The Making of QI

-This show is fabulous.

-I thought, that's the sort of programme I want to watch.

It's really, really good fun.

QI THEME TUNE PLAYS

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Shall we get straight down to business? Question one. What colour is the universe?

Why don't pigeons like going to the movies?

Does the Pope eat beaver?

Can you tell me what are coffee tights?

Maybe a prudish person might place them over the legs of a coffee table.

It is a pair of tights made of coffee, as it were,

or at least with caffeine in them.

Are there going to be other items of clothing made out of liquid? Like custard socks or...

or a nice vodka hat.

Now you've said custard socks, I want them now.

You can't have custard socks till you've put on your gravy cardie.

It seems unlikely that slipping on a pair of tights is going to dissolve a fat arse.

At least it'll stop your leg going to sleep.

Very good! Excellent.

When I knew I was going to be a dad for the first time,

I laboured under the illusion, since dropped, that I knew something.

But I thought, obviously, I don't know everything

so I will buy the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica,

which is about nine yards long,

and read all of it in order to become the best dad in the world.

It was so boring and difficult to read that I kind of despaired about it.

SHEEP BLEATS

When I first had the idea for QI in the late '90s,

I kept it to myself two years.

We used to meet occasionally and John would tell me regularly

that he had a big idea he wanted to impart.

Then we'd get distracted, usually by beer.

One fateful afternoon, he finally divulged the idea that was QI.

QI is, first of all, a mission and a philosophy.

It's a way of looking at the world which is different.

So he said, "OK, I'll give you three examples of interesting things."

For the first 21 years of basketball's existence,

it hadn't occurred to anybody to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.

You had to get a stepladder to get the ball out.

The second was the fact that kangaroos had three vaginas.

The third was about the existence of these things called tardigrades.

They live anywhere there's water, but, if they dry out, they can live for over a century

in a state of suspended animation.

You add water and they come back to life. I couldn't believe this.

So this is QI Central.

This is the key library of QI where I've been sitting for ten years,

researching the most unbelievably obscure subjects.

Over in this corner, we've got all the stuff about languages

and slang, quotations.

And, bizarrely, the Dictionary Of Minor Planet Names,

where I discovered there are asteroids called Smith, Jones, Brown and Robinson.

We had a lunch in Oxford where John gave me this big map

of what he wanted QI to become.

It was shops and it was a place to hang out and it was radio

and it was television, it was multi-media.

It was the idea that once you've got this idea that there's a way of making something interesting,

you can apply it to everything.

What happened is that John brought it to me

and I was at the time running in-house production

and it was an independent idea,

it came with Talkback Thames.

It was going to be called QI, because he'd listed all these facts

and he found himself using the phrase, "That's quite interesting".

Or people would say, "Oh, that's quite interesting."

I basically said, contrary to the usual rules in this thing,

"I'll help you develop it and make sure that at least a pilot gets made in some way."

APPLAUSE

Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to QI,

the quiz where the answers are much more exciting than the questions,

but the questions are completely impossible.

As I don't expect the panel to know the answers,

I shall give credit purely on the basis that I find their replies interesting,

regardless of whether they're correct or even relevant.

The pilot was huge fun to write, because I had the whole of all the stuff

I'd been researching for years. I could pick and choose.

I'd cherry pick the best possible questions.

In 1992, the French government relaxed the ruling on the list

of what French children could be legally christened.

Jean-Pierre, Marie-Claire, Jeanne-Marie, Tintin, blah blah.

The following year, after relaxing these laws,

the most popular name for a baby French boy was Kevin.

LAUGHTER

I remember Eddie Izzard was involved, and Alan.

I got involved with QI because I met John Lloyd

when he was directing commercials I did for Abbey National.

-ADVERT:

-Saving with Abbey National keeps my hair a part of me.

Lloydy, as we called John Lloyd, called me and said,

"The BBC really like it. They're going for it they'd like a series of QI."

Jane Root, who was running BBC Two, ordered 16 shows at once.

That's never happened to me in my whole career.

It went from being four of us in a room, to a whole set,

Stephen presenting the material that John had been working on

and we had contributed to, and questions that we had come up with.

-What was rectal inflation...

-LAUGHTER

..in Victorian England?

I think it's when arseholes went right up in price...

LAUGHTER ..and spiralling out of control.

The price was brought down by a change of interest rates.

Did the bottom fall out of the market?

There was something really special here because the pilot is such fun,

it's so alarmingly odd.

What is the sixth most popular name for a baby boy in Germany?

HE LAUGHS

Er, Klaus.

-No.

-Adolf!

-Oh, he said Adolf.

-D'oh!

-Minus ten. That's a minus-ten card.

-It's got "ph" on it, that's not Adolf.

-I know.

The literacy of our research department is neither here nor there.

Because, in those days, Stephen wasn't the national treasure he has since become.

He was just some guy, who was very bright.

People would say, "Is he that clever, Stephen?"

I'd say, "Of course he's not. No-one could know all that stuff."

QI's an odd programme, because it's hosted by Stephen Fry,

who is the cleverest man in the world, anyway.

Then he's provided with loads more information on cards, which he can refer to.

Then he's got a script on the autocue for other bits he doesn't know

and just in case something has slipped by his attention,

there's somebody shouting in his ear with additional facts.

Ah, we have late breaking news, as a matter of fact.

When he stops like that, he's not trying to remember,

he's listening to someone tell him it.

Cruithne is pronounced "Cruinia"

and it's actually Celtic.

He knows virtually nothing. Do you know what he knows about? Wagner.

