Knits & Knots QI XL

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Ah, good evening, good evening, good evening!

Good evening and welcome to QI, where tonight the K is silent,

as in knits, knots, knackers and knobs.

Let's meet a knitwit, Sue Perkins.

APPLAUSE

Knot a lot, Ross Noble.

APPLAUSE

Slightly knackered, David Mitchell.

APPLAUSE

And a complete kn... say no more, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

Right. All the K's are quiet and so are their k-noises.

Sue goes...

Sh!

Ross goes...

SHEEP BLEATING

-David goes...

-PIN DROPPING

-That was a pin dropping. You could hear it.

-Yeah.

-And Alan goes:

-# Silence is golden! #

Very nice. And how many knots are there in this picture?

# Silence is... #

-Yes?

-Two.

-KLAXON

-No.

-Four?

-KLAXON

It's a trap!

-Well, you've got some options.

-Oh, none.

KLAXON

David?

-One?

-Yes!

-APPLAUSE

Oh, you're such a swot!

Is it the noose, is that the only one?

There are two hitches, a bend and a knot.

-The one on the right is a k-noose.

-Yes.

-A noose, but it is a knot.

-Oh, a noose is a knot?

-A noose is a type of knot.

-A hangman's knot.

The hitches are the first one and the third one.

Is correct, they are hitches, and the second one is what's known as a bend.

In everyday speech, of course, the word knot is used for all of them

but this is QI where everyday speech is completely...

MUMBO JUMBO

So the highwayman's hitch, for example,

I have an example of a highwayman's hitch.

That's where you hitch your horse and the tighter you pull,

the tighter it goes but when you want to get away quickly,

-you pull the short one, da-dum!

-Oh, that is good.

-Isn't that clever?

Does he not just run off with the stick then?

-It's a post in the ground.

-Oh, I see, right. Sorry, yeah.

Because if you tied up your dog to that and you went, right,

and then threw it and the dog ran after it, a lot of confusion there.

Yeah. Another one was called the European death knot,

the Euro death knot, or EDK.

Was that named by UKIP?

It's also a one sided overhand bend.

It's used for joining two ropes, as you can see.

It's perfectly safe if used right,

but a lot of climbers thought it wasn't safe

and it was invented in Europe, so American climbers called it

the Euro death knot.

In fact it's very, very old and the 5,300-year-old man, Otzi,

who was discovered in the Alps, dead, obviously...

-For a moment there I thought you...

-He was preserved, preserved...

Been there for 5,000 years and going, "Help, will somebody help!"

He had amongst his possessions a knot tied exactly in that fashion,

so it shows we've been doing it for a very long time.

And that would have been before rope was invented, for sure.

How he pulled that off...

And the other hitch we saw was called the snuggle hitch.

Which is a more secure version of the better-known sailor's knot,

the clove hitch.

-You look at me as if I would know that.

-Sorry, I just...

"Come on, Susan, you know the knots."

One of the surprising things about it,

because it looks reasonably simple,

was that it was invented in 1987.

Or at least that's when it was very first introduced into the International Knot Tyers' Guild.

Didn't they think they had enough knots, without inventing more?

Yeah, I know. There are 3,800 in their...

We're not going to go through each one of them, you'll be pleased to know.

So that's a very specific '80s knot?

Did somebody go, we need a way of tying down Bananarama. Now...

It was a man called Owen Nuttall, anyway, who invented it

and he called it the snuggle hitch.

-NASAL SPEECH:

-I imagine he speaks like that.

-Well, he may.

"Nuttall here. I invented a knot."

The hangman's knot is named after one of the most famous

hangmen in history, Charles II's hangman.

-Oh, Johnny...

-It's a French guy.

-Johnny Noose.

No. Oddly enough, his surname is a sailing vessel. Jack...?

-Boat.

-Yacht.

-Ketch. Jack Ketch.

Which if I'm not mistaken has a tall mast at the front

-and a small mast at the back.

-Indeed, indeed, yes, the ketch.

-Yeah, well, I just like to point that out.

-Well done.

-Thank you.

This became pretty much the standard hanging noose that was used

because it broke the neck very quickly.

So, it was a very quick death when you dropped.

The drop, as they called it.

So, in a way, it was humane.

It's good that you say he was an effective hangman,

-cos if you weren't, you're essentially just a bloke that opens a door.

-Yes.

Do you know what I mean?

Because where was it?

There was a place where the prisoners built the gallows

and when you stood on a particular plank it forced the wood out

and then the door didn't open and no-one was getting...

Then they would test it and the door would open and then they'd go, all right.

And then they'd put the person there and then it would push the wood

and then it wouldn't, and they'd go, all right.

Take him away, test it again, fine. That happened loads of times and...

And so they decided God didn't want this person to die and let them off.

