The Week That Was

An interesting week that began with Monday's QI production meeting being filmed by The South Bank Show. They're doing a special all about our boss - the estimable Mr John Lloyd CBE - and his extraordinary career in TV. And, let's be honest, it's well-deserved. He's given us The News Quiz, Not The Nine O'clock News, Spitting Image, The Museum of Curiosity, Have I Got News For You, QI, Blackadder and had a hand in Mr Bean and several other well-known shows. He also co-wrote two episodes of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and The Meaning Of Liff with Douglas Adams. The man's a genius and deserves every accolade lobbed at him.

Tuesday was a working at home day, hunkering down on finding great material for the new series of QI and Wednesday was much the same. Thursday saw me having a couple of quite exciting meetings, one about my possible involvement in working for another popular TV series and one with a publisher about a new book. Then, in the evening, it was off to the famous Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road for the Transmission Prize award ceremony.

I was one of the judges this year - no mean feat when every candidate was an amazing person - and my role at the awards was to do a 15 minute presentation explaining who the eight finalists were, what their big idea was, and why we'd selected them for our shortlist. The prize was awarded this year to Dr David Nutt, a brave and brilliant chemist who is challenging politicians over their attitudes to classifications of drugs. As he points out, some of the most damaging drugs are perfectly legal and there are things that can be done to reduce their negative effects on society ... but there is a lack of political will to do so. Meanwhile, other drugs remain illegal making research into their possible uses in medicine fraught with difficulty and bound up with red tape.The Transmission Prize is all about taking big ideas and communicating them effectively and, in his books, interviews, talks, blogs and other media, David speaks with passion, authority and clarity. He was a worthy winner, but picking him out of such a brilliant shortlist was really difficult.

Okay, I admit it. I did enjoy a little ripple of thrills in seeing my name in Foyles' window. It may not have been any of my books on display, but I was judging the winner from the books that were on display ... so that's nearly as cool, isn't it?

Friday saw me back at work on QI and also taking part in an 'Ask the Author' live Twitter chat organised by my publishers at Unbound. Some of the questions were bizarre to say the least! But my latest book - Constable Colgan's Connectoscope - does contain some pretty weird facts too.

When I got home I was both flattered and amused to see that a student called 'Jack J' from the University of Chester had animated one of my appearances on Radio 4 last year. I appeared on Josie Long's Short Stories, speaking for a minute on the subject of the police playing hide and seek on night duty in the early 80s as a way of learning beats. Here's his excellent effort:



This week was a good week. And now the weekend is approaching and I'll be doing some extra QI work to make up for the hours I lost on Thursday. But, to be honest, it's a joy to do so it doesn't really feel like work. :)

What's that? Lunch break is over?

Ow! Mr Fry!

That whip stings!

The Badger Hole of Ignorance Special #1 - All about Series 1

In this episode of The Badger Hole of Ignorance, producers Dan Schreiber and Richard Turner discuss Series 1 of The Museum of Curiosity, recorded in 2006.

Aiding host John Lloyd in this first series was guest curator Bill Bailey.

The guests, and their donations, were as follows:

Show 1: Professor Richard Fortey (Curators of the Natural History Museum and the Giant Hornet of Chang Jiang), Sean Lock (The modern Scarf Knot) and Brian Blessed (The Yeti).

Show 2: Fran Beaumann (A Pineapple), Dr Gary Sheffield (Anderson Shelters) and Ben Elton (Privacy).

Show 3: Arthur Smith (Arthur Cravan), Professor Frank Close (Nothing) and Professor Ronald Hutton (Father Christmas).

Show 4: Victoria Finlay (Pliny the Elder), Kevin Day (The Battle of Waterloo) and Alastair Fothergill (the Hairy Angler Fish).

Show 5: Sir Jonathan Miller (Nottingham Alabasters), Dr Phillip Ball (Phlogiston) and Professor Marcus du Sautoy (The Monster).

Show 6: Dr John Gribbin (The Big Bang when it was the size of a Grapefruit), Alan Davies (Epping Forest) and Martha Reeves (Silence).

