Today's show is sponsored by Marilyn Manson's Fancy Dancin'.
This is the Technical Difficulties. We are playing Citation Needed.
I have an almost-randomly selected article from Wikipedia in front of me
and these folks can't see it.
Every fact they get right is a point and a ding [DING],
and there's a special prize for particularly good answers which is...
Now, sometimes the random article selector
comes out with something that I definitely can't use.
Sometimes it comes out with something wonderful.
And sometimes it comes out with something like...
The Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant.
[Laughter] Thump!
'Neck a vest' is when you get a pint of vest
and just try and try and down it.
Warming!
Nekavestnominate!
Actually, I found out what the German for 'neknominate' was,
and it's 'Biernominierung'.
ALL: Ahhh!
Yes!
It's got a lovely... Biernominierung.
Yeah, it's got that kind of assonance in it that really really sells it.
'Neknominate'... enh.
'Ich Biernominierung Hans!' It still works.
— Can you?! — Yeah.
— It still works.
Ohh, 'neck vest'.
Neckarwestnominate: you have to build a nuclear power plant in your back garden.
I was thinking you'd just have to wear a really bad sweater for the next day.
Really tight '80s tank top. That kind of thing.
Sorry, it just occurs to me that Starfleet spandex uniforms
don't really fit all body types. There's just...
That's a fair point! You never saw a fat Starfleet captain, did you?
That's what I was thinking.
What about Scotty?
No, but he didn't wear, like, the first version Next Generation ones,
you know, the *really* tight 'you can see their junk' level ones.
Oh yeah, they did fit, didn't they?
Can you imagine being a bit of a chunkier fellow in one of them?
Just the gut hanging out.
I suspect that enough TNG conventions have brought us this image.
'I've split my uniform, sir.'
— '...again.' — 'Again.'
[Sad trombone]
Are you just improvising a '70s sitcom on board the USS Enterprise?
Carry On Enterprise! Yeah.
Oh, actually that would have been really good.
Yeah! Carry On Star Trek could actually have been a thing.
It's around about the right time.
Goodness, I'm glad we're riffing on this,
because frankly Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant doesn't...
[Laughter] Thump!
[Laughter] ...doesn't have that much in the way of —
Is it in Russia?
No, it's in Germany.
Can anyone tell me its nameplate capacity?
Nameplate capac... Nameplate?!
They could have fit dozens and dozens of nameplates in there,
but that lousy nuclear fuel...
Why are you putting name badges into a nuclear reactor?
That sounds like the worst thing you could do!
Fifty nameplates per square metre.
When you've got a name like that, it must go right to the edge of the...
I'm imagining this place looks exactly like the one off Thunderbirds.
It's got a big circular sphere thing in the middle,
and with a name that long it's going all the way around the edge.
Literally — I'm giving you a point. That is pretty much exactly what it looks like.
Hahey!
Does anyone want to tell me what 'nameplate capacity' is?
— Why don't *you*? — I'd thought it was the power output.
— No! Name... — Yeah! Point. [DING]
Is it?
It's the nominal capacity. It's the maximum it can put out, sustained.
It's — to use your Star Trek reference again — maximum warp.
Oh! I see.
About 2.2 gigawatts.
— Of course! Argh! Just what I was going to say. — Yes!
It's hard to generate interesting questions about nuclear power plants.
Let's go a bit more generically.
What would happen if you wee in the reactor?
That's an interesting question about a nuclear power plant right there.
Your dick falls off.
Into the coolant, in which the...
Into the reactor via a pipe.
Okay? I'm not talking about opening the top up and just weeing in there.
I know exactly that a jet of neutrons will come out
and turn my dick into Godzilla, or something like that, right?
I'm... I mean, I'm imagining it's just...
ROAR!
It's such a brilliant image, I'm sorry!
I think we should all just take a breath,
and appreciate that what we're actually seeing
is a remake of Godzilla, just with a tiny Brannan
— perched somewhere very high in the shot. — [Screams]
Going, 'Oh ****, I shouldn't have pissed in...'
'however-you-pronounce-it Nuclear Reactor.'
'No, no, don't destroy Tokyo! We need that...!' 'ROAAAR!'
You'd look like an amazing Rod Hull and Emu.
What if Rod Hull had pissed into a nuclear reactor?! Would Emu have come real?
No! [Laughter]
Would the emu have become welded to his arm and sentient?
Folks, if we do have any experts in nuclear physics watching...
'Help me!'
Or indeed in Rod Hull.
Yeah.
Just... do tell us what would happen.
I mean, I'm imagining it would be basically like
pissing on the stones in a sauna, only a thousand times worse.
[Steam sounds] — Yeah.
And then, if you have got an emu on your hand, it comes real. Right?
[Laughter] You've basically got a cloud...
If you have the foresight to bring an emu with you.
Which I would, naturally!
