QI (2003–…): Season 19, Episode 12 - Silly Season - full transcript
The silly season is here and Sandi Toksvig tests her guests Stephen K Amos, Ivo Graham, Holly Walsh and Alan Davies with some frivolous trivia questions.
This programme contains some
strong language and ADU humour
*Q I*
Season 19 Episode 12
Episode Title: "Sillyly season"
Aired on: January 28, 2022.
Good evening and welcome to Ql,
where it's Sillyly Season
with a silly sausage -
lvo Graham!
APPLAUSE
A silly so-and-so -
Hol Wah!
APPLAUSE
A silly mid on -
Stephen K Amos.
APPLAUSE
And a sumptuous seasoning
of Alan Davies.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
And their buzzers are all
extreme silly.
Ivo goes...
CARTOON RUNNl NG SOUND EFFECT
Oh, I like that.
Hol goes...
CARTOON ARROW TWANGS
Stephen goes...
CARTOON BULLET RICOCHETS
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Looney TunesíMerrie Melodies
by London Music Works & Evan jol
Woo!
It's Silly Season, so let's start
with some silly questions.
Now, we got these by feeding
hundreds of questions
taken from the Ql database,
which is called Blue Whale,
into an artificial intelligence
program'
and we asked the program to come up
with new questions
in the same style.
So this is artificial intelligence
QI questions.
First of al what happens if
a flamingo is your wife?
People are very judgey about it.
Flamingoist.
Flamingoist, exactly.
And people talk about animal
husbandry a lot,
but they don't talk about
birdwifery a lot.
If a flamingo is your wife...
Yeah?
...Probably the best option is
to dress up as an egg
so youtre guaranteed to get laid.
Here's a question for you, Alan.
What is the best way to get
a radiant
complexion of trousering?
Well, you need to emerge from
within the trouser, Sandi.
I tm not a massive fan of
the QI supercomputer...
No.
. .With these...
But the question that it asked
over and over again,
which I am extreme keen on,
is, how many legs does
the Queen have?
She has one of her own legs
and then the other one's a sort of
official leg.
Official leg. I reckon shets on
coasters, isntt she?
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
When you see her in all
those big gowns,
those official events, you never
see her walking.
She sort of glides, doesntt she?
Oh, I see what you mean.
I thought you meant she was on
some kind of a drinks mat.
You don't want her to Mark
your table!
So, it asked over and over again -
how many legs does the Queen have?
And then sudden announced,
"I'm naked."
And it ao answered one
of its own questions.
"How did the Romans?"
was the question.
And the answer was "Nobody knows".
THEY LAUGH
So there's an American research
scientist
called Janelle Shane, and she
programmed a similar
sort of neural network to read
existing Love Hearts slogans.
Do you remember Love Hearts? Oh,
yeah. Those little, sort of, sweets?
So they're usual fair tame.
But she reprogrammed the Al
to do it,
and this is what it came up with.
"Loving horn", "Buns, buns, buns,"
and "All hail the chicken".
I think they would sell
like hotcakes.
Next Valentine's Day,
all hail the chicken.
Yeah, right.
So, she has a point in doing this.
It's not just sort of a bit
of sillyliness.
Al still has lots of limitations...
lVO SCOFFS
Making Love Hearts -
thatts the main one.
One of the things we need to look at
is neural networks are prone
to something called catastrophic
forgetting,
so forgetting old information
as new data is fed in.
And Al ao has a problem
with giraffing.
Anybody know what giraffing
might be?
Sticking your neck out?
THEY LAUGH
Getting things off high shelves?
Yes. No. So it constant identifies
things as giraffes.
OK! Yeah. Or anything unusual.
Why might that be?
I don't know!
Because it's...
Because it's stupid?
No, what it is, it's trained online,
and online people tend to post
unusual things
more than they'll post a sort of
featureless rock or something.
They're much more like to post
a giraffe, for example.
I hate it when people post
featureless rocks.
Featureless rocks are
very irritating.
Put some features on that rock,
for Godts sake!
Al thinks that giraffes are more
common than they are
because people, on the whole, tend
to put up unusual things,
and therefore it thinks that
they are more usual.
I mean, if you live in, like,
Namibia or somewhere,
you might see a giraffe...
I mean, I don't know if giraffes
live in Namibia. Do they?
Yes. They do? Yeah. OK.
Let's say yes. Well, then, you're
going to see a lot. Go zebra.
You're going to see a lot of them.
It's just that when you live
in Lewisham,
you don't see that many of them.
Right.
The old Namibia - Lewisham Paradox.
I 'd love to see one in Lewisham!
I've always thought that
fox hunting...
It's fine, they ban it in the
country cos it's mean.
Be great in London. It'd be great to
have all those guys in the red coats
on a horse, racing through.
Alan TRUMPETS
Yeah.
You say that, but the foxes in
London tend to have attitude.
Yeah. Know what I mean? I tve come
back from a gig, midnight,
therets a fox in my driveway -
cos I tve got money, big house -
and as I go into my drive...
THEY LAUGH
...the fox is looking at me
like that,
ttWhat? Walk around me! Tt
Yeah. No, they do have attitude.
We've got a fox, it comes and
it sits at the back door,
basical saying to the dog, "Eh!"
We've got exactly that!
We've only just got a dog,
and it was sleeping on the mat
by the back door
cos it's cool there, and the fox
came and just looked at it.
What kind of dog did you get?
It's half spaniel, half husky.
Oh, sweet!
Spusky.
It's a husky... Haniel?
Does it...? Is that a thing?
It's very pretty.
No, it's quite unusual.
My daughter wanted a spaniel,
my son wanted a husky.
I love... By some miracle, we found
one with half each.
King Solomon...
You sewed two together and...
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, the front half is
the spaniel.
The back half is a husky.
See, that was your error.
Everybody knows they've got those
fluffy little arseholes
which get really clogged up.
You'd have been much better having
the front as the husky
and the back as the spaniel.
Youtve sewed your dogs the wrong
way round, Davies!
The other two halves are
in the freezer.
Hol, everybody does NOT know...
...does not know that they've got
a fluffy arsehole!
That's not a thing!
So, there is the thing now
of AI cameras,
and they're trained to follow the
ball in some football matches.
There was a match at I nverness
Caledonian Thistle
Football Club, and the Al
became fixated
on the linesman's bald head.
And the camera would do nothing...
THEY LAUGH
It would do nothing but focus on it.
OK, after all that Al nonsense,
here's a perfect sensible question
written by a real-life human.
What use is a penguin erector
at cucumber time?
Penguints fallen over?
Yes.
Why would the penguin fall over?
Is it because...?
Well, A, they're stupid.
And...
Come on, Stephen.
Youtre not making any friends.
Youtve got a big house and you
hate penguins!
If they look up at something...
Yes.
...they just sort of fall backwards,
don't they?
So, if an aeroplane flies
over Antarctica,
they all fall on their back.
No, it's a myth.
Oh, is it? It's a myth.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
But what I like is that this
doesn't stop newspapers
reporting on these things.
I n 2O18, a Scots newspaper's
reported that Edinburgh Zoo
denied employing a penguin
erector...
Right... following a rumour it
had hired staff
to pick up penguins who
had fallen over
after looking up at aeroplanes.
I believed that story!
I've told thousands of people
that's true!
None of them believed you.
Yeah.
Cos the reason, I thought it had
something to do with making sure
that the cucumber was straight.
Yeah.
Because we all love a straight
cucumber.
We all love... Speaking on behalf of
the nation again.
Who doesn't love a straight
cucumber?
No-one's ever expressed
a preference!
Literally no-one!
Basical, we're talking about silly
newspaper stories
and they take place in
the silly season,
which in lots of countries is known
as cucumber time.
Great. So, as well as being the
title of today's show,
silly season refers to...
You know that period in late summer
when people are on holiday
and there's not real much
news around?
And it first came out as an idea
in 1861.
Ao known as
giant gooseberry season.
So lots of outsized fruits get
stories about them.
The sightings of sea serpents
and mermaids,
showers of frogs.
And lots of countries call
it cucumber time.
So, in the Netherlands,
komkommertijd.
And in Poland and Germany
and so on.
And nobody real knows why.
Because cucumbers are funny.
Apart from when theytre bendy,
which isntt funny at all.
No, we don't like that.
I tll tell you whatts not funny -
a gooseberry.
Hets not impressed at all by his
own gooseberry, that chap.
That's not a gooseberry, is it?
It is, darling.
It's a giant gooseberry.
It's enormous!
The silly season thing has worked
completely on Alan,
because youtve said silly seasons
are times when silly stories
emerge, like a giant gooseberry.
And then five minutes later,
Alants gone,
ttThat gooseberryts enormous! Tt
But I'm slightly confused.
You're not coming across that way.
No..
Is it silly season because they're
not true stories?
Sometimes they're not true,
and sometimes they're just something
that might not normal
be thought of as newsworthy.
Right. OK. It's like all the
ttand finallystt
get the first slot.
Yeah.
So there have been some marvellous
silly season headlines
from recent years.
There was the "world oinksclusive"
we had.
Ooh! "The Mail saves the bacon
of the Tamworth two."
Oh, that's about pigs.
Do you remember the story?
They were called Butch and Sundance,
and they escaped from an abattoir
in Wishire...
Oh, no!
..In 1988.
Oh, my God! They swam a river and
went on the run for a week,
and 1OO journalists tracked it
across the country.
The ham swam to Tamworth?
The newspapers printed full-page
maps of the route
that they were taking,
and eventual The Dai Mail bought
them to save their bacon.
Right. They "escaped" from
an abattoir?
Abattoir, yeah. I mean, why didn't
the others follow?
Why just two of them? Did they lock
the door behind them?
"We've got to go now!
Alan SNORTS
" Now!
"Oink!
"Come on! Oink!
"All right, we'll just go -
the two of us.
"Oink!"
I think it went something like...
"A little something like this."
But it's a marvellous time
for publicists,
because if they've got a show
that they want to promote,
this is a great way to do it.
I n August, 2OO5, The Sun reported
that a constellation
that looked like Richard Wion
of One Foot in the Grave
could be seen by anyone with
a keen eye.