I think that's a real thing, or I might have seen it in a Scooby Doo episode.

I'm not sure. I'm not quite sure.

Do they do a lot of hanging in Scooby Doo?

-Now you come to mention it...

-No more!

No, it's not. How would that be Scooby Doo?

Like, like, like... IMPERSONATES SCOOBY DOO

-Shaggy!

-That can't be Scooby Doo.

-AMERICAN ACCENT:

-It was Mr Ketch, the hangman, all the time.

So, now, I want you to take one of those each,

and tie yourselves together, as it were.

-This has gone quite dark now.

-It has, hasn't it?

Is it just me? It's like a party game in the '70s.

So, put each one of those around your wrist.

-No, no, don't undo it.

-Well, I can't get my hand through that, can I?

-Oh, sorry.

Little cock grab, that is.

-Cock ring!

-Try with this one.

-Swap. You can give me that one back.

-That's more like it!

There we are. Put your wrists through.

That's it, and then do that, so that you're tied together.

-OK.

-Yes, is that right?

-Is that good?

Without undoing the knots, untie yourselves.

DAVID: Oh, I see.

-Don't turn around, don't turn around.

-That hasn't helped.

DAVID: No!

-ROSS: No, that's it, you go through there.

-Yes!

-Yes!

No!

Emphatically no!

Completely not.

I'm going back up. I'm going back over.

Right, go, go through. Yes!

No!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I've got it, I've got it. Right.

Right. I've got it. If I do a forward flip...

Now...

Right, let's see if we can get...

Oh, oh.

I think technically you're now married.

You have let...

I'm coming down, I'm coming down.

You two hold it for a second and watch,

-because I think Sue is onto something.

-OK.

This is what we did when we were regularly handcuffed together as children.

No, watch. You mustn't untie the knot.

But...

Oh.

Yeah!

Well done. Brilliant!

-Have a go.

-I actually, I have no idea what you did.

Neither do I, but I feel alone now. I liked it when we were together.

Show them, if you can remember it.

What's properly weird is, I've now got a purple one round there.

-It's a magician's trick, it's a good...

-So what you have to do is, you have to make a loop.

And then you feed the loop through.

-What?!

-Then you go over your hand.

No way.

You are free.

No, you're not!

Is this your watch?

APPLAUSE

Oh, we've given up, we've given up.

Hang on, if I take my trousers off...

I think we have to call that a disaster.

But well done, Sue Perkins.

APPLAUSE

It was like playing S&M Twister.

It was rather, wasn't it?

It was a wonderful sight that will never leave my memory bank.

You're now a shoo-in for the 50 Shades of Grey movie,

-the pair of you.

-You are. Absolutely.

So, if you want to tie the knot at a knobstick wedding, what do you need?

-A knobstick wedding.

-A knobstick wedding?

I think I've been to a few of those.

-That's not an offensive term for gay marriage, is it?

-No!

I'd be very surprised

and disappointed to hear that on this show.

-It is now!

-It is now!

If you imagine a knobstick as being some sort of weapon,

-is there another type of weapon followed by a wedding?

-A shotgun.

Exactly. Pretty similar to a shotgun,

which is from a later era.

But a knobstick is a stick with a knob on the end.

So you wave your knobstick around and someone goes,

"All right, I'll marry you!"

-It's a club. The club... What used to be...

-LAUGHING: Sorry!

Sorry, I was about to go, "That's what I did to my wife!"

But I thought, "No! No.

-"No. No."

-No. She might be watching.

A knobstick is a type of wooden club.

Now, if a woman was unmarried and had a baby,

that baby was said to be on the parish, like Oliver Twist.

And the parish paid for workhouses

and the parish had to pay for the babies. And they didn't like that.

So, in smaller villages where they knew who the father was,

they would force the marriage by threatening them with a knobstick.

And that was what a knobstick marriage was.

It was an enforced marriage because the moment a man marries

a woman, he is responsible for the baby and the wife.

Whereas if an unmarried woman was in a parish, the parish was.

So it's that simple. There's a description of one here, from 1829.

"One of those illegal celebrations of matrimony which are termed by

"the peasantry 'knobstick weddings' took lately place in Wirksworth.

"The parties forced into the blessing state are William Saxton,

"a slender-witted man aged 24..."

Don't look at me when you said that!

The cheek of it!

"..and Lydia Brooks, some 15 years older, who has a wooden leg."

-Oh, dear.

-A marriage made in heaven.

Why did they need the knobstick then?

Why didn't she just hop after him, going, "Come on, marry me! Come on."

The word knot has been associated with marriage for a very long time,

tying the knot was first used in 1717,

at least that's the first record we have of tying the knot.

And there have been some very odd ones.

-In 2005, American Kevin Nadal married...

-A horse?

-A tree?

-No, it was himself.

