Sandi Toksvig is joined by Tom Allen, Cariad Lloyd, Jamie MacDonald and series regular Alan Davies. Can they come up with some quite interesting answers regarding trundling without falling into those notorious traps?

Topics

- Sandi asks the panel to her everything they know about the Tour de France. Among the interesting things about is that the most common name is "Nobody", because once Lance Armstrong had all of his wins revoked, no-one was declared the winner of the tour in those years. The Tour began as an argument between two newspapers. In 1894, the biggest scandal in France was the Dreyfus Affair, in which Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying. The country was divided between those who thought he was a traitor and those who thought he was a victim of anti-Semitism. The cycling magazine Le Velo (The Bicycle), founded by the pro-Dreyfus Pierre Giffard, had a major backer called Albert de Dion, who was arrested for demonstrating against Dreyfys's pardoning. De dion pulled his advertising from Le Velo, set up a rival newspaper called L'Auto (The Car). This was edited by Henri Desgrange, and as a publicity stunt he created a gruelling 19-day bicycle race in 1903. It worked so well that Le Velo folded as a publication the following year.

- Tangent: Cariad's late father was a triathlete and was training for an Ironman event, so he liked to watch the Tour de France, which Cariad did not enjoy.

- Tangent: Alan mentions that there was a stage of the Tour de France in Epping Forest, Essex, which leads to some audience members cheering, which Alan says is his first ever cheer.

- XL Tangent: Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow were once an item. When Stephen Fry appeared on 'Who Want's To Be A Millionare?' with Nigella Lawson (having snubbed Alan), they were asked the question: "Who is Lance Armstrong's girlfriend?" They got it wrong, going out on about £1,200, and Alan found it hilarious.

- XL Tangent: Jamie and his wife did a triathlon. He was on a racing tandem cycling around the Chris Hoy Velodrome, and he says: "I've never shat myself so much in my life." Someone told him: "What you'll notice about this bike is, there's no brakes." He was reaching 30mph in about five seconds.

- XL Tangent: The first ever winner was Maurice Garin. In 1910, the tour went into the high mountains for the first time, riding the 2,100m Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees. Writer Alphonse Steines did a recce to make sure it was safe. He got stuck in snow, abandoned his car, fell into a ravine, nearly died of hypothermia, was found by a search party at 3am, and he sent a telegram back to the editor that read: "Tourmalet crossed. Very good road. Perfectly passable."

- The first Briton to win the Tour de France was Millie Robinson, who won the Women's Tour in 1955. She worked as a van driver from the Isle of Man. Event organiser Jean Leulliot wrote: "I will never organise this race again. Women are different from men. They talk too much in the peloton. It's not normal. In addition, once the racing is over, they do not rest as they should, but fatigue their legs by going shopping." (Forfeit: Bradley Wiggins)

- XL: The skill of Alan's which is also on view on the Tour de France every year is his ability to draw a cock and balls. In the Tour there is a small team of effaceurs - erasers - who camouflage phallic graffiti along the route. There is a long-standing tradition that spectators paint the names of their favourite riders on the track, but on the 3,500km track there is lots of unwanted graffiti. Thus, painters drive ahead of the cyclists and turn "le sexe" into butterflies, owls and giant faces. The effaceurs drive two hours ahead of the race, but then they have to drive back because people paint more penises on the road after they have left.

- XL: Tandems can be used in love and war. During the Boer War, tandems were commonly used. The Royal Australian Cycle Corps had a war cycle, which was two tandems bolted together that could be fitted with a Maxim machine gun down the middle. The wheels were adapted so it could also go on railway tracks. The war cycle also doubled as an ambulance, by removing the gun and replacing it with a stretcher. They could generate electricity during the First World War, by using a static tandem attached to a dynamo. In the late 19th century, tandems and cycling in general was popular with the young. There was a two-person tricycle known as a "sociable", and young people could go on a tandem and be followed by a chaperone. There was a Chaperone Cyclists' Association formed in 1896 to supply, "spinsters over 30 to accompany young ladies on their bicycles."

- XLTangent: When Jamie and his wife were on the road with their tandem, they wobbled a bit and she went: "Shit! Shit! Stop, stop, stop!" Jamie put his foot down, and she went: "'Shit! Shit! Stop! Stop!' does not mean stop."