So here's the podcast hosted, as always, by the affable Ken Plume:



(All photos copyright Dan Schreiber)

The Badger Hole of Ignorance - Episode 1 - Mummies, Jungles and Lost Properties

Last Monday (30th) the first episode in Series Five of The Museum of Curiosity was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It featured presenter John Lloyd CBE and new curator Humphrey Ker with guests Egyptology Professor Joann Fletcher, explorer and altruist Colonel John Blashford-Snell, and comedian and environmentalist Mark Watson.

Photo copyright: Stevyn Colgan

Here's The Badger Hole of Ignorance Episode 1 podcast in which producers Dan Schreiber and Richard Turner discuss the episode with host Ken Plume:



Secondly, here's Jo Fletcher's extraordinary documentary - in full - telling the story of how she and her colleagues revived 2000 year old techniques to mummify a modern man. Mummifying Alan: Egypt's Last Secret is the fascinating, touching and respectful story of a very brave man facing his own death and of the dedicated scientists who worked hard to make his death something special and celebratory while also increasing the sum of human knowledge.



Next up, here's the documentary The Mission: A Grand Adventure in which 'Blashers' delivers a baby grand piano to the Wei Wei tribe in the middle of the Guyanese rain forest. Glorious British eccentricity at its best (sadly, the sound quality is a bit rough but quite watchable):



And here's Mark Watson in Australia doing some fantastic stand up (NSFW!):



More next week.

The Badger Hole of Ignorance - Episode Zero

Welcome to The Badger Hole of Ignorance, the official podcast of The Museum of Curiosity! Hosted by noted American broadcaster, film producer and owner of Fred Entertainment, the ever-affable Ken Plume, Badger Hole (as I like to call it, probably) will take you behind the scenes at the Museum. You'll hear how the show gets made, who makes the show and learn a little more about the people who make up the show's steering committee i.e. the guests and what they donate. Here's Podcast Zero, a kind of prequel podcast in which producers Dan Schreiber and Richard Turner explain the history of the show and how, against all the odds, it was born in 2009.

Words we should adopt

In a month or so, my good friend and boss John Lloyd, and co-author Jon Canter, will see their new book published. It's called Afterliff  and it's a 30th anniversary follow up to John's and Douglas Adams' magnificent 1983 volume The Meaning of Liff. The 'liff' books are based upon a simple premise, explained here by the authors:

'In Life (and indeed in Liff), there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no words exist. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.'

The result was that John and Douglas gave us words like:

Brumby (n.) The fake antique plastic seal on a pretentious whisky bottle.

Detchant (n.) That part of a hymn (usually a few notes at the end of a verse) where the tune goes so high or low that you suddenly have to change octaves to accommodate it.

Lusby (n.) The fold of flesh pushing forward over the top of a bra which is too small for the lady inside it.

Sidcup (n.) One of those hats made from tying knots in the corners of a handkerchief.

...and so many more. Do seek both books out immediately.

But there have always been situations for which English has no single word and so we've sensibly borrowed them from other languages. Here are a few more that I believe we should add to our lexicon:

Age-otori (Japan): To look worse after a haircut

Arigata-meiwaku (Japan): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favour, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

Backpfeifengesicht (Germany): A face badly in need of a fist

Gigil (Phillipines): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute

Ilunga (Congo): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time

L’esprit de l’escalier (France): usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

Pena ajena (Mexico): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation

Tatemae and Honne (Japan): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively

Tingo (Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbour’s house until there is nothing left

Waldeinsamkeit (Germany): The feeling of being alone in the woods

Yoko meshi (Japan): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language.

You can find many more in Adam Jacot de Boinod's excellent book The Meaning of Tingo.

Final visit to the Museum

Last night we recorded the final episode of Series Six of The Museum of Curiosity with Sir Howard Stringer (former head of Sony and NBC and possibly the only Oxford graduate drafted to fight in Vietnam for the US Army), Richard Ingrams (co-creator of Private Eye and The Oldie magazines), and Jane Bussmann (Comedy writer for Brass Eye, The Fast Show, Smack the Pony, South Park and the woman who exposed African terrorist Joseph Kony's activities to the West). What an endlessly fascinating group of people they were.

Photo: Stevyn Colgan

I'm very proud to work on such an amazing show. It's just a shame that more people don't know about it. In this age of myriad hi-def 3D TV channels, the radio is seen as very much the poor relation. But radio is where all the interesting stuff is. I doubt that we'd ever be able to sell the idea of the Museum to TV execs and yet it fulfils everything that Lord Reith insisted upon when the BBC was created: It educates, informs and entertains, absolutely to the letter. How many other shows can say the same?