-Oh. Can you do that?

He solemnly vowed, I, Kevin Nadal, take me,

Kevin Nadal, to have and hold, in sickness and in health.

His point was, if people are happy to celebrate married life,

why shouldn't they celebrate single life?

Did he take himself out on dates and wonder when

he'd make the first move?

I bet he also said, "Why's it always me who does the washing up?"

-"Why am I always the bridesmaid?"

-"It's not me, it's me!"

If he meets somebody, is he unfaithful to himself?

He would be, presumably.

"I'm not going to tell myself..."

-Would you have to divorce yourself?

-"Where have you been?!"

"I'm not saying."

"After many years of thought,

"I decided to have an open relationship with myself."

"And, you know, I don't mind what I get up to."

"But I just wish...

-"Don't do it behind my back."

-"Don't tell me!"

"Don't tell me, I don't want to know."

"Not in my bed!"

If he wanted to do a bit of wife swapping,

-he just goes the other end of the bed.

-Oh, dear.

In 1979, a lady called Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer,

a 57-year-old German woman, married...

-What do you think she married?

-Is it a bridge?

-No, from her name.

-Berliner-Mauer? So, Berlin Wall?

-She married the Berlin Wall.

In 1979, when it was still up, obviously.

-Someone married the Eiffel Tower or something.

-Did they?

They dated the Eiffel Tower for a while and then they got married,

and it says that they had been going steady with a bow

and they had had close relations with a fence beforehand.

And they were obsessed with...

There's a word for it, I don't know it,

for sleeping with inanimate objects.

Size isn't everything, but the Eiffel Tower is pretty impressive.

-As phalluses go...

-And there's a gift shop.

-Yes!

You've got a restaurant.

"The view from the top of my husband!"

None of these marriages, of course, has any official standing.

So those are some of the odder marriages.

The traditional way to make an honest woman of someone is to use

a church warden's knob, on the other hand.

Why would anyone ban knitting patterns, flowers, hugs and kisses?

This is a real ban, that is to say, a governmental ban.

It's got a war-time feeling about it.

-It has got a war-time feeling about it.

-Code?

-Code is the right word.

-What, they knit in code?

-Yes.

So in World War II you were not allowed to send abroad

any knitting pattern, just in case there was code embedded in it.

So you couldn't send, you know, socks to prisoners of war?

You could send socks,

-but not anything with a knitting pattern in it.

-Oh, right.

Because they could be used as some sort of code.

Open out a blanket and it says "June 6th, 1944."

Normandy.

Also postal chess was not allowed,

even kisses at the bottom of letters,

in case they had some meaning.

Presumably messages saying where the troops are moving...

Yes, those were obviously pretty much banned.

Could you not have got like, you know you get knitting machines,

could they not have made like an enigma knitting machine?

Where it makes the jumper and then scrambles it up,

-so that they couldn't pass the message.

-That would be very clever.

-It's an opportunity missed.

-It is an opportunity missed.

We have a Karen Templer, who is a QI watcher, has knitted us...

Oh, look at that.

And this says, in Morse code...

"I wool always love you."

Oh, that's cute.

Aaah. Thank you, Karen. Bravo.

APPLAUSE

-Isn't that nice?

-You know what she was doing there?

-She was indulging in a bit of four-ply.

-Hey!

-AUDIENCE LAUGH AND GROAN

-Good night.

-Very good.

And let's hope that it is Morse code and not Braille.

"You'll what? Get off me!"

You know the female knitters at the guillotine? Did they knit?

Didn't they knit code? There was something about them knitting code.

The most famous one is Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities

and they were known as tricoteurs, which is French for knitting women.

But a lot of people now believe they didn't really exist.

That they were sort of made up by Carlyle,

the great historian of the French Revolution, and by Dickens.

So they didn't knit, necessarily.

They didn't think that they actually sat there watching heads roll.

-Making bobble hats.

-In the book, Madame Defarge knits

the names of all the aristocrats who get their heads chopped off,

which is not really a code as a sort of gleeful cackling joy.

The original woman of the revolution,

the mothers of the revolution, were much-loved but then,

during The Terror, they became considered a nuisance

and so they were shut up or they were forbad to wear trousers,

a law that wasn't repealed until February, 2013,

in France.

Trouser suits had actually been illegal in France for that time,

-but obviously not enforced.

-No!

To say the least.

Now, how can knitting be used to reduce fear, crime and disorder?

Are you saying if he had a tank top on, he'd go,

"OK, I'm putting the gun down"?

-Well, you know, if he was knitting he couldn't be holding a gun.

-Yeah.

-Well, that's true.

-It's harder to stab, shoot.

You can only really kick people while you're knitting, can't you?

You can stab.

We'll come onto that, there is something called

Extreme Knitting, which we will come to.