...a cloud of radioactive piss-steam,
— essentially, is what comes out there. — Ha!
Also, if you've got a real emu, and your hand up its arse,
it turns into a puppet.
— Ohh! — It cuts both ways.
Science is amazing!
So anyway, this nuclear power plant.
Yes. How long has it been operating? (I'm just naming questions.)
Since '54.
All right. Okay. Let me have a go, let me have a go.
This is looking like something out of Thunderbirds.
Yep. And it's a West German nuclear power plant.
And it's in West Germany, so — that's fine, because it's been influenced
by American and British technology of the time in nuclear reactors,
which is what? Influenced Gerry Adam —
Not Gerry Adams! Gerry Anderson!
Gerry Adams' Thunderbirds!
— We're on dangerous territory here, lads. — WHOA, everybody!
I wasn't going to say anything more to follow that.
I was going to let it run all on its own!
I was just assuming...
During the '80s their voices were provided by actors.
Yes.
I was thinking the entire series as being silhouetted,
like The Hood in the opening credits. It just never comes out of it.
Oh, s***!
...Gerry *Anderson* would have been influenced by.
So I'm going to say, 19... 59, 1960?
I said '54.
Er, '63. Why not.
You're closest. Point. '71. [DING]
— Yes! — Argh!
Closest without going over!
W*****!
Which was late enough that it got what?
That earlier power plants may not have had?
Safety! And protection.
Yeah, it's got to be something like that.
Following Windscale, yeah. Yeah.
A ribbon to open it with.
Er, it was more something that they wouldn't have wanted.
Protest.
Protest! [DING] Protest. Have a point.
Absolutely right. Blocked the entrance with an eight-metre wall.
Oh, fair p— A wall?
Yes.
— They don't just appear. — A wall of...?
Literally, a wall of breeze blocks that they brought with them.
What do you mean, brought — bollocks!
Good on — that's some classic protest! I like that.
Yeah, but how long is it —
Whoa, whoa. Eight-metre-long.
Not eight-metre-high.
Ahhh.
Just over the entrance road, yeah.
— Still pretty cool. — I'm gonna say.
Yeah, that's a pretty good protest.
Like, we're not going to chain *ourselves* down...
Because I've got to say, there's some security guard that's sat there,
sipping his, I don't know, his schnapps or coffee or whatever, going —
Schnapps?! [Laughter]
I don't think security guards on nuclear power stations
are allowed schnapps.
It might be cold.
They're looking outside, someone's building a wall...
'Hmm. Better do something about that soon.'
[Drunken singing]
You know. You could easily just come out and go,
'Hey, hey, hey. Leave it. Leave it. Don't do that. Put it down.'
There is an international market for electricity.
Every time EastEnders ends, we have to buy in power from the continent
and bring it over to the UK.
And French nuclear power stations have to
stick another rod of uranium on, or something, I don't know.
[Laughter] Thump!
[Laughter] I don't think...!
— Just into a frying pan! — Stick another log on!
I think that's how it works! I'm not a scientist, but I...
Ainsley Harriott's Nuclear Power. 'I'll bang it in there, it's lovely.'
'Just bring another nuclear rod in from the shed, would you?'
— 'I think it's going to get cold.' — 'Yeah, all right.'
Have you got the schnapps? It's cold out there. [Laughter]
Mind you, you're saying this...
I went to York's nuclear bunker
ALL: Oooh!
...the other day. I went and did the tour.
And one major gripe: the guy doing the tour pronounced it 'nucular'.
[Groans]
That aside — very, very interesting.
Is this the one with the sign that says 'Secret Nuclear Bunker — This Way'?
Yeah. It says.
Right next to the windmill as well. I had a brilliant day.
I had a tourist's tourist's tour of Holgate.
— Windmills and bunkers! — Windmills and bunkers.
That's like Bedknobs and Broomsticks...
[Laughter] ...only more about power generation.
But it turns out, they didn't have NBC suits.
Er... Nuclear, Biological, Chemical.
They didn't have the standard protection suits.
So what you've got is a hundred and eighty civilians,
trained to run this place in the event of nuclear attack.
The first sixty to get there would be allowed in.
The other hundred and twenty were told, 'Go home to your families; enjoy dying.'
Wow.
I'm imagining that looking like a rather grimmer version of It's A Mad, Mad World.
Oh yeah.
Sixty. That's not many.
No. The sixty that are in there can only survive for thirty days;
work a hot bed system, twenty hours each;
don't have NBC suits to go up on the roof to check the readings;
the thing can't survive a direct hit, which is anywhere within twelve miles;
Oh.
...and these are the volunteers. These are the people that *want* to be there.
It's full of mechanical equipment...
so the police had a list of engineers,
which they would randomly select from,
and at this point it all goes a bit Soviet Russia.
