QI (2003–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Atoms - full transcript
(applause)
Hello.
Hello and welcome to QI,
The quiz that rhymes with Stephen Fry.
Now let's meet the members
of our happy band,
Al Davies, Howie Goodall,
Jez Hardy and Jo Brand.
Now, the rules are simple. I'm a pimple.
No, that's enough rhyming.
The rules are a cinch, in fact.
The questions are not.
As almost no one ever gets one right,
I award points for being interesting
and penalties for being pathetically obvious.
Each member of the panel is provided
with an attention-seeking device.
- Jeremy goes...
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
- (Stephen) Howard goes...
- (Flamenco-style guitar flourish)
- (Stephen) Jo goes...
- (cheesy keyboard chime)
- (Stephen) Alan goes...
- (bell) Cashier number four, please.
Very good.
Right, I'm going straight on to
the first question, which is in fact very easy,
so fingers on those
mushroomoid buzzers, please.
What is the main ingredient of air?
(bell) Cashier number four, please.
- (Stephen) Alan?
- Oxygen.
- Oh, Alan! So early on.
- (alarm bells)
No. No, no, no.
Not true, I'm afraid.
- I'm afraid you get a bit of a forfeit.
- (keyboard chime)
- Yes?
- Is it nitrogen?
Nitrogen is the right answer.
Well done, absolutely right.
Sorry.
I have to warn you
that if you had said "carbon dioxide",
you would have lost 3,000 points, because
there is so little carbon dioxide in the air.
- Because the trees eat it all.
- (Stephen) Sort of, yes, that's right.
The trees do,
they get rid of carbon dioxide.
But if you're in a lift with someone,
after a while...
(Stephen) Methane.
Sorry. I was just
second-guessing you there.
No, but after a while
there won't be enough air in the lift
and that will be carbon dioxide -
the cause of death would be.
- So always take a tree into a lift with you.
- Yes.
And then you can hide as well,
move around the lift unseen.
Entertain yourself. It should be a fruit tree,
so there'd be some food
as well as something
to get rid of the carbon dioxide.
And you can make a shelter
to shield you from the burning light
and possibly a canoe to escape.
In the event of flooding.
But, no, this is absolutely right.
Nitrogen is 78% of air.
Less than 21% of air is oxygen,
and only three hundredths
of 1% of the air is carbon dioxide.
But nitrogen is lethal.
If you breathe...
- (Stephen) It's not really.
...nitrogen only, you would die.
- Yes, because you need oxygen, don't you?
- Yes.
I've been scuba diving
and if you get nitrogen narcosis,
it means you get bubbles
of nitrogen in your veins.
- Yes.
- That's called "the bends".
And people think the bends
is because you go a bit... like that.
But, actually,
you get stuck in odd positions.
Your body can't move properly
cos it's full of nitrogen.
No, that's when the wind changes.
When the wind changes
when you're swinging on your chair
and running with scissors at the same time.
We're going to move from air.
We're going to move from air to areas.
- What is the most boring place in Britain?
- (keyboard chime)
(Stephen) Jo?
Is it the Big Brother house?
(laughter/applause)
Very good.
I'm feeling rather good
about Big Brother at the moment,
not that I've seen any of it,
but my agent got a call yesterday.
Now, I don't know what this means,
and they wondered if... One of the...
They had to blow the dust
off the phone straight away.
(Stephen) What are they called?
Thank you.
"Mr Fry's agent."
Thank you!
Now, what are they called
in Big Brother? Inmates.
- Housemates.
- Housemates, housemates.
- (Alan) Primates.
- One of the...
They're allowed to have a book,
which may be a new...
- They are allowed to have a book.
- No, they're not.
- They are.
- They can't read. They're not.
One of the housemates has asked
for one of my books. Isn't that exciting?
- I feel touched by celebrity.
- You know, the coffee table's a bit wonky.
I remember watching the first series, the
thing I really looked forward to was day eight,
because (Geordie accent) "day eight"
is a wonderful sound, isn't it? Bless him.
Newcastle, I believe.
Right.
Newcastle is far from being
the most boring place in Britain.
It certainly is not. Thank you
for dragging us back to the question.
Is this gonna be something like
there's been an actual survey of amenities...
"Survey" is a very good word
to stick to, actually,
because I'm talking
technically the most boring place.
- You mean flattest.
- Not exactly flattest.
- (Jeremy) Argos.
- No.
Most Greek islands are very pleasant.
What's wrong with Argos?
Next.
Next is a very good catalogue.
It gives you a chance to see what the clothes
would look like if attractive people wore them.
Very good.
Howard, I believe you were trying to buzz.
Is this...
just moving up here on Alan's idea,
but is this a place on the Ordnance Survey
where there are no signs of any kind?
Ten points. Ten points.
Absolutely right.
- Salisbury Plain.
- No, it's not Salisbury Plain.
(applause)
Sorry, Howard.
I jumped in on your round of applause.
I have a slight mind
to take five points away from you,
suggesting that Salisbury Plain is the most...
It has probably the most important Ordnance
Survey reference in all of the United Kingdom,
Stonehenge, for God's sake!
- Which is quite an interesting place.
- (Stephen) It certainly is.
My uncle stood on a land mine
on Salisbury Plain.
- (Stephen) During manoeuvres?
- During National Service.
- Yes, because the army use it a lot for...
- It really really really hurt,
but... he didn't lose a foot.
If the manufacturers had known it would hurt,
they'd have come up with a safety version.
It was much much worse than,
for example, stepping on a drawing pin,
which really really really hurts,
much worse than that.
- A paper cut is the worst thing.
- (Stephen) Lemon on a paper cut.
Paper cut, because people say,
"Oh, there's nothing worse than a paper cut."
"Not a sword, not a chain saw, nothing."
"Nothing worse than a summer cold.
Syphilis, grenade up the bum, nothing."
- Fair point.
- East Anglia.
- No.
- Almost a featureless environment.
No. As an East Anglian, I refute that
with every fibre of my being. The answer is...
No, you can't refute.
That's bad grammar, that, Stephen.
To refute, you have to provide evidence.
You mean "rebut".
- No, I mean repudiate.
- Fair enough.
(Stephen) But a good point.
Very good point.
If you weren't showing off,
you could have said "reject".
Yes. You're absolutely right, though
it's not bad grammar, just bad semantics.
- Yeah, whatever.
- Yeah.
But, no, I stand hideously corrected
and shamed.
A field outside Ousefleet
near Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.
