QI (2003–…): Season 17, Episode 11 - Quaffing - full transcript

*Q I *

*Q I *
Season 17 Episode 11

Episode Title:
"QUAFFING"

CHEERING

Good evening.

Welcome to QI,

where tonight we are quenching
our thirst at the bar

with a show
all about "quaffing".

Chin-chin, it's Jo Brand.

APPLAUSE

Mine's a large one.
Phill Jupitus.



APPLAUSE

HE MOUTHS

Three sheets to the wind,
it's Prue Leith.

APPLAUSE

And would you mind stepping
out of the vehicle please, sir,

it's Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

Right, the buzzers are on the house,
so what can I get you?

Prue goes...

♪ Pina coladas. ♪

Phill goes...

♪ Tequila! ♪

Jo goes...

♪ My milkshake brings all the
boys to the yard...



♪ It's better than yours. ♪

And Alan goes...

♪ I am a cider drinker

♪ It soothes all me
troubles away

♪ Ooh aargh, ooh argh, aay

♪ Ooh aargh, ooh argh, aay. ♪

Right.
When might it be a good idea

to order 300 gin and tonics?

Tuesday.

It's a bit late in the week,
frankly, to be doing it.

Let's think it through,
what is in gin and tonic?

Quinine. Quinine is in...
And why might you want quinine?

Isn't it good for stopping
mosquitos biting you?

No, it doesn't stop
mosquitos biting you,

but it used to be
the treatment for...?

Malaria. For malaria, yeah.
So, the problem is that today's

tonic contains very little,
so in order for it to be effective,

you would really have to drink 300
gin and tonics every single day.

I accept that prescription.

I mean, don't try it,
cos too much quinine

is unbelievably bad
for you.

You can get abnormal heart rhythms,
you can get double vision.

I think that's the gin, actually,
if I'm honest with you.

Like I haven't got an abnormal
heart rhythm already!

HE LAUGHS

Seriously,
it's like a jazz band.

I don't even know what
quinine is, do you?

It comes from the bark
of the cinchona tree.

Oh.

- So the... Thank you, darling.
- That's quite interesting.

I'm working my arse off here,
so thank you for that.

So, the Quechua
people,

who were the indigenous people
of South America,

they knew about
it long before

- the Europeans.
- Because they lived there.

- Because they lived there, exactly.
- The Europeans are at a massive

disadvantage with the fauna
of South America.

- Yeah.
- And the flora.

But the really sad
thing is, that it was the Europeans

who brought malaria to them.
So the malaria did not exist.

No! Oh, and now we have to go there
to catch it.

Very, very odd, isn't it?

So, what, do you get it out of the
bark and,

- what, sort of smoke it?
- Yeah. So, you have to distil it.

- You've to dstil it from the bark.
- Distil it from the bark.

Boil it up and it drips out,
or how do you do that even?

Well, it's a very long chemical
process and it was first done

in 1820
by two French scientists.

But it changed the face of the
world. Why might that be?

You can just go to more
horrible places.

Well, you could go to places that
you wanted to colonise.

Paint the whole map pink.

Is exactly right, Prue,
you could suddenly go to India

and parts of Africa.
Give them gonorrhoea instead.

Yeah.

Give us your land, we'll give you
an itch in an uncomfortable place.

There you go.

But the pre-quinine
malaria treatments,

they were just as bizarre as they
were desperate, so I love this one.

In medieval Europe, it was
thought that it would work

if you were thrown headfirst
into a bush and if you got out

quickly enough to leave the fever
behind, that would sort you out.

God, if someone landed in my bush
trying to get rid of malaria,

I'd be right pissed off!

You're not leaving your fevers
there!

Get out! Get out! Get out of it!

Also, eat an onion with "amen"
written on it.

Is it good for you, Prue, to eat a
raw onion? I wouldn't have thought.

My mother used to have onion
sandwiches, raw onion sandwiches.

White bread, lots of butter,
raw onions. It's delicious.

Tell her to put some cheese in.
Mmm, lovely.

Right, that's your G&T,
now time for some shots.

So, you've all got a shot glass
of something beside you.

So, Alan, having a look at yours,
what do you think it might be?

- Do you want me to drink it?
- You can have a taste, yes, have a taste.

- A taste? I mean is it,
- Mm-hm.

