Topics

- The thing that smells like ripe gorgonzola, doesn't show up well in photos and should not be touched under any circumstances is fake ectoplasm. After WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, many people tried to get into touch with dead relatives leading to a rise in spiritualism. By 1930, about 250,000 Britons were members of spiritualist churches. Then Arthur Conan Doyle used a séance to get in touch which his son Kingsley, who died in the war. As a result, many mediums became famous, some of whom claims to produce ectoplasm. Conveniently for the mediums, ectoplasm is supposedly very sensitive to light and touch causing serious and undefined damage to the toucher. The ectoplasm was actually made out of either cheesecloth or muslin, with gelatine, egg white, soap and other substances. One investigator, Harry Price, claimed the ectoplasm smelled of ripe gorgonzola. Danish medium Einer Nielsen was investigated by a team from a Norwegian university, and they claimed Nielsen hid ectoplasm in his bottom, which he fed up a hole in his outfit to his mouth, before pretending to vomit. (Forfeit: Boris Johnson)

- Tangent: French medium Eva Carriere used to chew paper and faces cut out of magazines. She got caught when a photo of her with a supposed dead person was clearly a photo of the then king of Bulgaria. In 1944, Helen Duncan, famous for her production of yards of ectoplasm from her mouth, nostrils, nipples and between her legs, was the last woman in Britain to be convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, for falsely claiming to procure spirits. Harry Price stole a sample of Duncan's ectoplasm and found it was made out of wood pulp and egg white. In November 1941, Duncan held a séance in Portsmouth in which she claims a spirit of a sailor told her that HMS Barham had sunk, which was not public knowledge at the time. After she announced this, the Navy were worried that Duncan could actually announce things to people that they should not know about. Winston Churchill was furious that people were wasting their time on Duncan.

- Tangent: A spirit trumpet was a device that was supposed to amplify abnormal, paranormal noises. This fact is illustrated with a photo of a séance with Harry Houdini's wife. Standing next to her is a man with a pair of handcuffs that he can't open, because the only person who could open them was Harry Houdini. Thus, the séance was an attempt to get in touch with Houdini to get him to unlock the cuffs. These séances to contact Houdini happen annually. Alan went to one, and he says that Houdini was interested in the spirit world because he wanted to contact his mother, whom he was very close to. Houdini constantly uncovered charlatans and frauds who claimed they were mediums. Houdini said: "If I can communicate with you, I will open a pair of handcuffs." Thus the séance in New York was conducted with the handcuffs on the table, which failed to open.

- The thing that was so scary it made sailors soil themselves was scurvy. Before it was discovered that scurvy was caused by a lack of Vitamin C, they thought it was caused by being away from land. Thus, in the 18th century a common treatment for scurvy was burying sufferers in soil, a practice called "earth bathing". Home soil was thought to be best, so ship owners took boxes of English earth on voyages. Thomas Melville, captain of a convict ship, would bury scurvy sufferers up to their necks and make them patient eat vegetables. The vegetables probably helped more than the earth. James Lind, the man who discovered that citrus fruits were the real cure, also thought earth bathing was good, so it became common on land too. 18th century quack James Graham recommended his patients buried themselves up to their lips to cure not just scurvy, but also venereal disease, rheumatism, leprosy and cancer, and he earth bathed dozens of times, often in public.

- Tangent: David originally suggests that scary thing is dysentery. Zoe once went scuba diving in Mexico, and she says that, "there's nothing more horrifying than discovered 20 metres underwater that you are going to suffer from what can only be described as catastrophic shits in a wet suit."

- Tangent: During the Age of Sail (1570s-1860s), scurvy killed over two million sailors. This was more than storms, shipwrecks, battles and all other diseases combined. For long voyages, ship owners would assume that about 50% of the crew would die of scurvy. Without Vitamin C, the body cannot carry out the reactions that produce collagen, which is like the glue that holds tissues together. Thus your body literally falls apart: you feel weak, get ulcers, bruise at the gentlest touch, your gums putrefy, your teeth loosen, old wounds reopen, and you bleed internally.

- XL Tangent: The cure for scurvy was forgotten and rediscovered several times. Vasco de Gama, the first European to sail to India in 1497, knew to give his sailors citrus fruits, but this was forgotten. Jacques Cartier, who explored the Saint Lawrence River in 1536, gave his crew tea made from cedar needles, and again this cure was forgotten. In 1607, the East India Company gave their sailors lemon juice, but they boiled it first, getting rid of the Vitamin C which is what is needed to stop scurvy. James Lind didn't come up with his cure until 1747, and it was another 47 years before the Royal Navy started issuing lemon juice.

