(applause)
Hello and welcome to QI, the IQ test for the backward.
Let's meet tonight's panel, who, like a properly-made cauliflower milk shake,
are thick, interesting and unusual.
Alan Davies, Jeremy Hardy,
Dave Gorman, Jo Brand.
Now, each member of the panel has an attention-getting device.
- Dave goes... - (high chime)
- Jeremy goes... - (low chime)
- Jo goes... - (medium-pitched chime)
- Alan goes... - (pneumatic drill)
And I go after the show, if I can hold on that long.
So this round is all about antelope, or antelopes.
A is for antelope and B is for bongo.
Apart from the obvious, what is a bongo?
- (high chime) - (Stephen) Dave?
I'm assuming that, apart from the obvious,
assuming that the obvious is some kind of African antelope,
then the less obvious answer would be that it's a percussive instrument.
We assumed that the obvious was a drum,
but the answer is, yes, it is indeed a type of African antelope.
But if you introduce the subject as, "This round is all about antelopes"...
You're right. It's a spectacular African forest antelope
with a caramel and white striped body, as you see there.
Much prized by poachers. There are only 100 reckoned to be left on the planet.
Can I just say, there's only 100 people on the planet
that understand the works of Jacques Derrida, so do you think they're all bongos?
That is what philosophers call a false syllogism.
(Jo) Ah.
This programme has gone beyond me already.
- Who's Jacques Derrida, first of all? - (Stephen) You can explain Derrida.
He's a French philosopher and I don't understand a (bleep) word he wrote.
- What's a syllogism? - Um.
(Jo) I know.
All men have bollocks,
all men can talk, therefore all men talk bollocks.
- Hm, yes, not... - (Jo) Is that right?
That antelope is very bad at plastering, isn't it? Look at that.
What's happened, he's not let the first coat set before the second coat.
Is there such a thing as silly jism?
(Stephen) Oh, dear.
What, like a cheap version of Play-Doh, you mean?
There's a film called Jism, that's just, that's...
I was... I was going to say it's just come out, but...
Can I just say something very strange,
because there's some German chewing gum called Spunk,
and you just have to be careful you don't swallow it,
but, in fact, I actually talked about that chewing gum
on Clive James's show
with you and Princess Diana, do you remember?
- Seriously. - That was a dream.
It wasn't.
- You've got to sort these out. - No, I remember.
I knew someone who worked somewhere... I didn't know someone, it's a lie.
Someone who claimed to know someone who worked somewhere the Queen visited,
and you have to provide a lavatory only for the Queen.
He went in afterwards and there was a pube on the seat and he kept it in a matchbox.
Good, well, let's go back to antelopes, about which this round supposedly is.
It's got a big old bum, like J-Lo, hasn't it, the bongo?
Yes, the antelope bongo has a large bottom. Does J-Lo have a large bottom?
Yeah.
That's good the way that they've tattooed those marks on for the butcher, isn't it?
(Stephen) No wonder there are only 100 left, yes.
Everybody's really made a thing about Kylie Minogue's bottom
and it's just the fact that she has one seems to be... it makes her somehow more sexy.
I think it's just a bottom. I mean, if she didn't have one, she'd fall down the toilet.
And her teeth are too big. If you look at Kylie's head, look at those...
Those teeth are proportionate to the teeth of a camel in the mouth of a toddler.
Her head must be really, really tiny, because...
Otherwise, if her head's a normal size, those teeth must be eight or nine inches long.
- Her head is about the size of a Kinder egg. - Despite having such ugly teeth,
she's not done badly for herself, really.
Now, for an extra two points, what was the name of the bongo player
in Tyrannosaurus, later known as T. Rex?
I went to see Marc Bolan perform when I was about 14, on Hastings Pier,
and what happened was girls would go up the front and they would faint,
be dragged out of the audience by the security and laid on the stage,
and as soon as they got on the stage they would jump up
and try and stick their tongue down his throat.
- What a brilliant ploy. - I tried it and they refused to lift me up.
Where's the tree? Because I've been past the tree that he crashed into.