But at the moment, we're looking at this form of knitting,

which has different names.

It's called Guerrilla Knitting, or sometimes Yarn Bombing.

And it is actually a way to make a place more peaceful.

It's to deter crime.

And it was tried out in Leicester, where they hung pompoms,

and put things round trees.

Oh, I feel calm already. It's like a tree-warmer.

Well, they used cosies for tree trunks, parking meters,

even buses, and tanks has been suggested, in the military areas.

The Leicester experiment has had mixed results.

Some locals don't think it works, others do.

The fact is, the pompoms have so embarrassed the Leicester police

that they have not allowed us to show photographs of them.

Which was extremely mean of them, but I'm sure

if you look it up, you'll be able to see the Leicester pompoms.

-They're embarrassed?

-Yes.

Embarrassed by the fact that they do look rather comic.

We can easily sort that out.

Basically, if you're watching, if you're in Leicester and you see

a policeman, just go, "Oi, where's pompom?" That'll teach them.

It certainly will. It certainly will.

But as I say, there's Guerrilla Knitting,

but I alluded to it earlier, there's Extreme Knitting.

What do you think that might be?

Now I've got Gregg Wallace in my head going,

"Knitting doesn't get more extreme than this!"

"First you get a slip stitch, then comes a taste of pearl."

Is it about doing knitting in places where you wouldn't normally,

like driving a Formula One car, or...

-Well, sort of.

-..parachuting or something.

The great heroine of this is one Susie Hewer,

aged 55 at the moment of going to press.

She has the world record for knitting a scarf

while running a marathon.

-Oh, that is good.

-That is impressive.

And she's also crocheted while running a marathon too,

and she's ridden a tandem,

and she does it to raise money for Alzheimer's research.

So it's all pretty good in the end.

Yeah. I did a half marathon when I was a student,

to raise money so that we could go to the Edinburgh Festival.

-Well, dear me.

-Do you know how much I raised? Have a guess.

-So that's what got you here.

-50 quid.

-70.

-Oh, that's good.

-70 quid.

-For 13 miles.

And then we got two grand off the Students' Union to top it up.

-Well, it worked out all right for you, didn't it?

-Yeah.

I would say.

Now, what about the biggest knitted objects in the world,

-how big are they?

-Massive.

Yes, is the answer. Give me a...

Thanks, I'll have a point, thank you.

-The biggest knitted object.

-Yeah.

Well, I've had my doubts about Venus for a long time, you know.

Is it going to be like a suspension bridge or something,

is a knitted object?

Inasmuch as it is, yes, it is a physical object

-on which people can live.

-It's a house?

Is the internet knitted?

-Does it count as a huge knitted thing?

-No.

It's a series of man-made knitted islands on the Peruvian side

of Lake Titicaca. And there are 45 of them.

They're from totora reeds, and there's a church on one of them.

There are buildings and houses, people live on them.

But they're quite...

But the scariest thing is the size of the nanas that built them.

Yes!

But several hundred people live on them, they get so used to

this rather springy surface that if they then go on land, they just,

they can't walk, it takes them ages to get their land legs back.

I think that's where Bez from the Happy Mondays,

-he's from there, isn't he?

-Yeah.

-Very good. Excellent.

-Be a great excuse, wouldn't it,

if you turned up somewhere pissed

to say, "No, actually, I'm fine, I just usually live somewhere knitted.

"And it's very odd, everything..."

Just used to a very different surface.

"Everything feels very wobbly, but honestly, I am a professional."

But the Lake Titicaca Olympic team must be amazing. Bang!

Give me a statistic about Lake Titicaca.

It is the biggest innuendo place on the planet.

It's got titties and it's got caca.

-Caca, exactly. Exactly.

-Is it very, very high?

It's the highest navigable lake in the world. Quite right.

Navigable means you can go in one end and out the other.

Yes, you can get ships on it and there are many ships on it,

and ports and things like that.

There are higher lakes which you couldn't get a ship onto.

Not been made more navigable by loads of knitted islands.

-Yes, they get in the way.

-Yes.

So, anyway, now for a new round. What Katydid.

Here are five creatures and five names.

I want you to match the creature to the name.

Oh, right, OK.

There's a dragon-headed, a spike headed, a horned,

a mimicking snout-nosed and a small hooded, and they're all called?

-Sheila.

-No, no, they're called katydids.

Why might they be called a katydid?

-A "cat-idid?"

-No, it is actually pronounced katydid.

It's because supposedly the sound

they make by stridulating their wings as many of the cricket-y type

animals and katydid animals do...

-Cricket-y type animals?

-Yes, crickets, grasshoppers, locusts...

-And we look to you!

-Do you do it in your nature shows?

"Oh, these are the cricket-y type ones."

"The cricket-y and the footballish ones."

So their bingo wings sort of rub and they let off...

