CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Gooooood evening! Good evening, good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI, where we have prepared for you
a veritable gallimaufry of gaffes, gammons and other gingambobs.
On the panel tonight we have the gotch-gutted Hugh Dennis.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
What does that mean?
A glimflashy grinagog, Phill Jupitus.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
A gravy-eyed gundy-guts, Andy Hamilton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And a proper gilly gaupus, Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And to attract my attention tonight, the buzzers are all on a Georgian theme. Hugh goes...
OBOE PLAYS STATELY MELODY
Ah. Andy goes...
BASSOON PLAYS JAUNTY TUNE
LAUGHTER
Phill goes...
JOLLY MELODY ON STRINGS AND FLUTE
LAUGHTER
Wow! And Alan goes...
MUSIC: "When I'm Cleaning Windows" by George Formby
LAUGHTER
It's George Formby.
♪ When I'm cleaning windows. ♪
Yes, George Formby. Excellent.
APPLAUSE
Let's look at a notable gaffe now.
How did Captain Schlitt's number two sink his own U-boat?
I'm assuming that the good captain was in the bath. This couldn't have happened in an actual...
No, it was a real...
You mean playing with a toy U-boat?
And it was a number two.
Oh, I see, a number two in that sense.
Yes. Not in the "yes, number one, carry on, number one"...
He might have blocked the loo and caused some sort of terrible backup...
affected the ballast.
Imagine how the lavatory on a submarine works. Ah!
Sorry, a bit of a clue. A ruthless competitor!
LAUGHTER
It's something to do with the flush on the toilet.
How does that work when you're underwater?
It sucks it out, but lets water in?
Yes. The point is that obviously the lavatory arrangements of a boat that is submersible are very complex.
Because you can't just flush the water out, the way you can in an aeroplane or train,
you have to have special training to operate the flush.
Or...
you shoot a sailor out of the torpedo tube, tied to a rope.
He relieves himself, and you pull him back in.
Well, it seems that what happened
was Captain Schlitt, in his U-boat, U-1206 - this is April 14, 1945,
just before the end of the war...
Oh, how annoying. Very annoying for him!
And he has a poo. And he claims that the loo was faulty and didn't work properly.
Klo. Klo as they would say, klo...gebrochen.
IN GERMAN ACCENT: It was not working.
But there is a theory that, in fact, he'd just done a rather monster and unpleasant poo,
and was too embarrassed to ask the sailor who was responsible for the doing of the flushing to come in.
Because there was a bit of a...
And so he did it himself and got it in the wrong order and he filled the place with sewage and water.
AUDIENCE GROANS
But more importantly... He just left it?! Yeah.
As you would if you're in a hotel, for example!
IN GERMAN ACCENT: There, it was...that was like that when I went in. It was...
Ja, ja. Don't go in that one. My God!
So has he climbed out of the tower of the submarine, and the...
No, they're underwater, that's the point. Did they perish?
Well, what happened is there was this leak, the water came in
and it leaked into... What powered those U-boats? Diesel?
No.
They had a battery. A huge acid battery.
And when the seawater hits the battery, it creates?
Chlorine gas, toxic chlorine gas.
And so they had to rise up to the surface to vent, and they were spotted and blown out of the water.
So just because he basically...
That's very unfair to shoot a man with his trousers round his ankles.
It is a bit.
Toilet's blocked. This doesn't count!
Captain Karl-Adolph Schlitt sank his own U-boat using nothing more deadly than its own lavatory.
Here are samples of handwriting from our panellists.
I want you to match the handwriting to the panelistas and see what you can say about it.
Give reasons if you can. Obviously don't say your own, cos you'll know your own.
"Hello, my name is Phill Jupitus"?
I wonder who that could be. I think there's a clue in that one.
It's rather good handwriting. It's quite calligraphically learnt.
Any thoughts? What about, "I must not answer back to..."?
D is Phill. D is Phill. I think there's a strong chance it's Phill.
I know that D is Andy, cos he writes on my scripts...
rude things,
when we're filming.
Does he have that fine handwriting? It is very fine.
Yes, that is me. Congratulations on fine handwriting.
A graphologist would say of yours that cos it's mostly joined up, logical, systematic thinker.
Some words are more spaced than others, therefore open, honest, but deep in thought.
Sociable because of the slightly forward slant to the right.
Right. OK, that's good. We can eliminate D as being Andy Hamilton.
I think C is Alan.
Because it's the untidiest?
No, I just think it's Alan.
Don't know why. Is it you, Alan?