But it was actual publicity
for Summer Nights of Gold
on UKTV Gold.
Bet he couldntt believe it.
I love these ones where
they're like,
"Face of Jesus found in apple" -
or something like that,
or in a KFC bucket.
Do you know, I was one of those.
So...
Someone found your face?
No.
Sunday Sport ran a picture,
and a full-page story. A picture
of you in the Sunday Sport, Sandi?
Wel no. What it was...
Holly LAUGHS
...they claimed to have found my face
on Meghan Markle's knee.
There you are.
I've never been so pleased!
It's like the Turin Shroud all
over again. That's amazing!
Who's on her other knee?
I don't know who I'm sharing with.
Is it Alan?
Alan on the other knee.
Do you think we could escape and be
tracked across the country,
and then eventually bought
by The Daily Mail?
It does beg the question, Sandi,
if she were to kneel down... Yes.
...Would your face hurt?
I mean, that's literal, like, one
of the questions I've got in here.
If Meghan Markle were
to kneel down,
would Sandi Toksvig's face hurt?
I don't...
2O1O, The Sun made a real big
splash about a donkey
that was being made to parasail
by its Russian owner.
They were very upset,
and so they had a big campaign and
they decided to buy the donkey.
What I LOVE about this story is that
they did buy the donkey,
but they had been tricked
by the owner
and rescued the wrong donkey.
Oh, no! I know.
What are the chances that donkeys
don't all look exact alike?
August, 2OO1, there was a man called
Philip Peters,
and he returned to his
parked car, OK?
Now, he had parked it in
a perfect legal place.
But while he'd been gone,
contractors in West London
had winched his Peugeot off
the ground,
painted two yellow lines
underneath it,
put it back down again,
and he'd got a ticket.
Wow! Yeah.
We once did an episode of
Jonathan Creek,
and the scene was Jonathan Creek
gets a clamp off...
A very dramatic plot!
Very dramatic. I had to lie down and
fiddle about with keys.
Anyway, the prop department had put
a couple of fake yellow lines down,
and the traffic warden came along
and gave us a ticket. No! Yeah.
Did you get a ticket?
I parked a car and they painted
the lines underneath the car
and we got a ticket, even though
we pulled out,
took a photograph of our car,
took a photograph of the gap
where our wheels were,
and then we had to spend about
four months
going to a small claims court,
trying to clear our name.
So the same thing happened
to you as happened
literally in that...?
I didn't get winched up, because in
Lewisham they're quite lazy,
but they just painted round it.
I n Namibia, itts very different,
obviously. Did you have to pay in
the end? No, we won.
But the whole thing was
so stressful.
I should say, I didntt realise
we were meant
to bring our own stories.
I once swam up the Thames
with a couple of pigs
and it was very dramatic.
I had to take a day off work.
I don't think of pigs as swimmers,
do you?
No, in Swiss Family Robinson,
the pigs swim from the boat
to the shore.
Oh, in that case, I'm complete
sold on the story.
If it's in the Swiss
Fami Robinson.
Whatts the Swiss Family Robinson?
Um... How old are you?!
To be fair, it was written
in about 1838.
Now, in British tabloid slang,
what is an FMD?
An effing something.
Yeah.
FEAPON of mass destruction?
THEY GROAN
I magine a middle-aged man is reading
in bed and he turns to his wife
and he turns a page like that
in the tabloid and goes,
"Fuck me, Doris, have you
seen this?"
It's known as an FMD...
...in the tabloid press.
Now, which pointless C can be found
off the coast of Cornwall
Is it the sillyent C
in the word Scilly,
of Scilly Isles?
Darling, very good.
Oh, thank...
You got a bit overexcited.
I thought you were going to have
an asthma attack.
I was remembering a holiday
to Tresco in 2oo5.
Did you have fun?
I had a terrific time.
Wonderful.
I fell off a quad bike and cried.
Listened to a lot of James Blunt.
Great time.
So, the Scil lsles used to be
spe Silly, as in S-I - I-L-Y.
There was no C in it.
But the loca added the C
around the 157Os
because the word
"silly", at one time,
it meant sort of happy and blessed,
but it had become the word
that meant foolish,
and they didn't want to be
described as such,
so they put the letter C in.
The Scillonians, as the islanders
are called,
refer to the lsles of Scil,
or just Scil,
but not the Scil lsles.
I'm going to give a shout-out to
The Turks Head on St Mary's.
It's literal the best pub
I've ever been to
in my whole life - as far as
I can remember.
What were you doing in the Scillies?
I was making a documentary.
I recommend it. It's worth the trip.
I love the...
Have you been, darling, to
the Scil Isles? No. Stunning.
Absolute stunning.
Or, as they say, "scunning".
Yeah. According to legend,
King Arthur fought
his last battle and was buried
between Cornwall
and the lsles of Scil, in the
mythical Kingdom of Lyonesse.
Looks like him being taken from
The Turks Head, doesn't it?
"I - I've had a marvellous time."
Tt I will finish my documentary
tomorrow. Tt
The story goes that there used to be
land connecting Cornwall
and the lsles of Scil,
and then it was swallowed up by
the ocean in a single night,
about 1, OOO years ago.
And there are people who claim,
if you listen very careful,
you can still hear the bel
of Lyonesse's
14O submerged churches
ringing underwater.
What, so there's a whole island
that went under?
Wel it isn't true, darling. Water
has separated Cornwall
from the isles for longer
than Britain's
been separated from France. You
provide us with these little thrills
and then you take them away.
I know. Just steal it from you.
We were separated from France?
Yes, darling. So Britain and Europe
were linked
by a landmass, Doggerland...
What is this wizardry?!
Yes. Until it was flooded,
about seventh millennium BC.
Wow! I tell you something that can
be found in the area -
in the waters there - which I do
think is amazing,
is the salp, S-A-I-P.
Anybody heard of salp? I love this.
So it's hollow,
it's jelfish-like,
barrel-shaped, it's transparent,
it's a sea creature.
So it's a group of anima known
as a sea squirt,
but basical it's the size of about
the palm of your hand.
It occurs worldwide, but in Britain
it's most found in the water
around the Scillies and Cornwall
and so on.
Basical, it's a tube with an
opening at either end
and it moves by jet propuion,
so it pumps water through itseff
by contracting bands
of muscle that ring the body.
When they swim together, it's a bit
like synchronised swimming -
because each member of the chain
continues to function
as a separate individua but they
swim with their own rhythm,
but at a real steady pace
together.
We've got some film showing them
doing this. Oh, lovely.
It is. Do you not think that is
miraculous?
Oh, it's like a murmuration.
Yes!
Of used condoms.
THEY LAUGH
They're often described as
jelfish, these salps.
But the truth is that salps and
humans are actual
more close related to each other
than either is to a jelfish.
Because the salp larvae have
spinal cords.
Next time someonets having a go at
me for getting off with a salp,
I tll say, tt I tm more like this than
ttthatts like a jellyfish,
thank you very much.
Tt Itts NOT the same as getting off
with a jellyfish.
Tt Look at the spinal cord! Tt
Yeah.
It's on the young salp that have
spinal cords.
The adus never...
Oh, great!
You're going to get double bad
nicked for that one. Oh, God!
That's no way to view new species.
"I wonder what they'd be like
as a sexual partner?"
I magine if you had a hollow pet,
and then you could
keep things in it.
Is this your next dog, Alan?
I'm thinking of getting a salp.
Half husky, half salp.
Half salp!
Still got the lovely, fluffy hole
at the end, though?
THEY GROAN
They reproduce in aernating
generation
of clones and individua.
So a solitary mother gives birth,
asexual,
to thousands of young clones,
all female,
which then form chains.
And these chains are then
fertilised en masse
and they swim up to the surface
through clouds of sperm
deposited by chains of men.
I mean...
What?!
Not men. Males. Not men. Males.
Male salp.
To be absolutely clear.
Yeah, sorry. Ivo goes for a swim,
and then suddenly...
No!
..half salp, half Ivo.
"Here come the salp! Oh!"
Each female clone then has a
single female offspring
before turning into a male. I mean,
it's just very interesting.
There was rather a good Attenborough
thing on the other day
where all these fish gather and then
the sperm is awash...
There was sperm everywhere
in the sea
and they're all fertilising.
And then these giant
stingray-type fish
come in and eat the sperm.
And it only happens once a year
at a particularly high tide
when the moon's in the right place,
and they just happen to know
it's going to happen.
But you can understand it
once a year'
cos once you've had that one time,
you think...
Yeah. I mean, part of me thinks,
are they thinking,
"Yeah, it's the time when
we get the sperm!"
Or are they thinking,
"Oh, no, sperm day.
"And I have nothing to eat
the day before.
"Take something sweet with you,
because it's very, very..."
THEY LAUGH
Anyway, we should real love salps.
I am slight obsessed with them.
I do. I love them.
I already love them.
But the other reason is that they
help with carbon capture.
This is a weird thing
to think about.
Their faecal pellets are very large
and very heavy,
and they sink down to the seabed -
as indeed do the dead salps
themselves -
and take thousands of tonnes of
carbon with them.
Because apparent nothing
eats a dead salp.
Just when you thought salps couldn't
get any more sexy. I know.
Lots of things will eat a live salp.
Nobody wants to touch a dead one.
It's not a thing.
Goodness me.
Apart from Ivo. Getting off with
a salp and then watching it
race its own poo to the bottom
of the ocean.
What a treat!
So you're thinking you're going to
get off with it until it dies?
Yeah. Well, at least till it loses
its spine.
THEY LAUGH
"I had to leave her.
She was spineless."
"I saw her emerge from a cloud
of sperm and I thought,
"'That's my salp." ' Oh!
Now, these are five S words which
are going to come up on the screen.
Can you rank them in order
of sillyliness?
Who wants to have a go?
Alan, have a go.
Skunkpoople's the most
silly word there.
Skunkoople is very silly, yes.
I mean, I know what a shart is,
but I don't think I want to say
it out loud on television.
What is it? Use the expression
ttfaecal pellettt.