There's absolutely nothing in it,
apart from part of an electricity pylon
and some overhead cabling.
On the 1:50,000 scale
Ordnance Survey map,
it's the blankest square kilometre
in the country.
Is it not in East Anglia?
Well, all right, it's north.
I think it is the north, Lincolnshire.
There's a terrifyingly large moorhen
up in the top right bit.
Charles Dickens, on the other hand, would
not agree. He'd have voted for Chelmsford.
He stayed there once and described it as:
"The dullest and most stupid spot
on the face of the earth".
And Charles Dickens should know, because
he actually invented the word "boredom".
Did you know that?
Isn't that interesting?
In Bleak House in 1852.
A little quite-interesting ripple
just ran round the audience then.
From one author to another.
What did Barbara Cartland do in 1983
which involved a sofa
and a hot-water bottle?
(guitar)
Do you know she was buried
in a cardboard coffin,
underneath an oak tree
in the grounds of her house?
I didn't. Five points for being quite
interesting. You're getting more interesting.
The oak tree was planted by Elizabeth I.
And the mourners
at her funeral took away...
were given a leaf of the oak tree
as a remembrance.
Gosh. Very good. Your five points stands. I'm
not going to increase it, but that is very good.
Why cardboard?
So it would perish?
So it would melt into the,
I presume, to melt into the earth sod.
That's because they weren't
entirely sure she was dead.
For the last 50 or 60 years it was
a bone of contention among most people.
Wasn't 1983... She broke a record in one year
for writing the largest number of books.
That had ever been written
by anybody in a single year.
You know, 30-something.
38, 39.
- Not far, I'll certainly give you...
- 40, 28, 35.
I'll give three points, before you give me
every number in the universe.
- She actually wrote 23.
- (Alan) 23, I meant to say.
23 novels, which got her into the Guinness
Book of Records, in one year, using only...
- I had that written down.
...from the hours of one to half past one.
In 78 years
she produced over 600 books.
- Has anyone in the audience ever read one?
- (woman) No.
Does anyone know anyone who's ever
read one? Has anyone ever seen one?
Now, you probably... in hospitals
is a place where you do see them, isn't it?
- Psychiatric hospitals.
- (Stephen) Psychiatric hospitals.
She did say, after she'd written all these,
she said, "I'll keep going till my face falls off."
A face, incidentally,
that reminded Clive James
of two crows that had crash-landed
into the white cliffs of Dover.
Now, what's 15 miles
away from everybody
and smells of geraniums?
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
- Yes?
It would be an out-of-town warehouse shop
called World of Geraniums.
"No" is the answer to that, because...
- Is it 15 miles from everyone?
- (Stephen) From everyone.
- It must be straight up.
- (Stephen) Good.
- (Jo) Or down.
- Or towards the Earth's core itself.
Is it like, you're never more than 15 miles
from a geranium, like eight feet from a rat?
It's not quite that. You're never more than
15 miles from the smell of a geranium.
- It's a very odd thing.
- Space smells like a geranium?
Mustard gas smells like geraniums.
Not mustard... Mustard gas, hence the name,
smells faintly of mustard, I think you'll find.
It's a very famous gas, but which is most
famous for forming a layer in our atmosphere.
- The ozone layer.
- It is indeed ozone.
I don't give you any points,
because that was too easy. Ozone is...
Well, having said
it was a famous layer, come on, as a gas.
There we are, look,
there's the ionosphere.
There's the mesosphere,
stratosphere, and the ozone layer,
wedged in between
the stratosphere and the mesosphere.
- It smells of geraniums?
- And it does smell faintly of geraniums.
- Now, I put it to you...
- (Stephen) Yeah.
...that were you to go into the ozone layer
and sniff, you would die.
You would not have enough time to say,
"It just smells a bit like..." (choking noise)
Someone goes, "What's it smell like?"
(choking noise)
Well, now, ozone
is a poisonous form of oxygen,
but without it the sun's ultraviolet rays
would kill all land animals and plants.
Ozone is blue
and smells faintly of geraniums.
One of my favourite layers of the atmosphere
is called the Heaviside layer. Heaviside layer.
- Is it a bit on the heavy side?
- Well, no, oddly enough, it isn't.
It's named after someone called Heaviside,
a rather marvellous, self-taught physicist.
But it sounds like it should be.
Self-taught sounds like he writes it on the
blackboard, runs round, sits and jots it down.
What resembles
a half-melted rubber bulldog?
This was a description
by the film critic John Simon, of a...
- Is it Walter Matthau?
- It is Walter Matthau! Five points. Well done.
- How did I get that?
- (Stephen) Very good.
- I love Walter Matthau.
- Top work.
That's according to the critic John Simon.
There we are.
Now, from actors to atomic physics.
What are atoms mostly made of?
Well, they're made of...
they are not mostly...
they are just made of
the thing that they are,
in that...
they are not combined
with other atoms.
They are alone.
Therefore they are just an atom.
It's not exactly a trick question, but they're
mostly made of nothing, by a very long way.
Even the atom of stone or diamond
is more nothing than it is anything solid.
It's like a tiny,
really small little piece of nothing.
Does it have protons and electrons,
or is that a molecule?
You're right. Protons and neutrons
in the middle, which is the nucleus,
and the electron, which whizzes round.
- I remember that from physics.
- Yeah.
An atom, in fact, is much emptier, relatively
speaking, than the whole solar system.
Ernest Rutherford, the first man
to describe the inside of an atom,
likened it to a few flies in a cathedral.
That's what those particles are inside
the atom. The simplest element is hydrogen.
It has a nucleus of just one proton,
around which orbits a single electron.
Now, if the proton were the size
of a drawing pin... yeah, yeah...
the electron would be the size of a pinhead
and it would be one kilometre away.
But if I were to put a pineapple on my head,
I'd look like Carmen Miranda, but I don't.
I don't think you've quite entered
into the spirit of it.
Well, they're really hard
to divide up into more than one part.
Yes, because the word means that,
it means "no cut".
- Can't split.
- A-tom, yes.
I think it's tomia,
is the Greek for a "cut",
as in appendec-tomy,
to cut the appendix and so on.
And the English word "tmesis",
which as far as know is the only English word
that begins with the letters "tm".
T-m-e-s-i-s,
which is rather wonderful,
which is when you cut a word in half
by putting another word inside,
like saying, abso-bloomin'-lutely,
or sen... (bleep)... sational, or something.
- Or Scunthorpe.
- Or Scunthorpe, thank you very much.
