VG Part One QI

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-You know when you find a bee and it's crawling on its last legs?

-I rescue them.

-Give it honey.

It's the only thing they eat. It makes sense when you think about it.

Yeah, yeah!

-No point just talking to it. Give it honey.

-They're very much a one recipe species.

I'm intrigued because I generally give it the sole of my shoe, but...

-Not to be harsh, but you know.

-You'd tread on a struggling, crawling bee?

As opposed to rehabilitate it?!

I like honey. I have it on my porridge, you murderer.

-We depend on bees.

-We need the bees.

So in future I should lure it back? Do I get a syringe of honey?

-How do I feed it?

-A teaspoon of honey. Don't tread on it.

-You should be arrested.

-LAUGHTER

You should be locked up...in a hive.

Isn't it true, though, that a bee in his entire lifetime makes a tiny amount of honey?

-I mean, just the minutest amount.

-But there's lots of them.

-You don't have to give much honey to this bee

before the world is making a net loss.

That's true.

It's useless. If you only get one teaspoon of honey from a whole bee's lifetime

and every time it takes a teaspoon and a half, suddenly there's no honey at all!

-This is more honey than this bee has seen in its life.

-It's insulting it, apart from anything else.

Like showing a very tired mason a whole cathedral! LAUGHTER

-May...

-APPLAUSE

Well, let's say you're in between Alan and Dara.

Like Alan you want to help the bee, but like Dara you also want to kill, kill, kill,

what you can do is get what I would term too much honey and you see the bee

-and you pour molten honey...

-No!

-Hear me out.

-OK.

-And then you watch him die a slow...

-Yes, I carry on with NO!

-I've now heard you out.

-Yes.

-And it's no better.

That's much worse than what I did!

-You're being humane?

-Yeah!

-You're not. You get a kick out of it.

Drowning the bee ironically in honey...

-You can't drown bees!

-"Is this too much honey?"

DAVID: "Not so keen on the honey now, are you?"

-You may try to drown bees, but I will follow you and...

-It wasn't him wanting to drown them.

-Yes, it was! He's a bee drowner.

-I'd smash them with a hammer.

-He wanted to tread on it.

-If there's a bee in a bath, I don't go, "Get the shoe!"

-Splishy! Splashy!

-Very good.

Well, thank you for that... interesting, fierce and, I think, productive debate.

I did one of those Royal Command Performances many years ago.

Anthony Newley wrote a song for the end that we had to do.

It had the gorgeous line, "At the London Palladium,

"the P-A-double L-adium,

"the super starry stadium that showbiz calls home."

-Ah, Newley. Brilliant.

-# The London Palladium... #

-I'd throw myself in the orchestra pit.

"Who's with me?"

-And you do that thing... Is there a word for it musically?

-BLEEP

-..Yeah!

For what I'm about to mention?

# That showbiz calls home Have a banana!

# That showbiz calls home And I love it!

# That showbiz calls home! # What is that?

-The annoying coda.

-Yeah.

I don't know what we're talking about any more. I've lost track.

-Who's this Newley man?

-Anthony Newley.

-Anthony Newley.

He used to sing with 100 syllables. # Aa-oh-aaah... #

-And David Bowie stole his voice, of course.

-Yeah, exactly!

And he was the first... Well, not the first, but a very early Artful Dodger.

-He was one of the first.

-# Aa-oh-aah... #

One of the most successful British showbiz people of all time. Won Oscars, Tonys, wrote Goldfinger.

There's a story, because Tony Newley told me himself...

Ah-oh-aah...!

-You haven't got a tie on, Danny.

-He won the Oscar for Goldfinger in '64 or '65.

And he was up against Henry Mancini. And he was at the Oscars. He said, "Dan, if you ever win..."

I'm doing Max Bygraves! "Dan, if you ever win an Oscar, and you will..."

He said the first thing you want to do is go straight to the toilets and look at yourself in the mirror.

