QI (2003–…): Season 8, Episode 15 - Hypnosis, Hallucinations & Hysteria - full transcript

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Well, well, well, well, well,

howdy, howdy, howdy-doody
and welcome.

Welcome to a QI that's all about
hypnosis, hallucinations
and hysteria.

And with me tonight are
the hypnotic Ronni Ancona...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..the hysterical Robert Webb...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..the histrionic Phill Jupitus...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..and His Majesty Alan Davies.



CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

With such a theme, we're all buzzing
with excitement of course

and Ronnie goes...

'You are feeling sleepy.'

And Robert goes...

'Very sleepy.'

And Phill goes...

'Your eyelids are heavy.'

And Alan goes...

SNORING

So if I hypnotised you
but then cut off your leg,

how much fuss would you make?

Doesn't it depend what you've
gone in for the hypnosis for?

I mean, if you'd gone into stop
smoking, I'd be a bit miffed really.



That's a very good point.

Assuming...

Assuming you'd gone in
because you had gangrene

or you needed to lose your leg...

They never used hypnosis
as an anaesthetic, did they?

Surely you'd be screaming in agony.

Oddly enough, no. It was used before
ether in the 1830s very commonly

or reasonably commonly at least,

once Mesmer had sort of,
as it were, introduced the world
to the idea of hypnotism.

What seems to be the case is that
most of the discomfort we feel -

even in an operation like sawing off
a leg - is the ANXIETY of pain.

If you can relieve yourself
of the anxiety,

an enormous amount of the pain goes

and a good example to prove this
is people who are in some way

allergic to or resistant to
anaesthetic

and so can't be put under
because it's too risky.

So they're injected with Valium,

which is an anti-anxiety drug and
all it does is tranquillise them.

It doesn't send them to sleep,
it just makes them feel less anxious

and you can do extraordinary things
to someone in that condition.

PHILL: If I was going in for surgery,

I'd feel anxious when I saw the man
in the top hat
with the crazy eyebrows.

It would be a worry, I agree, but
it has a long history. In the 1830s

there was a Scottish doctor
who did a lot of operations in India

where there is a really unpleasant
disease called filariasis

which causes
hydroceles of the scrotum.

Now anything scrotal
you might say is a worry.

It makes your scrotum
go into a triangle?

No, that would be isosceles!

LAUGHTER

This is hydroceles.

And he never ate Dairylea again.

These are large tumours

and the operation was so
uncomfortable, people would go for
years not daring to go to a doctor

but this meant the tumours grew
very big, and when I say very big...

Oh! I mean 46 kg scrotum.

Literally,

there was a case of a man who was
using his scrotum as a writing desk.

I'm sorry, but that is true.
He'd just...like that.

- Writing... - That's a good attitude
to have. - You're right.

I would get a Sharpie
and I would paint the face

like the front of
a space hopper on mine.

I'd make it look like a hedgehog...

winking.

This was the 1830s, of course,

when there was
no general anaesthetic,

it was before ether or chloroform.

So this Scottish doctor's name
was Esdaile. He would put them under
and it worked.

- He saved a lot of discomfort.
- SCOTTISH ACCENT: Your eyes
are feeling heavy.

No' as heavy as my testicles, Doctor!

You're kind of suggesting

that a lot of pain is just
a manifestation of anxiety, isn't it?

The fact is, pain is created
by the brain. It's not a real thing.

- It's just information, isn't it?
- Information.

The brain can create it,
the brain can be told not to.

- It's bloody sore information!
- It doesn't help.

You land a mallet on your thumb,
"It's just information!
It's just information!"

It doesn't really help. I tried to
be hypnotised to stop smoking once

and he was such a nice man and it
so wasn't going anywhere, I fainted.

- Even when it's a nice man, just
save the embarrassment, you mustn't
fake it, but I did. - Did it work?

- Do you smoke, have you given up?
- No, I did give up,

- but with prescription drugs,
not with hypnotism. - Superb.

Yes, hypnotic anaesthesia can be
surprisingly effective

though it seems to work
mostly by helping you relax.

You need answer
only one of the following.

What's the best way to
hypnotise either A - an alligator,
B - a tiger shark or C - a chicken?

- I've seen them do it to sharks.
- And what do they do?

- Don't they lie them on their backs
or something? - Exactly right,
you flip it over.

But I thought sharks had to
keep moving in order to survive.

Which is why whales have learned
to tip them over, to make them
suffocate and it will kill them.

