Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI. Tonight's show is all about "divination",
the ancient art of seeing into the future.
Well, as you already know, therefore, I am joined tonight by four people
I have a strange feeling that I've met before:
Phill Jupitus...
Graeme Garden...
Johnny Vaughan...
and Alan Davies.
Well, tonight, each of you is equipped with a device to help you see into the future
and predict your own score.
The closest match to your own score, and I'll be asking you at the end
if you can predict your own score, er,
will win 666 bonus points.
So, Johnny, you are ...
- a koskinomancer. - That's exactly what I am.
- And koskinomancers . . . - We sieve through things and whatever is,
--like soil--and whatever's left in the sieve is the future.
Anyway, tonight I'm going to use it to divine my score.
Fantastic. Very good. And Graeme, what do you have
with which to divine the future? You are, I believe, a tyromant.
I have . . . Yeah, a tyromant. I've got the baby cheeses.
Oh! A tyromant can tell the future by examining cheese.
So, Jupitus, erm, a tasseomancy.
- I believe, yes, erm . . . - Tea.
Yeah, yeah. What you don't know, you can tell the future through tea bags.
I think these are a proprietary brand of . . . I don't know if you can see that there.
While Alan has the gift of pygomancy,
which I believe is the gift of divination by arses.
- Do you have an arse with you tonight? - I do, but I am using it.
Have you got a spare arse, by any chance, then?
I have been provided
with an arse for divination purposes although I thought it was bosoms.
I thought it was the Charlton Brothers.
Don't. It's like catnip to his kind.
Yes, I can see into the future. Ooh!
Right, let's hear your bewitching noises. Johnny Vaughan will be going:
Graeme Garden goes: ("Is there anybody there, dear?")
Phill goes:
Ah, right. I have to do it Tabitha style.
Excellent. And Alan goes:
Oh, very good. Very good!
- Where have you gone, Alan? - Do not concern yourself. I have gone to another place.
You've gone to the Elysian Fields, perhaps.
Er, more Highbury Fields.
What?
Well you did say divination by "Arse-nal"!
Did anyone come here tonight mainly to see Alan?
Oh, everybody.
- Yes! - Oi! - Can I say: very unlucky.
But you get us for the whole night!
Thank you!
That's more like it!
- It doesn't matter! The show's gonna go on! - It will. Somehow.
They only got me tonight so the whole thing weighs out the same!
Right! Let's get on. One of the oldest "-mancies" of them all
is oneiromancy, which is divination by dream.
Graeme, have you had a recent dream?
Er, yeah. I was making love to a beautiful woman.
- Really? - Yes. - Well, I have here all these facts from dream interpreters, oneiromancers.
It's either your inner self letting you know
that you need to get in touch with your feminine side;
the woman is actually you, in such dreams. You're actually ...
You're making love to yourself or that part of yourself,
in your gruff male multi-tasking sort of way, er, have been ignoring.
- All right? - I wish she'd said.
- Well, you must ... - Yeah.
Or, the second interpretation is that you haven't been getting much lately
and you desperately need a shag.
- But there is a third one: - Oh, right.
The woman is actually your mother ...
No, you feel guilty, but frankly, it feels good as well,
so face it, Graeme: You're gay.
Dreaming about making love to a woman is a sure sign of being gay.
- Really? - Yeah.
Well, I'm glad you've straightened that out.
Johnny, what was your dream, please?
In my dream, I was dreaming,
and I was worried because I was unable to move in my dream,
and I knew it was a dream inside the dream,
so in the dream they got someone to help me who would give me advice on how to run better
in my dreams, within the dream!
Oh, wow! Wow.
- But this is . . . not . . . not . . . - You had a dream coach within your own dream?
- Within my own dream! - This is surprisingly common.
- Is it? - Yes. It's anxiety over the state of your life.
Your subconscious is telling you that you need to address your fear;
you can't move 'cause you're blocked, trapped, oppressed,
unable to fulfill your deepest dreams.
You're dreaming about yourself, as a comedian and entertainer.