Even before I did QI, people had this view of me

as being a bit of a schoolmasterly sort of figure.

Don't be put off by a young person knowing more than you.

-You must be used to it by now.

-I'm just mucking about, sir, sorry.

Because he's such a teacher type, it makes me want to wind him up.

Every time he looks around, I want to throw paper at his head.

G-E-N-O-C-I-D-E.

Oh, you're in trouble.

LEE MACK GRUNTS

ALAN GIGGLES

Stephen Fry would be a really good teacher,

because he won't whinge if you're being silly.

If he was my teacher, I would be thrilled.

And now I think a lot of the guests play up to it.

Phill Jupitus and others in particular,

love to mock my grown-up-ness, if you like.

What are the beer goggles? What is the Latin term?

-LAUGHTER

-Beer goggles?

-Yeah.

-What are they?

When you have the beer goggles on is when you fancy someone who normally you wouldn't fancy.

-Oh!

-So you would refer to someone as a "seven-pinter".

Stephen doesn't have beer goggles, he has madeira pince-nez.

With Stephen it would be, "Oh, you're a cracker. More madeira?

"A small sherry?"

Because I can't out-think, or sort of out-perform Fry,

all I can do is flirt with him, which does make him go really...

It's like he just turns into a Jane Austen character.

Just these flashes of, "Oh, stop it! No! Don't!"

How many muscles are there in your fingers? How many?

# 20 tiny fingers. #

One, if you play your cards right.

KLAXON AND ALARM BELLS

I cannot look at you.

Oh!

-Dreadful boy! I'm not going to pay any attention to you now.

-I'll put the pencil in.

APPLAUSE

I like hitting on him. Terrible(!)

HE LAUGHS

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit fur das Deutsche Vaterland.

Danach lasst uns alle streben,

bruderlich mit Hertz und Hand.

-I have an erection.

-LAUGHTER

He hasn't punched me yet,

but I think Stephen, at some point, will probably...

Because I like to disappear off into the distance.

If I could stand on a planet and throw an Ewok

into a lake of fart that would just be...

LAUGHTER

-That would be like... BRIAN COX:

-You couldn't, because it would shatter.

Even better!

I could be tossing Ewoks into a lake of fart? Ah.

Occasionally, he looks at me with that look of,

"It's all very well, the fact that we're talking about putting monkeys on stilts, but..."

He kind of goes, "Yes, the answer is..." Blah-de-blah. And it comes back to the thing.

It is always a wonderful thing

watching Stephen being terribly polite and affable

while you're saying something incredibly foolish

and knowing that he's about to hit you on the head

with what can only be described as a rather beautiful fact.

What do you call a left-handed lemon?

A potato.

No, but you're thinking along the right lines.

We're talking about molecules and their arrangement.

-You mean the opposite to a lemon?

-Yeah.

-Exactly, the mirror image of its molecular...

-An orange?

-Is the right answer. There's a lemon, obviously.

-Seven points?

-Seven points, that's your number.

-Do they make scissors for both?

Or just...

Does a lemon...?

It's along those lines, Johnny, yes.

The arrangement of the aroma molecules is exactly the same, except a mirror image,

and the result is as different a smell of a lemon to an orange.

I think my favourite one is when he talked about

his tailor at school. That's hilarious, yes.

My prep school tailors were called Gorringe, funnily enough.

-Where we got our uniforms made.

-You had a tailor?!

You had a tailor for a suit you wear when you're five?!

Were you born in the 1850s?

You had...

I shall measure up, young sir!

You had a particular outfitter,

who was the school outfitter,

which was a tailoring shop with school outfits called Gorringes.

Which side does young sir dress on?

Nothing you need to worry about!

You should know that! It's written on the toilet walls!

Heavens! Why did I even mention that?

Want to get measured up for shorts?

Lord!

Would sir like to wear a cravat on the cross-country run?

APPLAUSE

People, I think, do...

sometimes, erm, think either that I know everything,

which is obviously preposterous,

or that I pretend to know everything,

which I really don't mean to do.

He's immensely articulate,

got just enough knowledge to get by.

He can fool experts in their own field.

But sometimes he'd get things wrong.

OK, Stephen...

Oh, yes?

Oh, hello...

-I have been waiting for this opportunity.

-Oh, Christ!

What do penguins in the Falkland Islands do,

when RAF jets fly over them?

BELL RINGS IN STYLE OF UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE BUZZER

Fry, Cambridge!

APPLAUSE

-They look up and topple over, backwards.

-Really?

KLAXON SOUNDS

Oh, Fry! You idiot!

Alan and Stephen represent two different kinds of intelligence.

They are both highly intelligent people,

but they think in different ways

and Stephen is a kind of learned,

academic, thoughtful, you know, intelligence.

It's a mixture of the terrible English class thing,

of me being a sort of officery, Oxbridgy type,

tall and English, and him being

a sort of curly headed, slightly more Essex lad.

Alan's is intuitive. Alan's isn't about knowing information,

it's about bending information into new shapes.

This documentary said, eventually the sun

will explode or implode, or something,

and everything will be gone.

-That won't help Mars, will it?

-Including Earth.

No! On the way out, we have to stop at Mars.

I thought you meant there was a services there!

Someone trying to get you to join the RAC in the car park!

Humans will leave this planet, Stephen, they will.

The Wise One has spoken, ladies and gentlemen!

I can't imagine the show would ever work without both of them,

because they offset each other.

Because just as Stephen has told Alan...

The temperature ambit within which

human sperm can survive, is quite narrow.