-And it makes a chirping noise. Yes.

-I think mine do that.

Which puts them in common with locusts and grasshoppers

and cicadas and so on.

They're called kaydids because apparently the sound is,

"Katydid, katydidn't."

I don't know, we haven't got a recording of it,

-so I can't help you.

-Katydid, katydidn't.

Let's show the answers in a colour-coded sort of way.

-There you can see...

-The dragon-head.

But they're strange creatures.

And the most impressive, in some ways, is the small hooded,

which as you see is the purple one, which looks like a leaf.

We're looking at it very closely and it's moving, but it wasn't

discovered till 2010. It lived for millennia and it's not even rare.

It's in Australia.

It's because its camouflage is so astonishing, the mottling

of the leaves and everything else is such that people just don't see it.

That's the longest game of hide and seek.

-Yes, that's ever been ever played.

-Finally!

Eventually someone, "Look, what's that little blighter in there?

"That's an animal, it's alive."

"Oh, you got me, you got me!"

It would be a terrifying thing, actually suddenly to, you know, that

things that we've been looking at for ages turn out to be animals.

-Yes.

-You know, that you're suddenly looking at four trees

-and suddenly realise, "Oh, no, they're legs."

-Yes.

There's another katydid which does a really extraordinary thing,

it's a record in the animal kingdom, as far as we know,

it's the male Tuberous bush cricket.

It has the largest testicles for their weight of any animal.

ALL: Oh!

That's 14% of their body mass.

-14%?

-14%.

-Gonads.

-It enables them to fertilise as many females as possible.

They do this by inserting a jelly-like package, called...

Why are you looking at me?

I'm sorry, called a spermatophore, into the female.

But the back end of this spermatophore,

this bulging packet of spermatazoic jelly,

there's too much of it, it bulges out

and the female reaches back and eats it for lunch.

LAUGHTER

So it's a romantic dinner for one, so it's a double little present.

Only a man could say that!

-The thing about that...

-40%...yes?

The thing about that as a creature, though,

cos it's got such massive balls, like when you film it close up,

it must go like, it must leap and go, oh!

Quick, oh!

-Oh, the agony.

-Every time it lands, it's just, ooh.

Where's the penis? Is the penis massive?

I don't think it's as massive as the testes.

Just a little thing like that, and then two great melons.

Yeah. It's really...

Quite a powerful squirt, you'd have thought.

-She could be a mile away.

-Yeah!

Well, there you are, there's your katydid.

What's the longest distance of mating in the animal kingdom?

-What is?

-Yeah.

-Gosh, I don't know.

Some fish put the eggs and then the male fish comes along later...

-By post.

-They don't even meet.

That's true. You could send by post, I suppose.

-Can you?

-Well, there's the ninja slug.

No, this is a real thing.

A ninja slug?

The ninja slug, and when it's doing the loving,

-it, er... Yeah, I'm like a proper expert.

-The slug loving.

-Wax on, wax off.

-Yeah, slug loving.

And then instead of getting involved,

it comes up and then it fires like all the necessaries towards

the lady slug, and she "hoof", and then, I don't know what it's called.

-Catches it?

-Sort of, yeah.

-But she leans backward to catch it?

I don't think she's got hands,

but she, she sort of... That's the thing with a slug,

if you rush a slug like that, they don't go, "Urgh," they just,

"Oh." And then, yeah. Go like that.

Oh, it's that bit, on the... yes.

Wah!

-And then, yeah.

-Are you saying it's like the meat and two veg detach?

-Yeah. Takes it off...

-And fires, takes it off and fires it at a...

Takes it off and it... Again, I'm not sure where I found this out.

Scooby Doo. That is definitely Scooby Doo.

It sort of, its bits go, and then it, woo, like that. Then it...

I definitely seen that on Scooby Doo.

And then I think she's like that, "Wey!"

And she's basically like a goalkeeper, just readying herself.

Exactly. Yeah, honestly, it's like an explosion in an Ann Summers.

-Well, that's terrific, well done.

-There's nothing worse, though,

when this slug comes towards the lady and she dives the wrong way.

-That is, oh!

-Nightmare.

Moving on, moving on from the enormous knackers of the katydid.

What can you tell me about the royal knackers?

Well, I imagine they're pretty toastie right now.

Is it where royal horses are killed?

The Royal Knacker's Yard?

Yes, they don't any longer have a Royal Knacker's yard,

but they used to.

There was of course, in the Victorian age, and earlier,

a great need to get rid of horses who had died,

and to make the most of them.

And they went to knacker's yards. And there was...

And thence into lasagne.

And they were made into all kinds of things.

And the royal knacker was one John Atcheler,

who had the royal warrant from Queen Victoria, to knacker her horses.

And he was the official horse slaughterer.

