QI (2003–…): Season 13, Episode 7 - Middle Muddle - full transcript
Stephen Fry muddles through the middle show of the middle series of QI with Aisling Bea, Danny Bhoy, Jimmy Carr and Alan Davies.
Good evening!
Good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI,
for the middle show of the M series,
which is in the middle
of the alphabet,
where our theme is, well, not so much
middle as muddle, to be honest.
But we have the magnificent
Aisling Bea.
CHEERING
The mighty Danny Bhoy.
CHEERING
The magnetic Jimmy Carr.
CHEERING
And the miscellaneous Alan Davies.
CHEERING
And their buzzers
are merrily multifarious.
Aisling goes...
CHILD: # Here we go round
the mulberry bush
♪ The mulberry bush
The mulberry bush. ♪
Danny goes...
CHILD: # This old man, he played one
♪ He played knick knack
on my drum. ♪
Jimmy goes...
CHILDREN: # Three blind mice
♪ Three blind mice. ♪
It's like the soundtrack
of a horror film.
And Alan goes...
CHILD: # My Bonnie lies over... #
- BANG ON DOOR
- Will you go to bed?!
DOOR SLAMS
- Was that a gunshot? - I don't know.
The bit at the end, yes.
Well, the best place to start,
I always think, is in the middle.
How do you know when a chimpanzee
is having a midlife crisis?
Does it get a Chinese tattoo?
- Just on the back of his neck there.
- A motorbike.
A motorbike?
KLAXON BLARES
APPLAUSE
Where does the phrase
"midlife crisis" come from?
How long has it been in the language,
do you think?
Do you think the Victorians used it?
Do you think...?
- I bet it's more recent.
I bet it's like a '50s... - Yeah.
Cos it was about buying sports cars
and doing those kind of crazy...
divorcing your wife
and going out with someone of 22.
It was actually 1965
that a psychologist decided on
this midlife crisis.
He thought that only geniuses
got a midlife crisis.
He used the phrase,
but he said it was something
that happened to geniuses.
- But we... - It's not only us.
It's not only us.
Is it, Alan? You get them too.
Yeah. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
I went to my...
I went to my doctor and I said,
"I hate the West
and I want all the infidels dead,"
and he said, "Don't worry, you're
just going through a midlife Isis."
LAUGHTER
Of course, they might be in the
Olympics by the time this goes out!
That would be an extraordinary
turnaround of fortune for them.
- I think, in the next World Cup,
Fifa would take them. - What, Isis?!
- Yeah, of course. - Yeah,
they would be in England's group.
Group of death!
That is supposedly a man
in a midlife crisis.
If he's in a midlife crisis, he's
going to live to 300, which is...
The awkward thing
about midlife crises,
I've had some friends
that have gone through them recently
and they've left their partners,
gone out with much younger women
and they've bought sports cars,
and the most difficult thing
is pretending to my other half that,
"Aw! That's terrible. Isn't it sad?"
"Aw, ah.
God, he's had a disaster there.
"Yeah. No, apparently she used to be
a dancer. Yeah."
Yeah.
LAUGHTER
He's not... But is he happy?
Aw.
Yes.
He can't stop smiling.
He showed me some photos
on his phone, it looks amazing.
Well, it turns out that chimpanzees,
when they're young, they're high
and when they get to middle age,
they kind of go down
and then up again, which is
supposedly what a midlife crisis is.
Does it only affect the men, or does
it affect the women chimps as well?
It seems to be a male thing,
doesn't it? And I think...
Yeah. I hear that, sister monkeys.
Are those guys laughing
at the ginger ones?
Well, the tests were done
on the ginger ones,
or orang-utans,
as some people prefer to call them...
- The ginger ones, yes.
- ..and on the chimpanzees.
There are some well-known examples
of people in middle age
doing extraordinary things.
- Henry VIII was 35...
- Is he 35 in that picture?
I think, in that picture,
he's a little older.
- His reaction to a midlife crisis
was pretty extreme. - Well, it was.
He fell for a younger woman
when he was 35, called Anne Boleyn,
and as a result, broke with...
Catherine of Aragon. ..Rome.
Well, he broke with her as well,
that's true.
He divorced her
against the Pope's wishes.
Well, she didn't give him an heir,
did she? It's her own fault!
LAUGHTER
She should have magicked him up
a boy. She was a failure.
He had a boy, though,
but he was a bastard, wasn't he?
- Couldn't be King. No.
- So, he had some messy break-ups.
He had messy break-ups, but 35, that
was the year he really pushed it out.
You know, he broke with Rome,
founded his own church. And...
Who else is there?
Well, Jesus and Buddha.
Would you call Jesus's
a midlife crisis?
DANNY: He died when he was 33,
- so when was his midlife crisis?
- Well, in his 30s.
I mean, before he was 30,
he didn't really do anything.
But what about Buddha?
I mean, there was the weight gain.
LAUGHTER
- From Siddhartha to a big potbellied
thing. - Yeah, I think that's the...
That's the middle-age thing,
isn't it?
You just get into box sets and...
a bit more takeout, twice a week,
it's not good for you.
But he didn't become the Buddha
until he was in his 40s, about 48.
- What was his name before that?
Frank? - Maybe, well, 30s.
So there's still a chance for me,
is there?
Well, no-one really knows
what these things are about,
except that it does seem to be
a pattern with men.
Now, what mania was started
by a few myopic Merseysiders?
- # Mulberry bush. #
- Weirdly, you know...
- Yeah? - No, keep going.
Does this buzzer stop Jimmy
speaking? Try again.
LAUGHTER
Say something.
- I was just going to say...
- # Mulberry bush. #
AUDIENCE CHEERS
There's some support for it.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I find the buzzers
really disconcerting.
It does feel like someone's
about to get murdered in the show.
"Oh, go to bed!"
LAUGHTER
Those childish ghost cries.
♪ Mice. ♪
It's usually The Beatles.
Hmm. Isn't it?
Yeah, it's usually The Beatles.
The Beatles is what you're saying.
It's usually The Beatles.
He's saying The Beatles.
- KLAXON BLARES
- # Mulberry bush. #
Very good.
No, is the answer.
Oh. It was a mania,
but not Beatlemania on Merseyside.
Myopic Merseyside.
It involves something to do with M.
Myopic is short-sighted, is it? Yes.
Partially-sighted.
So, what M could help you
with partial-sightedness?
My glasses.
LAUGHTER
Yes.
Any particular type
of ophthalmic instrument
that would help, that began with M?
Monocle.
Monocle is the right answer.
There we go, very good.
Yeah.
APPLAUSE
I only knew that cos there happens
to be a monocle next to me.
It was a bit of a giveaway.
There you are, pop them in.
It was a fashion thing
that seemed to sweep Liverpool.
I can imagine it taking off again,
to be honest.
- You do look great.
- You look very good.
- Ah, Jimmy!
- LAUGHTER
- Oh, my goodness.
- My old pal.
What are you laughing at?
Jimmy, you've never looked more like
a ventriloquist's doll in your life.
LAUGHTER
So, Jimmy...
SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY LAUGHTER
Oh, my! You really did look like
Lord Charles there.
HE LAUGHS
I now feel slightly haunted.
Wow! Thank you for putting your hand
there, by the way.
It was really...special.
Your hair is all up.
They won't fit because monocles
had to be made to fit,
which is why they were expensive.
And because they were expensive,
they were associated
with the upper classes.
And even when you wear them,
it's very hard not to look rather
kind of like that, isn't it?
At what point in history
did someone just go,
make that mental leap between,
"I've got it here and
I've got a little bridge here.
"I could maybe
just put another one..."
Well, it's funny you should say that.
Which came first,
the monocle or the spectacles?
I'm going to say the spectacles.
Yes. The spectacles,
by hundreds of years.
- What? - When do you think
the monocle came in?
1974.
No. They came in in the 1800s
and they were instantly a success,
but they were expensive.
And we associate them with,
I suppose...
- Oh, there I am.
- DANNY: Yeah. There you are, yeah.
I had all three of those.
- DANNY: They knocked that up
pretty quickly. - Yeah.
But something gave them
a rather bad image
- in the 20th century.
- Californian vegetables. - Nazis.
Nazis, and in fact...
LAUGHTER
Californian vegetables.
Buy Californian vegetables.
- By Jove, they're awfully good.
- LAUGHTER
- Yeah, they were associated with...
- You do become instantly posh.
..aristocrats, German soldiers
and generals.
Ludendorff wore one, Krebs,
various of those figures there did.
Ja.
Advance.
- They really did never stop...
- No squinting.
- ..trying to look more evil,
did they? - No, they didn't.
Well, what could we add to this?
I've got the, you know,
the skull and crossbones,
I've got the weird look,
I've got the steely eyes.
They're a very good fit.
I know, I'll put
one spectacle lens over here.
GERMAN ACCENT: What about a monocle?
Zat would make us more evil.
A tiny moustache.
So, who are the famous monocle
wearers that you can name?
- Patrick Moore. - That's one. Good.
Goebbels. No, he didn't have one.
Hitler. Hitler!
It would have set him off lovely,
but no, he didn't. He didn't.
Mr Peanut, from the peanuts.
Yes, that's right,
the Planters peanuts, Mr Peanuts.
Can anyone think of any?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS SHOUT OUT
Terry-Thomas, we had Terry-Thomas.
No, I don't think he did.
Bad luck, you're out.
- Did Churchill ever wear one?
- Churchill, no...
- Jesus? - Erich von Stroheim.
- Jesus?! - Jesus wore one. - Jesus!
Chris Eubank.
- Chris Eubank! - Of course!
- It doesn't count
if you're driving a monster truck
through Brighton at the time.
There was a very peculiar thing
that started in 1902,
which was the New York Times,
whether as a joke originally,
but it seems to have become one
because it is so preposterous,
is they keep predicting the return of
the monocle,
so in 1902, they said
it was going to come back,
then in 1936 the reported that
more than 20 British MPs had one.
1941, they found that
monocle sales were up 50%
but then they dropped again
because...