(applause)
Now, what's the difference between
a hydrogen atom and a grand piano?
- (gunshot/duck)
- (guitar)
- Jeremy got there first.
- Well, size.
- Shape.
- Yes, you're right. It's a foolish question.
Possibly Iraq did have the capability
of splitting a grand piano.
(applause)
Very very good.
Very good indeed.
Five points. That's very good.
Yes, but, Howard, the musician?
Hydrogen was identified
by an eccentric man called Cavendish,
who was a reclusive nutter, basically, who did
lots of very good scientific things in a room...
- Brother of the Duke of Devonshire.
- Was he?
He was certainly a toff and he had
a lot of money, so he spent his whole life
living in this house doing experiments.
And he lived in
Great Marlborough Street in Soho.
If you walk from Great Marlborough Street to
Jermyn Street, it takes about three minutes.
And he identified hydrogen in about 1770,
something like that.
In 1770, the world's first
grand piano was made
by a man called Americus Backers,
who had his studio in Jermyn Street
at exactly the same time.
My connection is
they probably met at the same coffee shop.
You've got to have five points for that.
That's superb. Superb stuff. I love it.
Peculiar man. And how odd to have
an English aristocrat who is also peculiar.
I expect Howard will get it if I tell you that
there are 89 frequencies to a hydrogen atom.
- Well, there are 88 keys on a piano.
- 88 frequencies, if you discount harmonics.
Although not on an imperial grand, there are
more than 88 keys on an imperial grand.
- Are there?
- Yes.
That, unfortunately, looks like an imperial
grand, in which case it has four extra notes.
Well, in fact, it still is beaten
by the hydrogen atom.
Late breaking news in my ear is that there
are over 100 frequencies to a hydrogen atom.
So that was a bit of a knotty run,
so we'll have a nice easy one.
- How many wives did Henry VIII have?
- (all buzz at once)
- Six.
- Oh, Alan, Alan, Alan.
(Alan) The six wives of Henry VIII.
Just because other people have made the
mistake, it's no excuse for you to make it too.
He had six wives!
He had major, major
commitment problems, didn't he?
I imagine every time he said,
"Oh, it's not you, it's me."
Then I suppose they had a trial separation -
a brief trial and a very major separation.
Yes, of head from shoulders,
exactly right.
It must have been difficult
for the new woman in his life each time,
cos she'd say, "Oh, I don't know. Everywhere
I look, I just see her face" cos it's on a pole.
- (chime)
- Yes?
Can I say something interesting
about Henry VIII?
When he died and his body was moved
from Greenwich up to wherever it went,
Selfridges or somewhere...
- Maybe Westminster Abbey. We'll check.
- Maybe Westminster Abbey.
Possibly Kentucky Fried Chicken,
I don't know.
But his guts were so rotten,
and it was such a hot day,
that his stomach exploded.
- (Stephen) Oh, what a nasty thought.
- Isn't that a nice image?
He was syphilitic and he was huge
and he was a mess of a man.
- He sounds bloody gorgeous, doesn't he?
- Well, as a young man, he was.
He was considered one of the most attractive
men in all of Renaissance Europe.
I prefer syphilitic and bloated, myself.
- Yes, he did get a bit bloated.
- Cos at least they're easy.
No, yes, it's an interesting fact, this.
The real answer is three or four.
Henry's fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves
was annulled on two grounds.
It was never consummated,
and she was already betrothed
to Francis, duke of Lorraine.
This was correct in law at the time
and all parties agreed
that no legal marriage had ever taken place.
That leaves five wives.
The Pope declared Henry's second marriage
to Anne Boleyn void,
because Henry was still married
to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
The king himself,
as head of the Church of England,
declared that his first marriage was invalid,
on the correct legal ground
that a man could not marry his brother's wife.
And Catherine of Aragon
had been married to his brother Arthur.
Did he or did he not
have six weddings?
Yes, he did,
but that wasn't the question I asked.
And did he say, "This is my wife"?
Six different people.
Six different mothers-in-law, all said of him,
"He is my bloated, syphilitic son-in-law."
He said he'd never been married because
he'd never had a wife because his first wife...
What about all the families saying,
"Yes, you did. We were there"?
They heard the speeches. They'd wake up
in the morning dead, wouldn't they?
But there was no legal spousal status.
That's the point we're trying to make.
How many toast racks did he have?
That's the way.
Count the toast racks and you'll find out.
- Can I ask a question about that painting?
- Yes.
Is it all wrong in perspective?
It looks 2-D to me.
All Holbein's pictures are a bit flat.
He did one of Martin Luther and it's very flat.
- It looks like a pancake or an omelette.
- He could do perspective tricks.
He did a marvellous one
which you have to see from below.
Oh, yeah, that's what he said
after he'd bollocksed it up.
"You have to see it from below."
Holbein's really made...
It's elongated skulls and things,
and then when you move underneath it,
the foreshortening effect of being under it,
it becomes exactly the right proportion.
Michelangelo painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Good Lord, you are extraordinary!
How do you know these things?
- It took four years.
- Yeah?
Which is the same length of time
it takes to paint the Forth bridge in Scotland.
Oh, there you are. You're struggling towards
being interesting there.
I may have to give you two points.
There's a wonderful line in that film,
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
which is where Charlton Heston plays
Michelangelo and Rex Harrison plays...
Charlton Heston plays Michelangelo?
The effete Italian homosexual?
- That's the one.
- Played by the president of the gun club?
- He was an athletic Italian homosexual.
- I thought he was a wussy one.
He may well have preferred man-on-man
action. That doesn't mean he was Julian Clary.
He could have been butch, like me.
When I say "wussy one", I don't mean
he was gay. I mean he was a bit of a...
I thought da Vinci...
- You've got it the other way round.
- I thought da Vinci was the hard case.
No, no. Michelangelo was an animal.
- He was physically strong...
- Michelangelo never washed. He stank.
...beard and...
- Alan Yentob said this.
But he preferred
to take it up the Gary Glitter. There we are.
Now, depending on whether you believe
the pope or indeed the king,
or both of them together, Henry VIII
therefore had either four wives or three.
Now, what English word
rhymes with silver?
(guitar)
Is this one of the ones like "orange",
where there is no rhyme for it?
- Oh.
- (alarm bells)
You kind of said that,
didn't you? No.
A lot of people think, like orange,
that there is no rhyme for silver. There is.
- Bilver.
- Chilver.
Yes! Chilver! Well done.
- Well done for working through sounds.
- I don't know what it means. Chilver?