Your dream is saying, "Johnny, don't take yourself so seriously."
- Oh, I wish it did. - Er, you're also consulting an authority figure in the dream:
an expert, a priest, an oneiromancer.
In effect, you're asking your lost father for help.
You're gay!
Wait 'til I tell my dad tonight.
Yeah! In bed. So there you are!
- Phill, please, can we have a cleansing sorbet? - I can never remember the damn things,
but up until, sort of, my teen years,
I used to dream I was being chased around an empty football stadium by a giant monkey.
And then he'd stop chasing me and we'd sit down, and we'd just sit down and watch the game.
In an empty stadium.
I've got a thing about football: It represents your goals, fairly obviously I suppose, your aspirations.
But before the game can begin, before you can start to fulfill your dreams,
- Phill, if I can call you Phill ... - I must quieten the inner monkey?
No, you alone, because the stadium is empty,
that's the point-you alone have to confront the thing you fear most,
which is the big monkey. And what is the big monkey?
You're running from your adult self: large, hairy, lust-filled ... Yes. Yes.
You're gay!
- I'm gay. - That's what it is! It's so obvious, Phill.
So, there are lots of ways of interpreting the future,
interpreting the present, and there are lots of "-mancies".
So we here tonight, Stephen, could very well be said to be your mancy-boys.
You are my mancy-boys. What do you think a margaritomancy is?
- Margaritomancy? - Yes.
Erm, someone who reads from oysters.
- Oysters. Oh, that's quite intelligent, because you're thinking there - Thanks.
that "margarita" is the Greek for "pearl".
- It is just someone who reads pearls, yes, indeed. - Yes.
Spatulomancy?
- A blade or spade, isn't it? - A blade, yes.
You as a doctor might know; it's the shoulder blades of sheep, in fact,
so shoulder blades.
Auspices, which is a word we use a lot
"the auspices are good"-technically, is reading the flight patterns of birds.
We read the auspices in all kinds of other ways,
but essentially it's what humans do, don't we?
We see patterns in things anywhere and we'll try and read something into it.
- Like the weather forecast. - The weather forecast is
- Wrong. - always wrong.
We might just as well be reading the entrails of kid goats and things like that.
I think I would have watched Bill Gyles a lot more had he taken
- Slit open a baby goat. - cut open the goat and go:
"Well, it's going to be wet in Biddeford tomorrow."
What would hippomancy mean?
Yes, Graeme?
Divining by the use of a circus.
- Or possibly just horses. - Horses, indeed.
"Hippos" ... And, in fact, with ... The picture gave it away in the background.
- It did a bit. - It did, rather unfortunately, but well done. Yes. Yeah.
Horses are, in fact, about as intelligent as tropical fish,
in terms of brain power. But they have extremely good memories.
What was particularly clever about Clever Hans, the horse,
who was rather famous in his day?
Couldn't it count or give answers to something?
Not just count; it could do square roots ...
But it wasn't quite a con; it was something else.
- Wasn't it that it could read body language, basically. - Exactly right.
It could see people going
"Is it? Is it? Is it?" And they're going: and he stomps.
Only much, much subtler. It's basically what Derren Brown often does.
And if you train yourself to know how to read someone's body language,
the tiniest movement of an eye, the tiniest flexing of a muscle somewhere,
all those sort of things, you can, as it were, read someone's mind.
And this was what the horse was doing.
- But Derren's Brown's a bit brighter than a tropical fish. - He's a lot brighter than the horse, we have to say!
Do you know what, he's got one great trick ...
You know when you've got an empty seat by you in a train, and you don't want anyone to sit there?
He says you're insane to put things on the chair to stop people sitting there.
The trick is, as they approach,
you smile at them and pat the seat.
That's very good!
Horses are just stupid, I'm afraid,
and every day they have to re-invent the world, you know. You go
"What's that?!" It's a piece of paper!
It's a hedge; you saw one yesterday!
For Christ's sake, get a grip! Everything's ...
You looked so much my like my nan, then.
When you were ...
"It's a hedge, nan!"
