Next QI

APPLAUSE

How very nice.

Hello!

Good evening, and a very warm welcome to the next episode of QI.

Next to me tonight are the next best thing, Ross Noble.

APPLAUSE

Who's next? Lucy Porter.

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Whatever next? It's Frankie Boyle.

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And, better luck next time, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

Next, let's hear their buzzers. Ross goes...

# I wanna get next to you. #

Ooh. Cocktails, half price.

Frankie goes...

-# And the next step is love

-The next step is love. #

Aww. Lucy goes...

# For 24 years I've been living next door to Alice. #

-Alice...

-And...

Alan goes...

-BELL DINGS

-'Next!'

Right, what's the difference between the next big thing and a turkey?

Well, a turkey is sometimes a disaster.

Yes, it's an American show business term for a flop.

-A terrible show.

-Yeah.

So, the difference between the next big thing and abject failure.

It can be the length of the first half of the show.

By the interval, the next big thing was a turkey.

So, how can we tell? How can we tell that something is going to be

a big thing, or it's going to be a failure?

-Well, we don't know.

-Yeah.

Till the curtain goes up and the audience comes in, who knows?

-But maybe you can know...

-Well, here's the extraordinary thing.

There are certain people, consumers,

who systematically buy products that go on to fail.

And their lack of popular taste is unerringly reliable.

And they are called "harbingers of failure."

But they did some research,

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They analysed ten million transactions

at a chain of convenience stores, and what they discovered was,

people who buy the nail polish that fails

are also the people buying the ice cream that fails.

And there's some fantastic products that have been snapped up

by harbingers in the past. Watermelon-flavoured Oreo biscuits.

This is my favourite, there was a range of ready meals

made by a toothpaste manufacturer called Colgate's Kitchen Entrees.

-ROSS:

-Oh, that, I would've bought that!

Would you have bought that, cleaned your teeth

-while you're eating?

-You're eating the spaghetti

and flossing at the same time. That's genius!

But if you can find these people who've got what they call

a "flop affinity", then it's fantastic for market research.

-I'll tell you two things those harbingers have bought.

-Yeah.

My book and my last DVD.

APPLAUSE

Well, I've got both those, so I feel terrible now!

90% of all new products fail,

and there is a Museum of Failed Products in Michigan.

It was meant to be a reference library of consumer goods,

but the vast majority are failures, and there's some fantastic things.

This is one of my favourites.

Pre-scrambled eggs in a cardboard tube,

designed to be eaten in the car.

I'll have that!

Breath mints that look like crack cocaine.

This is very good.

100% recycled pillow-soft "Shit Be Gone" loo paper.

"Shit be gone!"

You have to do that when you use it.

"Whack Off insect repellent."

We've all done that!

It's a funny way to get rid of insects!

Can I just say, I have got some fabulous information about turkeys

which is not totally relevant. But you know when you learn something,

and you just think, "I totally have to share this," OK?

So, in the 1950s, they discovered that males would mate

with a lifelike model of a female turkey as eagerly

as they would mate with the real thing. So, of course,

they decided to try and find out what was the minimal stimulus

that would get a turkey going, OK?

They gradually stripped the model of its tail, its feet and its wings.

This did not deter the male bird in any way.

When there was just a head left on a stick, they were still up for it!

That is why my range of turkey sex toys never took off.

They were too lifelike.

Yes, well...

A freshly severed head on a stick was the most effective,

like, the sexiest thing.

That was followed by a dried male head.

And in third place, a two-year-old withered female head.

And in last place, but still eliciting a sexual response,

a plain balsa wood model of a head.

I don't know if you've ever taken a turkey to a Punch and Judy show.

It's horrific.

Unbelievable.

-That's all I want to do now.

-Yeah!

Anyway, the last people you want to buy your next big thing

are the first people to buy it.

Which of these would be nice next-door neighbours?

Galaxies, hyenas, newlyweds, octopuses or burglars?

That's more of a mime artist than a burglar.

It is, yes.

I imagine that burglars don't burgle their neighbours?

-Yes, that's absolutely right.

-They go further afield?

-Yeah.

-They're nice.

-I won't do the neighbours.

-They're not lazy,

-that's something in their defence.

-No.

-FRANKIE:

-It could be selfishness, though, couldn't it?

It could be that they just don't want to put

their own insurance premium up.

That's a very good point.

But you are right. Burglars are very good neighbours,

in that they're not going to burgle you.

Galaxies are bad neighbours.

So what happens, when they reach a certain age,

a galaxy stops spawning new stars

and they just swallow smaller galaxies.

