(applause)
Hello and welcome to QI,
the programme that's tough on boredom and the causes of boredom.
Let's meet this evening's magistrates of mirth.
Clive Anderson, Bill Bailey,
Meera Syal and Alan Davies.
Now, the rules are simple, the questions are hard. The scoring is my business.
Each of you is equipped with an electronic gavel.
- Meera goes... - (light banging)
- Clive goes... - (medium banging)
- Bill goes... - (heavy banging)
- Alan goes... - (Ping-Pong ball)
Oh, dear. Fingers and palms on buzzers, please.
What is the longest animal in the world?
Or which is the longest animal in the world, if you prefer?
- (Ping-Pong ball) - (Stephen) Alan?
Now, the first thing that came to mind would be a really long snake,
but I think that even the longest snake,
it wouldn't be as long as a really really long sea animal
like a whale, or something like that.
- Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. - (alarm bells)
- It's not the blue whale. - It's not the blue whale?
No. It was too obvious an answer.
- I hoped you wouldn't rush into it. - (heavy banging)
Bill, Bill, Bill?
The common or garden domestic cat.
- It's about that long, though! - Yes. But when you stretch them out...
Have you ever held a cat up under its arms like that? It's massive.
- But a blue whale is longer than that. - Yes, yes, but in its class, the cat...
If you held a blue whale up, you'd have to stand on a tall building
- and swing it for hours. - (medium banging)
It's a tapeworm inside a blue whale.
(laughter)
- That's very good. - That's got to be it.
- Brilliant thinking, but no. - (heavy banging)
- (Stephen) Yes? Let's forget the buzzers. - 0ff the buzzers now.
I would hazard a guess and say the Portuguese man-of-war.
I'll give you five points, because you're so much in the right class of animal.
- It is a jellyfish. - With long tendrils that stretch for miles.
- Long-down long? - No, across actually.
Are you familiar... and down, I mean, they do both, because they whip people with them.
Are any of you familiar with a Sherlock Holmes story called The Lion's Mane?
Do you remember it? It's about a man who's seen staggering from the sea
with this extraordinary network of weals,
as if he'd been whipped or had a red-hot net put onto his back,
and he gasps and as he dies he goes, "The mane, the lion's mane."
- Just like that. That's how it's written. - Right.
Holmes was retired by this point and is keeping bees on the Sussex Downs.
- Was he? - Yeah.
- He discovers... - Against their will?
They loved it. They loved being kept by Holmes.
The Lord Chancellor under John Major was a man called Lord Mackay of Clashfern.
- You'll remember him, as a lawyer. - Charming man.
He was a member of the Wee Frees, that particular sort of Low-Church Scottish sect.
- (Meera) The Wee Frees? - He was thrown out, though.
- He went to a funeral of a Catholic... - He was soft on homosexuals.
No, he went to a funeral of a judge who happened to be a Catholic
and so he wasn't allowed back in the Wee Free church.
They don't like popery, or any smelly objects.
But...
Awful, awful, awful!
Anyway, he was a... I won't say a mean man,
but he was giving a tea party for some Scottish lawyers - bread and toast,
and this tiny pot of honey.
And one of the lawyers said, "Ah, I see Your Lordship keeps a bee."
Kind of amusing, but not rude enough, obviously, for this audience.
The answer is the lion's mane jellyfish. Its main body...
The main body or "bell" of the lion's mane is only eight feet across,
but its tentacles are over 200 feet long, Alan.
So you'd be going, "Get off, you bastard!"
- (Stephen) He wouldn't be able to hear you. - Come here and try that!
So how does it happen to be in the story?
Had somebody scooped it out of the ocean and thrown it at him in this...
No, it had come up... it had come up on the jet stream, as jellyfish do,
to Cornwall and to the south coast...
Came up on the jet stream? 0ne of those aircraft?
(Ñlive) It was something for aircraft.
"I'm the longest animal in the world - I'm entitled to a private jet."
"I need the extra leg room, obviously."
(makes sucking noises)
It's steering it from the back.
"The exits are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here."
Excellent. Very good. And the answer, in the case of the lion's mane, is stinging.
A sting that can occasionally be fatal.