That was a pair of glasses,
it turned out.
But the war, the association with
Nazis then sort of dropped the sales
and then in 1970,
the New York Times again
reported sales had risen by 50%,
quoted a Bond Street optician.
If I ran an opticians,
I'd make them do the shop sign
in a really blurry font.
Even as recently as 2014,
the New York Times again reported
on a comeback in cities as diverse as
Manhattan and Cape Town and Berlin.
I like that the association with
Nazis made it drop,
- made it fall, the sales.
- Encouraging, yes.
You mentioned the Beatles and, of
course, there was a myopic Beatle.
- John Lennon. - John Lennon.
His glasses.
LIVERPUDLIAN ACCENT: I've never
worn a monocle in me life,
it was only glasses,
only ever worn glasses.
But he was very, very short-sighted,
so much so that if he didn't
wear his glasses,
he would be qualified as blind.
That explains Yoko Ono!
AUDIENCE EXCLAIMS
Now!
APPLAUSE
Why am I clapping? That's dreadful!
Another great figure from
the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
who died famously young...
Buddy Holly.
Buddy Holly, yes.
Oh, was he FLYING the plane?!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
That's it, when they found the
black box, it was just him going,
"Can I have a go?"
And the Big Bopper going,
"No, Buddy!
"You're bli-i-i-i-i-i-ind!"
He couldn't read the top line
of an eye-test chart.
He obviously famously
wore glasses too, as many do.
But there you are.
Now for a medical question.
What malady could you ameliorate
by standing in the middle of Wales?
- Yes? - Er, Moby Dick.
Ha!
- Stand in the middle of whales.
- Moby Dick!
Ah.
Oh, very good. Very good.
APPLAUSE
Very good. Whales or
Wales the country, though?
Well, you see, this is the thing.
Not whale, the giant mammal.
You kind of deserve a little point
for your Moby Dick.
- Oh, do I? - Because I am
actually talking...
If you stood in the middle
of a blue whale...
I know you're obsessed,
but it doesn't have to be blue.
Yeah, but let's say it's blue.
All right, blue. All right blue.
Because you know you can stand
in one of those.
You can? They're huge.
Yeah.
They are quite big, aren't they?
Of course, they're not the biggest
life form on earth, as you know.
Hell no!
Sorry, are we doing
a "best of" show?
In some ways, it's the "worst of".
You two have had this conversation
like a million times.
What's the question again, Stephen?
Yeah, what sort of amelioration
for what sort of malady
could you expect, if you stood...
A cream, an ointment? Some...a balm.
No. No, this is...the act
of standing,
it's not something that's just
taken from a whale.
This is an example.
This is in 1896 or thereabouts.
- This is an Australian...
- Is that a dead whale?
A drunken Australian
found a dead whale on the beach...
Just say Australian,
you don't need to beleaguer.
I knew you'd say that.
Is that him there?
Yeah, that's him.
..and decided to walk into the whale.
That looks like something from
Embarrassing Bodies, doesn't it?
It does a bit.
AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: "I've put on
a little bit of weight."
AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: "I've fallen
into a bloody whale."
LAUGHTER
"I thought a blowhole
meant something else.
"I feel like a bloody fool now."
"I'll look for a malady
and ameliorate it."
Just the kind of language you'd use.
But no, he got out of the whale...
He got out, he stank.
..and was amazed to discover...
He could walk.
LAUGHTER
That his... He was sober.
..his rheumatism had disappeared.
We'd never have got that. We could
have been here about a week.
I know. That's why I helped you out.
- Thank you so much.
- So it cures rheumatism?
- Well... - But I mean, you can't
get them at the chemist, can you?
No, you can't.
It started a fad, though. People...
- Would go and stand
in the middle of dead whales? - Yeah.
And whalers would leave a hole,
a little, sort of, area
for people who would pay
and go and stand inside.
And the decaying blubber
would act as a kind of poultice.
- Is there any kind of...?
- I want to go now.
No. Total... No evidence
that it works at all.
But it was just one of those fads
that they had in those days.
- What a fun fad. - A fun fad.
- These days we've got...
- Imagine if the monocle people went
and they were standing there like,
"Oh, I'm all for a fad now.
"Here I am with my monocle,
sat in a whale.
"I'll do anything, me."
But rheumatism, what is rheumatism?
I don't know. No.
That's a very good answer.
Aches and pain.
Yes, pain in the joints
is often called rheumatism,
but it covers up to 200
different conditions
and rheumatologists are real doctors,
but rheumatism...
There isn't one rheumatism.
There are all kinds
of autoimmune things that happen
to affect the joints and the muscles.
And there are all kinds of things
people take for it
that aren't necessarily any use.
Copper bracelets, for example.
You can pay up to £200
for a copper bracelet.
There was a rheumatologist who said,
"Yes, you can pay £5 for one as well
"and you go just as green."
Well, yeah, that's it really.
Australians with rheumatism
had a whale of a time.
What would you find
in a medieval manhole?
Do they keep
their favourite things in it?
Do they bury them in case
of marauding pillagers?
Is it like a priest-hole?
Like a hidey-place?
Well, you really would
have to know about this...
- I've never heard the phrase
"priest..." - Priest-hole?
- You don't have them in Ireland,
of course! - Well, we kind of do,
- but we don't talk about it.
- No, the priest-hole would be...
You would hide your Catholics
- in behind the fireplace
in a secret little... - Priest-hole!
During the time of Queen Elizabeth,
Catholics had quite a hard time of it
and people who kept
their Catholic faith
had priests who came to minister them
and, in the bigger houses, they put
little holes, sliding panels,
tiny places for the priest to hide
in case the army came round
in order to arrest them
and to catch them
in the act of being all Catholic.
- Yeah. - So those were the
priest-holes.
- They'd catch them
having loads of children. - Yeah!
Wow, I'd never heard of that before.
We're actually
in the Germanic regions here.
Obviously, there was no Germany
in medieval times, but...
Is it access to drains?
Ah, no. It's a legal issue.
It's a rather bizarre one.
If a man wanted to take
another man to court,
in Germany and in England,
they used trial by battle.
This is from Game Of Thrones!
This is clearly
from Game Of Thrones.
In England, if a man wanted
to take a woman to court,
he couldn't use trial by battle.
But in Germany, you could,
but you had to dig a hole
and be inside a hole
and tie one arm behind your back...
- LAUGHTER
- Oh, yeah.
- No way! - ..and then you could fight.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - I like that.
- But what if you were fighting
Brienne of Tarth? - Bring it back!
I feel like on this panel show,
I should be stood up like this
and all of you should be down there,
- and I'm slashing around me jokes.
- LAUGHTER
There were certain
other rules as well.
The man would be given three clubs
with which he could, you know,
try and hit the woman.
And the woman would have rocks
and a slingshot.
- Now... - Did this actually happen,
or...?
- Yes. Oh gosh, yes. - Really?
That should be surely be
the other way on.
He should have the slingshot
and the rocks,
if he's just stuck in a hole.
Yeah, I know. It's strange.
She can stand back quite a way
- and just fire at him. - With stones.
I imagine then, I suppose,
you can get right down in your hole,
can't you?
Yeah. And just go round like that,
with a club.
If the man touched
the side of his hole...
Oh, that's...
LAUGHTER
You know what I mean.
If he touched the side of the hole,
he forfeited one of his clubs.
- Right.
- And then he only had two clubs left.
But it's important to remember,
whoever lost the battle
would be put to death.
So this is quite a serious thing.
They've already sort of
dug the grave, so it's all right.
- Yes, that's true. - It's not as bad.
- Pop them in there, fill it in,
we're done. - Yeah.
- That's extraordinary.
- Isn't it? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Anyway...
That's what I love about this show,
that sometimes we can all just go,
"Yeah, fine."
- Indeed. - Perfectly lovely.
- That's quite interesting, yeah.
Still on the medieval match-ups,
what brilliant new strategy
was employed by the England team
in the European Championships
of 1176?
Did they just do
what they always do -
get a really easy qualifying group?
And Scotland got, you know,
- the Holy Roman Empire.
- LAUGHTER
The Knights Templar and Spain.
And England...England get
Lindisfarne.
Did they... Did they dig holes?
And they stood in the holes and
waited for the other team to... No?
- KLAXON BLARES
- Come on!
APPLAUSE
This is medieval again,
and it's early medieval,
I suppose you might say.
It's not football, though, is it?
It must be another...
No, it's not football. Jousting?
Jousting came later.
- What happened in early medieval...
- They need more space for that.
..was that.
I know, they do, don't they?
It's rather crowded.
They're not getting enough
of a run-up.
Yeah. Before jousting,
the two with lances, you know,
riding towards each other,
there was something,
which was a French word
that we still use to mean
a kind of fray.
It begins with M. Menagerie.
Not a menagerie.
LAUGHTER
Menage a trois.
A European menage a trois.
Melee. Yes! A melee is what it was.
Well done.
The original cast of Avatar
in a melee.
And we're looking at
the 12th century,
- and the great king then was...
- Henry II.
- Followed by his son, Richard I,
the Lionheart. - Oh, right.
And they liked this melee when
Richard wasn't out at the Crusades.
"I like it." And...
"I do. It pleaseth me."
And they saw this very good trick
and they copied it.
And that is, you tell them
you're not going to fight today.
You know,
"I won't do the melee today."
And they go, "Oh, OK."
And then they exhaust each other. And
then you come with your lot saying,
"I think I will actually."
And they're all completely tired,
and you win.
What do you mean
they exhaust each other?
Well, because they're running
backwards and forwards at each other,
- running and running.
- This is how I do a menage a trois.
I let them go for a while
and then I come in late.
They stole the idea
off Philip of Flanders
and it seemed to work pretty well.
The sport is called melee
and it's similar to jousting?
Well, the reason jousting then
took on,
as you can see from the picture,
this involves a lot all at once,
whereas jousting is cheaper.
- Ah, I see. - It's simply that.
It was so much cheaper to have that.
And you've got champions
at the jousting
who appeal to the ladies.