Yes. It is. Oh, that's really good.
How did you know?
Did you watch me doing it earlier?
No, I just thought, "That looks like Alan wrote it."
Which is the only way you can play this game.
Close lettering is unstable, apparently.
Oh.
There wasn't much room on the bit of paper. No? Ah...
I had to squeeze it in to get it in.
Letters not mostly joined up, sometimes does things without thinking.
It was a big, fat pen! You can't do joined up.
You gave me a marker pen!
B and A left. I think Phill and I can probably work out...
The logical thing. So B is Phill, yeah?
No. B is Hugh. It's quite good handwriting. It's quite flowing,
quite feminine, almost. Well, you know...
I'm very in touch with that part of my nature.
It's very nice handwriting. Does it say anything about me? Yeah.
Joins up most, but not all letters. Artistic and intuitive.
Self-control, egotism and coldness, on the other hand, because it's upright.
Why does being upright mean that?
It doesn't. It must be understood, the British Psychological Society, and any empirical test ever done,
has shown that graphology, as a way of interpreting character, has zero validity.
Like astrology.
So this is a bit of a, kind of, non-round? Yeah.
But, no, it's interesting to know that. And even in America, it's not allowable in court.
Forensic...
Sorry!
I mean, you know, but...
Forensic graphology, where you prove that this person did write this, that is allowable.
But the idea that you can interpret character is absolute nonsense.
I must say I'm not looking forward to the DNA round.
The worrying thing about it is that 3,000 British businesses use graphologists for recruitment.
They actually hire people on the basis of a completely specious...
Good a way as any, though, isn't it?
But it's botty water!
Girls have nicer handwriting than boys, though, don't they?
That is one thing you can often, not 100%, but you can tell gender.
And you thought I was a girl!
Not always. I said not 100%.
We actually Tipp-Exed out the smiley-faced dots over the eyes.
I like yours, Phill. You're A. It says here, about self-control, egotism, coldness,
unstable, sometimes does things without thinking.
I'm with you there. Yeah. Unstable. Whoa!
Thinking of having a fight as to who is the coldest.
Let's both get a 99 and just stand there with it.
First one to melt loses.
Whoa. I thought I was cold.
Phew! He is cold. So you did a handwriting test?
Yeah, I sat a test to become a French train driver.
What?!
My friend's dad was a psychologist for SNCF, and in France they had this idea that, you know,
a responsible job like a train driver, you ought to find out if the person's a maniac or not.
We don't bother with that. And...
So I sat the test, and there was a handwriting element.
What they did was, you had to hold the pen in your wrong hand, and there was a kind of rubber ring
around the middle, and you had to try and trace over what was written there.
If it drifted up the page, you were assertive, or possibly too aggressive.
And if it went down the page, you were deemed to be too passive.
Good Lord.
I'm fascinated how you can drive a train too passively, though. What do you do?
How can you be too passive? "Ooh, we're going terribly fast."
Ooh, no! You're turning into Alan Bennett.
Well, there you are.
Now we're off to Ireland where the policemen are called...?
Guards. Guards, the Garda, exactly. Did you hear about
the Irish policeman who tried to arrest a Polish driving licence?
Do you know this story? You do?
I sort of... Someone was done for speeding or something in lots of different parts of Ireland? Yeah.
That's exactly right.
He had 50 offences against him and was fast becoming the most wanted motorist in Ireland.
Prawo Jazdy is a master criminal because he had different driving licences with different addresses.
This Prawo Jazdy had all these... Goodness knows what he was up to apart from the driving offences!
That was what everyone was puzzled by. They really wanted him but it turned out one Garda member said...
IN IRISH ACCENT "I think, I may be wrong,
"but Prawo Jazdy is the Polish for driving licence."
And, red faces all round, the Garda had... There it is - Prawo Jazdy.
Hang on a minute! The fact it said "permis de conduire" above it might have been a hint, but there we are.
They're still looking for his brother, Rzeczpospolita Polska.
On the subject of driving licences, guess who had the first driving licence in the world.
The Queen.
No, oddly enough, you couldn't be WRONGERER because the Queen has...? No driving licence.
She's the only person in Britain who doesn't have a driving licence, yet who drives. Cheat!
I mean, in a legal way. She's the only one who has no legal need for a driving licence.
What does she show them at Blockbusters to prove her address?
A twenty pound note.
That would do it.
APPLAUSE
Well, no, but the first ever driving licence, not surprisingly, perhaps. Who invented the motorcar?