- There's a very small hammerhead shark
being flipped. - That is a toy shark.

Or a really big diver.

- A frighteningly big diver.
- I think we'd have heard of him!

- I think we would.
- 'Your lids are heavy.'

I think I know how to do chickens.

- Yes? - It's weird because it actually
looks like you're...oppressing them

- quite violently,
but you have to hold them
to the ground and draw a line. - Yes!

You draw a line from their
beak along

and they just stare at it.

That's what they do.
It's called tonic immobility in
animals and that's an example of it.

There's another way
to do it to chickens.
Take a stick or a paddle...

In this case, a light flagellation
paddle I happen to have
in the house. You fix eyes to it

and hold it up to it and it will
apparently stare at it forever.

Our producer tried it on his -
we're the kind of show
whose producers have chickens -

and he says it didn't work at all,
they just went off to eat things.

You just made that up, didn't you?

No, no, it is in all the books.
It says that that is a way
to hypnotise them.

- ROBERT: - In all the books?!

In all of the chicken-hypnotising
books? All of them?

How many are there?

This is why you can't ever
let your chickens watch the Muppets.

LAUGHTER

Frogs, lizards, crocodiles, sharks,
all go into a trance

if they're turned over
onto their backs and held there
for just a few seconds.

Rabbits and guinea pigs do the same
if you stroke them
or roll them over first.

Do you know how you wake up
rabbits and guinea pigs
if they're in that state?

You let a dog in.

The kinder way
is to blow on their nose.

- On the nose? - Yes,
a little blow on the nose will do.

- What have I hypnotised, do you know?
- Hugh Laurie.

- STEPHEN LAUGHS
- No, I did on a television programme.

When I was in Maine, doing
this documentary about America...

- What is the most famous animal
in Maine? - A lobster?

A lobster, we have a lobster in here.

- Ooh! - There it is.

- Now how did I do this?
- LAUGHTER

I stroked... I remember.
There you are.

You stroke him here, that's it.

He goes completely still.

I remember the one I did in Maine,
it was...

I could stand him up on his own.

You can see, there it is.

They seem smaller there.

There he is, completely still,
not moving a muscle.

- PHILL LAUGHS
- A mussel!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

There he is, completely still,

and if I lift him up,

his tail will come up usually

and he'll wake up.

Erm...have I killed you?

No, there he is.

He's all right. He's still asleep.

- Anyway...
- LAUGHTER

There we are,
he's quite active now, under there.

So dinner's sorted.

So he's going back to the zoo,
Stephen?

Of course, I'm going to throw him
back into the sea, naturally.

You truly are a Renaissance man.

I wear tights, put it that way.

What about, though... I mean
that's humans hypnotising animals.

Can animals hypnotise humans?

There was a dog -
Oscar the hypno-dog -

who was... There he is, look.

- Those are pretty amazing eyes.
- ALAN: - I'm feeling it now.

I'll go and get the biscuits.

The thing is,

he can keep up that stare into a
human's eyes for a very long time.

LAUGHTER

- ROBERT: - Depending on what human
wants to be stared at!

- Does he charge hourly? - ALAN: - Pack
it in, Oscar. Stop looking at me.

Hugh Lennon was his trainer.
He did go missing and a reward

was posted for his return,
though the public were warned
not to look into his eyes.

Does that sound like a publicity
stunt to try and get tickets?

"Oscar the hypno-dog is loose!
Don't look at him!"

"I've seen him. He's in the park."

Presumably when he's running around,
someone thought they'd find him and
go, "It's Oscar the hypno-dog,"

and he'd go,
"I'm not the dog you're looking for.

"I'm a Pomeranian."

So, yes, dogs can apparently
hypnotise humans. Snakes...

maybe not humans, but they're said
to be able to freeze a rabbit
by staring at them.

- They're very gullible, rabbits.
- Oh, please! - They believe anything.

- They're quite grumpy. - Grumpy?

- Yes. - They can be aggressive.

They're not supposed to be very
good pets. They're very grumpy...
and violent.

I like the Dutch ones you can ride.

Surely not?

They're huge, they're massive!

OK, maybe not ride.

Crush.

- That is a rabbit costume.
- A Dutchman wearing a rabbit costume.

DUTCH ACCENT: "OK, I am wearing
a saddle and it's time to go."

I love rabbits.

Oh, my...

"Wow, I am thinking maybe I should
have had a smaller celebrity."

So, yes, many animals
can be put into a trance,

but it's probably better
to practise on the ones
lower down the food chain first.