..Alan will say something like, "Yes, Stephen..."

Do sperms

feel pain?

LAUGHTER

Thing is, nobody knows the answer to that, not the elves,

not Stephen, not any professor in the world

and that's what makes it so delicious,

is that even Stephen, the national treasure,

doesn't know everything.

'The funny thing was, he wasn't even first choice for host.

'The guy I really wanted was Michael Palin.'

I remember having a very nice lunch,

in which you pressed the case

for me to do a new sort of television programme,

which you described quite, I have to say, quite messianically.

I just thought, "Perhaps I can't do this.

"This is a serious thing to do, being a quizmaster,

"being in control of people."

I think in the back of my mind I thought,

"If I'm the quizmaster, I am, once again, the neutral,

"straight man in the middle. Really, I just wanted to be silly.

I tried to persuade him for two hours.

He wasn't going to do it.

I went back to the office and it was a disaster,

and I said to the research team,

"We've screwed this up, it's not going to work."

I didn't know what to do.

It took me 24 hours to think,

"I'll just go and beg Stephen,

"if he'll sit in as the chairman, just for the pilot."

It never occurred to me for a minute to be offended by the idea

that Michael Palin was first choice,

because I can exactly see that he'd have been brilliant at it, actually.

I could just see that this was going to be something

which you couldn't just do,

because QI has become this enormous brand.

It's all over the place.

So I knew I wasn't getting into something that would be

Wednesday afternoons and then I could go and do a bit more travelling.

One lesson that ought to be taught at school,

is to embrace disaster when it happens, because 20 years later,

what seemed like a disaster at the time, might not seem like one then.

Much of John Lloyd's planning

about how QI was going to work, he kept from me,

and this, I discovered since,

was a deliberate ploy, because he needed the fall guy,

he needed an idiot.

No, no, not white, middle-class people.

-That's me!

-Not doing that!

LAUGHTER

No! No! So embarrassing!

All the time, now, I realise in his mind's eye,

there was a huge dunce's cap sitting on my head.

I think, first time I was on, Alan turned to me and went,

"I'm glad you're here. Usually, I'm the thick one!"

I thought that was the best compliment I'd ever had

and I might use it on my posters for the tour.

"Jesus! I thought I was thick" - Alan Davies.

There are 923 English words that have a C-I-E in them.

-Do we have to name them all?

-No.

You're let off. But name some.

-Ceiling!

-No, that's C-E-I!

LAUGHTER

-C-E-I, that's what you said!

-No, no!

If it's I before E except after,

we're looking for words where E follows C, aren't we?

No. The rule is

it should be C-E-I, according to that.

-But you're saying it's wrong!

-I'm saying there are 923 examples...

I know one which it isn't. Ceiling. That's not one.

-Ceiling isn't one!

-No!

-Ceiling isn't one you're looking for!

Yes! I want ones I am looking for!

So I'll repeat my answer when I say not ceiling!

I'm looking for ones I am looking for.

-Looking for ones you're looking for.

-So give me a C-I-E!

-Ceiling?

My God, I may explode at any minute.

Are you incapable of rational thought?

You cannot be that stupid!

You cannot be!

What happened, particularly in early shows,

was people didn't know what to do, they didn't know

whether to try and get the answer right,

they didn't know whether it mattered, they felt it did matter

because there are cameras and people, and you look stupid.

So I used to just...

talk a lot, answer, hit the buzzer and say stuff,

to keep the ball in the air, really.

Tell you something about oranges...

they're not the only fruit!

They're not the only fruit!

Alan...he's got such an interesting role in this.

Because he doesn't appear to know...anything.

I'm amazed he can function as a human being.

But he somehow adds value.

He asks questions that I would be embarrassed to ask.

If you all of the fish and the whales

and everything out of the sea,

how far down does it go?

Alan plays it exceptionally well,

but whenever I am on, that's...

The only real

sort of, competitive spirit for me is,

try and out-stupid Alan.

That's what I aim to do, is steal the crown from him.

I love the fact that Alan buries his head in his hands

whenever we come up with Aristotle or Pliny.

We start with Alan's favourite subject,

which is the Ancient Greeks!

Oh...!

He just finds the classical philosophers

so annoying, because they're so wrong about everything,

and yet, of course, they were so right!

What we call blue, they called something else.

They didn't call anything blue.

-They didn't look up, ever?

-No...

-They didn't have colours?

-No word for blue.

They had colours, but didn't have a word for blue.

-No word for blue? What did they say for sky?

-Bronze.

-Bronze?

Yes, they called it the bronze. Homer called it bronze colour.

I've got no time for these Greeks!

-Without them, you wouldn't be here!

-That's so rubbish!

-You say this every week!

-Because it's true!

Because without logic, mathematics,

harmony, democracy,

-justice...

-That's got nothing to do with people shagging,

-ending up with me!

-There wouldn't be television,

and without television, you are nothing.

I know that better than anybody!

You know, to watch Alan shake his head in disgust, is just wonderful.

The moment I say Pliny, I can see his heart sink!

The alternative cure for incontinence, which is to

knock back a glass of sweet wine mixed liberally with the ash

of a burnt pig's penis, then urinating

in your, or your neighbour's dog's bed!

None of this is made up!

The pig would be there going,

"I'm glad to see you're still pissing!"

LAUGHTER

He is, of course, I feel hesitant in revealing this to the world,

he is highly intelligent!

-Quite interesting thing?

-Yes, go on!

-Lady mosquitoes bite you, suck your blood.

