Jump to content

QI (G series)

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 213.47.144.254 (talk) at 23:56, 19 March 2010 (→‎Episode 13 "Gothic": Spell: Gogh). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

QI Series G
StarringAlan Davies
Guest panellists
No. of episodes16
Release
Original networkBBC
Original release26 November 2009
Season chronology
← Previous
Series F

This is a list of episodes of QI, the BBC comedy panel game television programme hosted by Stephen Fry. Series G is currently being aired on BBC One.

The first series started on 11 September 2003. Although not mentioned at the time, all of the questions (with the exception of the final "general ignorance" round) were on subjects beginning with "a" (such as "arthropods", "Alans" and "astronomy"). The following six series continued the theme: the second series' subjects all began with "b", and so on.

G Series (2009-2010)

Series G, currently being broadcast, will feature a total of 16 editions, making it the longest series yet,[1] and is the first to be broadcast in its entirety on BBC One. As with the previous series, extended "XL" editions are also being shown on BBC Two soon after the normal broadcast. Because of scheduling issues, this only began with the fourth episode. However, the first three episodes will have "XL" editions aired sometime in the future.

Nine new guests have appeared or will appear in this series; Jack Dee, John Hodgman, Barry Humphries, Lee Mack, Graham Norton, Sue Perkins, Jan Ravens, David Tennant and Sandi Toksvig. Another significant first is that episode 2 featured feature four guests instead of the usual three (with regular Alan Davies also present).

Accompanying the recordings was a little game Stephen Fry had set up for his Twitter followers. The object was to decipher a word the audience had shouted. The response for "glabrous" was so overwhelming that it made Twitter's Trending Topics list on 9 May 2009.[citation needed]

Episode 1 "Gardens"

Broadcast date
  • 26 November 2009
  • 20 March 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 11 June 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
  • Rob – A bell tinkling
  • Dara – A cash register kerching
  • David – A shop bell ringing
  • Alan – A Cockney shouting out "Pound a punnet!"
Theme

As part of the "Gardens" theme, the set was decorated with trees and the inner part of the QI magnifying glass became a garden with flowers in it.

Topics
Tangent: When catching wasps, Rob uses a jam jar filled with jam, so that the wasps get stuck and can't get out again.
Tangent: If a bee is dying, you should give it honey, as it's the only thing it will eat, but Dara prefers to use the sole of his shoe, rather than rescue it. A bee makes enough honey in its lifetime for one teaspoon. Alan also claims that bees can't drown.
  • The vegetarian spiritualist Charles Isham believed that real gnomes would be attracted to Garden gnomes. Isham first brought them into Britain in 1847. He wanted to try to commune with real gnomes by claiming that "seeing and hearing gnomes is not mental delusion, but extension of faculty". Isham made 21 gnomes, of which only 1 still exists today and has been insured for £1 million. The red cap that is worn by all garden gnomes, came from German miners, who wore red caps as well. (Forfeit: Phwoarr!)
Tangent: In Wast Water in the Lake District, there were some gnomes put at 48 metres deep for divers to look at, but 3 divers drowned while trying to look at them, so they were taken away by the police, but oddly when it was moved to 50 metres down, the police didn't take it away, because health and safety rules say that the police divers can't go that deep, so they couldn't take them away. The original idea was to just have gnomes in the lake for people to look at, as it was said to be dull.
Tangent: In Leicester, there is an old quarry, where an aeroplane and a bus have been put in for people to look at. In Scapa Flow, there is a massive German fleet there from World War I. It's there because the Allies couldn't decide who were going to have it, so they were scuttled instead. The French Fleet was sunk by the British in World War II, much to the annoyance of Charles de Gaulle, but the reason was so that the Nazis wouldn't get it. They were sunk off Morocco.
  • American farmers hate William Shakespeare because of a drug manufacturer called Eugene Schieffelin. He suggested that every species of bird named in Shakespeare's work should be in America. The only bird that wasn't there was the starling, so he released 100 into Central Park, there are now 200 million in North America. The main problem with the starlings is that they befoul everything that they don't eat, so they have become a major pest in America.
Tangent: Starlings come to Brighton in flocks of up to 1 million birds, some even coming from as far away as Germany and Poland.
  • The Grocers' apostrophe is a term used to describe somewhere where apostrophes shouldn't be, like "potato's". Societies have even been set up to protect the apostrophe and in Dublin, there is even a grocer's spelt "GROCER,S". This leads to a discussion about sign printing people and how they spell "accommodation". The Grocers' apostrophe has been ridiculed since the 18th century, when the Oxford Companion To The English Language said that "there was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known understood and followed by most educated people". Places like Birmingham have now abolished the apostrophe.
Tangent: There are only 5 places in America that have an apostrophe in their names. They are Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Ike's Point, New Jersey, John E's Pond, Rhode Island, Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona and Clark's Mountain, Oregon.
  • The way to determine what the difference between an apple and a pear is without tasting it or opening it up is to put them in some water to see if they float. Apples float, hence the pastime of bobbing for apples. Pears sink because they are denser. The oldest variety of apple is called a Pearmain.
General Ignorance

Episode 2 "Ganimals"

Broadcast date
  • 3 December 2009
Recording date
  • 8 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
  • Bill – An ape screeching
  • Sean – A chimpanzee screaming
  • Sandi – A parrot screeching
  • Alan – A dog yapping
  • John (who has no buzzer) - Blowing a whistle that sounds like a duck quacking
Topics
  • In the book, Gargantua by Rabelais, it is suggested that a goose would be a good alternative to toilet paper. The quote actually said, "I have, by a long and curious experience found out a means to wipe my bum. The most lordly, the most excellent and the most convenient that was ever seen. I wipe my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a montero, with a falconer's lure. But to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all the torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail napkins, bunghole cleansers and wipe breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well-downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And, believe me, therein upon my honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole, a most wonderful pleasure, where in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temperate heat of the goose which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, insofar as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains."
Tangent: Alan suggested that a hedgehog might be a good alternative as you could use both sides to clean out the bum.
Tangent: Other uses of a goose include the use of goose fat for making roast potatoes and people to cover themselves in to swim the English Channel, like David Walliams. It's not used as much any more, because people slip out if they're being rescued. They're also said to be better watchdogs than dogs. They were also used as chimney sweeps.
Tangent: At the Nottingham Goose Fair, it was said that Robin Hood used goose feathers for his arrows. The Bar-headed Goose can travel for unbelievable distances. They can increase their range by 70% by making the V shape to reduce wind shear, by controlling the vortices, which make it less harder for the birds behind it to fly through.
  • Giraffes have short necks in comparison to their legs. The main reason is animals like deer have to drink can just dip their head to have a sip, but giraffes have to mount an unbalanced position with their legs, because of their long neck.
  • Giraffes have long necks so they can fight with other giraffes. A single swipe of the neck could kill a giraffe. They don't use them to reach the tree tops, because they have to bend their necks to eat. It was used to be believed that giraffes were solitary, but they were in widely spaced groups, just so they could see each other. A baby giraffe comes out head first and are 6 feet tall at birth. The staple diet of the giraffe is the acacia plant. It tries to make giraffes avoid eating it by having a bitter taste and by warning its neighbours when giraffes are coming by giving off a chemical signal, known as the wind-borne warning burst. (Forfeit: to reach tree tops)
  • The commonest form of death for mountain goats is falling off cliffs and mountains. Despite being nimble, secure and sure-footed, they like to fight with each other 3 to 4 times an hour. It is said that female goats get sexually aroused the sweat of a human, because it has a similar goaty smell.
Tangent: Sean tells of the time when he was a goatherdsman.
  • In World War I, seagulls were trained to go to the periscopes of submarines and crap all over them to mess up their lenses. The training involved placing food on their own submarines, then the seagulls would recognise it as a submarine. Then when they'd see the ships in the war, they associate the submarine with food and go on top of them and cover them in crap. It didn't work because they couldn't distinguish their own submarines from enemy submarines. Interestingly, Stephen was making an ornithological mistake by referring to them as seagulls, because they are gulls. They aren't seabirds, they're land birds, although they do live on cliffs mainly, but they don't go far out to sea at all.
Tangent: In World War II, parrots were kept in the Eiffel Tower to warn when enemy aircraft were approaching.
  • Camels blow out their soft palate, known as the palatinus diverticulus or gula to attract females. The camels with the most testosterone have the biggest gulas. In Saudi Arabia, the gulas are cut out to make the camels better at camel racing. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia imports its camels from Australia, because they're good to eat. They also import sand from Australia, because it's the right sand for building.
  • Goldfish don't swim into the side of their bowls because they can tell the water pressure with their pressure sensors, similar to what humans have in their ears. They activate little gelatinous caps which activate little hairs, which like the cochlear fluid we have, are used to tell the pressure.
Tangent: Sharks also have neuromasts known as the Ampules of Lorenzini, but they detect electricity, because a lot of fish give off electricity as a weapon.
General Ignorance

Episode 3 "Games"

Broadcast date
  • 10 December 2009
Recording date
  • 15 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
  • Phill – An impression of John Anderson saying Gladiators ready!
  • Sean – A buzzer
  • Liza – Someone shouting Goal!
  • Alan – An impression of Bruce Forsyth saying Good game, good game.
Theme
  • Each panellist is given a Bang! gun during the first question.
Topics
  • Alan, Phill and Sean are in love with Liza. To settle the matter, they are to have a truel (a three-way duel). Sean hits the target 90% of the time, Phill, 60% of the time and Alan, only 10% of the time. Alan gets to shoot first, but everyone only has one bullet. His best strategy is to deliberately miss, because that would mean the next man to fire would aim at the opponent who was the better shot. It's an example of game theory, a concept devised by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, but also by Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr., the man portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. The theory has been applied to business and economics, for example, in tobacco advertising, companies were wasting money trying to get more people to buy their tobacco, but when it was banned, they suddenly found themselves saving money, without losing any market share. Another example was in Big Brother, when the 2 finalists were asked if they wanted to share the £50,000 prize money, or not. If both, said "share", they'd get £25,000 each. If one said "I'll take the lot" and the other said "share", then the person who said "I'll take the lot", would take the lot, whereas if they both said "I'll take the lot", both get nothing. The best option there is to say "share". In the end, both shared. (Forfeit: shoot myself, shoot Liza)
  • The game in which all players traditionally end up being thrown into a lake of fiery sulphur is the ouija board. In 1972, it was more popular than Monopoly, but by the end of that year, it had gone out of fashion because of the film, The Exorcist. Interestingly, the name "ouija" still belongs to Parker Brothers as a proprietary name. The origin of the name is unknown, but it's believed to be the French and German for "yes" ("Oui" and "Ja"). Originally, the idea of the game had nothing to do with dead people, it was supposed to be trying to connect with the part of you that automatically wrote. Only one-third of people nowadays use the ouija board to contact dead people. During World War I, they were used to give messages to troops abroad. The bit about sulphur comes from the Book of Revelations in the Bible.
Tangent: In the 1990s, a British court dismissed a jury, because they used a ouija board to contact the dead person in the case. It is claimed that the dead person said to them that the man was guilty, but it was dismissed because it wasn't done in the jury room, but oddly enough, if it had been, then the judge couldn't dismiss it, because he has no rights to know what goes on in the jury room. The man in question was eventually found guilty after a re-trial.
Tangent: There is an Elvis Presley seance website, where it says, "If you wish to repeat this experiment, please be considerate. Many people want to contact Elvis, and we're sure he's quite busy. Please treat this information as you would if he were alive and you had his e-mail address with respect".
Tangent: Boy Scouts at ages 12 to 14 were taught at Osterley Park (where the Home Guard trained) how to decapitate motorists using wire across a road. British roller skating champion Harry Lee also taught them how to knee someone in the groin using roller skates.
  • The toughest vegetarians in history were the gladiators, although they were actually vegans. A mass grave of gladiators was found in Ephesus, which gave all the indications that they didn't eat meat. They were known as barleymen, from "horeardii", meaning "eaters of barley". It was believed that they ate barley and beans and dry ash, but they needed to be fat. Scientists could work out that they were vegetarians because of low zinc levels. The bulls are the strongest animal vegetarians, but just about every animal is a vegetarian. Adolf Hitler wasn't a vegetarian, although he did smoke and drink, but not very much.
Tangent: Discussion of how people perceive scientists as being arrogant, despite religionists never being able to say "I don't know". Although, "we just don't know" is the default position, until something can be proven.
  • The panellists are shown a picture of a white gondola, and are asked where that picture was taken. The answer is Las Vegas, because since 1633, all Venice gondolas have to be black. They can have ornaments and bling on them, but they have to be black.
  • The easiest way to win money in a Las Vegas casino is by card counting while playing blackjack. It was originally used by the MIT Blackjack Team, who used the skill to win money. It's not illegal, you just play the game very well. Since it's becoming more common, casinos use a facial recognition system to identify card counters, so that any time they go into a casino anywhere in the world, they're instantly recognised because of these countermeasures. It was devised by Ben Campbell, who decided that the best way was to split up into teams to do the card counting. They also tried to do it with roulette.
  • The easiest way to tell is someone is bluffing is to try and spot their tell, which normally involves blinking. Gamblers normally try double bluffing to phase an opponent.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Kenneth Gandar-Dower once tried to see who would win in a race between a cheetah and a greyhound. The cheetah was uninterested and refused to race.
  • Mussels that don't open are safe to eat. A cookery writer called Jane Grigson wrote a book on seafood and created the myth of throwing them away if they don't open, but it just isn't the case. By the 1990s, 90% of cookbooks contained this myth. The Australian Seafood Commission claim that you should cook ones that are shut, but throw ones away that are open, because they'll be dead.
  • At the beginning of tournaments, gladiators never said anything. Only prisoners to Emperor Claudius were believed to say "We who are about to die salute you". (Forfeit: "We who are about to die salute you")