You're at death's door.
Why is your whole life
flashing before your eyes?

- Is it...? - 'Very sleepy.'

Is it the influence of
the early-'80s film Flash Gordon

where Dr Zarkov,
played by Topol, has his...
They try to empty his brain.

It's a myth that it ever happened
before Flash Gordon.

Since we saw Topol,
since we saw it happen to him,

that's what we all think
will happen.

That's my...

theory.

- I love it. - ALAN: - Hard to disprove.

It's hard to disprove except

in quoting a letter
from Admiral Beaufort,

who gave us the Beaufort Scale.

- Jiffy Beaufort?
- Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort.

He had a narrow escape from drowning
in Portsmouth harbour in 1795.

He saw everything.
"Each circumstance associated with
home were the first reflections.

"They took a wider range - our
last cruise, a former shipwreck,

"my school and boyish pursuits
and adventures.

"Every past incident of my life
seemed to glance across
my recollection

"in retrograde succession
in minutest detail."

There are many examples
of people talking about it,
so why do we think this happens?

Is it some sort of panic response?
It's just like the brain
just downloads everything.

- Yes... - It's doing your best bits.

- Doing your best bits?
- Just prior to...

- It's a montage. - Maybe it's
your brain trying to find

a piece of your life that can help
you in your present situation.

Yes, very good, Ronni, that is the
current and most convincing theory

that if you are in
a crisis situation, your brain,

which registers almost everything
that happens to you in your life -
not always consciously, it goes in -

and something weird happens and it
plays back all the incidents of your
life to find a match, as it were.

This happened and then this.

There was a recent case of a man who
was attacked by a great white shark.
He was about to die

and he remembered a DVD his son
had been watching years before

in which someone said,
if a shark comes,

plunge your hands into the gills and
he did that and he saved himself.

It's quite risky though,
if you're on the brink of death
and you're re-running

and you're like,
"No, not my Dad's 70th birthday!

"No, not that time!"

- Probably nowadays...
- The point is, I think,
if you're a doctor or a fireman

or something with
a level of expertise,

you're in a bad situation, all
kinds of similar scenarios play out

and with what seems to be
uncanny instinct you say,
"We need to do this."

Sometimes even before the event,
before the building has fallen,

because you've been in buildings
where things have fallen.

You've unconsciously registered
a creak, a bending of the wall
and you say, "Get out!"

But the point is, when you're
dying or drowning, there is nothing,
so your brain just dumps everything.

It tries every scenario
that seems mismatched
and people genuinely get...

It'd be handy if you get to
the end of your life flashing before
your eyes and this woman says,

"And now that life is available
to watch on BBC iPlayer."

Or if you lose your keys, just
put your face down in the basin,

start drowning yourself until you
get to the point you last had them.

It might work.

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

It would be terrible if you're
drowning and then it's Topol's life.

- Yeah. - That would be someone
else's life. - "Oh, no, Fiddler?

"I wasn't in Fiddler."

- IMPERSONATES BRIAN BLESSED: - Or Brian
Blessed on the birds in the trees.

IMPERSONATES BRIAN BLESSED: I've
been up Everest, you know.

Do you think with rising crime,

that death's door has become
more security-conscious?

Do you think they've got
an entry phone

or a couple of bouncers going,

"Well, we used to be able
to leave death's doors open

"but now we have kids coming in,
nicking bodies, drinking."

You see people sitting forlornly
on Death Avenue saying, "I put
the wrong number in three times.

"I've got to wait an hour
before it accepts my next input."
It's possible.

- You wouldn't mind being turned away
though. - Possibly not.

In many languages,
there's a phrase for
your life flashing before your eyes,

showing the prevalence of the idea.

Persian, Portuguese, Italian,
Russian, German, Norwegian,

Romanian, Spanish, Swedish,
Arabian, Dutch and French.

So it seems to be a common
phenomenon and may be explicable.

It seems people's lives do
flash before their eyes in a crisis

though it doesn't normally
do much good.

Maybe it's hypnotherapy you need,

so why not consult Zoe D Katze,
PhD, CHt, DAPA?

That's a pretty good series of...

I would say...

- Anagrams. - Hell of an anagram.

Is she invisible?
There's nobody there.

'Your eyelids are heavy.'

- Is she an animal hypnotherapist?
- She is an animal hypnotherapist.

She's a cat.

- Eh?! - Zoe D Katze is a cat
with a PhD,

a CHt and that diploma.

