"CHEERING" "ladies and gentlemen otherwise known as Bone Idle." "Phill Jupitus and Alan Davies." "APPLAUSE" "The four panellists of the Apocalypse." "May the Lord Reith have mercy on your souls." "Let's have a round on the buzzers and bells." "how do you sound?" "FIRST FEW NOTES OF BIG BEN" "And Clive goes... wait a minute." "LAUGHTER And Phill goes..." "NEXT FEW NOTES OF BIG BEN" "And Alan goes..." "CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS" "LAUGHTER" "Excellent." "gentlemen." "Bombs away." "have you heard about the Mexican kamikaze squadron?" "(IMITATES SPEEDY GONZALES) Kamikazes!" "Are they like that?" "That's right." "Only Mexican." "only my country." "LAUGHTER" "Very good indeed." "Very good indeed." "For the emperor!" "LAUGHTER andale." "I just imagine a bloke in a big hat riding a donkey into the Alamo." "LAUGHTER That was... they fart themselves to death and they explode in front of the enemy." "it's an oddly interesting thought because kamikaze's the Japanese for "divine wind"." "oddly enough." "Um...it is a Japanese word." "God's guffs." "Yeah." "But these..." "LAUGHTER" "These little Mexican critters..." "They're not people." "Exactly." "Not people." "..were deployed by the US Army in the Second World War against the Japanese." "They're not like the dolphins they deployed in the war against Iraq?" "they're not." "They let them out and then they pissed off." "What they call the Mark 8 MMS - marine mammal system." "What are the odds that the Iraqi Navy will be leaning out from a boat with a flaming hoop like that?" "LAUGHTER" "Hang on." "But a critter is..." "would be some sort of a desert fox." "No." "Uh..." "LAUGHTER" "Well..." "(LAUGHS) hasn't it?" "Uh...between an insect and a fox you might say." "Between an insect and a fox." "You might say." "In size or in..." "It's kind of... but it flies." "It's quite fox-like." "A bat." "A bat is the answer." "A Mexican bat." "A Mexican bat." "Oh!" "You're not gonna like this." "It's horrible..." "How do you know that's Mexican without a sombrero?" "it's actually..." "LAUGHTER" "It's the breed of the bat." "It's a Mexican free-tailed bat." "Phill. they'll nest." "yeah." "And they filled 'em with explosives." "Right?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "LAUGHTER" "But what would happen is is where they were sewed up" "What's that?" "And they'd start nibbling at themselves and exploding in an untoward fashion." "LAUGHTER" "Phill." "It's not actually the navy and it's not boats." "Is it not?" "It's..." "I'm very close in that I'm nowhere near at all." "you got the principle." "hundreds of these bats with little waistcoasts..." "LAUGHTER I know it sounds absurd." "They went there with napalm in them and a detonator to escape the light they would go into the... causing these whole towns to burn because most Japanese towns were made of wood and paper." "so they have to follow them out... there is some sort of ignition device incorporated..." "What do they..." "Was it a book of matches?" "LAUGHTER" "The...um...they actually... however. you will be pleased to know that poetic justice prevailed they were testing and the wind changed and the bats that had been dropped on a target little wooden city in the desert" "were blown back to the headquarters of the American Army and blew it up." "LAUGHTER I don't find it poetic." "I'm American." "LAUGHTER the kamikaze pilots... right?" "Yes." "though." "LAUGHTER" "APPLAUSE all airplanes are kamikaze planes." "Really." "LAUGHTER" "Unless you buy a return ticket." "LAUGHTER" "This is why I think that planes should run on AA batteries." "You wanna go to London and New York?" "All right." "You have to buy 200 AA batteries." "They only bring enough batteries to get you there." "No wastage." "You can always get them at the airport." "Yeah." "That's true." "And then if you run out over the ocean a Walkman or something you could get some more batteries..." "LAUGHTER the bit of ribbon that you pull the batteries out with hasn't..." "LAUGHTER Where's that gone?" "And so you have to get the end of a biro and..." "LAUGHTER 000 feet." "..trying to dig out 32 AA batteries with a biro." "none of this is as mad as a bat with a napalm waistcoat." "Yes." "But