- Is it in Norfolk? - (Jo) Barnes, isn't it?
- Near Barnes. - (Stephen) Barnes Common.
People stand around playing guitars on a Saturday night.
It's beautiful actually, there's a little shrine and they all stand around and sing.
Young people. No bigger than your thumb.
It is extraordinary. In Paris, in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery,
Jim Morrison's grave is far and away the most visited,
much more than Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde or various others.
Thatcher's grave is going to be a permanent urinal to all decent people, isn't it?
There will be...
Won't it be, in fact, a dance floor?
What they should put on Thatcher's grave is one of those arcade machines
where the lights flash up and you have to put your feet on the lights.
But the bongo player in T. Rex...
- No idea. - No.
Well, I'll give you the answer, then. The bongo player was called Steve Peregrin Took,
a Ladbroke Grove hippy named after a character in Lord of the Rings, apparently.
Marc Bolan was actually rather devoted and obsessed with Lord of the Rings,
but he was dyslexic so he never read it.
(Alan) That's strange. How can you be obsessed by a book and never read it?
Well, because his wife-to-be read it to him.
Perhaps he couldn't read because he was off his nut.
"Read us a bit of the book, dear."
Well, considering you owe him your hairstyle, Alan, I think you should be a little bit more...
There we are. So...
What is the curious South African pastime
known as Bokdrol Spoeg, in which antelopes play an indispensable role?
The only interesting South African pastime I can think of
is leaving the country when it becomes a democracy.
All the pub landlords in the West End that used to be Irish,
there'd be a bit of leeway about time:
(Irish accent) "Come on now, it's nearly half eleven. I have to open up again in a minute."
And now they are white South Africans.
And at the stroke of 11, it's "ding" and there's buckshot, tear gas,
and Land Rovers come out of the kitchen.
(South African accent) "Come along, please, haven't you got no townships to go to?"
I'll give you the answer, because Bokdrol is actually kudu dung.
Kudu is a type of antelope and Bokdrol Spoeg is kudu dung spitting.
Oh, gee.
It involves... Yeah, it involves who can spit the poo the furthest.
- Is it little pellety, round? - It's pellets.
It's pellets, but it's pellets of poo, there's no getting away from it, and this is...
Maybe it doesn't taste too repellent, maybe it's just all grass matter.
An old lady gave me a KitKat recently,
and it tasted exactly like old ladies' cupboards.
Exactly. And I looked on the sell-by date and it was 1998.
Ah, bless.
Are you using the phrase "old ladies' cupboards" in any kind of euphemistic sense?
The old lady's cupboard, under the stairs!
It's time to paint your butt white and run with the antelope, as they say in Texas,
which means "shut up and do as you're told" essentially.
It's time to move on out to another round.
(applause)
Now, before they were famous, both Clive James and Sylvester Stallone
cleaned out lion cages for a living.
Before he discovered Uranus from his terraced house in Bath,
the astronomer William Herschel was an oboe player in the Hanoverian army.
And before unifying Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi was a spaghetti salesman in Uruguay.
So, what sort of career advice would you, gentlemen and lady,
give a short, left-handed, epileptic Albanian bisexual with a very high-pitched voice?
- (low chime) - (Stephen) Yes?
Ring the Arts Council for a grant, straight away.
Giuseppe is Italian for Jesus.
- (Jeremy) No, it's Joseph. - (Stephen) Joseph.
- Why do you want to know? - (Stephen) Why, yes?
Are you thinking of having an Italian son?
- You can do that? - Yes, of course.
The internet's brilliant.
But the question was he is Albanian, short, epileptic, high-pitched voice.
- Left-handed. - Bisexual and left-handed.
You can't have invented all those characteristics, someone must have them.
Wasn't John Belushi Albanian?
- Of Albanian stock, certainly. - Yeah.
But Albania, as you know from the news currently,
its borders are under question from various different neighbours and...
- (Jeremy) Macedonia. - Who are the famous Macedonians?
- Celine Dion? - Philip.
And Philip's son?
