Themes

- The panellists all have the faces poking out of cut-out boards. The boards were invented in 1890s Cairo, which involved cutting holes in actual ancient sarcophagus lids, so tourists could pose as mummies, but as they ran out of lids they expanded to other images such as the sphinx. The panel are shown one involving Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Topics

- The part of mainland Britain that is closest to French soil is Lyme Regis. Following decades of coastal erosion, they had to rebuild the beach, using 30,000 tonnes of sand shipped from northern France. To rebuild the beach they had to remove the groynes, which are barriers all the way along the beach, the name of which comes the Latin: "to grunt" because they used to look like pig snouts. Some shingle was added to the beach to provide ballast. Afterwards, they also imported 6,000 tonnes of Norwegian rock to strengthen the cliffs, and the sea walls were made out of Portuguese and Chinese granite. (Forfeit: Dover)

- Tangent: Beaches can spontaneously vanish. A violent storm of the coast of Achill Island, County Mayo in 1984, washed away the entire 300m long Doogah Beach. This destroyed the local tourism industry. Then in 2017, unusual tidal activity brought the beach, restarting the tourism industry, only for the beach to be washed away again in 2019.

- Tangent: The Coastal Protection Act 1949 makes it illegal to take away any pebbles or sand from UK beaches. Doing so can result in a £1,000 fine and being forced to return what you took. In Italy, punishments are even harsher, with similar crimes resulting in six years in prison. In 2019, security services at Cagliari Airport confiscated 200kg of sand from tourists in a few weeks.

- Tangent: If you examine sand under a microscope, the grains all look different.

- Problems with living in a sand castle include how to go to the toilet. Sand castle worms (phragmatopoma californica) are creatures that live in castles made out of sand which they build themselves. The worms have tentacles on their head which sort through sand grains, then they secrete a compound from their body which acts as a kind of underwater glue, which they use to build their habitat. This underwater glue may have useful medical uses, as we could develop a glue to allow human bone to stick together without using metal pins. Each worm is about an inch long, and the tunnels they live in are about six inches long. When it is low tide the worms hunker down and seal themselves up, and when it is high tide they pop their heads out and fish for microscopic food. However, as they never leave the tunnel and always face outwards, going to the toilet is problem. They solve this by having a long tube halfway up the body; defecate on their own back, then shrugging the faecal pellet up the body and out of the tube. Some worms squirt sperm up into the water, others squirt eggs up, and that creates the larvae. They can then smell the cement that holes the sand castle together and go back to where they came from.

- Tangent: When she was 11, Lou once tried to get worms in order to lose weight, by putting a piece of raw meat on her bottom. It did not work. Many years ago, cyclists in the Tour de France would put steak down their trousers to stop rubbing, and after the race the stake was fully tenderised for their supper.

- Tangent: Marcio Matolias is a human who lives in a sand castle. Known as King Marcio, he is a sand sculptor who lives on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, who also runs a used bookshop which he runs from a three-square-metre castle which has been his home for over 20 years. Problems with living in the sand castle are bad weather destroying it, being incredibly hot during the summer, and it has no toilets so he has to use the one in the nearby fire station, which costs a dollar every visit. However, he does avoid paying any rent.

- XL Tangent: The very first reference to a sand castle being kicked over is in The Iliad in the seventh century BC. Homer describes the sun god Apollo demolishing a Greek stockade, which he compared to a child kicking over a sand sculpture.

- XL Tangent: The panellists make their own sand castles, for which you need to make the sand wet. Alan worries about the mess, leading to Sandi to comment that she likes a prissy child. Her then seven-year-old daughter and her whole class all went for burgers, and one boy there was very particular. When Sandi asked him if he was alright, the boy said: "I wonder if the chef might do a salad?"

- The panel are shown a long woollen dress and are asked where you would wear it. The garment is for women to wear as a bathing suit at the beach, dating back to 1870s USA. At the time, women were expected to bathe in full-length dresses which did not become transparent when wet, and often the hem would have weights in so the material did not float, although it was obviously a drowning risk. This all changed in the 1900s when Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman became one of the first women to publicly wear a one-piece bathing suit. The first time she wore such a suit in 1907 on a beach in Massachusetts, she was arrested for public indecency. The judge said: "Yes, I can see it's more comfortable for swimming", and afterwards she had to wear a cape to the edge of the shore.