You know, the handkerchiefs
and the favours
and the rather extraordinary
elaborate form of romance.
It's kind of funny that
that would appeal to ladies.
It's kind of like the version now
for men for The Only Way Is Essex.
- That you don't actually know
what someone looks like... - Yes!
..because they've got so much
fancy stuff and extensions on.
You're like,
"Oh, he's gorgeous. Look at him!
"I really like the look of him."
Then he takes off his thing
at the end
and you're like, "Oh, God!
"Maybe I don't like him."
Going round in a miniskirt
with a massive pole in your hand.
- Yeah.
- LAUGHTER
The chicks go wild.
Well, the first rule
of knight club was to cheat.
Now, for a question
about moral turpitude.
What morally questionable activity
will you finally be able to do
on the streets of Knutsford in 2015?
- Is the clue in the picture, Stephen?
- Sort of, yeah.
Does it involve nuts?
No. Sadly not.
Does it involve bunting?
Nor bunting. And look lower down.
What is there particularly
noticeable?
- Terrible shoes. - Oh.
Look at them, oh.
- Very bad shoes. - Yeah.
- The road. - Pavement's... - Parking.
Double yellow lines.
The pavement.
- What about the pavement?
- It's small, very narrow.
It's a very narrow pavement.
Thank you, Danny.
It is a narrow pavement.
You can't have that.
There's a reason for
the narrow pavement.
- Because... - Those two people
are massive.
LAUGHTER
In the olden days...
Yeah? A certain class of person
virtually ruled the roost in Britain
and that was an aristocrat.
Oh, the bastards.
Yes. Absolutely shocking people.
And you had to throw yourself into
the gutter if one approached you.
Well, sometimes they had strong,
stern and absurd moral views.
- And... - Oh, so they weren't allowed
to walk... - Well, yes.
- If you imagine... - ..side by side?
ARISTOCRATIC VOICE: "I'm not having
the working classes
"next to each other in the street
"cos it can only lead to touching."
I know you think you're doing
a voice, but that is how you talk.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
There's no difference.
Like a hair's breadth.
You are a beast.
Voicing the inner workings
of the mind.
So, you weren't allowed to walk
hand-in-hand with a lady?
You could just walk behind her?
- Basically, yeah. - I'm happy with that.
Well, Lady Jane Stanley,
who was the daughter
of the 11th Earl of Derby,
and she laid down this strict code
of... Single-file pavement...
Single-file pavements. ..in case
they touched one another.
Yes. She died unmarried,
as you might expect. Yeah!
She wrote her own epitaph,
apparently, which is,
"A maid I lived and a maid I died.
I never was asked and never denied."
I think that's not bad,
considering she was dead.
Yes, quite.
Fair enough.
But perhaps the most famous prude
of his era was a little later,
in the 1870s -
a fellow called Anthony Comstock.
Comstock was from New York
and founded a league
against lewdness of any kind.
He saw it everywhere. He hated it.
He'd been in the Civil War,
didn't like the swearing, apparently.
- Yeah, that's the worst thing
about war. - Yes, I know.
Especially that Civil War, you know?
I mean...
"They've blown my fucking leg off!"
"Now, now - language."
"I'm going to fucking kill you."
"Please, could you just kill me?
Thank you."
But the particular tragedy
that struck him in 1873,
after the war,
was a friend of his - who was
addicted to pornography - died,
supposedly having masturbated
himself to death.
LAUGHTER
There's a lesson in there, Jimmy.
I'm happy to report, Stephen,
that cannot happen.
You're just not trying
hard enough, boy.
HE LAUGHS
I thought you looked pale, Jimmy.
Comstock believed that anyway.
Yes, he founded the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice
and for nine years in its height,
from the '70s to early '80s,
the society was responsible for
700 arrests, 333 prison sentences.
So, almost a 50% success rate
on its arrests.
And fines totalling 65,000,
which was a heck of a lot then.
The seizure of roughly 65,000
articles as well.
Articles for immoral use of rubber,
etc.
LAUGHTER
I saw some ancient pornography once.
Someone... There was a book...
Scraping the barrel that day,
were you?
- "There's nothing left I haven't
seen!" - No, no,
someone was writing a paper,
at college,
on the history of pornography
and it was kind of the earliest
pornographic sort of photographs
and it was just a guy standing...
leaning on a fireplace,
but clearly they had only had
their photo taken in certain poses,
so they thought, "Well, I guess
that's how photos work,"
so he had a pipe on
and all the usual porn stuff
was going on, but...
I think it's rather wonderful.
Are you sure you're not
describing the album cover
of Bing Crosby's Christmas Hits?
The X-rated version!
As late as 1927 they were still going
and they managed, reprehensibly,
to shut down Mae West's
Broadway play, Sex,
and had her imprisoned for ten days.
Really?
There was the Comstock Law,
which made it a federal offence
to send obscene matter - for example,
contraceptives - through the post.
It was finally overturned in '36
in the wonderfully named case of
United States versus
One Package of Japanese Pessaries.
LAUGHTER
The US was always going to
win that one.
It was, wasn't it? I think so.
I've never had...I've never had,
in 14 years,
people eating sweets
in the front row.
What the hell?!
And I can't think
about anything else.
LAUGHTER
Thanks, Jimmy.
You can have them back
at the end of the lesson.
I feel really bad for those people,
because, obviously, you're just sat
there watching an episode of QI,
and then suddenly
the telly gets up...
LAUGHTER
..and nicks your sweets.
"I didn't press the red button,
what's going on?"
LAUGHTER
Anyway, what did the French do
with marmosets
that normal people did with cheese?
LAUGHTER
- I have no memory of that whatsoever.
- That's Alan!
Oh, we all remember
our student days.
Forget the marmoset.
Right, forget the marmoset. I say
"normal people" do with cheese?
What do we do with cheese?
I put it on bread or crackers.
Put it in the back of the fridge
for six months, then chuck it out.
Think laterally.
Not the substance, not the food even.
What else is there?
- Cheese. - Oh, not...not on some
sort of, no...
- No, don't. - Oh, Jimmy.
Not the substance.
Not any substance at all.
- Say "cheese". We say "cheese".
- That's it! Thank you, Danny.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Very good.
So do the French say "marmoset?"
- They do. - They say "marmoset"?
Well, they used to.
I put it in the past tense.
That makes me go, "Oh, no wonder."
Cos that makes you go like this...
and that's what all French people
look like in photos, "Allo. Allo."
We have a Frenchman in the audience.
We have Vincent, who's come all
the way from la belle France,
from la Republique. Bonjour.
Let's just listen to him shouting
marmoset in French.
Ouistiti.
Ouistiti. Brilliant, thank you.
And the point is,
we smile when we say the...
- Which titty? - Which titty?
- Which titty?
- Ouistiti. - This titty... - Which titty?
- ..or this titty?
- Which titty? - This titty
or this titty? - Ouistiti...
- Which titty? - Which titty will make
you smile? - Which titty?
It does make you smile,
just saying, "Which titty?"
If you stretch your face
to say "ti-ti".
- Titty. - Titty.
- As you do to say cheese.
- Little titty, big titty.
Exactly.
And other languages, of course,
have other words, or used to.
I don't think it... But people
Blue Steel now, don't they?
- They Blue Steel it. They don't...
- Well, there is that, unfortunately.
But do you know
of any other countries' words?
- Yes, the Danish... - Yes?
Yeah, what? Yeah?
They say "orange".
Well, they don't say the word orange,
do they?
Well, I don't know what it is,
but I remember someone...
It's the Danish for orange.
Do we have Danes in the audience?
- There's one. - Oh. - You're Danish?
It sounds like apple, doesn't it?
Say, if you could...
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Appelsin. - Yeah,
there we go. - AISLING: Appelsin?
A pussy?
- Appelsin. - Where titty, a pussy?
- Which titty? A pussy. - A pussy.
- This is... Europe is filth!
- Europe is filthy.
And in various other languages,
we have Serbian,
- I don't suppose anyone. Well...
- I don't think they smile in Serbia.
LAUGHTER
Do we have any Slavs in the audience?
No, we don't.
"Little bird" in Serbian is ptica.
Tee-chee-tsa.
- Tee-chee-tsa. - It might be the same
in Russian, I don't know.
- Iticheetza!
- LAUGHTER
Iticheetza! Iticheetza!
Iticheetza!
Honestly. Korean you might get,
cos it's their favourite thing.
- Eating dogs.
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Kimchi.
- Kimchi. - Nuclear. - Kimchi, yeah.
- Kimchi.
They love their kimchi.
Argentina and some other
Latin countries
is actually an English word they say.
Or Scottish.
A Gaelic word, I should say.
'Usquebaugh' means whisky.
- Usquebaugh? - Yeah, whisky.
- Or water of life, isn't it?
- Usquebaugh.
Ah, usquebaugh is the same in Irish,
in Gaelic as well.
Except you put an 'e' in it
when you make it English.
No, we don't put an 'e' in it,
because that's really...
LAUGHTER
They did for one 48-hour period,
yeah.
Bulgarian is... We don't have any
Bulgars in the audience, I'm sure?
- There's one! - A Bulgar!
- You're joking, really?
Is that what you say, a Bulgar?
You don't say you're a Bulgar?
Bulgarian?
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am Bulgarian.
- And what would you say if...?
- We say "zele". - Yes! Zele.
Which means?
- Cabbage. - Cabbage, yes. - Cabbage.
Good, very good.
The sad thing is that
they've tended to die out.
Not because people do Blue Steel,
as you were saying,
but because the Americanisms
and British even,
they say "cheese" or "smile".
People go "hmmm"
and they just do it.
Isn't it sad? People saying smile,
how awful.
No, I didn't...
I always wondered why
in old photographs,
like early 1800s and stuff,
they were never smiling,
and it's because the exposure
was two, three hours long,
- so you can't physically... - Wrong!
- Oh, is that wrong?
Yes, but I'm glad you said it,
because we were just going to
come to that very thing.
You're an absolute natural
for this show!
