radio was done by Dale Winton on his Radio 2 show, and he played Watership Down, you know, Bright Eyes, which Mike Batt wrote, you know." "d Bright Eyes... d" "And he got to the end of it, and he got to the end of it and he goes, "Listen to that" he said," ""A song about a rabbit written by a bat."" "And I thought that's classy." "Well he is the governor, isn't he?" "He's the governor, of course." "I saw the Wombles." "They were actually men dressed as Wombles, so they were enormous." "It was one of the most frightening things of my entire childhood." "They towered over children who'd come to see little cute Wombles who gathered litter and lived in a burrow." " They loomed over them like that." " Was it Christmas?" "Because all the dwarfs are booked up round that time." "Two actor friends of mine were in this, like a pantomime version of The Wind ln The Willows, and one was the Badger and one was Toad." "And they didn't really get on, they were getting on quite badly." "So obviously there's quite a long section of the show where Badger is nagging Toad, you know, to change his ways." "And one day Fred, who was the Toad, just got really really drunk, and he turned up for the afternoon show and Badger started telling him off and saying, "You've got to mend your ways."" "And he just said, "You (beep) off, you stripy bastard!"" " These little kids!" " Are there children still in therapy over it?" "Anyway, here's an interesting question as well." "What was unique about Good Friday 1930 that urgently required ten minutes of light piano music?" "Did Jesus come back and change his mind, and they had to fill in?" "No, it was a news programme..." "But instead of news, they played ten minutes light music." "Why would that be?" " Cos something had happened?" " Quite the opposite." " Nothing had happened." " Nothing had happened." "An announcer came on and said," ""Now ladies and gentlemen, there's no news tonight," ""so here is some music." lt's absolutely true." "Absolutely true." "(Applause)" " There was no news?" " Nothing." "Well in fact we've tried to check what did happen, and aside from football matches, in India there was the start of what was called the Chittagong Rebellion, in which several hundred youths attacked the telegraph office" "and disconnected all communications in the city of Chittagong." "But that didn't happen until ten o'clock, and it was too late for the news in London." "So there was no news it seems." "They probably didn't have traffic reports." "They wouldn't have..." ""And here we go live to the camera at Hanger Lane."" "And there's a bloke on a bike." ""York's, I wouldn't give you much chance of getting home" ""before six o'clock, and that's a fact."" ""You'd better call up your maid and butler and tell them to put something in the oven."" "Local papers have to deal with no news every week, they still write the paper every week." "My favourite ever, when I used to live in Sheffield, the Sheffield Star, my favourite ever headline," ""Worksop man dies of natural causes."" "Fantastic!" "Oh that's bliss." "But what about the story of the giant microphones invading the BBC?" "They were hushing that one up." "The Incredible Shrinking Announcer." "Now, prepare to lose composure, because it's General lgnorance, so fingers on buzzers." "What is this?" "Tap music." " Tap music?" " Yeah." " Very close, I mean it does..." " Looks like taps, doesn't it?" "By a weird accident, you're right, in as much as it is, it's a dance notation." "It's known as the Benesh Movement Notation, which was invented in the 1950's, by a Mr Benesh, who was an accountant, and a very talented artist and musician, and his wife was a ballet dancer," "and it shows the choreography of a particular dance." "So can you work out what it is?" "It sort of represents... ls that legs then?" "I assume, because usually when your dancing..." "The Hokey Cokey." "It is the Hokey Cokey, well done." "And there were legs going in and out." "Exactly." "There was an American version of the dance... a man called Larry Laprise, and he died in 1996." "What happened at his funeral?" "Oh, they couldn't get him in the coffin." " Why is that?" " They put the left leg in... then the trouble started." "Right, fair enough." "Mr Fry, can I do my song!" "?" "Bring back variety." "Now, next question, what was the first invention to break the sound barrier?" "May West's vibrator." "(Mimics rewing engine)" "How fast does a bullet travel?" "I need an answer, not a question." "More steam!" "They've got coal, they're shovelling it in." "She had a giant rubber band six feet wide and then ten men twisted it round." "(Stephen) Dear, dear me." "Cannonball, musket