LAUGHTER

Oh, Zoe! I think Oscar
is sitting opposite her.

It's a man called Steve Eichel
who is an academic

who wanted to demonstrate the ease
with which you can get

a doctorate online or any of these
apparently important professional

Hypnotherapy Association
qualifications,

- all of which were given to a cat.
- Oh, great.

The point is once you get one,
you can use the others to parlay

until you get a whole list of them.

She has a doctorate
in counselling psychology
from a mail-order university

and the CHt is
a certified hypnotherapist -

in the National Guild Of Hypnotists,
no less -

and the DAPA is a Diplomat of the
American Psychotherapy Association,

both qualifications which are
supposed to connote genuine
professional standing.

There you are, do be on the lookout,
gentlemen and ladies, when you go to
see them. If you can get a cat...

Oh, my cat's only got a BA!

LAUGHTER

It is astonishing, isn't it?

There are also what are called
diploma mills and degree mills,

which give out either a fake
diploma from a real university

or, as it were, a real one from
a fake college that doesn't exist,

like they make up one
that says "Christ's College, Oxford"
or something.

Are those hats falling from the sky
or are there hands beneath them?

- There are. - Is that how you
get your hat? They're dropped out of
a plane and you have to catch one?

Throw it in the air at your
excitement of having got a degree.

I like to think that underneath
that photo there's about 60 cats.

Miaow!

The thing is, that if you were a cat,

because of the tassels, you wouldn't
leave them alone, would you?

I've got diplomas for all of you.
Alan, you can put that on the wall.

ABSO?

Ronni, ABSO. That's a QI award.

- Academy of Advanced Banter.
- It actually has...

Do you get letters from
the American Biographer's
Association or something?

And they say, "You have
been selected as one of
the men of the year..."

- Oh, it's a scam. - "..by the
American Biographer's Association
for expertise in your field."

All you have to do is pay 700.

And it says, yes, "If you would
send 695, we'll send you a plaque."

I've got 12.

- LAUGHTER
- Well, there you are, yes,

pseudo-credentialing,
it's a big issue.

Other qualifications which the same
Eichel who gave Zoe the cat her...

or managed to get her
these qualifications,

he found energy therapist
qualifications easily got,

past-life regression therapist
and alien abduction therapist.

- That's sad.
- I want to do that course.

Yes. I'm going to get
a guinea pig and make it
an alien abduction therapist.

Show me where they probed you.

"Are you qualified to do that?"

"Yes, I am."

Yes, the Zoe the cat is a cat, but
that doesn't make her a bad person.

I need your help.
How can we persuade the audience
to elect me Pope

without them noticing
that we've done it?

That's odd.

That's wrong.

My hand is not that liver-spotted!

I'm having that.

You wouldn't wear such cheap
cassocks either.

No, I wouldn't either.
No, that's so odd.

Is there a technique?

Suppose I wanted to sell
them something without telling them.

- Some sort of mass suggestion.
- Subliminal advertising.

Subliminal advertising...

KLAXON BLARES

Horribly cruel of me
to try and pull it out of you

and then punish you for it.

No, the fact is, subliminal
advertising has never been
shown to work, it's a complete myth.

Although it's banned by
most broadcasting authorities
and the FCC in America,

it's not actually
ever been shown to work.

In fact, the person
who invented it in 1957 -
a man called Vicary - in 1962

he admitted he'd
falsified the evidence.

He claimed he'd used it and sold
lots of cola and burgers

by putting in a flash frame,
a single frame
out of 24 frames a second.

Obviously the eye doesn't
consciously register...

LAUGHTER

It just hasn't been shown to work.
I remember they did one
in the Young Ones.

- They did it all the time
in the Young Ones. - Yes, they did.

It's like going back to my childhood
and I'm remembering it all now.

- Your childhood?! - Well...

- Yes, Ronni, deal with it.
- LAUGHTER

Anyway, sound -
do we know any stories
of audio subliminal messages?

Oh, the court cases about
"backward masking" they call it,
which is, you know, satanic messages.

- Judas Priest. - Yes, perhaps the most
alarming story was two boys

who committed suicide,
or attempted suicide,

- and their parents took Judas Priest
to court. - They did.

Do you know what the message
was supposedly in the track?

- It was... "Do it, do it now."
- "Do it, do it now." Yes.

So Halford, as part of the court
case, went in with a load of records

and played them backwards
and then just read out
a list of things you could hear

in records when played
backwards just to show how...

