The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Audience Favourites (Pt 2)

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inks, and after nine new episodes of our favourite moments from the Infinite Monkey Cage, it's time to hand over to you, our listeners, to find out what clips of the show you most wanted to hear again.

Yeah, most of the letters were questions for Gardener's Question Time where the people got confused.

They were were all about hydrangeas.

Yeah, well, I mean, Brian, can we have some hollyhocks advice from you?

Yeah, don't grow them in peaty soil.

Thank you very much.

Now, a lot of the people writing in were talking about how I keep fit because Brian has a keep fit regime.

He has a personal trainer, a load of kettlebells, and a macrobiotic diet.

But my daily mechanism of fitness is just that I'm Brian Blessed for 10 minutes a day.

And it really keeps the weight off.

Oh, yes, there we go.

In, out, in, out.

One, two,

flash.

Honestly, I do recommend it to everyone.

If you wake up in the morning and just for the first two minutes you behave as Brian Blessed, it really is invigorating.

Put wings on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wings, a little hat, the whole thing.

Now, one of you said your favourite episode was The Infinite Monkeys Guide to Strawberries, which itself was a compilation of other listeners' favourite moments from the actual show.

So we were also going quite meta, favourites within favourites within favourites.

But let's start today, Brian.

Are you okay if I bring it up with spiders?

Yeah, and Victoria wrote in to say she enjoyed my...

She used the word genuine fear, but I think she means acting talent when the spiders were released on stage.

Oh, and Larissa Dubb wasn't the only one of you out there who was fascinated in their mating habits.

So here's comedian Claire Hooper asking ecologists Mariella Herberstein and Dita Hokkuli how exactly it works.

What works?

Well, the mating habits.

It's pretty complicated.

Can I ask a question?

And I'm not proud, but somebody has to.

If a spider has eight legs and eight eyes, how many penises does it have?

Two.

I knew it was worth asking.

They don't have a penis.

They have a genital opening.

They ejaculate the sperm out of the genital opening onto a web.

And then they dip their little pedipulps, the first pair of legs, into the droplet of sperm.

They take up the sperm into their legs.

then they search for a female, then they insert one of their little legs into the female genital opening, they ejaculate again,

if they're lucky they get to do it again with the other leg.

Hang on a minute, just to check that I've got the order right, they ejaculate and then they find a female.

Yeah.

Yes?

And then it's the left leg in and the left leg out.

Once they shake it all about, little spiderlings everywhere.

So absolutely fine.

And then after all that, they get eaten.

So in many species, he's eaten, maybe even after the first mating already, after the first copulation, he's already eaten.

Some of the families, he also breaks off bits of his

bits that get stuck inside the female and it prevents other males from accessing that.

Wow, he plugs the hole.

Yes.

And that's what it's called, that's what it's called, genital plugging.

So

that is the

official term.

Well done, Claire.

Cool.

Well, I've got some big ideas to take home now.

Do you think if the spider waited until she'd just eaten, he might get away with it?

Do you know what, like, is she eating him because she's hungry?

Or?

No, because they're tiny.

They're just an hors d'oeuvre.

They're

just a little snack.

So they're not substantive.

So it's not about satiation, not about hunger, although hungry females are quite grumpy.

I like to tell my husband he's who's just an entree too.

English people, very often, when they go to Australia, are very worried about spiders, aren't they, Brian?

You know, they've heard all about the funnel web spider that's going to bite them when they're sitting on the loo and all that stuff.

But actually, there are very, very, very few spider deaths and spider injuries.

And the huntsman spider, which is not particularly dangerous in terms of what it is itself, apart from the fact that the huntsman spider very often goes to sleep on warm car engines.

And then when people start driving again, it wakes the huntsman up, it crawls out, and at that point, people go, Ah!

And that's when they crash their car.

So, the huntsman, the element of surprise, is unfortunately the thing that makes it quite a dangerous spider.

They're harmless, but terrifying because they're big.

Now, Louise Foster says her favourite episode was back in 2016, or as Brian says, 2016, when we celebrated 200 years of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which, by the way, I saw, and I think you would like this, I saw the most fantastic thing.

A performer called Salty Brine, his real name, he really is Salty Brine, did a show all about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein using the songs of the Manchester brilliant band, The Smiths, from The Queen is Dead.