Episode 4 "Geography"

Broadcast date
  • 17 December 2009
  • 23 December 2009 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 14 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Jimmy's girlfriend once said: "Where would we be without sat-navs?"
Tangent: Some musicians had to be rescued by a helicopter, because their pink Mercedes-Benz van was directing them through a ford.
Tangent: Jimmy's idea to print out the information from a sat-nav and make it into a book, which Stephen names a "satlas".
Tangent: Rob's irritation with sat-navs when they interrupt the radio, which leads to Rob doing his impression of a man who is trapped in a small box, followed later by his impression of a "Welsh attitude sat-nav".
  • Genghis Khan is buried next to a baby camel. According to Mongolian tradition, the burial place of any great ruler had to be anonymous. According to Marco Polo, 20,000 people were killed to keep his burial place secret. This included all the slaves who excavated the grave and all the soldiers who killed the slaves, but this led to a problem, since it would have eventually led to everyone who was alive being killed. So, since they realised that camels have long memories, they took a suckling baby camel and killed it in front of its mother at the place where Genghis Khan was going to be buried, then they took the mother away. Every year the camel would go back to the grave, because that was where her baby died. Then when the camel died, no-one knew where he was buried.
Tangent: Genghis Khan was married 500 times. It is said that 8% of all males in Central Asia are related to a common ancestor from around 1,000 years ago and this ancestor may be Genghis Khan.
  • The invention of the teacup changed the course of Chinese history, because it was invented so early. The thing is that the Chinese never drank wine and people in the West liked to drink it in glass. The invention of glass meant that we also had the technology of lens grinding, telescopes and microscopes. The invention of spectacles meant that intellectuals and scientists had an extra 15–20 years of a reading and active lifestyle. Also came the invention of beakers, flasks and retorts, which was useful because glass is chemically neutral. Between the 14th century and the 19th century, no glass was made in China. It also meant that they had no mirrors and their windows were made out of paper, which meant they had dark houses. So, the point is that since they liked drinking tea from the teacup, they never bothered to try to invent glass.
  • The best direction to see Wyld's Globe was from the inside. In 1851, James Wyld installed a 60-foot high scale model of the Earth in the middle of London. It included all the land masses and all the seas and mountains built to scale. It was in Leicester Square between 1851 and 1862. One visitor said, "I visited it several times, and I never met with any one who was not delighted with it, or who did not find it most instructive." The most interesting thing about it, is that it's an inverse of what the Earth is, because you're looking at it from the inside, but anything that is shown on a globe on the outside is exactly the same on the inside. Unfortunately in 1862, the lease expired and the Leicester Square that exists today took its place. It was originally built to coincide with The Great Exhibition at Hyde Park.
  • The Arctic Highlanders (otherwise known as the Inughuit or Polar Eskimos) got their cutlery from meteorites. An explorer called Ross (after whom the Ross Sea is named) became the first person to encounter them. Up until that point, the Inughuit thought they were the only people on the planet. He went up in 1818 and discovered that the Inughuit had cutlery made out of bone and metal, despite them having no technology to smelt metal. To the Inughuit, the bits of meteorite looked like "a woman", "a tent" and "a dog" to them, so they took bits from the woman and used a bit of bone to make their eating implements. (Forfeit: Sheffield, IKEA)
Tangent: The first person to reach the North Pole was a man called Admiral Peary, who got there around 70 years after Ross first got to the Arctic. He took all the Inughuit's meteorites and sold them to a museum for $40,000. He also took 6 children, of which 4 of them died of TB instantly. Another one eventually saw his parents as skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He complained to Peary, who did nothing about it and it wasn't until 1993, that they were eventually returned home. Some people even refuse to believe that Peary got to the North Pole, as he would had to have gone at speeds that no other Arctic explorer has ever done since.
  • The "father of geography", Alexander von Humboldt was taught the language of the Ature 40 years after the last person who spoke it died from a parrot. von Humboldt was in Venezuela when he heard about the Caribs who has eaten the last of the Atures, but it was revealed that there was a parrot that was still alive, so von Humboldt learned all 40 words that the parrot knew and learned them, although they were slightly inaccurate as no-one could say what they were exactly, so he found someone who knew a similar language and they guessed at what the words might have been. von Humboldt was also a homosexual.
Tangent: Parrots can learn up to 200 words, but the odd thing is that they only mimic humans. It's unknown why they never mimic any other bird or animal in the wild.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Words to national anthems which seem more controversial to the Spanish one include this from La Marseillaise; "Do you hear in the countryside, Those ferocious soldiers roaring? They come up to your arms to slit the throats of your sons and wives!" The 6th verse of God Save the Queen goes, "Lord grant that Marshal Wade, May by that mighty aid, victory bring, May he sedition hush, And like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush, God Save the King/Queen!" Even more bizarre, the current Dutch national anthem goes, "William of Nassau, scion of a Dutch and ancient line, Dedicate undying faith to this land of mine, A prince I am undaunted of Orange ever free, To the King of Spain, I've granted a lifelong loyalty". Netherlands was part of the Spanish Netherlands 350 years ago.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: The Mediterranean Sea was once the driest lake in the world, until in the late Miocene era, the water from the Atlantic Ocean.came over the Rock of Gibraltar, 6,000,000 years ago, which cause the Mediterranean to flood, but also caused the Rock of Gibraltar to crumble. Because of this, all the fish from in the Mediterranean are descended from the Atlantic Ocean types. Alan found out this information from the Plymouth Aquarium.
Tangent: Barbary monkeys are actually miscalled as Barbary apes.
  • The things that are large, blue, rare, slow-moving, have calves, suffer from wet bottoms and are found all over the world are glaciers, otherwise known as ice floes. A glacier has been found that is 250 miles long, 60 miles wide and 1 mile deep. The bits that break off from glaciers are known as calves, which come from ice calving. They have "wet bottoms", because when it gets to warmer climes, they reach 0°C, they slide down and become warmer. They can travel up to 65 feet a day, although one in Pakistan did 7½ miles in 3 months. You can even get glaciers in the Tropics. One was spotted near Uganda and Congo. The only things that live in glaciers are ice worms which live on red algae. In one glacier they found more worms, than people living on the planet. Their ideal temperature is 0°C, but they freeze to death at -7°C, but they also melt at 5°C. It couldn't be a Blue Whale, because they can reach speeds of 30mph.
Tangent: There are no snakes in Ireland because of glaciation, since snakes can't survive in freezing temperatures.
Tangent: It takes 5kg of anchovies to make 1kg of farmed salmon.
Tangent: The 4th best-selling book of all-time, Green Eggs and Ham, has a vocabulary of only 50 words.

Episode 5 "Groovy" (Christmas Special)

Broadcast date
  • 24 December 2009
  • 29 December 2009 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 28 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
  • In keeping with the Christmas mood of the show, the studio is decorated with silver decorations such as silver Christmas trees either side of Stephen.
Topics
Tangent: Muybridge murdered his love rival in cold blood. He became the first person in American legal forensic history to claim insanity as his excuse for murdering his love rival.
  • People don't seem to mind queue bargers as much as you think. Stanley Milgram did an experiment in which people were asked to obey orders that they wouldn't do normally, but because the person who gave the orders wore a white coat, it gave them some authority, so they did it. His lesser-known experiments involved queues (or lines, as he called them), he observed 129 lines in railway stations and betting shops. He'd make a person go in between the 3rd and 4th person in the line by saying in a neutral tone, "Excuse me, I'd like to get in here". He'd leave either when he was admonished or when one minute was up, whichever was sooner. The experiments showed that on only 10% of occasions was the person asked to leave because he was admonished, and 50% of the time did people do as much as tut.
Tangent: A discussion about lane mergers and bar-jumpers. In America, they refer to lane-merging as "like a zip!"
Tangent: David's annoyance of people with more than 5 items going in the "5 items or less" queue in supermarkets.
Tangent: During World War I, a tank toured Britain to help raise money for the war effort. It toured all the major UK cities and the place where the most money was made was Glasgow. David mentioned this fact to prove to Lee that not all Scottish people were tight.
Tangent: Argument as what is classified as "many", because Bill set the forfeit alarm by saying "up to nine".
Tangent: Discussion about The Osmonds (the most famous Mormons).
General Ignorance
Tangent: Another infamous conspiracy theory is Paul McCartney being barefoot on the Abbey Road cover. The cover seems to show John as a preacher, Ringo Starr as an undertaker, George Harrison as a gravedigger (in denim) and Paul as a corpse. Interestingly, modern version of the album have the cigarette that McCartney is holding digitally removed.
  • There is no connection between Puff, the Magic Dragon and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Puff, the Magic Dragon is based on an Ogden Nash rhyme about a "realio, trulio little pet dragon". It was written by Peter Yarrow, who said on asked about it drug connection, "Even if I had the intention of writing a song about drugs, which I may have had later, I was 20 years old at Cornell in 1959. I was so square, drugs had not emerged. I know Puff was a good dragon, you've heard that from the mouth of the dragon's daddy. It is not about that". The origin of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds comes from a picture painted by Julian Lennon at playgroup of his friend, Lucy. It wasn't until much later on that any of the Beatles realised that the initials spelt out LSD. (Forfeit: drugs)
  • Stephen reads out a joke about a man going to a doctor and saying, "Doctor, Doctor, I can't stop singing Auld Lang Syne". The doctor says, "I'll have to send you to the Burns unit". The problem with the joke is that Robert Burns, who is claimed to have written Auld Lang Syne, did not write it. Although most people in the Burns Society believe he wrote it, he himself said it was an old song that he had written down. It was first seen in 1724, 35 years before Burns was born. It's popular in the Far East, in Japan it's used daily to signal the closing of large department stores. Bill actually made a point that it could have been to do with Burns Night, which is January 25, whereas you sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve. Auld Lang Syne means "Old Long Since" or "In The Old Days". (Forfeit: It Isn't Funny[clarification needed])
Tangent: As previously mentioned in Series B, Episode 4, Burns was never referred to as Robbie or Rabbie Burns. He preferred to use Robin, Rab or Robert.
QI XL Extras
  • Giraffe bicycles were used to light gas lamps. The bicycle was so tall, that the rider would light it from the bike in a leaning position, with the aid of a torch and an assistant. When he was done, he would return to the depot, or wherever he started from and the assistant would help the rider dismount from the bicycle.
Tangent: The penny-farthing was known as an ordinary bicycle in its day, despite its unusual shape. Most bikes in the old days were considerably taller than the bikes of today. The first regular-sized bikes with chain drive mechanisms were known as dwarf safeties. The Clark brothers built a tall bike, known as a "flood bike", that could ride through floodwater.
Tangent: Nowadays, many tall bikes are used in tourneys for jousting, whereby lances would be attached to the bikes. When he was at school, Stephen played a bike version of quad hockey.
Tangent: Lee visited Amsterdam when he was 19, and because he didn't do drugs, he just said he'd "have some cake", which of course were hash brownies. Lee had so many that he claimed that at 2am, he accused a taxi driver of trying to kill him.
Tangent: Fly agaric mushrooms in Siberia are eaten by reindeer, and it makes them bounce around. It's believed that's where the idea of the flying reindeer came from. Unfortunately, it's highly toxic to humans, so they would drink the urine of the reindeer to avoid the toxic.
Tangent: Lee tells of how he sniffs magazines at dentists to see if any of the smelly aftershave pages still smell after a long time.
Tangent: The correct term for the magic mushroom is psilocybin. Experiments involving magic mushrooms seem to try and prove that some religious experiences are based on hallucinations. Some Americans are even trying to prove that there is a God Spot, which has some connection with psilocybin. Magic mushrooms were re-discovered by Albert Hofmann. He more famously discovered LSD, which he found on ergot, which grows on wheat and rye. To test it, he took what he thought was a small dose, but it turned out to be a thousand times more potent than he expected, he described his experience by saying "a demon had invaded me, it had taken possession of my body, mind and soul. I jumped up and screamed to try to free myself from it, sat down again, helpless on the sofa, the substance which I had wanted to experiment on had vanquished me, I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane". It was also believed that Hofmann was involved in a CIA operation known as Project MKULTRA, which tried to see if LSD could be used as a truth drug.