A chilver is a ewe lamb.
- A me lamb?
- (Alan) It's a lady lamb.
- A me lamb? A you lamb?
- A female lamb. A ewe.
- Oh, ewe lamb. You.
- You.
You.
Where do all the diamonds come from...
in the world?
- South Africa.
- Oh, no! He's done it again!
- Oh, bless his heart!
- (alarm bells)
Oh, no, no.
No, all the diamonds in the world
come from volcanoes.
All diamonds are formed
under immense heat and pressure
hundreds of kilometres
beneath the Earth,
and are brought to the surface
in volcanic eruptions.
- 20 countries produce diamonds.
- Japan.
South Africa is only
the fifth largest producer after Australia,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Botswana and Russia.
Russia.
That's exactly what I said!
You did. Well done you.
Now, here's a quite interesting thing.
Diamonds are made of pure carbon
and so is graphite -
the stuff that pencils are made from,
the lead of a pencil -
but with the carbon atoms
arranged slightly differently,
so slightly differently that diamond
is the hardest known substance on Earth,
with a score of ten on the Mohs hardness
scale, but graphite is one of the softest...
"Mohs hardness",
like, as in Mo Better Blues.
No, as in M-o-h. The name of the fellow
who gave us this hardness scale.
Diamonds score ten and graphite scores
very very low, 1.2, or something like that.
What about Audley Harrison?
He is well 'ard.
Now, what's invisible
and travels at 38 miles an hour?
- (bell) Cashier number four, please.
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
I'm think it's... Is it the air
that we expel from our nasal passages?
It isn't that, I'm sorry to say.
- 38 miles an hour and it's invisible?
- (Stephen) Yes.
It's got to be a ghost on a moped
or a Stealth Skoda
or a Virgin train.
(Stephen) Oh, very good. No.
Is it a wind, like, you know, the sirocco
or the mistral, or something like that?
One of those winds. It's not one of those.
This often travels a great deal faster,
but it has been recorded
as travelling at 38 miles an hour.
You could overtake it
freewheeling on a bicycle.
- (Alan) A fart.
- No.
It usually goes much much faster.
I mean, really fast.
- How fast is a fart, though, do you think?
- Well, no, please. Let's not, no.
Well, no, because they've measured
how fast your sneeze is.
They've measured maximum speeds...
No one's ever measured
how fast we expel gas.
Do you wonder why?
You're working in laboratory conditions all day,
there's Bunsen burners around.
You could fart and someone could be
on the other side of the lab with a stopwatch.
And they could go... (sniffs)
"Yes, it's here."
(laughter/applause)
- (Stephen) Can I drag this...
- "38 miles an hour, I estimate."
Can I drag this above the level of
They Think This Is All Over, or whatever it is?
Is it a tidal wave?
A tsunami?
No. Even faster.
What's the fastest thing you can think of?
- Light.
- Light is the right answer.
- Is it?
- Absolutely right.
- Light usually, as you probably know...
- 186,000 miles a second.
Very good.
I'll give you a few points.
- Wait a minute. Someone slowed it down.
- (Stephen) Do you remember how?
So they could get into bed
before the light went out.
(laughter/applause)
That's the only reason
there is physics.
(Stephen) Top work.
No, you're quite right.
They put a laser light through, I don't know,
ice, glass, something like that... frosty.
Much colder than that.
Much much colder.
- Fridge.
- No. Really cold.
- (Jo) Igloo.
- Frozen vodka.
- So much colder than that.
- (Jeremy) Blackpool.
You're all doing well.
No. Astoundingly, light is, first, invisible.
You can't see it,
only what bumps into it, or it bumps into.
If you could see it,
you wouldn't be able to see anything else.
It's often said that the speed of light
is constant, but it isn't,
only in a vacuum,
when it is 186,000 miles a second.
In any other medium, the speed of light
varies considerably, as a matter of fact.
Through diamonds, for example, it goes less
than half as fast, 80,000 miles to the second.
- Is that because it's going, "Whoooh"?
- (Stephen) Yeah, exactly.
"This is the hardest thing."
But the slowest
it's ever been recorded at is through sodium
at minus 270 degrees,
where it travels at 38 miles per hour.
Now, fingers on buzzers, please, for a chance
of an enormous last-minute bonus
for that final question,
which is on animals.
Complete the phrase: A chameleon
changes colour to match its?
(bell) Cashier number four, please.
Environment.
Oh, that counts as "background". I'm afraid
that's got to be considered hugely wrong.
Hugely wrong. I'm afraid
you've fallen for it again. No, it doesn't.
- It doesn't. It never has, it never will.
- (guitar)
Temperature?
Yes, we'll give you a couple
for temperature.
Car?
That's background or environment, isn't it,
to match anything else around it.
It doesn't change colour to match anything.
It changes colour according to mood,
mood, temperature, or emotion,
fear, for example, and so on like that.
But they are changing to the colour
of the branch they're hanging on, don't they?
- That is the fallacy.
- Do they know that? Has anyone told them?
Shouldn't they be told?
"I don't know what you're doing that for.
We can see you."
"I happen to be in a slightly dodgy mood.
That's all this is about."
"I'm not trying to look like this leaf."
It used to be thought of chameleons,
in fact, if you were to, say, 100 years ago,
if you asked someone
for the well-known fact about chameleons,
they'd say that they live on air, which was
assumed to be because they move so little
and can very rarely be seen to be breathing.
And the other thing about chameleons
is their eyes can swivel independently.
- Do they know that?
- I'm sure they do.
Or do they just think
the planet's just going...
Right, it only leaves for me, therefore, ladies
and gentlemen, to give you the final scores.
And they are quite interesting.
I fear that in last place
is Alan with minus 24 points.
In third place, Jeremy with seven.
Second is Howard with 13.
But in the lead, rousingly,
is Jo with 36 points.
- Oh, my word!
- (applause)
(Stephen) That's about it
for QI this week.
There's just time for me to thank
Howard, Jeremy, Jo and Alan,
and to say something quite interesting,
concerning
an interesting property of graphite,
taken from the agony column
of the Daily Mirror.
"Dear Marge,
I noted in your column a few weeks ago
the pros and cons
of women going without a bra."
"A few weeks ago I saw a small item in the
paper which may help to settle the matter."
"It is said that if a woman is not certain
whether or not she should go braless,
she should place a pencil
under her bosom."
"If the pencil stays there,
she should wear a bra."
"I would sign my name to this letter,
but my wife still has my pencil." Good night.
