Comedy of the Week - Punt & Dennis: Route Masters

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis are on a mission from Beer to Eternity, in this warm and witty new podcast that celebrates new and half-remembered trivia as they try to find entertaining links between random places, people and things.Could you make your way from The Starship Enterprise to the Air Fryer, armed only with A-Level Economics and a Geography degree? Hugh Dennis is going to have to. While Steve Punt will have to pick his way across Africa, to find what links Machiavelli and Madagascar. Across the series, they’ll be joined by guests including Ken Cheng, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Isy Suttie and Marcus Brigstocke, on a scenic route which takes in Shampoo, The Gruffalo, Watford Gap Services and Yoghurt.Written and hosted by Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis With Jessica Fostekew Produced by Victoria Lloyd Recorded at Maple St. Creative Mixed by Jonathan LastA Listen Production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Root Masters. Hello, I am Hugh Dennis. Hi, I'm Steve Punt. And welcome to Rootmasters, the show in which we go on a journey through new and half remembered knowledge as we attempt to find the most entertaining route between random topics,

people, places and things, which at first glance appears to be entirely unconnected. And for this series, we know very little, don't we Steve? We know very little except that we're going to be starting at beer. And over the course of the series, we're going to gradually make our way to eternity because that's from beer to eternity. You see? Seemed like a good pun, didn't it? Yeah. So for show one, our random topic generator, or as I prefer to call it, Show 1, our random topic generator, or as I prefer to call it, our topic centrifuge, has thrown up prime numbers, the hunchback of Notre Dame and Jurassic Park. So that's

it. We go beer, prime numbers, hunchback of Notre Dame, Jurassic Park. And to help us this week, we have none other than comedian and actress Jess Foster-Kew. Hi Jess. Jess Thanks for having me. Paul Well, it's lovely. Have you enjoyed putting together your roots? It's been a roller coaster. I've got to get from prime numbers to the hunchback of Nottingham. Lake One, beer to prime numbers. So Steve the first section is yours isn't it? You've got to take us on the first leg of the journey. Yes. What has been randomly selected? I have to get from beer, I have to get from beer to prime numbers. Beer is a very, very big topic as it happens, because my initial problem is to get out of

beer and vaguely towards maths. So I had a good look at the rather multifaceted topic of beer, which it turns out is one of the oldest things humans consume. It's right up there with mammoth... Well, they've got sale-by dates and stuff on them. It's... Sure, haven't they? Every bottle. It's on the top of every bottle. As a genre.

Oh, as a genre. As a liquid. It is right up there with mammoth burgers, nuts and berries, and paleo diet Pringles. It's been around, so I read, since the agricultural revolution. Well that what, in Britain that was in about 1600. Exactly, that's what confused me. That's Jethro Tull isn't it? He used to stand around playing the flute and sowing seeds. I never understood why he needed a drill to sow seed. What kind of, was it like a black and decker? It can't have been. Because that would only be one seed

hole at a time and that would take ages. It would take forever. Yeah. So, anyway. Which agricultural revolution do you mean then? The agricultural revolution, I think they mean when we literally stopped being hunter-gatherers and started farming. One day we decided to... The original, the OG. Yeah, we thought, you know, instead of walking miles to find those berries, why don't we take some of them and stick them in the ground and then grow them here? In the garden. In the garden, yeah.

And now we've gone... In the big, big oblong garden. We've now gone completely... We've gone right to the end of that cycle, haven't we? So we used to... We were hunter-gatherers, then what happened after that? We grew it, and now we don't bother with either of those, we simply have it delivered. Yes, yeah, we're now in the Ocado Revolution, other food delivery services are available. But they're not very good. So the thing about farming is the thing that we farmed predominantly was grain. Very quickly they noticed that when grain got wet it started to ferment and

that was literally the beginnings of beer. This is all good. How is this getting us to prime numbers? What were you looking for? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, yes, what I was predominantly looking for was the fact that beer was very popular in ancient Egypt. Oh, I see. In fact, amazingly, the people who built the pyramids, the workers who built the pyramids, who were not necessarily slaves, apparently, I think that's a myth, but they were on something like between six to eight pints of beer a day.

Whoa, I did not know that beer was a thing in ancient Egypt, I thought everyone was drinking baths of milk and stuff like that. If you were on six to eight pints a day, how would you build a pyramid? Yeah, I now think they did it using water pressure, don't they? But how would you keep the edges straight? I know, that's what I think. It's quite an intricate structure, isn't it? I suspect the foreman had to stay sober.