Episode 6 "Genius"

Broadcast date
  • 1 January 2010
  • 2 January 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 21 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
  • In keeping with the "Genius" theme, each of the panellists are seen wearing glasses at the start of the show.
Topics
  • The panellists are each asked to put some tissue paper up their left nostril, then say something intelligent. This is because your nostrils control your ability to do certain tasks. If your left nostril is blocked, like the panellists' were, then you should be better at being able to do visual and spatial things, whereas, if the right nostril is blocked, you should be better at being able to do verbal things. This was looked at in a study in 1989 about unilateral nostril breathing by Block, Arnott, Quigley & Lynch. Sportspeople usually wear a nasal strip while playing sports, which of course means they are at their most verbally dextrous, since their noses are unblocked during the time they're on the field, although Graham suggests that they're used mainly to get cocaine up their nose. According to the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory, the right nostril makes you more emotionally negative as well.
  • The panellists are given this problem: Consider an n-dimensional hypercube, and connect each pair of vertices to obtain a complete graph on 2n vertices. Then colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black. What is the smallest value of n for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single-coloured complete sub-graph with 4 vertices which lie in a plane? Interestingly, Graham gave the answer, "6", which was what graph theorists used to think the answer was, up until 2003. The answer has a connection with Graham's number, a number devised by Ronald Graham, which is so big, that all the material in the universe couldn't make enough ink to write it out, but interestingly scientists know that it ends in a "7" (Graham Norton decided he wanted his number to be one higher and end in an "8"). The number is commonly written as "...9404248265018193851562535796399618993967905496638003222348723967018485186439059104575627262464195387". It is now believed to be at least 11, possibly 12, but definitely anywhere between 11 and Graham's number.
  • Exams are believed to easier nowadays, which is not the case. In the old days, IQ tests were done by percentile. Nowadays, the IQ test gets better by 0.3% every year, so 3% over 10 years, meaning children get smarter, so they have to normalise. So, under the Mental Health Act 1983, your great-great-grandparents would be retarded, because their IQ's would be 70. The Flynn effect was designed to try and bring the scores up above the IQ of 70, because in America, you cannot be executed for a capital crime, which would mean that Flynn would often be called up to try and prove that some people retarded, so that they wouldn't be killed. So, the main reason that children find IQ test easier is because they do more problem solving in life, than their parents did.
  • Geniuses might be bred through eugenics, a form of selective human breeding, which was also used by the Nazis. Someone who sort of bred a genius was Leonardo da Vinci, or to be accurate, his brother, Bartolomeo. Bartolomeo wanted his son to be a genius like Leonardo, and he was, in a way. This son, Pierino da Vinci was born just after Leonardo died and he became a genius after being sent to Florence, where he demonstrated great talent, but he died aged 22, leaving 20 works behind him.
Tangent: Graham talks about the time that he hosted an American game show and a female contestant on the show was asked what her "fun fact" was, and it was that her father was a serial killer, and her other "fun fact" was that she didn't tell her husband until after they were married. When asked why she hadn't told him, it was because his son had committed suicide.
Tangent: The screens show a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci dying with someone in the picture looking like Rodney Bewes from The Likely Lads, which leads to Graham admitting that he didn't know who he was, because The Likely Lads was never shown in Ireland. This leads to Stephen talking about the brilliance of QI, as they usually don't discuss popculture and celebrities, so Alan talking about Bewes annoys Stephen, as it was on a popculture topic. This eventually leads to Alan & Stephen suggesting that 2 other people in the painting look like Matthew Kelly and Brian Blessed.
Tangent: The first cloned cat came from the cat, Rainbow, but it's clone looked nothing like the original. It was called CC, which was short for "CopyCat". This was part of the project called "Operation CopyCat", part of a larger project to clone a dog, called Missy after Missyplicity. The first clone dog was the South Korean dog, Snuppy.
General Ignorance
QI XL Extras
  • There is no proof that making babies listen to music like Mozart makes them brainier. Alan claims that babies should only hear natural sounds, otherwise they go destructive and start having behavioural difficulties. It's also believed that because of this children shouldn't watch television until they're 4 years old. There was a study done which was later debunked by many others which claimed that peoples' IQ went up after listening to Mozart, but these people were students, not children.
Tangent: Mozart was so talented at a young age that he regularly entertained for people in the House of Bourbon and the House of Hohenzollern.
Tangent: "The English Mozarts" - Thomas Linley, who played a concerto at a younger age than Mozart did, he and Mozart played together when they were 14, but he died aged 22, when he drowned after being pushed from a boat into a lake. Samuel Wesley, most of his genius was suppressed because he suffered brain damage after banging his head.
Tangent: Interestingly, Mensa is Latin for "table", it was originally called "Mens", the Latin for "mind", but some people thought their "Mens Magazine" would be a gay porn mag. The table represents the "round table of equality". Apparently, "everyone's equal at Mensa, there's no elitism".
  • The Last Supper is decaying badly because Leonardo painted it on dry plaster, rather than wet plaster, which is what you normally do when it's fresco, so it decayed during Leonardo's lifetime. After his death, it decayed more because it was used in Napoleonic times as stabling. Interestingly, the bottom of it was destroyed, so a door was put in the painting at the point where Jesus' legs would've been. There is no proof that da Vinci substituted people in The Last Supper with some people that he knew, which other painters at the time used to do.
Tangent: If da Vinci's helicopter had been built, it wouldn't have worked. He isn't known as a great person in the field of science, because of his mirror diary, which had a code, which wasn't deciphered in his time, which had ideas of many inventions that were new at the time, but by the time it was deciphered in the 19th century, just about everything in it had been discovered independently.
Tangent: When Stephen was a child, Sugar Puffs made his urine smell of Sugar Puffs. This was followed by a discussion about people being more interested in urine than they let on.
Tangent: Alan brings up the theory that people who read books then bring themselves up to have a little smell, aren't smelling the book, they're smelling their own farts.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Discussion about animals in circuses.
Tangent: When Alan first heard of "dog cakes", he thought they were cakes made out of dog, like fishcakes are cakes made out of fish.
Tangent: Dara talks about cat shows and how people have to try and force their cat to do things, because they're unaware of where they are.
Tangent: David describes Crufts as the most pointless show on the TV, which leads to Alan & Graham saying that golf shouldn't be on the TV, but, Stephen defends it.

Episode 7 "Girls and Boys"