Mr Benz. Mr Benz, Karl Benz, as in Mercedes-Benz. Yeah, exactly.
He just made one for himself, did he? No, the citizens demand...
IN GERMAN ACCENT: I think I need a licence! It's a dangerous machine.
I need a licence to drive.
Now I can drive.
IN GERMAN ACCENT: Driving licence number one. Zero zero zero one.
ANDY: I bet the first thing he did when he got on the road
was stop the next bloke and go...
IN GERMAN ACCENT: "Where is YOUR licence?"
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Oh, dear.
IN GERMAN ACCENT: I will issue you with the licence.
It's five marks.
Zero zero zero TWO!
Good day to you!
Where is your licence?
I will issue you with a licence.
Five marks.
Zero zero zero three.
I don't know how he kept making the cars. Yeah, he was so busy!
The authorising body was called the Dampfkessel Uberwachungs-Verein,
which means the Steam Boiler Supervision Association,
which granted the first mandatory licences in Prussia.
IN GERMAN ACCENT: The SS...A.
LAUGHTER
Until the 14th of May, 2002, women in Lithu... He was still doing it! No.
Number one million one thousand...
Five euros.
Where is your licence?
LAUGHTER
In Lithuania in that year, women had to undergo a certain test in order to get a licence.
What do you think that test was? In where? Lithuania? Yes. Smear test?
Yes, a gynaecological examination. You're joking!
I don't know... There was one man who ran the entire office. He paid... Oh, right.
It is rather bizarre. Well... The Chinese have multiple choice driving test questions, 100 of them.
One of them includes, "If you come across a road accident victim whose intestines are lying on the road,
"should you pick them up and push them back in?" Is the answer yes or no?
I should think you don't push them back in... You're right. ..I would have thought. I'm not a doctor!
Didn't they have that weird thing in the Cultural Revolution in China?
Traffic lights here are green for go and red for stop.
They thought, during the Cultural Revolution, that that was incorrect and red should mean go
because, culturally, Communism and all the rest of it...
But they failed to change all the traffic lights,
so on some traffic lights green was go and on some red was go and they had thousands of accidents
and then they had to, sort of, change it back. Wow. Hence the probability of intestines lying on the road.
Probably where it came from in the first place. A practical question.
They're not actually green. They're kind of blue. Yes, they can be.
Because red and green is a very common colour blindness,
so when they first did red and green it was a disaster for some people, just carried straight on.
They couldn't tell whether it was the top or the bottom. No, so the green...
If I see a black and white film, I can tell which light's on, can't you? But not in the dark, Stephen!
You are relying on the colour, let's face it, usually. You're right. I'm sorry.
Can we not argue? That is what the terrorists want.
You're right!
Thank you, voice of sanity.
I did hear a character in a film once say, "Don't look at the lights, the lights never hit anyone."
That's quite a good motto for driving. It is.
IN GERMAN ACCENT: This is one I will use!
Don't look at ze lights, ze lights never hit anyone.
Ausgezeichnet.
We're motoring along nicely here, so can you tell me
what travels from Land's End to John O'Groats every year
at about one third of a mile per hour but it slows down a bit on hills?
Does it specifically go from there to there or...?
It goes from the south to the north but it includes going from Land's End... Is it a tectonic wave or..?
No, not a tectonic wave. I don't know if they exist. I just made it up, I think.
It's something slightly more abstract. It's a phenomenon, which you were sort of getting towards.
Is it dress sense?
If we're talking about moving from the south to the north... Ooh, careful! Now, now. Now, then.
The Gulf Stream or something? Is it a windy thing? It's seasonal. It is a season.
Winter? Spring.
Spring is the answer. Spring takes eight weeks to get from the very south coast
all the way up to the very north and up to the Orkneys. But what's the definition of spring?
There's a phenotype analysis you can do of particular common plants blooming.
Anyone from the Midlands who goes to London will say, "Oh, my God, they've already got daffodils out."
Or they'll go north and say, "They haven't got tulips yet."
It's very noticeable. "Southern bastards"!
It's like when the weatherman on Radio Four goes,
"You might like to make note that it's the first day of spring today."
IN SCOTTISH ACCENT: No, it's not! I think you'll find I'm still freezing here.
Eight miles a day it does? Spring?
Is that what we're saying?
It takes about eight weeks to get from John O'Groats and that's about a third of a mile per hour.
You could walk and just beat spring. Yeah. You could. It's a weird thought. Very weird.