- XL Tangent: When the Dauphin of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was born, a sartorial trend began which involved wearing a shade of brown called "caca-dauphin", which was the colour of the child's soiled nappies.

- The panel are shown Edvard Munch's The Scream and are asked what his problem is. The problem is other people. Visitors to the Munch Museum in Oslo are damaging the picture by breathing too close to it, who cause excess humidity. There are four versions of the picture, all drawn on cardboard, two with pastels and two painted. Another problem is that people keep stealing the pictures. In 1994, the first version was stolen from Norway's National Gallery in a robbery lasting just 50 seconds: two men pulled up in a van, propped a ladder against a wall, climbed into the museum and stole the picture leaving a note saying: "Thanks for the poor security." When the 1910 version of the picture was stolen in 2004, the robbers had to ask where the picture was.

- Tangent: It is believed the figure in The Scream was inspired by a Peruvian mummy that Munch came across at the Ethnographic Exchange Museum in Paris. The mummy is of a Chachapoya warrior who lived in the Amazon around 1,000 years ago. Another artist inspired by it was Paul Gauguin, with a similar figure in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

- XL Tangent: Dryness is also a problem in museums. During the Covid-19 lockdown, a lack of human breath in the British Museum causes humidity levels to plummet, meaning wooden and bone objects were at risk of cracking. Sandra Smith, the Head of Collections Care, said that: "For a while we were all holding our breath."

- You can make a scary movie even scarier using many of the tricks of B-movie director William Castle, aka the Abominable Showman. He made films such as House on the Haunted Hill and The Tingler, and employed many gimmicks to make things scarier. For his 1958 film Macabre, every member of the audience was given a life insurance policy to sign, and if you died of fright in your seat your family got $1,000. No-one did die. He kept nurses on stand-by in case something terrible happened, had hearses lining the street outside special showings, arrived at premieres in a coffin, and he employed women to sit in the audience to scream at particular moments. For example, in The Tingler when a character breaks the fourth wall and says a deadly parasite has escape into the cinema, the women he paid would then scream. Castle also hid machines to give vibrations at key moments in the film. In Castle's 1961 film Homicidal had a "fright break" in it, where people were allowed to leave and get a full refund before the terrifying denouement. To get the break you had to leave your seat and follow a yellow streak before the entire audience to a special booth called Coward's Corner, where a light shone on your with a recording intoning: "Watch the chicken. Watch him shiver in Coward's Corner."

- Tangent: When Alan's daughter was two they went to a pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk. It started in black-out, so she was very scared and Alan could feel her grabbing his arm. Then over the tannoy you could hear the giant shouting: "Fee Fi Fo Fum!" All the children cried in terror. Alan had to take her home she was so scared. Sandi took her godson Joe to a panto when he was three, and a character in the play turned to the audience saying: "I'm going to eat all the children!" Joe shouted: "He's just kidding, but let's go home anyway!"

- XL Tangent: David went to see "Scream" at the cinema, and it got to him because the film is a joke about horror films, and the area of doubt was what made him hate hit, but at the same time he thought it was quite well done so he went to see it again. It was just as bad the second time. He felt similar feelings when watching "Sharknado".

- XL: The scary individual who can point his face and his buttocks at you at the same time is a skunk. This is the position they adopt when they are about to spray you. The spray is usually a last resort. Some spotted skunks do handstands to warn predators, and will even charge while doing a sort of headstand before they fire. An intense spray in front of your face is enough to knock you out. The scent glands are right by their bottom, the size of grapes, and they have hugely powerful muscles to squirt the spray up to ten feet.

- XL Tangent: Alan had a friend who he has mention on the show before, nicknamed "The Squirt", who could urinate out of a window eight foot above him. When Sandi grew up in New York, it was believed that if a child had been sprayed by a skunk was to give them a bath in tomato juice, but it did not work. What instead happens is "Olfactory fatigue", where your nose gets used to the skunk smell and instead it catches the strong tomato smell. Alan was once in Canada where someone said there was a skunk living under the house, and when they walked past they would say: "Hey Mr Skunk, don't squirt us, Mr Skunk." Alan has never smelled skunk spray, but has smelled tear gas in Paris. Some people believe skunks have stripes to lure the predator's eye towards the skunk's arse, but Alan says that's true of all arseholes.