He said, "I was in the toilets and I'd just won for Goldfinger and Henry Mancini came in

"and he said, 'Where did you get that melody? It's brilliant.'"

"Thank you!" Then he thought, "Oh! He won last year for Moon River."

# Moon river... #

"I just won for..." # Goldfinger! #

But Henry Mancini, gentleman that he was, just left him with that.

-He wrote the MUSIC for Goldfinger?

-Yeah.

-I thought you meant the film.

Would you like a cup of cocoa, dear?

-If cryogenics takes off, it might benefit you to commit suicide.

-Why?

Die young, then get brought back looking the same. Do it again...

-True.

-So you get a couple of years, top yourself, get frozen again.

Why not just freeze yourself? Why top yourself AND freeze yourself in the hope they'd cured suicide?

Some day medical science will have moved on to have found some way

of dealing with massive gunshot wounds to the head! Then I'll score because I'll look great...

Is the idea that every decade you have a couple of good years?

Why would you even do that?

Then come back in 100 years' time, see what it's like, top yourself, come back in another 100...

-You're not getting my point!

-LAUGHTER

You started it with serial suicide!

-Why do you have to top yourself first?!

-Because you get frozen when you're dead! Not when you're alive.

-They freeze you when you're alive.

-When you're alive?!

-Yeah.

How can you be so shocked? "When you're alive?! Kill yourself first!"

There's got to be a moment of death to quickly whip your brain out, like with people's organs.

I don't think they're allowed to freeze you when you're alive.

They say it's so you can wake up in the future, but, in fact, the freezing would kill you.

-No, I'm thinking...

-But with Alan's plan you'd already be dead.

And then they take your brain out - that's something else he said -

and 100 years on they put the brain back in. "You'd look great."

LAUGHTER

It's going to work!

Why would you not want Private Gwilym Jenkins of the Royal Welsh Regiment

guarding your rose bushes?

-Sean?

-He's a goat.

Is the right answer!

-APPLAUSE

-Very good.

Very good.

-Yep.

-Oh, he's a beauty.

-You knew that or it was an inspired guess?

-No, I knew that.

-Various regiments were conjoined a few years ago. And there he is.

-Isn't he fine?

-Looks like Satan.

-From the royal herd at Windsor. He's... What?

He said he looks like Satan.

-Satan in the '70s, you know.

-He does a bit. You're right.

There's a regiment in Norway where there's a general who's a penguin.

-You're right again!

-He was honoured.

He was honoured in Edinburgh, of all places. Or inspected the troops.

-A penguin did?!

-He wanders up and down, with a thing round his neck...

-Looking up the kilts.

-Could be.

-No.

-What was this thing round his neck?

They couldn't pin a medal on him. Some seal of office.

-A seal as well?!

-LAUGHTER

Wow. We've got a seal, a penguin... But other regimental mascots include... The Irish Guards?

-Leprechaun.

-A big dog.

BILL: A goldfish.

One of those Irish dogs.

-A wolfhound?

-Thank you. An Irish wolfhound, indeed.

-The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders?

-A big cow!

-A haggis!

-No.

-Pekinese.

A tiger! A big tiger! Arrr!

-An Argyll and Sutherland terrier.

-No, it's further...

It's about the same size as the Irish wolfhound and the goat.

The bonsai panther!

-What's up north of Scotland?

-Er, Wales!

-Shetland pony!

-A Shetland pony. Well done, Alan, there.

-And the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters?

-A bottle of sauce.

-A wood louse!

-A man dressed as a bottle of sauce.

With his face out like that.

-Chaffinch.

-Not a...!

I read that the current North Korean leader...

-Kim Jong-Il.

-The Beloved Leader.

-He commands, Kim, Kimmy,

he demands that his duvets are filled with the softest down known to man.

And the softest down, apparently, known to man

is the chin of a sparrow.

-And he has 150,000 sparrow chins stuffed into his duvet.

-No...

Do they shave a live sparrow or do they kill a sparrow?

-Just a tickle under the chin.

-Chuck it under the chin.