No, it is a common misapprehension.
By 1845,
in the early daguerreotypes,
it was only a few seconds,
the exposure. One reason is...
At least five of them
look like they're dead.
Well, they are regarded as serious.
If you look at portraits in oils,
you know, paintings,
Reynolds, Gainsborough and so on,
they don't smile. No.
The Mona Lisa smile? That one.
Exactly, her enigmatic smile,
it's what makes her a unique...
That's very good, Aisling.
The lady on the far right there,
she was very good in
the Wizard of Oz, wasn't she?
- Terrifying. - She was, yeah.
To be honest, I wouldn't
be smiling if my parents
- had dressed me up like that
for a photograph. - I know, no.
But the word they said instead of
"cheese" turned out to be "prunes".
To make them look serious -
prunes, prunes. Prunes...
But anyway, what colour is a mirror?
Ah! Now, this is going to be
a trick. Come on, Danny.
Is it the colour of whatever
is standing in front of it?
No, you fool!
It's perfectly reasonable.
LAUGHTER
It's a perfectly
reasonable thing to say.
It would certainly reflect back
the colour of... It's just glass!
It's like a rainbow
because it's glass
and it is the accumulation
of light and...
and all of the colours
in a rainbow, but...
This sounds madder, but I feel
like I am right, but...
"Oh, go to bed!"
Silver.
KLAXON BLARES
Silver is not a colour.
- Silver isn't a colour. - Are mirrors
made of sand, aren't they?
Well, they are made of glass,
which is made of sand,
and the silvered backing,
whatever that might be that is used.
This silvery foil thing. What?
The what backing?! Silvered...
It's silver, but its colour isn't
silver, silver isn't a colour
because you can't make a silver
colour on a computer using...
Just because it's not on your
computer...! Silver is not colour.
- It's glass...
- No? - Silver is not colour, no.
- Oh, I love this show!
- It is good, isn't it?
It's all of the colours, it's like
when the sun goes through a raindrop
and a rainbow comes out cos...
And all the colours...
Yes, you're absolutely
on the right lines.
I mean, anything you see
as a coloured object...
Like a tomato looks red
because it takes in all
the colours of white light,
- all the colours in there, EXCEPT
red. And therefore, the red... - What?!
- Therefore, the red reflects back.
- But red... Sorry.
The red is in there
with all the others,
but can't get through, as it were,
and comes out...
- Don't let him into your mind.
- It's like Scientology, the whole...
- No, that's how it works. So, a
mirror... - How do Skittles work, then?
Sorry?
LAUGHTER
Taste the rainbow!
A mirror takes in all the colours,
but there is one colour
which slightly can't get in
- and you can only see that all mirrors
have a slight tinge of this... - Green?
- A vampire. Oh. - Yes, green!
Literally, I was just going
to list the colours.
Green is right
and you can see it there.
That is not coloured glass
of any kind.
You see it best in the effect of
a hall of mirrors - mirror on
mirror on mirror - so you're seeing
lots of mirrors together,
you see this tinge,
that gets stronger and stronger,
of green.
Now, that is just pure glass
and pure mirror effect,
but it seems green to us.
So if you are looking slightly
green in the morning,
you can blame it on the mirror.
Now, why might blocking the middle
of a fire exit be a good thing?
♪ Mulberry bush. ♪
Cos it stops the fire
from getting out.
"Hold on!"
So, if everyone goes
for the fire exit at the same time,
they would cause...
It would get blocked
by the mass of people,
whereas if you had two lanes,
it's like motorway traffic.
- If you block the middle, they would
go out sort of individually. - Yes!
- And it would be better. - You
are on the money, absolutely right.
It's an extraordinary thing.
- APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH
- We are a team!
They started it with ants.
I mean, they didn't start a fire,
but they had a single exit for ants
and they blocked
the middle of it
and they found that the ants
were slower,
but they all got out more quickly
and it seems to work with humans too,
probably for exactly
the reasons you say.
Is that why they do those individual
doors in airports? Maybe it is, yes.
Those ones where it says,
"Keep moving,"
as you walk towards
the plate glass.
But with aeroplanes, in order to have
a certificate of air worthiness,
amongst other things like making
sure the wings don't fall off,
you have to be able to evacuate
in 90 seconds.
No way! Because that is
the speed at which...
LAUGHTER
When you say...
Stephen, when you say "evacuate",
it depends what they say
over the tannoy.
90 seconds is how long it would take
a fire to engulf.
- That's helping(!) - She is, yeah.
- "Get off!"
When you do evacuate,
it's difficult to test, of course,
whether you can get people off.
- How do you motivate them to get
off quickly enough? - Do they pay them?
- Pay them.
- So is it like the last guy off...?
They basically give them
a monetary incentive
to get off as fast as possible.
They get a refund.
Well, no,
this is in the test situation,
you haven't bought a ticket,
you've been asked to test...
- Oh, tests! - The tests. "Get out in
90 seconds, I'll give you 20 quid."
Are you saying you would be
on a plane, it would be on fire
and they go, "We'll give you £20
if you get off,"
and you go, "Make it 30..."
LAUGHTER
"I'm holding out for more, love. It
is getting warm, but it's worth it.
- "They'll put the price up."
- Yeah, I'll be the last off.
So, now it's time to run screaming
into the disaster zone
that we call General Ignorance.
So, fingers on buzzers,
if you please.
It's Midsummer in the UK.
To the nearest hour,
what time does day become night?
About 10,
gets up again around 4?
KLAXON BLARES
So I was going to say 1!
You were going to say 1?!
KLAXON BLARES
You'll take that one!
I'll take that one!
Is it... I'm only saying this,
there is no rationale at all,
but is it noon? It's always
something weird on this show
and you go, "Oh, no, it's actually
night-time in the middle of the day.
"You're all idiots,
you've been doing it wrong."
In Midsummer,
there is no night in Britain.
There's no night.
There's no night, Danny.
LAUGHTER
It's constant twilight.
Oh, bollocks. It gets dark.
- Constant Twilight sounds like
a really good indie album. - It does!
Yeah, even as far south as Jersey,
twilight lasts between June 8th
and July 4th, without night.
And how do you define twilight?
Well, it's defined as the time
after the sun goes down, but...
When the vampires
and werewolves fight!
Who will she choose...
while constantly looking
like she has just farted?
- How? - In the Twilight films.
- You know Kirsten?
- She looks as if she has just farted
the whole time. - Shall I?
You look like you could
be one of the vampires.
"Oh, my God, am I going to pick you?
"You're so cold. Can I touch you?
Are you even real?"
That's exactly the whole movie.
The whole movie is her choice
between a half animal and a zombie.
So Twilight lasts about...
lasts about six hours
if you watch all three of them.
Twilight is defined as the time after
the sun goes beneath the horizon
but while there is still light
caused by the reflection
of the sun's rays
from the atmosphere.
During summer nights,
even at 2am,
there is still a little
bit of light from the sun.
When is the best time to
charge your mobile phone?
At night.
Well, good. Yeah, it might be.
Any other thoughts?
Oh, really?
I thought that would go off!
- You can't do it on Midsummer. - No.
"There is no night, you fool!"
When it's completely
almost run out of battery.
- KLAXON BLARES
Oh! - Oh!
If you've got an iPhone,
it's every 15 minutes.
LAUGHTER
It used to be the case
with an old phone.
Nokia would go on for weeks.
Yeah! Look at that beauty.
Bring 'em back!
That's like one of the most modern,
"Oh, it's not like it was
in the old days."
These phones of that generation
used what sort of batteries?
- Lithium? - Lithium.
- No, nickel is the point.
And if you charged it
when it was 20% full,
it wouldn't remember the rest of it,
as it were,
it was called memory problem.
So, you had to drain them.
You had to use them completely,
so that it would charge
the whole battery.
But we use lithium now
and that isn't a problem any more.
But here's a great thing
about batteries,
and I'm going to demonstrate this
to you,
and I think it'll be
rather interesting.
We're just talking about
ordinary AA batteries here,
whether or not they're charged or...
They have a thumb thing on them
now, don't they?
- I would, I would use...
- Well, they did the thumb thing,
but they've got rid of that,
haven't they?
They never quite worked.
It was supposed to shine a...
go green or something.
Yeah, yeah, go green
and there was like a press thing.
I would attach it
to my nipple clamps
and see if it gives me a buzz
that I need.
Here are two batteries.
How can you tell which one is flat,
as it were,
which one is drained of power
and which one is still powerful?
Try it on you.
- Some magnetic thing.
- It's nothing to do with magnetism.
I'm going to slip them through
these copper sleeves
so that they're both facing
the right direction
and should both fall
at the same time.
So you can count me down from
three, two, one and drop, all right?
The whole audience can join in.
ALL: Three, two, one, drop!
All right, let's have a look at that.
In theory, an empty battery
should bounce more.
- AUDIENCE MURMURS
- Oh!
And that is the case that this
is the one which has been drained.
It's to do with the gel
inside the batteries.
And when they're drained,
it's hardened and so it bounces more.
Should we do an apology now for
people breaking their mobile phones?
Presumably someone is at home going,
"Is this charged?"
- You could try it with that.
- Seems all right.
There you are, isn't that good?
- Couldn't you just buy new batteries?
- LAUGHTER
I just didn't think of that.
Right. Yes, the best time
to charge your phone
is any time you can find
a power socket.
All of which brings us charging
towards a battery
of very extraordinary scores,
which will amaze and astonish you.
Not.
So, in first place,
what an extraordinary debut,
Danny Bhoy on ten points.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In second place,
half as good, but still brilliant,
five points to Jimmy Carr.
I'm happy with that.
I'll take that all day.
- CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- Five?!
That's good.
In third place, with -7,
it's Aisling Bea.
- CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- Yeah!
Who does that leave us, I wonder?
Well...
-44 for Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well, that's all from Aisling, Jimmy,
Danny, Alan and me.
And I leave you with these wise words
from Pulitzer Prize winner,
Anna Quindlen.