- XL Tangent: A tandem with three riders is a also called a tandem. The term just means the riders are sitting one in front of another. "Tandem" comes from the Latin for "at length". There used to be a thing where horses would be one behind the other, and that would have been in tandem.

- XL Tangent: Tandem cycling was an Olympic event from the 1908 London games to the 1972 Munich games. Some athletes treated the event as a joke. In the 1952 Helsinki games, two Australian athletes, Lionel Cox and Russell Mockridge, decided to take part despite never having ridden on a tandem until the week before. They borrowed a bike from the British team, and won gold in the 2,000m event.

- The toughest obstacle faced by the first train to go all the way around the world was that fact he got arrested many times. George Francis Train was an American entrepreneur who circumnavigated the world in 1870, and is the person who inspired Jules Verne to create Phileas Fogg. During the trip he was arrested and held in Lyon Bastille for 13 days. Train introduced trams to Britain, his first being in Birkenhead. He invited all of the crowned heads of Europe to attend the opening, and not a single one turned up. Train later set up a line from Marble Arch to Bayswater, which was very popular, except with wealthy residents who had to cross the line to get to Hyde Park. Train was arrested for breaking and injuring the Uxbridge Road. Train was an eccentric who liked to shake hands with himself. Train was also a supporter of women's rights, which lead to him being arrested in the USA and declared a lunatic for supporting Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 was the first woman to stand for President. Train did not support all women however. He was angered when Nellie Bly broke his record and circumnavigated the globe in 72 days in 1889, so he made two much quicker journeys to get the record back.

- Tangent: In 1832, explorer James Holman became the first blind person to circumnavigate the globe. He lost his sight in the Navy aged 25, so he left, went to medical school, and spent the next 40 years travelling. He was once imprisoned in Siberia as a spy, he had a river in Equatorial Guinea named after him, published five volumes of memoirs, and claimed he could tell a person's social status by the sound of their footsteps.

-XL: There are several events in a tram-driving competition. In the European Tramdriver Championships events include stopping within 20cm of a cone without hitting it, accelerating to exactly 30kmph without a speedometer, braking by eye to get as close as possible to a marked spot on the ground, and tram tenpin bowling. In the last of these, the driver has to shunt huge bowling balls to knock down skittles, but without the tram itself hitting the pins.

- XL Tangent: When trams were introduced in the USA, fears that people might be hit by them lead to suggestions of putting sofas on the front of trams. In Coronation Street, the character of Alan Bradley was killed by a tram.

- The kind of tractor that cannot move anything heavier than an ant is a tractor beam. Such devices have been invented, and one is demonstrated in the studio by Prof. Bruce Drinkwater of Bristol University. The team has design one using hundreds of tiny loudspeakers which generate sounds louder than a jet engine but are too high-itched for humans to hear. The sound-waves surround an object and hold an item in place. Bruce demonstrates a low-cost, battery-powered version of the beam, which can hold a small polystyrene ball, and even draw the ball deeper inside it. Practical uses for the beam would be to make giant ones that could replace robots to make tiny things, or smaller ones to move cells, viruses etc. The version Bruce uses in the studio cost about £100 to make.

- The most leaning tower in the world is the 165m Montreal Tower, which was built to deliberately lean at an angle of 45 degrees. There are many towers which lean accidentally. For example, the Huzhu Pagoda in Shanghai leans at seven degrees (the Tower of Pisa leans at 4 degrees). Built in 1709, it tilted after they set off some firecrackers and the wooden supports burned down. The church tower of Suurhusen in Germany has a five degree lean, meaning the Tower of Pisa is not the most leaning tower in Europe. (Forfeit: Pisa)

- Tangent: The Leaning Tower of Pisa originally leaned in the other direction. Construction started in 1173, and after just five years and three storeys, it started tilting north, because the ground it was built on was too soft to hold the weight. Tapered blocks were put in to stop it tilting for around 200 years, but the result was it made it tilt south instead. Alan has been up the tower, and there is only a little railing to protect you from falling off. The tower is now stabilised in 2008 with cables and 600 tonnes of lead counterweights.

- Tangent: Sandi one said to Barry Cryer: "How did you know, when you were writing for The Russ Abbot Show, that you'd got a great idea for a piece of comedy?" Barry replied: "It was nine o'clock on a Monday morning and we were sitting there and somebody said, 'Russ Abbot opens a restaurant in the Leaning Tower of Pisa and tries to serve from the dessert trolley.' Ten-past-nine, we all went for a beer."

- XL Tangent: People were asked to submit ideas for preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling, and one person submitted the idea of a huge statue of a person holding it up.

- Tangent: The Elizabeth Tower, which holds Big Ben, also leans due to subsidence. Engineers estimate it will fall over in about 1,000 years. Tom wonders what time it will be when it happens.

- The clue is in the question: "What can be used to deliver the post in Tonga?" The answer is a can. Tonga consists of 170 islands in the Pacific, and for about 100 years the people on the northernmost island of Niufao'ou sent and received mail via tin cans retrieved from the sea by swimming postman. The island has a volcanic rim and thus lacks a natural harbour. When the postal system began in 1882, passing ships threw overboard buoyant biscuit tins and kerosene tins filled with letters, and they would put a flag on the tins to make them more visible. The strongest swimming would go out to retrieve the cans, and then use a long stick to pass outgoing letters up to the ship's deck. After one postman was attacked by a shark, they started using canoes. The island now has an airfield with delivers the post.

- Tangent: According to Tongan oral history, in the 12th century a piece of wood was briefly named king. King Talatama died without any heirs, and his brother Talaiha'apepe was the obvious next monarch. However, there was no precedent for brothers inheriting the throne, and this was considered a bad omen. Thus, Talaiha'apepe named a wooden block as the previous kind's son, making the block king. The block was given a wife to marry, and they adopted Talaiha'apepe as their son, and thus he could become king.

- XL: The place that begins with "T" and is a rubbish place to go for a drink is a tip in Tokyo. In 2019, a pop-up cocktail bar called Gome Pit was opened in a Tokyo trash treatment centre called Musashino Clean Center.

- XL Tangent: 15% of Tokyo Bay (250 square kilometres) is reclaimed land. It used waste from construction projects, which started in 1592 using dirt displaced from a moat dug round Edo Castle. Almost all of Tokyo's waste-processing facilities are built on land reclaimed using domestic waste. There is an artificial island off Tokyo Bay called Yumenoshima (Dream Island) as built using domestic waste inserted between layers of clay. The original plan was to build an airport there, but eventually it just became landfill. The island was the setting for the archery and water polo events in the 2020 Olympics.

- XL Tangent: In Copenhagen, there is a waste-to-energy plant which on the outside has an artificial ski slope, a hiking trail, and the world's tallest artificial climbing wall. It is known as CopenHill or Amager Bakke.

- XL Tangent: Cariad went skiing at school, and at the end she was given a certificate, but this took place in France and she did not know kissing on the cheeks was a form of greeting there. She was the first person to get the certificate and wrongly kissed the instructor on the lips, in front of the whole school.

General Ignorance

- The country beginning with "S" whose bagpipe culture is protected by UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List is Slovakia. It was added to the list in 2015, the list having started in 2008. The list safeguards cultural practices and raises awareness about them. Bagpiping has been important in Slovakian folk culture from at least the 18th century. Milan Rusko, the secretary of the Slovak Bagpipers Guild, claims Slovak bagpipes have a pleasant sound, as opposed to aggressive Scottish bagpipes.

- Tangent: Other items on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List include beer culture from Belgium; practices and expressions of joking relationships in Niger, where two communities who don't get on find a person in each community to represent them and then mock each other to stop fighting; and Mongolian coaxing ritual for camels.

- The panel are asked to name any UK contributions to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List. They cannot, as there are no UK entrants on it. In comparison, Ireland has three and France has 23. (Forfeit: Binge drinking)

- Dracula was prince of Wallachia. The real-life Dracula, Vlad III or Draculea (1431-76), better known as Vlad the Impaler, was born in Transylvania, but he was prince of neighbouring Wallachia. Vlad impaled thousands of people in his lifetime. (Forfeit: Transylvania; Darkness)

- Tangent: There is a castle that Vlad III did not live in but makes a big deal out of him called Bram Castle, but it is associated with Dracula because Bram Stoker saw a drawing of the castle in a book and based Dracula's home on it. The castle Vlad III lived in is about 150 miles away and is now a ruin. In 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the castle offered itself up as a site to get free vaccine doses, and the doctors wore fake fangs. If you were vaccinated, you were offered free access to an exhibition of medieval torture implements.

Scores

- Cariad Lloyd: -2 points
- Jamie MacDonald: -13 points
- Alan Davies and Tom Allen: -17 points