Occasionally fatal? How many times has it got to be fatal to matter?
- It kills some people and not others. - I see.
Isn't it true that to neutralise a jelly sting, you have to urinate on it?
I believe so. Ammonia in the urine is supposed to be very good.
(Bill) So they say.
- I think it's just an excuse to have fun. - Another wind-up.
- "You want to wee on that." - Another jet stream.
Another jet stream. Very good indeed.
So, a whale, on the other hand, is only about 106 feet long.
I say only - it is, of course, an enormous creature, the blue whale.
But what do you think is the largest thing that a blue whale can swallow?
(medium banging)
Another blue whale.
Surely this would lead one to think you were leading us down a line of a very small thing,
because it's so big and it'd be a very tiny thing,
but I'd say something huge.
- A kebab. - Yeah, a kebab...
Sideways.
Is it a conceptual question? The blue whale, a very vain animal.
Perhaps the largest thing it has to swallow is its pride.
Very good. Very good.
- Or a gullible animal that swallows anything. - They're vegetarian, though, aren't they?
- No, they're not vegetarian, no. - Well, they eat fish, but, you know.
- Krill, in fact, is the particular... - And they sieve it through their teeth.
They do sieve, because the little krill are very very small.
In fact, it comes from the Dutch meaning "very small thing". Little shrimps.
- I didn't know you did a blue whale, Alan. - I was doing a blue whale sieving its krill.
- Do you know, I've never seen that done. - Everything right except the hands.
- I reckon they can probably... - (Ping-Pong ball)
...get a Ping-Pong ball down their neck. - Ping-Pong ball is right.
- Something like an egg. - You're on the right lines.
- (Bill) A lobster. - Nothing bigger than a grapefruit.
They have tiny, tiny throats and they can't expand them much.
Well, they're the same size as their navels, about the size of a small side plate.
So they could be a supermodel. That's kind of the same diet, isn't it? Except they're very fat.
Except that they do eat three tons of krill every day.
They have the biggest brain in the world, don't they, the most enormous...
but all they do with this huge brain is to lie in the water with their mouth open,
sieving little bits of food, so they're not really exploiting their brains.
They call to each other covering 10,000 miles, their voices can be heard. That's impressive.
- No, I've never heard a blue whale. - What? 0n their mobile phones?
- Have you listened? - I... well...
10,000 miles underwater, but six feet up to the surface, nothing.
There's a blue whale about a mile away going, "All right, I'm only here!"
- Whale song is very indulgent jazz. - "Shouting!"
- (Stephen) Do you think? Free-form? - (makes whale/jazz noises)
- I think we're being very mean on them. - (Ñlive) It's not jazz, it's blues.
Their tongues are heavier than an elephant. Just one tongue is heavier than an elephant.
Their hearts are about the size of the average small family van.
- Family van? SUV. - Yes, family van, pick-up thing.
- But when they have babies... - There's an interesting thing, their genitalia.
(laughter)
- Give me the length of a blue whale's penis. - (Bill) A Nissan Micra.
- Give me the length of a blue whale's penis? - (Stephen) I know what I'm saying!
Give it to me now.
I... To be honest, I don't think I could manage quite that much, Stephen.
Ah, you've disappointed a man. Well, a blue whale...
That long. About that long. An arm's length.
Oh, my dear fellow, it's 16 foot long!
- 16 foot long. - 16 foot?
- 16 foot stroke feet. - (Bill) Flaccid?
Flaccid or nonflaccid, it doesn't actually... they don't get erections.
Well, you wouldn't, would you? It would take a long time.
(Stephen) 0ut of sympathy for the missus. Mrs Whale.
"All the blood's in my cock!"
You have to think of yourself, don't you, Alan, not of Mrs Whale.
It's Mrs Whale I think that would suffer most.
Well, I'm sure Mrs Whale's got an enormous vagina.
- It's certainly big enough to take 16 feet. - Like someone's living room.
You'd have to knock through your living room to get the car...
(Bill) As big as a Dixons?
What would you say a blue whale's testicle contained, in terms of fluid ounces?
I don't know, but I wouldn't like to be in the way.
Quite. Don't give me metric. Each testicle?
- We're talking a liquid measure? - Yes, liquid.
