Well, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI, the low, low budget quiz show,
otherwise known as Who Wants To Be A Commissionaire?
Let me, er, introduce our contestants, one of whom tonight
has the chance to win absolutely fuck all!
Will it be A) Mark Steel?
B) Vic Reeves?
C) Roger McGough?
- Or D)... Actually, let's ask the audience - Alan Davies!
Welcome to you all. Now, tonight's programme
is all about "denial and deprivation".
So to that end, we've done away with dreary old desks, we've fired the lighting director,
and the audience is actually out in the street tonight.
Well, there we are. And, of course, the buzzers tonight will be operated by hand;
they'll be hand cranked. And Roger will go:
Mark goes.
Vic goes:
And Alan goes:
Tonight, "denial and deprivation".
Each of you has some pieces of jail-breaking equipment,
all of which have been successfully used.
At the end of the show I'm going to ask you to use your skill and judgment
to work out how it might have been done.
But first, why do children play with their food?
The sixth child of Sigmund Freud was called Anna Freud,
and she took up her father's beacon of battiness.
She was the first person to write about denial. There's Sigmund on the right. Erm...
For me, playing with food came out of being deprived in Liverpool,
when there were no toys.
- So did you make, sort of, things out of meat balls, instead of Lego? - Well, exactly.
Mum used to put out a plate of turnip tops and cockles.
So as a youth, your toys were cockles?
Cockles. My first toy was toy cheese.
- For Christmas. - Toy cheese?!
Honestly, it was a metal-like cheese portion, which you wound up
used to wind up, I remember this, on the lino, and put it down,
and it used to make, like, cheese-y movements.
- Cheese-y movements? - Yes.
That is a very good reason to play with foods,
and it makes me all the sicker at the weirdness of Anna Freud.
Anna Freud believed, by playing with their food, they were really playing with their excrement.
The thing is, a child could play with its excrement,
- If it wanted to! - if it wanted to!
Of all human phases that you're in, it...
lower infancy is the one where you can most get away
with playing with your excrement.
"Oh, he's got his hand in his nappy again." But that's what... the one thing that we don't touch.
The Freud family is a good example. Anna Freud suffered from depression all her life
and never had children.
Sigmund Freud was terrified of the number 62,
and so he refused to ever stay in a hotel that had more than 61 rooms,
in case he got number 62.
And the first time after he'd made this rule,
the first room that he was booked into was number 31,
and he went, "Oh, see! Half of 62!"
Yeah, but, 62: Rhymes with poo; "6" looks like a poo pursued by a swan.
You know one of the things that people say is always a test of whether you're anal,
- is whether you keep your records in alphabetical order. - Yeah.
But... And I think, "Well, surely, it depends on how many records you've got."
I mean, if you've just got two and you keep going back and checking them: "Oh, Abba, ZZ Top; they're still there, that's all right.
I've got a room full of bloody records!
I keep them in alphabetical order so I can find the one I want.
Apparently, it means I've got a problem with me arse! How is that, then?
I shouldn't think, in her time,
they had Alphabetti Spaghetti
- That's true! - which was the main reason I played with my food, every breakfast.
I'd just insert my meatballs up my arsehole whenever they'd turn up on the plate.
And if they want to call you anal, it's up to them.
It's in their court. The ball's in their court.
The ball is up your arse.
Ineffably, imponderably stupid, and wonderful.
Now, er, Vic, does your wife like banting?
- Does she like a good bant? Has she ever banted? - Oh, regularly. - Does she?
On a Sunday afternoon, after the war film.
She bants, does she?
My wife adores bunting.
Does she?
This is banting. It's what you call a back-formation.
Do you know the verb "to maffick", which means "to celebrate"?
Which comes from Mafeking Night,
when the relief of Mafeking in the Boer War.
And so people said. "We are mafficking."
Rather like the old joke about Kipling: "I don't know, I've never Kippled."
Because obviously, Kipling's not a verb, nor is mafficking,
but banting is the same thing.
'Cause there was actually a man called William Banting
who started a fad that is still with us today.
He wrote a book called the Letter on Corpulence in 1864.