Philip... It's not Celine Dion.
So this epileptic, left-handed, short... is a Macedonian?
- Was? - His father was Philip of Macedon.
- Is he a singer? - (Stephen) Oh, now, Jo!
Somebody extremely great had these qualities.
- Alexander the Great. - Alexander the Great, thank you.
- You know Eric Bristow, the darts player? - Eric the Great, yes.
- The commentator, I can't remember... - Sid Waddell.
Sid Waddell, yes. When Eric Bristow won the World Championship, he said:
"Alexander the Great conquered the world when he was 33, Eric Bristow is only 27."
Rather disturbingly, Sid Waddell went to Cambridge, did you know that?
And wrote the children's footballing drama, Jossy's Giants.
Ten points to Dave Gorman for knowing about a play written by Sid Waddell.
If I was a left-handed, midget, bisexual,
I would be saying to people, "call me the Great."
These people always make up their own nickname.
Somebody who's got a name like Sebastian, they'll say:
"My name is Sebastian, but everyone calls me Big Knob." Or Knuckles or something.
- We move in very different circles, Jeremy. - No, they make them up.
I'm sorry to drag this all the way down to classical civilisation, but there we are,
we just ought to talk a little about Alexander, he's worth it.
According to one book, though God knows what kind of book it was,
he was the 33rd most influential human being who ever lived.
- I don't know what sort of arse writes... - Is that him there?
- That's a representation of him. - He was great cos there were four of him.
(Dave) No, he was just in an early boy band.
And he could do that trick where he puts his eyeballs down and you see the eye whites.
What did Alexander the Great do with the banana and the ring-necked parakeet?
(Jeremy) Partied all night long.
- Was he like... - Whatever it was, it was a hell of a night.
...those people that go into casualty and say:
"I was just hoovering and I slipped and it went up my arse"?
"I put the parrot in to get it out."
Well, no, the answer is actually that Alexander the Great introduced them to Europe.
Yes, he brought along the banana, the ring-necked parakeet,
sugar, cotton and crucifixion.
All of these useful commodities, or practices, came from India, in fact,
apart from crucifixion, which was invented by the Persians.
- Persia is in Iraq now, isn't it? - No, it's Iran.
God, you're like George Bush, aren't you?
Back to Alexander. What was his hair regime
and which part of him was dipped in honey?
- (Jo) Henna. - Lemon juice.
Like henna, because of course redheads were very common there.
- Jojoba. - Not jojoba.
(Glaswegian accent) "Where I come from, that's the month after September."
Very good. Very good. Very good, Billy Connolly.
No, the answer is, actually, he washed his hair in saffron,
- to keep it shiny orange. - I was trying to think of saffron!
Quite right. Saffron, which was a seriously up-market type of shampoo,
because at the time, saffron was as rare as diamonds and more expensive than gold.
All of him was dipped in honey, is the answer. When he died, he was embalmed in honey.
Roughly how many crocuses does it take to make a kilo of saffron?
(Jo) A million.
Well it takes about 1400 poppies to make a kilo of good heroin.
- (Stephen) Right. - The good skag.
So I'm guessing probably about the same amount.
- What, 1400? - Yes.
But you've got to sort out all the white and purple ones, haven't you?
Otherwise your saffron would be a kind of icky, kind of beige colour.
Yes, possibly that's true. No, I'll give you the answer as to how much saffron it takes.
I mean, it's about 85,000 and 140,000 crocuses go to make a kilo.
So not as many as a million. Even today, top grade Spanish Mancha saffron
retails at ?8,250 a kilo.
For three years in his teens, Alexander was taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher.
Aristotle was not only considered great in his lifetime, of course,
but for some 2,000 years after his death, virtually all of European science
was based on the teachings of Aristotle.
So what did Aristotle teach about flies that is absurd and wrong?
That they caused the First World War by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
But in fact, it was a Serbian group called the Black Hand Gang.
Right, no. Aristotle never made such claims.
No, it's just quite interesting.
Such was his influence on the world for thousands of years,
he claimed that flies had four legs.