Broadcast date
  • 8 January 2010
  • 9 January 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 29 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
  • Ronni – A harp glissando
  • Sandi – A woman singing a rising and falling scale
  • Jack – Wolf-whistle
  • Alan – A man shouting 'ello darlin'
Topics
  • Up until the 20th century, baby boys wore pink and baby girls wore blue. Boys at that time were also referred to as girls. In 1900, Dressmaker Magazine said "The preferred colour to dress young boys in is pink. Blue is reserved for girls as it is presumed paler and the more dainty of the two colours, and pink is thought to be stronger". In 1927, Princess Astrid of Belgium caused controversy when she gave birth to a girl, as "the cradle had been optimistically outfitted in pink, the colour for boys". It was believed that blue was more serene and paler, hence it was used for girls. Interestingly, up until the mid-15th century, all children were referred to as girls. Boys were known as "knave girls" and girls were known as "gay girls". Only in recent times, has calling a boy been referred to a male child, before that it meant a servant.
Tangent: Female monkeys are attracted to pink because of the pink faces of the young primates.
Tangent: It's believed that if someone is picking up a child, that's not theirs, if the child is dressed in pink, they'd be hugged inwards, and if the child is dressed in blue, they'd be hugged outwards.
Tangent: An experiment with baby chimpanzees showed that when given the choice of which toy to play with, either a toy truck or a doll, the baby boys all chose the truck and the baby girls all chose the doll.
Tangent: The traje de luces, the suit worn by a torero (a matador) in a bullfight, is often pink. It means "suit of light".
Tangent: Pink doesn't appear on the spectrum, it's an extra-spectral colour. It's said that girls head towards the red side of a rainbow, whereas boys head towards the blue sky.
Tangent: It's also believed that nine-tenths of the food collected by hunter-gatherers were provided by women.
  • At the moment, it's believed that the best way to get a baby girl is to have a low-calorie diet. A study was done and out of 100 people who had had a high-calorie diet, 56 gave birth to a boy. Women who had at least one bowl of breakfast cereal a day were 87% more likely to have a boy than women who ate no more than one bowl a week. On average, women who had boys had roughly 400 more calories daily than those who had girls. Women who were infected with Hepatitis B were 1½ times more likely to have a boy. The only known certain way is by embryo selection, which is popular in America and Thailand. It costs around $18,000. Aristotle believed that the diet of the mother and the sex position at conception made the difference. Anaxagoras thought that boys and girls came from different testicles, so if you tied up one testicle, it would guarantee you the other one. The Talmud suggest lining up the bed north-south before sex, if you want a boy. The French suggest wearing boots to bed would get you a boy.
Tangent: Alan tells the story of an English couple who went to Thailand to have their baby. A Thai woman told them, "if you look lovely when you're pregnant, you have girl, if you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you have baby boy." She then asked what she thought she'd have and the Thai woman replied, "Boy", and she had a baby boy.
Tangent: Sandi tells of the time when her son brought a friend round and he asked "What's it like having two mummies?", he replied, "It's marvellous, if one of them's poorly, you've still got one to do for you".
  • The reason that there are less female guests on QI is because women laugh less at other women, despite the fact that they laugh more than men, although audiences in general laugh more at men. It is believed that men make prats of themselves more often than women, although Lucille Ball and Goldie Hawn are two examples of women who can do that. Interestingly, as stand-up comedy was getting more popular during the 1980s, women portray women, but men didn't portray men, so in other words, women treated themselves as a minority, even though they are 51% of the population. Germaine Greer famously said, "there are only two things that women don't do as well as men, and that's design dresses and cook", which is slightly amusing considering that nearly all the great chefs and couturiers are men, whereas it was always believed that women were the better cooks and couturiers.
  • In China, Nü Shu is a form of writing devised in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province. It was a writing form that only women could understand. Since, women in China were not taught properly at all, they needed a secret code of writing. Nü Shu is a phonetic type of writing. When a woman in one of these secret friendship groups got married, they were given a book in which they would leave some blank pages, so they could write their secret thoughts down, which only women could read. They would send them, because they could never meet in their groups often, because they had bound feet. Foot binding involved 5 year olds breaking all the bones in their feet, so they could wrap their feet round themselves and then be wrapped up to be around 3 inches. Many of them would rot and many died of gangrene. This went on for around 1,000 years. They would also write using tapestries.
Tangent: In the Bantu language, there is a rule that states that is someone got married, the female would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in the male's name, because it is a language of respect that women have to use. Another secret language is Pig Latin, where the first syllable is put to the end of the word with the sound ay', so "Quite Interesting" becomes "Itequay Interestingay". In Germany, they have "Löffelsprache", which means "spoon speak", the French have "Louchébem", the Bulgarians have "Pileshki" and the Japanese is "Ba-bi-bu-be-bo". There's also a camp High church nonsense language where the Holy Communion are referred to as "haggers commagers" and also say "Oooh, Jessica Christ".
Tangent: A discussion about teenagers sounding the same in just about every language. Also, the fact that teenagers never look at you, when you ask them to look at you.
Tangent: Clownfish (made popular in the film, Finding Nemo) are known to be very fierce, but they're also immune to sea anemones. They actually form a bond with the sea anemones and have their babies there. They also have gender assignation, which means they can change their gender in later life. If there's a group of fish consisting of a strong female and male, along with several weak males, when the female dies, the strong male becomes female and one of the weaklings becomes the "alpha male".
General Ignorance
  • It's impossible to tell a woman from a man just by looking at them. It was believed that the easiest way to tell them apart was by the fact that women don't have Adam's apples, but they do. Even so, a good ladyboy can just about imitate anything female.
  • Men are better at map reading than women because of grey matter and white matter. Using MRI scans on men and women with equal IQ, they found that men use 6½ more grey matter than women, whereas women used 9 times more white matter than men. Grey matter is central to processing information for intellectual thought, such as map reading and mathematics. White matter connects the processing information to emotional thought such as language speaking and multitasking. (Forfeit: they're not)
Tangent: People being annoying when asking for directions.
  • The prize money given out at Wimbledon is unfair to male competitors. When it began in 1884, the ladies' winner got a 20 guinea silver flower basket and the mens' champion got a 30 guinea gold trophy. In 2006, Amélie Mauresmo won £625,000 for playing 142 games, whereas Roger Federer got £655,000 for playing 202 games. The women therefore got more money, because the short matches allowed them to play in doubles tournaments as well. The rate per game in 2005 was £1,432 per game for the top 8 women, whereas the top 8 men got £993 per game. The prize money is equal in terms of money, but not equal as the men have to play more tennis. (Forfeit: nothing[clarification needed])
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Sandi tells of her love for the colour pink.
Tangent: Sandi's theory about stamina and the speed of sperm, followed by a discussion about the fact that girls have no sperm at all.
Tangent: Alan's suggestion that if you're watching football on TV, you'll more likely have a boy. This also leads to a discussion about using remote controls and reading magazines during sex.
  • The most violent women in history are the Amazons of Dahomey, now known as Benin. They were a group of female warriors whose job was to protect the king. They were nominal wives of the king, but they were celibate. They were chosen for being aggressive, but their husbands could nominate their wife, if he thought she was a nag. They carried a switchblade that was capable of cutting a man in two. Some sources say that they were turned into men and made to despise women, whereas others say that venerated, they had slave girls with them carrying a bell, while men had to avert their eyes.
Tangent: Marco Polo suggested that Khutulun, the niece of Kublai Khan, was the most fiercest of all warriors, and she suggested that anyone who wanted to marry her had to wrestle her. If he won, he'd marry her, but if he lost, he'd have to give 100 horses to her. She eventually gained 10,000 horses this way and never married.
Tangent: In the United Kingdom, crime committed by women has gone up 25% over the last 3 years, whereas there was a 2% drop for men. It's believed that alcohol is a main component of this, because 50% of their testosterone get sourced through their blood while they're drunk.
Tangent: Discussion about girl bullying by text messaging. Sandi then tells of the first time she came to the UK, after being thrown out of an American school at age 14. She went to boarding school for 6 weeks, and no-one talked to her because of her New York accent. She managed to make it more British by watching the film, Brief Encounter. This leads to Stephen saying that if he was getting bullied at school, he'd tell them not to, because it would give him an erection.
  • The connection between grannies and Killer Whales is the menopause. Killer Whales are the only other animals apart from human that have a massive gap between menopause and death, hence the happy and active lives they live. Killer Whales are also matrilineal, so the females keep the life cycle going, as they provide most of the nutrition.
Tangent: Killer Whales can kill their own handlers. Sandi's granny got taken out of three care homes for bad behaviour.
Tangent: Sandi's mum grew up in Maidstone, Kent during the Battle of Britain, and all the terraced houses on her street were bombed apart from hers, she asked her mother why it wasn't and she replied "Granny wouldn't have allowed it". This leads to Sandi's suggestion that the army should be just grannies.
  • There was an urban myth during the 1940s that the Nazis disguised themselves as nuns with hairy hands during World War II. It was believed that they would parachute in and people in Britain were told to watch out for nuns from the South coast coming up on buses, trains or the London Underground on their way up to the Scottish Highlands. Their cover would be blown when paying fares, because it revealed the hairiness of their hands and forearms and in some cases, a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on their arm. Other ways to test if soldiers were German was to make them speak English, especially some very odd surnames, such as Featherstonehaugh (pronounced "Fanshawe"), Cholmondeley (pronounced "Chumley"), Berekely (pronounced "Barkly"), Mainwaring (pronounced "Mannering") and Belvoir (pronounced "Beaver").
Tangent: Female moustaches and Alan's grey pubic hair.
Tangent: The Tollemache family. They were a double-barrelled family, so they were the Tollemache-Tollemaches, but it was pronounced "Toolmake-Tollmash". One of their family had the longest name of any person in the British Army, Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His elder brither was Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Neville Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Interestingly, his initials spelt out LYONEL THE SECOND.

Episode 8 "Germany"

Broadcast date
  • 15 January 2010
  • 16 January 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 5 June 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: The whole notion about Germans "hogging the sunloungers" is supposedly a myth according to a the German writer Ralf Höcker who did a study, which said that the Germans weren't even aware that this thing was associated with them, but a survey done by Halifax Travel Insurance in 2009 showed that the Germans followed by the British, French, Italian and Portuguese were the most likely to reserve sunloungers. This leads to Jo telling a story about crashing into a sunlounger after a confrontation with some fat Germans.
Tangent: The other German stereotype is the fact that they are so efficient, which they themselves believe, but they think that the British think they are lederhosen wearing beer drinkers. The 6 major thoughts that the Germans think that the British are untidy, split into mobs, obsessed with royalty, drink tea all the time, are rather reserved and can't cook.
Tangent: Sean claims that the reason why Premier League footballers get booked for taking their shirt off is because that's when the sponsors are in full view, so by taking them off the sponsors get less coverage.
Tangent: Lederhosen originated in the 18th century when it was decided that the upper classes would ape the peasantry and have expensive wedding and country feasts where they pretended to be extravagant, like Marie Antoinette pretended to be a milkmaid with her silver curls.
Tangent: Rob shows off his "half-hose" socks, which Jo says make him look like a "knobhead". Rob then asks the audience if they think it's cool, with the majority disagreeing.
Tangent: In America, there are a group of people known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are descended from the Rhineland and Switzerland. The reason they are referred to as "Dutch", is because the word "Deutsch" which is German for "German" is correctly used as the word "Dutch", so "Dutch" is "Deutsch". The other reason is the "Dutch Dutch" (or the Hollanders) fought Britain many times and eventually invaded England. (Forfeit: don't mention the war)
Tangent: During the discussion, a picture is shown of Hitler wearing socks similar to what Rob is wearing.
  • Monopoly board games were used to escape from prison. A man called "Clutty" Hutton bought some Monopoly boards and through the help of MI9 had help turn them into escape kits, which were sold through bogus charities. Amongst the items were real money mixed with the fake Monopoly money, maps on silk, because paper was too bulky and rustly, whereas you could get much more detail on silk. His earlier work involved putting compasses into military tunic buttons. The Germans got wind of it, and worked out that the button could be unscrewed, so then the thread was reversed, so it became tighter as they tried to unscrew it, but then they got wind of that, so razor blades were put in that were magnetized at one end, so when they were attached to something metal, the "G" of Gillette would always point north. They were also given wettened blankets that could be made into greatcoats using it like a tailor's template, as well as pens with sacks of dye in them to make many different colours and playing cards that when dipped in water, could be peeled to reveal money. (Forfeit: Get out of jail free)
Tangent: Rob's idea to use giant Jengas to get prisoners out of prison, followed by Alan's idea of using snakes and ladders.
General Ignorance
  • Trick question: Who wrote Brideshead Revisited? (Forfeit: Evelyn War, taken as mentioning the war (Sean))
  • The panellists are shown a picture of a German Shepherd Dog. They were known as Alsatians up until 1977, mainly because at the time people resented anything with the word "German" in it, so they were called Schäferhund or Alsatian Wolfhounds, then just Alsatians, which was coined in 1918. Alan then reveals that he had a German Shepherd, which killed his next door neighbour's dog.
  • The Munich Oktoberfest is held mainly in September, although it is occasionally partly in October, depending on how the months are arranged. It's believed the world's biggest continuous festival. Over 6 million people cram into it every year. They drink 6,940,600 litres of beer during the festival.
Tangent: Alan tells of the time that he went to the 1998 FIFA World Cup in Bordeaux, France, where some temporary bars were built up in the city, and when Scotland played Norway, the Scots drank more beer that weekend then the entire population of Bordeaux drink in a year. Each of the bars only sold lager, and there were no food stalls and no toilets. One of the drunk Scots then mistook Alan for Alan Partridge.
Cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels, doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles.
  • The answer is "schnitzel with noodles", as they are never eaten together. There is a possibility that the popularity of the song has meant that some people eat it, but it's just because of the song. The lyrics of the song were done by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The film ends with the family crossing the border, not into Switzerland, but into Bavaria, near Hitler's private house, but then they walked the 100 kilometres down to Innsbruck and got to the border with Italy the day before it was shut.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Another of these loanwords id Gesundheit, which means "soundness" or "health".
  • The panellists are shown a ghost-like object, a SPUK, which is a device that is put on the underside of the toilet seat, and when it's raised it give off a voice message which tries to force German people to sit down on the toilet seat to urinate, rather than stand up. SPUK is an acronym for StehPinkler Unter Kontrolle. "Stehpinklen" in German means to stand urinating, whereas "Sitzpinklen" means to "sit urinating".
Tangent: Rob tells of how when he sits down on the toilet, his half-hose falls down to his ankles, if he's wearing something like a jumbo cord. Sean then says that when he's on the toilet, he takes his glasses off and puts them on his pants as a sort of hammock, but then he sometimes forgets they're there and they get "rammed into his under-regions".
Tangent: Sean says that is he were a nudist, he'd put a bit of toilet paper up his bottom and see if anyone noticed.
General Ignorance
  • In Germany, at 11:11 on 11 November every year, the Germans celebrate the start of their Carnival, which lasts all the way up to Ash Wednesday. It starts off quietly through November and December, partially due to Christmas, but by the time the Mardi Gras arrives, everything is in full flow. The word "carnival" doesn't mean "goodbye to meat", as believed, but actually means "to remove meat from your diet", from the words "carne levare". (Forfeit: don't mention the war (Alan))

Episode 9 "Gallimaufrey"

The full episode title "A Gallimaufrey of Gingambobs", means "an absurd medley of testicles".