Roll on Series Seven.

Fourth Visit to the Museum

We recorded Episode 4 of Series 6 of The Museum of Curiosity last night at the Shaw Theatre in Euston. It's the first time we've used it for this show and it's a lovely venue. On the panel we had astrophysicist and satellite designer Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, ex-GP, stand-up comedian, champion quizzer and star of The Chase Dr Paul Sinha and the legend that is Sir David Frost.

Another warm, witty, intelligent and occasionally hilarious episode in the can.

Two to go and still some great guests to come.

Photo: Stevyn Colgan

Third visit to the Museum

We recorded show 3 of series 6 of The Museum of Curiosity last night at the BBC Radio Theatre. Host John Lloyd and curator Humphrey Ker were joined by comedian and author Mark Watson, explorer and all-round adventurer Colonel John Blashford-Snell, and BAFTA award-winning Egyptologist Professor Joann Fletcher who, as you may know, was involved last year in the first mummification of a human being (using ancient Egyptian methods) for 3000 years.

Another amazing panel. Another amazing show in the can.

Photo: Stevyn Colgan

An Interview of Curiosity

Here's a little interview done a year or so ago by m'colleague Dan Schreiber - co-creator of The Museum of Curiosity - with m'boss, the legendary John Lloyd.



And, as a little bonus, a great talk by John and fellow QI founder John Mitchinson: The A-Z of QI. Enjoy!

What's another year ... ?

Hello all. I do apologise for the sparsity of recent blogposts and Twitter silence. It's been a busy time with various events and projects vying for my attention. It's also been a time of self-reflection which resulted in me given my lifestyle a damned good seeing to. Nearly a month on from when I wrote this blogpost, I am a stone lighter, have got my eating habits under control and feel 100% healthier and happier. My hair is also 7 inches shorter. Maybe that accounts for some of the weight loss.

I'm also a year older as today is my 51st birthday.

The 11th of August isn't an especially auspicious date but it's the only birthday I have so I have to make do. I share it with Enid Blyton, Alex Haley, Joe Jackson, Hulk Hogan, Ashley Jensen, Jah Wobble, comic book artist Jim Lee and Ian McDiarmid, the chap who played Palpatine/The Emperor in Star Wars. In 3114BCE, it was the date that the Mayan Long Calendar began; the one that a few ill-informed conspiracy loons say predicts the end of the world in December this year (the great thing about End of the World nutjobs is that, if we really do all go down the cosmic plughole, they don't get to be all smug and 'I told you so' about it). The 11th august 1968 marked the last working day for the last ever steam train operated by British Rail. Other than that, it's a pretty unremarkable date. Famous deaths on this day include Peter Cushing in 1994, Jackson Pollock in 1956, Hamnet Shakespeare (Will's lad) in 1596, and the excellently named Wilfred the Hairy in 897. It is the feast day of Saints Attracta, Gaugericus, Susanna, Taurinus of Évreux, Tiburtius, Chromatius, Clare of Assissi (patron saint of telephones, laundry and eye diseases), Philomena (sterility, lost causes and virgins), and Fiacre (VD sufferers, haemorrhoids, and taxi cab drivers). So that's nice.

When I was born, Mars was the closest it had been to the Earth in centuries (a fact my late father would often use as a good reason to suggest that I originated 'elsewhere') so it's rather splendid that the Curiosity Mars Rover managed to land safely on the Red Planet just a few days before my birthday. My birth was also marked by showers of meteors. And, indeed, when I stepped outside at Midnight last night to see the International Space Station pass overhead, I was delighted by the many meteors I saw. What a lovely way to see in my 52nd year on this incredibly special planet.

So, what's happening in the year to come? I plan to get ever smaller for a start. I still have a staggering six stones (84lbs or 38.10kg) to lose but I did have over 100lbs to lose so I'm well on my way. No fad diets or starvation either. This is sensible eating, understanding food and more exercise. It's not rocket science.