- XL Tangent: Born in 1887, Kellerman had rickets as a child and took up swimming to help her recover, and it was discovered she was good at swimming. She would dress as a mermaid and swim with fish in an aquarium in Melbourne. She eventually became a film star in the USA, performing all her own stunts, which including diving 60ft into a crocodile-filled pool. Kellerman was also the first person to appear nude in a Hollywood movie, doing so in A Daughter Of The Gods. Made in 1916, it was the first film to cost $1million, took 20,000 people eight months to make it, and all copies of it are lost.

- XL Tangent: The modern bikini was invented in 1946. Before it was the Atome, designed by Frenchman Jacques Heim, who said it was the world's smallest bathing suit, and then another man called Louis Reard said he would make one even smaller, which was the bikini, after the Bikini Atoll, where nuclear tests were being conducted at the time. "Bikini" means "coconut place" in Marshallese.

- XL Tangent: When Sindhu was eight, she returned home from school and her mother served her lunch in a bikini. When she asked her mother why she was wearing it, she told her she could not wear it outside because it was not modest, but it looked so good she decided to just wear it in the house, changing her clothes when Sindhu's father returned from work because she did not want to give him a heart attack.

- Germans spoil your Spanish holiday by messing around with time zones. In 1942, General Franco switched Spain from Greenwich Mean Time to Central European Time, to match Berlin's clock in solidarity with Hitler, and thus whole country moved forward by an hour. Thus, Spain is not in its natural time zone. There are many parts of Spain west of Greenwich, so during the summer on Spain's west coast, the sun is directly overheard at 14:40. (Forfeit: They steal the sun loungers)

- XL Tangent: The idea of Germans getting up earlier to hog the sun loungers is completely unfounded. The idea dates back to a 1993 Carling Black Label advert, in which a British person threw a towel from his room to a lounger, which skips across the pool like a bouncing bomb, to the theme from The Dam Busters. In 2014, German newspaper Bild conducted an investigation and claimed the British are by far the largest culprits to hogging sun loungers, but when they interviewed one British holiday maker, they claimed it was the French who did most of the hogging.

- Sunbathing was invented by American socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy. They went to the French Riviera in the 1920s with Cole Porter and friend Genevieve Carpenter, who became famous as part hosts. Before then, people only went to the Riviera in winter, but they persuaded the Hotel de Cap to remain open for the summer, and loads of people visited, including Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Dorothy Parker. The Murphys invented the idea of beach time and sunbathing. Before then, it was unfashionable to have a tan because it showed you worked outdoors and thus were poor. While Coco Chanel is often credited as inventing the sun tan after she came back from a Mediterranean cruise in 1923, she was probably just completing the craze on what was already becoming chic, because another woman made tans popular earlier. Tennis player Suzanne Lenglen, the first global female sports celebrity, played in short sleeves and had a deep tan in 1919. She was also the only female player to serve overarm at the time, drank cognac between sets, and won 241 titles in her career, whereas at the time of recording the episode Serena Williams had won 98. Part of the reason why Wimbledon is where it is now is because the former courts were at Worple Road, but they could not cope the number of fans who wanted to see Lenglen.

- At sea, the screw is better than the paddle. As boats became mechanised, the navy wanted to know whether it was better to have ships with screw propellers or paddles on either side, so to sort out the matter they had a tug of war between a two ships in 1845, one with a screw called HMS Rattler, and the other with paddles called HMS Alecto, and the screw won so they went with that design. Rattler's propeller is on display at the SS Great Britain Museum in Bristol. They later had tug of wars between electric and steam trains, with the electric winning.

- The one place you are guaranteed not to meet a shark is deep in land, because there is one shark that can walk on the coast. The Epaulette shark (Hemiscyllium ocellatum), so called because on the shoulder it looks as if it is wearing epaulettes, are native off the coasts of Australia and New Guinea, but you can also see them walking on the coast too. They are about two-three foot long, and use their tail and pectoral fins to shimmy along the seabed, but they can also crawl out of the water to access tidal pools, in search of food. The problem however is that they can become stranded in rock pools overnight, but they can withstand oxygen deprivation by putting their body into a kind of stand-by mode. These sharks tend to ignore humans.

