Topics

- The panel are asked to name any element of a British naval officer's uniform from 1747. They cannot, as there was no standard uniform at the time. The army had a uniform since the mid-17th century, which led to naval officers deciding to look more respectable and introducing a uniform in April 1748. This uniform consisted of a blue coat with a flared skirt and white cuffs.

- Tangent: To illustrate the question, the panel are shown portraits of two naval officers from before the uniform period. One is James Cornewall, who died in 1744 by having both his legs blown off by cannon. His is the first funeral monument in [Westminster Abbey that the government put forward. The other portrait is of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who wrecked his entire fleet off the Scilly Isles, losing 2,000 sailors on the way, because nobody knew how to work out longitude.

- Tangent: The first RAF uniforms were made in 1918, and the material that was used to make them was made specifically for Tsar Nicholas II. The material was for his Cossacks' trousers, but the RAF approached a clothmaker in Leeds called Hainsworth, who had a whole warehouse full of blue-grey material that was for the Tsar, but was undeliverable due to the Russian Civil War. Hainsworth offered the cloth to the RAF, and they are still the people who provide the material for RAF uniforms today.

- Tangent: Non-uniform days at school appear to have different names in different parts of the country. For example, at Tom's school they were called "mufti days", but the kids laughed at the word "muff". Also, Tom went the other way to most students and dressed even smarter than normal on mufti days, coming in wear a three-piece suit and a pocket watch. Meanwhile, at Chris and Alan's schools they just called it "own clothes day". The word "mufti" comes from an Arabic word for a judge, normally referring to an Islamic scholar who wore traditional robes. The robes were adopted by the British Army from about 1816.

- A cow can help you get away with murder down under if you reveal the plot of your book to others. In 1929, there was a novel about the supposed perfect murder, and a guy in Australia decided to use this method to commit actual murders. A young English writer named Arthur Upfield, who failed his exams as an estate agent so was sent to Australia by his father, travelled all over the outback. While there he wrote a series of novels about a mixed-race Aboriginal detective called Detective Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte. As well as writing, he was also working on the building of a rabbit-proof boundary fence in Western Australia. In the fourth novel, The Sands of Windee, the murder puts the dead victim inside a cow, burns both bodies, mixes the remains together, picks out any metal fragments and dissolves them in acid, and then everything else is crushed into dust and thrown into the wind. Upfield thought that the murder was so perfect that he could not find a way for Bony to solve the case, so he talked it over with everybody he knew. One of the people he spoke to was a co-worked on the fence, Snowy Rowles, who happened to be planning to how to murder three people, and used Upfield's technique. He carried out the first two murders to the absolute letter, and no bodies were ever found. However, with the third murder Rowles forgot to dissolve any metal in the ashes, resulting in the victim being identified by a very distinctive wedding ring. The local police knew about the unsolvable plot because Upfield had discussed it with them too, leading to Rowles being arrested, convicted and hanged. Rowles however claimed to the very end that the murders had never happened.

- Tangent: Agatha Christie's 1961 novel The Pale Horse features a murderer using thallium sulphate, a colourless, odourless, tasteless chemical found in rat poison. In 1988, a Florida woman died and the police suspected that the Agatha Christie method of murder had taken place. The victim's neighbour, George James Trepal, was known to have openly despised her. Trepal then made the mistake of holding a murder-mystery party, and the police sent an undercover detective, who found the thallium sulphate in his garage, as well as a copy of The Pale Horse.

- The notable person who has been seen regularly in public wearing rubber underwear is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin. Lenin died in January 1924, was laid in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow for about a week, and his body did not decompose because it was so cold. 500,000 mourners came to Moscow to pay their respects, and it was decided that because the public display of affection was so amazing that they should put Lenin's body on permanent public display. They preserved the body by dressing it in a rubber suit, then encasing it in a layer of embalming fluid and then putting his formal suit on top. His body today is still given a regular bath of alcohol and formaldehyde. However, it is now believed that only 23% of Lenin is original. All the body fluids were replaced by embalming fluids, his organs were removed, the fats in his skin were replaced bit by bit over the years, his eyelashes were replaced with fakes because the originals were damaged in the embalming and his nose had to be rebuilt in 1939. In 1945 two scientists tried to strength the skin on his feet, and accidentally dissolved a big chunk of it instead, so they had to make another bit of foot. At its peak, 200 people were employed at the Lenin lab just to keep his body preserved. It costs about £140,000 a year to maintain the body, and many people in Russia are pushing for a normal burial.

- Tangent: Odessa, Ukraine, had a statue of Lenin, but they decided that they no longer wanted it. However, rather than getting rid of it, they added a helmet and cape to it, so the statue now depicts Darth Vader. The helmet of the statue also emits free Wi-Fi.

- Sandi asks they panel how they would feel about being unceremoniously buttbuttinated. This question is about websites with profanity filters, which accidentally replace things that sound rude, which are not. In this case, the word "assassinated" having the syllables "ass" replaced with "butt". There was a period of time in 1996 when web portal AOL who not let residents of Scunthorpe register. Other towns with similar problems include Penistone, Clitheroe and Lightwater.

- Tangent: Another unintended online consequence is the Streisand Effect. In 2003, Barbra Streisand discovered there was a photo of her house on the internet. Only about six people had seen it, but she insisted the photo should be removed. This resulted in thousands of people deciding to look at the photo, because before then no-one knew it was there.