So our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, is expected quite soon,

this is in astronomical terms, four billion years from now,

to eat two of its neighbours, the large and small Magellanic Clouds.

And then about a billion years after that,

the Milky Way will get eaten itself by the Andromeda galaxy.

-Andromeda, yeah.

-Yeah. What about hyenas?

-Good neighbours, bad neighbours?

-All that laughing.

When Mrs Brown's Boys is on, it's probably a nightmare.

That's actually what they do in the studio audience.

They don't use canned laughter on that show, they have live hyenas.

The trouble with hyenas is,

-you spend days and days stalking your deer.

-Yeah.

And then they just come and rob it off you.

So I bet they're terrible neighbours.

Terrible neighbours. Any more for any more, Frankie?

I just think, although you'd know that they weren't laughing at you,

-it'd be hard not to be a little paranoid.

-Yeah.

They're extraordinary creatures, they're so aggressive.

There's so much testosterone in a hyena

that when a baby hyena is born, the first thing it does

is it turns around and tries to kill the next one

that's trying to be born. So, they're really aggressive.

-However, very good neighbours.

-Ah.

Most people who live in hyena-prone areas, in fact encourage hyenas,

because they control pests

and they clear up all diseased animal carcasses.

And they don't attack humans as much as that photograph might suggest.

That one's wearing a John Lydon wig.

What about newlyweds?

What do you think, good neighbours, bad neighbours?

Well, I enjoy hearing other people making love.

I so rarely do it myself these days.

Since my husband got a turkey's head on a stick

he's not interested any more but...

They did a survey in Colorado,

and they found that people are much happier if they think

they're having more sex than their neighbours.

That's a thing. And so, having a honeymoon couple move in next door

makes you feel depressed.

What about gloomy octopuses? Good neighbours, bad neighbours?

-FRANKIE:

-They'd have lovely gardens.

Well, yes and no is the weird thing.

It's the common Sydney octopus, but it's known as the gloomy octopus.

What it does is, it throws rubbish at its neighbours.

It lives in Jervis Bay in Australia, and it gathers debris into its arms,

and then it uses the jet propulsion siphons on the sides of its body

to hurl it at the neighbours.

It's really unusual to find projectile weapons in animals.

So it may just be over-enthusiastic housework, I don't know.

-Is it cos the octopuses next door are having more sex?

-Yeah.

-LUCY:

-The sound of the suckers...

-SHE MAKES SUCKER SOUNDS

OK, that thought is never going to leave me now.

Now, the next question isn't a next question,

it's a NECKS question.

So, I have...

I think that would look nice on you.

-And you can have this one here.

-Lovely.

And there we go.

This one there. Right, make yourselves a prat.

Now, who knows how to make a prat?

What have you done, darling, what knot have you done?

I don't know. It's what I used to do at school.

Did you ever have that thing called "peanutting" at school?

-When people pull your tie tight?

-They pull it really tight

-and then you can't get it undone.

-Yes, that happened a lot.

OK, do you know the answer to stop that happening?

Oh, I wish you'd been around in 1976!

If you put a 2p coin inside the knot,

then it's impossible to peanut somebody.

-I shall tell my boys.

-Pass it on.

So, the prat, basically you have to have it back to front,

like this, in order to tie it.

I haven't worn a tie since I gave up the pipe. Erm...

Like this.

And this is a self-releasing version of the prat,

it's called a Nicky knot.

And the reason it's self-releasing,

is that when you pull it out like that, you can just let it go.

And it won't end up in a knot.

APPLAUSE Thank you very much!

-FRANKIE:

-I sort of think the minute you get a really depressing job,

the one thing you have to wear is a sort of suicide kit.

Anybody know how long we've been wearing ties for?

-How long they've been around?

-About five minutes, now.

We've had ties since the Thirty Years' War, which was 1618.

It was the Croatians who first brought the notion

of wearing something. They wore a little small, knotted...

Am I a time traveller?

Just turn sideways. Turn this...

APPLAUSE

-That is quite spooky.

-My God, they've found out my secret!

Fire up the machine, we must travel back!

It's where we get "cravat" from. It's from the Croatians.

Then it took off, and the Parisians loved it.

King Louis XIV was so obsessed with his cravats,

he had a cravateur who used to lay out cravats for him to choose.

God, I've put on a bit of weight, haven't I?!

We could do a show with you just being characters from history!

While we're doing knots, now, I've been practising this,

and I can do it about one in three.

So, you've all got an opportunity to give this a go.

There we go. That was pretty cool!

APPLAUSE

OK, so, it is just a length of chain,

and then you place the ring up in like this...

Now, if you hold it with your thumb,

and then hold it with one of your fingers, and what you need to do,

you just let the finger go and not the thumb.