Hello.
Hello and welcome to QI,
The quiz that rhymes with Stephen Fry.
Now let's meet the members
of our happy band,
Al Davies, Howie Goodall,
Jez Hardy and Jo Brand.
Now, the rules are simple. I'm a pimple.
No, that's enough rhyming.
The rules are a cinch, in fact.
The questions are not.
As almost no one ever gets one right,
I award points for being interesting
and penalties for being pathetically obvious.
Each member of the panel is provided
with an attention-seeking device.
- Jeremy goes...
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
- (Stephen) Howard goes...
- (Flamenco-style guitar flourish)
- (Stephen) Jo goes...
- (cheesy keyboard chime)
- (Stephen) Alan goes...
- (bell) Cashier number four, please.
Very good.
Right, I'm going straight on to
the first question, which is in fact very easy,
so fingers on those
mushroomoid buzzers, please.
What is the main ingredient of air?
(bell) Cashier number four, please.
- (Stephen) Alan?
- Oxygen.
- Oh, Alan! So early on.
- (alarm bells)
No. No, no, no.
Not true, I'm afraid.
- I'm afraid you get a bit of a forfeit.
- (keyboard chime)
- Yes?
- Is it nitrogen?
Nitrogen is the right answer.
Well done, absolutely right.
Sorry.
I have to warn you
that if you had said "carbon dioxide",
you would have lost 3,000 points, because
there is so little carbon dioxide in the air.
- Because the trees eat it all.
- (Stephen) Sort of, yes, that's right.
The trees do,
they get rid of carbon dioxide.
But if you're in a lift with someone,
after a while...
(Stephen) Methane.
Sorry. I was just
second-guessing you there.
No, but after a while
there won't be enough air in the lift
and that will be carbon dioxide -
the cause of death would be.
- So always take a tree into a lift with you.
- Yes.
And then you can hide as well,
move around the lift unseen.
Entertain yourself. It should be a fruit tree,
so there'd be some food
as well as something
to get rid of the carbon dioxide.
And you can make a shelter
to shield you from the burning light
and possibly a canoe to escape.
In the event of flooding.
But, no, this is absolutely right.
Nitrogen is 78% of air.
Less than 21% of air is oxygen,
and only three hundredths
of 1% of the air is carbon dioxide.
But nitrogen is lethal.
If you breathe...
- (Stephen) It's not really.
...nitrogen only, you would die.
- Yes, because you need oxygen, don't you?
- Yes.
I've been scuba diving
and if you get nitrogen narcosis,
it means you get bubbles
of nitrogen in your veins.
- Yes.
- That's called "the bends".
And people think the bends
is because you go a bit... like that.
But, actually,
you get stuck in odd positions.
Your body can't move properly
cos it's full of nitrogen.
No, that's when the wind changes.
When the wind changes
when you're swinging on your chair
and running with scissors at the same time.
We're going to move from air.
We're going to move from air to areas.
- What is the most boring place in Britain?
- (keyboard chime)
(Stephen) Jo?
Is it the Big Brother house?
(laughter/applause)
Very good.
I'm feeling rather good
about Big Brother at the moment,
not that I've seen any of it,
but my agent got a call yesterday.
Now, I don't know what this means,
and they wondered if... One of the...
They had to blow the dust
off the phone straight away.
(Stephen) What are they called?
Thank you.
"Mr Fry's agent."
Thank you!
Now, what are they called
in Big Brother? Inmates.
- Housemates.
- Housemates, housemates.
- (Alan) Primates.
- One of the...
They're allowed to have a book,
which may be a new...
- They are allowed to have a book.
- No, they're not.
- They are.
- They can't read. They're not.
One of the housemates has asked
for one of my books. Isn't that exciting?
- I feel touched by celebrity.
- You know, the coffee table's a bit wonky.
I remember watching the first series, the
thing I really looked forward to was day eight,
because (Geordie accent) "day eight"
is a wonderful sound, isn't it? Bless him.
Newcastle, I believe.
Right.
Newcastle is far from being
the most boring place in Britain.
It certainly is not. Thank you
for dragging us back to the question.
Is this gonna be something like
there's been an actual survey of amenities...
"Survey" is a very good word
to stick to, actually,
because I'm talking
technically the most boring place.
- You mean flattest.
- Not exactly flattest.
- (Jeremy) Argos.
- No.
Most Greek islands are very pleasant.
What's wrong with Argos?
Next.
Next is a very good catalogue.
It gives you a chance to see what the clothes
would look like if attractive people wore them.
Very good.
Howard, I believe you were trying to buzz.
Is this...
just moving up here on Alan's idea,
but is this a place on the Ordnance Survey
where there are no signs of any kind?
Ten points. Ten points.
Absolutely right.
- Salisbury Plain.
- No, it's not Salisbury Plain.
(applause)
Sorry, Howard.
I jumped in on your round of applause.
I have a slight mind
to take five points away from you,
suggesting that Salisbury Plain is the most...
It has probably the most important Ordnance
Survey reference in all of the United Kingdom,
Stonehenge, for God's sake!
- Which is quite an interesting place.
- (Stephen) It certainly is.
My uncle stood on a land mine
on Salisbury Plain.
- (Stephen) During manoeuvres?
- During National Service.
- Yes, because the army use it a lot for...
- It really really really hurt,
but... he didn't lose a foot.
If the manufacturers had known it would hurt,
they'd have come up with a safety version.
It was much much worse than,
for example, stepping on a drawing pin,
which really really really hurts,
much worse than that.
- A paper cut is the worst thing.
- (Stephen) Lemon on a paper cut.
Paper cut, because people say,
"Oh, there's nothing worse than a paper cut."
"Not a sword, not a chain saw, nothing."
"Nothing worse than a summer cold.
Syphilis, grenade up the bum, nothing."
- Fair point.
- East Anglia.
- No.
- Almost a featureless environment.
No. As an East Anglian, I refute that
with every fibre of my being. The answer is...
No, you can't refute.
That's bad grammar, that, Stephen.
To refute, you have to provide evidence.
You mean "rebut".
- No, I mean repudiate.
- Fair enough.
(Stephen) But a good point.
Very good point.
If you weren't showing off,
you could have said "reject".
Yes. You're absolutely right, though
it's not bad grammar, just bad semantics.
- Yeah, whatever.
- Yeah.
But, no, I stand hideously corrected
and shamed.
A field outside Ousefleet
near Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.
There's absolutely nothing in it,
apart from part of an electricity pylon
and some overhead cabling.
