Genius QI

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hey! Hello!

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello!

And welcome to QI, the show-off show that sits at the front of the class,

shouting, "Me, sir! Me, me, me, sir, me!"

while other quiz shows are snogging behind the bike sheds.

Tonight, we're celebrating genius

with four of the most brilliant minds in the country,

the Einstein or entertainment, David Mitchell!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The Da Vinci of drollery, Dara O Brien!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The Galileo of gags, Graham Norton!

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

And the Morecambe of wise, Alan Davies!

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

But before our SWAT team of swots

done their white coats and clever clogs,

we should hear their buzzers, and Dara goes...

BELL

University College Dublin, O Brien!

David goes...

BELL

Peterhouse, Cambridge, Mitchell!

Graham goes...

BELL

University College, Cork, Norton!

And Alan goes...

PING!

Can I have a P, please, Bob?

LAUGHTER

Oh, that's...

APPLAUSE

That's completely unfair because Alan is a graduate of the University of Kent,

and he holds an honorary doctorate, so, Alan, could you press your buzzer again?

BELL

The doctor'll see you now!

LAUGHTER

Now, a very difficult first question, so I'm going to give you a bit of help.

-What I'd like you to do, you should have a bit of tissue somewhere near.

-ALAN:

-I can't see anything!

-No!

-Have you got tissues anywhere?

-Yeah.

I want you to stick a piece of tissue up your left nostril as if you had a nosebleed or something.

It's weird, OK. Left nostril, very good.

You've all passed that test. Well, two of you have.

I'm going for real penetration.

I can feel that up there.

If it came out your ear, that would be a worry. All right, now say something intelligent.

LAUGHTER

Er...

A squared equals B squared plus C squared.

That's very good! If...

Pythagoras's theorem, you know.

Yeah, excellent!

Well, no, what this is about,

do you breathe through your left nostril, your right nostril or both?

-My arse.

-Oi!

I've always suspected one works better than the other, but I've never kept a note of which it is.

Well, some people do keep notes of how people breathe.

-Does it not alternate?

-You're right, Dara O Brien, it does alternate.

It has a periodicity of four hours.

You swap from being mostly left to mostly right, and what's completely weird

is that you answer questions on different types of subject better

according to which side you're breathing through.

Am I going to asphyxiate at about half past 12?

You might, that's a good point! You can breathe through your mouth if you want to.

Should we be keeping notes of when our...you know,

of what shift work our nostrils are on?

Oh, the left will be in charge from one till four, that's when I should be doing maths-based things,

like my tax return.

If I'm going to write a poem, I'll wait till the more creative right nostril comes on at about 4pm.

-Breathing through the right nostril, you should be better at visual and spatial tasks.

-GRAHAM:

-So, now?

Yes, you should be good at visual and spatial things.

If you block the right one, you should be better at verbal things.

I know it sounds mad, but you've probably

heard of the study in '89 called Unilateral Nostril Breathing...

Oh, that old thing!

..by Block, Arnott, Quigley and Lynch.

So why don't all sports people constantly block their left nostrils?

Well, you've probably seen what a lot of sports people do.

They put a piece of Elastoplast, plaster, the anti-snoring thing,

and they do that so they're both open at the same time so they get maximum, I guess.

And often they snort drugs as well.

-They don't!

-When we watch a sports person with one of those things on,

-they're not only at their best at sport, they're also at their most verbally dextrous?

-Indeed!

-And visually and spatially because both are wide open.

-Otherwise they can't even go, "Mine!"

-No, what have you got? What have you found?

-I think I lost the end.

Ohhh!

-Oh, dear.

-It'll reappear, won't it?

Somewhere, yeah, eventually.

You'll cry it out at some point.

Are these going on eBay?

-They could do - do you want to sign it?

-All right, yeah.

I think I've already left my mark.

Blocking the right nostril makes you more emotionally negative,

according to another study, a higher score on the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory.

-So if you wish to feel slightly more cheerful, don't block the right nostril.

-So that's why now...

-Now you're quite happy.

-You're quite bouncy and happy, aren't you?

Oh, now... There, you see, you've blocked the right nostril.

It's terribly sad.

LAUGHTER

Keep them in, I'm going to ask you a question that will test your visual-spatial.

-Left?

-In the left, keep them left, OK.

It seems the quickest way to improve verbal reasoning is to shove a tissue up your left nostril.

Let's see how they've worked. Consider...

an N-dimensional hypercube and connect each pair of vertices

to obtain a complete graph of two to the power N vertices.

Colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black.

What is the smallest number, the smallest value of N

for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single coloured

complete sub-graph with four vertices which lie in a plane?

Six!

That is exactly what people used to think.

LAUGHTER

-APPLAUSE

-That's amazing.

-That's absolutely extraordinary.

-Further up there, further!

Yeah, until 2003, most graph theorists thought the correct answer was probably six.

-I can only apologise.

-But...

Come in here with your old graph-theory knowledge, how dare you!

It's so difficult, when you've got a busy showbiz lifestyle, to keep up with the graph theory?

It's probably only eight or nine hours a day you're devoting to it now.

-Well, I have to say, I've got Graham's number.

-Six?

-Have you got Graham's number?

-Er, no.

-Ah!

-We don't have that sort of relationship.

-You've not got that sort of relationship!

There is such a thing, which is relevant to this, Graham's number.

-But it's bigger than six.

-< Of course it is.

-It is so...

-It is really big. Try and think of a really, really big number.

-17.

Do you know what? It's even bigger than that!

This number, all right...

Now get hold of this idea - this number is so big that all the material in the universe, right,

couldn't make enough ink to write it out.

It's called Graham's number, named after Ronald Graham,

and weirdly enough, scientists know that it ends in a seven, which is really strange.

Why would it end in a seven?! Turn it into an eight and then it's a bigger number!

I didn't say it was the biggest number ever, it's just this is Graham's number, which is huge.

-You could have Norton's number.

-Yeah, Graham Norton, I made it an eight at the end.

-You can remove your tissues, incidentally, now.

-I think I'll miss it now.

-Oh, will you? OK.

I'm worried about what might come out when I pull it.

This problem, this graph problem, it seems - imagine the cube with lots of different dimensions

where each corner is connected with red or black lines to every other,

what is the fewest number of dimensions so that you end up with

at least one single coloured square with the same colour diagonals?

Until 2003, they thought it was six. Now it's been shown that there must be at least 11. It may be 12,

but it's somewhere between 11 and Graham's number, that enormous number.

-There's quite a lot of room for error, isn't there?

-That's not really an answer, is it?

The greatest mathematical minds in the world just don't know what the answer is.

-I don't understand the question.

-Neither do I.

-They don't either, to be honest,

and they're really hoping nobody checks.

What they do know is it ends in a seven.

Why are exams so much easier for youngsters these days?

-BELL

-Dublin, O Brien!

-Yes, Dara.

Thank you very much.

Firstly, are they actually easier these days, or are they simply marked more generously?

It is just one of these things, this may be a national thing you do,

but you've a tendency to presume that you have a very stupid generation of kids in this country.

Then you set them a series of exams, they all get As, and you go, "Proof!"

-That proves they're stupid, yes!

-It is a horrendous Catch 22 if you're a 17-year-old.

My problem with exams, though, is that more and more people get As,

so whether that's because they're getting more intelligent or the exam's getting easier, or both,

it still is defying the point of the exam.

The point in exams is to tell people apart, not just to go, "You're all great academically!

"Everyone can be professor of Latin!

"Share the professor of Latin's salary between you!

-"And starve!"

-You're right, it should be done by a percentile.

-Which is how it used to be done.

And that's the point of our IQ test, and what's interesting about the IQ test

is that each year it gets better by 0.3%,

so 3% every ten years, children get smarter, so they have to normalise.

So if you go back to your great-great-grandparents,

they would be, under the Mental Health Act of 1983, retarded.

-Well...

-Because they would have an IQ of 70.

My great-grandfather signed his marriage certificate with a cross so...

-Was his name Xavier?

-I don't think it was!

Well, perhaps he should have used a pen.

The only thing that you might say is quite interesting about this, it's called the Flynn effect,

the fact that people are getting the better at it. Under American law,

if you have an IQ of 70 or less, you cannot be executed for a capital crime.

You're considered retarded, and therefore Flynn has often had to go...

People might have an IQ of 72, which means they're going to die,

and he will say, "Yeah, but this was taken when he was a child,

"and revising upwards the 100 norm, he's actually 68 or something, so he is technically retarded,"

and he can save lives by doing that.

Quite easy to throw an IQ test, I'd have thought.

-Yeah, but they're taken as children.

-They're not smart enough to throw an IQ test!

That is really planning a murder, if you're seven, going, "I'll put a circle here...

"In 15 years, you're dead!"

It's kind of the reverse of the sort of eugenicist argument that

the Americans are using, where they're letting the stupid live.