Broadcast date
  • 22 January 2010
  • 23 January 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 4 June 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
  • Captain Schlitt of German submarine U-1206 caused his U-boat to sink because of a problem he had involving the toilet in the submarine. The problem with toilet in submersible vehicles is that they can't work like toilets on aeroplanes and trains, because of the obvious dangers with being underwater. Special training is actually needed to operate it properly. On April 14, 1945, Schlitt went to the toilet to do a poo, and he claimed that the toilet flush wasn't working properly, but there is a theory that he just did a rather unpleasant poo and didn't want to ask the person who did the flushing to come in, so he did it himself and got it wrong and filled the submarine with sewage and water, which then lead to the power source, a huge acid battery, which therefore created toxic chlorine gas, so they had to surface to vent the gas, but they spotted and blown out of the water.
  • The handwriting of each panellist is shown.
    • A graphologist would say of Andy's that because it's mostly joined up, it's of a "logical, systematic thinker", since some words are spaced out, he is "open, honest, but deep in thought", and "sociable", because of the slightly forward slant to the right.
    • Alan's would be described as "unstable", because of the close lettering, "does things without thinking", because the letters aren't mostly joined up.
    • Hugh's would be described as "artistic and intuitive", because most, but not all of the letters are joined up, but because it's upright, it also shows "self-control, egoism and coldness".
    • Phill's would be described as also having "self-control, egoism and coldness", "unstable" and "does things without thinking".

Stephen then explains that there wasn't much point in doing this because the British Psychological Society says that graphology as a way of interpreting character has zero validity. It's also not allowed in American courts either. Although, forensic graphology is allowable. Amazingly, 3,000 British businesses use graphologists for recruitment.

Tangent: Andy once took a handwriting test to try and become a French train driver. He reveals that his friend's dad was a psychologist for SNCF, and they did test to work out if drivers were maniacs or not, so they made people write with their wrong hand, and put a rubber ring around the middle of the pen and you had to try and trace over what was written there. If you drifted up the page, you were either assertive or slightly aggressive, but if it went down the page, you were deemed as too passive. There was also another test where the applicants were told to press the coloured button they were told to press for 15 seconds and there would be a hooter sounded, if they got it wrong. It would also be heard after the 15 seconds, to make sure they didn't go to pieces.
  • In Ireland, the police, known as the Garda were duped by a Polish driver called Prawo Jazdy. This driver had done 50 speeding offences across Ireland, and was fast becoming Ireland's most wanted motorist. He managed to make different driving licences with different addresses, so it would be hard to catch him. Then one of the Garda realised that Prawo Jazdy was the Polish for driving licence. Even more weird was the fact that above Prawo Jazdy on the licence was "Permis de conduire", which is of course French. The Queen is the only person in Britain, who can legally drive without a driving licence. The first person to have a driving licence was Karl Benz of Mercedes-Benz. The people who authorised the tests were the Dampfkesselüberwachungsverein (Steam Boiler Supervision Association), who authorised the first mandatory licences in Prussia.
Tangent: Up until May 14, 2002, women in Lithuania were made to undergo smear tests, or to be more accurate, a gynaecological examination. In China, they have a driving test that consists of 100 multiple choice questions. One of them is "If you come across a road accident victim whose intestines are lying on the road, should you pick them up and push them back in?" Yes or No? The answer is No. It was believed that in China that some traffic lights had the colour sequence altered, so red meant go and green meant stop, but they didn't change all the lights, so some still remained at red for stop and green for go, although in some cases, blue is used instead of green, because red-green is a common form of colour blindness.
  • Spring travels from Land's End to John o'Groats every year at about ⅓ of a mile per hour, although when going over hills, it takes an extra couple of days per 100 feet of elevation. It officially takes 8 weeks to get from the south of the UK, to the north of the UK. Spring is officially a phenotype of when common plants associated with Spring start to bloom. Birds fly south in the Winter, mainly because they need a source of food.
  • The panellists are shown diagrams of perpetual motion machines. A perpetual motion machine never stops, so it carries on forever, but it also must not have any energy input, although it must carry on having energy output. Interestingly, perpetual motion transgresses both the first and second law of thermodynamics. In an episode of The Simpsons, Lisa makes a perpetual motion machine, although it's impossible for it to happen in reality. Leonardo da Vinci did some drawings of possible perpetual motion machines, but he realised early on that it was going to be impossible for them to work.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Cola, as well as HP Sauce and vinegar are very good at cleaning coins.
Tangent: Andy's mum used to tell him not to drink cola, because it stains the inside of your stomach.
  • The only ape that walks just on its 2 feet, but isn't a human is the gibbon. This way of walking is considered to be more primitive according to evolutionists. (Forfeits: orangutan, baboon)
  • The panellists are asked to put these 4 things in age order from oldest to youngest: The Himalayas, a triceratops, a spider and a cockroach. The answer is the spider at 300 million years old, then the cockroach, which was just afterwards, then the triceratops which lived between 65 and 230 million years ago and lastly, the Himalayas, which are only 40 million years old. Interestingly, ants are contemporaneous with dinosaurs, but cockroaches pre-date them by 55 million years.
QI XL Extras
  • Stephen introduced the panellists using Georgian slang. "Gravy-eyed" means runny eyes, "Glimflashy" means an angry person, "Whiddle my scrap" means knowing someone's game or to see what people are up to. This leads to a game of Call My Bluff.
    • A "gentleman of three outs" is either a) a person without wit, money or manners, b) a person who owned three outhouses, which would be a mark of status in the 18th century, or c) a genteel description by Punch of the highwayman Jonny Tripplearse. The answer, correctly guessed by Alan was a).
    • "Grog Blossom" is either a) the mould inside a barrel of beer that you have to clean out before you can use it again, or b) pimples that were grown on peoples' faces after drinking too much. The answer, incorrectly guessed by Andy & Hugh was b).
  • It's believed that 20% of people have difficulty getting up in the morning, because they are either larks or owls. If they were a lark, they'd sleep at dinner parties and if they were an owl, they just can't get up. It's believed that young children and old people are larks, whereas teenagers are owls. There are many other methods of getting up, the MIT invented an alarm clock that when you pressed the Snooze button, it runs away and hides, and it's programmed to go to a different place every day, so it always changes. There is also an alarm clock in the shape of a dumbbell, and it doesn't shut up until you've done 30 reps with it. There is also one that has an online connection, and every time you press Snooze, money is donated to a political cause that you hate.
Tangent: Phill tells of how he used to sleep listening to BBC World Service, and then waking up listening to BBC Radio 4 and thinking he'd dreamt the news that he heard during his sleep, so thought he was psychic. This leads to Stephen telling a story of how he raided the kitchen at boarding school at 3am, just to get blocks of jelly.
Tangent: Andy tells the story of a binman who worked near his house at Hernhill, who always sung the last note of Don't Cry for Me Argentina wrongly.
Tangent: When the American Indians went on dawn raids they used to drink lots of water to make sure they got up early.
Tangent: Andy has a cuckoo clock, which has a monkey, instead of a cuckoo in it, and it only comes out whenever he says something interesting.
  • The Goldilocks effect works on the theory that Goldilocks liked everything "just right". It's used in business, you have 3 items, the first one is unbelievable expensive, the second is a quarter of the price, but just as nice, and the third is very cheap, which makes people go for the second one. The best use of the Goldilocks effect is with airfares. A standard Transatlantic economy seat is £500, business class is £3,500 and first class, where you get a full-size bed and have food whenever you want would cost £8,000. So, people would think that the perks of business class would be reasonable compared to first class, even though it costs 7 times as much as economy.
Tangent: Alan was once told by Steve Cram that some trainers have to expensively made so people will buy them, an example of "prestige pricing".
Tangent: The Goldilocks Zone is the distance from the Sun that another planet has to be in another solar system which would support water where it wasn't too hot or cold.
  • The snail telegraph was a form of communication. A Frenchman called Benoit had an idea that when 2 snails mated, they had a telepathic power, which meant that no matter how far away they were, they could always make thoughts to each other. So, he raised money and then glued 24 snails in a dish and labelled them all with letters of the alphabet and then he labelled the mates of the snails on another dish and sent it to New York City, so the mate of the one in New York City would wibble to receive the message from the other one in Benoit's lab. Unfortunately, this pasilalinic-sympathetic compass with "escargotic" vibration was proven not to work at all.

Episode 10 "Greats"

