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- The panel are asked to name any crime that Father Christmas is guilty of. Arguably he is guilty of breaking and entering; drunk driving due to people leaving drinks out for him; speeding as in order to around the 24,901 mile-long equator in 24 hours he would have to travel at over 1,000mph; and breaching the Data Protection Act for creating his naughty or nice list, as you are not allowed to keep a list of criminal convictions. If these are crimes, they would be victimless.

- Tangent: Gyles suggestions another crime being broken is impersonation with intent to deceive, namely by parents who don't want to encourage their children to believe in Father Christmas. Emmanuel said that as a child his family did not bother with Christmas, and since becoming a father himself he has gone over-the-top with his love of Christmas. He himself writes a letter from Santa and posts it to his kids, with letter containing things such as nice things they can do for others.

- Tangent: As a boy, Gyles put bits of wool/cotton across various doors, leading to the room where he was sleeping, in the hope tripping Santa up when he came in. As a result of this, at about 4am on Christmas 1957, Gyles first heard the word: "fuck".

- Tangent: Other examples of victimless crimes include being gay in countries where homosexuality is illegal. In 2023, 77-year-old Reginald Kincer was arrested for attempting to sell $1,800 worth of Viagra at a retirement complex in Florida. He had been stockpiling pills, and was charged with a federal offence because he got them in another state. This story focused the fact the community he was in was a home for swingers, and people would hang different-coloured spongers and loofahs to indicate what they were into. Gyles once went to a chemist that advertised Viagra with the slogan; "It won't make you Sean Connery, but it might make you Roger Moore."

- XL Tangent: Emmanuel did stand-up on a cruise ship where swinging was notorious, and the international sign for swingers is an upside-down pineapple. On this ship he had a friend who had a pineapple bucket hat, and he didn't teller her about this information.

- The panel are asked to name the most violent variety acts in history. Theatre manager Willie Hammerstein, father of Oscar Hammerstein, ran the Victoria Theatre in New York. He filled the headliner spot with singers known as Shooting Stars or The Shooting Showgirls, who were singers who had all shot people. They included Nan Patterson, who shot and killed her marred lover in a taxi; Florence Carman, who shot her husband's mistress; and Lillian Graham & Ethel Conrad, who shot a man called Will Stokes in the leg while they were trying to blackmail him. The posters advertising them luridly boasted of these crimes, and the posters were later used in court as evidence against them.

- Tangent: Alan suggests knife throwers as being violent. Gyles knows the truth of this because many years ago, when he was a support act for Bernard Manning, he shared a dressing room with a stripper named Cocotte (real name Doris), who had previously been a circus performer. She explained that what actually happens during the knife throwing act is that the thrower drops the knives behind him, a whooshing sound is played, and fake knives are fired out from the broad from behind.

- Tangent: Probably the worst vaudeville act was the Cherry Sisters, who were five prudish girls from Iowa who had a collection of moral plays, songs and ethnic dialogue routines. Everyone seemed to hate them. A soon as they came out on stage, people threw vegetables and eggs at them, but for some reason the act took this as a compliment. Eventually, they read a terrible review of them in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which led them to sue the editor for slander, resulting in them performing their show during the trial. The jury found the editor guilty and sentenced him to marry one of the performers.

- Tangent: Sandi's favourite variety act is the five Barrison Sisters, who were billed as the Wickedest Girls in the World. They would slightly raise their skirts as they danced, and then say to the audience: "Would you like to see my pussy?" When the audience said they would, they would lift their skirts up to real live kittens attached to their crotches.

- Tangent: Another variety performer was William Shapiro, who was billed as Sliding Billy Watson, who is the man who popularised the joke of sliding on a banana skin. There was another Billy Watson, who in 1909 introduced Billy Watson's Beef Trust, a chorus 30 of the largest women ever seen onstage. It was advertised as: "4,300lb of chorus".

- Tangent: A video is played of Gus Visser and his Singing Duck performing 'Ma! (He's Making Eyes At Me)'. This is probably the first-ever music video, from 1925, and provided by the George Eastman Museum in New York. In the act, Visser actually makes the quacking noise, and touches his duck at the right moments to make its mouth open.

- XL: The ideal man was created by Leonardo da Vinci, although today we know it is not ideal. His drawing of Vitruvian Man, which depicts a man with four legs and four arms standing in a circle and a square, is inaccurate. The drawing is named after the Roman engineer Vitruvius, who claimed what the ideal proportions of a person were. He said that the central point is the navel, "and if a man is placed flat on his back with his hands and feet extended, and a compass centred at his navel, his fingers and toes will touch the circumference of a circle thereby described, and so too a square may be found from it." Da Vinci took his measurements from real people at work and made his own notes. He said that from the elbow to the tip of the hand is a quarter of your height, the distance from the elbow to the armpit is one eighth of your height, and the length of the hand is one tenth. However, when you look at the drawing, the legs come out of the navel rather than the hips. (Forfeit: It's Gyles)

- XL Tangent: Da Vinci invented balloon animals. His biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote: "Having composed a kind of paste from wax, made of this certain figures of animals, entirely hollow and exceedingly slight in texture, which he then filled with air. When he blew into these figures, he could make them fly through the air, but when the air within had escaped from them, they fell to the earth."

- Each panellist is given an orange and some empty water balloons, and are told to burst the balloons using the orange. If you rub the zest of the orange onto the balloon, it will be enough to make it burst as it contains a chemical called limonene, but only on water balloons, as normal balloons use vulcanised rubber.