If I drank it all, would I die?

No, I am not allowed
to kill you.

It sounds to me
like you've said that before.

I have to say, the contract this
year has been particularly tricky

to negotiate.

What does it taste of?

You see, I just drank that,
I've got no idea what it is.

Any thoughts of what it tastes of?
And it tastes... I'm getting...

I'm getting gravel from the A167.
Inside of a wardrobe that hasn't

- been opened for a couple of years.
- It's as close as we can get to

what the Gladiators used to drink.

So, they quaffed a drink which was
made from ash, vinegar

and water, in order to help...

Are you enjoying it more
or less now?

Basically, what you're drinking
there is a burnt down chip shop.

APPLAUSE

Yeah, I'm getting saveloys.

What we know is that Gladiators
were mostly vegetarian,

they had a diet of lots of lentils
and lots of beans.

We know this from QI's great
friend Pliny The Elder.

I have to say, things he wrote,
we have to take them

with a little bit of a pinch
of salt, because he also said

"Drinking bulls' blood cures snake
bites and turnips provoke lust."

- I can't argue with that.
- No.

These are kind of early energy
drinks and the nearest

we can find to the kind of ash thing
is activated charcoal shots.

And people do drink them now, and
adherents say that it's fantastic

for, I don't know, hangovers
and increasing your energy.

I have to warn you that it can
cause constipation

- and make your poo black.
- No change there.

OK, so a little bit of ash for you.

- Let's come onto Phill.
- Me?

So, charioteers.

This, I'm straight away malt vinegar,
right out of the traps.

- OK.
- So malt vinegar.

PRUE LAUGHS

It tastes like watered-down
malt vinegar,

but I'm getting a bit of a salty
back end on it.

Yeah, so, well...

You've said that before
as well!

Had we been able to do this
properly,

a salty back end is exactly what's
missing, because what they drank

was indeed vinegar, which had been
watered down, but it also had dung

- in it, which would be...
- LAUGHTER

...would be your salted down back
end, right there.

So, what is in...

This is really, this is just posca,
which is vinegar and water.

It would have lots of good calories
in it, it would've been

a perfectly healthy thing, good for
your gut and so on.

Even Nero, who fancied himself
as a charioteer,

he swore by a good old draft of pig
dung and vinegar

to help you with your recovery.

Did you like it?

No. No.

Right,
Jo, let's have a go with you.

It looks like liquid
hopelessness to me.

Do you like it?
It tastes like ginger beer.

It is just ginger,
my darling, it's a stimulant.

Ginger, wherever it's been
available, has been used,

- has it not, as a...? As a medicine.
- As a medicine.

Here is the thing,
if you drank that,

how would you feel about drinking
from a toilet boil?

Love it!

Well, one of the weirdest
things about drinking ginger

is apparently it suppresses
feelings of disgust.

So, they did a study in 2019 in the
Journal of the American

Psychological Association.

Maybe I'll have sex
with my husband tonight.

You see your wife having
a ginger ale before bed.

Oh, I see, I understand.

I'll just get my bag.

So, mildly disgusting things,
like snot in a napkin or something,

you would feel, yeah, "ugh"...
Have that on some toast.

If you have that...
if you have the ginger first,

apparently you don't
feel as disgusted.

Somehow the ginger
suppresses the disgust.

I quite like the concept of snot
on a napkin, though.

That sounds like an upmarket
restaurant to me.

It's like a cocktail, isn't it?
Can I have a Snot On A Napkin?

- Right, Prue, let's have a go.
- You'd better have a ginger ale first.

What can you smell?

She gave it a sniff, did you see
that? Professional. Yes.

I have no idea what this is,
but I have drunk it before.

It's a modern energy drink.
You don't like the taste of it?

Well, it's a bit sweet,
what is it made of?

Crack.

It's sugar and caffeine
and something called taurine,

which is supposed to be even more
stimulating than caffeine.

- They're pretty much all...
- So if I have it all, I'll be jumping?

High as a kite, darling,
high as a kite.

So, these are all energy
drinks from a long time ago.

This is the most modern one that
we've come to here.

The money made by it is more
than the fragrance

and cannabis market combined.
It is worth an absolute fortune.

And since it's absolutely stuffed
full of sugar... Yeah.

...all it's doing is
making you fat.

Your point being?

Right, drinks away, please.

Time to go from quaffing to
scoffing,

but we are staying with
the letter Q.

Can you name a cereal crop that
begins with a Q?

♪ Pina colada. ♪

Yes?

Quaker Oats.

Quaker Oats is as close as we were
able to find ourselves,

you are exactly right,
you get extra points.

APPLAUSE

It's not quinoa, because I think
quinoa isn't a grass.

- It is not a grain, it's a seed.
- It's a seed. - A mammal.

- It's a seed. Yeah. As we now know.
- A seed, it's a seed.

It's a seed, so strictly speaking
it cannot be classified as a cereal.

And in fact, you know, it's good
news for the Ashkenazi Jews,

for example, they're not
allowed to eat grains over Passover,

- whereas they can eat quinoa.
- Bad luck to them, it tastes shit.

I always think it's one of those
foods that you need to add

actual food to it to
make it

- taste of anything.
- Yeah, like a cake.

Yeah.

Have you had quinoa?

- Of course I've had quinoa.
- Of course he has.

- Do you like it?
- No.

It's annoying on your plate,
it's annoying in your mouth.

It's irritating stuff.

- Have you cooked with it, Prue?
- Yeah, of course I've cooked with it.

- Do you like it?
- Yeah, I like it,

but I agree with you,
it needs help.

Here's the thing about quinoa,
it's a super food, it contains

a lot more protein than most plants,
plenty of iron, high in vitamin E.

It also has all ten amino acids
needed to support human life.

I mean, I say this,

in fairness, Haribo contains nine
of the...

- ...so-called building blocks.
- I really want to believe that.

That is true.

Yeah, Haribo has nine
of the

- building blocks of life.
- Right.

A Haribo a day keeps
the doctor away.

Now, seeing as we have
Prue on the panel, I thought

I should test your baking skills,
the rest of you,

so we're going to make some
Danish Lemon Quaffles.

And Prue, I'm going
to ask you to judge, please.

So, everybody bring out your tray
with your ingredients.

So, Prue, that is the instructions.

Have you made
Danish Lemon Quaffles before, Prue?

- LAUGHING: I don't think they exist.
- Don't be ridiculous!

OK, here we go. Right, you've got
one egg, one half cup of buttermilk,

five teaspoons of baking soda,
one half teaspoon of vanilla,

one cup of lemon juice, one cup and
a quarter of sugar, seven eighths

of a cup of all-purpose flour and
eight tablespoons of melted butter.

Prue, what are the instructions,
please?

All right, in a small bowl,
beat the egg until foamy.

Do you mean like the egg's foamy,
or until you're foamy?

And now you've got to beat it up.

Until it's foamy.

Come on, foam-up, you bastard!

- That looks foamy, what do you reckon?
- Is that foamy?

- OK, now.
- Yeah? All right.

Put it in a pan
and get the beans warmed up.

No, no.

Add the buttermilk
and vanilla.

- Which one's the buttermilk?
- That big white one.

- It's gloopy.
- And blend it well.

- Yeah. So, and the vanilla, darling.
- Is that the vanilla? Yeah.

- That's vanilla.
- I was hoping that was a shot

of Glenfiddich.

Other whiskies are available.

- Sandi. Can I lick the bowl, Sandi?
- Yeah?

Not at the minute,
we've got a bit more work to do.

Add the baking soda
one teaspoon at a time,

sprinkling it and beating until the
mixture is smooth

and the consistency of light cream.

Alan, you can do this.
Right, and beating...

Sandi, you should keep that other
show where it belongs.

APPLAUSE

- Where is your teaspoon?
- We know what you need.

Oh, thank you.

There we go,
sprinkling it in.

- How much baking soda? The whole lot?
- All of it.

- Let's get...
- OK.

- That's cheating.
- Thankfully, there's some skills

I had as a young man
that have come in useful.

- OK.
- I worked in a baker's!

Listen. Right.

- Now what? All right.
- I used to charge a fiver for this.

Now...

APPLAUSE

You had to have
the right money.

Oh, there was
a queue round the block, Alan.

- Yeah, OK, so done that.
- Yeah.

Pour the mixture
into the beaker.

- Oh, a beaker, is it?
- Mmm.

- Mm.
- OK. Pour it in there.

ALAN SLURPS

Aaargh!

"We don't want to go in a beaker!"

"Go in the beaker!
Go in the beaker!"

"No, we want to be back in our
individual bowls!"

- OK. Do you ever cook with your children?
- Yeah, frequently!

They like the process,
but they won't eat any of it.

OK. Add the lemon juice, all at
once, and blend into the mixture.

Blend, how do you... Oh, no,
I've spilt some in the eggcup!

Oh!

Argh!

APPLAUSE

That worked a treat.

- Oh, that was great.
- That was fab, wasn't it?

- That was really good. It was fab.
- Aah... What, it's not real food?

- No, darling.
- This is bullshit!

APPLAUSE

Phill, Phill, you've still
got a cup of sugar!

Anybody know
why that happened?

Something to do with the acid.

I think it happened because Prue
doesn't know how to cook.

So, the lemon juice is acid
and it mixes with the baking powder,

which is a carbonate,
and that is what happens.

Obviously, we invented
Danish Lemon Quaffles,

because it begins with a Q.

Can I recommend to you
a Penn & Teller book called

How To Play With Your Food,
and the recipe's in there,

it's called Swedish Lemon Angels.

But what a great thing to
make with your kids.

And wasn't Prue fantastic getting
out the instructions there?

APPLAUSE

Baking on television,
it'll never catch on.

Now for a question on quips.

Phill, how many jokes would you
exchange for this person?

Well, it's my child, so, er...

I've got to be honest,
it's a buyer's market.

- So, this is your daughter, Emily.
- Yeah.

And Emily is now one of the Elves
here, she works for us on QI.

But we learnt
this wonderful thing,

between the 5th and the 2nd century
BC in Athens,

comedians were known as "parasitos".
Literally means?

- We still are.
- Which literally means parasites.

So, spongers.

And they made a living by turning up
at dinner parties uninvited

and they would exchange
jokes for food.

And they had their own joke books
and kept them updated.

That's why we're such brilliant comics.
Look at the size of us.

- One or two dinners.
- Yeah.

So, there was a parasitos
called Saturio,

and he kept
a whole chest

full of joke books at
home and he offered

up... 600 of his quips, his jokes,
as a dowry for his daughter.

So we thought, "Well, let's extend
this and let's have

"your daughter as a hostage and see
how many jokes you would exchange."

- OK.
- So, if you can make the audience laugh,

I will release her.

OK. A salesman knocks
on the door of a house.

- KNOCKS ON DESK
- And the door opens and there's

a five-year-old child standing there
with a cigar

and a balloon of brandy.

And the salesman looks at the little
boy and goes, "Hello, little boy."

He goes, "All right?"

And he goes,
"Are your mum and dad in?"

And he goes,
"Does it look like they are?"

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

OK, release the child.

So, the ancient Greeks had
stand-up comedy nights,

but a lot of the time only other
comedians would attend.

There was a group in...

What's the one on the right
doing to the one on the right?

I think he... I believe that's the
beginning of improv.

The one on the left's not
keen on it. No.

Second left's going,
"Look at him! Look at him!"

"Look at him or I will torch you!"

Anyway, there used to be a thing
called the Group of 60,

and they were Athenian wits who got
together and exchanged jokes.

And so one of the ways you would
tell a joke in Athens,

you would say, "The 60 said,"
and so on.

But the very first joke book that
Europe ever had was published by?

Anybody have a guess? We are
talking in the mid 1400s.

Ladybird. Well...

The Vatican published. Oh.
It was utterly obscene.

They had. What?! They had a sort of
joke club called the Bugiale,

it was literally a fib factory.

There was a papal secretary called
Poggio Bracciolini and he kept

a record of all these jokes, and
he published it, 273 puns and jokes,

mostly the usual stuff, farts,
erections, obesity...

Rubbish at reading, isn't he? Look
at him. Yeah. Yeah.

"Excuse me, is that Athena?

"The frame of my picture has
fallen on my head."

Right, now, what was the most
exciting diet in history?

I reckon in the Siege of Paris.

Oh! They ate the zoo animals.
They did, darling, 1870?

There were recipes for elephant.
They ate the elephant,

there were recipes for his trunk
and his, er, whatever you call it.

Yeah. Cock.

