It's long been the case that a wise man heeds the warning
"Don't believe everything you see on the television" and, in my attempts to try and be wise, I have subscribed to this saying. As a result I know that there is no such place in the East End of London called Walford, that Daleks
cannot get up stairs and that David Dickinson is in fact fictional.
There are some exceptions to the above rule (thought I'd better point that out before people who spend all of their spare time in front of the Discovery Channel started to get irate). One such exception, albeit a lighthearted one, is
Q.I., which I have plugged before on this blog. For the terminally ignorant, Q.I. is a quiz show that unearths little nuggets of information that, although they are not common knowledge and often border on the ridiculous (fact being weirder than fiction, after all), are actually
Quite Interesting (hence, Q.I. - geddit?). It's on BBC2 and is hosted by the very knowledgeable Stephen Fry.
How else would I have found out about
Earth's second moon?
It's not the sort of thing that crops up on EastEnders, now is it?
Can you picture the scene:
"Ooh cup of tea and a bacon roll to go please, Ian", said Alfie.
"And did you read about Cruithne? It's Earth's second moon dontcha know? Rub-a-dub-dub, apples and pears, My auld man said follow the van.."
Not bloody likely.
Anyway the second series of this wonderful show was on before Christmas and I made every effort to try and catch it as, along with being very amusing, it is also quite informative (Q.I. again, see? Bloody clever these telly execs you know). Now as it was run on a Friday night I quite often "Sky Plussed" it and then would watch it when I got in later that night or in the morning whilst nursing my hangover. As a result, quite a lot of the little nuggets of information imparted throughout the series were lost to my alcohol-ridden brain.
But one "fact" stayed with me.
It was all about Stephen Fry recounting the fact that banana trees could walk.
It's not something you're likely to forget is it?
Banana trees. Walking.
That's the sort of thing that sticks with you.
Anyway flash forward a couple of weeks to last week in the office: Don't ask me how it came to pass, but we were deep in one of our stimulating conversations when I chipped in with the
"Did you know that banana trees could walk?" line.
Now rather than generating a stunned hush, as people were wowed by this revelation, or indeed generating a very interesting conversation of a Dendrological nature something else happened..
They began to take the piss..
Mercilessly..
And this has continued until today when I announced:
"Right, you fuckers, I'm going to go onto the internet and get you proof that banana trees can indeed walk".
So off I went to the internet and tried to find some page, any page, that would indeed back up my (what now seemed a tad iffy) statement.
Try typing +Banana +Tree +Walking into
Google, go on, I dare you.
Not a lot of supporting evidence is there?
Bugger!
Had TV lied to me?
The only thing I could find was a transcript from an interview held with Stephen Fry on a show called
"The Science Show" (don't get too excited though, think it's Australian so it's educational content must be called into question!) where he makes the same claim he did months later on Q.I.
Stephen Fry wouldn't lie to a Science Show would he?
Anyway whilst talking about Q.I. the interviewer (Robyn Williams) asks how they find out all of the information that comes up on the show, it reads like this:
Robyn Williams: Well, that’s quite interesting - in fact, it’s fascinating. But how was it found out, how did you get arse wiper’s facts organised?
Stephen Fry: Oh well, there are all kinds of ways, John Lloyd’s assembled a team of extremely varied and intelligent and plucky people who just check things out. But it’s often not so much that you check a fact, the point is you come across a fact and you then verify it. You don’t start off in the position, ‘we know that his bottom’s wiped by somebody else’. What happens is, you just go out looking at things, reading unusual books, finding yourself in a library picking up any old book and looking at it. It may be a book that says something like, 19th Century Malayan Dendrology and you may think it’s the most boring book in the world, but, on page 19 you discover that bananas walk sideways and that’s interesting.
Robyn Williams: They do in London, do they?
Stephen Fry: No, they do around the world, banana trees move, they actually move over the years they uproot themselves and actually shift the distance between where they were to a new place, which you might as well call walking. You see, there you are, it’s a book on 19th century Malayan dendrology, which you’d think would have no interest at all except to a dendrologist who was interested in 19th century Malaya and yet there you are, you find the interesting thing that banana trees walk. Well, I think that’s quite interesting and therefore it qualified for Quite Interesting.
This is, unfortunately, the only evidence I have uncovered so far. And whilst it's kept the mocking down to a bear minimum, I would like further proof.. So I am going to try and
find further proof.. In the meantime if anyone would like to point me in the direction of evidence, please do so in the comments section.
I just have to be right on this one