Media Cemetery Gray.

Some girls are bigger than others.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the bride of Frankenstein.

She's bigger than others.

Light that never goes out, yeah.

That episode features the actor and comedian Noel Fielding.

And and he told us about some of the monsters he's played on telly.

But he went on to describe a scary Frankenstein-type model of the singer Joey Ramone that he'd made from Plasticine.

From the Plasticine Joey Ramon to evolutionary biologist Nick Lane and Sir Christopher Fraling.

There was a bit in Frankenstein, I haven't read it for a long time, but they sort of made the creature bigger because it was easier, because it was quite difficult to recreate the body and the organs and stuff.

So they've made like a bigger version of it.

Yeah, he's eight foot tall.

Right, eight foot, yeah.

But you know, I think when Frankenstein describes where he gets his bits from, he says, charnel houses, graveyards, and slaughterhouses.

Right, so there's some animal in there, as well as human, which is why he's larger than life.

And the movies haven't really dealt with that.

There's bits of animal in there.

Well, that's what I did.

I used classicene and femo and some modelling clay.

Just on the science of the creature or the monster, in terms of stitching together loads of different bodies, what would be the medical ramifications and problems?

Because I presume you'd basically have the elbow rejecting the wrist and then the hand being rejected by the elbow.

So it is going to be, because I'm thinking of stopping with the research I've got to so far.

But what, what, in terms of that, just looking at when you sometimes do examination of the pure science of what this would actually mean.

So there we go, you have a body, you have a head stitched on, and then with a different brain put into it, which you've somehow managed to connect.

What problems are going to arise?

Good question.

He's making notes now for the radio listeners.

Robin is taking it down very carefully.

He's got a diagram and everything.

He's going to go home.

I suppose the biggest problem is that all the bits would be to differing degrees dead.

And

some cells will be alive, some cells will be dead.

Assuming that you were able to put them together perfectly, so all the nerves you could join them up, all the blood vessels you could join them up,

and that, yes, you can start the heart beating again by electrocuting it or something.

What would go wrong then?

The biggest thing which is probably going to go wrong is exactly the problem with how do you get the electricity flowing again.

So, this is what goes wrong when you do an organ transplant today.

If you've taken, you know, you take an organ out, you put it on ice for a couple of days, you try and find someone who's got the right immunological match so that it's not going to reject, and then you put it in again.

And the problem that you have is that it usually fails at that point.

If you've stored it for more than a day or two, on ice, this is,

then it all goes wrong.

And it goes wrong as soon as you reintroduce oxygen.

And what seems to be happening is, in effect, that the flow of electrons to oxygen just screws up.

It will not get to oxygen properly.

You produce these reactive-free radicals.

They attack the cell around it.

And it breaks down kind of cell by cell from within.

And to prevent that from happening is really, really difficult.

The writer Alan Moore has been a guest on the show several times, a wonderful writer, based in Northampton, creator of watchmen from hell and so much more and quite a few of you appreciated his ability to predict real science with his science fiction including someone called Supergrover who described him as a sage now Alan is a sage so much so that in the 1980s in particular he was very much seen as a philosopher by people and I'm sure I've told you this before but there's a beautiful story of him being interviewed and at one point the interviewer said now Alan you hate children don't you and he said I don't hate children.

And he said, I wondered why they thought I hated children.

And then he remembered an interview that he'd done over the phone.

And at the end of this interview, the guy had said, Alan, could you give us three philosophies for living a good life?

And he couldn't immediately think of three philosophies, but he had a box of matches in his hand.

So he just turned it over and he said, well, my three philosophies for living a good life are.

Keep in a dry place, keep away from children, and strike away from the body.

And that's what they printed, which I just think is is absolutely beautiful.

I love it.

He's a wonderful writer.

And I remember I was so jealous when you told me how the book Jerusalem started.

Oh, no, it's not Jerusalem.

It's a short story in Illuminations about the first femtosecond of the universe.

Oh, yes.

It was the best of times.

It was the first of times.

That

is the best opening possible to a book on any science at all.

Yeah.

Particularly the Big Bang.

Back in the second month case series, Alan explained how his work had been inspired by string theory to physicists Brian Greene and Jonathan Ross.

You were saying earlier about science fiction and science and how they relate.