Yeah, ah, now, yes. So, no, beer was very popular in Egypt. It didn't have any hops in it, by the way, at this stage. It was essentially, they used to think that it was essentially a sort of alcoholic porridge. Oh, yeah. Which, incidentally... Yeah, I'm no stranger to that. Yeah, if anyone from marketing is listening, I think that's quite a market there.

They know because of this thing of them burying food in pyramids. So when archaeologists go to pyramids with a powerful microscope, they find an awful lot of what the Egyptians used to eat, because they literally just used to leave it there for the ancient Egyptian mice, presumably. Do you think they… but if you… the other option, of course, if you find, you know, food next to a body in a pyramid is that a live person has been sort of, you know, convinced by a group of drunk Egyptian builders. Come in, come in.

You may, of course, be getting to this, in which case I apologize, but it's also true, isn't it, that monks in the Middle Ages drank an enormous amount of beer, didn't they? Well, yeah, monks... And children. And children. Everybody used to drink a lot of beer, but largely because it was much safer than drinking water. Yes. Because the beer water was boiled and then you wouldn't die of dysentery.

But building a pyramid is fairly simple compared with doing calligraphy, isn't it? Which is what monks did. Yeah, yeah. True. They did it after cuz cuz some Belgian monks used to brew beer. That's about like 12% alcohol Crumbs how on earth they managed to illustrate those manuscripts After that I did the last page of the book of Kels Incidentally I went to a Trappist monastery in Belgium to buy beer. Have you ever done that?

No, I haven't been to a Trappist monastery. And I thought the Trappists were silent. Just to ask for it in sign language. Yeah, exactly. I thought they were a silent order. And I went to get some beer that was 12% proof from this monastery. It was a really wet day and there was a monk. You queued up in the car and a monk walked along beside the cars and weirdly asked you what you wanted. Matthew So it was incredible.

Paul It was like a mobile off licence. It was brilliant. Matthew Yeah, like a McDonald's drive-through. Paul But I wasn't expecting him to talk either. When I went down the window and he went, you know, how are you? I've come well, I've come to buy some beer, but it's pouring with rain, it's a really murky day to do it. And he said, in perfect English, he said, don't worry, because with Trappist beer, you always have a happy feeling.

I feel really disillusioned now. I was assuming Trappist beer, you would have to buy in the form of charades. Yeah. a drink. It's a pint. It's six pints. Squat down. I'm looking for a stout. I want a stout. It's a multi-pack. I'm going to have to drag you back to ancient Egypt if we're going to make our way to prime numbers. One of the most important cities in ancient Egypt was Alexandria, although not until quite late, of course, because Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great, who went around naming cities after himself. And he came along to Egypt quite

late and set up the Ptolemy dynasty, of which Cleopatra was one, who were actually Greek. They weren't Egyptian at all. You seem to be the big map maker, that Ptolemy. Ptolemy? Oh, I'm not sure. There were a lot of Ptolemies around in Rome. We're wandering into areas so far beyond the Kuiper Belt of my knowledge. Where is Melvin Brangham in England? So, yes, Alexandria comes on quite late in Egypt's history, thousands of years after the pyramids

were built by drunks and Alexander very famous for its library. Do you know who the librarian? Appointed by one of the Ptolemies and his name was Eratosthenes You might have heard of him because he was the first person to measure the circumference of the earth Which he did with sticks which was very clever. All tied together. He put two sticks 200 miles apart to north and south and then measured the length of the shadow at midday and worked out from that the circumference of the earth and he only got it wrong by a couple of hundred miles.

A million miles. So how did he measure the shadows? He measured the length of the shadow on the ground when the Sun was precisely overhead and he found that the one that was further south, the shadow was slightly longer and realized that that must have meant the ground was curved away and then he worked out from the angle of the length of the shadow, making a triangle. You can feel the DMs coming in from the princess now. Anyway, the reason why he's important is because the other thing that Eratosthenes did was he invented something called Eratosthenes Civ, which sounds like a gardening implement, but it is in fact a way of calculating drum roll here.

Prime numbers! Lake Two, prime numbers to the hunchback of Notre Dame. So we have arrived at our first destination. Wow, what a brilliant smooth transition from that to that. I'm worried that you have taken so many impressive steps forward that my route is gonna look more like a dance. I need to get us from prime numbers to the hunchback of Notre Dame. Ah, right, okay, a bit of cultural leap there. The hunchback of Notre Dame was born in Egypt, you're there.