On the 1:50,000 scale
Ordnance Survey map,
it's the blankest square kilometre
in the country.
Is it not in East Anglia?
Well, all right, it's north.
I think it is the north, Lincolnshire.
There's a terrifyingly large moorhen
up in the top right bit.
Charles Dickens, on the other hand, would
not agree. He'd have voted for Chelmsford.
He stayed there once and described it as:
"The dullest and most stupid spot
on the face of the earth".
And Charles Dickens should know, because
he actually invented the word "boredom".
Did you know that?
Isn't that interesting?
In Bleak House in 1852.
A little quite-interesting ripple
just ran round the audience then.
From one author to another.
What did Barbara Cartland do in 1983
which involved a sofa
and a hot-water bottle?
(guitar)
Do you know she was buried
in a cardboard coffin,
underneath an oak tree
in the grounds of her house?
I didn't. Five points for being quite
interesting. You're getting more interesting.
The oak tree was planted by Elizabeth I.
And the mourners
at her funeral took away...
were given a leaf of the oak tree
as a remembrance.
Gosh. Very good. Your five points stands. I'm
not going to increase it, but that is very good.
Why cardboard?
So it would perish?
So it would melt into the,
I presume, to melt into the earth sod.
That's because they weren't
entirely sure she was dead.
For the last 50 or 60 years it was
a bone of contention among most people.
Wasn't 1983... She broke a record in one year
for writing the largest number of books.
That had ever been written
by anybody in a single year.
You know, 30-something.
38, 39.
- Not far, I'll certainly give you...
- 40, 28, 35.
I'll give three points, before you give me
every number in the universe.
- She actually wrote 23.
- (Alan) 23, I meant to say.
23 novels, which got her into the Guinness
Book of Records, in one year, using only...
- I had that written down.
...from the hours of one to half past one.
In 78 years
she produced over 600 books.
- Has anyone in the audience ever read one?
- (woman) No.
Does anyone know anyone who's ever
read one? Has anyone ever seen one?
Now, you probably... in hospitals
is a place where you do see them, isn't it?
- Psychiatric hospitals.
- (Stephen) Psychiatric hospitals.
She did say, after she'd written all these,
she said, "I'll keep going till my face falls off."
A face, incidentally,
that reminded Clive James
of two crows that had crash-landed
into the white cliffs of Dover.
Now, what's 15 miles
away from everybody
and smells of geraniums?
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
- Yes?
It would be an out-of-town warehouse shop
called World of Geraniums.
"No" is the answer to that, because...
- Is it 15 miles from everyone?
- (Stephen) From everyone.
- It must be straight up.
- (Stephen) Good.
- (Jo) Or down.
- Or towards the Earth's core itself.
Is it like, you're never more than 15 miles
from a geranium, like eight feet from a rat?
It's not quite that. You're never more than
15 miles from the smell of a geranium.
- It's a very odd thing.
- Space smells like a geranium?
Mustard gas smells like geraniums.
Not mustard... Mustard gas, hence the name,
smells faintly of mustard, I think you'll find.
It's a very famous gas, but which is most
famous for forming a layer in our atmosphere.
- The ozone layer.
- It is indeed ozone.
I don't give you any points,
because that was too easy. Ozone is...
Well, having said
it was a famous layer, come on, as a gas.
There we are, look,
there's the ionosphere.
There's the mesosphere,
stratosphere, and the ozone layer,
wedged in between
the stratosphere and the mesosphere.
- It smells of geraniums?
- And it does smell faintly of geraniums.
- Now, I put it to you...
- (Stephen) Yeah.
...that were you to go into the ozone layer
and sniff, you would die.
You would not have enough time to say,
"It just smells a bit like..." (choking noise)
Someone goes, "What's it smell like?"
(choking noise)
Well, now, ozone
is a poisonous form of oxygen,
but without it the sun's ultraviolet rays
would kill all land animals and plants.
Ozone is blue
and smells faintly of geraniums.
One of my favourite layers of the atmosphere
is called the Heaviside layer. Heaviside layer.
- Is it a bit on the heavy side?
- Well, no, oddly enough, it isn't.
It's named after someone called Heaviside,
a rather marvellous, self-taught physicist.
But it sounds like it should be.
Self-taught sounds like he writes it on the
blackboard, runs round, sits and jots it down.
What resembles
a half-melted rubber bulldog?
This was a description
by the film critic John Simon, of a...
- Is it Walter Matthau?
- It is Walter Matthau! Five points. Well done.
- How did I get that?
- (Stephen) Very good.
- I love Walter Matthau.
- Top work.
That's according to the critic John Simon.
There we are.
Now, from actors to atomic physics.
What are atoms mostly made of?
Well, they're made of...
they are not mostly...
they are just made of
the thing that they are,
in that...
they are not combined
with other atoms.
They are alone.
Therefore they are just an atom.
It's not exactly a trick question, but they're
mostly made of nothing, by a very long way.
Even the atom of stone or diamond
is more nothing than it is anything solid.
It's like a tiny,
really small little piece of nothing.
Does it have protons and electrons,
or is that a molecule?
You're right. Protons and neutrons
in the middle, which is the nucleus,
and the electron, which whizzes round.
- I remember that from physics.
- Yeah.
An atom, in fact, is much emptier, relatively
speaking, than the whole solar system.
Ernest Rutherford, the first man
to describe the inside of an atom,
likened it to a few flies in a cathedral.
That's what those particles are inside
the atom. The simplest element is hydrogen.
It has a nucleus of just one proton,
around which orbits a single electron.
Now, if the proton were the size
of a drawing pin... yeah, yeah...
the electron would be the size of a pinhead
and it would be one kilometre away.
But if I were to put a pineapple on my head,
I'd look like Carmen Miranda, but I don't.
I don't think you've quite entered
into the spirit of it.
Well, they're really hard
to divide up into more than one part.
Yes, because the word means that,
it means "no cut".
- Can't split.
- A-tom, yes.
I think it's tomia,
is the Greek for a "cut",
as in appendec-tomy,
to cut the appendix and so on.
And the English word "tmesis",
which as far as know is the only English word
that begins with the letters "tm".
T-m-e-s-i-s,
which is rather wonderful,
which is when you cut a word in half
by putting another word inside,
like saying, abso-bloomin'-lutely,
or sen... (bleep)... sational, or something.
- Or Scunthorpe.
- Or Scunthorpe, thank you very much.
(applause)
Now, what's the difference between
a hydrogen atom and a grand piano?