-True.

Male mosquitoes, not quite so dangerous.

-True.

-Point?

-You've made a point, but you're not going to get one!

There's another part of him

that's wonderfully bloody-minded and, as I say,

he's like a little spaniel puppy constantly running into the mirror!

What's the world's longest animal?

BUZZER

Is that me?

It'll be the blue whale.

KLAXON

I think the time I laughed most on QI,

was when Julian Clary was on,

and he started talking about meeting the Queen and doing a pooh!

I had wind when I met the Queen.

And did you release it?

I had to and unfortunately, I shat myself.

You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

-APPLAUSE

-So?

Well, she'd...she'd been there herself!

Had she?

She just looked, gave me that look and moved swiftly on.

And I tried to get rid of it by internal squeezing,

as can be done.

Are the muscles a little lax down there at the moment?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

STEPHEN GROANS

During the filming, I'm slightly having kittens

because it's the one part of the process

which is totally out of control.

-Graculus is a jackdaw.

-No. Jackdaw is Corvus monedula.

Yes, that's another word. It's the actual Latin name.

The Latin name for a jackdaw was graculus.

OK, let's not fall out over this, Stephen.

No, no. It's what the...

-I'm saying real Latin. No, no.

-LAUGHTER

You might be interested.

Because Roman people actually called birds things before they...

LAUGHTER

-Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

-APPLAUSE

There's nothing down there.

Aah! Ugh! Sorry about that. I am so sorry about that.

That's all right.

There's a portal into the underworld here, it's ridiculous.

If it's one of your shows, a show you've written,

then you're quite tense, really, going into it.

We have rehearsals and then the main show starts.

And you're really hoping the material

will work for the panel,

that they'll be able to sort of riff off it and come up with jokes.

Talking of Christianity, Rich, could Jesus walk on custard?

What? That...

That sounds like a sarcastic question you would ask Jesus.

"Oh, water? Eh, great. What about custard?"

LAUGHTER

It's not so much a question of, "Could he?"

-You're saying he did?

-He did, he did.

It was very hard to stop him, actually.

This was one - it's come out in research recently -

this was one of the Lord's favourite pastimes.

Out with the bread and fish,

"Look what I've got for desert. Somebody hold my shoes."

And he'd be, you know, he'd be doing it.

Welcome, everybody.

This is the first meeting for the research for the J series of QI.

From the very beginning,

I nicknamed the researchers on QI the Elves because I think of them

as little nibelungen in the Ring Cycle with little pickaxes,

mining at the mountain of knowledge and coming up with these little

extraordinary shiny nuggets in little wheelbarrows.

One of our researchers in the first series actually read

the entire Albanian English Dictionary

to get just two QI questions out of.

If you really want to try and understand things

and you want to get to the bottom of how things work,

you have to ask really stupid, simple questions.

They all come from different backgrounds, different disciplines.

They are all different ages.

They just have this one thing in common, an undimmable curiosity.

We got two balls here, OK?

You drop one ball here, it bounces down there.

You drop another ball here, it bounces down there.

What would happen if I dropped both balls together.

One will go over there.

I think you're probably right. I think you're probably right.

-Wey-hey!

-Giddy aunt!

I think what makes it work is the combination of taking ideas

that you're not normally allowed to talk about on television

because they're considered difficult or esoteric or dull.

This is where we found that calcium, amazingly, is a metal.

And it is in fact the commonest metal in the human body.

A great QI question.

And giving them to a panel of brilliant comedians and presenters

in such a way that they can find something you'll remember in it.

Chelmsford has the largest burns unit in Europe.

Oddly enough, the MP for Chelmsford West is Simon Burns,

though because he got a Douglas at university, he is known as?

-Third degree Burns.

-GROANING AND LAUGHTER

One of the really good things about QI is it seems

to have tapped into an absolutely bottomless pit of trivia.

We come up with ideas and questions

of just things we find interesting.

It's like good teaching, really.

The good teacher you had at school who just finds

an interesting way about talking about something

that 1,000 other children will tell you is an incredibly boring subject.

We don't worry about what people think about the questions,

we just do what we like and we always think that if we find something interesting,

everyone else will find it interesting as well.

The blue whale's tongue is heavier than a whole elephant.

Just one blue whale tongue is heavier than a whole elephant.

Their hearts are the average size of a small family van.

If you want to do a piece on gravel,

it's up to us to go and find out there is something interesting to say about gravel

and not say, "You can't do a piece on gravel, that's far too boring."

You know, whether it is what carpets are made of

or how fast the Earth spins around or whatever it might be,

it's grist to our mill.

Women have been shown to be able to smell fear.

What this Viennese man did, he was called Grammar,

he made a lot of women watch films, some of which were horror films.

All of the women had pads under their arms.

Then, other women smelt all of the pads

and they could identify without fail

the pads of women who had been frightened.

Are you sure this isn't just some soft porn film?

The QI Elves, they are either the best or the worst pub quiz team in the world,

cos we all know really strange bits of information, often complementary.

We know lots of stuff but we don't really know things.

For example, erm,

the capital of Honduras.

Ask me what's the capital of Honduras.

What's the capital of Honduras?

Tegucigalpa. Actually, I got lucky with that one.

Generally speaking, we're not good at that kind of thing.

It's like the X-Men. Each one has their special superpower.

I do animal genitalia.

There's an interesting thing, their genitalia.

LAUGHTER

Give me the length of a blue whale's penis.

A Nissan Micra.

Give me the length of the blue whale's penis!

-LAUGHTER

-Give it to me now.