SANDl LAUGHS
When you, yeah, you think you're
going to be doing a fart,
but you actually faecally
pelletise your pants.
Yep.
It's a... It's a...
You PELLETISE?!
Tt I tve pelletised my pants again. Tt
"I suspect you've pelletised your
pants.
"You wanted to do a Skunkpoople,
"but you've Sectoried."
I don't fart, so I couldn't shart.
You don't fart? No.
I've only ever farted three times
in front of my husband.
But they were all sharts.
No, once I was very ill.
Second time, I sort of tripped
on the stairs
and it was out of shock.
And the third time, cos he was
telling me off in the car
and the timing was too perfect.
Right, let's have a quick look.
The correct order for
these words is...
Of sillyliness?
..Skunkoople...
That's the sillyliest, yeah.
..and Subvick are both silly.
Sectori and Suppect are not silly.
No.
And shart, its status as a word
is undetermined,
as to whether it's silly or not.
Because it sounded rude and might
amuse people for that reason,
rather than its sillyliness.
So these were researchers in 2O15
at the University of Alberta.
They were trying to establish
whether you could objective
measure the sillyliness of words,
and participants were shown various
computer-generated nonsense words
and asked to rate how humorous
they actual were.
And the resus were remarkab
consistent.
Made-up words tend to be measurab
funnier
the more unusual their combination
of letters.
So the less you expect to hear
certain letters together,
the more amused you're going
to be by them.
And once they figured
the pattern out,
researchers were able to predict
whether test subjects
would find a word funny with an
accuracy of about 92ofo.
Subvick and Skunkoople were
classified as silly,
along with Quingle, Probble,
Finglam and Wook.
I've no idea what I'm saying.
I could be saying terrible things!
Anyway, Sectori and Suppect are
not silly
since they're more similar
to actual word forms.
I actually thought, Sandi, it could
be a little
trick you were playing on us.
I thought they might be
Scandinavian words.
No, no. Scandinavian words are all
terrib sensible.
Sectori sounds very Latin.
That sounds Italian, doesn't it?
"Eh, you, Sectori!"
"Donde esta mi Sectori?"
I mean, that's Spanish, but,
you know?
You say Scandinavian words
are quite sensible,
but the things in IKEA have all got
quite sort of strange names.
I've got a theory about IKEA, right?
At night, what they do is they write
out price tags, right?
And then they throw them in the air
in the dark.
So you can get tealights for ♪5OO
or a sofa for 5Op.
You can make up IKEA products -
if you just go down to the bottom
and say,
"I'm looking for a bonk
or a skicklefluff."
Tt I tm looking for a shart. Tt
They'll look for it for ages.
I need a Subvick and a Suppect.
Here's some more slang.
If you need to convince somebody
that you're not a robot,
there is another silly word
that you should use.
Does anybody know what it is?
One that would suggest that
you are a human.
It's a real silly, childish word.
Is it a flubble?
Flubble?
It's poop.
Ah!
I hate that word.
Yes! Poop?
The Americanism of a perfectly
good poo.
Yeah, look, 2O18 study by cognitive
scientists at MIT,
1, OOO people were asked to come
up with the most human word
somebody could say.
Different participants were shown
pairs of words
taken from the list that the
original 1, OOO people generated,
and were asked which word in each
pair was chosen by a computer
and which one was chosen by a human.
I n fact, they were all chosen
by humans,
but the word they most often
believed had been selected
by a human was poop.
Anyway, moving on.
How can you make sure that nobody
takes you serious online?
I think itts very difficult.
I put a tweet out, because it was
heavy lockdown,
and I ordered a bicycle. Mm.
So I thought, very funny, humorous.
I went, tt New bike has arrived,
the seat is so high.
Tt However, my testes get a good
workout. Tt Yeah.
I n my mind, quite funny.
Somebody wrote back to me,
tt Have you tried eBay?
TtGet yourself an inflatable seat. Tt
Some people are quite
literal-minded.
That's much nicer than the shit
I get when I post a tweet.
Are people mean to you?
Yeah!
I don't do any of it,
so I don't know.
You're wise.
Itts pretty unpleasant.
Apart from Stephen, who can post
any old rubbish about his balls
and just gets sent to eBay.
SANDl LAUGHS
Er, so there's a thing called
Poe's Law,
and it's an Internet truism.
So, however ludicrous a statement
you make on the Internet,
if it doesn't include a smiley face,
somebody will take it serious.
And it's named after somebody
called Nathan Poe.
So if you had done the thing
with the bicycle
and then added a smiley face,
it would have been fine.
Ah!
I'll tell you what, Sandi.
Yes, darling?
You're missing nothing.
No.
Really, honestly.
Do you do the...? I went back
on Twitter
after a few years off it because
I 'd published a book,
and I've had lots of nice comments
and stuff about my book,
which is very gratifying,
but if you dare to venture
an opinion
on any subject whatsoever...
Anything at all Yeah.
...someone will be after you.
Oh, right. So the most famous
example of this
was the Twitter joke trial.
So there was a Twitter man called...
Twitter user? Twitter man?
Twitter man's good.
Twitter man called Paul Chambers,
and he wrote,
"Oh, crap, Robin Hood Airport
is closed.
"You've got a week and a bit to get
your shit together,
"otherwise I'm blowing the airport
sky-high."
I remember this, yes.
He was charged with sending
a menacing message.
That really was apparently not...
No, but he lost his job and so on.
Yeah, he did.
But if he had apparent just added
a simple smiley face... Yeah.
...at the end, everybody would
have thought, "just kidding."
There are other sorts of laws
a bit like Poe's Law.
There's Parkinson's Law -
work expands to fill the time
available for its completion.
There's Sod's Law -
the worst possible outcome
always happens.
And Sod's Law... A slight less
extreme American equivalent,
Murphy's Law, which is anything that
can go wrong
eventual will go wrong.
But what do you think this is?
Muphry's Law?
What do we think that is?
So, I talked about Murphy's Law.
Anything that can go wrong will
eventual...
The law of typos?
It is.
If you write something which points
out a spelling
or a grammatical error in somebody
ee's work,
there will be a similar error...
Oh, yeah.
...in what you've written yourseff.
It is just a thing.
Yeah. The one that's extraordinary
is the Cobra Effect,
which is where the consequences
of an attempt to solve a problem
actual make the original
problem worse.
Oh, God, that's my life.
Thank you.
So, the story is told - possib
apocrypha but it's been told
since the 187Os...
Every sitcom plot ever created.
Yes, absolute.
So, there was a 19th-century scheme
to rid Delhi of cobras
by placing a bounty on them.
So, what happened is people started
breeding cobras to claim the bounty.
So the scheme was cancelled.
Then people had all these cobras,
so the farmers just released them
into the wild, and there were then
many more cobras by the end.
The problem was worse than
it had been in the first place,
and it's called the Cobra Effect.
Do you know what the
Barbra Streisand effect is? No. No.
There was an aerial photograph
of her house online
and she wanted to have it removed.
Now, she launched a $5O million
lawsuit against a guy,
he was a retired software engineer,
and he had taken the photo
to document coastal erosion,
but she didn't want people to know
it was her house.
Wel before the lawsuit,
nobody knew it was her house.
The photo had on been downloaded
six times, twice by her lawyers.
And after that,
thousands of people, thousands!
We've pixilated it,
just to save any upset.
I've got a law, I think.
Walsh's law. Yeah?
The smaller the hand,
the creepier it is. OK.
I've got small hands,
they're quite creepy.
Are they creepy? I think so.
Why do you think they're creepy?
They just sort of a bit like...
They're not quite the right size
for what they should be.
Do you know Dom I rrera,
the American comedian? Yeah.
He's talking about watching porn
with his wife,
and his wife goes,
" Now, that's a cock."
And he's going,
"They've all got tiny hands.
"The girls have got tiny hands.
"They seal their mouths together,
"they've got tiny mouths
and tiny hands."
He's so funny.
I clear am watching
the wrong stuff.
Have you got a law you'd make
for yourseff, darling?
Grahamts law - no showers ten
minutes before leaving the house.
The amount of times I tve made
myself later by having a shower,
had to break into a run for a train
and then being sweatier and dirtier
than if I hadntt had the shower...
I n the first place.
Yes, cursing myself...
It's a bit like the Cobra Effect,
you've made the problem worse.
Anybody ee?
There is a law called Stefants Law.
Right?
If anyone is into physics,
you know this.
I tm not into physics or anything,
but I do know that therets something
called Stefants Law, and I took
it upon myself to find this out.
And basically, what this law does
is it measures the heat
coming off a black body.
Is that right? Yeah. So I tm guessing
right now, youtre all sweating.
There's a thing about oxygen
readers... What are you doing?
You know you get these oxygen
readers on your hands?
Oh, is that...?
I didn't know what you were doing.
Sorry, yeah.
For years, they've been giving...
Can you stop doing the mime?
Holly, itts the combination
of the disgusting mime
and your creepily small hands.
For years, they've been...
They've recently found out that
they've been reading
black people's results not right,
because it's to do with
light penetrating skin,
and they give really incorrect...
Because they obviously tested
on white people, not on...
That's terrible.
Sandits just found out about racism.
I know! What? What?!
I think I would like a law,
Amosts Law.
It would be to ban your elderly
parents staying with you
for longer than three weeks.
And I tll tell you from my personal
experience, my dad did stay with me
for four weeks, over the recent
lockdown, and hets 82,
and I had no idea, in all these
years, that he is a bell end.
Because he...
Did you never wonder where
you got it from?
Dontt you criticise
me with your small hands!
He put the heating up to lava,
for example, and I tm like,
ttAre you not burning in my house? Tt
I like watching real-life murder
documentaries, thatts my thing.
And I got him into it.
If you watch them, you know that
they have re-enactments with actors,
and at the end, the final shot
is the real accused in a courtroom.
I was watching it one day
with my dad, and my dad went,
ttOh, look,
theytve got the wrong man.
Tt He wasntt the man we saw earlier. Tt
Just go home!
What would you have?
Like, an alarm go off?
A three-week thing and then
suddenly, "Whooooo!"