So, anyway, what's the best thing to do with a dead donkey?
- Yes. - Christmas dinner. A lovely Christmas dinner.
- If you're having the big family 'round, a donkey will go a long, long way. - Yeah ...
The big old cavity; plenty of stuffing.
Can you be hung like a dead donkey?
People had this idea that donkeys knew when their death was coming
and went away and apart from everyone else, like elephants are said to do.
And therefore, to see a dead one was apparently very rare,
although they're common. So it's considered very lucky.
And you have to jump over it one, two, three times.
The word "donkey": When did it come into the English language?
When was Don Quixote published?
No, it's very odd. The word was "ass"
all the way through the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries, most of the eighteenth century
In the late eighteenth century it suddenly appeared, the word donkey.
But it was pronounced "dunkey", like monkey.
If we wiped out every single mule on this planet
today, all of them ...
by next year ...
there'd be 10,000 of them.
- Really? - At least.
- How would that work? - Because they're hybrids.
- They can't breed amongst themselves. - No, no, exactly. Yes.
- They can't actually breed amongst themselves, though - No, they can't.
- so they rely on that - I see what you mean, so.
So you could whack them out and you'd still have horses getting donkeys,
so you still get the, er, mule population up.
"You'll still have horses getting donkeys?"
Yes. I wanted to put it mildly, I didn't want to say "boning them"
- Which way 'round. Which way 'round is it, though? - It's the female horse.
is correct. And the male donkey.
- So it's the donkey that does the shagging. - The donkey's little.
Yes.
So donkeys are quite intelligent; they have to find a box and then...
No, because in one department, Phill, the donkey is blessed.
- Now you see. - Well, that's a long reach, that, still.
In fact, the donkey can do it from a different field, they can just ...
If it chooses.
Oh, dear. And they have a very Leslie Phillips way of treating their lady. They go, "Hee haw."
No, that's right, yeah. And the other way round is called a "hinny".
- The what? - Hinny. A male horse and a female donkey is called a hinny.
- A hinny? - They're much rarer.
When the female horse gives birth to a mule, 99.99 percent of female mules are sterile,
and the males are invariably sterile, but they don't know they are.
So they have to be gelded so that they don't shag all the time.
What about donkey's milk. Do you know anything about that?
- Donkey milk. - Yes.
It probably makes an amazing cheese.
Well, oddly enough, it's the one thing it doesn't.
- No? - But come on, you're naive!
- Sometimes, honestly - I want donkey cheese!
In India they have always, in the countrysides, fed babies on donkeys' milk.
It's very nutritious indeed;
it contains oligosaccharides, which are very, very good for you
and have all kinds of immuno-helpful things, don't they, Dr Garden?
I'm sure they do, yes.
Very good for bathing in, too. Wasn't Cleopatra in ass's milk?
She was in ass's milk, absolutely, and pure donkey's milk. Poppaea, the wife of Nero.
Three hundred donkeys were milked to fill her bath.
- Big girl, was she? - A big girl, yes.
Now, we all know what demons are, but does anyone know what a demon-ym is?
- D-E-M-O-N-Y-M. - Demonym.
Is it a false name you give when you go on a march?
Demo-nym.
A demo-nym. Hey! No, it isn't. What does "demo" mean in Greek words?
- People. - People.
People. It means your people name.
In other words, you could say: He is a Briton;
he is an Englishman; he's a Scotsman; she's a Welshman; she's, you know, French.
Now, if someone's from France, they're French, and if someone's from Germany, they're German,
but what's the right word for someone who's from the USA?
"Obese."
Is it "burger-eating invasion monkey"?
Oh, excellent.
Is it "Columbian"?
That is a word that is used.
I don't know what it is in English, but I know... I've seen the French before.
- It's like Etaunician. - Etaunician is the French, indeed, absolutely right.
- There was the Spanish one, estadounidense. - Oh, right. Okay.
The Chinese have lovely ones. They say, for American, meiguroren,
- which means "lovely country person". - Does it?
But what do you think they call the English? It's yingguoren, and that means... ?
- Tiny country person. - No. It's rather nice;
I feel rather proud, really. It means "hero country person".
- Oh, that's great, isn't it. - A country full of heroes.
Frenchmen are faguorens.
Spineless and gay!
Oddly enough, it means "law country person".
Now, it's not a view widely held in the Middle East,
that it's a land of lovely country people, but there you are.
Speaking of the great Satan, America,
how much would you say this recording is worth? List.
- I'd say it's worth about a man's soul.
Why do you say that?
- Because . . . I've forgotten his name, the guitarist - Robert Johnson.
- Robert Johnson. Who went to the crossroads... - It was Robert Johnson, and you know the story of the crossroads, exactly.
Well done. Excellent.
- He recorded nineteen tunes. - Twenty nine songs. When?
When? 1923?
1938. In his mid twenties he was.
He wandered into a studio and played extraordinary blues music.
But what contributed, do you think, to this legend that it sold his soul?
Because his talent bolted out of nowhere.
Some people felt that. He'd gone away for a year or so
and come back amazingly good and so much better, better than anyone had ever heard the blues.
And how did he die eventually? What happened, because there's a different...
- Did the devil claim his soul at the end? - He was shot in a hooch house.
- Not shot. Again, it's... - Oh, poisoned.
- ...all legend. Poison. - Yes.
- A poison which... - Poison, was he poisoned?
Strychnine in the whisky.
He died in his twenties; he was an absolute classic
sort of case of booze and whisky and women and... and wandering and, er
Yes, but you can't write the blues if you live a lovely life and you go jogging and...
"The Gyles Brandreth Book of Blues"!
Anyway, there you are. That's the great story of Robert Johnson.
Now, what is the first computer ever to beat a grand master at chess now doing?
Is it filtering calls for British Telecom?
- You're so close to being right. - If you have a billing query
- It kind... - move knight to bishop three!
Oh, very good.
It's actually slightly more disturbing;
- it's working for United Airlines as a reservations clerk.
Didn't Kasparov say actually that it... He found it actually had intelligence, it was shifting.
It was actually Deeper Blue, I think, when it beat him.
- You're absolutely right. Deep Blue... - Wasn't it named after...
Isn't IBM called the Big Blue?
- Is that its nickname? - It is. Yeah, it is.
- And that and an amalgam of... ? - Of "Deep Thought".
- "Deep Thought", which is... ? - In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", yeah.
I thought it was split in half, actually. It was in museums; they took...
Well, yeah, they did, I mean they were only using part of it; it was immensely powerful.
But didn't they cheat and actually, what..
what Kasparov pointed out is that it was, it... it managed to spot his trap
- in the sixth game or something, which is... - Absolutely right.
He set a trap in game two,
which a computer could only have avoided by thinking creatively.
leading Kasparov to accuse IBM of cheating,
and leading Stephen Fry of accuse Johnny Vaughan of cheating and reading his cards,
it was so accurate. Well done. Very good.
Yeah. Excellent.
I've watched Gary Kasparov, who played a match against Nigel Short in London.
And it really is absolutely terrifying; you could feel this energy coming out of him.
He hunches over the board and the way he moves the pieces, they...
Even the way they move the pieces have names, you know.
Vasily Smyslov, who was a very great Grand Master, for a long period in the 50s,
he used to move his pieces like that and give a slight twist before letting go.
- Oh. A flourish! - And still to this day,
known as the "Smyslov screw".
Because it's the way... As if he's screwing it into the board.
- It's really extraordinary. - But he did complain
that it was actually starting to show intelligence, rather than just cold logic.
- Exactly. - Two hundred million permutations
- it can think ahead or something. - Two hundred million positions a second can be analysed, yeah.
Why don't we phone United Airlines and set a trap?
Yes! That's a brilliant idea. "Me to seat A7."
But doesn't it kind of restore your faith in the human mind,
rather than being cynical about IBM?
The fact that, you know, he's going up against something that can do, what, two hundred million processes a second?
It's amazing. It's close to autism, though, what he's got, isn't it?
