Moths v Butterflies - Katy Brand, Jane Hill and Chris Jiggins

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What really separates a moth from a butterfly? Is it just a matter of day and night, or is there more to this fluttering feud than meets the eye? Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince flap into the fabulous world of Lepidoptera with Professor Jane Hill, Professor Chris Jiggins, and comedian Katy Brand. Together, they chase colourful wings through science and storytelling, uncovering epic insect migrations, the secrets behind dazzling wing patterns, and most importantly, why Katy has a butterfly tattoo on her arm!

Producer: Olivia Jani Series Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

BBC Studios Audio Production

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:05.2	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:06.4	I'm Robin Ince, and welcome to the infinite lepidopterineum, or at the very least, the very, very, very big butterfly house.
0:16.7	Leppadopterineum.
0:17.3	That's why I should have said very, very big butterfly house.
0:20.1	To be fair, you can pick me up on that, but you were the one who said there's no way I'm saying that line because I won't be able to pronounce it. And now you've pronounced it in front of me, yet again, making fun of the arts with your cold, cold, cold physics mind.
0:36.8	Lepidopterium.
0:39.1	Lepidoptererian.
0:40.3	Lepidoptererian?
0:43.1	Let's go to our guests who have not yet been introduced,
0:44.6	so we'll be really be phantasms.
0:46.1	Leopoctoratarium?
0:47.3	Leapidototterian.
0:48.8	I've never used any of those words.
0:50.9	Oh no.
0:53.0	We've got the wrong guests.
1:09.4	Now regular listeners will know that in our unashamed quest for a larger audience, every so often we pitch two animals against each other in the title of the show before delving immediately into scientific detail and thus faithly undermining the populist conceit.
1:12.6	So we start off by trying to be like WCW, then we become an open university, so it's the equivalent
1:14.3	of starting off with the idea of an
1:16.5	illegal East End lockup
1:18.3	dog fight, but then actually
1:20.6	it turns out that it's just
	...

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