"You've got to leave, old man."
Anyway...
What's the downside of being
sucked in a sa mine?
Oh, God.
A lot of men would say it doesn't
matter where they're sucked.
Wow. I wasntt aware there was a
downside of getting sucked anywhere.
Do you not think it looks like his
wife was just there a minute ago,
and he's going, "Darling? Darling!"
This is in Havana, in 2OO5,
it was after Hurricane Wilma.
And you can see that the water
is swelling down, probab
down into a drainage system there.
So, it's worth thinking about how
water can make that swift movement.
This is an absolute true story.
Lake Peigneur,
which is in Louisiana,
was a shallow, freshwater lake
and it sits above...
Wel it sat above a large
underground sa mine.
So, in 198O, there's an oil company
and they're drilling in the lake
and they inadvertent bored a hole
straight into the mine,
and the lake water drained into the
hole - a bit like the photograph
we saw at the very beginning -
it created a 4OO-metre,
in diameter, whirlpool.
It sucked in the drilling platform,
11 barges, a tug boat,
many trees and 65 acres of the
Rip Van Winkle Botanic Gardens,
including all of their greenhouses.
From one drilling!
Did all the people get away?
Everybody was absolute fine,
remarkab. That's extraordinary.
Not even the people
working underground got hurt.
What are the
Rip Van Winkle greenhouses?
No, the Rip Van Winkle Botanic
Gardens, in Louisiana.
Whots Rip Van Winkle?
Are you serious?
I tm very sorry. Oh!
Rip Van Winkle is a wonderful
American tale about a man
who goes to sleep and sleeps for...
You don't know this story?
No. Watch that, and
Read Swiss Family Robinson.
Yes, I tve got a lovely lockdown
night in ahead of me.
Wel you're fine,
I'm doing porn and sharting.
The flow of the cana
which normal drained the lake
into the Guff of Mexico, reversed.
It sucked sea water into the lake
and fed this terrible maetrom,
which then became
a 50-metre-deep waterfal
and the water then erupted upwards
through the mine shafts
in the form of 4OO-foot geysers.
And remarkab, nobody was injured,
including 55 miners
who were working underground.
But what was a three-metre-deep
freshwater lake is now
a 4OO-metre-deep sawater lake.
Do you not think
that's extraordinary?
That is extraordinary.
It sounds mythologica doesn't it?
It sounds like those sort
of maetroms that you hear about.
I mean, there are genuine natural
whirlpoo which exist
in some seas and rivers.
Norway has two of the biggest -
Sastraumen and the Moskstraumen -
but the number-three slot is taken
in the Hebrides, by Corryvreckan.
There we are,
there's the Corryvreckan. Oh, look.
They did a documentary in 2OOO,
a television documentary,
they threw a mannequin into
the Corryvreckan with a depth Gauge
attached to it, and it came
to the surface some distance away.
It had been dragged along the bottom
at a depth of 86O feet.
Wow. I n fact, there's a story,
George Orwell...
Do you know who George Orwell is?
I do know who George Orwell is,
thank you.
George Orwell almost died in
Corryvreckan.
He was living nearby,
he was writing 1984.
He decided to take his
three-year-old son, along with some
nieces and nephews, out on a boating
trip past the whirlpool.
And they got sucked in and capsized
and just about managed to swim
to a small island, where Orwell tied
his shirt to a fishing rod
and waved it about until
they were rescued.
And now for some
silly misunderstandings,
it's General lgnorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
How many seasons are there?
Oh... Gah...
Be very careful.
First time on the show -
four seasons!
Ah, yes!
Yeah, it's a rite of passage.
Itts a rite of passage!
Yeah. It real depends where you
live, and it ao part depends
on who colonised
you in the first place.
So, the UK will recognise four
seasons, haven't always done so.
We once just had summer and winter.
The English language didn't have
sort of established names
for spring and Autumn until about
the 16th century.
What did they call
four-season pizzas then?
Yeah, weird, didn't have
four-seasons pizza in the
16th century.
Did they just
call them two-seasons pizza?
Where's the fun in that? So, how
many seasons are there, Sandi?
Wel it depends where you are.
So, South Vietnam, there's three.
Hot and dry, rainy,
cool and dry.
Parts of the United States,
sort of the southwest,
they have four seasons
for historical reasons,
because the colonies, where they
came from, they had four seasons,
so they rather imposed it.
The traditional Hindu calendar's
got six seasons.
I hope all of these places
have their own QI and everyonets
getting it wrong there as well.
Yeah.
There might be four seasons,
or three, two, one, six.
Even none at all - it all depends.
What's the most popular Volkswagen?
CARTOON BULLET RICOCHETS
Yes? Polo.
Polo. Hol there with the Polo.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Itts the Beetle.
Any more for any more?
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Oh, itts a Golf.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Passat.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Scirocco.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Kombi Bus.
Oh! Oh! No.
So, we're measuring by the number
of items sold,
rather than by the value,
and VW sells more sausages
than cars.
So, I have some here.
These are Volkswagen Original Tail
"the original part".
They're curry-flavoured sausages
they original produced
in VW factories to feed the staff.
They became so popular, they're now
sold by them for ten Euros a pack,
and they're given as gifts in VW
dealerships in 11 countries,
but not in the UK.
When you buy a car,
you get given free sausages,
and the VW base in Woffsburg has
got 30 butchers on the payroll
and they produce these.
Do you not think it's wonderful
These are original
Volkswagen sausages.
But I've got you something, Alan,
that I think you're
going to real like,
which fits in with the sausages
but yet vegetarian.
Is it a live pig? No.
So, this is marvellous. This is
about corporate sausage tie-ins, OK?
There is a football club
called Bedale AFC.
They're a non-league football club
and they're from North Yorkshire,
and they have a sausage sponsor,
a local sausage company called Heck.
And in 2O17, they took to the
pitch, emblazoned...
Ooh, I like Heck sausages.
..emblazoned, the kit -
this is the one on the right -
with hundreds of sausages,
and pink shorts.
It was described as the WURST
football kit ever.
Managed to make the news as far as
Turkey and Canada.
And then, in 2O18,
they looked like hot dogs.
That's the next one along.
2O19, it was bangers and mash.
And then 2O2O, each strip featured
a big carrot for a vegetarian thing.
They've got one
more they're thinking of,
which is to do a toad in the GOAL
strip for the goalie.
But we're very pleased we've managed
to get hold of, for you, look,
darling, sausage and mash kit for
you. With peas, darling. I love it.
So, I hope that that works for you.
I love it.
Yes, I think it's rather fine,
isn't it?
Those four lads don't look
very happy about it, do they?
VW's WURST product is a bit
of a banger, if we're honest.
AUDl ENCE GROANS
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
How should you handle rare,
old books?
Oh, in white gloves, the...
No. Not at all. Why not at all
I n the British Library,
it's all very dim
and the light and the air
temperature and all that...
Yeah. But in fact, on your hands,
you should have nothing at all.
You should have extreme clean,
but naked, hands.
I like the phrase
"extremely clean butt-naked hands."
Butt-naked hands.
Butt-naked hands?
Butt-naked hands!
So, organisations like the
National Trust, the Smithsonian
in the United States,
the British Library and so on,
they don't approve of white gloves
because you lack the dexterity
and the tactileness of fingers,
so you're more like to
tear a page.
And they're slippery,
so you might drop the book
if you've got gloves on.
And ao, there are tiny fragments
of pigment more like to stick
to the material of the glove than if
you've just got your skin.
But you definitely shouldn't
do this.
No, that's definite a mistake.
And gloves can ao retain dirt.
Also, you look like a creepy
mime artist.
It is quite creepy, isn't it?
Yeah, so just stick
to snooker refereeing.
Just keep your hands butt-naked
and get on with it.
One group of people who do
tend to wear gloves
are Japanese police officers.
Any thoughts as to why
that might be?
Sushi. It's all that comes... Sushi!
Oh, is it shoving people on trains?
They love that, don't they?
So, there's an interview in 2O1O
with an officer
who had been in charge of security
at Beatles concerts.
So, the band visited in 1966,
and he says he introduced the rule
because they had to manoeuvre lots
of screaming young women, and he
thought it was inappropriate for
them to do this with their hands.
So, it dates from screaming fans
of The Beatles in 1966.
Wow. The Beatlest legacy,
itts just so diverse.
It's SO diverse.
Japanese police officers.
Now, here's an easy one.
Ignorance of the law is...?
CARTOON ARROW TWANGS
Not an excuse.
But it should be an excuse.
Wel it can be, that's the thing.
I mean, it's a terrib
well-known legal axiom,
but lots of legal systems...
Why is there a badger?
What's going on?
It's Toad of Toad Hall.
Oh, it's Toad of Toad Hall.
I couldn't see Toad in the dock.
So many legal systems, including
ours, have recognised exceptions
which slight erode the principle.
I n fact, the Germans, the French,
the Austrians, they have
criminal codes explicit
recognising a defence
of a reasonable mistake of the law.
I n South Africa, as long as the
accused is genuine
ignorant of the law,
that is a defence.
I think that's fair.
There are laws in this country,
which are called
strict liability laws,
and it doesn't matter whether you
knew or not, then you are guiy.
So, things like speeding.
But that's clear, that's clear.
Yeah. But did you see, in 2O2O,
there was a woman who got a parking
ticket because she was giving
CPR to a dying man in a car park,
and she overstayed by 12 minutes
and got a ♪1OO car-parking fine?
It's like when people have to pull
over for ambulances and they pull
into a bus Lane and then they get a
ticket. They get a ticket for that,
yeah. Which brings us to this silly
thing we do at the end of the show
of giving
everybody meaningless scores.
So, in first place,
Captain Sensible tonight -
wel I'll be damned -
with minus five, it's Hol!
Second is the slight foolish,
with minus six, it's Alan! Second!
Third is the pretty dopey,
with minus 13, Ivo!
Tonight's silly-bil,
with minus 27, it's Stephen!
It's thanks to lvo, Hol,
Stephen and Alan.
And I leave you with this silly
sign-off from the French epicure
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.