Because the police go, and invite them to join, and come and help,
and if they say no, they're arrested, and they go along to help anyway.
Wow.
I'd just go straight to the 'arrested', personally.
Yeah. 'There's two ways we can do this...'
But it's the thought of everyone pelting in,
in various methods of technology...
Yeah, and the sixty-first person just...
— 'Darrrgh!' — 'Ooooh!'
'Doooh!'
It seems wrong to have this as a farce in my head,
but in my head, the door closes, it just kind of...
— Bonk! — Yeah.
Bounces back down the steps, yeah?
Either that or the last person runs in and reaches out,
and pulls his hat back in before the door shuts.
It's really weird as well, because they do the tours on an hourly basis,
or an hour-and-a-quarter basis,
and if you're not there when they go in, you're not allowed in.
They go and close off the spiked top fence,
then they close the blast door behind you, and you go and do the tour.
So when we come out, having had —
you know, it's seriously paranoic down there.
— Yeah. — It's weird, it's like...
This was never used. This is the weirdest ******* **** I've... eugh!
This is strange. This should be a film set, it's not.
And you go back out and you open the blast doors,
and there's all these people on the fence just waiting to be let in for the next tour!
[Laughter] Aaaa! Aaa! It's like Threads! It's like Threads happened!
It's Threads turned up to eleven.
If you guys are around on a different Sunday,
because we're going to be busy tomorrow,
You'll — well, you'll hate it, but you'll all love it, I'm sure. It's great.
No! No! No! Because it'll make me think of Threads!
Yeah!
Speaking of that bunker tour, they're still doing...
well, they *were* still doing tours around the Chernobyl site.
— Yes. — Yeah.
Well, it's slowly becoming more acceptable to go in there.
But the roof's about to cave in there...
— they haven't finished fixing it, so. — Oh, no, no, no...
— Not in terms of fallout, I mean... — Yeah.
20,000 years or whatever before it's habitable.
But the restrictions around it are slowly slackening so that you can go in.
Yeah. What was a pretty impossible tourist destination ten years ago
is... they were doing package tours five years ago,
and now it's got to the point where they're opening it for filming...
They're just letting people in.
And it's always been kind of a porous border anyway,
— because locals could just come in. — Yeah.
Some of their people are still living there.
— Yeah. — Yeah, some people refused to move.
Wildlife's thriving.
— Oddly. — Oddly. Weirdly.
So, you know what?
Fling another nuclear rod on, it seems like it's fine!
Stick another rod on the barbie.
[Laughter] I was just thinking that.
Just to drag it back to being silly...
Yeah.
Obviously, the bunker in York is one of the big command centre bunkers.
Yes!
And it was decommissioned and whatever else...
Was it an RSG?
To use the technical terminology — Regional Seat of Government?
No, that was the bunker over the road.
Which is now gone and is now a modern-built block of flats, but it was near there.
Not as big as the Harrogate one, because obviously that's the...
— the backup national one or whatever. — Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah. There's like thirty or sixty of these bigger ones, with the sixty people
who get to wait for thirty days to go outside and die, but anyway.
And they've been sold off or whatever else.
One of them, you can paintball in.
ALL: Ohhh!
And obviously, on top of this, there's all the little three-man ones
that are out in the hills and around.
The Royal Observer post ones, yeah.
Yeah. They're being sold off as real estate.
Yeah. It's all ROC...
The nearest one for us is in Fulford, and it's somebody's wine cellar.
Ohhh, yes!
And there are also people who will do package tours,
where the three of you can go and be in this hole
for three or four days, for a watch cycle of the ROC.
Next filming location!
Three of us cooped up in one location for an entire weekend?
I'd go spare anyway.
Can you imagine the maft?
[Groans]
Well, this is the thing about this hot bed system.
You've got sixty of them on eight-hour shifts, twenty at a time,
and you literally... just climb back in.
That's the hot bed idea.
And you've got a litre of water a day, so you're not going to wash with it.
At that point, when the world has ended...
I'd drink my own piss, quite frankly.
Oh no, there was enough to drink, just about.
No, he would anyway!
Sorry, I was tempted to end on that line. Just cut to black...
...on that.
'I'd drink my own piss, quite frankly!'
'FIN.'
All right. On that...
'On that nuclear bombshell...'
[Groans]
Clarkson!!
Congratulations, Chris, you win this one.
Just for talking for the longest.
Just for talking for the longest, yeah.
But with knowledge and aplomb!
— A plum? — A plum!
I also have other fruits!
A nuclear plum.
You've won a piece of classical music played using old military ordnance.
— Ah. — That fits.
It's Pachelbel's "Cannon in D".
— Until next time, that's been Matt Gray... — Bye-bye!
That's been Gary Brannan...
That's been Chris Joel...
'It's the end of the world as we know it.'
I've been Tom Scott. We'll see you next time.
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