Just try and let the... Yeah, Ross has got it!

APPLAUSE

-Just a few more goes...

-All right, you're determined.

Put the chain... OK.

Don't make me get up and show you!

So, make your hand wide like this, OK?

And then, hook your thumb like this, but don't hook the chain.

Just hold that like that and only let your finger go.

APPLAUSE

I feel like a teaching assistant.

And where can you get one of those, this time of day?

Oh, yes! APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

I feel my time here has been worthwhile.

Right. Is this the neck verse thing?

CHORAL SINGING

Isn't it beautiful?

It's not worth losing your nuts for though, is it?

Well, you might lose more than that...

Really? Is it about hanging?

It is about dying, certainly.

It's known as the neck verse. Does anybody know why?

-FRANKIE:

-The neck verse is how a German doctor tells you

you have whiplash.

-I do know this.

-Yes?

-There used to be a thing called benefit of clergy.

-Yep.

Where if people could prove that they were in the clergy

-by reciting a verse of the Bible...

-Yep.

..then they were tried under ecclesiastical law

instead of normal law, where they'd be more likely to get hung.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, it's brilliant.

APPLAUSE

It's Psalm 51 and it was known as the neck verse,

and you had to be able to recite it in Latin.

"O God, have mercy upon me,

"according to thine heartfelt mercifulness."

And, the benefit of the clergy, it existed for about 600 years,

from about the 12th century to 1841.

And some crimes, the clergy would get lesser sentences.

And so it used to be you had to prove you were clergy.

But over time, it was enough to prove you were literate,

so, obviously, in Latin, and this created a loophole.

So, illiterate people could learn that verse by heart,

and the courts were happy to go along with this legal fiction

because there were many crimes which it was felt

that the punishment was too harsh. So, they would allow this fiction

that you were a member of the clergy,

and therefore you could get away with it.

In fact, Ben Jonson, the playwright, in 1598,

he avoided being hanged for killing an actor in a duel,

an actor called Gabriel Spenser, by pleading benefit of clergy.

I know a bit about Ben Jonson.

He murdered someone that he acted in a play with,

the play was called The Isle Of Dogs.

And it was so offensive that it was suppressed so completely

nobody's ever worked out what it was about.

-We don't even have a record of the script or anything?

-No.

-And then you released it on DVD!

-Yeah!

APPLAUSE

So, what's the best thing about clickbait?

There's nothing good about it at all, it's horrifying.

Why would you think it's horrifying?

Because there's nothing about me taking a quiz

saying which Game Of Thrones character I am

that suggests that I am in the market for a brand-new Lexus.

But why do you do it? That's the question, why do you do it?

Boredom. I think it's also the internet tries to sell itself as,

oh, it's connective, you're connecting with people

and you're not. The other day I saw a thing about the FA Cup final

on the BBC website, and at the bottom it said "Get involved".

What, in the FA Cup final?!

How?!

Can somebody describe clickbait for anybody who doesn't know what it is?

-LUCY:

-The worst ones are the...

"23 things you never knew about ducks.

-"Number 12 will astonish you!"

-Yeah.

They call them "listicles",

which is portmanteau of "list" and "testicles" cos...

..they're all complete bollocks.

So, here's the weird thing.

The research suggests that the pleasure we get

from cute and funny or shocking videos,

the ones that do the rounds on the internet,

we get the pleasure from anticipating them

and not from actually seeing them.

There's also a thing called the spoiler paradox,

which has a similar effect. People enjoy a story more,

when they know how it's going to turn out.

And we think maybe the story's easier for the brain to process,

without the distraction of wondering how it's going to end.

So, spoiler alert, Alan's going to come last today.

Already, the audience having a much better time!

Looking forward to something is more than half the fun, it seems.

And the next question is absolutely fantastic!

Who has green sponge balls?

-FRANKIE:

-Is it...?

-AUDIENCE MEMBER:

-SpongeBob SquarePants!

-Ah...

KLAXON

APPLAUSE

That's why you're sitting over there!

-ROSS:

-Can you imagine that bloke, for the rest of his life,

he's going to go, "And I knew the answer, and I shouted it...

"Oh, God!" Who was it? Hand up, hand up, who was it?

-Welcome to my world.

-Let's have a clear shot of you.

-What's your name?

-Nick!

-You're going to be so sorry. OK.

You're a harbinger of failure, Nick.

-Anybody else know? OK. So...

-Green sponge balls...

-Green sponge balls.

-..is what they have on a snooker table

in a tinnitus clinic.

So, who has, in the UK, who has green sponge balls?

-LUCY:

-Erm...

-Is it a medical thing?

-No, it's a species.

Would it be a sponge?

-It's not a sponge, but is in the sea.

-Seaweed?

It is seaweed. It is a kind of seaweed.

APPLAUSE

But, you know, what's sad is that there isn't any any more.

It's all gone,

but it used to be one of the must-have species

in the mid-19th century for seaweed collectors.

So there was a brief craze,

it gripped the daughters of Victorian well-to-do.

In fact, even Queen Victoria herself had a seaweed album.

-FRANKIE:

-Before TV, people were just so bored.

They were just sitting there going,

-"Collect some seaweed, invade India..."

-Yeah.

"Let's just try and get through this."

That's true. Yeah.

And what happened, it's a bit like egg collecting and butterflies,

it caused the depletion of certain species.

Some of which still have never recovered,

and the green sponge ball was thought to be extinct

because of that, at least in the UK.

Now to the NEST question.

Why would your mum have you for breakfast?

-Is there a species that eats its young?

-Yes.

-Not all of the young, I presume?

-Some.

-It would be short-lived.

But why might that be?

Is it that the babies are just particularly delicious?

You think they just can't resist that.

Yeah, exactly, like a little quail or something.

You go, "Ooh.

"Ooh, lovely. Lovely bit of butter on that."

Yeah, it's lucky that chickens don't like eggs, really, isn't it?

-Yeah, that's true.

-Yeah.

They're all sitting there eating omelettes and dying out.

Maybe it's that thing where you sniff your own baby

and they seem to you so delicious, you almost want to eat them.

-Yeah.

-Maybe insects just go,

"There's no society to hold me back, I'm going to follow through."

I often say I could eat my son with a spoon.

-I don't mean it but... LUCY:

-Yeah. It's the knees.

I could just eat babies' knees all day long.

-I really could. Just the knees.

-They are just gorgeous.

-They could have the rest.

-Yeah. Even their feet are...

-Oh, yeah.

-Delicious.

No, we are talking about a burrowing beetle and its larva.

And it chooses to make its life in a rotting corpse

of some kind or other, and that's where it has its babies.

And it has to adjust the size of the brood to the size of the carcass.

There's got to be enough food.

And so, researchers at the University of Edinburgh

have established that she will choose to eat the ones

that nag her most.

-This is great parenting.

-Yeah.

-This is what we all need, isn't it?

So, the burrowing beetle baby that keeps going, "I want a snack,

"I want a snack..." Gone.

-Finished.

-If my children are watching, I am learning a lot.

Your children aren't watching,

they're in their bedrooms with their knees missing.

APPLAUSE

Any of you boys do half the housework in your homes?

Don't be stupid!

Because here's an extraordinary thing.

In heterosexual relationships, even if the man does half the housework,

it's usually the woman who's in charge of allocating the tasks,

and making sure it gets done.

So, in other words, nagging itself,

yet another job about the house which women are expected to do,

and men wriggle out of.

Moving on now. All the way from Pennsylvania,

the marvel from Philadelphia, Euphonia!

What's her act?

She removes her legs...

and hovers above a man on a knitting machine.

Well, you're not far off. It is a machine.

She looks rather hirsute, doesn't she?

She's called Euphonia, she's from 1845.

-FRANKIE:

-Were they trying to do the turkey experiment with a human?

It's heading more and more towards the head.

So, 1845, a German inventor called Joseph Faber

exhibited this incredible machine.

It could talk, it had bellows for lungs,

a tongue and a larynx made of wires and reeds and levers,

and it was operated by a piano-like keyboard.

So there were 16 keys, plus one to open the glottis, the vocal cords,

and foot pedals, and sounds came out of her mouth.

She could laugh, she could whisper, she could sing God Save The Queen.

But the fundamental problem with her is that she scared people.

-Yeah, she's scaring me now!

-Yeah. She had...

Urgh!

The turkeys have kicked off!

"That's the one."

HE IMITATES AN EXCITED TURKEY

It's like a frustrated turkey was in the room!

Apparently her tongue lolled about in her mouth

-and her voice was awful...

-Oh, no.

..it was as if it came from the depths of a tomb.

It was very, sort of, hoarse and hideous.

And Faber, who made it,

twice he destroyed the Euphonia out of frustration.

And the first time he rebuilt it and the second time, well,

-he took his own life.

-So it's basically like Siri.

It is a kind of Siri.

Now, fingers next to buzzers, please,

for the General Ignorance round.

Why are dock leaves good for nettle stings?

# Next to you. #

-Ross?

-They're not.

You're absolutely right.

The fact is, we don't even know why nettle stings hurt quite so much,

or last so long. What we do know

is that nettles are covered with tiny little hollow hairs,

which break off when you touch them and they act like needles

and they inject, oh, it's a cocktail of unpleasantness into your skin...

But yet, delightful as soup.

Very good as soup, and in theory, very, very good medicine.

So, there's a thing called urtification,

-do you know what that is?

-I don't, no.

It's beating yourself with stinging nettles, fundamentally.

And the Romans used to do it in Britain because there was damp

and it gave them arthritis.

And so urtification apparently got rid of it.

And they did a study in 2000,

and the Royal Society of Medicine confirmed it is a safe

and effective treatment for rheumatic pain, so you can use it.

-Not many people know that the actor John Nettles...

-Yes.

..you shake his hand, burns your skin.

-It's horrible, horrible.

-But if you throw yourself against him,

it gets rid of your rheumatism.

Very much so. Romans can't help themselves.

Getting John Nettles to smack himself against them.

Old ladies, he's like a faith healer.

You know when they're like... "Have you got rheumatism in your body?

"I want you to come down."

John Nettles slaps you on the knees.

Your kids would like him.

The longer I work with Ross, the more I believe him...

LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH

Now, what kind of questions are barristers never allowed

to ask the witness?

Leading questions.

KLAXON

# Next door... #

-Lucy?

-Multiple choice?

APPLAUSE

"Did you A, kill them, B, have a takeaway, C...?"

"Oh, mostly Cs, you're a Gemini!"

So, you can sometimes have leading questions.

They are allowed in cross-examination.

So, when you're questioning the other side's witness,

it's absolutely fine. They're not allowed in what's called

evidence in chief. So, that's when you're questioning your own side.

You couldn't, for example, say,

"And did the accused hit you about the buttocks with the cucumber?"

You're not allowed to say that...

-"Or, did he B..."

-Yeah.

-"..put the cucumber between the buttocks?"

"Or, was it C, the actor John Nettles,

-"who was just trying to help?"

-Yeah, you're not allowed to do that.

You have to say "what happened next", is basically the thing.

But, in cross-examination,

you're not only allowed to ask leading questions,

most people say you SHOULD ask them.

Is the fellow on the right, by any chance, saying "tattyfilarious"?

"Oh, lovely day, a lovely day for committing murder."

That's why I didn't become a lawyer,

there's not enough funny voices in the law.

Now, what kind of evidence isn't going to get you convicted

under any circumstances?

Circumstantial.

KLAXON

And that was a leading question!

We think it's the case that you can't use circumstantial,

but in fact most convictions depend entirely on circumstantial evidence.

Because fingerprints and DNA samples and phone records,

credit card receipts, bloodstains, lack of an alibi,

that can all be circumstantial evidence,

stuff from which you can infer that somebody was present at a crime.

And finally, a male black widow spider

and a female black widow spider have just finished having sex.

What happens next?

-# Next to you. #

-Yeah, Ross?

Tiny cigarette.

APPLAUSE

-Oh, no, no! It wouldn't be a tiny cigarette, would it?

-No.

It'd be eight tiny cigarettes. Like that.

"Shall we do it again?"

Maybe she could try and kill him in that way, rather than by eating him,

which I think is the answer that we were being led towards.

Ah, she eats him.

KLAXON

No, she does not, if she's a black widow.

So, there is once species in the widow group in which the female,

let's say, routinely eats the male...

-Scottish widows?

-The Scottish widow!

Yes, but at least she's insured.

It's the redback spider of Australia, it's the only one.

There are three species found in North America

and post-coital cannibalism in one of the three is rare

and in the other two it's completely unknown.

And they get their name "widow"

probably because people have watched their behaviour in captivity,

when they're not behaving normally, I think.

Post-coital cannibalism amongst black widows is the exception,

not the rule. OK, next, it's the scores, and in first place,

with a magnificent 6 points, it's Ross!

APPLAUSE

And in second, just one point behind with 5, it's Frankie!

APPLAUSE

In third place, with -4, Lucy!

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

And in fourth place with -10,

it's the audience!

Which means that in last place of the next show, is, was,

or will be, with -25, Alan.

APPLAUSE

My thanks to Frankie, Ross, Lucy and Alan.

I leave you with this news from the Western Daily Press,

concerning what people plan to do next, after they retire.

A survey of 1,000 over-50-year-olds found that many

intended to travel more, write a book, do a parachute jump,

or take up a new hobby when they reach 60.

Some of those polled said they wanted to become a volunteer,

or raise money for charity.

While others just wanted to eat more cakes, and have more sex.

Until next time, goodbye.

APPLAUSE