APPLAUSE

To be honest, I don't think I could manage quite that much, Stephen.

-You've disappointed a man.

-About that long.

An arm's length.

Oh, my dear fellow.

-It's 16 foot long. 16 foot long.

-LAUGHTER

If the QI Elves remind me of any group of people,

think of something like Bletchley Park where they cracked the Enigma code.

You know, you have a strange mixture of chess players

and pipe-smoking mathematicians

and crossword puzzle-solving figures

all coming together and bringing their expertise

and their sideways views of the world

and their eternal curiosity.

So we have a meeting where we go through this huge basket of questions

that we've put together and they are graded from one to five.

One is straight into the show. Brilliant question, good subject.

Two is a good subject but probably needs a bit of work on the question

to give the panel something interesting and funny to do with it.

Three is sort of not sure.

Four probably should be a five but we're being polite

and five is known as the bucket of despair.

The Government waste thing,

they wrote an article in 1906 about the fat boy of Peckham,

John Trunley,

who was built a special 200 yards of railway

by the council because he was too unfit to walk to school.

-That's excellent.

-Possibly the first ever wastage.

Once we've done that and scored the questions,

you then have to look through them

and find if there are themes in them you can pick out.

If you can find a theme, you can start picking out questions

and see what order you might run them in in the show

so not only would it make a good show when it's cut

but as we shoot in front of a live audience for two hours,

it will actually be lively and exciting show that goes out as live.

My favourite part of the process by far

is where I usually sit in the Sound Gallery to watch the show.

The audience is in, hundreds and hundreds of people

all so excited. Some of them faint they're so excited when they arrive in the studio.

We have the longest waiting list for tickets for QI outside Top Gear,

so people are very excited.

And so am I, on every show. Even though we have made over 130 now.

-Who is your favourite panellist?

-Sandi Toksvig.

-She's on tonight.

Oh, wow! Really? Seriously? Oh, wow! That is fantastic.

When that music starts and the applause goes and Stephen says,

"Good evening, good evening, good evening."

I think it's brilliant, it is so exciting.

Go-o-ood evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,

good evening, good evening, good evening and welcome to QI.

I get to my dressing room usually by about three o'clock,

having stopped by at the office where the Elves and production staff are

and picked up the cards and the script, such as it is,

and a highlighter pen.

Then I go down. We do a rehearsal with stand-ins for the guests.

There are video slides in the background and audio queues

and sometimes props, so cameras have to rehearse for that

so that the thing will flow on the evening itself.

-Checking your earpiece.

-Yes, you're coming through loud and clear.

There's a little man who comes in my... Who speaks in my ear.

-LAUGHTER

-Oh! Oh! Now! Oh!

He's telling me that we are ready to go.

It's easy to forget when you watch the show, cut, on TV at half-an-hour,

that they've sat on the stage for two hours

in front of a live audience.

Let's inject some testosterone into the room, shall we?

Actually, let's not. Let's instead introduce Alan Davies.

It's incredibly difficult territory for even these great stand-up comedians,

because you're not asking them to do jokes about the normal things that you might.

It's not, "My mother-in-law".

You're asking them to do jokes

on bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism,

which it's not easy to think up something

on the spur of the moment that's funny about that.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

-Chicken.

-No!

-KLAXON SOUNDS

-The egg?

The egg is the right answer, yes.

There's that wonderful joke about the chicken and egg

have made love and are lying there, having a post-coital cigarette.

The chicken says to the egg, "That answers that old question."

It's almost never the case that the question plays out on the night

the way we planned it in the writing room.

The only one, actually, we can remember that we've identified

that went the way we thought it would was the fantastic question

about why edible tortoises took so long to find a scientific name.

Were they particularly litigious?

"Give me a name and I will sue you."

It wasn't that. A nice thought, again.

They had another property, which was unfortunate for them.

-The tortoises did?

-Yeah.

-They were edible?

-They were so edible.

Anyone who saw one couldn't stop to think of a name for it.

They just had to eat it straight away.

It's one of those... I don't know what they are called.

Just get one, they are really bloody good.

There's no, there's no Latin name for the pistachio nut, either.

Exactly the same way. No-one could be bothered.

"Shut up with your Latin. Eat them, they're brilliant!"

I'm afraid that's what happened.

-There's no Latin name for Maltesers.

-LAUGHTER

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

None of them made it to Europe.

"Now, this time, this time,

"we're going to take it and we are going to study it."

Leave it. No. We are taking it back.

When the ferry gets to Dover, there's a bloke going like this,

leaving the door where the tortoise is kept.

When the show's going out, obviously,

there's not a great deal you can do.

We sit in a...there's a little box behind the gallery

where Flash the producer is and the director.

If anything comes up during the show

where one of the panellists queries one of our facts

or comes up with an assertion of their own

that we're not sure is right or wrong...

..Then we will, you know, immediately run to check it out,

erm, before they stop talking about it, basically. That's the dream.

I know something about statues of military personnel.

-Yes?

-On horseback.

If they're up on their hind legs, that means they died in battle,

if they've got one leg up,

that means they died on service but not in a battle.

If they've got all four down, it means they died after, years later.

Is that really true?

If that's true, I shall have the little QI Elves...

They're flashing me now. "This is an urban myth and not true."

LAUGHTER

They're very quick. APPLAUSE

The best players of the game are the ones who basically

don't take any notice of the question

and say what the hell they want to.

The socks that man in the middle is wearing are very long,

and just out of interest for you,

that's something I've turned to recently.