- Your gut feeling about Christmas with the in-laws can change, in particular your gut's microbiome. The state of the microbiome depends on your mood, and can change if you have stress, depression, obesity or inflammatory bowel disease. Thus, if you find staying with your in-laws stressful, you will end up having fewer of the microbes that you actually need. A 2019 study involved people submitting daily dietary reports on the 23rd and 27th December, and stool samples had to be taken to a research centre on ice within six hours of sampling. However, the study did not do well. Two of the participants failed to provide the second stool sample because it was too disgusting to do; one person decided to go on a Christmas fast; people who had pigged out were too embarrassed to fill in the form properly; and people who didn't like their in-laws used the fact that they were doing a poo-related study not to go visit them.

- Tangent: Bob Monkhouse had his mother-in-law to stay over one Christmas, at a time he was worried about his sperm count being low. He had been to the doctor, was told to provide a sample, and was given a screw-top jar to provide it in. Monkhouse went to his bathroom, but he had trouble so he asked his wife to help. She couldn't help, so he asked for his mother-in-law to help. She put a towel of it, and still none of them can get the lid off the jar.

- The most humane way to catch a mouse is using one of the many different mousetraps patented in the USA over the years. They are believed to be the most frequently invented device in US history. The standard snap trap was designed in 1899, but the inventors quickly discovered that women bought them, and because they did not want to prize the mouse out of the trap once it had been caught and wash the trap, they just threw the whole thing away and bought new ones. The US Patent Office has issued over 4,400 mousetrap patents. Examples include one designed by James Williams of Texas which fired a gun at the mouse, and he believed his trap would also work as a burglar alarm. Another trap was designed to take out an entire infestation, in that the trap puts a bell around the mouse's neck, is then released, and you can hear the mice feeling back to the other mice, so you know where all of them are. A third trapped the mouse in a toy vehicle which then drove around the room. A fourth created in 1931 forced a mouse to walk a plank into a bucket of water.

- XL: The panel are given a piece of carpet, some glitter and confetti to make it dirty, and a variety of different items to clean it. This is inspired by an event in Las Vegas called the Housekeeping Olympics, in which teams of hospitality works compete in events like bed making, speed vacuuming, and mop races along a slalom course of yellow plastic signs. One of the events is also getting confetti out of carpets, and probably the best tool is a lint hair remover. You can use a balloon and pick things up using static electricity. If you get glitter on your clothes, you can spray them with aerosol hair spray, let them dry and then wash normally.

- Plain ice cream, also known as traditional ice cream in Scotland, tastes of cream and sugar. No flavouring is added to it. Vanilla ice cream comes from a type of orchid. (Forfeit: Vanilla)

- XL Tangent: Gyles was once served what was called plain ice cream by Ted Heath, which had the flavour of Encyclia orchid. These orchids were given to him by Fidel Castro.

- XL Tangent: Emmanuel says he has no stories in comparison to Gyles, but then Alan point out that Emmanuel once met Denzel Washington while wearing a blue-sequined leotard. It occurred when he was in a theatre production touring Germany. Washington was in the same place releasing a film, and as they passed each other walking, Emmanuel was speechless. All he could say was: "Is that the shirt you wore in 'Man On Fire'?" Washington looked at him in his leotard and replied: "That's the best thing you've got?"

- Tangent: The panel are given some plain ice cream to eat. The top three most popular ice cream flavours in Britain are vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. The panel are then given another tub of ice cream try to figure out the flavour. As it is Christmas, it is Brussels sprout flavour. In Japan, you can get raw horse flesh ice cream. Before the days of freezers, you had to buy blocks of ice cream and wrap them in newspaper which you had to quickly get back home before they melted.

General Ignorance

- XL: The percentage of your ancestors which were men is about 33%. This is because historically, men are much more likely to die without reproducing. Only about 40% of men have ever reproduced, as opposed to 80% of women. Everyone is probably descended from a population of about 60 women and 30 men who were breeding in Africa before humans left the continent. (Forfeit: Fifty)

- Apart from drinking less alcohol, the way to ensure you won't be hung-over on Boxing Day varies from person-to-person. Everybody has a different reaction to alcohol. It is independent of gender, and is not even strongly correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed. (Forfeit: Don't stop drinking; Drink plenty of water)

- Tangent: Traditional cures for hangovers include painkillers, fry-ups, and having another drink, known as "hair of the dog". This phrase comes from a incorrect belief that when people were bitten by dogs, you could prevent rabies by taking hairs from the dog and putting it in the wound. In the 1930s, there were cocktails called Corpse Reviver to help with hangovers. Different meals to cure hangovers across the globe include the German Katerfruhstuck, consisting of pickled herring and sauerkraut; Ancient Romans used deep-fried canaries; the Sicilians use dried bull's penis; the Mongolians have pickled sheep's eyeballs in tomato juice; and American cowboys use an infusion of rabbit droppings.

- XL Tangent: The symptoms of drunkenness is caused by alcohol inhibiting the production of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Prof. David Nutt of Imperial College London has created a drink called Sentia, which produces the effects of drunkenness but contains no alcohol, so you won't be hungover.

- Out of your typical festive plants, mistletoe is the most poisonous to cats.

- Tangent: Fifty years ago, Gyles was on Radio 4's Today Programme, and suggest people should enjoy a cup of mistletoe tea. Within moments, doctors had called the programme saying that mistletoe tea would kill anyone who drank it.

[i]- Tangent: Ways you can stop cats messing around with your Christmas tree include only putting decorations on the top of it, cut all the lower branches from it, hang the tree upside down from the ceiling, or put bells at the bottom of the tree so can her when the cat is nearby.

- One last variety trick is performed, with Sandi getting Emmanuel to perform the table cloth trick. He fails, but Sandi successfully does it.

Scores

- No scores given.