Broadcast date
  • 29 January 2010
  • 30 January 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 12 June 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: There does seem to be cases of heightism in the workplace, short people are paid less than taller people and is comparable in magnitude to race and gender. A study of Fortune 500 companies shows 90% of the chief executives of those companies are above average height, and 30% of those are above 6'2".
  • Everyone who was born in Europe is descended from the 8th century king Charlemagne. The reason being is that since every person has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc., by the time you get back to the 13th century, you'll have had more ancestors than people who have lived on the planet. This was discovered in 1995, by a man called Mark Humphreys at Dublin University. He discovered that his wife was the great-granddaughter of King Edward III, 20 generations down the line. He also discovered that Hermann Göring and the American explorer Daniel Boone had the same ancestry and then realised that the mathematics meant that everyone had the same ancestry as well.
  • The greatest good that the Great Fire of London did was to clear buildings so that new ones could be made by Christopher Wren, such as St Paul's Cathedral. By the time of the fire, most of the plague had already gone, but it wouldn't have made much difference to the city, because the plague mainly took hold in the suburbs. By the time of the fire in September 1666, there were very few deaths and it just died, not because of the fire, but by an unknown source. (Forfeit: cleared the city of plague)
  • The Great Train Robbers weren't really great because of the very easy methods in which they were caught. The went to a farm and played Monopoly using the stolen money and they left their fingerprints all over the set. 12 of the 15 were rounded up, 1 was acquitted and 2 of them were never caught. The most famous member was Ronnie Biggs, who was asked by the mastermind, Bruce Reynolds to find a diesel train driver for the robbery. The man he found was known either as Old Pete or Stan Agate (it's not known because he was one of the 2 who were never caught), and so Biggs received £147,000 (£1.6 million today) just for finding this driver and bringing him to the scene, who it turned out, couldn't drive a train, yet Biggs still received his money.
  • Despite being discovered in 1535, the reason it took 300 years to give the Giant tortoise a scientific name was because they were so edible. While they were being brought back to London and eventually Europe, they were all eaten, so no scientific study on them could be done. The only comparisons of them were that they tasted like chicken, beef, mutton and butter and saying how much better they are than all of those things. No-one who had ate tortoise had eaten anything better. All 12 species of giant tortoise are now protected. Adwaita was Clive of India's pet tortoise. He died in 2006, at the age of 255, meaning he was born before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, before the French Revolution and had his death announced on CNN. He is believed to be the oldest living creature ever, because most creatures don't survive long out of captivity. They were also used as water stores, because they have a special internal bladder that stores water so perfectly that it's drinkable, so when you slit them open you get an extra gallon of fresh water. It was pretty useful, as they could be stacked on boats, because they couldn't move and they didn't need to be fed for a long time. They also contributed to whaling, as they could be used as a foodstuff and a water supply. They had no predators until they were discovered by man, they were evolutionarily complacent, like many island species, because only humans travel across islands in that way.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Discussion about 18th century paintings depicting horses with small heads.
  • In cold weather, most of your heat escapes from your arm or leg, if exposed. Only 10% of heat escapes from your head. (Forfeit: your head)
Tangent: Sean tells of how he once sat next to Lionel Blair, and that he never got the chance to tell his grandmother that fact.
  • The lingua franca (or everybody's second language) of Ancient Rome was Greek. (Forfeit: Latin)
  • 43 different men have been President of the United States. The panellists are shown a clip from the inauguration of Barack Obama, which shows him saying he's the 44th President, which is true in the case of terms, but not in the terms of people. Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th President, so he took the Presidential Oath twice. The reason he is counted twice is because he had two non-consecutive terms, since Benjamin Harrison was President between his two terms, so Obama is the 43rd different American president. (Forfeit: 44 — since the forfeit was taken from Obama's speech, Obama himself was given the forfeit of -10 points.)
QI XL Extras
  • The Great Disappointment was the name given to the supposed Second Coming of Jesus. The American William Miller carefully scrutinised the Bible and it suggested that Jesus would return in 1844 and scourge the world and clean the sanctuary, that was according to Daniel 8:4. Over a million Millerites believed him and sold everything they had to prove this belief. One man even threw himself off a barn believing he would be scooped up and saved. Unfortunately, Jesus didn't return and it became known as "The Great Disappointment". Interestingly, many more well-known religions have branched off from Millerism, including the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which was founded by a former female Millerite, and currently has 15 million adherents in America. Another man, Charles Russell founded the Jehovah's Witnesses, which held the belief of the Apocalypse, as depicted in the Book of Revelations. Nowadays, there is a new movement, known as the Rapture, that believes that when Jesus returns, everyone will escape from their bodies and leave their clothes behind them. A book by Edgar Whisenant that was released in 1988 and called 88 Reasons why the Rapture is in 1988, sold 4 million copies, although it of course, didn't happen, but there is now a website called www.raptureready.com, which has millions of hits, tells of ways to prepare for the Rapture and to protect loved ones who don't make it, such as being stung by enormous wasps. (Forfeit: Have you been talking to my husband? (Jo))
Tangent: In the Nazi concentration camps, the Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles on their uniforms, the Jews had yellow stars, the gays had pink triangles.
Tangent: As mentioned in Series C, Samuel Pepys famously buried some Parmesan cheese in his garden to protect it from the Great Fire.
Tangent: Discussion of why cheese has a sell-by date on it.
Tangent: Sean mixing up the Great Train Robbery with the plot of the film Herbie Rides Again. The Great Train Robbery took place on 8 August 1963 and the amount of money stolen was the equivalent of £40 million in today's money. The train was a post office train that was being sent to burn used £1, £5 and £10 notes.
Tangent: The main reason why the Great Train Robbery was referred to as "Great", was because it was simply a train robbery. In 1903, the first ever film that was based on a story, rather than just looking at nature was release and it was called The Great Train Robbery.
Tangent: Alan tells of a cafe near him that does "good ol' English grub" and on the table there are 3 different menus, one has Sid James and Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film, one has Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their overcoats and the other has the Kray twins.
  • If a Giant Panda does a handstand in front of you, it's trying to tell you that you're on its land. Because they eat for 12 hours a day, they don't have much time for rutting or fighting, so they urinate to mark out their territory, and they prefer to urinate while in the handstand position, and the higher up a tree that the urine lands on, the more dominant it is.
Tangent: A recent discovery in San Diego Zoo has revealed that pandas don't need Viagra or panda pornography to get sexually excited. It's believed that if they swap cages and smell the secretions in each other's cage, then they're up for it.

Episode 11 "Gifts"

Broadcast date
  • 5 February 2010
  • 6 February 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 19 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Since 1992, there has been a ban on all imports from Cuba to the United States, but most United Nations countries have condemned this boycott, except for Israel and Palau.
Tangent: Jan explains that performing impressions of other people's physical movements and mannerisms is called echopraxia. An impression of the way they speak is called echolalia.
Tangent: Trollope also invented the post box, but he regretted doing so. The problem was that women were now able to communicate freely at post offices, because before the post box, every woman had to go to their father or servant to put the stamp on, but now they could do send the letters themselves, so could have relationships without their parents' consent.
  • The oldest joke in the world was "There was an absent-minded professor who was on a sea voyage when a storm blows up and his slaves are weeping in terror. He said, "Don't cry, I have freed you all in my will"". That joke depicted the Abderites as being rather stupid. The Greek joke book, the Philogelos has this joke inside it: "An Abderite asks a eunuch how many children he has, the eunuch replies "None, Duh! I'm a eunuch!", then the Abderite says..." The punchline of that joke is actually missing. Another old joke is a Sumerian one from 1900BC, which goes "something that has never occurred since time immemorial - a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." An old English one is "What is the most cleanliest leaf amongst all others? - Holly leaves, because no-one will wipe their arse with them."
Tangent: The subject of the first impression recorded was Socrates in The Clouds, a play by Aristophanes. Socrates was put to death for corrupting youths.
Tangent: An old Greek joke provided by Jimmy that still works today, "A barber asks "How do you want your hair cut?", and the person says "In silence"."
  • A scold's bridle was a torture device for women who gossip or were malicious and spiteful. A more common punishment is the cucking stool, wrongly known as the ducking stool. The male equivalent was barratry. Interestingly, there are hardly any records of them being used, 50 of them still exist today. The studio has the one that currently resides in Walton-on-Thames.
  • "What do you get if you cross a caterpillar and a butterfly?" There is a theory put forward by Donald Williamson called hybridogenesis stating the butterfly and the caterpillar are of different species. Normal starfish start life as a small larva with a tiny starfish inside. They grow and separate and the larva degenerates. Williamson found the Luidia sarsi differs with the larva living for months as an independent animal. He reasons there is a chance of creating a double species, since "sperm and seed" have been mixing in the sea for millions of years, so these new species could be created once every million years. (Forfeits: butterpillar, caterfly)
  • 1% of American adults are in gaol, roughly 2.3 million, or 1 in every 99.1 adults. More than twice as many as South Africans, more than three times as the Iranians, more than six times as the Chinese. No society in history has imprisoned more of its citizens than the United States. The United Kingdom is ahead of China, Turkey and India, with 148 prisoners per 100,000. In the USA, they have the three strikes law, which gives a life sentence for anyone's third crime, no matter how trivial, providing they have 2 serious crimes against them already. So, a man called Leandro Andrade is serving 2 consecutive 25-year terms for shoplifting 9 videotapes. Another man, Kevin Weber, got given 26 years for stealing 4 chocolate chip cookies. One in 30 men aged between 20-34 are in jail, and for black males, it's 1 in 9. There are more 17-year-old black people in jail, than in college. 5% of the world is American, and 25% of all prisoners are American.
Tangent: In reference to the first question, you're not allowed to bring in anything into America that has been made in a prison, but interestingly, the prisoners are effectively slave labour. 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests and ID tags and other military essentials are made in jail, along with 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture, which allows the USA to compete with Mexico. All prisoners are forced to work, failure to comply leads to solitary confinement.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Baring-Gould is also believed to have been at a children's party he asked a small girl, "And whose little girl are you?" whereon she burst into tears, and said: "I'm yours, Daddy." He did however have 15 children, so could have been easily confused. Alan tells how a comedian was asked after an act who his agent was, and the comedian replied "You are".
Tangent: Art collector Edward James recalled in his autobiography, his mother shouting "Nanny! I'm going to church. I want one of my daughters to go with me." The nanny then asked which one. Mrs. James replied "The one with the red hair, she'll go with this coat."
  • It is virtually impossible for Archimedes to have moved the Earth in the way he suggested. He said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth." Assuming he weighed 100 kilograms and placed his fulcrum a kilometre away from the bottom of the Earth, he would need a lever 6.5 billion light-years long to balance and move the planet. Assuming that he moved the lever by one metre, the Earth would move by less than the diameter of a single proton. (Forfeit: with a lever)
Tangent: If you tried to use Newtonian mechanics, by getting everyone to jump up at the same time, the Earth would a tiny bit, but it would be cancelled out by the Third Law of Motion.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Despite the United States-Cuba boycott, you can still get flights to Miami, and people on the flights wear massive coats to hide things that they're not allowed to bring on board from security.
Tangent: In recent times, the Academy Awards goody bag have had to be declared against tax. The 2008 Academy Awards goody bags were worth £57,000. They included a £15,000 holiday, an espresso machine, a cashmere blanket worth £855 and a white gold pearl and diamond pendant worth £740. At the BAFTAs, you get given Tic Tacs and at the British Comedy Awards, they used to give out bowls of Minstrels, as well as plenty of alcohol.
Tangent: Jan tells of the story about one of the first cheapskates, Diogenes the Cynic.
Tangent: It was almost impossible to do an impression of Gladstone or Disraeli in the 19th century, as the population was so big, it would be hard to know if the impression was accurate at all. Harold Macmillan met Peter Cook at the Fortune Theatre, and Cook impersonated Macmillan, the first time a Prime Minister had been impersonated. In 1737, Robert Walpole created an act which forbade any person from doing political satire on him, it also gave the Lord Chamberlain the powers to approve any play before it was staged, with the exception of The Establishment Club.
Tangent: Clive once got given some homing pigeons, which returned to their original owners after a couple of weeks.

Episode 12 "Gravity"