But anyway, young people find IQ tests easier than their parents

because apparently they're exposed to more problem solving in their life.

Maybe geniuses are born, not made, and if so, how would you create a genius?

Is there a way of ensuring a genius?

Breeding two geniuses together...

-Well...

-..and then giving them a high-fibre diet,

exposed to lots of vitamin D from the sun...

You mention eugenicists earlier. Tell me what eugenics is, then.

Yeah, tell us about your theory of eugenics!

I'm not sure, is it sort of generally trying to breed people to be brighter and stronger and better at things,

and stopping people from breeding if you think they might have stupid or feeble...?

-People farming!

-Nazism.

People husbandry, isn't it?

As Alan said, Nazism, of course, is a thing that...

There were people, quite respectable antecedents and liberal points of view before Nazism

who believed that eugenics may be a good idea.

-Lots of them, yeah.

-Bernard Shaw and many others.

I did a game show in America a while ago, and there was a contestant on it, this woman,

and her sort of interesting fact, her fun fact about herself

was that her father had been a serial killer, right?

-LAUGHTER

-And her other fun fact was she hadn't told her husband

that her father was a serial killer until after they were married!

So it's a light-hearted thing, but I'm trying to say to her,

"Do you think maybe your husband would have been concerned about having children

"given that there's a serial killer in you somewhere?"

And she went, "No, no, no, he's been through similar things - his father committed suicide."

And you just thought, "You've a serial killer and a suicidal man,

"and you thought that was a good gene pool to be splashing around in!"

You would give birth to a child who kills himself lots of times.

A serial suicide, it's terrifying!

When you say after she'd married him, how long...

Was it before the speeches?

LAUGHTER

"Dad's about to say a few words, this might be worth catching."

This may explain why he went with orange.

The only one with plastic cutlery at the wedding reception.

"Why are they wheeling your dad around with a cage over his face?"

I suppose what you'd do, then, you'd have a "Come as a serial killer" themed wedding.

Can we just go back to the past? And on the subject of creating geniuses, who was one of the great geniuses?

Well, Da Vinci.

Da Vinci is exactly the man I was after.

He was known to be a genius in his own time. I mean, they knew how astoundingly great he was.

His brother, Bartolomeo, actually...

Was an idiot.

That's awful!

Bartolomeo married, and he decided he wanted their child to be like

his brother, Leonardo, and oddly enough, it sort of worked.

There's Leonardo dying.

It shows he was kind of worshipped, they realised how great he was.

What's Rodney Bewes doing in the background?

Yeah, it's defo Rodney Bewes!

He does look like Rodney Bewes.

Rodney Bewes is the Highlander, is he?

What a weird, unsettling thing to discover that would be,

in the context of the credit crunch and everything, suddenly to discover that Rodney Bewes was immortal.

I mean, can you imagine on the news, "And today it emerged that

"actor Rodney Bewes has been alive for as long as time"?

Given the things we've been talking about where I'm pretending to know

-what you're talking about, I actually really don't know who Rodney Bewes is.

-Oh!

Do you remember The Likely Lads?

-We didn't get that in Ireland, did we?

-No, we didn't.

-James Bolam...

-I know who he is!

-And Rodney Bewes. They played a couple...

-That's basically him there.

-Oh, right! >

The chance of me meeting him in the future are very high.

I have to say, the whole point about QI, right, is that the rest of the world talks about cultural things,

reality TV and pop stars and Rodney Bewes, and we talk about Leonardo.

And what you've done by coming on... No, you actually!

We started talking about Leonardo, and we've arrived at Rodney Bewes! That's the wrong direction!

I didn't even know who he was!

Don't blame me!

You're so right!

I'm sorry! I was very unfair on you, Graham.

I was wafting in the rarefied air of Leonardo.

The stink bomb of Rodney Bewes was exploded over there.

To me, Rodney Bewes looks older there than Rodney Bewes in our present time so I think

Rodney Bewes must, in the future, travel back in time

to check Leonardo da Vinci's pulse to make absolutely sure he's dead,

using the futuristic technology of pulse checking.

The others are all going, "What's this weirdo Rodney Bewes doing?"

The one on the right has his head in his hands, "It's so embarrassing."

Why's he holding his hand?

Yes, Leonardo was such a genius he predicted the Likely Lads.

LAUGHTER

He wanted James Bolam and Rodney Bewes has turned up.

That's why he's going, "Oh, no, it's Bewes."

The one on the right has definitely got his hand on his head for that reason.

We ordered John Cleese and Connie Booth.