And he was the first man systematically to come up with diets.
"To bant" is "to diet": "I'm banting. I'm on a diet."
- "Biltong" is a dried meat, isn't it? - Yes, it is.
And "building" is a sort of large edifice.
Air-dried meat is a mystery to me.
Is it?
Because I tried to do it; I was in a restaurant;
had a bit of steak and tried to dry it out in the toilets on the hand drier.
But it didn't work.
"Life with Vic"! Erm...
No, well, anyway, William Banting, as I say, started this... this trend,
which before, really, in our civilisation, at least,
Fatness had been a sign of prosperity and no one had ever worried about it.
But they think that the person who really started the trend,
in America, was William Howard Taft, the American president,
who got stuck in a bath once, he was so fat.
And he decided to do something about it and went on a diet, and this became well known.
And at the same time, Hollywood was beginning, of course.
And suddenly this idea of trying to be thin caught on
and has been plaguing us ever since, of course.
As late as the fifties, the big fad was the tapeworm pill.
You swallowed a pill that had a tapeworm egg in it.
Because people observed that poor people were very thin, often,
and perhaps it was because they often had parasites and worms inside,
not because they weren't eating enough, no, no.
- A friend of mine had a tapeworm. - Really?
- Three feet long. - When did he discover that he had it?
When he went to the doctor.
And... Fair enough.
I don't know how they got it out.
There's that rumour about the Mars Bar, isn't there?
- Oh, go on. What? - If you've got a tapeworm, you starve yourself
then you put out a Mars bar, near your...
Ye-es?
and the tapeworm is so hungry it comes out and goes for the Mars bar.
And you grab it and pull it out!
But there we are. More on disturbing physical practices now.
What is meant by the expression "hoover the talking seal"?
What would I mean if I said that?
It's either one of those wonderful Oz expressions for throwing up.
"I'm just gonna have to, er, hoover the talking seal."
Or "My wife came in just as I was 'hoovering the talking seal'."
Yes. Or Edgar Hoover. None of the Presidents liked him at all;
they all tried to get rid of him, particularly Nixon.
I imagine him flopping round the Oval room,
you know, balancing a ball on his head.
Or it could be a talking seal called Hoover.
- Yes. - It's a talking seal called Hoover.
The only mammal ever known to have produced human speech.
He was found as a seal pup in 1971, in Maine,
by a family called the Swallows. And they found that he started talking
and he even had a Bostonian accent.
Erm, I don't know if you'll agree, but I think he's saying here,
something like "hello there" and "get out of here", in a more-or-less New England accent.
"Get out of here."
I think it's "get out of here, come on, get down.
Let's hear that again. We've got to hear it one more time.
I have to say, I've heard Americans a lot less eloquent than that.
He died at a very ripe old age, in 1985.
- What were his final words? - Ah, yes.
"Go on, get out of here!"
But he appeared on ABC's breakfast show, Good Morning America.
He received his own obituary in the Boston Globe.
Now, from the "blah blah" seal to La Bastille.
- Do you see what I've done there? - I see what you've done, yes.
- It's in Paris. - "Paris" is good. - Yes.
Very good. Can you tell me anything else interesting about La Bastille? Either of you. Mark.
- It was a prison. - It was a prison.
- And it was stormed on July 12th. - 14th.
14th, but close. Two days out.
You say two days out, but I'd have stormed it two days early; I'd have been on my own.
There were only seven prisoners, weren't there?
- is exactly the right number; there were only... - Two lunatics, two...
- Yes. - Hang on.
Two lunatics, two forgers,
two thieves, and a very bad mime artist.
Wasn't he convinced he was Julius Caesar, one of them?
Oh, this is good. You're getting points, too.
I'll come to this. This is impressive.
Listen to this.
We have four forgers. We have the Comte de Solanges,
who was inside for "sexual misdemeanors",
but unspecified kind.
Two lunatics, one of whom was an Englishman or an Irishman, they're not quite sure
called Major Whyte with a waist-length beard,
who thought he was Julius Caesar.