He happens to be more intelligent than most;
some of them you wouldn't trust to sit the right way on a lavatory, to be honest, but he...
That much of your brain is taken up with the... the processing you're doing,
it's not surprising that you're not safe to use the street unattended. Er...
Anyway, er, listen, listen. With that sad story of Gary Kasparov and Deeper Blue,
I'm sure, as most of you will have predicted,
we stumble towards the tragic end that we call General Ignorance,
so fingers on buzzers, please. What is the number of the Beast?
- Yes? - Six hundred and three score and six.
Oh, no, no, no.
- No, no. - That's the number of the Beast.
- No, it isn't. - I lose points, don't I, for that bit of ignorance?
- You do, you do, big points. - God, I'd done so well as well. - Big points. Yes.
- Yes. Hello? - 0898.
For almost 2,000 years, the number 666 has carried connotations of evil,
but they've discovered an Oxyrhynchun from the old city of Oxyrhunchus
- Oh, you pulled that on me. - They've discovered a papyrus which has the whole book of Revelations
it's the oldest papyrus on the book of Revelations and the number is 616, as was known about.
- Yeah? - That's the fax number of the Beast.
St Irenaeus of Lyons had also seen some manuscript with 616
and just said, "Oh, it can't be right," and changed it to 666.
- So 616... - 616 in the original, absolutely,
which is rather embarrassing for all those bus companies and roads
and things that have changed their name from 666.
Er, there's actually one bus company,
in Moscow, changed its route 666 to 616.
Which is really bad luck.
There is an A666 in England, do you know where the A666 goes?
- Lancashire somewhere. - It is Lancashire. - Yeah.
"Pendlebury . . . to Langho in Blackburn."
All the numbers on a roulette wheel add up to...?
666. Yes, they do.
Six hundred and sixty five pounds and ninety nine pence is the retail price of the Beast.
And twenty five point eight-oh-six-nine-eight?
- The square root of the Beast. - The root of all evil.
Yes, exactly. I will give you 66.6 points
if you can tell me what a fear of the number 666 is?
It's hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. There you are.
The fear of 616 is the one we should now have,
which is, hexakosioidekahexaphobia.
Oh, that's all right then.
Now, what about this.
Which human being in history has done the most damage to the environment?
- Alan? - George Bush.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Stalin, Genghis Kahn. Mao Zedong. Margaret Beckett.
No. Not Margaret Beckett.
We can give you his birth year. 1889.
Yes.
- Oh, no, it's not going to be Henry Ford, then. - No.
- No, okay. Okay. - No.
- Diesel! Mr Diesel. - No. Not that, neither.
Oh. Again, I'm losing points fast, and it just...
No, no, you don't lose them; you only lose points if there's a...
- All right, okay! - because you've said something obvious or
- Mr Chrysler! - No, no, no.
- Sorry, sorry. It's not, if I tell you his name - Henry Lawrence!
- I'll tell you his name. - William Wallace!
- I'll tell you his name. - Go on, then.
- Thomas Midgely. - Thomas Midgely?
He discovered by chance that iodine added to kerosene
reduced knocking in cars.
So he decided that although it slightly reduced it, "slightly" wasn't enough;
he wanted completely to reduce it.
So he tried every single chemical in the periodic table,
until he came up with lead.
And as a result, all motor cars
for seventy-odd years put lead in their petrol,
creating billions and billions of dollars worth of
And millions of tonnes of lead into the atmosphere.
- Harming millions, probably, of people. - And yet he... he... he looks a lovely fellah.
He looks a lovely fellah.
Some think it was his guilt about that
that led him to think of doing something about the nasty old sulphur dioxide
and the nasty old ammonia that we used in refrigeration.
So he discovered in three days dichloroflouromethane.
- Fantastic. - And he was very proud of that,
because it's inert, it's non-toxic, it's beneficial;
the first of the freons.
- What did he not know it was also doing? - Destroying the ozone layer.
- He's a card, isn't he?
Not content with thousands and hundreds of millions of tonnes of lead!