I mean with regard to string theory as an example of me kind of reading half a book on string theory and focusing upon one sentence, which is my basic method of approaching almost everything.

And I'd read a couple of books on string theory and and the sentence that caught my eye was that essentially reality and the universe is created by the vibrations of these strings,

which I thought was lovely because there's poetry there.

I mean that makes everything music.

So I immediately banged out an eight-page comic story about a guy with a super string violin who can alter reality.

Now I don't believe that you can actually do that, but it was a poetic conceit based upon the actual science.

Well, you would presumably alter the laws of physics if you played around with the and vibrated the strings in a different way and

wet again.

We need you, Alan, in our laboratory.

Everything you need to know about science is in Fag's Future Shocks in 2018.

Later in that episode, Alan and Jonathan went on to discuss the idea and the limitations of consciousness.

I think that science as a tool is the greatest tool that consciousness has come up with to help us in fathoming the cosmos about us.

It's the most perfect tool.

But I believe that it only

can and should

go so far.

I feel that science is perfect for describing the material universe.

But I believe that the realm of consciousness

is actually outside the boundaries of science.

I mean, you can't repeat consciousness in a laboratory.

You can't measure it empirically.

I know that you can sort of do.

Not yet.

Not yet, but.

Well, you may be able to do it.

You may be able to produce a conscious computer, for example.

Without a saying that he doesn't think we should.

Is that what you're saying?

Well, I don't think we can actually create a conscious computer.

We might be able to.

Have you ever seen Jimmy Carr work life?

he's a joke machine

i i really liked the i mean the thing that you were saying about the arthur clarke idea of the phone network becoming conscious i saw a wonderful comic strip the other day just i don't see many of them these days but this one was really appealing it had got a fortress in the middle of a wasteland and a guy turns up at the gate and they say who goes there

and he says i would like to come into your fortress and they say well we can only take people people who are going to be useful to us.

And he said, well, I think that you'll find that I am useful, for I am the internet.

And they say, no, you're not.

And he says, yes, I am.

I can prove it.

And they say, well, go on then.

And he takes out these bits of paper and he says, I bring you pornographic pictures and the rantings of angry children.

They think about it for a while.

And they say, well, there's one question.

If you can answer it, we will accept that you are the internet.

We are interested in purchasing hot water bottles shaped like cats.

What else might we be interested in purchasing?

The next clip is from the first podcast we recorded in lockdown with an audience with remarkable technology.

Do you remember?

We got loads of stuff on Twitter saying, Why have you put canned laughter on it?

And it wasn't canned laughter.

The BBC engineering department had developed a system where, what is it, about 100 or 200 people?

There's more than that.

It went up to 1,000 by the end of those could listen in on Zoom.

Every single member of the audience is sitting alone, you know, in their front room.

Yeah.

And yet, if you heard them laugh, they were all laughing in the same way you would hear in an audience.

And then also occasionally you would hear things like, can you get the cat out, please?

And also, we had some lovely things, of course, like the fact that

because everyone who was a guest on the show was just at home as well, normally they don't bring their dogs.

So, it was a lovely thing that every now and again you would have an astronaut's dog barking.

Yeah.

Well, here's comedian Sarah Pascoe introducing herself at the top of the show.

And listen to her reaction and to that of archaeologist Dr.

Sarah Parkak when they hear everybody out there on the Zoom.

clapping.

Hello, my name is Sarah Pascoe.

I'm a comedian and writer.

And what I'd like to know about the human past is whose idea it was to domesticate dogs.

Who was the first person who decided to kind of get a wolf and make him lovely?

And you're on the right panel for this because Alice Roberts knows the answer, but it's not the subject we're doing.

But anyway, this is our panel.

Oh, that is what wonderful applause.

We've missed it so much, that sound.

Hungry for it.

Lovely.

But the real reason we're talking about that show is because Listener Alan got in touch.

Listener Alan.

So it's a coincidence, isn't it, that he's called Listener Alan?

That's his name.

Is that his name?

Yeah, Listener Alan.

Listen, that's what he's named for.

Listener Alan, Mr.

Listener Alan.

I can't hear anything in this village.

We need to go and find Listener Alan.

He does all the hearing around here.

Yeah, well, Listener Alan got in touch to tell us his favourite moment was the bit from the archaeologist talking about scooping out Pharaoh's brains.