If you timed it with a daffodil and walked at exactly the right speed, it'd go pop-pop-pop-pop.
And it would be rather beautiful.
I'm in touch with my feminine side!
You're responding to your handwriting beautifully.
It's the phenological observations, as they call them, of the various things that trigger spring.
It's a rather wonderful thought, spring moving up like that.
Why do birds fly south in the winter?
I thought you were going to sing Close To You! To go to Margate.
Because it's too far to walk. Bah.
They're going because it's warmer presumably, aren't they?
What's the advantage of the warmth? Well, you feel nicer.
More food to eat. There's nothing like the sun on your feathers.
It's the insects. In the north, in the frozen earth, you can't get at them
or they've died or are in a dormant state and are not available. Food for the birds is not there.
So it is food.
Spring travels north through Britain at around one third of a mile per hour
but arrives two days later for every hundred foot of elevation.
What's the point of those machines?
Ah. That's an eternally filling glass in the middle. Never empty.
Perpetual motion. Oh, points to the man, absolutely! They're all perpetual motion machines.
Or attempts to design perpetual motion machines. What is a perpetual motion machine?
One that never stops? One that is in motion in perpetuity, Stephen. Yes.
You're asking a silly question. Think, boy! There's more to it - there must be no input of energy.
No energy in, but you should be able to get energy out.
Because it's moving. And it transgresses what law?
Thermodynamics. The first and second laws of thermodynamics.
There's a Simpsons episode where Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine.
Homer says, "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
It is a great line but the point is they can never work.
Leonardo actually did drawings of attempted perpetual motion machines.
He realised... He's drawn a chocolate orange on the top.
Oh, yes!
How boring have you got to be to draw a diagram of how to take a chocolate orange apart?
He invented a lot of things, but I didn't know he invented that.
He wrote in his notebook, "Oh, ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued?
"Go and take your place with the alchemists."
So he spotted quite early on that it was never going to work. Sadly, our universe is not made in such a way.
You'd only need one and you could power the world from it, in theory.
You only need one and you could power the world from it! Sorry, Mr Bond.
That brings us now, grumbling to the gizzards of general ignorance,
so fingers on buzzers, if you would.
Take a child and give them a really sugary drink. What happens?
I haven't got any kids. I've no idea.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
But, speaking as an uncle,
I'm often discouraged from giving them too much chocolate because they go, in quotes, mental.
Aah, right. Is that it?
No, it's odd.
Almost every mother watching this will disbelieve me
when I say that medical evidence shows that sugary drinks do not cause hyperactivity.
They do NOT cause... I know, it's shocking.
You're all going, "You should see mine. It does. I swear to you, it does!"
It doesn't. Maybe it's just any sort of fuel so if you gave them a drink of water or an apple...
You do test the children who do this by giving them drinks which have no sugar at all,
though the parents THINK they have sugar...
It's the parents that change! The parents PERCEIVE it.
And the parents who perceive it are the ones who most hover over their children
and are most critical of their children's behaviour anyway.
They're the ones who apparently notice it. Was this research funded by Coca Cola?
We trialled this question on the QI website and none of the mothers believed us.
They all said, "I don't care what the scientists say, my child goes nuts."
I don't believe it, either, but then I am very in touch with my feminine side.
Kids dip quite quickly anyway, don't they?
If you keep giving them something to snack on, they'll go up again.
That's how it works with my nephews. They run around for a bit, then go, "Oh... Uh... Oh..."
They go, "Ugh, I want to go home." The you give them a sandwich and they go, "We're up!"
It seems to be quite hard work keeping an even keel through the day.
I think that's generally true.
We know you won't believe us, but sugary drinks don't make children hyperactive.
That's why we call it general ignorance.
However, what happens if you leave teeth in a glass of cola overnight?
They completely dissolve and disappear.
KLAXON WAILS
No, it turns out they don't.
There was a famous occasion in 1951.
A doctor appeared before the House Of Representatives special committee.
He was called Clive McKay of Cornell University.
To dramatise his testimony, he said that a tooth left in a glass of Coke
would begin to dissolve after two days.
Even if his claims were accurate, it is of absolutely no relevance whatsoever
because you don't soak your teeth in it. Isn't that the one that cleans your money?
I believe it does. HP sauce. That's really good at cleaning money.
It's the vinegar - that's what does it. Is that it?! Yeah.
All that money I've been wasting on HP sauce...!
I used to drink a lot of Coke in my early teens and my mum used to say,
"You shouldn't drink Coke because it stains the inside of your stomach."
