This is the Technical Difficulties. We're playing Citation Needed.
Joining me in the studio today: he reads books, you know — it's Chris Joel!
Hellooo.
Everybody's favourite Gary Brannan — Gary Brannan!
Salutem.
And the bounciest man on the internet — Matt Gray!
It's not a studio, it's a kitchen diner.
I'm choosing to quietly ignore that.
In front of me I have an article from Wikipedia, and these guys 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:
Today's article is: Lisa Clayton.
She's from somewhere that makes bricks.
Ooh. Why do you say that?
ALL: Clayton.
TOM: Ohh, right.
Erm, Birmingham actually.
GARY: Yep. MATT: Yup.
[Laughter]
Okay, so someone from Birmingham. What is this, f***ing Crime Watch?
CHRIS: 'Have you seen Lisa Clayton?'
'Have you seen her? Do you know her?'
Well, here's the thing: Lisa Clayton, you wouldn't have seen her for quite a while...
For 285 days.
Because she was invisible?
[Laughter]
Briefly.
That's not briefly!
You'd cause bedlam with 285 days of invisibility.
It's brief on the universal scale!
Oh, yes, yes.
So 285 days of being invisible.
Er, of not being seen by the world.
Hibernation.
In a cupboard.
World Hide and Seek champion.
I'd go with that one.
Er, not quite. She did certainly go away for a while.
Arctic wanderer.
Ooh, explorer certainly. I will give you a point for that. [DING]
Explorer in the sense of going places rather than the sense of discovering places.
Did she go to Wolverhampton?
That's still not been discovered!
The mystical city of...
ALL: Wolverhampton!
MATT: Eugh.
The one thing I do know about Wolverhampton, they've got battered chips.
TOM and MATT: Oooh. GARY: Eh?
Two very different reactions there. I went, [Doubtful] 'Oooh...'
Matt went, 'Yep, yep, I'll have that.'
Yeah... I'm with Matt on this.
See, it would involve going to Wolverhampton to get it,
but what I can do is try it at home.
The other thing is, I think you'd only need three.
I think after three, I'd have had enough.
Have you ever had a battered chocolate bar?
ALL: No.
I once tried that, but I didn't work out you had to put batter in it. So I just dropped a Rocky into a pot of oil.
CHRIS: Fwoomf! 'Awww.'
There's a chippie round the back of the Nestlé factory, and I had a battered Yorkie.
Oh... Yeah... No.
TOM: Ohh, that's a dense...
One bite was enough.
Because it is just hot dripping chocolate, hot dripping oil, and... [Gags]
It's just a weapon, isn't it, basically.
We're back to our chocolate rods from God...
GARY: We are. MATT and TOM: Yeah.
That's how you get the casing on to get it through the atmosphere.
GARY: I was going to say that that's a hand grenade.
I was once in the US, and someone ordered deep-fried cheesecake.
Ooo.
GARY: How does that work?
You get a slab of cheesecake, you batter it, and you deep fry it.
And then you add like, raspberry sauce on it.
I had one bite, and was like: That's lovely, and that is now enough.
[Laughter]
I did have some cake the other day,
where somebody, rather than creating icing, had just rendered down entire Mars bars.
ALL: Ohhh...
So every element of the Mars bar then re-set into...
TOM: I can't get behind that.
When I was... Quite a while ago, when I had a house in York.
The woman was a bit dicky but I wanted to make a cake, right, to take to work..
So I made cake one... Didn't really rise, door not shutting properly.
Now what I should have done is said, F*** it, I'm going to Tesco.
But damn it, I'd started, I was going to do this.
So I tried again — that one, also flat. Tried again, that one also flat.
Oh God, I know where this is going.
Third one burnt down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp.
[Laughter]
'But the last one stood up!'
So I put...
At this point something happened in my brain that wasn't normal sense.
I thought: stack them all together, put jam and cream in between,
And then I melted over the top an entire Yorkie.
TOM: [Groans]
In fact, three entire Yorkies, I think it was, I put over the top of it.
You've just got a brick! You've got...
You've got a prohibited weapon there!
I've got to say, it was almost starting to collapse in on itself, mass-wise.