-Stephen fills his duvet with the softest man known to sparrows.

-LAUGHTER

Ah, I do. I do.

Who painted this picture?

-"Aaaaow!"

-Yes?

Van GOFF. HOOTER

We're after...

I'm going to go Van GOTH.

HOOTER

-Wha...?!

-Van GO!

-Van GO?

HOOTER

"Here's Jimmy!"

Cezanne.

LAUGHTER

-At least you don't lose points for that.

-Van HO.

-Closer...

-Van HEUGH.

-What?

-Van HEUGH.

-Now, listen. We can help you out with that name.

-Jolly close, Jack. Were you aware there's a Dutch version of QI?

-Yes.

-Would you like to see the presenter?

-Not really.

-He will tell us how the name is pronounced.

-Pretty good.

-Sho shexy.

-Come on!

-The correct Dutch pronunciation is Vincent Van HOCH.

But, please, don't try this at home.

-There you are.

-What would he know?

-He wears more makeup than you, Stephen!

Let's have the next word. And it's..."grog blossom".

-Would you like to explain what it is?

-This is actually

the kind of mould that you get on the inside of a barrel of beer

-that you have to clean out before you use it again.

-Phill?

I'd like to do it in the style of the out of work actors they had on Call My Bluff.

They'd do their definition in an effort to beg for work.

FLAMBOYANTLY Imagine if you will...

..a lone figure walking across Hampstead Heath...

..the sun glinting in his very eyes,

for he is making his way back from an evening at the inn

where he has partaken of mead

and other lascivious beverages. LAUGHTER

Adorning the chin of said stout fellow

are pimples, for they betray his excesses,

and these, at the time, were known as...

Marty Fitch - 01 287 469.

Available for panto.

..grog blossom.

Bravo! Excellent.

The true understanding of evolution shows that nature is horrific.

The Victorians hated it because they loved countryside, birdsong...

-Mrs Alexander's All Things Bright And Beautiful.

-Yes. Instead it is a vicious struggle for survival...

All animals are hungry and afraid and die before they get old and it's a miserable, hard life.

-Unless they live in zoos.

-A life they wouldn't expect in the wild.

Maybe they could let them out of the zoo for a little bit and let them back in the circus.

-Mmm...

-I miss a dog pushing a pram. LAUGHTER

-You...

-Cirque du Soleil is all very well,

-but an elephant counting.

-You're pitching yourself in a tailcoat, tights and a top hat,

-welcoming everybody to Circus X Factor Call Me A Nancy, aren't you?

-No!

-You are.

You'd have to do the elephant's back story. "This is the elephant's last chance

"for a career in show business." The elephant in tears.

"He's doing this for his dead grandfather," and the elephant staring at a big pile of ivory.

LAUGHTER

-You are a sick puppy.

-Give it some piano keys!

The band's about to play for him and they go, "These?"

Tactless.

"Yeah, my grandad was in show business as well."

Oddly enough, it seems that both girls and boys will take more pain from a woman.

-They did calibrated tests of putting fingers in a clamp and...

-What?!

-..both men and...

-Who volunteers for that?

-But you get to keep the clamp.

-Now it all becomes clear.

-You pay students. You say, "Say stop when you can't take it any more."

In both women and men's cases, women could turn it further.

Oddly enough, if there are pleasant pictures on the wall you can take more pain.

-That's what art does for us all.

-There's a wonderful thing called Stendhal Syndrome.

-Oh, yes...

-The idea that people are so overwhelmed by a piece of art, they faint.

-Did we cover that?

-No...

-LAUGHTER

That's the beauty. We can do the questions again and again.

I go, "That rings a bell."

Also painkillers have different effects. Right up until the 1990s,

-drug companies did not test painkillers on women.

-Because they complain, anyway.

Oh, Jack, you're making friends(!) I fear... I think Jack better suffer for that one.

Actually, women's ability to take different levels of pain alters

in different stages of the menstrual cycle, so they said women were not a reliable test of painkillers...