Yeah, we're there, but he wasn't, he wasn't. So a prime number is a natural number greater than one that is not the product of two smaller natural numbers. So for example, five is a prime number because it can only be made up of one times five or five times one and that involves five itself. Four is a composite number because you can make it up with two times two. For people who we've just patronised who didn't need explaining what a prime number was, unlike me, I have got some interesting facts about prime numbers. The only even prime number is two. No prime number greater than five ends in a five. Quite like that one, not sure why. No prime number that's bigger than five ends in a five. Five is the biggest number that's

a prime number. Yeah, exactly. So continuing to take inspiration from my young son, who loves maths and understands what prime numbers are better than me, he's also interested in another type of prime numbers and that is because he collects bottles of a drink called Prime. Oh, hello. Him and many children his age are obsessed with this drink. This is a drink invented by influencers, wrestler Logan Paul and rapper KSI. And they're massive on YouTube. And so it's the under 14s who are watching tons of YouTube who are obsessed with these guys

The two types of prime there's one that's caffeinated In it comes to can and there's one that comes in a bottle Which is describes itself as a hydration drink which is it means it's a drink drink, right? It's a liquid drink. Yeah, that's it's a liquid drink. Okay It's not it's not alcoholic porridge I might get contacted by parents saying why on earth has your son got this drink and I Discovered a hack I discovered it wasn't the drink itself that my son was interested in he was obsessed with it And when your son is asking you over and over again for years and years and years for this drink

Then we found one an empty one obviously in a bin. He was just as happy. So all his other primes have been taken from bins. So anyway. That's good, although that's not such, that's probably not a good look with the other parents either is it? No exactly, yeah. Just ferreting in a bin, surprise. Just going round bins in the local area. The prime numbers are that in 2023, at their peak, Prime surpassed $1.2 billion in sales. They know what they're doing, don't they? These influences. This is all very good news

for me, though, because for a long time I thought a prime number was the number you dialed when the delivery hadn't arrived. An Amazon delivery you mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I did think about going there and I didn't. We've gone with Prime the Drink. The main people buying this is a particular generation and they're called Gen Alpha. So that is anybody born between now and 14 years ago is 14 year olds and under. That's the market here.

Oh, okay. So this is that we're, I've forgotten where we're heading. We're heading for the hunchback of Lottadar. I promise. I promise. So they're best known for being, I'd say, digital natives. On average, they spend at least three hours a day on apps. There's a book called Irresistible that's done really well. Well, for obvious reasons. How could you keep your hands off it? Yeah, yeah.

The cover alone, they've dipped it in prime. You know there is a whole science to that, taking photos of food to make it look attractive. When I worked in marketing, we were always told the story about how you, if you had mashed potatoes, but they used to use cigarette smoke, they used to hide a cigarette in the mashed potatoes. Oh gosh. Supposedly, I don't know the truth of it. I haven't seen mashed potato with a cigarette put in it since Watford Gap got updated, I

don't think. Anyway, fantastic. There's lots of tricks in that trade, aren't there? I was at a very small part in a sitcom where a child was being fed hearts, chicken hearts. But really, it was the most delicious strawberry sweets. Nice. Yeah. So, yeah, actually just, yeah.

I did once do, I was once in a commercial where they spent more time on what they called the pack shot. The stuff involving the actors, they knocked off in a couple of hours. Yeah. And then they spent what they called the pack shot. The stuff involving the actors they knocked off in a couple of hours and then they spent a day on the pack shot. So yeah, they're very, very careful about that sort of thing. Yeah, I also spent 16 hours filming an ad for a very popular brand of cracker that you'd put cheese on and the angle at which I had to hold that cracker whilst lip syncing to a popular music song, that went on for a really long time. I had to eat so cracker whilst lip-syncing to a popular music song that went on for a

really long time. I had to eat so many bits of cheese on cracker I was given a spittoon. Actually now you've mentioned it. I'd forgotten when we when Hugh and I were very young we were both in a commercial for a well-known kind of beer. And when they do the pack shot for beer, it's even harder because they have to light the beer in order that it looks like it's sort of glowing. Yes, well, and I imagine this beer advert that you two did was potentially before the times where you'd have to say drink responsibly at the bottom, which brings us back to the fact that beer is addictive and that we were talking about internet addiction. I read as part of this research that the dopamine hit that you get from the white light of clicking

on your phone screen to wake it up is bigger than the hit of dopamine that you get when you look at the face of a newborn baby and they're designed to give you a big shot of dopamine because they're pathetic and useless and they need us to keep them alive. We get a bigger hit from a phone than we do from a baby's face and I think we all know what that means. Babies need to up their game! There's a really good book about our relationship with the internet and how addictive it is called Irresistible by Adam Alter. He is a New York Times bestseller, an academic and a writer, which brings me to writers in New York.