He also said, "I don't wish
to paint myself as greedy,

"but if we were going to put a
message in it would be, 'Buy more
of our records.'" He also said,

"Do it doesn't mean kill yourself."

- Stephen, the song WAS called
Suicide Solution. - Oh, was it? - Yes.

Finally, being in a pop quiz
pays off!

They say that you can put things
under your pillow,

like students have lectures
on tapes and they put them under
the pillow and while you're asleep.

Yes, hypnopaedia, it is called.
I know it sounds...

like interfering with a child
while they sleep.

"We thought it was one of
them hypnophiles."

Yes, paedia as in Wikipedia and
encyclopaedia, as in learning,
and hypno as in sleep.

There are pillows you can buy now
that actually have speakers built

into them, but frankly, there is no
real evidence that it works in terms

of what's being taught, but if you
sell someone classical music

and say, "Contains subliminal music
that will increase your
self-confidence,"

it is shown that that will work,
even if it's just the music.

Back to self-hypnosis,
if you bang your head on the pillow
the number of times...

Do you know, weirdly,
I found that worked.

At prep school, I used to do that
to get up early to raid the kitchen
and things like that and do stuff.

- What did the banging...
- If you want to wake up at 4am,

you bang your head four times
on the pillow.

- Or you have a child.
- It sounds mad...

- Or you have a child, obviously.
- It's just the power of suggestion,

this is the thing, isn't it? But also
hypnosis is if you keep telling
yourself something will happen...

- Yes, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Yes, it's kind of like
autohypnosis, isn't it?

It kind of is, yes.

Other subliminal images have been
seen, Lenin, for example, was seen
by some in the Labour Party rose,

I don't know if you can there.

- That's someone from Planet of the
Apes. - It's more like that, isn't it?

But there we are. So, yes,
subliminal advertising doesn't...

work. Seriously though,
I'd be very pleased.

Anyway, what kind of behaviour
would you expect from
a superstitious pigeon?

They always wear their feathers
in exactly the same colour and
exactly the same order every day.

Well, it is just that sort of
superstition that pigeons have
been found to exhibit.

It's quite interesting, a very
well-known American psychiatrist
called B F Skinner,

he found that if you feed pigeons
at predetermined intervals,

the pigeons, because they can't
predict when the food is coming,

they seem to register what they were
doing at the time the food arrived

and repeat the action to make
the food come next time,
which is a very human thing.

It's like humans blowing on dice
before a game of craps.

They would walk in anti-clockwise
circles because maybe twice
they were walking anticlockwise

when the food arrived and they think
that must be why the food comes.

- That's not superstitious, that's
just hopeful. - It's superstitious.

Last time I won this game,
I was wearing one red sock
and one blue, so I'll wear

a red sock and a blue sock again,
sportsmen do it all the time.

- They repeat actions
that happened before...
- People do it all the time.

- It's called magical thinking,
where you think you're having an
effect on the world. - Exactly.

- And you're not. - You're not.

I can't watch this match because
the last round, I didn't watch
and we won.

Or I was standing up when England
scored a goal, so I've got to stand
up for the rest of the match.

- I'm going to go to the toilet now,
we'll definitely score.
- All that. We do it all the time.

- My uncle, when he lights a cigar,
we always score. - Yes, it happens
to all of us.

They're all dead now,
because I killed them.

It's almost like a form
of megalomania, isn't it,
in a bizarre sort of way.

- That we could possibly affect
the outcome. - Yes. - That is
the nature of superstition.

It's quite hard, it has to be said,

to find any definition
of superstition that doesn't also
cover religion.

It makes the same promises, the same
suggestions of individual actions...

You convince yourself
you're involved

in the world somehow -
if I wear my lucky scarf,
then I'm really in the game.

- And you're just wearing a scarf.
- Yes, that's right, it is.

And each religion will regard
other religions as superstition
and theirs as not being.

I am religious,
you are superstitious.

In the Catholic Church, it is a sin
to be superstitious.

- You'll change that when you're Pope.
- I'll change that when I'm Pope, yes.

- APPLAUSE
- No, no, stop.

What are we going to do
with the gold?

"And as Pope Stephen walks out onto
the balcony, underneath the ladder,
with several black cats..."

American psychologist B F Skinner
managed to train pigeons
to be superstitious

by giving them arbitrary food
rewards and keeping his fingers
crossed, and best of luck to him.

Now, what's hysterical about
wandering womb trouble?

- Wandering womb. - Hysterical as in,
that's Janet Leigh in Psycho.
- It certainly is.