He's buried in Highgate Cemetery, where there is

a tomb with a prancing horse on top of it, like a Ferrari mascot.

Is it prancing the other way up?

Maybe prancing is a sign of revenge.

"We got you at last, you bastard."

He had two knacker's yards.

The first was in Sharp's Alley near Smithfield

and then later near Kings Cross, at Belle Isle.

And they were famously malodorous, you wouldn't want to live near them.

Huge, huge copper vats filled with horses being rendered down.

But here from 1844 is an extract from Bentley's Miscellany,

"The knacker's cart arrives in double quick,

"The mob admires the cart, the royal arms and the inscription:

"'Knacker to Her Majesty.'

"The royal knacker, a swell knacker in cords and tops,

"with a bit of butcher's apron, just as big as a bishop's,

"merely to distinguish his profession,

"pole-axe in hand, descends from his vehicle."

-Well, that's pageantry.

-That's pageantry, isn't it? Exactly.

That's what I want to see televised, David Dimbleby doing

the commentary, "The slaughtering of the royal horse."

Absolutely.

It wouldn't be David Dimbleby though, it'd be Fearne Cotton.

I'm afraid it would.

People would say, "They've ruined the horse slaughtering this year."

"They've trivialised the knackering."

-"It used to be so respectful."

-So much pomp and circumstance.

Explain what bit of the horse was bubbling up to the top now,

is it a bollock, is it an eye?

-Yes.

-But they don't know now, these new presenters.

Football clubs used horse oil to...?

-To stop chaffing?

-Lubricate something.

Their boots, actually, oddly enough, to keep their boots supple.

Cricket teams rubbed it into their bats,

much as they then used to do with linseed oil.

Doctors used neatsfoot oil to massage a patient's joints

after coming out of plaster, they would use that.

Selected bones were sent to knife manufacturers for the handles.

There you are, look. See, "Horse meat for sale, this store only.

"With beef, lamb, pork also available."

He's thinking, "I won't have the horse."

The horse looks a bit worried! The horse is deciding which to have.

But by strange, I don't know

if coincidence or irony is the word, but in 1824 the RSPCA was founded

and there's a plaque to show where it was founded.

Old Slaughters Coffee House.

That's what you want to do after you've had a good old night

-slaughtering, is have a latte.

-Yeah.

-I fed horse meat to a lion once.

-Did you?

That was a pony trick gone wrong!

-No, I was in Namibia...

-Yeah.

..doing a documentary about this place where they rehabilitate big cats.

They had three lions

a bit like Clarence, the Boss-Eyed Lion from Daktari.

I remember him well.

They were kind of semi-tame and they fed them horse meat,

so if a horse died anywhere within about 300 miles,

they'd try and get hold of it.

And they'd chop it up and you'd put it...

They'd lift a bit of the fence and you shove this metal bowl

underneath and a lion would come over, put its tongue in.

And lions have got these barbs

on their tongue that can pick up a piece of horse meat

and dangle it, and then they look at you through the bar like that.

-Still got the hair on the side.

-Oh...

-Quite a flimsy fence.

-Yes.

-We're lucky still to have you. Well done, you.

-Quite a sight.

Quite an impressive sight.

Well, if anyone from Leeds tells you to eat kicker, what should you do?

Run away, because that's Kicker there.

You can see we're still in the world of meat.

Is it horse?

It is actually just plain horse, yes, it's horse.

And Yorkshire was the last place really to eat horse

on a major scale in Britain.

Until quite recently.

Well...

But of course recently there have been a few scandals

which mean we've probably all been eating horse.

That dark brown horse has the hair of Tina Turner.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

You're spot-on.

What you're looking at here is the entire line-up of Horse Kajagoogoo.

-You're absolutely right.

-It's really spooky, that.

Well, horse was very popular right up until the first millennium,

until Gregory III, the Pope, deemed it too pagan.

But the Scandinavians had always loved eating horse

and the greatest Scandinavian, as it were,

presence in Britain was in Yorkshire.

And so it remained as a tradition to eat horse

right up until really the '30s.

And the last butcher selling horse in the county was Arnold Drury

in Doncaster, who died in 1951.

He proudly advertised "Viande Cheval,"

meat horse, "of super quality horseflesh."

And other butchers called it kicker, more euphemistically.

And in the 19th century, rural Yorkshire folk who moved to the city

were known as kicker eaters.

I've eaten horse.

-Well, most of us have, apparently, without knowing it.

-Yes.

-I ate it consciously.

-How was it?

-To... Very lean. No fat on it at all.

-Wow.

Just basically like eating, I don't know, wall installation.

-Just no succulence to it.

-Yeah.

Isn't it odd how we rebel at the idea of things

that we're not used to?