-We're all over the place.

-..but then the American FDA said, "This is not good enough

-"and you must factor it in."

-I've just come back from America.

They have fantastic drugs. You can buy shedloads.

I was in a chemist and I ended up not in the haemorrhoid section, but in the haemorrhoid aisle.

Yes, it is astonishing. The size of those Walgreens and huge pharmacies. Unbelievable.

-Absolutely staggering.

-Is it embarrassing walking down the haemorrhoid aisle?

It's bad enough if you have to ask for the stuff. Apparently.

-"He likes to walk down the haemorrhoid aisle."

-Yeah!

Oh, dear.

What about exactly an hour? Where did the hour...?

Why did they decide on an hour? What was that? Why an hour?

-Why not make half an hour an hour?

-24 is divisible in so many ways.

-Very factorisable.

-Divisible by 2 and 3 and 4 and 6 and 8.

-So is 10.

-It's only divisible by 1, 2, 5 and itself.

-Only in one dimension.

If you go into another dimension, you can do anything you like.

-Unfortunately, we weren't in another dimension, Bill.

-Oh!

-I'm sorry.

-Why was it important to divide 24 by 8?

-No, it was to have as divisible a system as possible.

-Why not have 100?

-If you want to, you can have decimalised time.

I'm going to make my own. I've got to cross two of these off!

-Yeah.

-Let's have a vote!

-Which ones to cross off?

3 and 8.

-Well, last night...

-You can't have 1 to 10. We'll never have elevenses ever again.

-Nineses!

-Nineses?!

-Nineses!

-So how many hours are in your day?

-20.

-20 hours of daylight?

-Nice and simple. Call it a hoorar.

-Right, OK.

-A hoorar.

-A hoor!

-A hoor?!

-Hoor!

-A strumpet!

-That is a whore.

-20 strumpets!

-Yeah.

Aye!

-It was 12 hours because the Babylonians...

-What do they know?

They had a base 12 counting system.

-But we have 10 fingers.

-Yes.

-And 10 toes.

And you could count off the sections of time by using your digits.

-What time is it?

-One, two...

-Three and a half.

-Two minutes past four. What would that be, then? About six?

-Yeah.

There could be a line in merchandisable metric clocks.

-It's the Bill Bailey QI metric clock.

-Metric clock.

-Yeah.

-That's fine. That'll do me.

-We've just done an hour on that topic.

-By whose system?

-I think you'll find it's an hour and a bit.

-That can only mean one thing - time to move on!

Where does the extra square in this diagram comes from?

Those two are the same size.

But there's a white square of bits missing. How can that be?

-Because some of the triangles...

-Have a look at it happening.

That one goes there, that one goes there and there.

Like so, like so, like so.

-And now there's more space in there.

-Yeah. But that can't be possible, can it?

Yet my eyes tell me it is.

-It's not even longer? No.

-It's the same.

Yup, there it is.

-It is a cheat.

-That's witchcraft!

-It is.

Rather appropriately, it was a magician who discovered this.

-It's five blocks high, the same number of blocks long.

-It's a very small, subtle cheat.

The hypotenuse seem to be the same, but they are curved, not straight.

The red triangle has a ratio of 5:2, the blue is 8:3,

-so the two triangles are not similar.

-One has a bigger area?

Exactly. One has a slightly dipped line. The eye assumes they're straight,

and it's puzzled by that gap. Anyway, we thought you'd like that. It's quite interesting, isn't it?

Curry's Paradox. Simply a trick. The gap appears as the hypotenuse is imperceptibly bent.

-Curry's Paradox.

-That's nice.

-Should you buy the insurance?

LAUGHTER

Or just risk it?

There are the lovely Osmonds. Aren't they lovely?

-What teeth!

-They were rubbish.

Apart from Little Jimmy Osmond, a long-haired lover from Liverpool.

And Big Graham Osmond, the one they kept in the attic.

-Who had terrible teeth.

-He had one massive one.

-And he wrote all the songs.