He was so trusted that nobody bothered to count.
It's quite literally true. He did have some strange... He thought snot was brain matter.
- He might be right, who knows? - Because the brain is grey and squashy.
He thought if you blew your nose, that was your brain matter coming out of your nose.
There are 200 different types of common cold
and they are all spread by sneezing and coughing
and things like that coming out of your nose.
You don't get them by standing in the rain.
But it is true that if your nose is cold,
those germs that cause the common cold prefer cold temperatures and multiply
and are more likely to take hold and give you disease.
So if you keep your nose warm, you'll be all right.
Really?
Ten points to Dr Davies for being interesting. Very good, thank you for that.
Have you thought about going on This Morning with all this knowledge?
- I like Fern. - I like Fern as well.
- Nice woman. - What's fern got to do with it?
- She presents it. - Oh, it's a person?
It's a person.
No, Fern is a plant that presents a programme.
This is my show and for all my oddity,
I'm more interested in what Aristotle thought about flies
than some fatuous bint who presents morning television,
and whether or not she was felt up by some other fatuous bint.
That's just me and I'm odd. But there you are.
So Aristotle, of course, is connected to Alexander the Great how?
- Umbilically. - No.
Same sculptor. Went to the same sculptor.
For their driving licences, they go and get sculpted.
At the mirror, with the bloke next to you with a bit of stone.
"Going on holiday this year?"
"I don't do the eyes, I'm afraid."
"The fellow who does the eyes has gone away."
No, he taught him, he was his teacher. All right, who cares? Let's go on.
- That's the end of that round. - (applause)
Right, from Aristotle to auricles.
Anyone know what an auricle is? A-U-R-l-C-L-E?
- (high chime) - It's the ear or an earlike thing.
Dave Gorman is absolutely right, it's a nice name for the ear or ear lobe.
- Oh, dear, there's an unfortunate person. - "Oi, four-ears!"
You live in Norfolk, don't you, Stephen? You must see that sort of thing all the time.
Thank you.
No, this round is in fact all about these, it's all about auricles, all about ears.
Here's a quite interesting cutting from the Independent.
Detectives were called to a disturbance outside a pub in Southampton
and found a severed ear, which they packed in ice and put in a police station fridge.
When the ear's 23-year-old owner rang them the next day,
he was told it was too late, the ear had "gone off".
But he didn't hear them, cos he was going, "Sorry?"
(Stephen) "I can't hear you. I haven't got my ear."
Detective Inspector Ray Burt said, "Unfortunately, it had been in there too long."
"It was next to an egg roll that had gone off as well."
"There was nothing we could do."
So after Van Gogh, or "Fan Hgoch", as the Dutch call him, cut off his own ear lobe,
- what did he do with it? - He posted it to the lover who spurned him.
Yes, that's very close. He put it in an envelope.
I think he actually delivered it personally, rather than posting it.
He put it in an envelope and took it to a prostitute, to the brothel,
- and gave it to this particular girl. - "Now look what you've made me do!"
He actually didn't sever the whole ear off, he kind of sort of sliced it in half,
- it was rather unpleasant. - Died a pauper, didn't he?
He committed suicide a pauper, yes. Well, he shot himself and died of his wounds.
He was not a happy bunny. And the reason he cut his ear, he'd had a violent...
Well, it was a bit more than that.
I mean, he was seriously mentally ill, rather than not a happy bunny.
All right, if you want to put it that way.
If you have to dress it up in your scientific way.
As an ex-psychiatric nurse, I feel I have to distinguish between the two.
Isn't that how you used to talk to your patients?
Not-a-happy-bunny syndrome.
Tried to commit suicide. Oh-dear-not-a-happy-bunny syndrome.
- Fair enough. Good. - I must say, I do like his beard.
- It's a fine beard, isn't it, I think? - Actually, isn't that incredible?
(Alan) Dave Gorman, not a happy bunny.
(Dave) That's very good.
(Stephen) Well, well, well.
The reason he cut his ear off was a violent argument with Gauguin,
the artist who'd been staying with him for months.