The one on the left is gesturing towards Rodney Bewes as if to say, "Leonardo, who's this dick?"

LAUGHTER

"Seriously? Rodney Bewes?" >

"You brought Rodney Bewes here as a doctor?!"

That's Matthew Kelly anyway, that one.

Oh no! No, don't make it Matthew Kelly.

Oh, Lord. I've now got a horrible feeling that the Brian Blessed on the end has had his head sawn off.

He's had his brain taken out.

-AS BRIAN BLESSED:

-That is no longer Brian Blessed! He's turned into somebody else!

APPLAUSE

I wanted...

I wanted to discuss the fact that, unbeknownst to him,

when Leonardo died, he had a nephew called Pierino,

who was brought up to be a genius and actually kind of was.

He was sent to Florence and demonstrated great talent,

-but sadly he died aged only 22, leaving 20 works behind him.

-Pushed out of a window by Michelangelo.

Or possibly by Mozart.

Working in tandem.

Yes...

-Having stolen Rodney Bewes' time-travelling technology.

-Exactly, it all makes sense.

-Yes.

Sort of, yeah.

Which was the first animal to be cloned?

Well it can't be...

It's not Dolly the sheep then.

No, you're right. You have all been so good at avoiding the honey traps.

No, but I thought it was Dolly the sheep, but it's not.

Not the first animal, no. We have to go back to the 1880s for the first cloning.

Yes, it was a sea creature actually.

-An octopus or something?

-No, it was a sea urchin.

There's one. This was a German called Dreisch who did it in 1885.

But in 1902, another German, Hans Spemann, cloned a salamander.

He used a rudimentary noose to to separate the cells of an embryo,

and the noose was made of the hair of a human baby.

He used it as a lasso just to separate. Isn't that marvellous?

-That's fiddly work.

-It is very fiddly work.

There must have been lots of times where he used to go... SHOUTS

"Could I please have another baby's hair?"

Go back to the baby. "Argh!"

"One Guinea, madam."

All the people trying to keep him calm. "Would you like another...

"NO, I DON'T WANT ANOTHER COFFEE!"

They'll go, "Do you want me to have a go?"

But Dolly, Dolly was in 1996, Dolly the sheep was the one you cleverly avoided. But why Dolly?

-Why poor Dolly, do you know?

-It was named after Dolly Parton because the cell came from the mammary glands.

Correctly correctington.

Well done, sir. Excellent.

APPLAUSE

Do you think there was a point where they go, "We can just get another sheep and say there it is.

"It's genetically identical that one, yes.

"Those two sheep look similar, well, that's because they're genetically identical."

Oddly enough, things can be genetically identical and rather surprising,

because the first cat to be cloned was called Rainbow

and her clone was known as CC. There.

They just didn't put the effort in, did they?

They went to all the pet shops for that little faker.

They could at least have sent the guy who they sent to get the kitten with a photo.

Not just, "Get any cat."

The little kitten is called CC.

-Points if you can guess what that stands for.

-Cat clone?

Wittier, or sort of wittier.

-Say?

-AUDIENCE: Copycat.

Points to the audience. Copycat, you see?

Very good.

The operation was known as Operation Copycat, it was part of a larger project to clone a dog.

LAUGHTER

It was called Missy, Missyplicity named after a dog named Missy.

The world's first cloned dog from Korea was called Snuppy.

Then they ate it.

LAUGHTER

Anyway, the point is the first animal to be cloned was the sea urchin way back in 1885.

Since then, many other animals have been given the treatment,

including the first cloned cats which look nothing like each other.

No, it doesn't take a genius to know that it's time to look for some general ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers, if you would. How old are you?

LAUGHTER

-BELL

-Norton.

How old do I look?

BELL

How old do I feel?

It just shows you the effect of this game, though.

You ask a question, and all four of us think that's something

I definitely know the answer to, but I've been made so uncertain that

I'm not even willing to give my own age, name or address.

How can this possibly be a trap? I am 37.

-BELL

-37. There we go, no points for that.

ALARM BLARES

But that's not wrong!

DAVID: Don't accept it, you are!

GRAHAM: We should all do it.

BELL 34.

-34, eh?

-34. ALARM BLARES

You don't want to do this.

-BELL

-Graham Norton, 46.

ALARM BLARES

ALAN: I'm not doing it.

LAUGHTER

Obviously, as the baby that was called Graham,

or Dara or David or Alan,

arrived on the planet the number of years ago that you said,

but that's not how old you are whenever I touch you.