You know, we are totally used to drinking the proteinous

fatty stuff that comes out of an alien animal,

that is designed to make its calf double in weight every week,

and we're perfectly happy,

skull it back and go, that's all right, I'm eating a cow's milk.

-But even more so...

-But someone says eat a horse's milk, you go, "Ugh!"

Even more so than that, when my sister-in-law

-expressed some breast milk and kept it in the fridge...

-Ah.

and her brother came in and drank it...

It made everyone feel a bit unwell, but no-one quite knows why.

Well, exactly, because it's a lot more...

-Clearly it's designed for human consumption.

-Precisely,

much more than cow or horse milk is.

I tell you what, it makes a lovely rice pudding.

-It really does.

-But wasn't there a shop selling...

-Breast milk ice cream.

-Yeah.

We should all try lots of different animals' milk.

I'm very happy to try horse milk.

-I had some of that breast milk ice cream.

-Did you?

Yeah. I was on a television programme

and they brought it round as a gimmick, I didn't seek it out.

No.

And it tasted completely like normal ice cream.

I thought you were going to say completely like tits.

-Yeah, it tasted very, very strongly of tits.

-Very breasty.

No, it tasted very much like dog or horse milk, in fact.

Well, the most famous 19th century Royal Knacker was Jack Atcheler,

responsible for dealing with 26,000 horses a year.

Talking of being knackered,

describe the world's oldest mattress.

I'll have to think, it's got springs sticking out,

-it's a bit tatty, it's stained...

-It's a lot older than that.

It's very, very, very, very old.

39,000 years old, we think.

It's in KwaZulu-Natal, in a cave, and it's made of rushes and reeds.

And it was used by humans for thousands and thousands of years.

And they would add top layers of insect-repelling plants,

so that they wouldn't get bitten during the night.

-So it's a really extraordinary...

-What was it, king, super king?

-I think probably wider. Californian double king, probably.

-Oh.

-Yeah.

-Absolutely.

-I think I've stayed at that hotel.

Compared to apes, of course, humans are relatively hairless.

We have two major areas of hair, don't we?

We have our little top knot

and we have our little lower down area of hair.

Both of which can be susceptible to lice.

-There's the head louse.

-Ah!

-And there's the public louse.

-Which is actually on the decline.

-The crab. Is it?

-Yes, it is. Yeah.

Not so many pubes about these days, are there?

-Because of Brazilians, you think?

-That's exactly why.

-The Brazilian has...

-Because of the, you know...

-Shaving downstairs.

-I'm not sure how I know this, but it is true.

-Scooby Doo again.

-Probably.

HE IMITATES SCOOBY

And if it hadn't been for you pesky kids,

I'd have gotten away with it, as well.

Apparently their numbers are... Yeah.

They have had to actually start sanctuaries now. Special...

-Special pube sanctuaries and I donate every month.

-Little crabberies.

To provide a natural habitat because their natural habitat is shrinking.

It would be awful, actually, if you found you had pubic lice

and then there was some sort of environment agency order on it

that you couldn't get rid of it.

"I'm so sorry, they're important to the ecosystem."

-They are restricted, they are zoned.

-They are like bats.

It was assumed that, when we were hairier beings,

we had various lice on our bodies and that some of them specialised

in the head and began to evolve into head lice

and the others specialised in the pubes and began to evolve into pubic

lice, but it has been discovered that they are not related at all.

And that our pubic lice are actually related to lice that live

on gorillas, which asks a rather interesting question as to...

who was it? Who made that...

David Attenborough! >

SILENCE!

-Yeah?

-David Attenborough.

No, it was 3.3 million years ago that the jump was made.

I think that still works, David Attenborough.

So down there and up there, no...

-They're not related.

-You see, I've got a sort of nature corridor.

-Ah!

Well, I think you will find they will try down there

and not like it, they'll stay up there.

How dare you! How dare you!

That's an area of outstanding natural beauty, down there!

But it's an immense distance.

Let's just say an area of special scientific interest.

I've had a picnic area put in. I've got a gift shop down there.

-Coach party.

-Oh, my God. Jesus.

There must have been louse meetings,

though, somewhere in people's chest hair. The more...

The more adventurous of the head lice meet the more adventurous

of the pube lice and they must have tried mating.

-To make chest lice.

-They created a new species - tit lice.

Just live around the tit area.

Tit louse, that is a nice thought, I like that.

-It's almost Beatrix Potter, isn't it?

-Yes!

-This is a children's book waiting to happen.

-It is.

You're going to do the audio recording.

Anyway. Moving on. What's the oldest profession?

Oh, get that one.

We are all terribly frightened of the obvious one.

Prostitute, prostitute!

Prostitute! I'm just shouting prostitute like I usually do.

-Must be due.

-It must be five o'clock!

If I walk past, in Soho, you see models upstairs, it would

be amazing if you went in there and it was like a Hornby Model Railway,

just loads of women in their pants just going, "Come on, it's brilliant.