GARY: Superdense...
I nearly created a cake black hole, it turns out later on.
Someone said their teeth hurt after eating it.
TOM: Yes!
You've got four cakes crushed down!
'We're out of osmium, best use cake!'
It's diamond.
The middle of it was a solid diamond, and small other buns were starting to get trapped in its orbit.
Just walking past a cake shop to take it to work, and stuff's battering up against the glass.
[Whooshing noises]
Cake-based gravity...
Could...? I was gonna say "Could you do that?" I'm pretty sure the answer is: no.
No!
I'm achieving it as the years pass.
GARY: Yeah...!
A long time ago we were talking about Lisa Clayton.
GARY: Oh yeah, we were, yeah! TOM: To give her full name...
Did she go into space?
Er, no. Lisa Lyttelton, Dowager Viscountess Cobham. As she is now known.
Now that's one for your exam paper, isn't it.
Yep. She set out September 1994, came back June 1995.
Tried to discover America; worked out it had already been done.
[Laughter]
Oh. You know what, you're very close.
Oh f*** off.
CHRIS: And you said 285 days... TOM: Yup.
Only person to walk across Canada?
But not seen. People'd see you in Canada. There are people.
She tried to row across the Atlantic on her own or something?
Close enough, I'll give you the point. [DING]
'Fastest Sail Around the World by a Woman, Single-Handed Without Assistance'.
'First British Woman to Sail Single-Handed and Non-Stop Around the World'.
Respect!
Well done to you! That's good work, that is. If you still...
And to be sat there with one of your hands just in your pocket!
What? Single-handed... Ohh.
Yeah, just making it look good!
TOM: Wow...
That seems like an unnecessary thing to do to yourself.
...encumbrance, isn't it, yeah.
There'll be a point someone off the Cape of Good Hope,
You're like, 'I should really have done this two-handed, but you know...'
'I did say at the start!'
MATT: 'An award's an award!'
A 38-foot yacht. Does anyone want to take a guess what it was called,
given that she was sponsored by her university?
University of Birmingham.
The Brummie Bastard.
It's a good name for a boat. Not quite.
I was hoping it was sponsored by Staffordshire University, and then she could have been Keelehauled.
ALL: AYYY!
Keele is a town in Staffordshire.
Was it [Brummie accent] the 'Alroight'?
You know what, that's close enough. It's the Spirit of Birmingham.
I was going to say, HRH Lenny Henry.
GARY: [Laughing] Spirit of Birmingham...
I like the way you went with *HRH* Lenny Henry...
something I'd like to see — rather than HMS.
Me too.
31,000-mile journey, single-handed, round the world, in a yacht...
Some of the difficulties she'd have had on the way?
Crying. If Ellen MacArthur's anything to go by.
Yes, if Ellen MacArthur's anything to go by.
Tesco delivery not turning up.
To be honest, you have enough trouble with that anywhere.
She's just sitting there, sailing around, trimming the sail...
All of a sudden, she looks around:
'Sorry we missed you' — 'I'm sitting right here! How did you manage that?!'
'I have a hundred miles of visibility in every direction!'
That's because they've got a Tesco submarine.
I like the idea of Tesco submarine delivery...
because it implies there's a Walmart submarine from a different superpower steadily hunting them.
And all Asda can afford is a destroyer on the surface, hoping for the best with depth charges.
And there's a Carrefour flotilla coming up...
'We're loading in the granary torpedoes now!'
Eyyy!
Granary torpedoes: type of bread.
CHRIS: I enjoyed it. TOM: He got it.
I got it.
Hardships on the way, as you're circumnavigating round the world?
TOM: What might your boat do?
Fall over!
Yes. Have a point. [DING]
I was going to go for, more drastically: sink.
[Laughter]
Well, she wouldn't have made it round if it sank.
She might have... been able to reinflate it?
TOM: It's not an inflatable dinghy! It's not...
₤9.99 Tesco summer range inflatable dinghy.
Stood on one end, inflating the other end...
'F***in' hell!'
It's not the Scarborough boating lake she's trying to circumnavigate here.
No, she went round that enough times to make up 31,000 miles.
Yeah. Yeah.
Capsized seven times.
GARY: How? MATT: That's all right.
I don't know how you right a boat on your own when it's capsized, but...
MATT: Carefully. CHRIS: Yeah.
Basically, you stand on the rail, and I think there's a line that attaches to the end of the mast.
I mean, this is the principle for dinghies, I don't know about a 38-foot yacht.
TOM: Oh, okay. Yeah.
But basically you haul on that end of it...
Wow. And then you go back in the water as it...
MATT: And hope it doesn't keep going. TOM: Yeah.
Yeah. That's the principle with smaller vessels.
I don't know if her weight's enough to do it, or whether she can move ballast across in...
Ah, that's a point, yeah.
It's probably water-based ballast, so you pump it up to the topside or something.
Or the side that's out of the water, and then you lean on it...
I would have thought you wouldn't go all the way around the world with a boat you couldn't right.
Because it's capsized, then you've got 'turtle' which is when the mast's downwards, and then you just...
GARY: That's it, she's had it. CHRIS: You go home.
CHRIS: On the other hand, did you see this thing, it was earlier in the year...
You know there are now these carbon trimarans with solid carbon sails.
It's just like a big vane on the back.
They flipped one.
MATT: [Gasps] GARY: Oh, I can see that...
They nosed in.
Oh, is this the America's Cup?
The America's Cup one. Yeah.
TOM: That killed a man. MATT: That killed them. Yeah.
Because the new ones are essentially hydrofoils, floating above for most of the journey.
CHRIS: Yeah.
Fifty miles an hour, carbon fibre...
Nosed in, flipped it — mast down.
GARY: Yikes.
So the America's Cup works by the winner of the previous America's Cup sets the rules for the next lot.
Oh, is that it? Ahhh.
TOM: And the person who won the last one was...
I think it was a billionaire who runs Oracle and all sorts of IT groups.
Yeah, that's it. It was Oracle.
So he said, all the boats — carbon fibre, high speed...
CHRIS: Trimaran... TOM: Yeah.
Cool things. Essentially, if Batman had a sailing boat...
Yeah.
[Gravelly Batman voice] 'To the Bat-Boat!'
TOM: But when they crash... it's terrifying. MATT: Everyone dies.
Yeah. Well, only one. Everyone else was sort of injured.
Oh really? I thought it was everyone.
No, no. They were rattled but they managed to limp it back to port or get it towed or something.
God, that'd be great in other competitions, if the winner could set the rules for next time.
Boxing! You can have the springy boxing gloves that come out like that and back in.
And until you beat me using that methodology, I'm not interested.
We need to get Elon Musk to win tennis.
'Yep. You have to do it in space.'
You mentioned Dame Ellen MacArthur, by the way...
GARY: Yeah. MATT: Oh yeah.
And it's quite interesting to note the difference between her and Lisa Clayton...
Obviously, Ellen MacArthur — knighthood for breaking the record...
Lisa Clayton has essentially slipped into obscurity.
Well, not anymore!
TOM: [Laughs]
All eight of you watching, please spread the word!
At the end of the show, congratulations Matt, you're this week's winner!
Yeeeeeeeeees!
That went on for much longer than I expected it to!
But slightly less long than I was expecting.
Yeah. Yeah.
You win a British Prime Minister's feeding trough that tells kids to be wary of people they don't know.
It's John Major's Stranger Danger Manger.
Heyyy!
Enjoy that —
I've got a use for one of them, actually.
In the meantime — I don't want to know why.
TOM: That's been Chris Joel. CHRIS: Godspeed.
TOM: That's been Gary Brannan... GARY: Godspeed.
TOM: That's been Matt Gray... MATT: Bye bye.
I've been Tom Scott, and we'll see you next time.
Is this something like Fish Slapping Dance?
ALL: Ohh!
With a side o' bacon...
Bacon beating!
Brannan, if you'd care to mime with me...
GARY: Go on.
Comme ça?
Bradford Crane, which —
Bradford! [Laughs]
Bradford Crane.
'Hello? Bradford Cranes?'
'Er, yeah, we got a 9-tonne, a 14-tonne, and er, Maurice Micklewhite...'