"Burgundy makes you
think of silly things,
"Bordeaux makes you talk about them,
"and Champagne makes you do them."
Cheers and goodnight.
strong language and ADU humour
*Q I*
Season 19 Episode 12
Episode Title: "Sillyly season"
Aired on: January 28, 2022.
Good evening and welcome to Ql,
where it's Sillyly Season
with a silly sausage -
lvo Graham!
APPLAUSE
A silly so-and-so -
Hol Wah!
APPLAUSE
A silly mid on -
Stephen K Amos.
APPLAUSE
And a sumptuous seasoning
of Alan Davies.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
And their buzzers are all
extreme silly.
Ivo goes...
CARTOON RUNNl NG SOUND EFFECT
Oh, I like that.
Hol goes...
CARTOON ARROW TWANGS
Stephen goes...
CARTOON BULLET RICOCHETS
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Looney TunesíMerrie Melodies
by London Music Works & Evan jol
Woo!
It's Silly Season, so let's start
with some silly questions.
Now, we got these by feeding
hundreds of questions
taken from the Ql database,
which is called Blue Whale,
into an artificial intelligence
program'
and we asked the program to come up
with new questions
in the same style.
So this is artificial intelligence
QI questions.
First of al what happens if
a flamingo is your wife?
People are very judgey about it.
Flamingoist.
Flamingoist, exactly.
And people talk about animal
husbandry a lot,
but they don't talk about
birdwifery a lot.
If a flamingo is your wife...
Yeah?
...Probably the best option is
to dress up as an egg
so youtre guaranteed to get laid.
Here's a question for you, Alan.
What is the best way to get
a radiant
complexion of trousering?
Well, you need to emerge from
within the trouser, Sandi.
I tm not a massive fan of
the QI supercomputer...
No.
. .With these...
But the question that it asked
over and over again,
which I am extreme keen on,
is, how many legs does
the Queen have?
She has one of her own legs
and then the other one's a sort of
official leg.
Official leg. I reckon shets on
coasters, isntt she?
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
When you see her in all
those big gowns,
those official events, you never
see her walking.
She sort of glides, doesntt she?
Oh, I see what you mean.
I thought you meant she was on
some kind of a drinks mat.
You don't want her to Mark
your table!
So, it asked over and over again -
how many legs does the Queen have?
And then sudden announced,
"I'm naked."
And it ao answered one
of its own questions.
"How did the Romans?"
was the question.
And the answer was "Nobody knows".
THEY LAUGH
So there's an American research
scientist
called Janelle Shane, and she
programmed a similar
sort of neural network to read
existing Love Hearts slogans.
Do you remember Love Hearts? Oh,
yeah. Those little, sort of, sweets?
So they're usual fair tame.
But she reprogrammed the Al
to do it,
and this is what it came up with.
"Loving horn", "Buns, buns, buns,"
and "All hail the chicken".
I think they would sell
like hotcakes.
Next Valentine's Day,
all hail the chicken.
Yeah, right.
So, she has a point in doing this.
It's not just sort of a bit
of sillyliness.
Al still has lots of limitations...
lVO SCOFFS
Making Love Hearts -
thatts the main one.
One of the things we need to look at
is neural networks are prone
to something called catastrophic
forgetting,
so forgetting old information
as new data is fed in.
And Al ao has a problem
with giraffing.
Anybody know what giraffing
might be?
Sticking your neck out?
THEY LAUGH
Getting things off high shelves?
Yes. No. So it constant identifies
things as giraffes.
OK! Yeah. Or anything unusual.
Why might that be?
I don't know!
Because it's...
Because it's stupid?
No, what it is, it's trained online,
and online people tend to post
unusual things
more than they'll post a sort of
featureless rock or something.
They're much more like to post
a giraffe, for example.
I hate it when people post
featureless rocks.
Featureless rocks are
very irritating.
Put some features on that rock,
for Godts sake!
Al thinks that giraffes are more
common than they are
because people, on the whole, tend
to put up unusual things,
and therefore it thinks that
they are more usual.
I mean, if you live in, like,
Namibia or somewhere,
you might see a giraffe...
I mean, I don't know if giraffes
live in Namibia. Do they?
Yes. They do? Yeah. OK.
Let's say yes. Well, then, you're
going to see a lot. Go zebra.
You're going to see a lot of them.
It's just that when you live
in Lewisham,
you don't see that many of them.
Right.
The old Namibia - Lewisham Paradox.
I 'd love to see one in Lewisham!
I've always thought that
fox hunting...
It's fine, they ban it in the
country cos it's mean.
Be great in London. It'd be great to
have all those guys in the red coats
on a horse, racing through.
Alan TRUMPETS
Yeah.
You say that, but the foxes in
London tend to have attitude.
Yeah. Know what I mean? I tve come
back from a gig, midnight,
therets a fox in my driveway -
cos I tve got money, big house -
and as I go into my drive...
THEY LAUGH
...the fox is looking at me
like that,
ttWhat? Walk around me! Tt
Yeah. No, they do have attitude.
We've got a fox, it comes and
it sits at the back door,
basical saying to the dog, "Eh!"
We've got exactly that!
We've only just got a dog,
and it was sleeping on the mat
by the back door
cos it's cool there, and the fox
came and just looked at it.
What kind of dog did you get?
It's half spaniel, half husky.
Oh, sweet!
Spusky.
It's a husky... Haniel?
Does it...? Is that a thing?
It's very pretty.
No, it's quite unusual.
My daughter wanted a spaniel,
my son wanted a husky.
I love... By some miracle, we found
one with half each.
King Solomon...
You sewed two together and...
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, the front half is
the spaniel.
The back half is a husky.
See, that was your error.
Everybody knows they've got those
fluffy little arseholes
which get really clogged up.
You'd have been much better having
the front as the husky
and the back as the spaniel.
Youtve sewed your dogs the wrong
way round, Davies!
The other two halves are
in the freezer.
Hol, everybody does NOT know...
...does not know that they've got
a fluffy arsehole!
That's not a thing!
So, there is the thing now
of AI cameras,
and they're trained to follow the
ball in some football matches.
There was a match at I nverness
Caledonian Thistle
Football Club, and the Al
became fixated
on the linesman's bald head.
And the camera would do nothing...
THEY LAUGH
It would do nothing but focus on it.
OK, after all that Al nonsense,
here's a perfect sensible question
written by a real-life human.
What use is a penguin erector
at cucumber time?
Penguints fallen over?
Yes.
Why would the penguin fall over?
Is it because...?
Well, A, they're stupid.
And...
Come on, Stephen.
Youtre not making any friends.
Youtve got a big house and you
hate penguins!
If they look up at something...
Yes.
...they just sort of fall backwards,
don't they?
So, if an aeroplane flies
over Antarctica,
they all fall on their back.
No, it's a myth.
Oh, is it? It's a myth.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
But what I like is that this
doesn't stop newspapers
reporting on these things.
I n 2O18, a Scots newspaper's
reported that Edinburgh Zoo
denied employing a penguin
erector...
Right... following a rumour it
had hired staff
to pick up penguins who
had fallen over
after looking up at aeroplanes.
I believed that story!
I've told thousands of people
that's true!
None of them believed you.
Yeah.
Cos the reason, I thought it had
something to do with making sure
that the cucumber was straight.
Yeah.
Because we all love a straight
cucumber.
We all love... Speaking on behalf of
the nation again.
Who doesn't love a straight
cucumber?
No-one's ever expressed
a preference!
Literally no-one!
Basical, we're talking about silly
newspaper stories
and they take place in
the silly season,
which in lots of countries is known
as cucumber time.
Great. So, as well as being the
title of today's show,
silly season refers to...
You know that period in late summer
when people are on holiday
and there's not real much
news around?
And it first came out as an idea
in 1861.
Ao known as
giant gooseberry season.
So lots of outsized fruits get
stories about them.
The sightings of sea serpents
and mermaids,
showers of frogs.
And lots of countries call
it cucumber time.
So, in the Netherlands,
komkommertijd.
And in Poland and Germany
and so on.
And nobody real knows why.
Because cucumbers are funny.
Apart from when theytre bendy,
which isntt funny at all.
No, we don't like that.
I tll tell you whatts not funny -
a gooseberry.
Hets not impressed at all by his
own gooseberry, that chap.
That's not a gooseberry, is it?
It is, darling.
It's a giant gooseberry.
It's enormous!
The silly season thing has worked
completely on Alan,
because youtve said silly seasons
are times when silly stories
emerge, like a giant gooseberry.
And then five minutes later,
Alants gone,
ttThat gooseberryts enormous! Tt
But I'm slightly confused.
You're not coming across that way.
No..
Is it silly season because they're
not true stories?
Sometimes they're not true,
and sometimes they're just something
that might not normal
be thought of as newsworthy.
Right. OK. It's like all the
ttand finallystt
get the first slot.
Yeah.
So there have been some marvellous
silly season headlines
from recent years.
There was the "world oinksclusive"
we had.
Ooh! "The Mail saves the bacon
of the Tamworth two."
Oh, that's about pigs.
Do you remember the story?
They were called Butch and Sundance,
and they escaped from an abattoir
in Wishire...
Oh, no!
..In 1988.
Oh, my God! They swam a river and
went on the run for a week,
and 1OO journalists tracked it
across the country.
The ham swam to Tamworth?
The newspapers printed full-page
maps of the route
that they were taking,
and eventual The Dai Mail bought
them to save their bacon.
Right. They "escaped" from
an abattoir?
Abattoir, yeah. I mean, why didn't
the others follow?
Why just two of them? Did they lock
the door behind them?
"We've got to go now!
Alan SNORTS
" Now!
"Oink!
"Come on! Oink!
"All right, we'll just go -
the two of us.
"Oink!"
I think it went something like...
"A little something like this."
But it's a marvellous time
for publicists,
because if they've got a show
that they want to promote,
this is a great way to do it.
I n August, 2OO5, The Sun reported
that a constellation
that looked like Richard Wion
of One Foot in the Grave
could be seen by anyone with
a keen eye.
But it was actual publicity
for Summer Nights of Gold
on UKTV Gold.