- So we're talking gallons? Sort of 20 gallons. - Yeah, 20 gallons, I'd say.
- Oh, you do exaggerate. It's seven gallons. - (Alan) Higher!
21... It's 14 gallons, both, and if they're having an orgy it's more, if they're having a party.
Are they like a couple of medicine balls, then?
The testicles only weigh 22 pounds each,
which in human terms would be pretty pathetic.
It would make ours weighing like a broad bean or an individual bean.
One last question on aquatic animals. What do you think you could teach an octopus?
- There's an octopus. - What could I teach an octopus?
- Yeah, what can... - I've seen an octopus. I went scuba diving.
I've seen one on a plate in a restaurant in Greece.
- They use the ink to make risotto. - They do.
Do you know how octopuses mate?
- They mate with their third right arm. - (Alan) Do they?
- We all do that. - Yeah, quite.
Yeah, they use their third right arm to transfer the sperm to the female,
which is handy, cos it leaves the other seven free to hold the kebab and the remote control.
Is it right they've got a brain per tentacle, or am I making that up?
You're not making it up. It's a matter of some debate amongst students of the octopus.
- Oh, I'm glad to join in, then. - It doesn't have a discrete separate brain.
But some people believe that it needs such extraordinary neural power
in order to control the thousands of different suckers separately, which it can do,
that the sort of intelligence is located somewhere, not exactly a brain as we know it.
But they are very bright and they can be made to recognise colours.
There's a trick they can be made to do, which is impressive.
- And this is what we need to teach it? - Yeah, which it can be taught.
- (Bill) Play the drums? Play the drums? - (Stephen) No. That would be so good.
Assemble a drum kit really quickly.
It can unscrew... it can unscrew the lid off a bottle or some sort of container.
And it can take up to ten seconds or an hour, depending on how tight the lid is.
- But the odd thing about octopuses... - So it's like girls. Girls can't do that either.
They loosen it first, as you well know.
That's the one thing men can do now. Women can do everything else, apart from open jars.
And once women work out how to do that, we're finished.
Now you've got octopuses to do it, you don't need...
(Stephen) We're doomed as a sex.
The odd thing is they don't have very good memories, so they have to learn every day.
So scientists can teach them, but they have to teach them each time how to do it.
They'll pick it up quickly, but the next day the same octopus will forget it.
They've got three hearts.
I'll give you five points cos that's quite interesting and true.
Because if you cut one of the tentacles off, it will still reach for food.
So you could keep it in the kitchen, take the lids off all your jars.
- Would that work? - (Stephen) Now, next question.
What begins with A, has six C's and no B's? Clive.
- Well... Is it... - (Stephen) It begins with A.
Is it the Welsh alphabet? I'm only guessing.
- You haven't mentioned the L's which are... - No L's, that would be the clincher.
- No B's. - (Alan) No bees, as in bzzz.
No bees like that, so...
- Is it six seas, as in the ocean? - Ah! Ah!
- Six seas. Begins with A. - 0oh!
It's America. There are no states in America beginning with B, and then there are six C's.
There must be. California, there are two Carolinas, Connecticut. I think there are six.
So I think I've come up with the right, though possibly also wrong, answer.
But I'm dreadfully pleased with it. I don't care if I get any points or not.
No. You don't get points, but you certainly get the admiration of us all.
I'm not feeling the admiration...
No, you were better at it, but on the other hand, let's turn our attention to the question.
Antarctica.
Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. Is the right answer. Antarctica. Quite right.
- You were so close. - I think I'm right. I'm not accepting it.
Ah, but that's not strictly true, is it, because, of course, you have the Antarctican ice bee.
If you did, then the question would be meaningless.
Yes.
I wouldn't put it beyond you to go now to Antarctica with a bee in a matchbox
and photograph it, just so you could get a point.
You see?
You worked out the thrust of the question - bees, as in buzz, buzz, and seas, as in oceans.
It is bordered by the Ross Sea, Davis Sea, Weddell Sea, Bellingshausen Sea,
Lazarev Sea and the Amundsen Sea,
but not one little member of the 92,000 hymenopteran bees and wasps exists
- or has its being in Antarctica. - (Alan) The what bees?
