Kaleidoscope QI

APPLAUSE

Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,

good evening and welcome to QI.

Tonight, we'll be covering a kaleidoscope of K topics.

My co-pilots on this kamikaze caper are: the keen-eyed Sandi Toksvig!

The kick-arse Liza Tarbuck!

The knee-high Susan Calman!

And the knave very voluble Alan Davies.

And the buzzers today are kaleidoscopically colourful.

Sandi goes:

# Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair... #

Liza goes:

# Green is the colour of the sparklin' corn... #

Susan goes:

# Blue is the colour of the sky... #

And Alan goes:

# We'll drink a drink a drink to Lily the Pink the Pink the Pink

# The saviour of the human race... #

AUDIENCE CLAP ALONG

It's like an old people's home!

Join in. You can have your cocoa in a minute!

-Yes.

-It's only for an hour!

Old people's home? It's like a Nazi rally.

That was how they used to warm up at Nuremberg.

Now ve had better get on with our erste Frage,

the first question, which is about your kin.

Your kin and kindred.

Do you know what your relatives smell like?

My grandmother used to smell of Lily of the Valley.

Nobody smells of Lily of the Valley any more.

That was very common.

Grandmothers don't smell the same at all now, do they?

-They used to smell faintly of mints.

-And Amontillado sherry.

-Oh, yes. Just the one.

-Just the one, dear.

Baileys. That's what my gran smelled of.

Baileys, round the inside of the glass with her finger.

Oh, my goodness! Desperate.

There used to be a perfume called Tramp.

-Yes, there was!

-Tramp.

And the advert for Tramp

was a young lady who knows what she wants,

and that's to be called a Tramp, apparently, in the 1970s.

And she wanders through a market and all these guys are like "Hey",

-and she's like "I'm a Tramp".

-It was a famous nightclub in Jermyn Street.

Tramp or Charlie.

Charlie! I can remember Benny Hill

doing a monologue about going to one of those King's Road...

"It was a den of ini-quiety".

He said "It was full of kinky boots and underwear."

He said "I could smell her Charlie across the room".

I mean, it was her perfume.

Just so wrong.

Men used to smell of Old Spice, didn't they?

-Dads smelled of Old Spice.

-And Brut.

Brut, yes.

Paul Abbott once wrote a line in something I did for him

which said, as our characters went into my parents' house,

the last line was "Don't say anything about the smell",

-which was really fascinating.

-It makes you think of it.

Absolutely. It was that line of genius that he's very good at.

That is very good, isn't it? Well, in fact...

I'd know the smell of my children anywhere.

-My own children.

-That's an interesting point.

It seems that a lot of members of the animal kingdom do,

-for very good reasons.

-I was sat on quite a lot...

So it would ring a bell.

..by an older brother in order to incapacitate me during disputes.

-Very beautifully put.

-And there was a certain aroma that I think...

How powerful the olfactory memory can be.

-It is the most powerful.

-If he sat on me today...

-You'd know!

-I'd be thrown back to 1973.

Well, you're absolutely right.

Can you think of an evolutionary or ecological reason

why you might need...

Well, you would not want to mate with your cousin.

You wouldn't want to shag your own close relatives.

So you'd want to know what your relatives smelled like so that you...

This sounds like all shagging takes place in the dark, but...

I mean, for example, most mammals don't raise their young

the way we do with long, long bonding,

so you recognise your mother and say "I must not shag my mother."

But in other mammals, they might not see their father, for example.

The mouse lemur, which is one of the cutest little things,

the Madagascan mouse lemur, is reared exclusively by its mother.

But it can recognise its father's smell and avoid shagging him.

And butterflies have incredibly keen senses of smell.

They can smell mates from a huge distance away.

But if they're inbred, they have fewer sex pheromones.

Don't they say that as well,

when you're getting together with somebody,

that part of the reason that you get on well

is that you enjoy each other's smells?