Bet he couldntt believe it.
I love these ones where
they're like,
"Face of Jesus found in apple" -
or something like that,
or in a KFC bucket.
Do you know, I was one of those.
So...
Someone found your face?
No.
Sunday Sport ran a picture,
and a full-page story. A picture
of you in the Sunday Sport, Sandi?
Wel no. What it was...
Holly LAUGHS
...they claimed to have found my face
on Meghan Markle's knee.
There you are.
I've never been so pleased!
It's like the Turin Shroud all
over again. That's amazing!
Who's on her other knee?
I don't know who I'm sharing with.
Is it Alan?
Alan on the other knee.
Do you think we could escape and be
tracked across the country,
and then eventually bought
by The Daily Mail?
It does beg the question, Sandi,
if she were to kneel down... Yes.
...Would your face hurt?
I mean, that's literal, like, one
of the questions I've got in here.
If Meghan Markle were
to kneel down,
would Sandi Toksvig's face hurt?
I don't...
2O1O, The Sun made a real big
splash about a donkey
that was being made to parasail
by its Russian owner.
They were very upset,
and so they had a big campaign and
they decided to buy the donkey.
What I LOVE about this story is that
they did buy the donkey,
but they had been tricked
by the owner
and rescued the wrong donkey.
Oh, no! I know.
What are the chances that donkeys
don't all look exact alike?
August, 2OO1, there was a man called
Philip Peters,
and he returned to his
parked car, OK?
Now, he had parked it in
a perfect legal place.
But while he'd been gone,
contractors in West London
had winched his Peugeot off
the ground,
painted two yellow lines
underneath it,
put it back down again,
and he'd got a ticket.
Wow! Yeah.
We once did an episode of
Jonathan Creek,
and the scene was Jonathan Creek
gets a clamp off...
A very dramatic plot!
Very dramatic. I had to lie down and
fiddle about with keys.
Anyway, the prop department had put
a couple of fake yellow lines down,
and the traffic warden came along
and gave us a ticket. No! Yeah.
Did you get a ticket?
I parked a car and they painted
the lines underneath the car
and we got a ticket, even though
we pulled out,
took a photograph of our car,
took a photograph of the gap
where our wheels were,
and then we had to spend about
four months
going to a small claims court,
trying to clear our name.
So the same thing happened
to you as happened
literally in that...?
I didn't get winched up, because in
Lewisham they're quite lazy,
but they just painted round it.
I n Namibia, itts very different,
obviously. Did you have to pay in
the end? No, we won.
But the whole thing was
so stressful.
I should say, I didntt realise
we were meant
to bring our own stories.
I once swam up the Thames
with a couple of pigs
and it was very dramatic.
I had to take a day off work.
I don't think of pigs as swimmers,
do you?
No, in Swiss Family Robinson,
the pigs swim from the boat
to the shore.
Oh, in that case, I'm complete
sold on the story.
If it's in the Swiss
Fami Robinson.
Whatts the Swiss Family Robinson?
Um... How old are you?!
To be fair, it was written
in about 1838.
Now, in British tabloid slang,
what is an FMD?
An effing something.
Yeah.
FEAPON of mass destruction?
THEY GROAN
I magine a middle-aged man is reading
in bed and he turns to his wife
and he turns a page like that
in the tabloid and goes,
"Fuck me, Doris, have you
seen this?"
It's known as an FMD...
...in the tabloid press.
Now, which pointless C can be found
off the coast of Cornwall
Is it the sillyent C
in the word Scilly,
of Scilly Isles?
Darling, very good.
Oh, thank...
You got a bit overexcited.
I thought you were going to have
an asthma attack.
I was remembering a holiday
to Tresco in 2oo5.
Did you have fun?
I had a terrific time.
Wonderful.
I fell off a quad bike and cried.
Listened to a lot of James Blunt.
Great time.
So, the Scil lsles used to be
spe Silly, as in S-I - I-L-Y.
There was no C in it.
But the loca added the C
around the 157Os
because the word
"silly", at one time,
it meant sort of happy and blessed,
but it had become the word
that meant foolish,
and they didn't want to be
described as such,
so they put the letter C in.
The Scillonians, as the islanders
are called,
refer to the lsles of Scil,
or just Scil,
but not the Scil lsles.
I'm going to give a shout-out to
The Turks Head on St Mary's.
It's literal the best pub
I've ever been to
in my whole life - as far as
I can remember.
What were you doing in the Scillies?
I was making a documentary.
I recommend it. It's worth the trip.
I love the...
Have you been, darling, to
the Scil Isles? No. Stunning.
Absolute stunning.
Or, as they say, "scunning".
Yeah. According to legend,
King Arthur fought
his last battle and was buried
between Cornwall
and the lsles of Scil, in the
mythical Kingdom of Lyonesse.
Looks like him being taken from
The Turks Head, doesn't it?
"I - I've had a marvellous time."
Tt I will finish my documentary
tomorrow. Tt
The story goes that there used to be
land connecting Cornwall
and the lsles of Scil,
and then it was swallowed up by
the ocean in a single night,
about 1, OOO years ago.
And there are people who claim,
if you listen very careful,
you can still hear the bel
of Lyonesse's
14O submerged churches
ringing underwater.
What, so there's a whole island
that went under?
Wel it isn't true, darling. Water
has separated Cornwall
from the isles for longer
than Britain's
been separated from France. You
provide us with these little thrills
and then you take them away.
I know. Just steal it from you.
We were separated from France?
Yes, darling. So Britain and Europe
were linked
by a landmass, Doggerland...
What is this wizardry?!
Yes. Until it was flooded,
about seventh millennium BC.
Wow! I tell you something that can
be found in the area -
in the waters there - which I do
think is amazing,
is the salp, S-A-I-P.
Anybody heard of salp? I love this.
So it's hollow,
it's jelfish-like,
barrel-shaped, it's transparent,
it's a sea creature.
So it's a group of anima known
as a sea squirt,
but basical it's the size of about
the palm of your hand.
It occurs worldwide, but in Britain
it's most found in the water
around the Scillies and Cornwall
and so on.
Basical, it's a tube with an
opening at either end
and it moves by jet propuion,
so it pumps water through itseff
by contracting bands
of muscle that ring the body.
When they swim together, it's a bit
like synchronised swimming -
because each member of the chain
continues to function
as a separate individua but they
swim with their own rhythm,
but at a real steady pace
together.
We've got some film showing them
doing this. Oh, lovely.
It is. Do you not think that is
miraculous?
Oh, it's like a murmuration.
Yes!
Of used condoms.
THEY LAUGH
They're often described as
jelfish, these salps.
But the truth is that salps and
humans are actual
more close related to each other
than either is to a jelfish.
Because the salp larvae have
spinal cords.
Next time someonets having a go at
me for getting off with a salp,
I tll say, tt I tm more like this than
ttthatts like a jellyfish,
thank you very much.
Tt Itts NOT the same as getting off
with a jellyfish.
Tt Look at the spinal cord! Tt
Yeah.
It's on the young salp that have
spinal cords.
The adus never...
Oh, great!
You're going to get double bad
nicked for that one. Oh, God!
That's no way to view new species.
"I wonder what they'd be like
as a sexual partner?"
I magine if you had a hollow pet,
and then you could
keep things in it.
Is this your next dog, Alan?
I'm thinking of getting a salp.
Half husky, half salp.
Half salp!
Still got the lovely, fluffy hole
at the end, though?
THEY GROAN
They reproduce in aernating
generation
of clones and individua.
So a solitary mother gives birth,
asexual,
to thousands of young clones,
all female,
which then form chains.
And these chains are then
fertilised en masse
and they swim up to the surface
through clouds of sperm
deposited by chains of men.
I mean...
What?!
Not men. Males. Not men. Males.
Male salp.
To be absolutely clear.
Yeah, sorry. Ivo goes for a swim,
and then suddenly...
No!
..half salp, half Ivo.
"Here come the salp! Oh!"
Each female clone then has a
single female offspring
before turning into a male. I mean,
it's just very interesting.
There was rather a good Attenborough
thing on the other day
where all these fish gather and then
the sperm is awash...
There was sperm everywhere
in the sea
and they're all fertilising.
And then these giant
stingray-type fish
come in and eat the sperm.
And it only happens once a year
at a particularly high tide
when the moon's in the right place,
and they just happen to know
it's going to happen.
But you can understand it
once a year'
cos once you've had that one time,
you think...
Yeah. I mean, part of me thinks,
are they thinking,
"Yeah, it's the time when
we get the sperm!"
Or are they thinking,
"Oh, no, sperm day.
"And I have nothing to eat
the day before.
"Take something sweet with you,
because it's very, very..."
THEY LAUGH
Anyway, we should real love salps.
I am slight obsessed with them.
I do. I love them.
I already love them.
But the other reason is that they
help with carbon capture.
This is a weird thing
to think about.
Their faecal pellets are very large
and very heavy,
and they sink down to the seabed -
as indeed do the dead salps
themselves -
and take thousands of tonnes of
carbon with them.
Because apparent nothing
eats a dead salp.
Just when you thought salps couldn't
get any more sexy. I know.
Lots of things will eat a live salp.
Nobody wants to touch a dead one.
It's not a thing.
Goodness me.
Apart from Ivo. Getting off with
a salp and then watching it
race its own poo to the bottom
of the ocean.
What a treat!
So you're thinking you're going to
get off with it until it dies?
Yeah. Well, at least till it loses
its spine.
THEY LAUGH
"I had to leave her.
She was spineless."
"I saw her emerge from a cloud
of sperm and I thought,
"'That's my salp." ' Oh!
Now, these are five S words which
are going to come up on the screen.
Can you rank them in order
of sillyliness?
Who wants to have a go?
Alan, have a go.
Skunkpoople's the most
silly word there.
Skunkoople is very silly, yes.
I mean, I know what a shart is,
but I don't think I want to say
it out loud on television.
What is it? Use the expression
ttfaecal pellettt.
SANDl LAUGHS
When you, yeah, you think you're
going to be doing a fart,
but you actually faecally
pelletise your pants.
Yep.
It's a... It's a...