- They form part of the group Hymenoptera. - "Hymen"?
It means "wedding" in Greek,
and there was a myth about the bees officiating at the wedding of Zeus,
which I told you about a few weeks ago, and I remember you being very bored by it then.
I'm disappointed that you haven't remembered.
The bees in charge of a wedding?
They catered for the wedding.
- What? Mainly honey-based cakes? - They came up with honey.
They invented honey specifically for him.
Now, let's shake the snow off our slippers
and address ourselves to the rather Clivey subject of Andersons.
According to the website AmlAnnoying. Com,
Clive Anderson is 17% less annoying than the continent of Antarctica.
Andersons are quite common -
it's the 13th commonest surname in the English-speaking world.
But are they quite interesting? Let's start with an easy one.
Alan, who's the odd one out,
- Clive Anderson... - (Alan) Yes.
...Pamela Anderson, Gillian Anderson or Hans Christian Andersen?
You see, now, Clive hasn't done any topless modelling...
Well, I'm sorry to... I'm sorry to stop you right there.
When was this picture taken? I appear to have exactly the same shirt on there.
Years ago I had the same shirt.
Now, Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer of children's stories.
Gillian Anderson, actor, she's English.
- Pamela Anderson isn't. - Is she? The one who's in X Files?
Born in London, yes.
She was the only one whose wedding bees catered at.
You always get an odd person out. Anyone can be an odd person out.
Rem acu tetigisti, you've hit the nail on the head.
Hans Christian is the odd one out because he's dead, and none of the rest of us are.
And he spells "Andersen" with an e instead of an o.
He spells it like Arthur Andersen, but he doesn't boast about that any more.
Pamela is the only one who videoed her honeymoon, so she's the odd person out.
I'm the odd one out because I'm here, and Gillian Anderson, bear with me on this,
is the odd one out because she's the only one who isn't an odd one out.
- Pamela Anderson's the odd one out. - Why? For why? Tell me.
Because she has... sunglasses on.
Big tits.
Go on, say it. You know you want to.
No? All right. Sorry, it's just me. I don't even like big tits.
I was not going to say she's the odd one out cos she's got big tits.
- No, let me... - She's American.
(Ñlive) Canadian.
Hans Christian is the only one without a range of swimwear.
Help us out here, Clive.
Yes, my range of swimwear hasn't really gone down terribly well.
I cater... they're largely aimed at the blue-whale market.
- I can't explain why, for the moment, but... - Boasting.
- Vegetarian? Are you vegetarian? - I'm not vegetarian, no.
- So, clearly, they all are. - (Meera) Everyone else is.
They're vegetarian. The other three are vegetarians.
Although, in the case of Andersen, obviously, Christian Hans...
Pamela Anderson never eats meat, are you saying?
- Now... - I'm just checking the facts here.
Bill, what was the unforgettable achievement of John Henry Anderson,
the Great Wizard of the North?
- John Henry Anderson? - (Stephen) Yeah.
- Known as the Great Wizard of the North? - (Stephen) Yes.
Why do you look at me as if you think I might know that?
The Great Wizard of the North. Well, I suppose it could be wizard, wizardry,
as in some sort of Ku Klux Klan grand-wizardry sort of thing,
but then they were grand wizards, weren't they, rather than great wizards.
- Was he a Freemason? - No. To be honest, I don't know.
I don't know his cock length, I don't know his hair colour. I'm sorry.
- So he hasn't met you. - Is he alive or dead?
- Animal, vegetable or mineral? - He's well dead. 18th century.
Wizard, like a sporting wizard? A spin bowler, or perhaps a very very good putter of the ball.
(Stephen) No.
Turning princes into frogs, frogs into princes?
That sort of thing, in the way normal people do.
- A conjurer. - A conjurer, that's right.
And he did the first of a very famous trick, that's really it.
- Saw the lady in half? - No.
- (Bill) The hat, the rabbit. - Yes.
He was the first person to pull a rabbit out of a hat, so there you are.
Very impressive. He was the finest magician ever to come out of Scotland.
He was legendary throughout 19th-century Europe. He was born in the 18th century.
His inexhaustible bottle was extremely popular,
which produced any drink requested by the audience.