-I now favour the longer sock.

-Do you?

Can you take me through your reasoning?

I can. I'll show you. The gentleman's sock.

The half-hose. It is called the half-hose.

Now, Jo. You, as a lady, are going to think this sock stops a lot sooner than it does.

So watch, watch this.

Look at that. Surely, surely we've reached the peak.

-Oh, my goodness me.

-Surely we've peaked.

-Oh, my word!

-Surely! Surely!

He's wearing tights! Ah!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Can I say, not so much to Jo but to Stephen, Alan and Sean,

I urge you to give it a go.

Because it gives you a feeling of security.

They do make you look like a knob head.

Many times it has got completely out of control and, you know,

it is uncomfortable for me at the time but the truth is,

it has resulted in some great television

and you've got to think of the scene

where they're talking about the Parthenon.

Where everybody started to sing, led by Bill Bailey and Jimmy Carr.

That, you can't really script that.

They say, of the Ac-, Ac-, Acropolis, where the Parthenon is...

STEPHEN BABBLES

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is...

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is... Th-, the-ey...

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

So he kept stumbling on it. He never fluffs. He hates fluffing, Stephen.

# They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is

# They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is

# They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is

# They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is. #

And, of course, I became fully aware of it

and the more aware of it I became, the more impossible it became.

Can I write it down? Read it.

-It says it there.

-LAUGHTER

You've got to tell us now!

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is...

..that there are no straight lines.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I've been broadcasting for very nearly 35 years now

and I can say that QI is the most fun show,

the nicest show that I've ever had to produce.

My favourite part is definitely the edit.

Because the thing is, we take all the components and make something of it.

It's in there somewhere and it's a question of finding it,

like a sculptor with a big bit of rock and somewhere inside is a statue of David.

The shows are usually slightly different from what comes through the door from the studio.

Getting it down to 44 is slightly painful.

44 down to 29 is very painful because you've cut a show that you like.

You've cut a show that's got bits you're most interested in,

bits that make you laugh the most.

The balance of questions is there before it comes to the edit.

What we're actually doing is enhancing what was there.

If there's a pause in recording where they have to think before they answer,

they um and ah, and part of what we do in the edit is to make it look slick.

Have a look at this.

What? What? What? Hmmm. Mmmye-e-e.

A-hey! Guss-ah getcha-ka pow!

Arr-arr-rum. Um.

STEPHEN PURRS

INTAKE OF BREATH

Um. Um. Ne-ne-ne-ne-ne.

Eh, moving on.

I think the QI core audience isn't a core audience.

That's its great success, is that it is genuine,

across the board, anyone who is interested in stuff.

I think that since QI started, it has broadened its audience

and a lot of people that I wouldn't presume would watch QI love it,

watch it, enjoy it and have assimilated lots of facts

and knowledge but have had a really good laugh at the same time.

It's old-fashioned kind of BBC entertainment for everybody.

We get lots of teenagers watching

and I think school children, in particular, like the show

because it's a very, very badly-behaved classroom.

The main thing I like about QI is the witty humour.

Like, whenever I watch it, I learn something new.

I like the fact that they have loads of facts.

Because mainly, it's about the facts for me.

For resuscitation, they used to blow smoke up your bum.

I think there's something about QI which is more fun than school,

or it is school as it should be.

To make school more like QI, the teachers could use interesting facts

which will make you laugh and remember things

and just things that are more than textbooks, reading, writing.

Interactive stuff, just like this place here,

where you learn things at the same time as having fun.

And we muck about in class.

If we're given work to do, an exercise to do,

we do them wrongly on purpose

and occasionally break the equipment.

I want to saw something, now.

I just, I just want to say...

LAUGHTER

These have been lent to us by the garden museum.

-It works! It works!

-It really does!

-Oh, my God!

-CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hope it doesn't break.

I tell you what...

I really wish they hadn't made this set out of asbestos now.

We've had some great props. Some of them, I'm not allowed to touch.

I remember we had a rifle that you could shoot around corners

and I went to grab it and Stephen nearly kicked me.

Don't touch it. They did ask that nobody else touch it.

It's very valuable, I'm afraid.

I was going to make it go over the desk.

I'm sorry.

I can't believe I'm not allowed to play with that.

I'm afraid I was given specific, "Alan not to touch", instructions.

It's very valuable.

I love the fact that somewhere, there's a memo that just says,

"Machine gun, for Stephen Fry's use only."

But some of them, I am allowed to touch

and then we can have great fun.

I've always enjoyed... After a while, they gave me a desk

and I would find things in there.

Alan, I believe you've got something inside your desk.

-Have I?

-Yes, have you not looked?

-There. So, what is that?

-It's a loofah.

-And where do loofahs come from?

-The bathroom.

It's getting a bit harder to find especially general ignorance questions,

because there are only so many common misconceptions

that people have or there are only so many things

that people know that then turn out to be wrong.

Is the thing in James Bond about sumo wrestlers

being able to retract them? That's true, I think.

It's true that it's not true, we read it.

The other one, in fact, nobody liked this

but it's in one of them, I think Goldfinger,

is they shoot a bullet inside an aeroplane

and Goldfinger gets sucked out through the...

That's untrue as well.

As regards to the rest of the show, there doesn't seem to be much sign we're running out.

If anything, there's an alarming amount more to know

than there was when we started the show.

The idea of doing each series about a different letter of the alphabet

started in a very strange way, which is we had made the pilot

and saw a publisher about doing a book from it.

The Book Of A.

Although we've since done 10 QI books which have been translated into 32 languages,

they didn't want an encyclopaedia of things beginning with A,

they wanted something more random, like the pilot.

So I said, what if the television series was all about A

and then we could do a Book of A and a Book of B.

They said, "That is a good idea. We would definitely do that."

So I went back to the office and said,

we're going to do 12 programmes all about the letter A.

We laughed the whole afternoon.

We thought this was impossible, it couldn't be done.

The publisher never bought the idea after all.

It's a very cunning system to base a programme on a letter of the alphabet.

It does, you know, suggest there will be an end after 26 series

but 26 series is pretty good for most programmes,

so what a very, very clever idea.

The plan to start each series with a letter of the alphabet

was planted quite early on,

but that means that I will be 62 when it finishes!

It was an extraordinary act of hubris on John Lloyd's part

that the very first series should be around things beginning with A

because it suggested he had the confidence it would last through the alphabet.

I hope that even if I'm in my wheelchair

by the time it gets to Z,

that somebody will still be carrying the flag for it.

QI at its best is what television is about.

When I watch the show, if I'm not on it, I'll watch it,

and you find it is just time spent in good company.

-They really are like little people's arms.

-LAUGHTER

-They are.

-That is a person. That's the Pope.

-LAUGHTER

-Oh, I see. The one on the right?

-You're right. His front paws...

-They are like little hands.

-That's what the Pope is thinking.

He's going, "He's got little hands".

"Are you ready to order?", and he is going, "Shall I have beaver?"

I find when I come on this show that Stephen starts talking about

something and you think,

I know an awful lot about this, which I didn't think I did.

That's one of the fascinating things about a head, is what lives in it.

I've often wondered, why could you not,

if it's only 62 miles to what people call space,

why can't you just build a ladder?

It can't be beyond the wit of man to build a ladder

-and you could walk up it and save a lot of bother.

-Yes.

-An oxygen pack necessary, but, yes.

-Maybe a lift?

-A lift would be good.

Once you get up there, there is nothing really there.

It's a bit like Norfolk. LAUGHTER

Now...you just be careful!

We, generally, as people, as humans,

retain far more information than we're aware of on a daily basis.

What this programme does is actually, by a series of randomly opening doors and switching on and off of synapses,

unlocks all this information that, hitherto, you probably didn't even know you knew.

You're learning while you're watching it.

It's another one of them creative shows where unwittingly...

My dad will wake up in his sleep screaming Pythagoras' theorem thanks to you.

And now my mother is sleeping in a separate room.

I have odd facts lodged in my head

as a result of doing the Unbelievable Truth and QI.

I can't always remember...like a badly put together Wikipedia page,

I haven't really got enough citations for the information in my head.

All the stuff I've been taught... well, not taught, I've listened to, I've talked about, I can't remember.

I mean, Alan, there's a couple of things about moons he knows.

How many moons does the Earth have?

-CHICKEN BUZZER

-Yes?

The Earth has one moon which is made of cheese.

KLAXON

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

-I'm afraid you lose ten.

-But it does have one moon.

-No.

-It's called THE moon.

-LAUGHTER

One of them.

-I rest my case!

-APPLAUSE

I haven't learned anything. I don't remember any of it.

It's amazing stuff.

It's instantly forgettable because it's beyond trivia.

If you're going on Have I Got News For You, you can make sure you've read the papers

because all sorts of small stories will come up,

but if you have read at least eight pages into the Telegraph every day, that will help you.

But on QI, you have to wish you had been listening more your whole life.

I'm 40, so I've done 40 years of preparation.

That's how you have got to look at this show.

You've done as much preparation as you have life, because anything might come up.

It's cricket to the full contact football that is Mock The Week.

It's very relaxed, sitting in the sun and it's a meandering conversation.

It's a warm, supportive atmosphere

and there's not a sense there's a right or wrong answer

or people looking to interject and crush.

It's just a beautiful petri dish on which fabulous comedic mould can grow.

The best panellists are self-starting.

The ones who are not worried about what the questions are, who they're sitting next to,

whether Stephen's being rude to them or not, which he sometimes is.

I didn't know how much I didn't know until I came on this show.

I'm afraid to catch a bus now.

Mock the Week, I love doing, because that's my group.

We all grew up together.

This feels like walking into the staffroom,

so it's a little bit intimidating. You're a bit too keen to impress.

If he thinks something's stupid, he will say so.

-If it was '55, it was Elvis Presley.

-Erm, wider.

-Rock 'n' roll!

-Rock 'n' roll is the right answer.

-Don't look so stupid now, do I?

-LAUGHTER

Not quite so stupid, Rob, no, but all things are relative.

LAUGHTER

It's the intellectual equivalent of not having the right change...ever.

The first time I came on, nobody knew who I was and I felt like, I'm being competent.

But I definitely had that feeling that when I'd been quiet for a while,

everyone would be worrying for me because they thought,

this is some makeweight they've got on because somebody good cancelled.

If all the panellists were like David Mitchell, it would be like all four soap boxes.

As Stephen calls it, "Your angry logic, David".

Samuel Pepys famously buried his Parmesan cheese to protect it from the Great Fire

but why does cheese taste better when it's grated?

Sometimes it does, but if you get one of those catering bags of grated cheese,

if you should be working for a catering company

and happened to steal one, for example.

What sort of twit would do that? LAUGHTER

You buy cheese at the supermarket and it says, "Consume within two days of opening".

A vast amount...how much cheese do you think I'm going to get through?

Why? It's fine. We know it's fine!