You PELLETISE?!
Tt I tve pelletised my pants again. Tt
"I suspect you've pelletised your
pants.
"You wanted to do a Skunkpoople,
"but you've Sectoried."
I don't fart, so I couldn't shart.
You don't fart? No.
I've only ever farted three times
in front of my husband.
But they were all sharts.
No, once I was very ill.
Second time, I sort of tripped
on the stairs
and it was out of shock.
And the third time, cos he was
telling me off in the car
and the timing was too perfect.
Right, let's have a quick look.
The correct order for
these words is...
Of sillyliness?
..Skunkoople...
That's the sillyliest, yeah.
..and Subvick are both silly.
Sectori and Suppect are not silly.
No.
And shart, its status as a word
is undetermined,
as to whether it's silly or not.
Because it sounded rude and might
amuse people for that reason,
rather than its sillyliness.
So these were researchers in 2O15
at the University of Alberta.
They were trying to establish
whether you could objective
measure the sillyliness of words,
and participants were shown various
computer-generated nonsense words
and asked to rate how humorous
they actual were.
And the resus were remarkab
consistent.
Made-up words tend to be measurab
funnier
the more unusual their combination
of letters.
So the less you expect to hear
certain letters together,
the more amused you're going
to be by them.
And once they figured
the pattern out,
researchers were able to predict
whether test subjects
would find a word funny with an
accuracy of about 92ofo.
Subvick and Skunkoople were
classified as silly,
along with Quingle, Probble,
Finglam and Wook.
I've no idea what I'm saying.
I could be saying terrible things!
Anyway, Sectori and Suppect are
not silly
since they're more similar
to actual word forms.
I actually thought, Sandi, it could
be a little
trick you were playing on us.
I thought they might be
Scandinavian words.
No, no. Scandinavian words are all
terrib sensible.
Sectori sounds very Latin.
That sounds Italian, doesn't it?
"Eh, you, Sectori!"
"Donde esta mi Sectori?"
I mean, that's Spanish, but,
you know?
You say Scandinavian words
are quite sensible,
but the things in IKEA have all got
quite sort of strange names.
I've got a theory about IKEA, right?
At night, what they do is they write
out price tags, right?
And then they throw them in the air
in the dark.
So you can get tealights for ♪5OO
or a sofa for 5Op.
You can make up IKEA products -
if you just go down to the bottom
and say,
"I'm looking for a bonk
or a skicklefluff."
Tt I tm looking for a shart. Tt
They'll look for it for ages.
I need a Subvick and a Suppect.
Here's some more slang.
If you need to convince somebody
that you're not a robot,
there is another silly word
that you should use.
Does anybody know what it is?
One that would suggest that
you are a human.
It's a real silly, childish word.
Is it a flubble?
Flubble?
It's poop.
Ah!
I hate that word.
Yes! Poop?
The Americanism of a perfectly
good poo.
Yeah, look, 2O18 study by cognitive
scientists at MIT,
1, OOO people were asked to come
up with the most human word
somebody could say.
Different participants were shown
pairs of words
taken from the list that the
original 1, OOO people generated,
and were asked which word in each
pair was chosen by a computer
and which one was chosen by a human.
I n fact, they were all chosen
by humans,
but the word they most often
believed had been selected
by a human was poop.
Anyway, moving on.
How can you make sure that nobody
takes you serious online?
I think itts very difficult.
I put a tweet out, because it was
heavy lockdown,
and I ordered a bicycle. Mm.
So I thought, very funny, humorous.
I went, tt New bike has arrived,
the seat is so high.
Tt However, my testes get a good
workout. Tt Yeah.
I n my mind, quite funny.
Somebody wrote back to me,
tt Have you tried eBay?
TtGet yourself an inflatable seat. Tt
Some people are quite
literal-minded.
That's much nicer than the shit
I get when I post a tweet.
Are people mean to you?
Yeah!
I don't do any of it,
so I don't know.
You're wise.
Itts pretty unpleasant.
Apart from Stephen, who can post
any old rubbish about his balls
and just gets sent to eBay.
SANDl LAUGHS
Er, so there's a thing called
Poe's Law,
and it's an Internet truism.
So, however ludicrous a statement
you make on the Internet,
if it doesn't include a smiley face,
somebody will take it serious.
And it's named after somebody
called Nathan Poe.
So if you had done the thing
with the bicycle
and then added a smiley face,
it would have been fine.
Ah!
I'll tell you what, Sandi.
Yes, darling?
You're missing nothing.
No.
Really, honestly.
Do you do the...? I went back
on Twitter
after a few years off it because
I 'd published a book,
and I've had lots of nice comments
and stuff about my book,
which is very gratifying,
but if you dare to venture
an opinion
on any subject whatsoever...
Anything at all Yeah.
...someone will be after you.
Oh, right. So the most famous
example of this
was the Twitter joke trial.
So there was a Twitter man called...
Twitter user? Twitter man?
Twitter man's good.
Twitter man called Paul Chambers,
and he wrote,
"Oh, crap, Robin Hood Airport
is closed.
"You've got a week and a bit to get
your shit together,
"otherwise I'm blowing the airport
sky-high."
I remember this, yes.
He was charged with sending
a menacing message.
That really was apparently not...
No, but he lost his job and so on.
Yeah, he did.
But if he had apparent just added
a simple smiley face... Yeah.
...at the end, everybody would
have thought, "just kidding."
There are other sorts of laws
a bit like Poe's Law.
There's Parkinson's Law -
work expands to fill the time
available for its completion.
There's Sod's Law -
the worst possible outcome
always happens.
And Sod's Law... A slight less
extreme American equivalent,
Murphy's Law, which is anything that
can go wrong
eventual will go wrong.
But what do you think this is?
Muphry's Law?
What do we think that is?
So, I talked about Murphy's Law.
Anything that can go wrong will
eventual...
The law of typos?
It is.
If you write something which points
out a spelling
or a grammatical error in somebody
ee's work,
there will be a similar error...
Oh, yeah.
...in what you've written yourseff.
It is just a thing.
Yeah. The one that's extraordinary
is the Cobra Effect,
which is where the consequences
of an attempt to solve a problem
actual make the original
problem worse.
Oh, God, that's my life.
Thank you.
So, the story is told - possib
apocrypha but it's been told
since the 187Os...
Every sitcom plot ever created.
Yes, absolute.
So, there was a 19th-century scheme
to rid Delhi of cobras
by placing a bounty on them.
So, what happened is people started
breeding cobras to claim the bounty.
So the scheme was cancelled.
Then people had all these cobras,
so the farmers just released them
into the wild, and there were then
many more cobras by the end.
The problem was worse than
it had been in the first place,
and it's called the Cobra Effect.
Do you know what the
Barbra Streisand effect is? No. No.
There was an aerial photograph
of her house online
and she wanted to have it removed.
Now, she launched a $5O million
lawsuit against a guy,
he was a retired software engineer,
and he had taken the photo
to document coastal erosion,
but she didn't want people to know
it was her house.
Wel before the lawsuit,
nobody knew it was her house.
The photo had on been downloaded
six times, twice by her lawyers.
And after that,
thousands of people, thousands!
We've pixilated it,
just to save any upset.
I've got a law, I think.
Walsh's law. Yeah?
The smaller the hand,
the creepier it is. OK.
I've got small hands,
they're quite creepy.
Are they creepy? I think so.
Why do you think they're creepy?
They just sort of a bit like...
They're not quite the right size
for what they should be.
Do you know Dom I rrera,
the American comedian? Yeah.
He's talking about watching porn
with his wife,
and his wife goes,
" Now, that's a cock."
And he's going,
"They've all got tiny hands.
"The girls have got tiny hands.
"They seal their mouths together,
"they've got tiny mouths
and tiny hands."
He's so funny.
I clear am watching
the wrong stuff.
Have you got a law you'd make
for yourseff, darling?
Grahamts law - no showers ten
minutes before leaving the house.
The amount of times I tve made
myself later by having a shower,
had to break into a run for a train
and then being sweatier and dirtier
than if I hadntt had the shower...
I n the first place.
Yes, cursing myself...
It's a bit like the Cobra Effect,
you've made the problem worse.
Anybody ee?
There is a law called Stefants Law.
Right?
If anyone is into physics,
you know this.
I tm not into physics or anything,
but I do know that therets something
called Stefants Law, and I took
it upon myself to find this out.
And basically, what this law does
is it measures the heat
coming off a black body.
Is that right? Yeah. So I tm guessing
right now, youtre all sweating.
There's a thing about oxygen
readers... What are you doing?
You know you get these oxygen
readers on your hands?
Oh, is that...?
I didn't know what you were doing.
Sorry, yeah.
For years, they've been giving...
Can you stop doing the mime?
Holly, itts the combination
of the disgusting mime
and your creepily small hands.
For years, they've been...
They've recently found out that
they've been reading
black people's results not right,
because it's to do with
light penetrating skin,
and they give really incorrect...
Because they obviously tested
on white people, not on...
That's terrible.
Sandits just found out about racism.
I know! What? What?!
I think I would like a law,
Amosts Law.
It would be to ban your elderly
parents staying with you
for longer than three weeks.
And I tll tell you from my personal
experience, my dad did stay with me
for four weeks, over the recent
lockdown, and hets 82,
and I had no idea, in all these
years, that he is a bell end.
Because he...
Did you never wonder where
you got it from?
Dontt you criticise
me with your small hands!
He put the heating up to lava,
for example, and I tm like,
ttAre you not burning in my house? Tt
I like watching real-life murder
documentaries, thatts my thing.
And I got him into it.
If you watch them, you know that
they have re-enactments with actors,
and at the end, the final shot
is the real accused in a courtroom.
I was watching it one day
with my dad, and my dad went,
ttOh, look,
theytve got the wrong man.
Tt He wasntt the man we saw earlier. Tt
Just go home!
What would you have?
Like, an alarm go off?
A three-week thing and then
suddenly, "Whooooo!"
"You've got to leave, old man."
Anyway...
What's the downside of being
sucked in a sa mine?
Oh, God.
A lot of men would say it doesn't
matter where they're sucked.