fire, catapults." " (Alarm)" " Oh, hello?" "No, not the cannonball." "They've spelt it wrong, they've spelt it wrong!" "Points to me." " (Sean) No, they haven't." " You'd prefer three n's, would you?" "There's two n's in canon, isn't there?" "Three I would have thought." "Yeah, well one on the end, but I mean in the middle." "In the middle two, yes, yeah." "Otherwise it's a ball of religious person." "We thought it was Bobby and Tommy, you know." "Hey!" ""You're looking at me." ""He's looking at me!" ""Stop looking!"" "Alistair McGowan, watch out!" " Not a cannonball then?" " No, not a cannonball." "It's 7,000 years old, the earliest we've found, in China, it was invented." "A very common thing in all cultures there." "Harrison Ford uses it extensively." " A firework." " Not a firework." " (Alan) A whip." " A whip is the right answer." " (Mark) What?" " A whip." "The sound of a whip cracking is not leather hitting leather, it is a sonic boom, a mini sonic boom." "Where it makes a loop and as it tapers towards the end, it gets faster and it gets up to 724 miles per hour." "We only discovered this as a..." "humans only discovered it when we were able to use high-speed cameras to see it all slowed down and see that the leather wasn't hitting itself and that it wasn't the noise at all." " Professor, that's fantastic!" " lsn't it?" "It's great news." "Well, on the subject of sounds, when you listen to the waves in a sea shell, what are you actually hearing?" "(d Vivaldi's Four Seasons)" "Yes?" "Nine times out of ten, Norah Jones." " Norah Jones." " (Alan) What do you mean?" "Well it's the sound you hear when you do that." "Well you're hearing the sea." " (Alarm)" " No." "Why would that be?" "Well you're right, you're on the beach, aren't you?" "No, you can be in Ashley de la Soosh, you would still hear that same noise." "I've never done it anywhere away from the seaside." "You must try to do it with a mug." "It's the pounding of your blood in your ear drums." " (Alarm)" " Oh dear!" "No, it's not that neither." "No." "Who's that girl though who's got the seashell on her ear?" "She looked like she failed the Magnum advert." "They said, "No, lick it, you silly bitch!"" "They're awully rude, aren't they, but I know what you mean." "You just get a rushing sound like... what would that be?" " Air in your ear?" "Echoes?" " Yeah." "Noise, airflow resonating inside it." "It works with a mug, or a cup." "If you hold a shell suit to your ear, you can hear Romford." " (Applause)" " That's very good." "There we are." "Now, who wrote the tune for Alan's buzzer?" "(Toy xylophone)" "Prince Edward." " Who's that?" " Oh blimey, it's me." "is that two of Anne Robinson's daughters?" "You see now how they got the idea for the slinky." "I bet there's a clown somewhere panicking, going, "Jesus Christ!"" "It's just it's like five minutes to show time, he's going, "Oh!"" "Why is it not so springy now?" "You're not eating so many Cheesie Wotsits, are you." " Also I'm looking a bit ginger there, aren't I?" " You certainly are." "He looks like the new Anne Robinson, have you seen her?" " The new..." "Oh yes." " She's regenerated into a beautiful new lady. lt's extraordinary." "She looks like a Siamese cat walking into a storm." "(Mark) What was the tune again?" "It was what we would call Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." "(Mark) lt didn't do that last time." " l bet it's German." " (German accent) Twinkle, Twinkle?" " At five years old." " Little Star!" "No Mozart wrote an extraordinary series of variations on that tune at the age of five." " Very beautiful variations indeed." " Bloody Mozart!" "Special needs boy." "Now, let's get to the scores." "It's a distant quartet here, my goodness me." "Well look, we're going to have to do it in first to last." "Our winner, very tunefully, is Linda with two massive and tuneful points." " (Applause)" " Two points!" "And Mark managed a perfectly respectful and harmonic minus four." "(Applause)" "And Sean was not quite so on song with minus eight." "(Applause)" "And as usual, I'm sorry to say," "Alan managed an absolutely astounding, caterwauling mess of a ruin of a sound, which was minus thirteen." "Congratulations." "(Applause)" "That's all from Ql for this week." "A big hand please for our singers - Sean, Mark, Linda and Alan." "(Applause)" "And we leave you with this famous musical memento, the observation of the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham to a lady cellist," ""Madam, you have between your legs" ""an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands," ""and all you can do is scratch it."" "Goodnight." "(Applause)"