it's like a step." "Cos one minute they're trying to get little bats that didn't work." "then." "We'll blow up two cities." "I'm glad you said that." "which I'm gonna address to Rich." "Which comedian went and dropped an atomic bomb on Japan?" "which comedian bombed in Japan." "(LAUGHS) And that would have been me." "Did you bomb in Japan?" "I bombed so horribly in Japan that I..." "In front of an English-speaking audience?" "No." "Japanese-speaking audience." "LAUGHTER" "I think I've put my finger on what went wrong." "That had a lot to do with it." "LAUGHTER" "No." "A comedian member of...what you might call a troupe of comedians." "One of the Stooges." "No." "Better known than the Stooges." "Abbott and Costello." "Woo-woo-woo-woo!" "you knucklehead!" "LAUGHTER" "You dropped that atomic bomb on Japan!" "I oughta..." "Oh!" "LAUGHTER" "They'd never have won the war if those blokes had had a plane." "Oliver Hardy." "No." "This man didn't drop the bomb." "He contributed materially to the technology behind the dropping of the bomb." "Very specifically behind the dropping of the bomb." "he...he invented... everyone else was working on the nuclear explosion." "chi-chi-chi." "They were a particular clamp." "There's a particular clamp that held the bomb to the aeroplane." "The Bob Hope..." "The Crazy Gang." "Marx Brothers." "the Marx Brothers." "Zeppo." "Zeppelin-o." "That one there." "The one with the ring round him." "What's his name?" "Karl." "No." "LAUGHTER and on the right-hand side there's Chico." "Zeppo." "Zeppo is the right answer." "The bomb door designer." "Zeppo Marx." "also known as Who-o..." "LAUGHER ..left the stage act. and he left to become an agent and to set up a company that specialised in engineering and design." "Called Blammo." "Uh...called..." "LAUGHTER It should have been called Blammo." "And he came up with the clamp that help the bomb as well as a wristwatch he came up with that detected your pulse and gave an alarm when you were having a heart attack." "LAUGHTER" "Groucho said he was a lousy actor the funniest and the wittiest of the Marx Brothers." "Harpo could actually talk in real life." "LAUGHTER No!" "now you've shattered all my..." "I read his autobiography." "He spent the first 15 years of his life nicking stuff and he's really proud of it." "They all did." "They were gangsters in New York." "Big hoodlums." "The Three Stooges are flying planes and they're the Gangs of New York." "The Gangs of New York." "He's got the stovepipe hat." "We're gonna kill you if you don't give me the money." "LAUGHTER" "He had a long career as an after-dinner speaker Unaccustomed as I am..." and everyone fell about." "LAUGHTER" "Lot of the early 20th-century gangs in New York were Jewish. right up to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel." "I think that a lot of the Scorsese oeuvre would be a lot nicer if people had horns and..." "(BEEPS HORN)" "De Niro..." "LAUGHTER" "..had had a funny hat." "whats-a you gonna do?" (BEEPS HORN)" "LAUGHTER" "You think I'm funny how?" "I'm gonna play this (BLEEP) harp over here." "LAUGHTER" "I amuse you?" "!" (BEEPS HORN)" "LAUGHTER" "Fantastic." "I think." "boom"?" "A suicide corgi." "LAUGHTER" "The next Norwegian entry for the Eurovision song contest." "LAUGHTER boom. #" "Terrierist." "APPLAUSE excellent." "Joy upon joy." "very good." "You must have some points for that." "you kind of said it... waving behind you." "(GASPS) Dog with a bomb in it?" "And the Russians could be just..." "Dogs with bombs tied to them is what we're looking for." "(ALL EXCLAIM) I know." "It's... isn't it?" "(ALL EXCLAIM) It's too grotesque." "The story...the story is horrible." "very angry..." "Throw a stick at a tank and he'd just go." "no..." "LAUGHTER" "(BARKS) Do you know..." "LAUGHTER" "Why don't they just throw a bomb at the tank for God's sake?" "Instead of making the dog go..." "Because they're armour-plated and the point is very hungry which you can't get a bomb at easily." "Why not just put a bomb there?" "why not just put a bomb there?" "no." "with the training." "Sorry." "So they become used to looking under tanks for food... dear." "LAUGHTER" "I thought you meant on the battlefield." "Whose