And the gun trick, in which he seemingly was able to catch a bullet fired from a musket.
He advertised himself by leaving pats of butter around hotels
reading, "Anderson is here" - a little stamp that he had.
- I've tried that as well. - Did it work?
So you're providing both the announcement of your arrival and the lubricant in one happy go.
Now, Meera. Meera, Meera, Meera on the panel.
What did Hans Christian Andersen have in common with Joseph Stalin, very specifically?
I know bits about Hans Christian Andersen. He was a weird fellow.
- He was well weird. - A very weird fellow.
- He was an agoraphobic. - Correct. Two points for knowing that.
And apparently The Ugly Duckling is a great gay parable, because he was gay.
He was well gay, yes. Yes, he was well, well gay.
- Well gay. - Well, a big, big butter user.
Nobody knows the original ending, when the duckling goes off to do musical theatre,
but it's clearly a gay parable.
And he worked in ballet. He was just slightly too clumsy and big to be in ballet,
but he adored the ballet, which not in itself is a sign of being gay, though, let's face it, it is.
He fell in love with the son of a friend, who married,
and his body was actually buried with this boy he fell in love with and this boy's wife,
until the family decided it was a bit of a stain to have this threesome in the grave forever.
- This grave is a bit crowded. - Yes, so they were removed.
But he was a sad figure. It says on my card he was a friend of Dickens.
It's not quite true, because...
- "Friend of Dickens", is that a euphemism? - "Friend of Dickens." That's enough of that.
Dickens got tired of him. He stayed at his house and wouldn't go.
"I'm exhausted, Hans. Will you leave?"
- "And take your butter with you." - (Stephen) "Hans, off."
It's where the phrase "hands off" comes from. And also "What the dickens?"
Well, no, it's a very peculiar thing he had.
They were both the offspring of a cobbler and a washerwoman.
- The same one? - (Stephen) No, dear.
Then they would be brothers, wouldn't they?
Well, we're trying to get a link between them.
As Meera said, for a very very well-designed ten points,
Andersen survived to become a tall, gangling, gay, vegetarian writer of fairy tales,
who suffered from dyslexia, agoraphobia and the fear of either being burned or buried alive.
But some 128 years after his death, the discriminating voters on AmlAnnoying. Com
still rate the tortured Hans as less annoying than his cuddly namesake Clive.
Now, finally, to a magnificently magisterial morass of memory loss,
as I remind you that general ignorance of the law, or anything else, is no excuse.
Fingers on buzzers, please. What did Atlas carry on his shoulders?
- (Ping-Pong ball) - Yes?
- The Earth, the globe. - Oh, Alan.
- (alarm bells) - Why, why, why do you always do this?
No, in Greek myth Atlas, who was one of the Titans
who rebelled against Zeus, the king of the gods,
was punished by Zeus by being made to carry the sky, the heavens.
But he is often shown holding the globe,
most famously on the cover of a collection of maps by the Flemish cartographer Mercator.
The volume became known as Mercator's Atlas.
The name stuck, and the image of holding up the Earth.
I've always seen pictures of him with the Earth.
As child I thought "Where are his hands on the Earth"?
You could go and find his hands.
So, what provides more than 50% of the Earth's oxygen?
- (Ping-Pong ball) - It's Alan in there first.
- Trees, greenery. - (alarm bells)
0h, Alan, Alan, Alan, Alan! 0h, dear, oh, dear.
Every time, headlong.
Is it not? They eat carbon dioxide.
(Stephen) They provide oxygen, but not 50%.
(medium banging)
I think it's the British Oxygen Company. They've cornered the market.
(Alan) The oceans. The oceans.
- The plankton stuff. - Sort of plankton, it's like...
- (Bill) Worms. - (Stephen) Algae.
Algae.
(Stephen) Which is a kind of plankton. Absolutely right.
Yes, these single-cell plants live across the surface of the Earth's oceans
and generate far more oxygen than trees give us.
Some scientists say as much as 90% of the Earth's oxygen.
- I've got it in my pond. I get rid of it. - (Stephen) No!
Think how many people you'll kill by doing that.
You might just as well go round with a pillow and clamp them to old ladies' faces.