- What was his next trick? - His... His next trick...
The cigarette!
- "I'm sick of not having smoke going into my lungs. What..." - As you know...
- Then he decided to cut out the middle man and just kill babies with hammers.
- So anyway... - That's where they drew the line.
So he's put lead in petrol; he's invented CFCs;
er, but then he was struck by polio at the age of 51.
Well, fucking good!
It gets better.
He invented for himself a harness,
because he was crippled by polio, to get himself in and out of bed.
One morning
he had swung around a little bit oddly,
and in the ensuing struggle he strangled himself to death.
- Hoisted by his . . . - By his own petard, aged 55.
And that's Thomas Midgely, the man who's done more damage than anybody else.
Anyway, which religion causes harm by sticking pins into dolls?
I don't know, but I bet he set it up.
Pins into dolls, who do that?
- Oh, hello. - Voodoo.
Oh, who said that? He did?
He said "voodoo". Thank God, he hexed it. No, it isn't.
Voodoo was never involved the sticking of pins into dolls.
- What... What... So, what religion does? - European witchcraft.
Oh, I always thought it was Methodists!
- Do you know... - They're a bunch of heretics.
Do you know what the dolls are called in European witchcraft? They're made of wax or they're made of ceramics, made of wood,
straw, all kinds of things, but there's a word for them.
Do you know it? It's rather nice."Poppets."
- They're called "poppets". - Ah, isn't that lovely.
The closest, anyway, that voodoo ever comes, is... They do have these little empowered figures called Bocheos,
which have small holes in, into which you put
tiny pegs to channel healing energy.
So it's a generous kind thing, voodoo, to help people.
It had made its way through slavery from West Africa
to the Caribbean in particular. Of course, Haiti is where it's most associated with.
The missionaries and so on came and they wanted to discredit the local religion
religion in order to raise up the claims of Christianity,
, so they said it was full of cannibalism and zombie- ism and, and...
and things that they'd actually gotten out of European witchcraft.
And so it was really poor old Voodoo who has rather suffered from it. Terrible. Terrible.
They should get you to do redo their image for them.
Yeah, why not. "New... Double Action Voodoo."
Take two poppets into the shower.
Yes! Exactly.
And finally, what is a desire line?
- Yeah? - Is it between the District and the Circle, just on the...?
It is to do with travel in a sort of way.
It's the name the planners give to the,
apparently almost haphazard maze of meandering lines
that people make, like paths, that often don't follow contours...
- Oh, great. - And they're called desire lines.
There is actually a rather nice word people use for those who wander along without really thinking.
- Do you know what it's called? - Trespassers.
No.
"Get out of it!"
"Meanderthals."
Wise designers are now designing public spaces
where they allow people's infinite capacity to wander apparently at random and make paths.
I like that. Desire lines, yeah.
- Yeah, desire lines. It's very pleasing, isn't it? - Do I get my points back for liking it
- and being interested? - Let's first see if you can predict your scores.
Because if you can, accurately,
there will be six hundred and sixty six points in it for you. The old number of the Beast!
- You want to know if I can predict my score? - Yes.
And...?
- No. - No.
Graeme, what have you got there?
I have my faith in cheeses and I've
- got minus one. - Minus one you think you've got.
I think I've got plus seven.
Excellent. Well, I wonder what Alan thinks he's got.
Won on penalties!
We shall see. Let me give you a true reading now.
In first place,
with seven, is Graeme.
Oh! And I've got the minus one.
Phill, you have plus six in second place. Just one off.
And I'm afraid, because you did fall into a few of our heffalump traps,
third place, Johnny Vaughan with minus nineteen.
I don't think you have to be Nostradamus to know who came in lastly lastington.
It was Mr Alan Arsenal Absent Davies with minus seventy!
That's it from QI. I leave you with this mysterious quatrain from Stephen Wright,
the Nostradamus de nos jours.
"I went to a restaurant/That serves breakfast at any time./
/So I ordered French toast/During the Renaissance." Good night.
A very enjoyable show, apart from the nonsense about the counting.
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