Actually, we went back and listened to it all, and there's very little of scooping out Pharaoh's brains in it.

But much like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's not so much what actually was seen or was created.

It was what was in the mind of the listener.

It's kind of more about space age techniques for uncovering the secrets of the ancient world involving lasers and radars.

But there are still those who don't believe some of the discoveries that space archaeologists like Sarah Parkak have made.

Should we let her explain that?

Yeah.

This is why I can be a terrible dinner guest because invariably someone will ask the question, come on, tell me the truth.

Did aliens build pyramids?

And then I'll go get someone, I'll get someone to get me a huge sheet of paper and I will spend about 30 minutes doing diagrams showing the 800 plus year evolution from tombs under the sand or graves in the ground and how there was a long, slow evolution to the construction of pyramids.

You can actually see it over time and it's a really logical progression.

You have the genius of someone like Imhotep, the architect of the Great Pyramid of Joser at Saqqara.

And he was sort of the Steve Jobs of his time.

He was the one that decided, you know, instead of having stone rectangular mastabas, let's just stack them one on top of the other and see what happens.

And lo and behold, the pyramid was born.

So you definitely have these extraordinary genius breakthroughs like you see throughout human history and you see today.

Now let's send me some music.

Listener Jill, oh, this must be related to listener Alison.

Yeah, she's listener Alan's friend, yeah.

Listener Jill said she particularly enjoyed an episode we made in Manchester back in 2011 or 2011 for you.

What should it be?

I think 2011 is fine, but apparently the BBC guidelines is 2011.

Oh, is it?

Because you'd say 1900.

You wouldn't say 1,900.

No.

2011.

There, we've shown all the arguments for it to be 2011.

There was a show all about...

the science of sounds.

Yeah, comedian Tom Wigglesworth told acoustic expert Trevor Cox about his least favourite note.

Can I tell you a story about when I was nine years of age?

It depends.

On my ninth birthday, right, this is completely true.

My grandad died, right, which was both disappointing as it was selfish.

I thought you were going to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can.

Shall I say that again over the top of the?

Okay.

If you can just fake a comical reaction

when I was nine years of age, my grandfather passed away on my ninth birthday, which was as disappointing as it was selfish.

Anyway, we went to the funeral, right?

And I'm from a very emotionally repressed family.

I mean, it's just Yorkshire, so we're all a bit backward emotionally.

But we went to the church, and I was only nine years, I was nine years of age, and in the funeral,

I wasn't used to seeing the output of emotion from all the grieving relatives.

It completely did me in.

It completely floored me emotionally.

I was on the ropes.

I was seeing everybody sobbing and weeping and hugging and I'd never seen anything like it.

So I was just in pieces, right?

And then one note happened in the hymn.

That note made me cry so hard, it almost turned me inside out.

I can't describe the rush of emotions which went whoa like that out of me.

I had to be sent home from a funeral.

I've probably been the first person ever to be thrown out of a funeral.

I was sent home for a funeral.

And then a few years later, we inherited the piano.

My granddad didn't need it anymore because he was dead.

So, messing about on the piano, I picked out this note, and it's called the devil's note or something.

Can you do it, Julian?

Just that one bit?

That distance there is a tritone, it's three notes apart.

And it does have a very special effect.

It's really useful in music for giving an effect.

I mean, it's interesting that we're talking about how different cultures perceive music and the way it works.

I think that for everyone has got to be spooky.

And on that note, we've reached the end of this second series of The Infinite Monkeys Guide 2.

Thanks for sending in all your suggestions.

And if you haven't heard the other episodes in this mini-series, then do go and have a listen on BBC Sounds.

And of course, also on BBC Sounds, you can listen to the whole versions of all of the episodes that we've referenced over the last 10 shows.

We've covered failure, the future, gardening, and we've even tackled the gods.

All those can be found in a flowerbed.

Failure, future, and gardening are gods.

Yeah.

Because failure, because the plants don't grow.

The future, because if you plant the plants, they will grow.

Gardening, because that's what planting the plants is.

And God, because

God is what gives the world beauty.

Wow, we've really changed the way that we do this show now, haven't we?

And the answers to why the universe exists.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

Bye.

And it says here, please, can Brian also say bye.

Say bye.

Bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history.

Be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians.

Obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Cain.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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