You bastard!
- Unbelievable! - (Bill) Killer!
Mature trees, by comparison, actually use more oxygen than they produce.
- Where is the driest place on Earth? - (Ping-Pong ball)
- Yes? - The Sahara Desert.
- (alarm bells) - (Stephen) 0h, my God! Unbelievable!
Minus 20 points for the Sahara Desert. Bless you, Alan, no. Yes?
It's a couple of counties in North Wales. Especially on a Sunday, you can't get a thing.
- You cannot get a drink, no. Not there. - (Alan) Australia?
No, not Australia. You didn't say the Atacama Desert.
It hasn't rained in Chile in the Atacama Desert for 400 years,
but there is a place drier than that.
- The moon. - No, on Earth.
You'll be right one day, when that moon comes crashing down. "I was right all along."
- That moon, that's dry... - (Stephen) It's so dry.
Cor, it's dry.
- It's called the Dry Valleys region. - (Bill) The Dorito.
The Dry Valleys region, and the continent has come up in...
- (Alan) America. - (Ñlive) Australia.
- (Bill) Pringle. - (Meera) Africa.
Antarctica.
- Antarctica, thank you very much indeed. - Antarctica?
- Yes, isn't that surprising? - Really?
Well, I'd like to give you ten marks for that.
Thank you, and it is quite interesting, yes. Thank you so much.
How can that be dry, because that's snow there and snow is just water?
List and I will tell you. The fact is the average annual rainfall is less than two inches.
It's about the same as the Sahara,
but it contains coastal valleys known as the Dry Valleys, in Antarctica,
that are free from ice and snow, which haven't seen rain for two million years.
So it's a long way clear of its closest contender, the Atacama,
parts of which haven't recorded rain for a mere 400 years.
The Sahara is lush by comparison, Alan, lush.
"Lush" is often shouted at you, I know. I'm going to shout it again.
Has there been one of those rain-catching things there for two million years?
And Michael Fish going checking it every couple of millennia.
"Nothing!"
They have ways of putting little cores into the Earth, to check.
It gets 250 times as much rain as the Atacama, actually, the Sahara.
As well as the driest, Antarctica is, of course, not only the coldest place on Earth,
it also lays claim to being both the wettest and the windiest too.
70% of the world's water is found there in the form of ice,
and its wind speeds are the fastest ever recorded on Earth, about 200 miles per hour.
Now, how long, team, how long is a day?
- (Ping-Pong ball) - Yes?
No!
- Don't do it, Alan! - Don't say it.
- Slightly... - There's no B's in a day.
...less or more than 24 hours.
Correct! Correct.
It is absolutely spot on.
15 points.
The day, as in a single rotation of the Earth about its axis,
is never exactly 24 hours long.
- Of course not. - It varies every day.
Astonishingly, it can be as much as a whole 50 seconds longer
or, as you rightly and eruditely said, shorter, depending on the season.
Even averaged across a year, a day is still not quite 24 hours,
as measured on an atomic clock.
The moon, again, it's the gravitational pull of the moon
which alters the Earth's rotational axis.
So what happens is that time is added on and goes out of sync with the atomic clock.
So the International Earth Rotation Service
has to actually dictate when seconds are added to time.
There is indeed a leap second. Exactly right. It's called the leap second.
I'll give you five points for actually knowing what you're talking about. Very good indeed.
(coughs)
Now, let's have a look, if we may, now, at the - oh, dear me - scores.
- I haven't got any points. - Shush your mouth for once, please, Clive!
All right. Let's start, sadly, at the bottom. With minus 20 it's Alan Davies.
- (all) Ah. - (applause)
- Thank you very much. - In third place, with ten points, Bill Bailey.
- All right. - In second place, with 19 points,
it's Meera Syal.
So, Mr "I have no points" Clive Anderson,
Anderson is the winner with 26 QI points.
That's it from QI for this week. Thank you very much indeed to Meera, Clive, Bill and Alan.
In an evening when we've discovered that deserts can be made of ice
and that Andersons are by no means always annoying,
I ask you to give your verdict on this thought of Rita Mae Brown's:
"If the world were a logical place, then men would ride side-saddle."
I don't know what that means either. Good night.