- XL: You can spook a Spartan on his wedding night by making the bride wear women's clothes and having long hair. In Sparta, boys and girls were separated from the age of seven. In order to get ready for marriage, the girls had their hair cut short and dressed in a man's tunic in order to help him because they were not used to interacting with women and it would help them relax. Male Spartans were allowed to marry from the age of 20, but they had to live in all-male barracks until they were 30. If you were a young husband, you were expected to sneak back to visit your own wife. A young man could become a father before he saw his wife in the daylight, the idea being it kept the marriage exciting. Spartan women had a lot of equality and more rights than just about anywhere else in the classical world. They liked it when the men went off to war, because then the women were entirely in charge.

- XL Tangent: If a man refused to fight in the Spartan Army, you would be obliged to shave off half your beard to show how cowardly you were, in that you were half a man. In 400 BC, Xenophon wrote that men who did not go to war would be beaten up in public if they looked cheerful, and even worse would be left unpicked when teams were chosen for ball games.

- XL Tangent: In the film "Cold Mountain", Ray Winstone leads a band of Confederate press gangers who go from homestead to homestead looking for young fighting-age men who were hiding in barns, punishing people for hiding men who should be fighting. David suggests the thing to do is volunteer quickly and try and get an administrative role.

- The UK's largest collection of spirits is in the National History Museum. 23 million exhibits are picked in ethanol and formaldehyde in a collection that takes over 27km of shelving. There is an alcohol supply system that runs all the way through the museum's walls, which is linked to two 1,000 litre tanks of ethanol that is pumped around the museum with compressed air and every lab has a tap that you can draw the solution from. This alcohol however is highly toxic. (Forfeit: My house)

- XL Tangent: You cannot preserve something in pure formaldehyde because it is a gas.

- XL Tangent: The National History Museum contains species sent by Darwin, Cook, Scott, Shakcleton and Joseph Banks. It also contains a giant squid called Archie which is preserved in a custom-built 9m acrylic tank. He was frozen when he arrived at the museum and made the whole place smell of urine for days after he was defrosted due to ammonia released from his tissue.

- Tangent: The Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn, London contains a jar of moles and the Bishop of Durham's rectum. It is the rectum of Thomas Thurlow, who died of bowel cancer in 1791, and it was preserved by Dr. John Hunter, after whom the Hunterian Museum is named.

General Ignorance

- The world's fastest mammal is the Mexican free-tailed bat. Cheetahs can travel from 0mph to 60mph in three seconds, and reach a maximum of 75mph, but researchers in Tennessee strapped backpacks to these bats, monitored the bats from a low-flying plane, and showed the bats routinely reach 100mph on wing-power alone. There are some birds that can travel faster than these bats, but only when diving. Peregrine falcons can exceed 180mph when diving, with one measured in 2005 at 242mph. (Forfeit: Cheetah)

- Tangent: Bats form the largest mammal colony in the world. Bracken Cave, Texas, is home to over 15 million bats Every night, they leave the cave in a "batnado". The bats swarm so much that nearby planes have been instructed to avoid them. This colony eats over 80,000 tonnes of insects a year (which is 500 blue whales worth of insects). These bats are also called guano bats as the manure they produce is also a good fertiliser. They drop about 50 tonnes of guano on the cave floor every year. In the 19th century, they tried to dig down to see how much there was, and they stopped digging after they went down 60ft.

- Tangent: Blue whales can travel at 30mph, but only in short bursts. Normally they travel at just 5mph.

- The panel have to identify a beast that is a carved statue near the Great Pyramids of Giza. It is not a Sphinx, despite being called the Great Sphinx. Carved in about 2550BC, the word "sphinx" did not appear until 2,000 years after it was made, and we don't know what it was meant to represent. Theories suggest the statue might of the sun god Horus of the Horizon, or Horemakhet, or a particular pharaoh called Khafre, whose father built the Great Pyramid. The sphinx of Greek myth had a lion's body, a woman's head an eagle's wings, and the one in Giza has no wings. It also has a man's head, which we know because it originally had a beard. The British Museum has sphinx stubble in its collection. In 1400BC, the statue was already in a state of disrepair. The statue keeps getting buried in sand, and it was only excavated to look how it does now in the 1920s. (Forfeit: A Sphinx)

Scores

- Richard Osman: 1 point
- Zoe Lyons: -5 points
- David Mitchell: -6 points
- Alan Davies: -23 points