Broadcast date
  • 12 February 2010
  • 13 February 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 9 May 2009
Panellists
  • Note: This is the first time Alan has been a joint winner, and also the first time that Rich Hall has sat in a different seat to his usual one (on Stephen's immediate left). Up until now, only Alan has sat in the same seat, apart from when he swapped places with Stephen in the series B Christmas Special.
Buzzers
  • Rich — Falling object crashing on landing
  • Barry — Soldiers marching followed by their commander shouting "Wait for it!"
  • Bill — A speak-your-weight machine saying "12 stone, 2 pounds, 4 ounces"
  • Alan — A person being sprung in the air saying "Arrrrrrrggggghhhhh!!!"
Topics
  • Theoretically, you can get to anywhere on Earth in exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds, by burrowing through it. The speed would be the maximum velocity as determined by gravity. If you had a tube that went through the Earth, you'd accelerate to the middle, then decelerate on your way out. You could end up anywhere, because gravity works at every angle, not just north-south. The Antipodes are the exact opposite points on Earth, they don't have to be north-south. There was a contest to make an Earth Sandwich to find the antipodal points of places on the Earth. The winners had New Zealand at one end and Spain at the other, but there was controversy because baguettes were used for the sandwich, and if they were put crossways, it strictly wouldn't be a sandwich. Other antipodal points include Indonesia to Colombia, and an interesting one for religionists, Mecca to the Tematangi Atoll (also known as Captain Bligh's Atoll) in the Pacific Ocean. Interestingly, there is a massive lagoon in the centre of the island, and because it's the antipode, whichever direction you look at, you're facing Mecca. The 42 minutes and 12 second theory was made in a series of letters in the 17th century between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.
Tangent: The idea of a gravity train isn't feasible on Earth, but it's possible on the Moon, because there is no molten core, but it would take 53 minutes to go through the Moon.
  • Aristotle believed that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects, but this theory was disproved by Galileo Galilei who worked out in his head that objects with different masses fell at the same speed. He then did experiments involving ramps and other things. He then proved that half a ton of coal fell at the same speed as a ton of coal. He also proved that if people believed Aristotle's theory, it wouldn't work, since he said that the heavier object fell faster than the lighter one, so if they were attached together they would have to fall at the same speed, because one couldn't hold the other one up. Then, the Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott did an experiment on the Moon with a hammer and a feather to prove Galileo right. (Forfeit: Dropping Cannonballs From The Leaning Tower of Pisa)
Tangent: Alan tried to answer which was heavier, a ton of gold or a ton of feathers, but since gold is measured in troy weight, rather than avoirdupois, a ton of gold is heavier than a ton of feathers.
Tangent: Similarly, Isaac Newton's law of gravitation were thought out before he published them in 1687, which was a whole 100 years before the Montgolfier brothers did their first flight in a hot air balloon.
  • George Biggin and Letitia Sage flew in a hydrogen balloon from Southwark and went "all the way". Around 150,000 people came to see balloon ascents, as they were the spectacle of the age. Vincenzo Lunardi, an Italian who brought ballooning to Britain, was going to go up with Biggin & Sage, but he then thought that might be too many, so he escaped and so they became the first members of the mile high club. WHilst flying over Piccadilly, it was believed that Sage was spotted "on all fours", although she later claimed that she was fastening up the opening of the balloon. The accurate answer is that they got to Harrow, so they travelled a distance of 14 miles, and spoke to below through a speaking trumpet. There was a scandal involving wager books and the gentlemen's clubs, Brooks's and White's in the St James's area of London. It mainly involved making bets involving having sexual intercourse in a balloon, or as they put it, "plays hospitals with...", but they made bets on just about anything imaginable.
Tangent: The first people to cross the English Channel by air were Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his American backer. While on the flight, they had a massive argument involving their nations, who they were both very proud of. So, Blanchard put on lead weights to give the balloon more ballast, meaning that Jeffries would have to get out, so Blanchard would become the first man to cross, but then both their national flags fell out of the balloon as well. Then they dropped out of the sky too early, so they had to jettison all their food and instruments, as well as the sandbags, before taking all their clothing off and they then peed and pooed out of the basket, and they just made it over the cliffs and landed in a tree to get the record.
  • A gossypiboma is something left inside you by a surgeon after he has done an operation, normally cotton, lint or sponge. "Gossypi" is actually the Latin for cotton. There are 1,500 cases of this every year in the United States. 54% of foreign objects are found in the abdomen or pelvis, 22% in the vagina, 7.5% in the chest and 17% in other places, like the spinal canal, brain or face. There have been cases of suing, such as a man who had a 6 inch metal surgical clamp, but then they realised that he'd already had an operation to take out a 6 inch surgical clamp, because it was then found out that he had 2 stuck in, and when they removed the first one, they didn't bother checking around for the other one. The main reason for objects being left in people is either because of emergency work which hasn't been properly planned, unplanned changes in procedure and patients with a higher body mass index. If the item stuck inside a person is a surgical instrument, it's know as foreign-body granuloma, but interesting the surgeons refer to it as "retaining", making out that it's the fault of the patients. (Forfeit: Mind Your Own Business)
  • When you shoot a gun in the air, the bullets land in a different place, so the shooter would never get hit, as even a small blast of wind, would move it away from the gun. A test was done on a floating platform, where 500 bullets were shot in the air and only 4 landed on the platform. A typical 7.62mm bullet fired vertically can reach a height of nearly 2.5km, meaning it would take 17 seconds to reach the top height, then take another 40 seconds to come down, if it was going at a speed of 70 metres a second, which would cause serious cranial injuries. Interestingly, if you had a bullet in one hand and a gun facing horizontally at the same level in another, both bullets would hit the ground at the same time, if fired at the same time. The reason being is that they both have the same force working on them, gravity. The only way this couldn't happen is if the bullet was fired at 5 miles per second, which means it would leave the Earth and never return into the atmosphere, or if the bullet went far enough, because then the curvature of the Earth would mean it had further to fall. There are many practical applications to this in the laws of physics which say it must be the case.
  • If someone is hiding at the Welcome Break motorway service station at Scratchwood Services, which is the first service station on the M1 motorway, north of London, the best way to stop them without getting out of London and with no telecommunications, is to shoot them using the guns on HMS Belfast, which is permanently moored in the River Thames in the centre of London. The forward turrets on HMS Belfast are directly aimed at Scratchwood Services.
Tangent: In World War II, the USS Phoenix managed to survive the attack on Pearl Harbor without even a scratch, it was known as the luckiest ship in the United States Navy. It was sunk in 1982, after it had been sold to Argentina and renamed General Belgrano, which still remains the only ship sunk by a nuclear submarine, with the loss of over 300 lives.
General Ignorance
  • The daily recommendation of wine could be dispensed by a cloud the size of a bus. The daily limit of wine is 250ml.
  • A gunslinger's revolver has 5 bullets. Wyatt Earp said that despite the fact there are six chambers, the 6th chamber is for safety, the hammer can rest on it, so you couldn't discharge by mistake, because the six-gun, as it was known, had no safety catch. (Forfeit: Six)
Tangent: Stephen met an armourer in America who worked on Westerns all his life and said that the only 2 people never to blink when firing a gun were Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner.Alan Davies abrubtly said one of them was Kenneth Williams
  • The red juice that comes out of a steak when you cook it is myoglobin, which is used to operate muscles. When you use muscles for short, sharp bursts of energy, glucose from the blood provides the fuel, but when you want to do sustained activity, myoglobin is used to oxidise the fat, which provides the energy. (Forfeit: Blood)
Tangent: A joke from Stephen: "What do you get when you put "it" in gravy?" - Gravity.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: A discussion about the film Brazil, change machines, tubes, the dangers of aeroplane toilets and sucking up prairie dogs with a grain elevator.
Tangent: In those days, they used a barometer as an altimeter when flying.
  • An underwater weighing machine would be used for the most accurate form of body weighing. If you're under 20% fat, then you're not obese, but for women, it's 30%. (Forfeit: Whale Weigh Station)
Tangent: The body mass index is your weight divided by your height squared. Interestingly, though the BMI has flaws, because muscular people would be classed as overweight, because of all their toned muscles, but marathon runners would also be classified as malnourished and underweight.
  • Even though bicycles are ancient, by modern standards, the physics of bicycles wasn't fully understood until 1970. The reason you're more stable on a bicycle when you go faster is because of torque, not gyroscopic pull, as was believed. This was proven by a man called David Jones, who discovered the caster effect, which showed that the back wheel, self-rights itself as you go along. Also, when you want to turn left on a bicycle, you turn the handlebar slightly to the right, known as countersteering, so when you're heading towards a kerb, you have to steer into it, before you can get away from it. A way to test this is to take your left hand off the handlebar and try and turn left, it makes you able only to go right.
Tangent: Bill reveals the time that he played Adolf Hitler in a play called "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", and his mum said that Bill looked great looking like Hitler.
Tangent: Stephen tells of a Utopian way of exchanging bicycles that happened in Cambridge, where people would just exchange bikes wherever they wanted and it lasted just 2 days.
  • The Fosbury Flop was created by Dick Fosbury as a better technique to do the high jump. The previous techniques were the straddle, the Western roll, the Scissors and the Eastern cut-off. In the 1968 Summer Olympics, he performed this new technique and won the gold medal. The reason why every high jumper now uses the Fosbury Flop is because of how the centre of gravity works. When doing the Flop, your centre of gravity is under the bar, whereas if you did the Scissors, your centre of gravity would be 30cm over the bar. The other thing the Flop did was change the landing from a sandpit to a cushion type landing. So, by having a lower centre of gravity, you have more height, in exchange for no extra effort. The records have also stood for a long time. The male record was set in 1993, while the female one was set in 1987. The male long jump record between 1935 and 1960 was held by Jesse Owens.
Tangent: Bill tells of the time he lost a charity limbo dancing match to Sinitta and Lionel Blair. He came 3rd, and Lionel Blair won.
General Ignorance
Tangent: The recommended daily allowance of wine in the United Kingdom is 21 units per week. In Poland, it's 12.5, in Canada, it's 23.75 and in America, it's 24.5, in South Africa and Denmark, it's 31.5 and in Australia, it's 35. In the UK, if you drank between 21 and 30 units, you'd be in the the group of people in the lowest mortality rate in the country. To be on the same level as a teetotaller, you'd have to drink 63 units a week, the equivalent of a whole bottle of wine a day. Although, it was later admitted by the person who made the claim, that he made the number up, and was just asked to think of a number.

Episode 13 "Gothic"

Broadcast date
  • 19 February 2010
  • 20 February 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 9 June 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
  • Jack — Music from Psycho
  • Jimmy — A man breaking down a door, saying "Here's Jimmy!", followed by a woman screaming (a reference to the film, The Shining)
  • Sue — A man shouting "Aaaaaaaaoooooooooowwwwwww!!!!" (The Wilhelm scream)
  • Alan — A man reading out the football score "Arsenal 0, Norwich City 4."
Theme
Topics
Tangent: The man in American Gothic was Grant Wood's dentist.
Tangent: Discussion about why everyone wanted to paint their bedrooms black, like Goths.
Tangent: Jimmy points out how the woman in American Gothic looks like Gail Platt from Coronation Street.
Tangent: Discussion about van Gogh giving his ear to a prostitute, and the "possibility" of it being a primitive bugging device, which leads to Alan telling of the similarity between that and the alien in the John Sayles film The Brother from Another Planet.
Tangent: In Seattle, there is a company called SeeMeRot.com, where you can have cameras put into coffins, so you can the person inside disintegrate. Their slogan is "Being dead and buried doesn't mean you can't have friends over!". This leads to a discussion about being buried alive.
  • In the 1960s, ⅔ of all Americans who accidentally lost a limb came from the same town in Florida. The reason was insurance. There were 50 occurrences in the town which had a population of just 500. Most claimed they were shot off by hunting rifles. Other claims included accidentally firing someone climbing a fence.
General Ignorance
  • After the Vietnam War, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was occupied by a soldier who had died in Vietnam. His family had heard that "the Unknown Soldier" had died in a helicopter crash, and their son had also died in the same helicopter crash, but through DNA testing, it was proved that he was "the Unknown Soldier", so his remains were exhumed. It's believed that there never will be another "Unknown Soldier", because all British & American soldiers are DNA profiled. The original "Unknown Soldier" was first done simultaneously in Britain & France after World War I in 1920. In Britain, there were 4 bodies and the general pointed at one and he became "the Unknown Soldier". That particular soldier was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey with full military honours and was entombed with a Medieval crusader's sword from the Royal Collection in the presence of a guard made up of 100 VC's. The guests of honour were 100 women who had lost their husbands and their sons during the war. The Cenotaph, made by Lutyens is dedicated to the soldier as well. (Forfeit: Nobody Knows)
  • The phrase "Saved by the bell" is a boxing term. There is no proof of the myths about people who tied a bell to their toe, but they have found to not be true, although many people do fear premature burials, such as in the Edgar Allan Poe book, The Premature Burial. (Forfeit: Buried Alive)
  • Mozart's burial wasn't a pauper's funeral in Vienna as many believe, although only members of the aristocracy were buried in tombs or vaults. His funeral cost 8 guilder and 56 kreuzer. Mozart had a pet starling who he buried in 1784, and its whistling inspired the principal theme of the last movement of Piano Concerto K453.
Tangent: On the top 10 list of play-off tunes for people who die is the theme tune to Countdown.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Discussion about The Da Vinci Code being a book about "bad monks" and about the fact that Grant Wood sounds like the name of a porn star.
Tangent: Discussion about early Goths, such as Alice Cooper, Robert Smith of The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux.
Tangent: Discussion of the new theory that van Gogh lost his ear in a fight with Paul Gauguin. van Gogh was never good with girls either, the parents of a girl he liked refused him access, so he stood with his hand being burnt by a flame of a candle until he could see her, but her father just blew it out and told him to go away.
Tangent: The exponential growth originated with the rice and chessboard problem, in which a guy puts one piece of rice on the first chessboard piece, then 2 on the next, 4 on the next, etc. The total number of grains needed to fill the board is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64 - 1), which is the amount of rice that would be made in 80 years, if all the arable land was converted.
Tangent: Even though zombies and voodoo are associated with Haiti, it originated in West Africa. "Zombie" comes from the West African word, "nzambi".
Tangent: Jimmy once took his brother through a graveyard and he thought that people who were buried under gravestones with curly bits on the top were chefs.
  • In a graveyard, a person buried under a broken column means that they died young. Other symbols include a broken chain which symbolises a loss in the family and apples represent sin. The lichen that grows on graveyards is looked at by scientists as an indicator for pollution. The main reasons they do it is because you can roughly tell the age of the lichen on the gravestone because of the date and graveyards are not normally sprayed with chemicals, so they remain unaltered, and because it's considered bad to spray them with pesticides.
Tangent: Other odd methods of burials include being turned into compost by being dissolved in liquid nitrogen then being vibrated, then a magnet is used to remove mercury and other metals that could harm the making of it. Then 25-30 kilograms are left over which then gets made into a coffin made out of maize or potato starch, and then you're buried and rot into the earth and biodegrade within 6-12 months.
Tangent: The panellists try to explain to Stephen what the reverse cowgirl is.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Another popular play-off tune is Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. The next track on their album after Bohemian Rhapsody is Another One Bites the Dust.