Plus it has a label on it saying, "20 years aged".

Exactly!

And two days before it's completely inedible, you sell it to me!

LAUGHTER

My particular delight as a new guest was Dan Radcliffe,

who I resisted for years, thinking, "Harry Potter guy? No", and he was fantastic on the show.

-The wizardly Daniel Radcliffe.

-APPLAUSE

He took to it like a duck to water.

He knew lots of stuff, he was so nice, he was such a lark.

-What's the oldest trick in the book?

-Is it an ancient Greek book?

-Even older.

-Egyptian?

-Egyptian is the right answer.

-I think I might...

-You might know this?

-Is it a man called Dedi?

-How do you know about Dedi?

He was a man who did the first magic trick

-which was, I think, a decapitation of a goose.

-You're right.

And tore it off and did it to impress the king.

-And it's in an ancient scroll.

-It is!

Which I do know the name of... I think.

-Go on.

-The Westcar Papyrus?

-The Westcar Papyrus. This man is brilliant.

APPLAUSE

QI guests are unusual people - they have a strange mix of being imaginative and very nice

so I think you see a difference between many other panel games.

It's a pleasant experience to watch, QI, and it's a pleasant experience to be on.

And I'm very pleasant as well. I'm extremely pleasant.

Did you know a veal has to have more space to be transported to the abattoir

than a human being in the back of an aeroplane?

-To be fair, we have a holiday, they get killed.

-LAUGHTER

You could be coming back. Have we got a vegetablist?

-I'm a veggie.

-You're a vegetablist?

-I wouldn't eat a veal, I would free it.

I had a puffin last week.

That's not delicious but the point of eating it was because I'd never had one before.

-I had the same with guinea pig.

-Have you tried one of my turds?

-LAUGHTER

Did you just say what I thought you said?

Get out. Out now.

The signature aspect of QI is the forfeit.

There are things you think you know and I ask a question

and everybody thinks they know the answer and they'll not want to say it.

-What do you suffer from if you're afraid of heights?

-Vertigo.

KLAXON

How many senses do you have?

MUSICAL BUZZER

I sense a buzzer coming.

-Five.

-KLAXON

Six, seven, eight, nine, four, three, two, one.

How old are you?

It shows the effect of this game, though.

Ask a question all four of us think, that is something I definitely know,

but I've been made so uncertain, I'm not even willing to give my own age, name or address.

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

-There we go, no points lost.

-KLAXON

-LAUGHTER

-But that's not wrong!

I realised around series four that I was the fall guy. The penny dropped.

I decided I was not going to press the button any more and say the stupid things.

I was a bit foldy-army about it

and John Lloyd took me to one side and he told me that it was a sign of great intelligence

to get things wrong and come last.

Finally proving that it's all academic and a dream, with -27, Alan Davies.

The scoring system, we get asked about this a fair bit,

and it's a proprietary algorithm and I can't talk to you about it.

I'm not responsible for the scoring system on QI.

That is entirely the responsibility of Colin, who is a very close friend

and I trust implicitly that his mathematics,

though it does occasionally look wrong, is right.

The questions that we've got wrong which are really obvious

and usually admit our mistakes.

We even go back and, in future shows,

we might give people their points back.

Or take them off them.

I answered a question about an obscure scientific fact called the triple point of water,

which is the temperature at which water can exist in all three states.

I said zero was the temperature and I got extra points for this.

Zero is the triple point of water.

It's the first temperature at which water can exist in all three states

because you can have water vapour which is at zero as well.

Very good. You must have some points for that and this round of applause.

APPLAUSE

A year later I come back and I'm told they have received a e-mail

which points out that the actual temperature is 0.01,

so I was one hundredth of a degree off.

Points were docked from a show I did a year later.

It's zero.

KLAXON

You see, we never forget.

That's what you said last time and we gave you points for it.

We're now going to take those points away from a previous series.

That's the forfeit, because some of our eagle-eyed viewers wrote in to point out

that the triple point of water is actually 0.01 degrees centigrade.

-That's 12 points off.

-But I was rounding off.

That is arcane and nerdy and picky and pedantic in a delightful way.

I felt aggrieved at the time but I knew it was the right thing to do.

I had to take my punishment.

Occasionally, QI is re-run,

now and then,

once in a couple of blue moons.

My kids watch QI endlessly on repeat, so they're quite big fans of it.

It's one of the few things I've done that they actually like,

which is not a good thing, but I'm letting you know that.

It's a very rare evening that I don't see that QI's on somewhere.

It's on permanently.

It's only interrupted by a stupid motoring show

but other than that, I can say I will watch QI and you always can.

You can watch the same one three or four times

and there's always something fresh that you missed the first and second time.

The show is successful because it differentiates itself

from other comedy panel shows because it's not just about comedy. You're learning things.

QI is, no-one expects you to know the answers, whether you know or not, it's irrelevant,

but you enjoy each other's company and you have a nice conversation.

It's like a parlour game without rules. Lovely.

It's very much like being at a dinner party.

Being invited to a dinner party at Stephen Fry's house.

Who are the other guests going to be? This is exciting.

For the people at school, education-wise, who fell through the cracks, this is our X Factor.

Everyone, from the runners to the lighting director, all really like making the show.

It's fantastic fun to do and it feels worthwhile.

QI isn't really about making successful television,

it's about something far more important - having interesting lives.

We have to be careful that we don't get smug,

don't relax too much and think, we know how to do this. You've got to keep moving.

This is a show that could go on for a century or more.

There's no end to the quite interesting things there are in the world.

Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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