- XL Tangent: In 1972, Idi Amin expelled 60,000 Asian Ugandans from the country. Lots of people in Leicester, which already had a large Asian community, worried there would be a sudden influx of these new people. Thus, Leicester City Council put out loads of adverts in the Ugandan press telling people to avoid the city. What actually happened was that the Asian Ugandans discovered Leicester for the first time, and thus decided to move there.

- The panel are shown a photo of a fox jumping and diving into some snow, and are asked what is interesting and hidden under the snow. Snow can cover over 40 million square kilometres of the northern hemisphere in winter, which results in the creation of a hidden ecosystem called the subnivium. If the snow is light and fluffy, as well as about eight inches thick, it allows warm vapour to rise up from the ground and refreeze overhead, making an icy ceiling. This holds up a series of tunnels which are windless and relatively warm. Foxes dig down into the snow either to get food or just to be warmer. This snow is home to beetles, lemmings and mice. Grouse sometimes dive-bomb into the snow to get to the food. It is an important ecological refuge, which is danger due to global warming.

- Tangent: Japanese macaques, including babies, make snowballs. They roll them down hills and carry them about. There are crows in Alaska and Canada that have been filmed snowboarding on steep snow-covered roofs, using plastic lids or just on their backs.

- XL: The thing that unites the panel and would make all of them very good undercover spies is that no-one suspects celebrities. Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn all worked as spies, hiding in plain sight. People wanted to meet them; they would hear information and would pass it on. One of the USA's most successful spies in the 2000s, in Africa, was Darrell Blocker. He was a CIA agent working undercover in Africa, who used to sing as a body. He sang in the church choir, the Glee Club etc., and was recruited by the CIA. In 2003, he was at a bar in Uganda called Bubbles O'Leary, and he saw a band called the Kampala Jazz All-Stars. The band were not doing well, so Blocker suggest they should do some Bob Marley, which the crowd loved and the band asked him to join in. Thus the band became one of the most popular in the country, leading Blocker to become a Ugandan celebrity. In his other life, Blocker was the head of the whole of the CIA in Africa.

- XL Tangent: Chris was almost a spy. He applied for a job at MI5 20 years ago, and out of 3,000 applicants he got down to the last 30. In the end, MI5 wisely thought it was not a good idea to hire a blind spy.

- XL Tangent: Josephine Baker worked as a spy. She worked as an erotic cabaret dancer, and was a huge star in her adopted Paris. She worked undercover throughout the Second World War for the French Secret Service. Her luggage in which she had all her showbiz regalia was also full of stolen dossiers and photos. Lots of Nazi officers wanted to meet her, who would tell her secrets, which she would scribble down on her body when she went to the bathroom. She would then transcribe this information, hide it in her underwear, then passed it onto an agent, who in turn passed it directly to Churchill.

- XL: If you are trying to get into the underworld, the bouncer might say to you how to fix a broken boat. To enter the Duat, the Ancient Egyptian underworld, you had to answer a quiz set by the ferryman Hrad-Haf. You would be asked: "The weather is windy but the boat has no mast, what should we make our new mast from?" According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the correct answer is: "The phallus of the baboon god Babi, god of virility." Babi's phallus is also what makes "the bolt on the doors of heaven".

- XL Tangent: The Pharaoh Khufu was buried with an entire boat. People would be buried with board games in case they got bored on the way to the Duat. Many people had figures called ushabti, which were meant to serve you in the afterlife. A woman named Ankh, who died in 2010 BC, had a guide to the underworld stuck on the inside of her sarcophagus. The guide was known as the Book of Two Ways, and is the oldest instruction book that we know of.

General Ignorance

- XL: The very first female ruler of Egypt was Neithhotep. She founded Egypt's very first dynasty, almost 5,000 years ago. She is buried in a tomb that is covered in markings which are usually reserved for pharaohs. There were seven rules of Egypt called Cleopatra, of which the most famous was the last. (Forfeit: Cleopatra; Nefertiti)

- XL Tangent: The two sphinxes that are next to Cleopatra's Needle, the obelisk in London, were made in Pimlico in 1881. They were damaged by a German bomb in 1917, and you still put your fingers in the bomb markings.

- The Virgin Islands were named after the cult of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. According to one story, Ursula was a third century Christian princess who agreed to marry a pagan prince to forge peace between the kingdoms. Before the wedding, she and 11,000 virgins were allowed to make a pilgrimage to Rome. However, they were killed on their way back, in Cologne, by Hun warriors. Christopher Columbus named the islands after them, with the largest island being called Ursula. We now believe the 11,000 virgins is a mistake in a Latin inscription, where the "M" for martyr was mistaken for the "M" for 1,000, so there actually just 11 virgins. (Forfeit: Lou)

- XL Tangent: The Basilica of St. Ursula in Cologne still holds the alleged bones of the 11,000 virgins, where there is a display made out of the bones. The number of bones suggests the number of virgins is between 11 and 11,000.

- The panel are shown a photo of some frogs and are asked how they get around. The frogs in question - the tiger-legged monkey frog, the red-banded rubber-banded frog, the Senegal running frog and the bumblebee toad - all walk rather than jump. In theory, all of these frogs could hop, but they choose to creep about like cats when stalking their pray. (Forfeit: Jumping)

- Tangent: The pumpkin toadlet, which is about the size of a thumbnail, has not developed its inner ear. Thus it cannot balance, meaning it can jump, but not land. Also, it cannot hear, but it still cries out. It is also one of the most poisonous creatures on Earth.

Scores

- Chris McCausland: 8 points
- Lou Sanders: 1 point
- Tom Allen: -5 points
- Alan Davies: -38 points