But two days after the ear incident, he left without saying goodbye.
Now, butterflies have ears on their wings.
The ears of grasshoppers and cicadas are on their abdomens.
Crickets' ears are on their forelegs.
Where are a snake's ears?
- (Jo) I presume it hasn't got any. - Ah, very good, five to you.
But they must be able to hear, because the whole fall of Eve, the serpent says, "Eve."
And she says, "Bugger me, a talking snake!"
And up pops the serpent, I'll do a little puppet to make it more interesting.
"Eve, hath not the Lord..." She says, "'Hath'? What do you mean 'hath'?"
And he says (lisps) "Don't take the pith, it'th not my fault I'm a therpent!"
Before we get all the way up to Revelations and the end of the Bible...
Keith Harris and Wristy the snake, ladies and gentlemen.
Snakes don't have ears, maybe they can lip-read.
They don't have wings and they don't, of course, have legs.
Now, how would you go about washing the ears of an okapi?
- With good cheer. - Absolutely, and it would be a happy okapi.
There's an okapi.
(Jeremy) Just take it to the garage would be best, wouldn't it?
Rather than messing around with Q-tips and all that,
just pay the four quid, it's got to be worth it.
The hot wax. The okapi can wash his own ears, so you don't need to do it for him.
His tongue can go all the way round into his ears, right inside, give them a good clean out.
There you are, an enormously long and versatile tongue.
So, thank you very much for that.
What were the enormous earlike growths that Galileo discovered in 1672?
(Jo) Did he find them on himself?
No, he found them a long, long, long, long way away.
(Alan) Asteroids.
- Not quite. - Planets.
- Connected thereto. - Debris.
Yes, you could say debris, 328 foot wide, but thousands of miles long...
Very thin, but huge. Hundreds of thousands of miles that way.
- The rings on Saturn. - String.
He discovered the rings on Saturn?
He spotted them on his new invention, the telescope.
- There they are. - He thinks they look like ears?
Yeah, well look at them, there they are.
- Not unlike ears. - (Jo) Nothing like ears.
The first telescope ever invented and you see something,
you don't see it that clearly with those colours,
it's just that sort of roundish shape with the kind of internal whirl.
So he thought they were earlike. I don't think he's that stupid, is he?
- Galileo, no. - Sorry, Galileo, you don't match up.
You may have discovered more about the universe than we'll ever know,
but, no, not good enough for our panel,
who will be able to tell much better arse jokes than you ever would.
We owe our civilisation to men like Galileo and I won't have him mocked.
Galileo was the first man ever to see the rings of Saturn.
He couldn't understand what they were, and who can blame him?
They are extraordinary-looking items. 172,000 miles wide, but only 328 feet thick.
But more topical ear news now from the London Times.
John Bennett, aged 36, a Londoner,
was today ordered to seek treatment at a psychiatric hospital
after biting off the ear of a Danish Labour Exchange official.
The court was told that when the official recovered consciousness after the attack,
he found his ear on a desk with a note that read, "Your ear".
(applause)
And we come now to our exciting final buzzer round,
and to remind you that if there is any answer you give
that is deemed to have been obvious and predictable, you will be forfeited ten points.
- Who was the first king of England? - (low chime)
- Alfred. - (alarm bells)
Oh, dear, oh, dear. How extraordinary.
Alfred the Great. You lose ten, I'm sorry about that.
No, the first king of England was?
- (medium-pitched chime) - Ethelred.
Not quite Ethelred. First right couple of syllables, he was a...
- Ethelbert. - No.
- (Jeremy) Ethel Merman. - No, not Ethel Merman.
It was, in fact, Athelstan,
924 to 939. A 15-year reign.
He was the grandson of Alfred the Great. Alfred the Great was only king of Wessex.
Ah.
Now, according to Aristotle, how do hedgehogs make love?
- (low chime) - Yes?
Carefully.
- Oh, you've done it again! - (alarm bells)
Oh, Alan, Alan!