- But she didn't have a wandering
womb, she was being stabbed
to death by a maniac. - She was.

- She was hysterical for a very good
reason. - Yes. What does hysterical
mean? Where does the word come from?

'You're feeling sleepy.'

- I think this is something to do
with hysterectomies. - Yes.

Originally...

The Greek word for uterus
is hystera, so the word hysteria?

Yes, it was Hippocrates also
who thought

that there was a correlation between
mental unbalance and the womb
becoming wandering around the body.

He thought the womb, like an animal,
moved around the female body.

I've got a very good female friend
who's a gynaecologist
who was telling me.

That is how the word hysteria
came about,

it was associated entirely
with women from the same root
as hysterectomy.

- She's hysterical, slap her! - Yes,
slap her, that was the attitude that
men had towards women's illnesses or

particularly neuroses, that somehow
it was to do with them being women,
and women of a certain age

were associated with all kinds
of what were called hysterias,
hysterical responses.

But it was Freud who said
that almost

for every real condition,
you might have a hysterical version
which was created by the mind,

but it was as real, it wasn't
feigned, that's the point.

- This was before hysterical became
a synonym for hilarious? - Yes.

"You have a hysterical condition."
"Well, it doesn't feel
very hysterical to me!"

But there is such a thing as
hysterical blindness and muteness,

people will lose the ability to see,
although physically there is nothing
wrong with their eyes at all.

So, what about Hitler?

What about Hitler?

- Leave Hitler alone. - Week after week,
you have a go at Hitler.

Do we know about Hitler
and blindness? I mean,
he's not blind there, obviously.

- But do you know any stories
about his blindness?
- No. I thought he was colour blind.

In the First World War, after a gas
attack, he apparently went blind
and dumb for some time.

- That was close, wasn't it? - Yes.

Someone else would have
taken his place.

It was in hospital, during that,
that he had a vision

that he would lead Germany
to greatness, unfortunately.

- But it's quite interesting...
- That went very well, didn't it?

Don't listen to visions
when you've just had a gas attack.

- Yes. - Wouldn't it be terrible
if that was an evil Labrador,

like Oscar, and it just said,
"You will rule the world!"

- Hypno-dog. - Hypno-dog, yes.

An American psychiatrist called
Walter Langer wrote a report

on Hitler during the war
and it was quite interesting.

He said both that he thought
it was hysterical blindness
and speechlessness,

they were definitely that,
but also predicted - this is
a Freudian analysis -

that in Hitler's symbolic vision,
as it were, Austria is his father
in 1914, old, exhausted, dying,

and Germany is his symbolic mother,
young, vigorous, married to
Austria and about to be violated.

Whatever you make of this,
it is undoubtedly the case
that unlike almost all Germans,

Hitler called Germany Mutterland,
not Vaterland.
Motherland, not Fatherland.

Langer went on to say that the most
likely outcome of Hitler's life
was that he would

commit suicide, probably, he said,
in a symbolic womb,

which is quite an impressive piece
of prophecy.

Maybe there is something in
this Freudian lark after all.

Anyway, hysteria, as Ronni rightly
knew, used to be attributed

to the womb roaming about the body,
interfering with other organs.

Doctors thought it would cause
anything from a nervous breakdown
to blindness.

Now a question which will test
your reflexes. Watch the film here
of the setting sun.

All I want you to do is to hit
your buzzer at the moment the sun
has dropped below the horizon.

It's speeded up, obviously.

'Eyelids are heavy.'

You got there first.

KLAXON

Well too late! Well too late!

That is the moment at which
the sun is below the horizon.

What we see is a mirage.

I know it sounds crazy,
but it's true.

You're looking at me as if to say...

- Is this to do with how far away
it is? - It's to do with

the bending of light and the eye
not accepting it, but it is
genuinely below the horizon.

Physically, the Earth has turned
such that it is not there.

I know you're looking very cross
and "That can't be true!" about it.

That's a film of it, though.

I know, but you can get thermal
mirages and there's nothing there,
on the roadside, water puddles.

You get rainbows
and they're not there.

That's a photograph, but it's not
there. There's no water there,
it's just air.

I'll try and explain. Light from
the setting sun passes through our
atmosphere at a shallow angle

and gradually bends
as the air density increases,

not dissimilar to the image
of your legs in a swimming pool.
The effect artificially raises

the sun in the last few minutes
of its decline, and by coincidence,

the amount of bending is pretty much
equal to the diameter of the sun.