LAUGHTER
That's going to put the girls off, isn't it(?) Yeah.
How do you know that's not true? You don't but you think, "If I ever see the inside of my stomach,
"it's probably going to be a bit late to worry about what colour it is."
I can't wait, Andy. I don't like to talk about a friend's death but at your post-mortem...
Look at this terrible stained intestine... Coke-coloured tripe.
My goodness. Well, they do cause tooth decay but not as much, as we discovered in a previous QI, as...?
Jam. No.
Crisps, potato crisps. There is far more tooth decay caused by them. No!
Yes. Because they stay on your teeth? Yeah, they stay there and hang around.
Here's one you might actually believe. Name an ape that walks just on two feet and isn't human.
Because we obviously walk on two feet rather than on our hands. Only on two feet?
Yeah, it doesn't... Orang-utan? No.
KLAXON WAILS
They use the back of their hands, like this. Is it a monkey with a tail? I seem to remember seeing...
A monkey with a tail? It's got a tail for balancing. We need more from you there, Phill!
Baboon, gibbon, chimp... Oh, you've said it! Baboon. No. Gibbon, chimp. Yes.
KLAXON WAILS
Gibbon is the right answer. The funky gibbon, in particular. The funky gibbon especially.
Here are some gibbon.
Look at it go! Look at it go! It looks so shifty, like it's just nicked something.
It looked like he had the Mission: Impossible music in his head.
I can do this - do-do... That's rather good, isn't it? That's Russell Brand!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Do they do that just to taunt the other apes? They probably do. "Can you do this? I can."
It's considered to be a more primitive way of walking, the way we do and gibbons do.
Seems to have been earlier than the four. I know, that's weird.
Let's finish with an easy one.
I want you to sort these creatures and phenomena into age order.
Which is the oldest? Oldest to youngest.
I'd put A first. The Himalayas.
Yeah. Hmm. No, they're quite young, that's why they're tall.
Tall mountains are young because they haven't been worn down... They are the youngest thing on the board.
They are the youngest of all. They're ONLY 20 million years old.
I think D, C, B, A.
D, C, B, A is not bad... D, C, A, B. It's actually C, D, B, A. Oh, right.
The oldest is the spider, then the cockroach,
then the triceratops, then the "Himalias" or Himalayas.
In fact, it's quite interesting, which is, after all, our business.
Ants are contemporaneous with dinosaurs but cockroaches pre-date them by at least 55 million years
and spiders are even older - 300 million years ago.
If the spider's first, what did it catch?
LAUGHTER Damn, that's good.
Flies, but not cockroaches. So the fly was first?
Ha! Which came first, the spider or the fly? A really good question.
There's a lot of webs and spiders going, "Come on."
Out of innocent ignorance, childish wisdom spills out.
I'm only teasing, you know! No, the dinosaurs lived from the Late Triassic, 230 million years ago,
to the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago.
And Mount Everest was only 25 million years.
So it's 25 million years younger than the youngest dinosaur.
Hmm. A whippersnapper. That looks like the pictures from the worst spelling book ever.
LAUGHTER
There's a DOCKROACH in the corner
and I saw a BINOSAUR...
LAUGHTER
..and Alp. Alp, Alp! I get Alp!
That's very good.
Well done, everybody.
The Himal-ee-as or Himal-eye-as or Hima-lay-las...
or the Himalayas, as human beings say...
LAUGHTER
The Himalayas have only been around for 40 million years.
The last dinosaurs died out 25 million years before they were formed.
Spiders and cockroaches are even older than dinosaurs. That's it. Let's look at the scores.
Oh, my goodness gracious me! We have a clear winner with plus four points, would you believe?
Hugh Dennis! APPLAUSE
A good score. Thank you very much.
But also in the black with plus two,
it's Andy Hamilton! Gosh! APPLAUSE
That's never happened before!
17 behind, with minus 15,
Phill Jupitus! APPLAUSE
Aw! Oof!
Oh, and way down with the cockroaches at minus 56, Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you.
So it's farewell from Hugh, Andy, Phill, Alan and myself.
I'll leave you with the story of a couple who went to the Natural History Museum
and they saw the big dinosaur skeleton and asked the attendant how old it was
and he said, "It's 65 million, 14 years and 3 months old."
They said, "That's amazing. Is that carbon dating? How can you tell so precisely?"
He said, "No. When I first came here, they told me it was 65 million years old
"and I've been here 14 years and three months."
Thank you. Good night.
APPLAUSE
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