He groaned them into a tin can. It was connected by a piece of string.

Aaaeiiee!

# Wild horses...nyah! Nyah! #

# Crazy horses! #

HOWLING

-You're very bad.

-# Paper roses! #

"What was that, Graham?" "Aa-oooh!"

Behave.

Pull yourselves together at once.

The Church...

of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints...

-What a great idea!

-Aaa-ooyah!

That's a great idea for Dr Who. Dr Who goes into the attic

and finds the elderly secret brother of the Osmonds! And that's how they kill off David Tennant!

Aaargh!

-That's the Christmas show.

-Played by Bill Bailey!

-I was buying ties the other day...

-I thought you had them selected.

They said, "Do you want them in a bag or a box?" I said, "Bag, though if I'd asked for a box,

"you could have said you spent the day tie boxing."

-I know...

-And we laughed(!)

This is the gold you miss if you're not on the street where Stephen is.

-All right, I regret it. At the time...

-It's very nice.

I bet you when he came round... LAUGHTER

When he picked himself back up off the floor...

"Shall I still put them in the box, sir?

"Any more of them?"

All right! Come up.

-It was a light remark...

-"Oh, I've gone!"

Yeah.

"Oh, I wish you came in here more often."

-Why did it take 300 years to give the giant tortoise a scientific name?

-A scientific name?

i.e. the Latin name. It turned out to be Geochelone...

-Is it because they thought that was pretty good, giant tortoise?

-We'll leave it with that.

No, I... I was going to say something that now is unusable.

-I'm going to have to say it now.

-Go on. Get on with it, man.

-They thought...

LAUGHTER

-Better be good.

-They thought it was a normal tortoise, but closer.

-That's so sweet.

-But I couldn't get that concept.

Will it be further away or...? Further away would be a minute one.

Would they mistake a quite far away normal one for a miniature one? Or would...?

The thing that you're saying is that the tortoise...

They go that way.

If there was a tortoise over there that was giant, but I for some reason thought it was there,

I wouldn't think it was giant. "It's just one there.

-"Oh, my God! It's over there and it's massive!"

-On a huge beach with no other points of reference.

-That's not the reason.

-Are they particularly litigious?

"If you give me a name, I will sue you."

-No, it wasn't that. They had another property that was most unfortunate for them.

-The tortoises did?

-Yeah.

-They were edible.

-They were SO edible. Anyone...

Anyone who saw one couldn't stop to think of a name for it? They had to eat it straightaway?

One of those... I don't know what they're called. Just get one. They're very good.

There's no Latin name for pistachio nuts, either.

No-one can be bothered. "Shut up with your Latin. Eat them!"

No Latin name for Maltesers.

LAUGHTER

It's kind of true. None of them made it to London, to Europe.

"This time, THIS time, we're going to take it."

"Leave it. We're taking it back."

There's a ferry coming in to Dover and a bloke going...

Leaving the door where the tortoise was kept.

"All right, look, there's nine. We'll eat eight. But absolutely..."

And everyone's looking at it and going, "Come on..."

The sea's becalmed, for days on end, and there's one tortoise left.

"Come on, sir. Let's just go back and get some more."

And the moment after they've eaten that last tortoise,

they think, "We are..." LAUGHTER

"I'm too full."

Even Darwin on his last voyage,

-there were dozens of them.

-He collected every species in the world and ate that one.

-They did.

-"We've done all the butterflies, all the beetles..."

The only descriptions compare them to chicken, beef, mutton and butter

and say how much better they are than all of those things.

No-one had ever eaten anything better.

And the liver and the bone marrow. Every part of it was delicious.

-Whereabouts are they from?

-The tropics.

-Are there flights?

They are now protected! All 12 species!

If they're that delicious, they can't be. "We've protected them. No need to look."

Burp!

Oops! But there were some that survived, however.

-Let me tell you about a very extraordinary one.

-That bloke is befriending that one.

"Come over here, my pretty. I'm trying to think of a name for you."

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd - 2010

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