Wow. I wasntt aware there was a
downside of getting sucked anywhere.
Do you not think it looks like his
wife was just there a minute ago,
and he's going, "Darling? Darling!"
This is in Havana, in 2OO5,
it was after Hurricane Wilma.
And you can see that the water
is swelling down, probab
down into a drainage system there.
So, it's worth thinking about how
water can make that swift movement.
This is an absolute true story.
Lake Peigneur,
which is in Louisiana,
was a shallow, freshwater lake
and it sits above...
Wel it sat above a large
underground sa mine.
So, in 198O, there's an oil company
and they're drilling in the lake
and they inadvertent bored a hole
straight into the mine,
and the lake water drained into the
hole - a bit like the photograph
we saw at the very beginning -
it created a 4OO-metre,
in diameter, whirlpool.
It sucked in the drilling platform,
11 barges, a tug boat,
many trees and 65 acres of the
Rip Van Winkle Botanic Gardens,
including all of their greenhouses.
From one drilling!
Did all the people get away?
Everybody was absolute fine,
remarkab. That's extraordinary.
Not even the people
working underground got hurt.
What are the
Rip Van Winkle greenhouses?
No, the Rip Van Winkle Botanic
Gardens, in Louisiana.
Whots Rip Van Winkle?
Are you serious?
I tm very sorry. Oh!
Rip Van Winkle is a wonderful
American tale about a man
who goes to sleep and sleeps for...
You don't know this story?
No. Watch that, and
Read Swiss Family Robinson.
Yes, I tve got a lovely lockdown
night in ahead of me.
Wel you're fine,
I'm doing porn and sharting.
The flow of the cana
which normal drained the lake
into the Guff of Mexico, reversed.
It sucked sea water into the lake
and fed this terrible maetrom,
which then became
a 50-metre-deep waterfal
and the water then erupted upwards
through the mine shafts
in the form of 4OO-foot geysers.
And remarkab, nobody was injured,
including 55 miners
who were working underground.
But what was a three-metre-deep
freshwater lake is now
a 4OO-metre-deep sawater lake.
Do you not think
that's extraordinary?
That is extraordinary.
It sounds mythologica doesn't it?
It sounds like those sort
of maetroms that you hear about.
I mean, there are genuine natural
whirlpoo which exist
in some seas and rivers.
Norway has two of the biggest -
Sastraumen and the Moskstraumen -
but the number-three slot is taken
in the Hebrides, by Corryvreckan.
There we are,
there's the Corryvreckan. Oh, look.
They did a documentary in 2OOO,
a television documentary,
they threw a mannequin into
the Corryvreckan with a depth Gauge
attached to it, and it came
to the surface some distance away.
It had been dragged along the bottom
at a depth of 86O feet.
Wow. I n fact, there's a story,
George Orwell...
Do you know who George Orwell is?
I do know who George Orwell is,
thank you.
George Orwell almost died in
Corryvreckan.
He was living nearby,
he was writing 1984.
He decided to take his
three-year-old son, along with some
nieces and nephews, out on a boating
trip past the whirlpool.
And they got sucked in and capsized
and just about managed to swim
to a small island, where Orwell tied
his shirt to a fishing rod
and waved it about until
they were rescued.
And now for some
silly misunderstandings,
it's General lgnorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
How many seasons are there?
Oh... Gah...
Be very careful.
First time on the show -
four seasons!
Ah, yes!
Yeah, it's a rite of passage.
Itts a rite of passage!
Yeah. It real depends where you
live, and it ao part depends
on who colonised
you in the first place.
So, the UK will recognise four
seasons, haven't always done so.
We once just had summer and winter.
The English language didn't have
sort of established names
for spring and Autumn until about
the 16th century.
What did they call
four-season pizzas then?
Yeah, weird, didn't have
four-seasons pizza in the
16th century.
Did they just
call them two-seasons pizza?
Where's the fun in that? So, how
many seasons are there, Sandi?
Wel it depends where you are.
So, South Vietnam, there's three.
Hot and dry, rainy,
cool and dry.
Parts of the United States,
sort of the southwest,
they have four seasons
for historical reasons,
because the colonies, where they
came from, they had four seasons,
so they rather imposed it.
The traditional Hindu calendar's
got six seasons.
I hope all of these places
have their own QI and everyonets
getting it wrong there as well.
Yeah.
There might be four seasons,
or three, two, one, six.
Even none at all - it all depends.
What's the most popular Volkswagen?
CARTOON BULLET RICOCHETS
Yes? Polo.
Polo. Hol there with the Polo.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Itts the Beetle.
Any more for any more?
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Oh, itts a Golf.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Passat.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Scirocco.
CARTOON GUNSHOT
Kombi Bus.
Oh! Oh! No.
So, we're measuring by the number
of items sold,
rather than by the value,
and VW sells more sausages
than cars.
So, I have some here.
These are Volkswagen Original Tail
"the original part".
They're curry-flavoured sausages
they original produced
in VW factories to feed the staff.
They became so popular, they're now
sold by them for ten Euros a pack,
and they're given as gifts in VW
dealerships in 11 countries,
but not in the UK.
When you buy a car,
you get given free sausages,
and the VW base in Woffsburg has
got 30 butchers on the payroll
and they produce these.
Do you not think it's wonderful
These are original
Volkswagen sausages.
But I've got you something, Alan,
that I think you're
going to real like,
which fits in with the sausages
but yet vegetarian.
Is it a live pig? No.
So, this is marvellous. This is
about corporate sausage tie-ins, OK?
There is a football club
called Bedale AFC.
They're a non-league football club
and they're from North Yorkshire,
and they have a sausage sponsor,
a local sausage company called Heck.
And in 2O17, they took to the
pitch, emblazoned...
Ooh, I like Heck sausages.
..emblazoned, the kit -
this is the one on the right -
with hundreds of sausages,
and pink shorts.
It was described as the WURST
football kit ever.
Managed to make the news as far as
Turkey and Canada.
And then, in 2O18,
they looked like hot dogs.
That's the next one along.
2O19, it was bangers and mash.
And then 2O2O, each strip featured
a big carrot for a vegetarian thing.
They've got one
more they're thinking of,
which is to do a toad in the GOAL
strip for the goalie.
But we're very pleased we've managed
to get hold of, for you, look,
darling, sausage and mash kit for
you. With peas, darling. I love it.
So, I hope that that works for you.
I love it.
Yes, I think it's rather fine,
isn't it?
Those four lads don't look
very happy about it, do they?
VW's WURST product is a bit
of a banger, if we're honest.
AUDl ENCE GROANS
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
How should you handle rare,
old books?
Oh, in white gloves, the...
No. Not at all. Why not at all
I n the British Library,
it's all very dim
and the light and the air
temperature and all that...
Yeah. But in fact, on your hands,
you should have nothing at all.
You should have extreme clean,
but naked, hands.
I like the phrase
"extremely clean butt-naked hands."
Butt-naked hands.
Butt-naked hands?
Butt-naked hands!
So, organisations like the
National Trust, the Smithsonian
in the United States,
the British Library and so on,
they don't approve of white gloves
because you lack the dexterity
and the tactileness of fingers,
so you're more like to
tear a page.
And they're slippery,
so you might drop the book
if you've got gloves on.
And ao, there are tiny fragments
of pigment more like to stick
to the material of the glove than if
you've just got your skin.
But you definitely shouldn't
do this.
No, that's definite a mistake.
And gloves can ao retain dirt.
Also, you look like a creepy
mime artist.
It is quite creepy, isn't it?
Yeah, so just stick
to snooker refereeing.
Just keep your hands butt-naked
and get on with it.
One group of people who do
tend to wear gloves
are Japanese police officers.
Any thoughts as to why
that might be?
Sushi. It's all that comes... Sushi!
Oh, is it shoving people on trains?
They love that, don't they?
So, there's an interview in 2O1O
with an officer
who had been in charge of security
at Beatles concerts.
So, the band visited in 1966,
and he says he introduced the rule
because they had to manoeuvre lots
of screaming young women, and he
thought it was inappropriate for
them to do this with their hands.
So, it dates from screaming fans
of The Beatles in 1966.
Wow. The Beatlest legacy,
itts just so diverse.
It's SO diverse.
Japanese police officers.
Now, here's an easy one.
Ignorance of the law is...?
CARTOON ARROW TWANGS
Not an excuse.
But it should be an excuse.
Wel it can be, that's the thing.
I mean, it's a terrib
well-known legal axiom,
but lots of legal systems...
Why is there a badger?
What's going on?
It's Toad of Toad Hall.
Oh, it's Toad of Toad Hall.
I couldn't see Toad in the dock.
So many legal systems, including
ours, have recognised exceptions
which slight erode the principle.
I n fact, the Germans, the French,
the Austrians, they have
criminal codes explicit
recognising a defence
of a reasonable mistake of the law.
I n South Africa, as long as the
accused is genuine
ignorant of the law,
that is a defence.
I think that's fair.
There are laws in this country,
which are called
strict liability laws,
and it doesn't matter whether you
knew or not, then you are guiy.
So, things like speeding.
But that's clear, that's clear.
Yeah. But did you see, in 2O2O,
there was a woman who got a parking
ticket because she was giving
CPR to a dying man in a car park,
and she overstayed by 12 minutes
and got a ♪1OO car-parking fine?
It's like when people have to pull
over for ambulances and they pull
into a bus Lane and then they get a
ticket. They get a ticket for that,
yeah. Which brings us to this silly
thing we do at the end of the show
of giving
everybody meaningless scores.
So, in first place,
Captain Sensible tonight -
wel I'll be damned -
with minus five, it's Hol!
Second is the slight foolish,
with minus six, it's Alan! Second!
Third is the pretty dopey,
with minus 13, Ivo!
Tonight's silly-bil,
with minus 27, it's Stephen!
It's thanks to lvo, Hol,
Stephen and Alan.
And I leave you with this silly
sign-off from the French epicure
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.
"Burgundy makes you
think of silly things,
"Bordeaux makes you talk about them,
"and Champagne makes you do them."
Cheers and goodnight.