I believe some roosters were
eaten as well.

And...

So that is an interesting one,
but it's possibly not the most...

Exciting... exciting diet.

The end of the 19th and indeed
the beginning of the 20th century,

there were professional fasters.

They were called "hunger artists",

and these were people who
would, in public, see who could

fast for the longest.
I'd love to do that, wouldn't you?

Here, if we all stopped eating now,

if we, like, didn't have any food,
the five of us. Yeah.

Would me and Jo last longer,
because we're fat?

How dare you?!

APPLAUSE

I'll point out I'm much
heavier than Jo.

I'd slaughter her in a fasting
competition.

It's not a competition, but do...
Are these reserves, or is it...?

Yes, of course we would last longer.
Do you? Yeah. Don't you think?

I don't know that's necessarily
true. I think it depends on

your metabolism, and on your ability
to survive. Yeah.

So, how long do you think
you would last?

Because if you could
last for a very long time,

you could make thousands and
thousands of pounds. A year.

There was a guy called
Giovanni Succi,

he was paid more than a quarter
of a million pounds back in 1890.

He lasted 40 days on stage
in London.

And afterwards he had missed eating
so much,

he went on to found Pringles.

What we now reckon is,
it doesn't matter about your initial

body weight, you'd probably last
8 to 12 weeks. OK.

All of us would be about the same.
But this fad, it started in 1880,

there was a doctor called
Henry Tanner, and he bet that

he could live on water for 40 days
and he made an absolute fortune

from people just coming to stare at
him. There was a woman called

Mollie Fancher, she was also known
as The Brooklyn Enigma.

And she claimed she had psychic
abilities due to starvation.

And she was challenged to do
it for 40 days with

round-the-clock observation
by doctors, but she said,

"The doctors are bound to be male,
I'm not going to do it,

"because, you know, modesty would
prevent me from doing this."

The truth is, on the whole, it was
discovered people had been

secretly eating.

Anybody remember the last one in
sort of in popular and modern times?

Oh, it's David Blaine. David Blaine.
Yeah. He did 44 days in the box.

I went to see him. Did you go and
see him? When I went

it was quite late at night and
people were throwing eggs at him,

which I thought was rude.

How long would you last if you
just... without water, though?

Not anywhere near as long, I mean...
Three days?

Yeah, you must have some
hydration of some kind.

There's a rule of three, you can
survive three hours without shelter,

you can survive three days without
water and three weeks without food,

is the sort of rule of three.
What was the first one?

You can survive three hours
without shelter.

There's cricket matches
longer than that.

I mean, the one that is
extraordinary

is the breatharian diet.

Does anybody know what the
breatharian diet is?

Is it breathing air? Just that.

Literally just that.

They claim to live purely off
light and air.

I would guess they're the only
people who can bore vegans

at dinner parties.

What's the least amount of food
anything can survive on?

Any human? No, anything.

A living being.

2% of your body weight or something?
2% of your body weight?

I mean, we need at least 1,200
calories, don't we, human beings?

Only 1,200? That's three muffins.

A team from the University
of Southern California has recently

discovered microbes that genuinely
seem to survive on almost nothing.

This is an astonishing story.

So, the sediments
of the Pacific Ocean,

they have been found living there,
and based on how much oxygen

has depleted over the ages,
researchers propose that they

may have been alive
for 75 million years.

They've certainly been alive for an
extraordinarily long period of time.

They don't do anything
apart from really, really slowly

metabolising really, really small
amounts of food.

What is extraordinary,
so, say they've been alive

for 75 million years, that time,
if they can understand time,

will have passed really quickly
for them, because an animal's

ability to perceive time is linked
to the speed of its metabolism.

So, a fly has a very, very fast
metabolism,

so signals go to the brain
incredibly quickly.

So a newspaper coming at it seems
to move rather slowly,

and that means that the fly can get
away much more quickly.

And you never can swot them. You've
got a couple of 75-million-year-old

microbes at the bottom of the
Pacific going,

"Where have the dinosaurs gone?"
Yeah.

It is, it is that. They were here
ten minutes ago.

Also, are they not going,
"Well, he's evolved. She's evolved.

"They all evolved, he's gone on land
now, that one.

"Yet here we are, still at the
starting gate.

"What's going wrong with us?!"