- I'll tell you, it's quite interesting. - (Alan) Get a bit pissed, put some music on.
Yeah, that kind of thing, yeah, like everybody else. No, I'll give you the answer.
Here it is. They do it face to face, with the female lying on her back.
- (Jeremy) That's disgusting! - Well, that's how...
That's how Aristotle thought they made love. He was actually wrong, it's not true.
They do it in the normal way, but the female lays her plume, her quills, very flat indeed,
so flat that they don't become in any way prickly.
And he gets on, he has to bite into her neck, though,
cos they become slippery, he could slip cos of the way they're aligned.
And he bites the back of her neck in order to get purchase on her
- and does the deed and then he's off. - Ducks do that.
- Do they? - Yeah. They hang on.
They hang onto the back of the lady duck's neck.
Lady duck, how sweet. "Lady."
And oddly enough, they have slight pricks on their penises, the male. They have slight...
- A barb, to interlock. - A slight barb so that the... Yeah.
They can catch fish as well.
What is the most dangerous animal in the history of the world?
- (low chime) - Yes?
A sloth driving a petrol tanker.
- Very good. Very good. - Listening to Radio 2.
- I'll give you ten for that. No. - (Alan) Human beings.
- Human beings, you might argue is true. - Lions.
- Not lions. - (low chime)
Japanese fighting tortoise.
No. If I tell you this animal was responsible for the deaths
of probably half the human beings who've ever lived.
- Mosquito. - Goldfish.
So close. Alan was in fact right, it is the mosquito.
Half the human beings who've ever lived are reckoned to have been killed
- by the mosquito. - 3,000 people die of malaria every day.
That's 45 billion human beings in our history. But it depends what you mean by people,
how far you go back in our evolutionary history.
- Well, you know, humans sort of... - Homo erectus.
Glad to hear about that.
Could you introduce us?
No. Stop it.
It is arguable that the most dangerous animal in the world now
is the common housefly, which is also responsible...
- Not that common housefly? - Yes, the common housefly.
- Drops his aitches. - Absolutely.
Leaves the washing-up for days.
- Who are the lords of shouting? - (medium-pitched chime)
We are!
Very good, very good. I like that. You can have five each for that.
No, the answer, extraordinarily, is that they are angels, unlike you.
According to Jewish mysticism, 10,500,000 of them sing to God at dawn every morning,
led by the angel Jeduthun, the Master of Howling.
And who cut off Samson's hair, in the Bible?
- (high chime) - Nicky Clarke.
No. Anybody any thoughts on that?
- Delilah. - (alarm bells)
(Stephen) You've done it again. You've done it again.
No, no, no, she didn't, not in the Bible.
There's actually, I know about this, because it's an old American con trick.
You get a couple of American con artists.
One would go into a bar and he would get drunk, or appear to get very drunk,
and be rather obnoxious, and his partner would come in,
and across the bar they would just start having this discussion
and the more sober one would say something about having had his hair cut,
like you know, "I feel like Samson having his hair cut off by Delilah."
And the drunk one would say, "What do you mean Delilah?"
He says, "In the Bible, when Delilah cuts off Samson's hair."
"It doesn't say Delilah cut off Samson's hair."
And, anyway, he starts getting a bet. He says, "I bet you $ 10,000 it doesn't say it."
And everyone's so pissed off by this extremely annoying drunk, that they join in the bet.
And in the Bible it reveals that Delilah calls for a servant to cut off Samson's hair.
- It is a ridiculous trick question. - Is he played by Mel Gibson?
Victor Mature.
It's time now, ladies and gentlemen, for that exciting moment
where I announce the final scores.
In fourth place, I'm afraid, is Alan with ten.
Second equal, Jeremy and Jo with 15.
But our winner tonight is Dave Gorman with 20 points.
(applause)
Well, that about wraps it up for QI.
It only remains for me to thank Jo, Alan, Dave and Jeremy,
and to pose one last pertinent and quite interesting question, and it is this:
What's long and pink and hard in the morning?
Answer - the Financial Times crossword.
- Good night. Thank you. - (applause)