And similarly lauded but this time science fiction author called Felix Gilman, who lives in New York with his wife, who has written an extremely popular award-winning steampunk fantasy series of books called The Half-Made World. Yep. Half-Made is one of the two possible meanings of the French word Quasimodo. Ah, there we go! We've got to theunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo meant as a name half made, which was a horrible

way of describing somebody born with a deformity. Oh. At the time when Hugo was writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Lake Three, The Hunchback of Notre Dame to Jurassic Park. So we find ourselves at the Hunchback of Notre Dame to Jurassic Park. So, we find ourselves at the hunchback of Notre Dame. And I've got to bring us home now, I've got to get us to Jurassic Park, haven't I? Um, yes. There's a very obvious link there, they're both filmed. But we're not allowed to do it that way, because that's not the most interesting way.

No, it isn't. So, where did I go? Notre Dame, the hundreds back of Notre Dame to Notre Dame Cathedral. Okay. That's how I started. And again, you know, as you both know, at this stage of the process, you're just basically scrabbling about. Yeah. Desperate aren't you for things? So, I, Notre Dame Cathedral is a very interesting place. It's a 12th century cathedral. It burnt down. It's very close to where all the Olympic triathletes got E. Coli. Lovely, absolutely lovely. Nice, none of that.

Literally none of that went anywhere. But it does get, it gets 12 million visitors a year. It's one of the most visited places in France. So I thought, I wonder whether looking at other places that are very kind of visited globally might get me Somewhere were you expecting to find Jurassic Park on the list of maybe I believe It's crucial that you do understand. It's a fictional place

Was yeah, I'm sorry never been a theme park You know that Crystal Palace in South London, there's a dinosaur themed sort of sculpture park which dates from literally just within a couple of years when dinosaurs were invented. It's amazing because it was before they knew what dinosaurs looked like, like we do now, so all the sculptures are really wrong. It's really funny. But they show you what people in the 1850s thought dinosaurs looked like. Anyway, sorry. In Crystal Palace.

In Crystal Palace. If you want to see even less accurate dinosaurs in Sidcup, you can do Dino Crazy Golf. Can you? Well that's in the mouth and out the tongue. In the mouth, out the tail, over and over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of various. Just the cultural range of this show that we've gone from Victor Hugo to... Sid Cup Crazy Golf.

The Stegosaurus. The Stegosaurus must be quite a difficult one. Anyway, I didn't go to Jurassic Park. I had this list of the world's most visited attractions and the first one I went to was the Taj Mahal. Oh, I thought that might be up there. When I was looking out the Taj Mahal, I wondered what it says. Because the Taj Mahal, as well as being one of the most visited places in the world, is

also Britain's most common name for curry houses. So there are 26 Taj Mahals and I was hoping that there might be you know Chicken Jurassic Park or something as one of them. You were reaching there weren't you? I was reaching. Definitely reaching. And it didn't happen. So then I started looking further into what the Taj Mahal was because it was actually very interesting and the the Taj Mahal and this makes it rather odd that it is the name for Curry houses and I didn't know this it's a mausoleum. Oh, did you know it was a mausoleum? So the why would you why would you name a curry house after a mausoleum? It's like calling a pub You know the jolly coffin or something is there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it was built the Taj Mahal was built in

1631 as a mausoleum for someone called Mumtaz Mahal, who was the wife of a guy called Shan Jahan, who was the fifth Mughal emperor. And he built it for her because he was absolutely grief-stricken. So he built this, it's an amazing, I've never actually been to the Taj Mahal, have you been to the Taj Mahal? No, I'd love to go. But it is, it's amazing, it's like, you know, it's in 42 acres and, you know, it took 22 years to build and it cost the equivalent of £77 million now, which sounds like a lot,

but it's actually... All of those are compound numbers. Yeah, they're all compound numbers and they are a third, the £77 million is a third of the amount that Chelsea have spent on transfers in the closest. It is effectively one coal palmer. Right, that's a good measurement. That is what the Taj Mahal costs. Am I right in thinking it's right by a river as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's weird. I often think it's weird that these places that you know incredibly well, these world sites, and then you realise that you don't actually know where they are in context at all. No. There's one year during the, you know, the Masters Golf, which appears to be happening in this beautiful sort of forested with all these rhododendrons. I'd look on Google Earth and it's actually in a suburb of Atlanta. It's completely surrounded by suburbs.