I'm going to be doing some more research/writing for the fifth series of The Museum of Curiosity soon. I thoroughly enjoyed working on episode one, which was recorded in July. The other five episodes are being recorded in September and it'll be great working with Jimmy Carr and John Lloyd again plus all of the fantastic guests that producers Rich Turner and Dan Schreiber have lined up. Beyond that, there's some work for QI and I'll be doing several talks. Plus I've been asked to be a speaker at next year's QEDCon in April. This year's was excellent by all accounts - sadly I couldn't go as it clashed with the Ig Nobel Prizes British Tour of which I was a part. So I'm really looking forward to that. I may even do my first stint at Edinburgh next year too. I've been writing and developing a show for a year or so now and I reckon it's just about ready. I'll do a few dry runs later this year to test the water.

Then, of course, there's the new book. It seems to be stuck on 33% but, then again, nothing seems to be moving on Unbound at the moment due to the Summer holidays. But I'm a third of the way there and, rest assured, once the kids are back at school and people are looking towards Christmas, I'll be whoreing my junk around like a $10 hooker.

A year older but no change there then.

Curioser and Curioser!

Some exciting news!

This year, I am officially one of the researchers for the fifth series of BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity.

Devised and produced by Dan Schreiber and Rich Turner, the show is hosted by QI supremo John Lloyd (above) and a guest curator. Three guests are invited onto the show to donate items to the museum that inspire curiosity and fascination. This has, so far, included the yeti, the death of Father Christmas, Spiderman, nothingness, the urge to press red buttons marked 'do not press', a walrus's penis bone, and God's wife.

Donators have included Sir Terry Pratchett, Jon Ronson, Philip Pullman, Clive James, Leigh Francis, David Eagleman, Neil Gaiman, Marcus Chown, Sarah Millican, Suggs, Professor Richard Wiseman, Brian Blessed, Alain de Botton, John Hodgman, and many many more from the worlds of science, literature, entertainment and academia. Each series has a different curator and, to date, the post has been held by Bill Bailey, Sean Lock, Jon Richardson and Dave Gorman. This fifth season sees the appointment of Jimmy Carr, a regular on sister show QI and a very clever chap.

The show starts recording in a few weeks and will go out on the radio in the Autumn.

Henj

Here's something I did for the last QI Annual (H). QI writer Justin Pollard had the great idea of doing a 'What if?' style feature about the building of Stonehenge as a flat-pack item (there is a smidgin of truth to this idea - see here). He passed the idea on to me and I got together with QI supremo and all-round comedy genius John Lloyd and we created a little story involving wizards and giants and an explanation for the current state of the monument. So here it is:








If you reproduce this anywhere, please give us the appropriate credit. The official citation is:

Originally published in the QI ‘H’ Annual, the ‘Henj’ infographic was written and designed by Justin Pollard, Stevyn Colgan and John Lloyd. Reproduced with the kind permission of QI Limited

Words you didn't know you didn't know 2

Some new words for everyday things that you may not be aware of:

Barm – the yeasty froth on top of brewing beer. Used in the past to make barm cakes.

Bathycolpian – having a large bosom with deep cleavage.

Bittings - the pointed teeth and notches found on a key. A key is made up of two parts – the blade (where the bittings are found) and the bow (the bit you hold onto and twist).

Blind Nipple - a short piece of pipe or tube, closed at one end.

Dactylion – the tip of the middle finger.

Escutcheon – the metal surround for a keyhole, often with a stylised keyhole-shaped (clithridiate) hole in the centre.

Findings – the metal doohickeys that hold jewellery together; clasps, wires, bails etc.

Flink – collective noun for more than a dozen cows.*

Ginglyform – hinge-shaped.

Glabella – The space on your forehead between your eyebrows.

Kerf – the trench made by using a saw before the cut is complete.

Marraffino – the device inside toothpaste tubes that makes the paste stripey.

Muscae volitantes – the technical name for the threadlike or worm-like ‘floaters’ that you can sometimes see drifting across your eyeballs. Seeing them is called myodesopsia. They are nearly always harmless.

Natal Cleft – the crack between the buttocks that builders delight in displaying.

Onychophagia – the habit of biting your nails.

Phloem Bundles - the stringy parts of a banana.

Runcation – the act of weeding.

Spine – the straight part of the comb that the teeth attach to.

Toe – the very tip of the bristles on a paintbrush. The main body of the bristles is called the belly.

Whiffling – describes the action of a bird descending rapidly from a height once the decision to land has been made. It involves fast sideways drifting, first one way and then the other. Geese whiffle.

*Flink is a bit of a mystery. While it turns up in word lists and dictionaries all over the internet, the only 'official' flink is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a 19th century US rural dialect verb meaning, ‘to behave in a cowardly manner’; probably simply a variant of ‘flinch.’ The creators of the Word Detective website attempted to track it down and discovered that it seems to be a fanciful invention inspired by the ‘cow’ of that ‘cowardly’ definition in the OED and may therefore be mountweazel.

A mountweazel is a spurious entry deliberately included in a dictionary or encyclopedia in order to trap plagiarists. The name comes from a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, supposedly a famous photographer of rural mailboxes, who was included in the 1975 edition of The Columbia Encyclopaedia. It seems entirely possible that ‘flink’ was invented as a mountweazel for a text, perhaps an online dictionary, which was then widely plagiarised. Of course, if flink is still popping up on the internet in a few years, it’ll be time to consider it as a 'real' word fit for dictionaries. That's what happened to the term flange as a collective noun for baboons. It was mentioned once in the 1980s BBC comedy series Not the Nine O'Clock News during the 'Gerald the Gorilla' sketch and was repeated so often thereafter that it now appears in proper dictionaries.

With pleasing symmetry, the producer for the show was the very same John Lloyd that I mentioned in the previous 'Words you didn't know you didn't know' post.

Thanks for word suggestions from Barney Ashworth, @GlamLovinKitty, Persephone, Julian Williams, @Beanobundle, Twittles and @Ariadnaquape.

As an aside, do have a read of the curious story of the Fox Terrier that unwittingly became a mountweazel on my old blog here. And I discuss the related subject of False Authority Syndrome - believing something to be real because it appears in a book/on a website/on TV etc. - here and, more recently, here.

Words you didn't know you didn't know

Back in 1983, my good friend John Lloyd and the late great Douglas Adams wrote a book called The Meaning of Liff in which they catalogued all of the things, feelings and situations that didn't have a word to describe them. The words they used were all UK placenames. Thus a BALDOCK (n.)became 'The sharp prong on the top of a tree stump where the tree has snapped off before being completely sawn through', and a PIMLICO (n.) became the 'Small odd-shaped piece of plastic or curious metal component found in the bottom of kitchen rummage drawer when spring-cleaning or looking for Sellotape.'

Well, the truth can sometimes be as strange as fiction. Here are some names of things that you may not have realised actually had names. Enjoy sharing them with bemused friends and colleagues.

Aglet - The plastic coating on the ends of shoelaces.
Akimbo – hands on hips or knees apart with feet together.
Armscye - the armhole in most clothing. 
Brannock Device - the machine that's used to measure your feet at the shoe shop.
Crepuscular Rays - rays of sunlight coming from a certain point in the sky.
Dysania - the state of finding it hard to get out of the bed in the morning.
Feat - a dangling piece of curly hair.
Ferrule - the metal part on a pencil that holds the eraser.
Gynecomastia - having man-boobs.
Lunule - the white, crescent shaped part at the top of a nail.
Morton's Toe - when your second toe is bigger than your big toe.
Muntin - the strip of wood/metal/PVC separating window panes.
Paresthesia - the pins and needles feeling you get when part of your body falls asleep. This is also known as obdormition.
Peen - the ball-shaped lump opposite the hammer's striking side. If it has a claw for pulling nails it's a Cow Hammer rather than a Ball Peen Hammer.
Petrichor - the smells outside after it has rained.
Purlicue - the space between the thumb and the forefingers.
Phosphenes - the lights you see when you close your eyes and press your hands to them.
Rectal Tenesmus - the feeling of incomplete defecation.
Semantic Satiation - what happens when you say a word for so long that it loses its meaning or sounds nonsensical. 
Skeuomorph - a design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, rivets on jeans, copper colour on pennies, the shutter sound on a digital camera, and the pointless handle on a tiny jug.
Tittle – the dot above a lower case letter i or j.
Wamble - stomach rumble.

Sadly, I can't remember where I found these. If you know please tell me. Meanwhile, any good new ones you'd care to add to the list?

The Meaning of Liff is still on sale. And there's this cheeky online version here.