So it's exactly as it's there,
but it's actually disappeared.

- I hate this show. - Oh, Phill!

- Be interested, please.
- The sun is there. - I know.

And you're like, "No."

"It's the sun!"
"Not there. Mirage."

Have you ever seen a mirage?

- Yes. - Where? - Travelling through
the desert in America,
you see them all the time.

The standard ones in the roads.
What appear to be huge puddles of
shimmering lakes of water,

which are not there. You must have
seen those in the roads.

Yes, but I grew up in Scotland,
and they are there.

- Fair enough. - In New Zealand, you get
quite bad sunstrike off the roads,
causes accidents.

And what does that entail?

Because New Zealand is so low on
the planet, if you see what I mean,

and the sun comes through quite
a lot of atmosphere to get to it,

and the angle of it when it hits
the road causes a lot of blindness
in the eyes of drivers.

- Right. - I daresay that the drivers
in New Zealand, as they see

the sun setting, are reassured
to know that it's not there.

APPLAUSE

Yes, the fact is that despite
Phill's reluctance to understand it,

that the setting sun is actually
below the horizon the moment

that its lower edge
seems to touch the sea.

So to the place where everything
you think you know proves
to be an illusion,

the nightmare that we call
General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.

What shape is this staircase?

'Eyelids are heavy.'

- Yes, Phill. - It's not there.

Now, Phill!

APPLAUSE

'Very sleepy.'

Spiral.

KLAXON

I'm very happy for you.

- 'Eyelids are heavy.' - It is a helix?

Yes, it's helical,
well done, exactly right.

It's terribly pedantic, but a spiral
is when it gets bigger and bigger
and wider and wider,

- and a helix, it stays the same,
as a staircase does. - (I knew that!)

But you just wanted the forfeit,
didn't you? Yes.

Very well, so what's that?

- A double helix. - A double helix,
exactly, and that is?

That is... What is that? Tell me
what animal that is, Stephen.

- I can't tell you by looking
at it, I'm afraid.
- That is a Hypno-Labrador.

DNA. We've got a lot of it in our
bodies. If it was all stretched out,
how far would it reach?

Is it something mega,
like to the moon and back?

It's so much more mega.
A tenth of a light year,
outside the solar system,

that's how long that much of it is,

50 trillion cells, 23 chromosomes
per cell, 220 million base pairs
per chromosome.

That really does kick the "If you get
your skin out, it's half a tennis
court" in the knackers, doesn't it?

Half a light year... a tennis court.

So do you know about the
Argentine blue bill or lake duck?

- It has a part of his body
that is corkscrew shaped. - Is it
going to be its neck?

It's not going to be its neck.

- Legs? - Nor its legs. It's its penis.

There are quite a few animals
that have spiral penises.

When it procreates, does it kind of
spin in like a screw?

If push comes to shove and you're in
Argentina with a bottle of Merlot...

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

- A very decent... - It's a win double,
because you get your wine out

and you get a pleasured duck.

HE QUACKS LOUDLY

Oh, this is corked.

Then you ask the wine waiter
to bring you the bill.

Not only does it have a corkscrew,
it has the longest penis, relative
to its body size, of any vertebrate.

- It's the length of its whole body.
- Did you know that or did
the duck tell you?

"It's as long as I am."
What about the earwig, hasn't
the earwig got a penis?

- The earwig doesn't have a brush
at the end of its penis like that
animal does. - A brush? - A brush.

- Wow, it can clean up after!
- What do you think the brush is for?

Brushing down the curtains.

What you think the brush is for
on the lake duck's penis?

What is the one aim of
the male of the species?

For brushing the feathers out of
the way of the lady duck's doodah?

No, what is the purpose
of the male's...

- Sorry, the lady duck's punani.
- Releasing spermatozoa into the...

- Releasing yours. - Oh, right.
- Not anybody else's, that's why
males fight with other males.

- So the brush is to remove any sperm
from the previous drake who may
have been there. - No, stop it!

- So you clean out the previous sperm,
so it's yours...
- A little spring clean!

And the weird thing, even weirder,
is the lady duck,

her vagina is corkscrewed, but it's
corkscrewed in the opposite way.

"I can't believe it, a left-hand
thread at this time of the night!"

- It is quite astonishing,
isn't it, it really is.
- I feel bad talking about it.

And you know the other thing,
Stephen? Male duck's imperial,
lady duck's metric. Nightmare!

So true. Ridiculous.
There you are, nature.