- (gunshot/duck)
- (guitar)
- Jeremy got there first.
- Well, size.
- Shape.
- Yes, you're right. It's a foolish question.
Possibly Iraq did have the capability
of splitting a grand piano.
(applause)
Very very good.
Very good indeed.
Five points. That's very good.
Yes, but, Howard, the musician?
Hydrogen was identified
by an eccentric man called Cavendish,
who was a reclusive nutter, basically, who did
lots of very good scientific things in a room...
- Brother of the Duke of Devonshire.
- Was he?
He was certainly a toff and he had
a lot of money, so he spent his whole life
living in this house doing experiments.
And he lived in
Great Marlborough Street in Soho.
If you walk from Great Marlborough Street to
Jermyn Street, it takes about three minutes.
And he identified hydrogen in about 1770,
something like that.
In 1770, the world's first
grand piano was made
by a man called Americus Backers,
who had his studio in Jermyn Street
at exactly the same time.
My connection is
they probably met at the same coffee shop.
You've got to have five points for that.
That's superb. Superb stuff. I love it.
Peculiar man. And how odd to have
an English aristocrat who is also peculiar.
I expect Howard will get it if I tell you that
there are 89 frequencies to a hydrogen atom.
- Well, there are 88 keys on a piano.
- 88 frequencies, if you discount harmonics.
Although not on an imperial grand, there are
more than 88 keys on an imperial grand.
- Are there?
- Yes.
That, unfortunately, looks like an imperial
grand, in which case it has four extra notes.
Well, in fact, it still is beaten
by the hydrogen atom.
Late breaking news in my ear is that there
are over 100 frequencies to a hydrogen atom.
So that was a bit of a knotty run,
so we'll have a nice easy one.
- How many wives did Henry VIII have?
- (all buzz at once)
- Six.
- Oh, Alan, Alan, Alan.
(Alan) The six wives of Henry VIII.
Just because other people have made the
mistake, it's no excuse for you to make it too.
He had six wives!
He had major, major
commitment problems, didn't he?
I imagine every time he said,
"Oh, it's not you, it's me."
Then I suppose they had a trial separation -
a brief trial and a very major separation.
Yes, of head from shoulders,
exactly right.
It must have been difficult
for the new woman in his life each time,
cos she'd say, "Oh, I don't know. Everywhere
I look, I just see her face" cos it's on a pole.
- (chime)
- Yes?
Can I say something interesting
about Henry VIII?
When he died and his body was moved
from Greenwich up to wherever it went,
Selfridges or somewhere...
- Maybe Westminster Abbey. We'll check.
- Maybe Westminster Abbey.
Possibly Kentucky Fried Chicken,
I don't know.
But his guts were so rotten,
and it was such a hot day,
that his stomach exploded.
- (Stephen) Oh, what a nasty thought.
- Isn't that a nice image?
He was syphilitic and he was huge
and he was a mess of a man.
- He sounds bloody gorgeous, doesn't he?
- Well, as a young man, he was.
He was considered one of the most attractive
men in all of Renaissance Europe.
I prefer syphilitic and bloated, myself.
- Yes, he did get a bit bloated.
- Cos at least they're easy.
No, yes, it's an interesting fact, this.
The real answer is three or four.
Henry's fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves
was annulled on two grounds.
It was never consummated,
and she was already betrothed
to Francis, duke of Lorraine.
This was correct in law at the time
and all parties agreed
that no legal marriage had ever taken place.
That leaves five wives.
The Pope declared Henry's second marriage
to Anne Boleyn void,
because Henry was still married
to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
The king himself,
as head of the Church of England,
declared that his first marriage was invalid,
on the correct legal ground
that a man could not marry his brother's wife.
And Catherine of Aragon
had been married to his brother Arthur.
Did he or did he not
have six weddings?
Yes, he did,
but that wasn't the question I asked.
And did he say, "This is my wife"?
Six different people.
Six different mothers-in-law, all said of him,
"He is my bloated, syphilitic son-in-law."
He said he'd never been married because
he'd never had a wife because his first wife...
What about all the families saying,
"Yes, you did. We were there"?
They heard the speeches. They'd wake up
in the morning dead, wouldn't they?
But there was no legal spousal status.
That's the point we're trying to make.
How many toast racks did he have?
That's the way.
Count the toast racks and you'll find out.
- Can I ask a question about that painting?
- Yes.
Is it all wrong in perspective?
It looks 2-D to me.
All Holbein's pictures are a bit flat.
He did one of Martin Luther and it's very flat.
- It looks like a pancake or an omelette.
- He could do perspective tricks.
He did a marvellous one
which you have to see from below.
Oh, yeah, that's what he said
after he'd bollocksed it up.
"You have to see it from below."
Holbein's really made...
It's elongated skulls and things,
and then when you move underneath it,
the foreshortening effect of being under it,
it becomes exactly the right proportion.
Michelangelo painted
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Good Lord, you are extraordinary!
How do you know these things?
- It took four years.
- Yeah?
Which is the same length of time
it takes to paint the Forth bridge in Scotland.
Oh, there you are. You're struggling towards
being interesting there.
I may have to give you two points.
There's a wonderful line in that film,
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
which is where Charlton Heston plays
Michelangelo and Rex Harrison plays...
Charlton Heston plays Michelangelo?
The effete Italian homosexual?
- That's the one.
- Played by the president of the gun club?
- He was an athletic Italian homosexual.
- I thought he was a wussy one.
He may well have preferred man-on-man
action. That doesn't mean he was Julian Clary.
He could have been butch, like me.
When I say "wussy one", I don't mean
he was gay. I mean he was a bit of a...
I thought da Vinci...
- You've got it the other way round.
- I thought da Vinci was the hard case.
No, no. Michelangelo was an animal.
- He was physically strong...
- Michelangelo never washed. He stank.
...beard and...
- Alan Yentob said this.
But he preferred
to take it up the Gary Glitter. There we are.
Now, depending on whether you believe
the pope or indeed the king,
or both of them together, Henry VIII
therefore had either four wives or three.
Now, what English word
rhymes with silver?
(guitar)
Is this one of the ones like "orange",
where there is no rhyme for it?
- Oh.
- (alarm bells)
You kind of said that,
didn't you? No.
A lot of people think, like orange,
that there is no rhyme for silver. There is.
- Bilver.
- Chilver.
Yes! Chilver! Well done.
- Well done for working through sounds.
- I don't know what it means. Chilver?
A chilver is a ewe lamb.