job was it to change gear on that dog?" "LAUGHTER" "That is the trigger..." "That's the trigger for the bomb." "When he gets under the tank." "This is just... on a Sunday." "no." "LAUGHTER" "Mmm." "Lovely sheep." "Don't worry." "That one didn't blow up." "LAUGHTER He lives on a farm now." "He lives on a farm now." "LAUGHTER but..." "LAUGHTER poetic justice." "The dogs just turned round in the battle and so they went and blew up their own tanks." "LAUGHTER" "So...uh...the Russians started to shoot all the dogs..." "They didn't shoot that one." "They didn't shoot that one." "He lives on a farm." "They really love him." "They stroke him a lot." "LAUGHTER onto our next picture question." "Why is this picture a double first?" "Are they gonna use the penguin to blow up the Scotsman?" "LAUGHTER" "It's...it's a brilliant plan." "The first time the pipes are played in Antarctica." "Yes." "It's probably the first time a penguin was ever subjected to any kind of music." "went like that..." "LAUGHTER" "APPLAUSE" "Is this the first ever Edinburgh festival?" "LAUGHTER" "Would that it were." "No." "Did you..." "(LAUGHS)" "Stephen Robinson." "would that it were." "Would that it were." "LAUGHTER" "(IMITATES ROBERT ROBINSON) LAUGHTER" "No...uh..." "This one for mother and oldest son." "Did you know that... ..uh...that 50% of pipers are..." "I mean bag pipers...um... 50% of pipers suffer from repetitive strain injury and also are hard of hearing." "that is poetic justice." "That..." "Exactly!" "Very good." "Excellent." "how neat." "APPLAUSE it's the first postcard ever to be sent from Antarctica." "obviously you don't bring a lot of stuff to Antarctica." "This guy had to drag his bag..." "What if they had hit a crevasse?" "Too much weight and it turned out it was just because he'd brought a..." "You never know." "It might have saved his life." "It might have caught in the crack and he'd swing from it." "LAUGHTER but you know what I mean." "what is the common name of the species Ursus arctos?" "Ursus arctos." "do you say?" "dear." "it's not the polar bear." "That was a bear trap." "It was indeed a bear pit." "A bear trap." "the common name is..." "Two common names." "if you're European another." "Grizzly." "What's Ursus mean?" "Ursus is the Latin for bear and arctos is the Greek for bear." "yeah." "What's a hair bear in Latin?" "LAUGHTER weren't they?" "The Hair Bear Bunch." "You can join in at some level I find." "LAUGHTER" "There's always a way in." "yes." "or the brown bear." "The point is that the arctic itself... not the other way round. the great bear." "The constellation in the sky is always over the north. so the Antarctic is named after the ant and the bear." "that's..." "LAUGHTER" "Ant and Bear." "Why would that be?" "The Adventures of Ant and Bear." "They're like Ant and Dec." "Yes." "Exactly." "LAUGHTER obviously." "LAUGHTER And I think easier to tolerate." "And..." "LAUGHTER" "Ant and Dec." "I love their work." "They won't come on the show now you've said that." "bother." "LAUGHTER How am I going to live with myself?" "they're good!" "Write them a letter." "Antony and December you should..." "They could be walking up and down under here as we speak." "LAUGHTER" "They're not..." "Ant is always on the left." "is that how you can tell?" "Always on the left." "So reading from left to right they're in alphabetical order." "Ant and Dec. Ant and Dec. Easy. they still..." "somehow it works." "Like the eyes following you round the room." "It's like the moon going with you up the M1." "Ant and Dec always." "as if you cared." "Um...how do polar bears disguise themselves?" "Uh..." "LAUGHTER" "They stand in front of anything white." "yeah." "no." "a misconception that they cover their nose with their left paw thinking that it disguises themselves." "Like that." "Like our model." "Our demonstrator is showing us now." "Where's Alan?" "Where's Alan gone?" "Where's Alan gone?" "LAUGHTER Where has he gone?" "Are you sure they're not just checking whether they've got bad breath?" "LAUGHTER why you have to disguise yourself at all?" "That's absolutely spot-on." "Bear tax." "Who is..." "Bear tax?" "LAUGHTER" "No bears here." "LAUGHTER" "Alan?" "I haven't seen