- XL Tangent: The Great White Shark Cafe is an area of the Pacific Ocean discovered by scientists at Stanford University in 2002. Every year sharks visit this area, which seemed to be like a virtual desert as there was no food there, but it was discovered that there is food there, but much deeper than our satellites can see, where the shark eat animals like squid at levels were sunlight does not reach. One scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium, Salvador Jorgensen, describes it as the largest migration of animals on Earth, but it is vertical one time with the light cycle.

- XL Tangent: Another place you are likely to find sharks is alongside bikini pageants in trashy movies. Examples include Super Shark, the plot of which is: "An offshore drilling accident releases a giant primordial shark threatening to turn a bikini content into a bloodbath", and has the strap line: "Bikinis, bullets and big bites". Another example is Avalanche Sharks from 2013, where an avalanche on a ski resort wakes a prehistoric snow shark that was buried deep under the snow, threatening a bikini competition. Ed has seen a movie called Sand Sharks, where sharks have learnt to come onto the land, swim under the sand, leap up and kill mainly women in bikinis.

General Ignorance

- Puffed-up puffer fish are full of water and poison. The fish have no rib cage and elastic skin. You may have to burp them like a baby because if they inhale while out of the water, they can get air in their system which they can't get rid of themselves, stranding themselves by floating upside down. You have to hold the fish underwater and gently squeeze the stomach. Puffer fish are the second most poisonous vertebrate on the planet, behind the poison dart frog. The only creatures immune to their toxin are sharks. The poison however is actually produced by the bacteria that live inside the fish. The Japanese delicacy, fugu, made out of this fish requires specialist preparation. Eating fugu hospitalises about 50 people a year, with about half a dozen deaths per year, and is so dangerous Japan's emperor cannot eat it. There was an attempt to make some non-poisonous puffer fish by breeding them without the bacteria, but it did not taste as nice. The poison is found in the liver, ovaries, eyes and skin.

- XL: If you were shipwrecked on an untouched Caribbean island, you could not drinking coconut milk as coconuts are not native to the Caribbean. Palm trees are native to Asia, they are an invasive species harming local wildlife, and while coconuts can drift from one island to another, there are no currents from the Pacific to the Caribbean without human help. Coconuts arrived in the Caribbean as a way of taking water on board ships. (Forfeit: Coconut milk)

- XL Tangent: Coconuts can provide you with high-calorie food, drinking water, a shell that you can turn into charcoal to cook on, fibre you can turn into rope, use them as floats for rafts, and clap them together to impersonate a horse. The mutiny on the Bounty occurred when Captain Bligh accused the crew of stealing coconuts.

- The world's longest mountain range is underwater. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge is a system of underwater mountains crossing almost the entire globe, about 40,000 miles long, compared to the Andes which is about 4,300 miles long. It was discovered by American oceanographer Marie Tharp in 1952, despite not being allowed to go to sea on any of the expeditions because she was a woman. She discovered it by taking all the measurements that the men brought back from sea, and she said: "I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, a once-in-the-history-of-the-world opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s." Every time she mapped out the measurements, she found this huge rift in the ocean, but all her colleagues ignored her, but it was confirmed to be the largest physical feature on Earth.

- Test-your-strength machines actually test your accuracy. Also known as the high striker, the strongman game or the strength tester, the key to hitting the bell is to maximise the force exerted on the mechanism by hitting the exact centre of the impact button flatly and squarely with the mallet. Website "The Art of Manliness" recommends using the same action as you would use for splitting wood with an axe. Sometimes the machines would be rigged so weak people could score high and strong people would score low. As a bonus challenge, each of the panel have a good on the machine, and the points they reach are added to their score. Ed gets 70, Sindhu and Alan get 50 and Lou gets 40 after missing it first time around. The show's floor manager, Guy Smart, manages to hit the bell and scores 100. (Forfeit: Strength)

Scores

- Guy Smart: 100 points
- Alan Davies: 58 points
- Ed Gamble: 53 points
- Lou Sanders: 45 points
- Sindhu Vee: 42 points