- A me lamb?
- (Alan) It's a lady lamb.
- A me lamb? A you lamb?
- A female lamb. A ewe.
- Oh, ewe lamb. You.
- You.
You.
Where do all the diamonds come from...
in the world?
- South Africa.
- Oh, no! He's done it again!
- Oh, bless his heart!
- (alarm bells)
Oh, no, no.
No, all the diamonds in the world
come from volcanoes.
All diamonds are formed
under immense heat and pressure
hundreds of kilometres
beneath the Earth,
and are brought to the surface
in volcanic eruptions.
- 20 countries produce diamonds.
- Japan.
South Africa is only
the fifth largest producer after Australia,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Botswana and Russia.
Russia.
That's exactly what I said!
You did. Well done you.
Now, here's a quite interesting thing.
Diamonds are made of pure carbon
and so is graphite -
the stuff that pencils are made from,
the lead of a pencil -
but with the carbon atoms
arranged slightly differently,
so slightly differently that diamond
is the hardest known substance on Earth,
with a score of ten on the Mohs hardness
scale, but graphite is one of the softest...
"Mohs hardness",
like, as in Mo Better Blues.
No, as in M-o-h. The name of the fellow
who gave us this hardness scale.
Diamonds score ten and graphite scores
very very low, 1.2, or something like that.
What about Audley Harrison?
He is well 'ard.
Now, what's invisible
and travels at 38 miles an hour?
- (bell) Cashier number four, please.
- (gunshot/duck quacks)
I'm think it's... Is it the air
that we expel from our nasal passages?
It isn't that, I'm sorry to say.
- 38 miles an hour and it's invisible?
- (Stephen) Yes.
It's got to be a ghost on a moped
or a Stealth Skoda
or a Virgin train.
(Stephen) Oh, very good. No.
Is it a wind, like, you know, the sirocco
or the mistral, or something like that?
One of those winds. It's not one of those.
This often travels a great deal faster,
but it has been recorded
as travelling at 38 miles an hour.
You could overtake it
freewheeling on a bicycle.
- (Alan) A fart.
- No.
It usually goes much much faster.
I mean, really fast.
- How fast is a fart, though, do you think?
- Well, no, please. Let's not, no.
Well, no, because they've measured
how fast your sneeze is.
They've measured maximum speeds...
No one's ever measured
how fast we expel gas.
Do you wonder why?
You're working in laboratory conditions all day,
there's Bunsen burners around.
You could fart and someone could be
on the other side of the lab with a stopwatch.
And they could go... (sniffs)
"Yes, it's here."
(laughter/applause)
- (Stephen) Can I drag this...
- "38 miles an hour, I estimate."
Can I drag this above the level of
They Think This Is All Over, or whatever it is?
Is it a tidal wave?
A tsunami?
No. Even faster.
What's the fastest thing you can think of?
- Light.
- Light is the right answer.
- Is it?
- Absolutely right.
- Light usually, as you probably know...
- 186,000 miles a second.
Very good.
I'll give you a few points.
- Wait a minute. Someone slowed it down.
- (Stephen) Do you remember how?
So they could get into bed
before the light went out.
(laughter/applause)
That's the only reason
there is physics.
(Stephen) Top work.
No, you're quite right.
They put a laser light through, I don't know,
ice, glass, something like that... frosty.
Much colder than that.
Much much colder.
- Fridge.
- No. Really cold.
- (Jo) Igloo.
- Frozen vodka.
- So much colder than that.
- (Jeremy) Blackpool.
You're all doing well.
No. Astoundingly, light is, first, invisible.
You can't see it,
only what bumps into it, or it bumps into.
If you could see it,
you wouldn't be able to see anything else.
It's often said that the speed of light
is constant, but it isn't,
only in a vacuum,
when it is 186,000 miles a second.
In any other medium, the speed of light
varies considerably, as a matter of fact.
Through diamonds, for example, it goes less
than half as fast, 80,000 miles to the second.
- Is that because it's going, "Whoooh"?
- (Stephen) Yeah, exactly.
"This is the hardest thing."
But the slowest
it's ever been recorded at is through sodium
at minus 270 degrees,
where it travels at 38 miles per hour.
Now, fingers on buzzers, please, for a chance
of an enormous last-minute bonus
for that final question,
which is on animals.
Complete the phrase: A chameleon
changes colour to match its?
(bell) Cashier number four, please.
Environment.
Oh, that counts as "background". I'm afraid
that's got to be considered hugely wrong.
Hugely wrong. I'm afraid
you've fallen for it again. No, it doesn't.
- It doesn't. It never has, it never will.
- (guitar)
Temperature?
Yes, we'll give you a couple
for temperature.
Car?
That's background or environment, isn't it,
to match anything else around it.
It doesn't change colour to match anything.
It changes colour according to mood,
mood, temperature, or emotion,
fear, for example, and so on like that.
But they are changing to the colour
of the branch they're hanging on, don't they?
- That is the fallacy.
- Do they know that? Has anyone told them?
Shouldn't they be told?
"I don't know what you're doing that for.
We can see you."
"I happen to be in a slightly dodgy mood.
That's all this is about."
"I'm not trying to look like this leaf."
It used to be thought of chameleons,
in fact, if you were to, say, 100 years ago,
if you asked someone
for the well-known fact about chameleons,
they'd say that they live on air, which was
assumed to be because they move so little
and can very rarely be seen to be breathing.
And the other thing about chameleons
is their eyes can swivel independently.
- Do they know that?
- I'm sure they do.
Or do they just think
the planet's just going...
Right, it only leaves for me, therefore, ladies
and gentlemen, to give you the final scores.
And they are quite interesting.
I fear that in last place
is Alan with minus 24 points.
In third place, Jeremy with seven.
Second is Howard with 13.
But in the lead, rousingly,
is Jo with 36 points.
- Oh, my word!
- (applause)
(Stephen) That's about it
for QI this week.
There's just time for me to thank
Howard, Jeremy, Jo and Alan,
and to say something quite interesting,
concerning
an interesting property of graphite,
taken from the agony column
of the Daily Mirror.
"Dear Marge,
I noted in your column a few weeks ago
the pros and cons
of women going without a bra."
"A few weeks ago I saw a small item in the
paper which may help to settle the matter."
"It is said that if a woman is not certain
whether or not she should go braless,
she should place a pencil
under her bosom."
"If the pencil stays there,
she should wear a bra."
"I would sign my name to this letter,
but my wife still has my pencil." Good night.