-It seems so.

-And it can keep you together.

I don't know about women, but men have no sense of smell who are...

Do you remember the word?

-Wordsworth was this, has no sense of smell.

-No.

Anosmic. Anosmic.

You can't taste any food or anything.

You wouldn't be able to taste food.

But men who have no sense of smell get less...fewer sexual partners.

I thought you were going to say takeaways!

"I'll just have toast again."

There you are.

Nature has its reasons for producing smelly rellies.

-Why did the spider go to the bathroom?

-Ooh.

-They don't come up the plughole, they fall in.

-Correct.

Fall in and they can't get out.

But why do they go there, are they thirsty?

-Well, they're house spiders, so they live in a...

-House.

-I've got the hang of this show.

-I still feel there's a trick coming.

They're usually hidden nicely in the wainscoting.

They can last a long time without food,

-but one thing they can't do without...

-Is a drink.

Now, just put your own considerations apart!

Are they voyeurs? Do they like watching people in the bathroom?

"Here they come!"

That's why they're called spider. "I spied her!"

As I say, they can do without food and they can do without drink,

but they can't do without...?

Washing.

-Exercise.

-Well, kind of. It's sex.

The male spider, come autumn, has got to get his rocks off.

This is where they lose their inhibitions.

That's when you'll see them in bathrooms and so on.

They don't really stand out. On carpets, you might miss them,

but in bathrooms, against the white, they're unmistakable.

But what happens if they don't have sex? Do they explode?

It's a primary imperative amongst a lot of animals.

They have an eight-finger shuffle.

Essentially, when I see these spiders

running around my house in the autumn, they're just really horny?

Yes. The male's looking for a female.

That makes it worse.

I've come round to spiders,

because they eat about 2,000 bugs a year,

and that's 2,000 less of those in your house and just one spider.

-Completely.

-Or two, because they've got to have sex.

I pulled a curtain once when I was still in bed,

and you know the dread thing of seeing that above you?

And for the length it took for it to drop,

I was up over my boyfriend

and at the end of the room before it dropped.

It's the quickest I've ever moved in my life.

That would be a very good Olympic sport, spider drop.

The height of the spider

and then the distance you're going to travel, some calculation,

degree of difficulty.

That's a garden spider web, isn't it?

But in houses, you get cobwebs, which are messy and asymmetrical.

Film companies have spray cobwebs,

which is the most glorious thing.

I'm sure you've done it in Jonathan Ross. This is magical stuff.

You can presumably buy it online,

but it's so great for Halloween parties. I recommend it.

Did you just say Jonathan Ross?

I didn't even notice! Sorry. I meant Graham Creek!

I like the idea of Alan having had a brief career as Jonathan Ross.

Maybe it's like Doctor Who, everyone gets a shot at being Jonathan Ross.

You were the sixth Jonathan Ross.

I've had a long enough career to regenerate.

Spiders, I think, can't see very well.

So you would have been as much a surprise to the spider.

I don't think they drop on you on purpose.

They don't see you and think "Ooh, I'll have a go."

"It's Liza Tarbuck! Liza Tarbuck!

"I'm going to get an autograph.

"Wahey! Oh, she's gone!

"I used to like you!

"Liza!"

That was brilliant. It was like Jonathan Ross was in the room.

Mrs Spider, after mating the house spider, what will she do?

-Eat it.

-Yes, the most famous being the redback.

-Black widow.

Or the black widow, indeed.

The redback, the male is really the most willing for it.

He will inseminate the female and then jump into her open mouth.

-How marvellous!

-Last thing he does.

Your good old British house spider, she has the decency to

wait for the male to die before eating him, so it's kinder.

She must feel weird if she has sons cos

-she knows how they're going to go, so it can't be...

-It's true, it's true.

Look at the boy, oh, shame.

You'd think she'd want either the insemination or the spider dinner.

She might not have wanted either of them.

-That's true.

-Would have gone...Oh, God!

Ah-ah-ah...

-I've just had tea.

-Eat me, eat me.

So, if there's a spider stuck in your kitchen sink,

he's probably on the pull.

Now, I have one of my knick-knacks to show you.

ALL: Ooooh!

Yes, now this...

The great Lord Kelvin in the 1890s was wondering along a beach

with a friend called Hugh Blackburn, who was a mathematician.

They found a pebble and a surface on which to spin and they found it

had a peculiar property, not unlike this, which is called a tippe top.

-Erm, and you give it a spin...

-Oooooh!

-Oh!

-It turns upside down.

Now, what you, sort of, don't notice because it's still going

clockwise but it's upside down, so it's reversed the direction of spin.

Oh...

And engineers and mathematicians like Bohr

and Pauli were fascinated by this.

It is quite fun.

We can show you some VT of it being done properly,

then you can see slightly better spin there.

So, this is about, you know when they were saying...

The spin is still going...sorry.

Where they were saying that the earth axis is going to change

and that north is going to be south. It's much like this.

-Sorry, Liza, is the world going to turn upside down?

-Apparently so.

-Soon?

-Tuesday, it's happening on Tuesday.

Just if I've got to get up and deal with my bills or not.

This is even, perhaps, more impressive.

This little thing here and what's strange about this is

I can spin it one way but not the other.

If I spin it anti-clockwise, it goes very happily anti-clockwise

but if I try and spin it clockwise, it not only will resist,

it will stop and spin anti-clockwise.

I'm now going to try and spin it clockwise.

Because of the shape... the particular shape?

Obviously it's the reason, yes.

-Messing with its...you're twisting its melons, man.

-Yeah!

And then round and round and round again.

-Do you know physics is extraordinary.

-It is, try it anti-clockwise.

-It really is...why?

-I know, it is very mysterious.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to dismiss you by saying it was because of the shape.

I'm trying to ascertain what the shape...I couldn't really see what was the shape.

-It's a cat's tongue, Alan.

-It is a cat's tongue.

So, there you are. That shows it goes nicely counter-clockwise.

-Let me see.

-It's sort of a humpy thing.

Slight hump in it but it's nothing...

-But it's got a twisty bit.

-Tiny twist. Now, do it clockwise.

-Isn't that amazing?

-Did you say it has a name?

This particular thing is called a rattleback.

That's extraordinary, isn't it?

Yeah, so that's the tippe top and the rattleback.

Two very extraordinary objects that you can spin around

and seem to have minds of their own.

Now, name the world's scariest spice.

-Well, it's none of them.

-No.

Because I was a member of the Spice Girls fan club at the age of 20.

LAUGHTER DROWNS OUT SPEECH

-So, we're not going to be looking for an actual spice?

-Well, yes.

-So, it's once of these?

-Yes.

In order to big-up the price of spice

and it didn't need much to do it back in the 17th century,

spice was the most precious commodity in the world.

Indeed there were spice wars between...?

-The British, the Dutch and the Portuguese mainly.

-Absolutely right.

-And the island of Banda...

-Yes.

..in Indonesia was swapped for Manhattan.

Well, one of the Banda islands was, yes.

Because it had so much nutmeg on it

-and nutmeg was more valuable than gold.

-Indeed.

And they used it to preserve meat.

Well, they do and at the time, they thought it was

a cure for the bubonic plague, which increased its value even more.

The island was actually called Run, which is

-one of the Banda islands but, erm...

-Have you been to a spice farm?

It's the most astonishing thing cos you say,

"Oh, I'm going to go to a spice farm.

"Thinking there'll be the nutmeg here and the paprika here..."

It all grows all together in the most fantastic eco-system

and you walk around and they're intertwined.

It's the most heady experience I've ever had in my life, it's fantastic.

-Yeah.

-Spice farms in places like Tanzania...incredible.

-Tanzania and also Sri Lanka.

-So, that's nutmeg there? Love that.

Yeah.

And nutmeg is related to mace in which way? What way? How way?

-Cousins.

-Well, I think it's that I put mace in my beef stroganoff

but not nutmeg, does that work?

Mace and nutmeg are the same plant,

-just different parts of the same plant.

-Oh, OK.

-Actually, yeah.

But the one we're talking about is cinnamon.

And the salesman of cinnamon, in order to sell it at the most

premium price they could, used to tell of where it came from.

Which was the nest of this extraordinary bird,

which they called the kinnamomon orneon.

And it used these twigs of cinnamon in its nest

and what they would have to do to catch it, this giant bird,

is they'd leave slaughtered bits of giant oxen

and the birds would take them up and put them on their nest,

which would over-balance the nest and it would fall down

and they would take out the cinnamon twigs.

And, so they would charge all the more money for how dangerous

it was, basically, to gather from this mystical bird.

That is so fantastic,

cos you can imagine on the Silk Road or the trade roads

stopping and earning your supper of a night by telling

the tale of that particular thing.

Exactly and in fact it is the bark from a tree,

which doesn't take that much skill.

But to travel the distance it did, once it got to Britain,

a long, long way away...

-Oh, yeah.

-..only the very, very richest of people could afford it.

Now, the word pepper has, as it were, two meanings for us.

We have the pepper, which is salt and pepper

and then we have hot peppers.

And do you remember the name of the scale by which you measure

the heat of peppers?

I heard a little whisper in the audience.

If you have a really strong one, it smells like someone's died inside you.

-Ahhhhh... Ooooohhhh....

-Someone in the audience is dying to get out here.

-Richter.

-Say it again?

-FROM THE AUDIENCE:

-Scoville.

Scoville, Scoville Scale, you're absolutely right.

And on the Scoville Scale a jalapeno, for example, is 5,000.

Whereas, the hottest one is the Trinidad Maruga Scorpion.

-Oh, it sounds hot.

-Which ranks over two million on the Scoville Scale.

Could it kill you, if it was that...?

Almost, I mean, the hottest possible on the Scoville Scale

are actually genuinely poisonous but the hottest curry,

supposedly, ever measured that's been eaten.

It was eaten by a Dr Rothwell, who was a radiologist,

perhaps appropriately.

In order to prepare it, the chef had to wear goggles and a mask...

Like so, and it produces crying and shaking and vomiting,

in eating it.

Very like our local Indian.

The restaurant's owner said that Dr Rothwell was hallucinating

and he himself took a ten minute walk down the street weeping,

in the middle of eating it.

Took him an hour to eat. Which is not bad.

So, so hot!

Now, which Olympic sport should women not take part in?

Weightlifting.

-She looks so pleased with herself.

-She does, as wouldn't you be.

Four scenes away from a prolapse though.

I'm trying to think of her name, she's amazing.

She can lift The equivalent of two fridges over her head.

-She's an astonishing...

-Cheryl Haworth, by the way.

Cheryl Haworth, that's right, and she's an amazing weightlifter.

-I went to women's weightlifting in the Olympics.

-Did you?

Marvellous.

And a woman from Kazakhstan won,

very emo...not a dry eye in the house.

-You can see the physical effort.

-Oh, absolutely.

It's quite funny, the weightlifting because usually,

I was going to say the trainer but it's more like the handler...

Coaxes out the weightlifter...

This way, this way.

-And then they get the powder for the...

-Oh, yes.

..for grip and then they get in position

and they go "sh-sh-sh" and you all have to be quiet.

You could hear a pin drop and then they make this...and

when they can't do it, it's heartbreaking.

-It's four years...

-They turn their back on it.

If they do do it, everyone erupts.

-So, it's a very emotional experience.

-I bet it is.

There was one girl who fell down and got pinned under it.

PANEL GASP

Everyone's craning their necks for a view.

Is she alive?

Twitching...

STEPHEN LAUGHS

Took about four people to lift the thing off her neck, you know.

-Kept getting help cos it was enormous.

-Exactly.

It was very, very exciting.

-Everything about the Olympics was exciting.

-It was?

-It was quite exciting just going to the ExCeL centre, no-one's ever said that before.

-No.

-Are you talking about the ancient Olympics or...

-No, the ancient Olympics was all male anyway.

No, this is, obviously, women should be allowed

and can take part in all the summer Olympics...

Except Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, he said

that it should just be about male athleticism, applauded by women.

But we've moved on from that, as we know. So, when we say "should"...

-Is it a K?

-Yes, it is a K.

-It's a K thing?

It's a K, the word actually means, in its own language,

a man's something.

Which is why, technically, you can't have a woman's version of it.

-Kayaking.

-Is the right answer.

-Really?

-Yeah.

APPLAUSE

Absolutely right.

In the Inuktitut language, it means a man's boat.

Except, they also had all female boats

-and I'm trying to think of the name of them. They had a boat that was only for the women.

-Kayakette.

And traditionally the women caught more fish...in their boats and

they've got a completely different name, like an umiak, I think.

It was called a trawler.

Errrr!

Sometimes the men used the umiak for hunting walruses and things,

but they were mainly used just for transporting people and objects.

Now, these two in this picture, one seems to have a quiver

for arrows and the other one seems to have a baby...

-Growing out of her shoulder.

-It would be awful to get those mixed up.

Baaaaah!

So, anyway...now for a question about going under the knife.

What's the advantage of having

an arm surgically attached to your face?

You could use it like a trunk.

-You could.

-Feed yourself buns.

Are you talking about an arm, or an arm and a hand, or...?

-Extra arm.

-No, it's not to give you an extra arm.

-Skin grafting.

-It was kind of skin grafting.

It was done in the 17th century by an Italian surgeon.

That's the process - there's your arm.

It's the bit near the shoulder,

and it's attached, as you can see, to the nose.

It was quite common in that period for the nose to perish,

to disappear, to get diseased from...?

-Oh, syphilis.

-Syphilis, I'm afraid.

There was a man called Gaspare Tagliacozzi,

who was a surgeon from Bologna,

and he performed this rhinoplasty, essentially.

I'd like an eye on me finger.

-An eye on your finger.

-Mm.

I'm sure it'd be possible one day.

Fit for the uses on buses and tubes.

I'm afraid people get...

-LAUGHTER

-No! Not for an auto colonoscopy!

Stop it!

Behave! That's just revolting.

A-ha.

Of course, the other thing is, there was

a nobleman who decided he didn't want anybody's...

There was a nobleman who decided he didn't want...

I'm reading.

There was a nobleman who decided he didn't want a cut

made in his own arm, so he had a servant have his arm cut.

-Really?

-Yeah.

And the servant had to sort of follow him all around.

Of course, what happened was the servant died

and the nose was rejected.

Of course.

And they weren't sure whether he died

because it was rejected or whether it was rejected because he died.

So he had no nose and nobody to get the tea!

There's another operation - a gynecomastia,

which is breast diminution.

In 2012, a paper called

Gynecomastia in German Soldiers - Etiology and Pathology,

looked at the number of breast reductions that were taking

place among the male members of the German army.

Abnormal breasts - why would German soldiers have abnormal breasts?

-They drink too much milk.

-No.

Is it when you march like this?

Not quite the marching, it's a ceremonial buffeting of your

rifle against your chest.

It actually causes the breast to enlarge.

Is it like a shock thing?

It's a shock and the breast has to get used to this regular

pummelling, and decides to push extra fat out to protect itself.

-Wow.

-It's during ceremonial drill...

Women could save money on breast implants and just get a gun.

I think it might be quite odd

if you were just sitting on the bus doing that all the time.

I'd save it for private!

I think if you took a gun on a bus at all you'd be in rouble.

In the last six years,

212 German soldiers have had this procedure,

which is not inconsiderable,

considering that being a male soldier it's kind of embarrassing.

Exactly. I just thought, wouldn't it go away?

Yeah, the modern German army...

-MIMICS GERMAN ACCENT:

-Forget all you notions of the Nazis,

we're whole new peoples!

We're very at ease with our inner woman, you know.

It's really, there's no embarrassment -

I could show you my breasts. And I'm not embarrassed at all.

It's fine.

-That's an incredibly sexy accent.

-Thank you.

-It really is.

APPLAUSE

I think camouflage clothing is weird cos you can see them perfectly well.

You may have missed the point but I know of know what you're saying.

Right, now it's time for the klaxon roulette that we call General Ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers, please.

Which way is this comet going?

-ALAN'S BUZZER

-Where's it headed to.

I think it's going that way, I thought was the answer.

-KLAXON SOUNDS

-Oh!

Dagnabbit!

It looks as though the tail is to the left.

The tail is caused by solar wind.

There's nothing to reveal the direction of travel.

It's solidified carbon dioxide turning into gas in the solar winds,

and it's always pointing away from the sun, the tail.

-Isn't it beautiful?

-They are beautiful, aren't they?

Who took that picture?

That's a good effort.

You could put it into a competition.

I shot this on a Nikon F8, standing on a step ladder.

It took me 40 years to get the film developed.

I assume from some passing object that NASA sent up.

But it comes from the Greek comitos, do you know what that means?

-Electrical store.

-No.

APPLAUSE

It means "long beard",

and that's what it reminds people of, a nice long beard.

The point is, there's nothing to reveal the direction of travel.

-We don't know where that one's going then?

-We simply don't know.

-Luton.

-It's going to Luton. That'll do.

Describe the skin on a crocodile's head.

There isn't going to be any, is there?

-Thick.

-Thick is probably right, yeah.

-This is a trap, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Would I?

-Yes.

-They don't have any skin.

-Yeah, they do.

-It's not that.

-It's not that then, yeah.

Shoe.

Reptilian.

Yes, that'll do. Bit it isn't scaly.

-Not scaly.

-That's right.

Not scaly.

Move on then, next one.

-Just do a quick explanation.

-Fish are scaly.

It's cracked skin and it's irregular.

Scales are genetically programmed to appear and are regular,

but these are different on every single crocodile

and they're not regular.

Once, I did an extraordinary trip where I canoed across Africa -

I don't recommend it, you get a condition called trench bottom,

and, um...

-Met a wonderful woman...

-Sorry, you did what nude?

-I canoed across Africa.

-Nude?

No, no, not nude.

All I could hear...

It was in my head.

It wasn't dangerous enough, so I...

I thought I heard you say, "I can nude."

That's why I went, "Pardon?"

Anyway, I met this woman, this missionary and I said to her...

LIZA LAUGHS

She said, "I hope you're not in a kayak."

-She was a missionary...?

-A missionary.

And she said to me, "Are you worried about crocodiles." I said, "Yes."

She said, "If you should meet a crocodile, here's the advice -

"offer it your arm cos then you've still got both legs to run away."

True.

I like that. We know another good way.

Put a rubber band over its mouth.

It can only move one jaw and it can't put any pressure upwards,

snap it down.

The things that look like scales on a crocodile's head

are actually just cracks in its skin.

So, that's the end of the show so let's find out who's

the clever clogs and who's a big stupid old thicky.

In equal last position on minus nine,

-it's Liza and Susan!

-SHE CHEERS

APPLAUSE

In a highly respectable second place

with minus four, Alan Davies!

APPLAUSE

Which means that our runaway,

super-soaraway winner with minus two is Sandi Toksvig.

APPLAUSE

So it only remains for me to thank Susan, Sandi, Liza and Alan.

Good night.