"Life is not so much about beginnings
and endings
"as it is about going on and on
and on.
"It's about muddling through
the middle,"
which I hope we've done this evening.
Good night.
Good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI,
for the middle show of the M series,
which is in the middle
of the alphabet,
where our theme is, well, not so much
middle as muddle, to be honest.
But we have the magnificent
Aisling Bea.
CHEERING
The mighty Danny Bhoy.
CHEERING
The magnetic Jimmy Carr.
CHEERING
And the miscellaneous Alan Davies.
CHEERING
And their buzzers
are merrily multifarious.
Aisling goes...
CHILD: # Here we go round
the mulberry bush
♪ The mulberry bush
The mulberry bush. ♪
Danny goes...
CHILD: # This old man, he played one
♪ He played knick knack
on my drum. ♪
Jimmy goes...
CHILDREN: # Three blind mice
♪ Three blind mice. ♪
It's like the soundtrack
of a horror film.
And Alan goes...
CHILD: # My Bonnie lies over... #
- BANG ON DOOR
- Will you go to bed?!
DOOR SLAMS
- Was that a gunshot? - I don't know.
The bit at the end, yes.
Well, the best place to start,
I always think, is in the middle.
How do you know when a chimpanzee
is having a midlife crisis?
Does it get a Chinese tattoo?
- Just on the back of his neck there.
- A motorbike.
A motorbike?
KLAXON BLARES
APPLAUSE
Where does the phrase
"midlife crisis" come from?
How long has it been in the language,
do you think?
Do you think the Victorians used it?
Do you think...?
- I bet it's more recent.
I bet it's like a '50s... - Yeah.
Cos it was about buying sports cars
and doing those kind of crazy...
divorcing your wife
and going out with someone of 22.
It was actually 1965
that a psychologist decided on
this midlife crisis.
He thought that only geniuses
got a midlife crisis.
He used the phrase,
but he said it was something
that happened to geniuses.
- But we... - It's not only us.
It's not only us.
Is it, Alan? You get them too.
Yeah. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
I went to my...
I went to my doctor and I said,
"I hate the West
and I want all the infidels dead,"
and he said, "Don't worry, you're
just going through a midlife Isis."
LAUGHTER
Of course, they might be in the
Olympics by the time this goes out!
That would be an extraordinary
turnaround of fortune for them.
- I think, in the next World Cup,
Fifa would take them. - What, Isis?!
- Yeah, of course. - Yeah,
they would be in England's group.
Group of death!
That is supposedly a man
in a midlife crisis.
If he's in a midlife crisis, he's
going to live to 300, which is...
The awkward thing
about midlife crises,
I've had some friends
that have gone through them recently
and they've left their partners,
gone out with much younger women
and they've bought sports cars,
and the most difficult thing
is pretending to my other half that,
"Aw! That's terrible. Isn't it sad?"
"Aw, ah.
God, he's had a disaster there.
"Yeah. No, apparently she used to be
a dancer. Yeah."
Yeah.
LAUGHTER
He's not... But is he happy?
Aw.
Yes.
He can't stop smiling.
He showed me some photos
on his phone, it looks amazing.
Well, it turns out that chimpanzees,
when they're young, they're high
and when they get to middle age,
they kind of go down
and then up again, which is
supposedly what a midlife crisis is.
Does it only affect the men, or does
it affect the women chimps as well?
It seems to be a male thing,
doesn't it? And I think...
Yeah. I hear that, sister monkeys.
Are those guys laughing
at the ginger ones?
Well, the tests were done
on the ginger ones,
or orang-utans,
as some people prefer to call them...
- The ginger ones, yes.
- ..and on the chimpanzees.
There are some well-known examples
of people in middle age
doing extraordinary things.
- Henry VIII was 35...
- Is he 35 in that picture?
I think, in that picture,
he's a little older.
- His reaction to a midlife crisis
was pretty extreme. - Well, it was.
He fell for a younger woman
when he was 35, called Anne Boleyn,
and as a result, broke with...
Catherine of Aragon. ..Rome.
Well, he broke with her as well,
that's true.
He divorced her
against the Pope's wishes.
Well, she didn't give him an heir,
did she? It's her own fault!
LAUGHTER
She should have magicked him up
a boy. She was a failure.
He had a boy, though,
but he was a bastard, wasn't he?
- Couldn't be King. No.
- So, he had some messy break-ups.
He had messy break-ups, but 35, that
was the year he really pushed it out.
You know, he broke with Rome,
founded his own church. And...
Who else is there?
Well, Jesus and Buddha.
Would you call Jesus's
a midlife crisis?
DANNY: He died when he was 33,
- so when was his midlife crisis?
- Well, in his 30s.
I mean, before he was 30,
he didn't really do anything.
But what about Buddha?
I mean, there was the weight gain.
LAUGHTER
- From Siddhartha to a big potbellied
thing. - Yeah, I think that's the...
That's the middle-age thing,
isn't it?
You just get into box sets and...
a bit more takeout, twice a week,
it's not good for you.
But he didn't become the Buddha
until he was in his 40s, about 48.
- What was his name before that?
Frank? - Maybe, well, 30s.
So there's still a chance for me,
is there?
Well, no-one really knows
what these things are about,
except that it does seem to be
a pattern with men.
Now, what mania was started
by a few myopic Merseysiders?
- # Mulberry bush. #
- Weirdly, you know...
- Yeah? - No, keep going.
Does this buzzer stop Jimmy
speaking? Try again.
LAUGHTER
Say something.
- I was just going to say...
- # Mulberry bush. #
AUDIENCE CHEERS
There's some support for it.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I find the buzzers
really disconcerting.
It does feel like someone's
about to get murdered in the show.
"Oh, go to bed!"
LAUGHTER
Those childish ghost cries.
♪ Mice. ♪
It's usually The Beatles.
Hmm. Isn't it?
Yeah, it's usually The Beatles.
The Beatles is what you're saying.
It's usually The Beatles.
He's saying The Beatles.
- KLAXON BLARES
- # Mulberry bush. #
Very good.
No, is the answer.
Oh. It was a mania,
but not Beatlemania on Merseyside.
Myopic Merseyside.
It involves something to do with M.
Myopic is short-sighted, is it? Yes.
Partially-sighted.
So, what M could help you
with partial-sightedness?
My glasses.
LAUGHTER
Yes.
Any particular type
of ophthalmic instrument
that would help, that began with M?
Monocle.
Monocle is the right answer.
There we go, very good.
Yeah.
APPLAUSE
I only knew that cos there happens
to be a monocle next to me.
It was a bit of a giveaway.
There you are, pop them in.
It was a fashion thing
that seemed to sweep Liverpool.
I can imagine it taking off again,
to be honest.
- You do look great.
- You look very good.
- Ah, Jimmy!
- LAUGHTER
- Oh, my goodness.
- My old pal.
What are you laughing at?
Jimmy, you've never looked more like
a ventriloquist's doll in your life.
LAUGHTER
So, Jimmy...
SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY LAUGHTER
Oh, my! You really did look like
Lord Charles there.
HE LAUGHS
I now feel slightly haunted.
Wow! Thank you for putting your hand
there, by the way.
It was really...special.
Your hair is all up.
They won't fit because monocles
had to be made to fit,
which is why they were expensive.
And because they were expensive,
they were associated
with the upper classes.
And even when you wear them,
it's very hard not to look rather
kind of like that, isn't it?
At what point in history
did someone just go,
make that mental leap between,
"I've got it here and
I've got a little bridge here.
"I could maybe
just put another one..."
Well, it's funny you should say that.
Which came first,
the monocle or the spectacles?
I'm going to say the spectacles.
Yes. The spectacles,
by hundreds of years.
- What? - When do you think
the monocle came in?
1974.
No. They came in in the 1800s
and they were instantly a success,
but they were expensive.
And we associate them with,
I suppose...
- Oh, there I am.
- DANNY: Yeah. There you are, yeah.
I had all three of those.
- DANNY: They knocked that up
pretty quickly. - Yeah.
But something gave them
a rather bad image
- in the 20th century.
- Californian vegetables. - Nazis.
Nazis, and in fact...
LAUGHTER
Californian vegetables.
Buy Californian vegetables.
- By Jove, they're awfully good.
- LAUGHTER
- Yeah, they were associated with...
- You do become instantly posh.
..aristocrats, German soldiers
and generals.
Ludendorff wore one, Krebs,
various of those figures there did.
Ja.
Advance.
- They really did never stop...
- No squinting.
- ..trying to look more evil,
did they? - No, they didn't.
Well, what could we add to this?
I've got the, you know,
the skull and crossbones,
I've got the weird look,
I've got the steely eyes.
They're a very good fit.
I know, I'll put
one spectacle lens over here.
GERMAN ACCENT: What about a monocle?
Zat would make us more evil.
A tiny moustache.
So, who are the famous monocle
wearers that you can name?
- Patrick Moore. - That's one. Good.
Goebbels. No, he didn't have one.
Hitler. Hitler!
It would have set him off lovely,
but no, he didn't. He didn't.
Mr Peanut, from the peanuts.
Yes, that's right,
the Planters peanuts, Mr Peanuts.
Can anyone think of any?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS SHOUT OUT
Terry-Thomas, we had Terry-Thomas.
No, I don't think he did.
Bad luck, you're out.
- Did Churchill ever wear one?
- Churchill, no...
- Jesus? - Erich von Stroheim.
- Jesus?! - Jesus wore one. - Jesus!
Chris Eubank.
- Chris Eubank! - Of course!
- It doesn't count
if you're driving a monster truck
through Brighton at the time.
There was a very peculiar thing
that started in 1902,
which was the New York Times,
whether as a joke originally,
but it seems to have become one
because it is so preposterous,
is they keep predicting the return of
the monocle,
so in 1902, they said
it was going to come back,
then in 1936 the reported that
more than 20 British MPs had one.
1941, they found that
monocle sales were up 50%
but then they dropped again
because...
That was a pair of glasses,
it turned out.
But the war, the association with
Nazis then sort of dropped the sales
and then in 1970,
the New York Times again
reported sales had risen by 50%,
quoted a Bond Street optician.
If I ran an opticians,
I'd make them do the shop sign
in a really blurry font.
Even as recently as 2014,
the New York Times again reported
on a comeback in cities as diverse as
Manhattan and Cape Town and Berlin.
I like that the association with
Nazis made it drop,
- made it fall, the sales.
- Encouraging, yes.
You mentioned the Beatles and, of
course, there was a myopic Beatle.
- John Lennon. - John Lennon.
His glasses.
LIVERPUDLIAN ACCENT: I've never
worn a monocle in me life,
it was only glasses,
only ever worn glasses.
But he was very, very short-sighted,
so much so that if he didn't
wear his glasses,
he would be qualified as blind.
That explains Yoko Ono!
AUDIENCE EXCLAIMS
Now!
APPLAUSE
Why am I clapping? That's dreadful!
Another great figure from
the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
who died famously young...
Buddy Holly.
Buddy Holly, yes.
Oh, was he FLYING the plane?!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
That's it, when they found the
black box, it was just him going,
"Can I have a go?"
And the Big Bopper going,
"No, Buddy!
"You're bli-i-i-i-i-i-ind!"
He couldn't read the top line
of an eye-test chart.
He obviously famously
wore glasses too, as many do.
But there you are.
Now for a medical question.
What malady could you ameliorate
by standing in the middle of Wales?
- Yes? - Er, Moby Dick.
Ha!
- Stand in the middle of whales.
- Moby Dick!
Ah.
Oh, very good. Very good.
APPLAUSE
Very good. Whales or
Wales the country, though?
Well, you see, this is the thing.
Not whale, the giant mammal.
You kind of deserve a little point
for your Moby Dick.
- Oh, do I? - Because I am
actually talking...
If you stood in the middle
of a blue whale...
I know you're obsessed,
but it doesn't have to be blue.
Yeah, but let's say it's blue.
All right, blue. All right blue.
Because you know you can stand
in one of those.
You can? They're huge.
Yeah.
They are quite big, aren't they?
Of course, they're not the biggest
life form on earth, as you know.
Hell no!
Sorry, are we doing
a "best of" show?
In some ways, it's the "worst of".
You two have had this conversation
like a million times.
What's the question again, Stephen?
Yeah, what sort of amelioration
for what sort of malady
could you expect, if you stood...
A cream, an ointment? Some...a balm.
No. No, this is...the act
of standing,
it's not something that's just
taken from a whale.
This is an example.
This is in 1896 or thereabouts.
- This is an Australian...
- Is that a dead whale?
A drunken Australian
found a dead whale on the beach...
Just say Australian,
you don't need to beleaguer.
I knew you'd say that.
Is that him there?
Yeah, that's him.
..and decided to walk into the whale.
That looks like something from
Embarrassing Bodies, doesn't it?
It does a bit.
AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: "I've put on
a little bit of weight."
AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: "I've fallen
into a bloody whale."
LAUGHTER
"I thought a blowhole
meant something else.
"I feel like a bloody fool now."
"I'll look for a malady
and ameliorate it."
Just the kind of language you'd use.
But no, he got out of the whale...
He got out, he stank.
..and was amazed to discover...
He could walk.
LAUGHTER
That his... He was sober.
..his rheumatism had disappeared.
We'd never have got that. We could
have been here about a week.
I know. That's why I helped you out.
- Thank you so much.
- So it cures rheumatism?
- Well... - But I mean, you can't
get them at the chemist, can you?
No, you can't.
It started a fad, though. People...
- Would go and stand
in the middle of dead whales? - Yeah.
And whalers would leave a hole,
a little, sort of, area
for people who would pay
and go and stand inside.
And the decaying blubber
would act as a kind of poultice.
- Is there any kind of...?
- I want to go now.
No. Total... No evidence
that it works at all.
But it was just one of those fads
that they had in those days.
- What a fun fad. - A fun fad.
- These days we've got...
- Imagine if the monocle people went
and they were standing there like,
"Oh, I'm all for a fad now.
"Here I am with my monocle,
sat in a whale.
"I'll do anything, me."
But rheumatism, what is rheumatism?
I don't know. No.
That's a very good answer.
Aches and pain.
Yes, pain in the joints
is often called rheumatism,
but it covers up to 200
different conditions
and rheumatologists are real doctors,
but rheumatism...
There isn't one rheumatism.
There are all kinds
of autoimmune things that happen
to affect the joints and the muscles.
And there are all kinds of things
people take for it
that aren't necessarily any use.
Copper bracelets, for example.
You can pay up to £200
for a copper bracelet.
There was a rheumatologist who said,
"Yes, you can pay £5 for one as well
"and you go just as green."
Well, yeah, that's it really.
Australians with rheumatism
had a whale of a time.
What would you find
in a medieval manhole?
Do they keep
their favourite things in it?
Do they bury them in case
of marauding pillagers?
Is it like a priest-hole?
Like a hidey-place?
Well, you really would
have to know about this...
- I've never heard the phrase
"priest..." - Priest-hole?
- You don't have them in Ireland,
of course! - Well, we kind of do,
- but we don't talk about it.
- No, the priest-hole would be...
You would hide your Catholics
- in behind the fireplace
in a secret little... - Priest-hole!
During the time of Queen Elizabeth,
Catholics had quite a hard time of it
and people who kept
their Catholic faith
had priests who came to minister them
and, in the bigger houses, they put
little holes, sliding panels,
tiny places for the priest to hide
in case the army came round
in order to arrest them
and to catch them
in the act of being all Catholic.
- Yeah. - So those were the
priest-holes.
- They'd catch them
having loads of children. - Yeah!
Wow, I'd never heard of that before.
We're actually
in the Germanic regions here.
Obviously, there was no Germany
in medieval times, but...
Is it access to drains?
Ah, no. It's a legal issue.
It's a rather bizarre one.
If a man wanted to take
another man to court,
in Germany and in England,
they used trial by battle.
This is from Game Of Thrones!
This is clearly
from Game Of Thrones.
In England, if a man wanted
to take a woman to court,
he couldn't use trial by battle.
But in Germany, you could,
but you had to dig a hole
and be inside a hole
and tie one arm behind your back...
- LAUGHTER
- Oh, yeah.
- No way! - ..and then you could fight.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - I like that.
- But what if you were fighting
Brienne of Tarth? - Bring it back!
I feel like on this panel show,
I should be stood up like this
and all of you should be down there,
- and I'm slashing around me jokes.
- LAUGHTER
There were certain
other rules as well.
The man would be given three clubs
with which he could, you know,
try and hit the woman.
And the woman would have rocks
and a slingshot.
- Now... - Did this actually happen,
or...?
- Yes. Oh gosh, yes. - Really?
That should be surely be
the other way on.
He should have the slingshot
and the rocks,
if he's just stuck in a hole.
Yeah, I know. It's strange.
She can stand back quite a way
- and just fire at him. - With stones.
I imagine then, I suppose,
you can get right down in your hole,
can't you?
Yeah. And just go round like that,
with a club.
If the man touched
the side of his hole...
Oh, that's...
LAUGHTER
You know what I mean.
If he touched the side of the hole,
he forfeited one of his clubs.
- Right.
- And then he only had two clubs left.
But it's important to remember,
whoever lost the battle
would be put to death.
So this is quite a serious thing.
They've already sort of
dug the grave, so it's all right.
- Yes, that's true. - It's not as bad.
- Pop them in there, fill it in,
we're done. - Yeah.
- That's extraordinary.
- Isn't it? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Anyway...
That's what I love about this show,
that sometimes we can all just go,
"Yeah, fine."
- Indeed. - Perfectly lovely.
- That's quite interesting, yeah.
Still on the medieval match-ups,
what brilliant new strategy
was employed by the England team
in the European Championships
of 1176?
Did they just do
what they always do -
get a really easy qualifying group?
And Scotland got, you know,
- the Holy Roman Empire.
- LAUGHTER
The Knights Templar and Spain.
And England...England get
Lindisfarne.
Did they... Did they dig holes?
And they stood in the holes and
waited for the other team to... No?
- KLAXON BLARES
- Come on!
APPLAUSE
This is medieval again,
and it's early medieval,
I suppose you might say.
It's not football, though, is it?
It must be another...
No, it's not football. Jousting?
Jousting came later.
- What happened in early medieval...
- They need more space for that.
..was that.
I know, they do, don't they?
It's rather crowded.
They're not getting enough
of a run-up.
Yeah. Before jousting,
the two with lances, you know,
riding towards each other,
there was something,
which was a French word
that we still use to mean
a kind of fray.
It begins with M. Menagerie.
Not a menagerie.
LAUGHTER
Menage a trois.
A European menage a trois.
Melee. Yes! A melee is what it was.
Well done.
The original cast of Avatar
in a melee.
And we're looking at
the 12th century,
- and the great king then was...
- Henry II.
- Followed by his son, Richard I,
the Lionheart. - Oh, right.
And they liked this melee when
Richard wasn't out at the Crusades.
"I like it." And...
"I do. It pleaseth me."
And they saw this very good trick
and they copied it.
And that is, you tell them
you're not going to fight today.
You know,
"I won't do the melee today."
And they go, "Oh, OK."
And then they exhaust each other. And
then you come with your lot saying,
"I think I will actually."
And they're all completely tired,
and you win.
What do you mean
they exhaust each other?
Well, because they're running
backwards and forwards at each other,
- running and running.
- This is how I do a menage a trois.
I let them go for a while
and then I come in late.
They stole the idea
off Philip of Flanders
and it seemed to work pretty well.
The sport is called melee
and it's similar to jousting?
Well, the reason jousting then
took on,
as you can see from the picture,
this involves a lot all at once,
whereas jousting is cheaper.
- Ah, I see. - It's simply that.
It was so much cheaper to have that.
And you've got champions
at the jousting
who appeal to the ladies.
You know, the handkerchiefs
and the favours
and the rather extraordinary
elaborate form of romance.
It's kind of funny that
that would appeal to ladies.
It's kind of like the version now
for men for The Only Way Is Essex.
- That you don't actually know
what someone looks like... - Yes!
..because they've got so much
fancy stuff and extensions on.
You're like,
"Oh, he's gorgeous. Look at him!
"I really like the look of him."
Then he takes off his thing
at the end
and you're like, "Oh, God!
"Maybe I don't like him."
Going round in a miniskirt
with a massive pole in your hand.
- Yeah.
- LAUGHTER
The chicks go wild.
Well, the first rule
of knight club was to cheat.
Now, for a question
about moral turpitude.
What morally questionable activity
will you finally be able to do
on the streets of Knutsford in 2015?
- Is the clue in the picture, Stephen?
- Sort of, yeah.
Does it involve nuts?
No. Sadly not.
Does it involve bunting?
Nor bunting. And look lower down.
What is there particularly
noticeable?
- Terrible shoes. - Oh.
Look at them, oh.
- Very bad shoes. - Yeah.
- The road. - Pavement's... - Parking.
Double yellow lines.
The pavement.
- What about the pavement?
- It's small, very narrow.
It's a very narrow pavement.
Thank you, Danny.
It is a narrow pavement.
You can't have that.
There's a reason for
the narrow pavement.
- Because... - Those two people
are massive.
LAUGHTER
In the olden days...
Yeah? A certain class of person
virtually ruled the roost in Britain
and that was an aristocrat.
Oh, the bastards.
Yes. Absolutely shocking people.
And you had to throw yourself into
the gutter if one approached you.
Well, sometimes they had strong,
stern and absurd moral views.
- And... - Oh, so they weren't allowed
to walk... - Well, yes.
- If you imagine... - ..side by side?
ARISTOCRATIC VOICE: "I'm not having
the working classes
"next to each other in the street
"cos it can only lead to touching."
I know you think you're doing
a voice, but that is how you talk.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
There's no difference.
Like a hair's breadth.
You are a beast.
Voicing the inner workings
of the mind.
So, you weren't allowed to walk
hand-in-hand with a lady?
You could just walk behind her?
- Basically, yeah. - I'm happy with that.
Well, Lady Jane Stanley,
who was the daughter
of the 11th Earl of Derby,
and she laid down this strict code
of... Single-file pavement...
Single-file pavements. ..in case
they touched one another.
Yes. She died unmarried,
as you might expect. Yeah!
She wrote her own epitaph,
apparently, which is,
"A maid I lived and a maid I died.
I never was asked and never denied."
I think that's not bad,
considering she was dead.
Yes, quite.
Fair enough.
But perhaps the most famous prude
of his era was a little later,
in the 1870s -
a fellow called Anthony Comstock.
Comstock was from New York
and founded a league
against lewdness of any kind.
He saw it everywhere. He hated it.
He'd been in the Civil War,
didn't like the swearing, apparently.
- Yeah, that's the worst thing
about war. - Yes, I know.
Especially that Civil War, you know?
I mean...
"They've blown my fucking leg off!"
"Now, now - language."
"I'm going to fucking kill you."
"Please, could you just kill me?
Thank you."
But the particular tragedy
that struck him in 1873,
after the war,
was a friend of his - who was
addicted to pornography - died,
supposedly having masturbated
himself to death.
LAUGHTER
There's a lesson in there, Jimmy.
I'm happy to report, Stephen,
that cannot happen.
You're just not trying
hard enough, boy.
HE LAUGHS
I thought you looked pale, Jimmy.
Comstock believed that anyway.
Yes, he founded the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice
and for nine years in its height,
from the '70s to early '80s,
the society was responsible for
700 arrests, 333 prison sentences.
So, almost a 50% success rate
on its arrests.
And fines totalling 65,000,
which was a heck of a lot then.
The seizure of roughly 65,000
articles as well.
Articles for immoral use of rubber,
etc.
LAUGHTER
I saw some ancient pornography once.
Someone... There was a book...
Scraping the barrel that day,
were you?
- "There's nothing left I haven't
seen!" - No, no,
someone was writing a paper,
at college,
on the history of pornography
and it was kind of the earliest
pornographic sort of photographs
and it was just a guy standing...
leaning on a fireplace,
but clearly they had only had
their photo taken in certain poses,
so they thought, "Well, I guess
that's how photos work,"
so he had a pipe on
and all the usual porn stuff
was going on, but...
I think it's rather wonderful.
Are you sure you're not
describing the album cover
of Bing Crosby's Christmas Hits?
The X-rated version!
As late as 1927 they were still going
and they managed, reprehensibly,
to shut down Mae West's
Broadway play, Sex,
and had her imprisoned for ten days.
Really?
There was the Comstock Law,
which made it a federal offence
to send obscene matter - for example,
contraceptives - through the post.
It was finally overturned in '36
in the wonderfully named case of
United States versus
One Package of Japanese Pessaries.
LAUGHTER
The US was always going to
win that one.
It was, wasn't it? I think so.
I've never had...I've never had,
in 14 years,
people eating sweets
in the front row.
What the hell?!
And I can't think
about anything else.
LAUGHTER
Thanks, Jimmy.
You can have them back
at the end of the lesson.
I feel really bad for those people,
because, obviously, you're just sat
there watching an episode of QI,
and then suddenly
the telly gets up...
LAUGHTER
..and nicks your sweets.
"I didn't press the red button,
what's going on?"
LAUGHTER
Anyway, what did the French do
with marmosets
that normal people did with cheese?
LAUGHTER
- I have no memory of that whatsoever.
- That's Alan!
Oh, we all remember
our student days.
Forget the marmoset.
Right, forget the marmoset. I say
"normal people" do with cheese?
What do we do with cheese?
I put it on bread or crackers.
Put it in the back of the fridge
for six months, then chuck it out.
Think laterally.
Not the substance, not the food even.
What else is there?
- Cheese. - Oh, not...not on some
sort of, no...
- No, don't. - Oh, Jimmy.
Not the substance.
Not any substance at all.
- Say "cheese". We say "cheese".
- That's it! Thank you, Danny.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Very good.
So do the French say "marmoset?"
- They do. - They say "marmoset"?
Well, they used to.
I put it in the past tense.
That makes me go, "Oh, no wonder."
Cos that makes you go like this...
and that's what all French people
look like in photos, "Allo. Allo."
We have a Frenchman in the audience.
We have Vincent, who's come all
the way from la belle France,
from la Republique. Bonjour.
Let's just listen to him shouting
marmoset in French.
Ouistiti.
Ouistiti. Brilliant, thank you.
And the point is,
we smile when we say the...
- Which titty? - Which titty?
- Which titty?
- Ouistiti. - This titty... - Which titty?
- ..or this titty?
- Which titty? - This titty
or this titty? - Ouistiti...
- Which titty? - Which titty will make
you smile? - Which titty?
It does make you smile,
just saying, "Which titty?"
If you stretch your face
to say "ti-ti".
- Titty. - Titty.
- As you do to say cheese.
- Little titty, big titty.
Exactly.
And other languages, of course,
have other words, or used to.
I don't think it... But people
Blue Steel now, don't they?
- They Blue Steel it. They don't...
- Well, there is that, unfortunately.
But do you know
of any other countries' words?
- Yes, the Danish... - Yes?
Yeah, what? Yeah?
They say "orange".
Well, they don't say the word orange,
do they?
Well, I don't know what it is,
but I remember someone...
It's the Danish for orange.
Do we have Danes in the audience?
- There's one. - Oh. - You're Danish?
It sounds like apple, doesn't it?
Say, if you could...
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Appelsin. - Yeah,
there we go. - AISLING: Appelsin?
A pussy?
- Appelsin. - Where titty, a pussy?
- Which titty? A pussy. - A pussy.
- This is... Europe is filth!
- Europe is filthy.
And in various other languages,
we have Serbian,
- I don't suppose anyone. Well...
- I don't think they smile in Serbia.
LAUGHTER
Do we have any Slavs in the audience?
No, we don't.
"Little bird" in Serbian is ptica.
Tee-chee-tsa.
- Tee-chee-tsa. - It might be the same
in Russian, I don't know.
- Iticheetza!
- LAUGHTER
Iticheetza! Iticheetza!
Iticheetza!
Honestly. Korean you might get,
cos it's their favourite thing.
- Eating dogs.
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Kimchi.
- Kimchi. - Nuclear. - Kimchi, yeah.
- Kimchi.
They love their kimchi.
Argentina and some other
Latin countries
is actually an English word they say.
Or Scottish.
A Gaelic word, I should say.
'Usquebaugh' means whisky.
- Usquebaugh? - Yeah, whisky.
- Or water of life, isn't it?
- Usquebaugh.
Ah, usquebaugh is the same in Irish,
in Gaelic as well.
Except you put an 'e' in it
when you make it English.
No, we don't put an 'e' in it,
because that's really...
LAUGHTER
They did for one 48-hour period,
yeah.
Bulgarian is... We don't have any
Bulgars in the audience, I'm sure?
- There's one! - A Bulgar!
- You're joking, really?
Is that what you say, a Bulgar?
You don't say you're a Bulgar?
Bulgarian?
- AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am Bulgarian.
- And what would you say if...?
- We say "zele". - Yes! Zele.
Which means?
- Cabbage. - Cabbage, yes. - Cabbage.
Good, very good.
The sad thing is that
they've tended to die out.
Not because people do Blue Steel,
as you were saying,
but because the Americanisms
and British even,
they say "cheese" or "smile".
People go "hmmm"
and they just do it.
Isn't it sad? People saying smile,
how awful.
No, I didn't...
I always wondered why
in old photographs,
like early 1800s and stuff,
they were never smiling,
and it's because the exposure
was two, three hours long,
- so you can't physically... - Wrong!
- Oh, is that wrong?
Yes, but I'm glad you said it,
because we were just going to
come to that very thing.
You're an absolute natural
for this show!
No, it is a common misapprehension.
By 1845,
in the early daguerreotypes,
it was only a few seconds,
the exposure. One reason is...
At least five of them
look like they're dead.
Well, they are regarded as serious.
If you look at portraits in oils,
you know, paintings,
Reynolds, Gainsborough and so on,
they don't smile. No.
The Mona Lisa smile? That one.
Exactly, her enigmatic smile,
it's what makes her a unique...
That's very good, Aisling.
The lady on the far right there,
she was very good in
the Wizard of Oz, wasn't she?
- Terrifying. - She was, yeah.
To be honest, I wouldn't
be smiling if my parents
- had dressed me up like that
for a photograph. - I know, no.
But the word they said instead of
"cheese" turned out to be "prunes".
To make them look serious -
prunes, prunes. Prunes...
But anyway, what colour is a mirror?
Ah! Now, this is going to be
a trick. Come on, Danny.
Is it the colour of whatever
is standing in front of it?
No, you fool!
It's perfectly reasonable.
LAUGHTER
It's a perfectly
reasonable thing to say.
It would certainly reflect back
the colour of... It's just glass!
It's like a rainbow
because it's glass
and it is the accumulation
of light and...
and all of the colours
in a rainbow, but...
This sounds madder, but I feel
like I am right, but...
"Oh, go to bed!"
Silver.
KLAXON BLARES
Silver is not a colour.
- Silver isn't a colour. - Are mirrors
made of sand, aren't they?
Well, they are made of glass,
which is made of sand,
and the silvered backing,
whatever that might be that is used.
This silvery foil thing. What?
The what backing?! Silvered...
It's silver, but its colour isn't
silver, silver isn't a colour
because you can't make a silver
colour on a computer using...
Just because it's not on your
computer...! Silver is not colour.
- It's glass...
- No? - Silver is not colour, no.
- Oh, I love this show!
- It is good, isn't it?
It's all of the colours, it's like
when the sun goes through a raindrop
and a rainbow comes out cos...
And all the colours...
Yes, you're absolutely
on the right lines.
I mean, anything you see
as a coloured object...
Like a tomato looks red
because it takes in all
the colours of white light,
- all the colours in there, EXCEPT
red. And therefore, the red... - What?!
- Therefore, the red reflects back.
- But red... Sorry.
The red is in there
with all the others,
but can't get through, as it were,
and comes out...
- Don't let him into your mind.
- It's like Scientology, the whole...
- No, that's how it works. So, a
mirror... - How do Skittles work, then?
Sorry?
LAUGHTER
Taste the rainbow!
A mirror takes in all the colours,
but there is one colour
which slightly can't get in
- and you can only see that all mirrors
have a slight tinge of this... - Green?
- A vampire. Oh. - Yes, green!
Literally, I was just going
to list the colours.
Green is right
and you can see it there.
That is not coloured glass
of any kind.
You see it best in the effect of
a hall of mirrors - mirror on
mirror on mirror - so you're seeing
lots of mirrors together,
you see this tinge,
that gets stronger and stronger,
of green.
Now, that is just pure glass
and pure mirror effect,
but it seems green to us.
So if you are looking slightly
green in the morning,
you can blame it on the mirror.
Now, why might blocking the middle
of a fire exit be a good thing?
♪ Mulberry bush. ♪
Cos it stops the fire
from getting out.
"Hold on!"
So, if everyone goes
for the fire exit at the same time,
they would cause...
It would get blocked
by the mass of people,
whereas if you had two lanes,
it's like motorway traffic.
- If you block the middle, they would
go out sort of individually. - Yes!
- And it would be better. - You
are on the money, absolutely right.
It's an extraordinary thing.
- APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH
- We are a team!
They started it with ants.
I mean, they didn't start a fire,
but they had a single exit for ants
and they blocked
the middle of it
and they found that the ants
were slower,
but they all got out more quickly
and it seems to work with humans too,
probably for exactly
the reasons you say.
Is that why they do those individual
doors in airports? Maybe it is, yes.
Those ones where it says,
"Keep moving,"
as you walk towards
the plate glass.
But with aeroplanes, in order to have
a certificate of air worthiness,
amongst other things like making
sure the wings don't fall off,
you have to be able to evacuate
in 90 seconds.
No way! Because that is
the speed at which...
LAUGHTER
When you say...
Stephen, when you say "evacuate",
it depends what they say
over the tannoy.
90 seconds is how long it would take
a fire to engulf.
- That's helping(!) - She is, yeah.
- "Get off!"
When you do evacuate,
it's difficult to test, of course,
whether you can get people off.
- How do you motivate them to get
off quickly enough? - Do they pay them?
- Pay them.
- So is it like the last guy off...?
They basically give them
a monetary incentive
to get off as fast as possible.
They get a refund.
Well, no,
this is in the test situation,
you haven't bought a ticket,
you've been asked to test...
- Oh, tests! - The tests. "Get out in
90 seconds, I'll give you 20 quid."
Are you saying you would be
on a plane, it would be on fire
and they go, "We'll give you £20
if you get off,"
and you go, "Make it 30..."
LAUGHTER
"I'm holding out for more, love. It
is getting warm, but it's worth it.
- "They'll put the price up."
- Yeah, I'll be the last off.
So, now it's time to run screaming
into the disaster zone
that we call General Ignorance.
So, fingers on buzzers,
if you please.
It's Midsummer in the UK.
To the nearest hour,
what time does day become night?
About 10,
gets up again around 4?
KLAXON BLARES
So I was going to say 1!
You were going to say 1?!
KLAXON BLARES
You'll take that one!
I'll take that one!
Is it... I'm only saying this,
there is no rationale at all,
but is it noon? It's always
something weird on this show
and you go, "Oh, no, it's actually
night-time in the middle of the day.
"You're all idiots,
you've been doing it wrong."
In Midsummer,
there is no night in Britain.
There's no night.
There's no night, Danny.
LAUGHTER
It's constant twilight.
Oh, bollocks. It gets dark.
- Constant Twilight sounds like
a really good indie album. - It does!
Yeah, even as far south as Jersey,
twilight lasts between June 8th
and July 4th, without night.
And how do you define twilight?
Well, it's defined as the time
after the sun goes down, but...
When the vampires
and werewolves fight!
Who will she choose...
while constantly looking
like she has just farted?
- How? - In the Twilight films.
- You know Kirsten?
- She looks as if she has just farted
the whole time. - Shall I?
You look like you could
be one of the vampires.
"Oh, my God, am I going to pick you?
"You're so cold. Can I touch you?
Are you even real?"
That's exactly the whole movie.
The whole movie is her choice
between a half animal and a zombie.
So Twilight lasts about...
lasts about six hours
if you watch all three of them.
Twilight is defined as the time after
the sun goes beneath the horizon
but while there is still light
caused by the reflection
of the sun's rays
from the atmosphere.
During summer nights,
even at 2am,
there is still a little
bit of light from the sun.
When is the best time to
charge your mobile phone?
At night.
Well, good. Yeah, it might be.
Any other thoughts?
Oh, really?
I thought that would go off!
- You can't do it on Midsummer. - No.
"There is no night, you fool!"
When it's completely
almost run out of battery.
- KLAXON BLARES
Oh! - Oh!
If you've got an iPhone,
it's every 15 minutes.
LAUGHTER
It used to be the case
with an old phone.
Nokia would go on for weeks.
Yeah! Look at that beauty.
Bring 'em back!
That's like one of the most modern,
"Oh, it's not like it was
in the old days."
These phones of that generation
used what sort of batteries?
- Lithium? - Lithium.
- No, nickel is the point.
And if you charged it
when it was 20% full,
it wouldn't remember the rest of it,
as it were,
it was called memory problem.
So, you had to drain them.
You had to use them completely,
so that it would charge
the whole battery.
But we use lithium now
and that isn't a problem any more.
But here's a great thing
about batteries,
and I'm going to demonstrate this
to you,
and I think it'll be
rather interesting.
We're just talking about
ordinary AA batteries here,
whether or not they're charged or...
They have a thumb thing on them
now, don't they?
- I would, I would use...
- Well, they did the thumb thing,
but they've got rid of that,
haven't they?
They never quite worked.
It was supposed to shine a...
go green or something.
Yeah, yeah, go green
and there was like a press thing.
I would attach it
to my nipple clamps
and see if it gives me a buzz
that I need.
Here are two batteries.
How can you tell which one is flat,
as it were,
which one is drained of power
and which one is still powerful?
Try it on you.
- Some magnetic thing.
- It's nothing to do with magnetism.
I'm going to slip them through
these copper sleeves
so that they're both facing
the right direction
and should both fall
at the same time.
So you can count me down from
three, two, one and drop, all right?
The whole audience can join in.
ALL: Three, two, one, drop!
All right, let's have a look at that.
In theory, an empty battery
should bounce more.
- AUDIENCE MURMURS
- Oh!
And that is the case that this
is the one which has been drained.
It's to do with the gel
inside the batteries.
And when they're drained,
it's hardened and so it bounces more.
Should we do an apology now for
people breaking their mobile phones?
Presumably someone is at home going,
"Is this charged?"
- You could try it with that.
- Seems all right.
There you are, isn't that good?
- Couldn't you just buy new batteries?
- LAUGHTER
I just didn't think of that.
Right. Yes, the best time
to charge your phone
is any time you can find
a power socket.
All of which brings us charging
towards a battery
of very extraordinary scores,
which will amaze and astonish you.
Not.
So, in first place,
what an extraordinary debut,
Danny Bhoy on ten points.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In second place,
half as good, but still brilliant,
five points to Jimmy Carr.
I'm happy with that.
I'll take that all day.
- CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- Five?!
That's good.
In third place, with -7,
it's Aisling Bea.
- CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- Yeah!
Who does that leave us, I wonder?
Well...
-44 for Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well, that's all from Aisling, Jimmy,
Danny, Alan and me.
And I leave you with these wise words
from Pulitzer Prize winner,
Anna Quindlen.
"Life is not so much about beginnings
and endings
"as it is about going on and on
and on.
"It's about muddling through
the middle,"
which I hope we've done this evening.
Good night.