Well, yeah, we're going back to the pyramids that you were talking about during beer. I went to the pyramids thinking I was going to, you know, see this magnificent place in the middle of the desert. It is effectively in a part of Cairo that if it were here, you would think this is where... It's sort of an industrial estate this is where one of the one of the pyramids should have pets at home. Dunelm behind it, someone burning some tyres. And the Taj Mahal is built next to a river and it's an incredibly polluted river actually in Agra where the Taj Mahal is the eighth most polluted city in the in the world. So it looks beautiful,

but just over there, it's not quite so nice. So anyway, it was built as a kind of a love token, a memorial for Shah Jahan's wife. Although, you know, you think that's magnificent, although contemporary records suggest that he possibly wasn't quite as griefs you know struck as he appeared to be because contemporary records said that he was so consumed by grief that he gave up royal duties for a week. Well I think you a conscientious ruler. Okay, he had a job to do. He's got a, he's got a, a state to run.

Yeah. What a great dad. He took a day's spontaneity. It took a week. A solid day. But then he stopped wearing lavish clothes and he stopped listening to music for two years. So, I mean, it sounds like, but in a kind of grief

off, he was absolutely stuffed by Queen Victoria. Although she only built the Albert Memorial. So, that sort of got me, no, it's the other wonders of the world. They're mostly linked by bad building, aren't they? That's what I've seen so far. Colossus of Rhodes just snapped in half, Gardens of Babylon. It turns out they've all been built by people who were fed beer for breakfast as babies Well oddly enough the one ancient wonder of the world that was built by drunks is still there Yeah, so clearly You're right

But the the you know the medieval wonder of the world which includes the leaning Tower of Pisa That's a wonder of the world simply because it was badly built of Pisa, that's a wonder of the world, simply because it was badly built. It's got no other reason, has it? What if it's USP? Tarz Mahal, built without a damp course. Unbelievable. Oh, sorry mate. Yeah, it's causing some, anyway.

So, then I went back, this is just explaining my route, then I saw no closer, so then I went back to, in the course of looking through all this I then came across an article originally I believe in the Delhi mirror okay about how seriously the Delhi mirror that's brilliant which said that when they were making a 2015 film pixels which is an Adam Sandler film, you probably won't have seen it, have you ever seen it? No. Yeah. The film classification board in India said, that's fine, but please do not show

any destruction of national monuments in India, because they like to blow things up in that film. So they didn't show any of that. And that was why in 2016 in the film called Independence Day Resurgence, in which aliens do blow stuff up a lot. They decided not to blow up any Indian national monuments, including the Taj Mahal. So, and that of course, who is the star of Independence Day resurgence? Geoff Goldblum. Geoff Goldblum. And Geoff Goldblum is also in Jurassic Park. Thank you.

So that's it. We have made it, haven't we? From beer to prime numbers,, Prime Numbers to the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Notre Dame to... where was I going? Oh yeah, Jurassic Park! Sort of weird, weird route, but that's hopefully the joy of it. Leg one of the journey from beer to eternity achieved. Yes, yes.

And thank you very much. Thanks for having me on this trip. Did you enjoy that? Loved that. Yeah. A few things got off your chest there as well. Yeah, totally. I think we've all experienced, not just entertainment,

but a sort of bit of therapy. Yeah. Sort of cathartic. And I think we have to choose a starting point for next week. So because this whole thing has been slightly chaotic, and because Jeff Goldblum was in Jurassic Park, is an expert in chaos theory. And because it's always fun to talk about Jeff Goldblum was in Jurassic Park is an expert in chaos theory and because it's always fun to talk about Jeff Goldblum we'll start with Kaukau's theory so if you'd like to hear us

struggle to make our way between those disparate targets do join us again next week Root Masters is written and presented by Hugh Dennis and Steve Hunt. The guest was Jessica Foster Q and the producer was Victoria Lloyd. It was a listen production for BBC Radio 4. Thanks for listening to the Comedy of the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. If you want more check out the Friday Night Comedy podcast featuring The News Quiz and Dead Ringers. 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 Kane. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.