Wonderful nature. So, strictly
speaking, a spiral staircase
is actually helical.

So why are there so many lavatories
in the Pentagon?

Er, one each?

- Do you know how many people work
in the Pentagon? - Thousands.

23,000.

There aren't 23,000 lavatories,
so, no, I'm afraid it's a really
ghastly reason.

- Where is it? - Virginia.

Virginia is a southern state
and it had laws, not nice laws.

- Oh, no. - Segregation. By law,
you had to have one lavatory
for white people

and one for black people,
so there were double the number.

I'm afraid it's true,
it's a horrible truth.

It shouldn't have happened,
because it was built in the '40s
under the presidency of FDR,

who had specifically outlawed
racial segregation in federal...

he couldn't legislate for the states
but he could say that no
federal building...

So when he arrived for his first
inspection, he was told,

he was furious that there were
all these lavatories.

Well, it's not very PC, it's true,
but have you ever been
for a queue in the ladies' loo?

So it's nice for you that there
are so many, yes. You racist.

But although they built them all
for that reason,

they were banned from using it and
they were never racially segregated.

Look at all the tennis courts
they've got as well.

That centre bit alone, just to give
you a sense of the scale of it,
is five acres, just the middle bit.

17 and a half miles of corridor,
at least 284 lavatories,
six separate zip codes,

just the Pentagon, but apparently,
it takes only seven minutes to walk
from one place to another.

Only one cleaner, they have.

Yes, poor darling. Racial
segregation in Britain, did it ever
happen in the Second World War?

I assume yes,
judging by the leading question.

- For one reason only.
- Because of the Americans.

Because of the Americans and in fact
it is at least something we can be
vaguely proud of, is that

the Americans in the bases who used
pubs insisted that they had pubs
for whites and blacks only

and the British public said, no,
we're not going to do that.

White Americans would come in and
see black people and start fights

and the British would fight
with the blacks against them.
We thought it was intolerable.

There were propaganda films
that they showed American GIs

who were going to be stationed
over here before they came,

with a little old lady coming into
a railway carriage

and there is a black GI
and a white GI and she says,

"Oh, you must come round
for some tea, both of you."

And the voice-over is, "This would
never happen in our country, but
you will have to be prepared."

- And they were preparing GIs...
- That the British would invite
black people...

- Yes. - Preparing them
for the horrors of tea.

It's rather eye-watering to think
that in our parents' lifetimes,
such a thing might have happened.

- "You may be offered buns." - Yes.
- "These are safe to eat."

Anyway, they built twice as many
restrooms as they needed

in the Pentagon so they could keep
them racially segregated.

Name something invented
by Vyacheslav Molotov.

'Very sleepy.'

A Molotov cocktail.

Oh!

KLAXON

He didn't invent
the Molotov cocktail.

He invented the Sloe Comfortable
Screw Against the Wall.

- Which he is drinking there. - Yes,
having one right now. Pina colada.

Well, he invented some grim things
like death lists.

The Molotov line, like
the Maginot line, a defensive line,
various other things.

- He was a Bolshevik. - He was a
Bolshevik, he was the Foreign
Minister under Stalin, all the way.

He lived until 1986.

A very exciting job,
Foreign Minister under Stalin.

- You can imagine, absolutely.
- Every day, "What are we going
to do today?"

"I don't know. Have you asked him?"
"He hasn't woken up yet."

He claimed his country, in the war
against Finland, was dropping
food parcels

when it was dropping cluster bombs.

So the Finns called them
Molotov's breadbaskets,
these bombs that came down.

When they fought against the Soviet
tanks... Don't forget, the Finns
beat the Russians.

It was quite an amazing war. They
used petrol bombs and they said,

"These are Molotov cocktails to go
with the bread you're giving us,"

so it was kind of their joke.
But they humiliated Russia, Finland,

- it was an extraordinary achievement.
- Very, very well done. - Yes, very well
done, Finland, absolutely.

Which brings me to the real matter
of the scores, and my goodness,
are they interesting or not?

Well, they are quite interesting.

I'm afraid in fourth place,
with minus 32, it's Robert Webb.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And in third place
with minus 17, Ronni Ancona.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

- In second place, Alan Davies with
minus eight. - Thanks very much.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Which means our runaway winner,

our solar sceptic
with minus two, Phill Jupitus.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm not here. I'm not here.

That's all from QI. Goodnight from
Ronni, Robert, Phill, Alan and me,

and I will leave you
with this thought.

You will tune in again next week,
you will. Goodnight.

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