him." "LAUGHTER" "Or they stand in..." "like that and they put three bits of coal there and a carrot in their mouth." "LAUGHTER there we are. in which we ask Alan is this a rhetorical question?" "No." "Quite right." "LAUGHTER" "So..." "LAUGHTER" "Thinkers..." "Oh!" "I hate those." "LAUGHTER" "What's the point of rhetorical questions?" "Hey." "LAUGHTER fingers on the buzzers." "Uh...how many states are there in the United States of America?" "CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS Alan." "dear!" "dear." "technically." "Oh." "Because four of them are not states." "There they are." "Ah." "Pennsylvania and Massachusetts." "They're commonwealths." "They're commonwealths." "Exactly." "All four of them are actually commonwealths rather than states." "What that constitutionally means..." "Is their governance any different from the other?" "Do they have governors and they have the same sort of... ..when conducting their business?" "you know." "LAUGHTER The odds against that..." "They've all got straight lines apart from one." "Only one state in the US hasn't got a straight line in it." "that's a good question." "I should imagine that would be Hawaii." "there you are." "how interesting." "Now..." "LAUGHTER in the whole of the Second World War only six Americans were killed right? what is a fugo?" "He's the seventh Marx Brother." "LAUGHTER but it's not that." "a fugo is a paper balloon." "There were atomic bombs in one direction let leash the paper balloons then!" "LAUGHTER They sent thousands of them." "Over the Pacific..." "With a bomb hanging off it?" "yep." "But the odds against them landing on a city in mainland United States because most of it's kind of wasteland." "It's farmland to the west and desert..." "BELL TOLLS Whoops." "Hello." "not..." "LAUGHTER but the chances are the chance is more likely it will hit something which is not gonna kill people." "isn't it?" "Presumably because radar wouldn't detect it because only the little bits of metal in the bomb would be even..." "But the paper wouldn't show up on radar." "which is from mulberry." "if you prefer." "Balloon!" "Very good." "Fugo..." "(FAKE JAPANESE ACCENT) Baroon!" "Yeah." "Fugo it's called." "No good at..." "Can't do a Japanese... which allowed it to travel hundreds of miles an hour." "they were made by schoolgirls who didn't know what they were making." "They stuck pasted..." "BELL TOLLS" "LAUGHTER" "Birmingham is a wasteland." "LAUGHTER" "APPLAUSE Is that so?" "I believe." "Alabama." "That's a wasteland." "They should team up with each other." "They should." "LAUGHTER which you neatly avoided the trap of..." "It's blowfish..." "Not that puffer fish thing." "It's the big one..." "There's a bit in the middle that... yeah." "Is it about six people a year die in Japan as... a bit more than that." "Between 30 and 100 suffer from the poisoning I suppose." "800 Americans die in a McDonald's every year." "Really?" "Wow." "Which one?" "LAUGHTER" "Best to avoid that one." "He certainly will. (LAUGHS)" "The Blowfish McMuffin." "LAUGHTER" "But you're right." "This is a fish which has inner parts - organs - which are deadly poisonous." "Alan." "it turns out there are traces of the poison always left and if they're small enough..." "Get you high." "You're quite right." "very poisonous." "And you have to be specially trained and all the restaurants in Japan where you can eat it have little lanterns hanging outside made of the skin of this fish with a little symbol to show that it's a trained..." "Part of the training is you have to eat the fish that you've just cut." "LAUGHTER Have you had the fugu?" "I haven't." "I've never been to Japan." "you'd be like Godzilla." "They'd be... "Aiee!" "Stephen Fry-u!" Mr Fly!" "Mr Fly!" "LAUGHTER Mr Fly!" "You'd be rampaging through downtown Tokyo." "Baaaa!" "LAUGHTER a museum!" "Why is it that the Japanese..." "LAUGHTER and they always get it wrong." "I refuse to generalise about a race of people." "LAUGHTER and he called him "Rorui Temperaton"." "LAUGHTER just ask them to say orange tip fritillary." "LAUGHTER" "I will not do it!" "It's..." LAUGHTER the interview is over." "You build bridge now!" "LAUGHTER" "So much for the Geneva Convention!" "LAUGHTER