You know, the Marquis de Sade would have been in the prison
at the time of the storming of the Bastille. It's a very tragic story, this,
because he was in there for a long time,
but a week before the storming of the Bastille, he was transferred to another prison
because he'd been upsetting passers-by by shouting obscenities at them through a tube out of the window.
This is... It's as if you've been reading my card, Mark!
And so all his stuff... It was tragic, because... And he spoke to his wife
and he said, "Look, can you make sure you go 'round there and pick all this writing up;
I've spent years writing in there."
And she thought, "Well, you know, no rush, is there? It's the Bastille."
Safest place in Paris.
"What's going to happen to that?" And then I think she went down there on the day of the storming of the Bastille
and thought, "Oh, shit."
Absolutely right. Ten days before the storming
was when he was moved to Vincennes.
And the authorities were upset because he was shouting not just obscenities,
but anti-monarchist sentiments at passers-by.
So they moved him to Vincennes, and otherwise he would have been released.
It was rather like the Tower of London, and even at the Tower of London's height,
it was quite a civilised place to be a prisoner.
I mean, you got wine and food and you got an allowance; you got tobacco;
you could move around as much as you like.
So this was like the Groucho of the prison world.
Yeah! The English equivalent, as I've mentioned, is the Tower of London.
So tell me why the Kray twins were imprisoned in the Tower of London?
- Were they ravens who were named after them? - No, that's a cunning answer.
The ravens do have weird names.
And they're literally prisoners, 'cause they're kept in cages at the moment,
because of the worries of bird flu.
They're called Gwylum, Thor, Hugine, Munin,
- Branwen, Bran, Gandulf, and Baldrick. - And Dave.
- So they did actually have the Krays in the Tower? - They had Ronnie and Reggie of the...
- of the three Kray brothers. - Was there a prison officer's strike or something
- and there was nowhere else to put 'em? - No, they were a bit younger than that.
Did they go on a school trip?
No.
- National service? - Very good,
- absolutely right. - Because there was a barracks there, wasn't there?
There was a barracks there and that was their one;
it was the City of London Regiment of the First Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers,
which is where people like Michael Caine had gone when they'd done their national service.
People in the East End: that was their local barracks.
But they were actually imprisoned there,
because when they did their national service, "they don't like it.
"Ron and Reggie didn't like it!"
And they beat up their training sergeant
and, er, "and went home to have tea with their mum".
The weird thing about Ronnie is, he was pretty... pretty psychopathic
and as most people know, he was gay, but he had this weird thing,
that everyone had to admire his boyfriend.
So they'd have a meeting of the Firm, and there'd be the heads of, "Plaistow and Hackney
and Dalston and all the local branches of the Firm",
and there'd be Ronnie, the Colonel, and there'd be a seventeen youth called Cyprian or something. Standing there.
And Ronnie would go, "Hello everybody, this is Cyprian," and they'd go, "Hello, Cyprian."
And Ronnie would go, "Inn'e gorgeous?"
And they'd all have to go. "Oh, he's lovely, Ronnie! Oh, he's...
Oh, how you pick 'em! Oh, you lucky dog."
David Putnam, of all people, used to manage them for a very short period of time.
- I know; it's weird. - What? - Yeah, he did.
They wanted to go legitimate, and he tells a story of how they were with David Bailey,
who took those famous photographs of the two of them in suits, you know, the... standing one behind the other.
And they were all in this pub; it wasn't the Blind Beggar, but it was a Kray pub.
Ronnie had gone off, he was the insane one, so they were left with Reggie, who's supposedly the... the normal one.
And these couple of drunks come in, and they suddenly spot David Bailey,
and they go, "Oh, you're David Bailey, ain't you? Go on, take me photograph."
And David Bailey goes, "No, no." They said, "No, don't be a fucking arsehole;
take me photograph."
He said, "No, no, I've run out of film." "Don't be... give me that; take my photograph!"
Reggie gets up and looks at himself in the mirror across the bar like that and suddenly goes
"baff", like that.
And knocks him right across the room and he bangs his head against a piano
and blood starts to trickle down, and his mate goes to him, and they just flee.
And David Bailey, to his credit, was very angry and says,
"Reggie, you are a tosser.
For God's sake, I get this every day; I'm a photographer;
people know what I look like. I can handle it; you didn't have to do that; you could have killed him."
There was this terrible silence that Reggie had been shouted at like this.
And he gave a little shy smile and he said, "Well, to tell you the truth, Mr Bailey,
I'd had my eye on that cunt all afternoon; he'd been eating my sandwiches!"
Very extraordinary. Anyway.
"Hoover the Talking Seal
An audacious, loquacious seal Called Hoover, after each meal,
Having vacuumed the fish Right out of the dish,
Would jabber and babble, Blabber and gabble
- Chatter and prattle and spiel." - Hey, very good! Thank you. Oh.
Our resident poet, Mr Roger McGough, thank you very much indeed. The Hoover poem.
All this talk of crime brings us to the short, sharp shock that we call General Ignorance.
So, fingers on your hand cranking buzzers and bells please,
and what are the four main religions of...
What are the four main religions of India?
- Yes, Alan! - Sikhs.
Yep.
Buddhism.
- Oh, no, it's not one of them. - Hinduism.
Hinduism, yes.
- Christianity. - Yes, and one more.
- You've only said... - Islam.
- Muslim. Islam. - Islam, yes.
In correct order, they are Hindu, Islam, Christian, and Sikh.
- No Buddhists in India? - There are Buddhists; it was invented in India, of course.
The Buddha was an Indian. But it's not one of the four main religions.
There are 805,000,000 Hindus.
There are 134,000,000 Muslims.
There are 23,000,000 Christians.
That's 22 and a half million more than there are in Britain.
And there are 19,000,000 Sikhs.
Buddhists.. There are 7,000,000 of them,
0.7 percent of the population. Although Buddhism was founded in India,
its spiritual home today is, of course, Tibet.
And the taking of life is forbidden in Buddhism.
Tibetan butchers, therefore, are ranked amongst the lowest of the low,
along with undertakers and blacksmiths, oddly enough.
But whose job is it in Tibet to milk the yaks?
- I know who cleans the hooves. - Who's that?
- Yaksmiths. - "Yaksmiths"! Yaksmiths.
The milkman. Is there a milkman has to milk these...
Oh, no, there is no milkman.
Do they have milk? Is it nice?
Tibet smells of butter, they say. There's butter everywhere.
The trick part of it is is that the yak is the male of the species.
So nobody milks a yak.
- What's the female called? - The nak, oddly enough. - The nak?
- A nak or a dri. - One of the things I really remember about Tibet and about yaks, too,
They make sculptures, apparently.
- They do, religious. Yeah. - It's every year there's a festival
of these sculptures made out of butter milk.
And there's apparently a guy... In the 20s, there's a famous surrealist Buddhist sculpture.
He actually made a yak out of butter milk
which he was able to milk,
and made another even larger.
- How tall is a wild yak? - I think enormous.
- Yeah, I'm... I'm going six feet. - Yes. - Six five. My height, in fact. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to say four foot.
Well, that would be a domesticated yak.
I'm going to say nine, maybe ten foot.
I've already told you that it's six foot five.
I think it's about fifteen foot.
I'm so glad I was never your teacher, I really am.
- But, yeah, you're right... - Twenty foot, sir!
Aside from their meat, and all their milk products, particularly the yoghurt and the butter and the cheese,
they have the longest hair of any animal, the yak. It gets up to two foot long
- and it was used for, in the 17th century? - Wigs.
- Wigs, your periwig. Your Charles II style wig. - Is this the, er...
And in fact, the BBC wig store, we checked, still has quite a large number of yak wigs.
And if you're going to play Santa at Christmas,
then the chances are your beard will be yak.
Couldn't we introduce the yak to Britain?
I don't see why not. I mean, they are rather specialised for the altitudes in Tibet.
If you introduced them to Britain, they'd blow up to a huge incredible size.
Why not?
Or we could have yaks dangling from balloons.
The altitude would be right.
- Fantastic. - You could. - I love the idea.
Have a hot air balloon? "Come up to see the yak fields."
Five thousand feet up. And they still graze. On what? Air.
They'd have to be up there, because their blood cells are half the size,
but they have twice as many.
So actually, when they came down to sea level, they'd be immensely powerful.
- Like Terence Stamp in Superman II. - Very much like that.
Yeah. "Kneel before Zod."
- Yeah! - There we are. Let's move from yaks, now, to crabs. How many legs do crabs have?
- I know. - Yes! He's... - Eight.
Eight, you've got eight there... and I'm afraid that's a forfeit.
They've, of course, got ten, and their snippers.
Well, the answer is ten. You're right.
The front ones are tucked-in, as you can see, but they do count as legs.
No, they don't.
What animal has legs that don't reach the floor?
- They do walk with them. - What sort of legs are they?
They are functioning legs. They do walk with them: sideways, backwards, forwards.
- I do have a children's poem if I can remember it... - Oh, go on, yeah.
"A crab, I'm told, will not bite, Or poison you just for spite;
Won't lie in wait beneath a stone, Until one morning out alone,
You poke a finger like a fool into an innocent looking pool.
Won't grab your hand And drag you off across the sand
Down into the bottom of the sea To eat you dressed for Sunday tea.
The crab I'm told is a bundle of fun With claws like that, pull the other one!"
They're not legs.
They're its arms.
Of course, if you'd said six, you could have been right, 'cause the crab louse has six.
- Yeah. - Six.
- Well done! What are you thinking of? - A crab louse.
A crab louse.
- And where do crab lice live? - In a crab louse house.
Sorry, it's hanging around with Roger for an evening; it makes you rhyme things.
Crab louse house. In your pubes, or in one's pubes.
- Don't be disgusting. - They do!
That's where you get crabs. Go into Boots and say "one's pubes are infested with crab lice.
A bottle of Quellada lotion if you please."
Is said crab louse related to that crab?
No. They're called it because they latch on to the follicles of the pubes,
or the eyebrow, or the eyelashes, even, and beards.
Why are you looking at me?
I have had crabs and I got them from a dodgy sofa.
That's what she told me.
I went to the doctor's and it was one of those traditional British doctors
with a big bow tie?
and he took his bifocals off and said, "Hmm..."
He strapped on some binoculars and then he looked at my pubis very closely and went, "Hmm..."
And I just creased up laughing. He said, "I'm afraid, Mr Moir, you're going to have to stop laughing;
you're jiggling about and I can't focus on the crabs."
Now, er, what did George Washington have to say about cherry trees?
- No one wants to say the obvious. - What's the obvious?
In his garden was a tree... - Yeah?
which he didn't chop down.
Yes, you're avoiding our trap. There's a famous story every American knows
about Washington saying, "Papa, I cannot tell a lie.
I cut down the cherry tree with my axe."
And it's a completely made-up story,
written for children by someone called Parson Weems,
who tells this story to show what an honest fellow he was,
that even as a six year-old child he said, "I cannot tell a lie."
His father said something like,
"My son, that you have told the truth means more to me than
a thousand trees bathed in gold or silver," or something.
This is brilliant. You get... must get points here.
But I remember this just... when I was young, 'cause I really wanted someone to say that to me.
You know, your dad: you broke his favourite cup, you know.
"Who broke my cup?"
"I did, dad." "You bloody", you know..."
He never said, "Run to my arms, you dearest boy,
run to my arms. Glad am I, George, that you killed my tree,
for you have paid me for a thousandfold.
Such an act of heroism in my son is worth more than a thousand trees,
though blossomed with silver and their fruits of purest gold."
- As if. - Ah. And then he said, "Brilliant.
Can I watch CBeebies now?"
Next. What would you call these people?
- Yes. - Beefeaters.
- Oh! No. - Yes, they are.
No.
- Yeoman of the Guard - Yeoman of the Guard.
Yeoman of the Guard. Well, I know they're that... but that's what people call them. "Beefeaters."
No, these are Yeoman of the Guard and those are Beefeaters.
- Different uniform. - Oh, yeah, isn't it!
Well, to me, Aston Villa and West Ham have the same uniform.
No, that's the Yeoman of the Guard, er, away kit.
Just so you get it clear, the ones with the straps are the Yeoman of the Guard,
and the ones without the straps are the Beefeaters.
They are the Yeoman Wardens, the ones who would have looked after Ronnie and Reggie, no doubt.
And if we can go back to look at the Yeoman of the Guard.
They have the arquebus strap for their guns, the actual Yeoman of the Guard.
Are they allowed to go to Spec Savers, or should they all be...?
So, yes, the Yeoman Warders, who, er, never carried guns, have a slightly different strapping arrangement in their uniforms,
and they're the jailers of the Tower of London.
Speaking of which: Brings us to our final challenge for you.
You should have your four props,
and I want to see if you've worked out how you could use them for escaping from jail.
That's a green felt tip pen.
It was used for an escape by someone called Steven Russell, from the Estelle Unit in Houston, Texas.
- Did he colour himself green... - Yes!
and pose as a leaf?
You were nearly there. He wore a white jump suit.
And he painted it green so he looked like one of the prison guards.
One of the doctors... and he escaped as a doctor.
He just walked out the door.
What have you got there, Roger? What's that?
Dental floss.
This was Vincenzo Curcio, a Mafioso.
And this was only in the year 2000, quite recently, in Turin.
He was guilty of murder and arranging seven other murders, so he was serious criminal.
How did he escape using only dental floss?
You get your dental floss, hang it round the bars and leave it dangling.
Then you get your potato
and you break it up and you stick it on the floor in front of the door
- Yes... - and then you put spots all over yourself with the green. - Yeah.
Make plague noises. And when the warder runs in,
opens the door... Of course, he slips, careers across the cell floor;
get your chili powder, throw it in his eyes,
and then in the confusion, get the end of the dental floss
- and tie it to the inside of the door. - Right.
So when he gets up screaming, saying, "You bastard, I'll have you!", runs out,
runs out, slams the door behind him. The bars come off, and you get away!
Fantastic!
Brilliant. You've used all four props for one escape.
But let's just keep with the floss.
This man, Vincenzo Curcio, this Mafioso:
he flossed the bars
and it sawed through them,
that's how strong the floss was.
And these particular iron bars were very good at withstanding explosions,
but not good at withstanding dental floss.
What about the chili powder?
- Well, I think the throwing it in someone's eyes is a good one. - Is exactly right. It happened in Pakistan in 1997.
Five prisoners escaped by throwing chili powder in the eyes of a prison officer.
- That would hurt. - Er, so that leaves us the potato.
Is it like in Escape from Alcatraz, where you just draw a picture on it and it looks like your head
and you leave it in the bed?
Well, not far off. Have you ever seen a film called Take the Money and Run?
- Yeah. - The wonderful Woody Allen film?
And he does something with soap, do you remember?
It'd make a gun, the shape of a gun. With black...
What Woody Allen does is he carves a gun out of soap,
and then blacks it with boot black, so it looks just like a pistol,
and then he holds up the prison officer, and they go out across the courtyard,
and it's raining, and when you cut to the wide shot, there's this great ball of lather
and he's led back into the prison. But he was basing it on the true story
of one of the most famous criminals in the twentieth century in America.
- Derringer. - Dillinger. Dillinger.
Dillinger. Dillinger, John Dillinger, carved his potato into the shape of a gun
- and got away with it. - But a very small gun. - Yes.
- If you had to carve one out of that. - It may have been a bigger potato.
It would be pathetic.
Which brings us to the small matter of the scores, ladies and gentlemen.
In equal first place, with time off for good behaviour, remission and patrol,
Vic and Roger are on one point.
One?
In third place, just over the wall,
Mark Steel on minus six!
But banged up in solitary tonight,
it's Alan on minus thirty-nine!
And my thanks go to Roger, Vic, Mark, and Alan.
I leave you with a famous denial. When the American President, Thomas Jefferson,
was asked if he was having an affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings,
he replied, "The man who fears no truth
has nothing to fear from lies."
DNA recently, on Sally's descendants, has shown
that this meant "Yes." Good night.
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