Episode 14 "Greeks"

Broadcast date
  • 5 March 2010
  • 6 March 2010 (XL edition)
Recording date
  • 26 May 2009
Panellists
Buzzers
Notes
  • This is the third instance of a complete panel appearing twice. Anderson, Hall and Jupitus all appeared together in episode 3 of series B.
  • The Audience were only announced as winners in the XL version, as the fact that won them their 10 points was cut from the initial broadcast.
Theme
Topics
  • If you were a rich Athenian, you had to sponsor a Greek battleship. The only way to get out of it was by finding someone richer than yourself. The interesting thing is if your property was worth 70 times more than the average wage of a skilled worker, you had to pay for the Greek Navy. To challenge paying, you had to find someone richer than you and appear together in court and offer to swap everything you had to the person you thought was richer than you.
  • According to Herodotus, before a Spartan went into battle, they had a new haircut. Before the Battle of Thermopylae, a Persian spy went into the Spartan camp and saw them getting new hairdos, which meant that they were prepared to die, in a way, it was their preparation for mortal combat. Interestingly, the depiciton of the Spartans in the film 300 could have been more camper than it was, because during the battle depicted in the film, the 300 Spartans were accompanied by 700 Thespians. All the city states did run on different lines, but the sad thing is that eventually the Spartans and Athenians went into battle later on, and the Spartans won, and they didn't like the classical civilisation such as art, harmony, music, mathematics, logic and politics. Stephen says that the Athenians loss would be like if the Klingons beat the Vulcans in Star Trek.
Tangent: The word "laconic" means taking your time before you answer. An example of this was during the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians sent a messenger to Sparta, which said "If we beat you, we will not spare your children. We will destroy your civilisation. We will kill everybody. We will spare no-one." The Spartans reply just said, "If", which was the original laconic phrase.
  • At a gymnasium, you shouldn't wear any clothing, because "Gymnos" is the Greek for naked, hence "gymnasium" meant "a naked place". During the Ancient Olympic Games, the competitors performed naked, so to restrain the penis, they put it in a sort of pouch called a kynodesme. It kept the penis in an upright position by being tied in a bow. If your trainer, wanted to get your attention, he'd just pull on the bow to get your attention.
Tangent: Other thinks involving the word "gymnos", were "gymnopaedia", where young naked boys went out dancing in public festivals and "gymnologise" means "to debate while naked".
  • Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games won his own Olympic gold medal in poetry, although he actually entered it anonymously. In the early years of the modern Olympics, there were non-physical events, such as town planning, which was an event up until the 1948 Games. Other artistic events included sculpture, music, painting and literature. The oldest person to win an Olympic medal was a Briton called John Copley, who won a silver medal in the engravings and etchings event in 1948. In the 1900 Summer Olympics, there was a gold medal for the poodle clipping event, where the winner, a farmer's wife who clipped 17 poodles in 2 hours. Correction: This was an April's Fool joke created by the Daily Telegraph in the run up to the Beijing Olympics.[2] QI are now aware of this.[3] The reason that all the artistic events were stopped was because they believed that it defeated the point of amateurism, because all the athletes had other jobs, whereas the artists, poets, etc, would carrying on doing those jobs after the Games.
  • Olympic gold medals are made of at least 92.5% silver, but they do have 6 grams of gold in them. The medals are gold plated, but they haven't been made of 100% since 1912. If the medals today were made out of 18 carat gold, they'd be worth £3,000, or £1.5 million for the whole competition. (Forfeits: Gold, Chocolate)
  • If you bite a gold coin, and a toothmark is left, then it's a fake coin, because other metals were used in making gold coins, but for some lead was used, and that did leave an impress, so those ones would be fake, and you'd be ill if you had some lead, but as Alan points out, there is no lead in pencils, as mentioned in series A. Only 161,000 tonnes of gold has ever been mined in human history, most of it being in the last 50 years, and Rich claims that if it was all compressed, it could be put into the QI studio, but it wouldn't fill 2 Olympic size swimming pools.
Tangent: The island of Yap in Micronesia, used hole shaped stones as its currency, and it makes it a fixed money supply, unlike the gold standard that Richard Nixon got rid of whil he was President of the United States.
  • Sewage could be used to create alien life, because most faeces done in space is simply jettisoned, rather than taken back to Earth. Arthur C. Clarke had a theory, known as "Toilet of the Gods", which suggested that humans might even be descended from the poo of another civilisation. It came about because scientists discovered that a lot of the junk in Earth's orbit was covered in faecal matter. There are now space debris lawyers, because if any junk hits a satellite that orbits Earth, it could destroy it.
General Ignorance
  • You shouldn't touch a meteorite after it crashes on Earth, because it would be too cold. In space, they are between -240°C - -270°C, they're still cold inside and outside, so you could have frostbite. Around 50,000 meteorites above 20 grams fall into Earth every year, but most of them are lost at sea, but most of the ones that land on land are found in Antarctica. No human has ever died from a meteorite, a dog was killed by one in Egypt in 1911 and a boy from Uganda was hit, but not seriously hurt by one in 1992. (Forfeit: It's Hot)
  • The instant you get sucked into a vacuum you have only the amount of air left that you exhale to survive, so normally that's only a few minutes at the most. Gases escaping from your body would make you instantly defecate, projectile vomit and urinate. You could survive with no long-term problems, but only if you stay in for a couple of minutes. The first sensation would be the moisture on your tongue boiling, which would make you lose taste for days. This information is known because of accidents with humans. (Forfeit: Instant Death)
  • The country that has weekly news broadcasts in Latin is Finland. The show, called Nuntii Latini has a 5-minute broadcast every Friday at 1:55pm, then again on the local radio in Helsinki. Radio Bremen in Germany also do 4½ minutes of Latin news a month. Interestingly, more people outside Finland understand Latin than Finnish, which is the reason of why they do the broadcast. (Forfeit: Vatican City)
Tangent: There is a Finnish singer called Jukka Ammondt who has done covers of Elvis Presley songs in Latin, including "Nunc Hic Aut Nunquam", also known as "It's Now or Never", "Cor Ligneum", also known as "Wooden Heart" and "Tenere Me Ama", also known as "Love Me Tender".
  • Because of health and safety, nothing is thrown at the end of a Greek meal any more. Instead, flowers are now used, as they're much safer, although Greek restaurants can obtain a licence to throw the plates. (Forfeit: Plates)
QI XL Extras
Tangent: The suffix "ship", as in "battleship" or "championship" is of Germanic origin. Interestingly, all the f's in German, became p's, such as "ffennig" became "pfennig" and "feffer" became "pepper", but even more weirdly the Arabic language removed all its p's because of this, hence "sharip", became "sharif". This thing is known as the fricative shift and was created by the Brothers Grimm.
  • A Roman orgy is not as debauched as a Greek symposium. A Greek symposium was a place mainly for drinking, although nowadays, the word "symposium" means seminar or something intellectual-like. A Roman orgy wasn't really a wild place where sexual intercourse took place, it was more a place where you liked food, and they not to be exclusively for adults either. Caligula himself preferred to have solid gold food and fish that looked like they had just come out of the ocean and were still blue. There is also no truth that they had a vomitorium to throw up food, after all a vomitorium is actually an exit from a theatre, although Alan claims that as he was growing up people in pubs used to go outside to throw up, so they could drink more alcohol, otherwise known as a tactical chunder.
Tangent: Gymnasiums were originally designed to be places where the middle classes trained for battle. They then became places of education, the two most famous ones being the Academy and the Lyceum. The Academy was where Plato taught and was named after Akademos.
Tangent: The word Odeon was interestingly not Greek, it was named after Oscar Deutsch, who used his initials "OD", to name the cinema chain he created. The answer was given by an audience member, who earned 10 points for the audience.
Tangent: An Irishman created counterfeit Rai stones on Yap and ruined its economy.
  • A Greek ideal was a person who seemed to symbolise the "perfect" Greekperson. It seems to determine on a few factors, one of them being the wrist measurement. Each of the panellists gave their wrist measurement, of which Phill's was 8", but his thigh measurement needed to be 28", but his were only 23". His neck is 19" which is perfect, as it should be twice the size of the wrist. All the other panellists have 7" wrists. The perfect bicep should be 17", Alan's is only 12½". The panellist closest to the Greek ideal is Clive, even though Phill has a perfect Greek neck. 2 men called Eugen Sandow and Monsieur Attila created the bodybuilding craze, later made more famous by Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They made their fame by doing shows in London, and their fans were allowed to touch them only with smelling salts, otherwise they'd faint.
Tangent: Phill has a tattoo of a Greek helmet on his wrist.
  • This theory was created by Kurt Gödel, widely regarded as the best logician in the 20th century. He was also a personal friend of Albert Einstein, although he starved himself to death. He never published it, because he didn't want people to think that he believed in God, he was just demonstrating how symbolic logic could be used. Gödel starved himself to death because he kept having paranoid fantasies of being poisoned. The only person he trusted to taste his food was his wife, but she was in hospital most of the time.
Tangent: Stephen was in the film I.Q., where Lou Jacobi played Gödel and Walter Matthau played Einstein. Matthau taught Stephen how to gamble.
General Ignorance
Tangent: When Greece won UEFA Euro 2004, a pub near where Alan lived made a homemade blue plaque, which said that a Greek person ran down the New North Road to celebrate Greece's victory.
Bonus: Because Alan was in last place, Stephen gave him the chance to switch his points with that of the audience (in a reference to the first question), if he could say what the audience got their 10 points for. Unfortunately, he forgot that it was the Oscar Deutsch/Odeon question.

Episode 15 "Green"

Broadcast date
  • 26 March 2010
Recording date
  • 22 May 2009
Panellists
Notes
  • The projection screen behind Davies broke during recording, so he and Bailey had to move to the other side of the studio for the rest of the recording.

Episode 16 "Geometry"

Broadcast date
  • 2010
Recording date
  • 2 June 2009
Panellists

References

General
  • Wolf, Ian. "QI - Episode Guide". British Comedy Guide. Retrieved 15 November 2009.
Specific
  1. ^ Lloyd, John (20 August 2008). "QI creator says BBC1 is 'our natural home'". Broadcast. Retrieved 8 May 2009. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  2. ^ Hooper, Andy (15 August 2008). "How Telegraph struck Olympic poodle-clipping gold in Beijing". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 8 March 2010.
  3. ^ "April Fool (Poodle Clipping)". QI Talk Forum. 15 August 2008. Retrieved 8 March 2010.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=QI_(G_series)&oldid=350885811"