yes!" "whatever the question was." "LAUGHTER" "Fugus." "Fugus." "That's right." "Fugus." "Fugus and Fugos." "when are penguins found near the Magnetic North Pole?" "CUCKOO CLOCK SOUND Yeah?" "When they're wearing a suit of armour." "LAUGHTER" "BELL TOLLS" "Uh...they're going to be soon because the... ..the magnetic north and south is going to switch any minute now." "give the man five points!" "Absolutely spot-on." "APPLAUSE but the fact is the north and the south flip in magnetic..." "I think penguins might be my favourite animal." "They are wonderful." "I like the one on the bottom left." "LAUGHTER doesn't he? was that the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa every million or so years." "The..." "Really? everyone's fridge magnets is just gonna fall on the floor?" "No." "That's not... won't they?" "No." "That's not how fridge magnets work." "What will happen is compasses will point to the south rather than the north." "won't it?" "I think people will get used to it quite quickly." "they won't." "I think they will." "not south." "I don't care what you say." "LAUGHTER dear." "APPLAUSE" "Do we know why it happens?" "What's..." "No." "I don't think we do." "It's a very mysterious process." "Just somebody flicks a switch... because... what a loss." "Yeah." "The magnetism deflects the solar rays..." "I want you to imagine that the penguin and now look at that picture." "LAUGHTER" "I think it's...they don't have many predators." "Obviously in the Antarctic they don't." "Polar bears eat 'em." "They don't live in the same continent." "Don't they?" "font" "The polar bear lives in the north and the penguins in the south?" "They've never seen one another?" "No." "No." "they all..." "it's like lions and tigers." "In my head they're all hanging out together and they've never met." "exactly." "Asia." "Imagine if it was like that with men and women." "right?" "Do you think it would be better if it was harder to conceive but easier to give birth?" "LAUGHTER" "I should imagine." "isn't it?" "isn't it?" "Yeah." "You're right." "you wouldn't want to gasp in agony for 36 hours to conceive." "that's unusually what it sounds like." "then." "What is wrong with this picture?" "BELL TOLLS Yes?" "No Starship Enterprise." "CUCKOO CLOCK SOUNDS" "It should be the other way up." "Yeah." "Absolutely right." "Have some points." "Quite right." "usual convention of putting north at the top and south at the bottom." "isn't it?" "but at the moment its north pole's at the top and its south pole's at the bottom." "What I meant was it should be vertical." "I see." "LAUGHTER" "Davies." "I can't help it." "You can take those points off yourself. how are Boy Scouts connected to poles?" "LAUGHTER" "Don't look at me like that..." "BELL TOLLS" "As part of their uniform they used to have a hat and a pole and a neckerchief and a special pole for example." "Something to do with Poland." "It is to do with Poland." "Um...name things that are particular about boy scouts." "dob." "That's one." "you've got there." "very close to the Polish salute." "Let's have a look at a Polish salute shall we?" "There you are." "On your screens now." "let me think." "Let me think." "LAUGHTER nerdy scout." "isn't it?" "We need hard scouts." "LAUGHTER" "I loved the Boy Scouts." "We went to 'Nam." "LAUGHTER more than really British. there was a man called Seton who founded a movement called the Woodcraft Indians." "Did you go in a helicopter gunship?" "(IMITATES HELICOPTER)" "He had a little waistcoat with napalm strapped in." "LAUGHTER With the Doors playing really loud. you run towards them..." "LAUGHTER" "..and you press that button there." "dib." "Kaboom!" "LAUGHTER you got your killing gooks..." "LAUGHTER" "You've got your napalm waistcoat too." "there you are." "Yes. supposedly after some Polish war hero who had three fingers blown off." "yeah." "LAUGHTER Oh!" "Do a Polish polar bear." "Fantastic." "Thank you." "Well..." "LAUGHTER that's it for another week I'm sorry to say." "And the final scores are poles apart." "Phill scored a piping hot 4. but Alan bombed with minus 4." "APPLAUSE" "Two fingers to Alan and to you all." "It's do widzenia." "Goodnight." "APPLAUSE" "Closed Captions by CSI"