If I touch your arm, how old is that arm? Is it as old as that?

About six weeks old, something like that?

DAVID: Is it five years we replace our entire selves?

There are different bits of one, that's right.

-DARA: Your cells regenerate.

-Your red blood cells last only 120 days.

A liver has a turnaround time of 300 to 500 days, 1.5 years.

GRAHAM: Hurry up!

LAUGHTER

Give it a chance to recover.

The entire human skeleton is replaced every 10 years or so, so all of your bones.

Really? That's good, isn't it?

Yeah, it is!

They're replaced in an aged way, rather annoyingly,

-rather than a brand new one.

-So they're replaced with second-hand ones?

Not exactly used, no.

I'm thinking of trading in my eight year-old Mazda for an eight and a bit year-old Mazda.

I'm afraid that's how it goes, yes. It's all rather unfortunate.

An adult's body may turnout somewhere between seven and ten years old

in terms of its cells, though some cells are much younger.

And 98% of the 7 billion billion billion atoms in the human body are replaced yearly.

I think some of my socks are older than I am.

That's a marvellous thought.

I feel I should defer to them.

Yes, you've been around longer than me. Most of the cells in your body aren't your own, they're not human.

This is bacteria?

Yes, they're bacteria. In fact, more than 500 different species,

more than ten times the number of human cells. Isn't that interesting?

On average, all the cells in your body are around ten years old.

How did the Church of England originally react to Darwin's theory of evolution?

-They weren't happy about it.

-They weren't happy about it!

BELL They didn't get it, I don't think.

Nobody really got it for a while.

He delivered it to a meeting of the Royal Society, I think it was, and people just kind of went, "Oh, OK."

That's true of his original paper, but when he published

The Origin Of Species, it was a massive bestseller.

It fact it sold out even before it was printed, and he was a gigantic figure of his time.

He was one of only five people not royal to be given a burial at Westminster Abbey.

They absolutely understood his greatness.

The surprising thing is the Church of England were not that worried at all.

But for many years most churchmen had encouraged people to believe

that a lot of the Bible was metaphorical,

not literally true, but if there's anything

-shocking about it to them, it's that it shows nature doesn't care.

-Yes.

The idea of a linear evolution they thought was fine, that might have been part of God's plan,

but the true understanding of evolution also shows that nature is completely horrific.

That was the major part the Victorians hated because they loved the countryside and birdsong.

This is Alexander's All Things Bright And Beautiful.

And instead they're locked in a vicious struggle for survival where all...

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

Unless they live in zoos, where they're quite stress-free.

It is, it's a life they wouldn't expect in the wild.

The Origin Of Species was widely respected by mainstream churchmen

at the time of its publication.

Finally, how many brains did the man with two brains have?

-Two.

-Yes.

LAUGHTER

That's brilliant!

APPLAUSE

It's so cruel!

He's wise enough to spot a double bluff.

This is a technique of the bully.

You hit us and then you go, "What, did you think I was going to hit you?

"I wasn't going to hit you. I've just lifted my hand to stroke you."

HE WHIMPERS

You're so right, that's exactly what we do.

The fact is that Dr Michael Gerschwin has proved that we all have two brains.

Your gut has an enteric nervous system and it's the only part of the body that can operate

perfectly if all connections are cut from the upper brain, from the real brain, the thing we call the brain.

It doesn't have the intelligence and consciousness of the brain, but it operates separately.

In that sense we do have two brains.

How bright would our stomachs be in the animal kingdom?

Would they be cleverer than an octopus?

I doubt it, I think they're just good at one thing and that's preparing poo for exit.

Basically, it's not even the stomach, it's the gut.

It's the greater and lesser intestine, the colon.

Like all of us, The Man With Two Brains actually did have two brains, according to the latest thinking.

The gut does act as a separate brain, so pens down, stop writing.

That's it for our exam today, geniuses. Time to mark your papers.

Well, my goodness, my gracious,

the newcomer with minus 19, Graham Norton.

APPLAUSE

In third place, with minus eight, David Mitchell.

APPLAUSE

In second place with a very respectable minus seven, Dara O Brien.

APPLAUSE

Which can only mean, with today's geniuses of geniuses of genius

is Alan Davies with four points!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So that's all from QI. My thanks go to Graham, Dara, David and Alan.

I leave you with our genius Leonardo da Vinci's favourite joke.

It was asked of a painter, why, since he made such beautiful figures,

which were of dead things, why his children were so ugly, to which the painter replied

that he made his pictures by day, but his children by night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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