Do you remember that comet?

Which one?

What about that asteroid?
That was a bang, wasn't it?

Oh, that was big, wasn't it?

Anyway, 75 million, isn't that
astonishing? Brilliant.

Right, now it's time for the round
that's guaranteed to make

Alan's stomach turn -
General Ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers, please.

What is the most expensive
liquid on Earth?

It's probably a wine.

Ah!

KLAXON BLARES

Oh. Yeah, anybody else?

Elvis's bathwater.

There's someone doing little
vials of Beatles... No!

Yeah, yeah, there is. Really?!
Go online, have a look.

And people are buying it?!
Little vials of bathwater.

Yeah, because when he died,
everybody went, "Oh, I know,

"save the bathwater."
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I thought he died on the toilet.

Yeah, that's much cheaper,
that water.

We think the answer is probably
racehorse semen.

There is an internet factoid that
says scorpion venom is

the most expensive liquid on Earth.
It is £30 million per gallon.

But here is the thing
about scientists,

they've worked out a new way
of breeding and milking scorpions.

It's brought the price right down.

Oh, yes.

Oh, they've ruined...
the market's crashed. I know!

You can now get a gallon of scorpion
venom for a mere £70,000.

"Now come on, Daisy,
put your stinger in the milker."

Yeah.

A gallon is a lot. It is a lot.
You can get a gallon of LSD

for £123,000. Where?!
It's on offer at Waitrose.

Chanel No 5, £20,000 per gallon.

Printer ink, £2,000 per gallon.

So that's... We're heading down the
prices here.

Holy shit! That is a racket,
isn't it?! That is a racket.

But the most expensive
liquid that we can find seems to be

racehorse semen.

So, for a mare to be serviced by
a famous thoroughbred called Galileo

would cost the owner about £540,000.

The average volume of a stallion's
ejaculation...

...is 65ml.

So, Galileo would have to ejaculate
70 times in order to

produce one gallon of semen,
and so his semen would be worth

almost £50 million per gallon.

It is the most expensive thing
we could find. Wow! Ooh. I know!

How much is a man's semen worth?

- Yours? A quid.
- Yeah.

What, a gallon?

In Poundland.

Horse semen is much more expensive
than printer ink, but even if

it was cheaper, it would probably
cause some kind of paper jam.

Now, what is traditional
marmalade made from?

Quinces? Oranges.

KLAXON BLARES

Prue had it right. What did you say?
Quince. It is.

So, etymologically speaking,

marmalade should be made
from quince.

Anybody know where we get
the word "marmalade" from?

Well, the myth is it was
"Marie est malade", isn't it? Yeah.

Mary Queen of Scots?
That Mary Queen of Scots supposedly

ate it when she was sick and it
was the French, "She is sick,"

and so they made the marmalade.
It's absolute nonsense.

It comes from an old word for
quince, it's Portuguese "marmelo".

Jo, why might you not want to be
a marmalade madam?

Cos I don't like fruit.

What do you reckon, marmalade madam?

You run a brothel and you get
paid in jam for your hookers.

Well, you don't run the brothel,
you are a prostitute.

It was a 17th, 18th century.

You have to make them
toast afterwards.

The young ladies of the night were
known as marmalade madams.

I used to live next to
a madam of a brothel,

and she used to tell me
which newsreaders used to come in.

AUDIENCE: Ooh!

I'm not telling you. "Ooh, yeah."

Did one of them just before he
finished go, "And finally...

No.

"This just in."

"And now showers." Um...

Oh, my God, I'm joining in!

Which brings us to the belly of the
beast - the scores.

Let's have a quick... Oh, this is
very good. In first place,

absolutely marmalising the
competition, with six points,

it's Phill!

APPLAUSE

Not a real quiz.
This is not a real quiz.

WHISTLES

In second place with two points,
it's Alan!

CHEERING

And in penultimate place,
making a fantastic debut,

with minus one, Prue!

CHEERING

But busting a gut,
yet still in last place,

with minus 13, Jo!

APPLAUSE

My thanks to Prue, Phill,
Jo and Alan.

And it's time, ladies
and gentlemen, please,

with this quaffing
quotation from Terry Pratchett.

"There are better
things in the world than alcohol.

"But alcohol sort of compensates
for not getting them."

Cheers!