"We've got a station box."

-But, it's not prostitution.

-Is it knitting?

No, but you're right, it begins with a silent K.

-When we made early tools, what did we make them out of?

-Flint.

-Knapping.

-Knapping. Yes. Flintknapping.

Seems to be the oldest profession,

from archaeological digs we see a homo habilis handyman.

He was an early, smaller version of us

and he knapped away at flint to make spearheads and so on.

It seems to have been the first job that we know of.

But logically, if that's...

Someone has tried hunting just with a normal stick, before he's asked

someone to have a go at knapping some flint to make his stick sharper.

-So I reckon hunter has got to be a job pre-knapper.

-Yeah.

But you were self-employ... Well, mmm, you...

I reckon they were all probably... None of them were on PAYE.

I was going to say. As if P45...

Even before hunter, there was surely spear caddy.

-Spear caddy.

-The fella who hands the spear to the hunter.

"Spear caddy, could I have the number four, please?"

Of course, you'd have to have a wood chopper, woodcutter.

You've got to have one of those. You're right.

Anyway, flintknapping was certainly an old profession.

All of this is before prostitutes.

Certainly the oldest one with a silent K. Yes.

-Is there a word for prostitute that begins with a silent K?

-Probably.

Knob-gobbler.

-LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-Wow, that was quick! That was fast.

The oldest human occupation we have evidence for is

flintknapping.

Now, what should you watch out for when handling these?

It's roses, rose stems.

Oh, is it, is it old women with secateurs?

Yeah, well, that's one thing.

What else might harm you if you try to pick them?

The thorny bit?

KLAXON SOUNDS

-No, roses don't have thorns.

-Not a thorn?

Well, they do, it's a known...

Thorn bushes have, thorn bushes have roses, is that it?

-Is it a trick?

-No, on roses they're called?

-Prickles.

-Prickles, well done. Absolutely right...

-They prick you.

-They're not thorns.

A thorn is a very specific thing, botanically.

Thorns are modified branches or stems,

and prickles are part of a plant's skin, which is what those are.

They come out from it.

So when Bon Jovi sang Every Rose Has A Thorn...

-They were lying.

-He's made an absolute fool of himself.

They did.

# Every rose has a prickle! #

That would be great, wouldn't it, if you went to a Bon Jovi gig, and

# Every rose has a... #

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! And the QI thing went off...

We've got to invite him on the show, absolutely right.

So let's see if we've learned something tonight.

I'm going to show you something and tell me,

is there a thorn in this picture?

-Er, there's not one on the rose.

-No.

KLAXON SOUNDS

Oh, God!

Well, you said no, didn't you?

But you were more accurate. You said there's not one on the rose.

But isn't there one on the crown?

-No, there isn't one on the crown either.

-One on the grass?

Oh, Alan, you were the only person on the programme

when we covered this.

There is no such thing as Ye Olde Rose and Crown,

it's THE Old Rose and Crown, and the letter Y is called a...?

-Thorn.

-Thorn.

The letter is the thorn.

-So the Y is called?

-A thorn, yes.

-A thorn.

-It's a "th" sound.

When you see that, you don't say YE, you say THE.

THE. So when people say ye olde, they're completely wrong, it's THE.

I will never get it wrong again.

So you no longer have to say Ye Olde Tea Shop, it's The Olde Tea Shop.

What if you open a new one?

How does that...?

Then just call it The New Tea Shop.

Now, who fancies one of my Knick Knacks to celebrate

the beauty of chemistry?

I've got a bottle here of alcohol, but this is not drinking alcohol.

-I'm just going to...

-That was full at the start of tonight.

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to make a cloud,

which I think you'll find is rather exciting.

I've got a pump here, and Alan, I'm going to ask you to pump for me,

-would you?

-Every Monday.

That's it.

By doing this I'm just making it evaporate a little, and I'm going

to stick the plunger in as soon as I can, so I don't get too much.

Now, by pumping it in, you're applying pressure to this,

-there you go.

-Shall I pump? About ten.

Two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine, ten. That'll do.

Is it going to blow up? Is it going to explode?

-And...

-Oh!

-Cloud.

-Oh, look at that.

-I've made a cloud.

But, pop it in.

APPLAUSE

We can now make it disappear.

Gone cloud.

Come back, cloud!

Oh, isn't that exciting?

All of which brings us to the scores,

and our winner tonight on minus six is David Mitchell.

HE MOUTHS: Minus six.

In a very respectable second place on minus nine, is Ross Noble.

Who knew?

Improving all the time, in third place, with minus 17,

Alan Davies.

But tonight's frayed knicker elastic is Sue Perkins on minus 22.

Well, that's all from Sue, David, Ross, Alan and me.

Good night.

Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd