APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
and welcome to The QI Grill.
Tonight's guests are hungry to begin, so let's go straight through and start eating.
- For starters, it's Jimmy Carr. - APPLAUSE Thank you very much.
And the consomme professional, Johnny Vegas.
APPLAUSE
A substantial main course, Phill Jupitus.
APPLAUSE
And of course, a sweet little pudding, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
But first, a small amuse bouche or "amuse booze" with the compliments of the house. Jimmy goes...
# Food, glorious food We're anxious to try it... #
- Phill goes... - # Did you steal it?
# There's nothing left to eat... #
And Johnny goes...
# Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam
# Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam...
# And then I trampled nine women
# To get to the bar... #
Thank you. And Alan goes...
# Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit
# Yack-yack, rabbit, yack-yack, rabbit... #
- What's that smell? - Sorry.
- LAUGHTER - It's not you. It's an elephant.
# Yack-yack, rabbit... #
There's an elephant in the room.
There will be one coming up on the menu some time tonight, and it's bonuses if you catch my eye.
Let's move on.
'What happens in the Rhubarb Triangle?'
I don't think I'm allowed to call it the Rhubarb Triangle any more.
- That wasn't custard, that was some sort of yeast infection. - Eugh!
LAUGHTER
You bad man!
The Rhubarb Triangle, hmm!
M'lady!
- The leaves are poisonous. - Good point. That is true.
We were always told as children, "Don't eat the leaves."
- Just don't eat the leaves of rhubarb? - Yeah. - That's where I've been going wrong.
- You thought it meant ALL leaves. - Badness. - Yes.
Rhubarb leaves make your mouth numb and enough of them, you can die.
The Rhubarb Triangle, we're no closer?
Do marzipan fighter planes go missing?
Do they not pick anything up on the liquorice radar?
They suddenly start talking nonsense and gingerbread men, good men...
- Brave. - ..who fought in the pudding wars just vanished.
Their wives are holding their eyes going, "This is all they found!"
I want to live in your world, Johnny Vegas. It's a wonderful idea, but it is a triangle.
- It's an actual place like the Bermuda Triangle? - It is.
- Dare I suggest they grow rhubarb there? - Yes, in a very special way.
Does rhubarb grow incredibly quick?
It can be made to grow in a more remarkable way than nature intended
and that's what happens in the Rhubarb Triangle.
- Up north? - We are up north. - We're up north growing rhubarb quickly. - Where would we be?
- Yorkshire. - Yorkshire. - Yeah.
It's a triangle made from Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield.
- So it's quite a small triangle. - Leeds to Bradford is like from here to Jimmy!
- It's a small scalene triangle. How do they grow it? - Forced marriages amongst rhubarb. - Forced is right.
- They force the rhubarb. - At gunpoint.
- It's the great rhubarb forcing capital of the world. - They force it? What are you talking about?
- You leave it outside for two years. - To teach it a bloody lesson! - What if it's heartbroken?
- Then you bring it into the dark. - And you make love! - Absolute dark.
- You make love to it and... - In heated, dark rooms,
it grows at extraordinary rates
because none of its energy and nutrients go to making leaves to capture sunlight cos it's dark.
They shoot up. You can actually hear them grow.
In the forcing rooms, there's this creaking sound of rhubarb growing.
- And they provide 90% of all winter rhubarb. - 90%? - In that one triangle.
- Now, we never grew rhubarb that way in the 1839-1842 time. - No, we didn't.
Do you remember what war we were engaged in then?
- Opium War. - It was. We tried to flood China with opium.
They fought back not wanting to be filled with our opium, but we imported rhubarb from China.
Rhubarb was useful as a laxative
and the Imperial Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu wrote to Queen Victoria,
warning that unless the British stopped supplying opium to China,
he would cut off rhubarb supplies to Britain, killing everyone through mass constipation.
The Queen never had the letter translated, so she risked the entire nation being bunged up.
Now, Corn Flakes were invented by accident.
But what were they originally used for?
# Food, glorious food... #
Originally, they were the world's most difficult jigsaw.
It was for putting in mattresses for monks
as an anti-masturbation sound trigger device.
- They had... - Johnny Vegas, take some points!
You're joking!
- LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE - Unbelievable!
Well...
You didn't get it precisely right, but they were originally designed to discourage masturbation.
They were... It's absolutely true.
Not by the noise you would make if they were a filling for a mattress, which is a reasonable idea,
but it was John Harvey Kellogg and his brother who had the Battle Creek Sanitarium...
There's John Harvey, I think, but they hated masturbation.
- They made gloves out of 'em. - No.
That would be a lacerating experience, I grant you,
- but no, it's... - Whereas Coco Pops, oh!
- Every exam I sat at school... - You masturbated with Corn Flakes? - I put "masturbation" as an answer.
I walked away with nothing, but stuck with that idea and it's paid off, it's paid off!
You're right. What happened was they had been rolling out wheat dough and they left some overnight.
It broke off into flakes and they discovered that some patients enjoyed it with cold milk.
And Kellogg was convinced that cereals taken in huge quantities
would act against the libido and stop the deleterious practice of masturbation
which he thought caused "acne, heart disease, atrophy of the testes, dimness of vision,
"epilepsy, insanity and...
- "short-sightedness." - LAUGHTER
If I have Coco Pops, I'll run out and shag a hole in the wall.
They don't put that on the packet, do they? That's never been their marketing policy. "Coco Pops..."
- This might get you excited too, but Kellogg also advocated enemas. - Oh!
Visitors to his sanitarium would follow a water enema
with a pint of yogurt, half of it taken orally and half anally.
Well, you want to sort out which is which!
Good smoothie.
Would it shift bacon rind?
- Would it shift bacon rind?! - It was a question. Never mind.
- It was nothing. - No, it was important. - Let's wait till we holiday in Paris!
So the Kellogg brothers hoped Corn Flakes would prevent masturbation.
- What happens if you only eat rabbit? - # Food, glorious food... #
I'd imagine, eventually, if you eat enough of it, your feet become lucky.
I like it. Any other thoughts?
- You die. - Why so? - It's a nothing meat. - It's full of protein,
but there is very little oil and vitamins.
Do your children kill you? Cos you come home yet again and go, "Sorry, Fluffy's passed away.
"I was giving her a lovely hot bath with some onions and carrots and she just slipped off, I'm afraid."
Do you have really bad nightmares that there's a compulsory purchase order on your street
and you go, "They're coming"?
People start singing Bright Eyes and a bulldozer turns up and kills your nan?
That's not what I've got on the card. Nothing about nans. Phill is right.
- Phill has given the answer. You die. - You die?
The Hudson's Bay Company recorded cases of trappers dying who were feasting plentifully on rabbits.
- The more they eat, the sooner they died. Why do you think that was? - Were the rabbits cursed? - No.
No, the reason is that you use vitamins and minerals in order to digest.
The more you eat, the more vitamins and minerals you use up and excrete, the faster you die of malnutrition.
Many trappers died. If they'd had a tiny bit of vegetables, they would have survived.
- They thought, "We're eating rabbit, it's full of protein." - My dad killed my rabbit and fed it to me.
Perhaps he was trying to kill you, Johnny.
Well, the 39 other rabbits he'd bought in.
- I'm very sorry your rabbit died. - No, you're not.
It seems to me to explain a great deal. Do you remember what disease rabbits got in the '60s and '70s?
Myxomatosis.
- If you ate a rabbit that was... - Mixy. - ..what would it do to you? - Go blind?
No, it would do no harm to a human.
- If you ate enough of them, you would die. - If you ate nothing but rabbit.
As long as you had vegetables, you could eat as many as you like.
It's when you have nothing but rabbit that you die.
Louis XVIII of France had the remarkable ability to tell, just by smelling a rabbit stew,
which part of France the rabbit had been killed in.
- Was it more that he'd say, "This one's from Burgundy," and they'd go, "Yes!" - "Because you're the King."
"You have an incredible ability."
- You may be right. - "We didn't find it in the field out the back(!)"
I have a horrible feeling you are right.
Two rabbits starting a family could have 33 million offspring in just three years.
They don't get the benefit payouts.
Do you know why that doesn't happen? 90% of baby rabbits are eaten by predators.
Who presumably die.
Yes. You haven't really grasped the idea that if you eat NOTHING BUT rabbit, you die.
Eating rabbit itself will not kill you. You have to eat ONLY rabbit.
Is that now clear in your mind?
Are you telling me that the kestrel gets some peas and carrots?
- It gets other animals too. - They have the nutrients? - They do. - Shrew, hmm, lots of vitamin C in a shrew!
It's like a little furry capsule of Sunny D. Good vitamin eating!
They eat the whole shrew, so they get everything the shrew eats.
- Shrews only eat rabbits. - No, they don't. You're picking on me and I won't have it!
When did rabbits arrive in Britain?
Tuesday.
Do you remember what year it was?
3,000 years ago. Tuesday morning.
# Spam, spam, spam... #
There's an elephant in this question.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Did one of them rebel against Hannibal
and ride an elephant into this country
and, um, people were so awestruck by the tiny rabbit riding the elephant
that they gave him a chain of restaurants to manage,
but he realised his life was elsewhere like most middle-class people leaving college...
My headache's come back!
The short answer to that is no.
- The long answer is... - BLEEP - ..no.
So...
In fact, rabbits were introduced into this country by the Normans
probably in the 12th century, so not at the Battle of Hastings.
"These are the Britons, these are the rabbits." Was it quite formal?
Not so much the Britons as the Saxons, I suppose.
- They were introduced... - They were introduced formally. - In French.
Did the Britons find them stand-offish and judgmental?
FRENCH ACCENT: "We better not eat all the rabbits or we die!"
You still haven't quite got the point.
- We could eat all the rabbits we like... - As long as we have some peas and carrots! - Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Thank you. Finally, everybody has got the point.
But when rabbits were introduced into Britain, they were kept in warrens run by...
Elephants!
..people called warreners and they didn't go wild in the countryside until the 19th century.
- Thursday. - Thursday, the 19th century, exactly.
So there were 600 years between the introduction of rabbits to Britain
and they becoming a wild animal seen all over our fields.
I think we may have exhausted our rabbit subject and I've enjoyed it,
but the point is this - if you eat NOTHING BUT rabbit, you die.
Now to the vegetarian option. Macadamia nuts are not all picked from trees,
but they also drop onto the ground.
What kind of dropping would you search for the tasty and nutritious mongongo nut in?
# Food, glorious food... #
- I don't know, but macadamia sounds like a Scottish university. - Very good. Very clever.
- Where would you find the mongongo nut? - In Africa, I would say.
- In Africa? - Yeah. - Are they in monkey poo? - No, they're not. - Are they in something's business though?
- They are found in something's business. - Yes!
- APPLAUSE - Well done.
The points will be shared between you. You're absolutely right.
- Elephant dung is full of nuts? - Yes. It takes a week to pass through their bodies. - Imagine that!
"I'll see you... I'll see you Friday."
Looks like their arses are about to sing!
Very good. Yes, they go through the elephant's system where they remain intact.
- They are then gathered... - Who first gathered that nut? - I guess they saw it drying in the dung.
- Do we know what they taste like? - Yes, they're a bit more like a cashew,
but they're related to the macadamia nut.
- I like cashews. - I'd love to serve a pile of elephant poo at Christmas
and watch the family work their way through it going, "Don't spoil your dinner."
Everyone sat round the table smelling of shit!
- It's a lovely Christmas... - "Well, he puts out the finest nuts. I hear he gathers them himself."
Indeed. So the mongongo nut is collected from piles of elephant droppings
which brings us all shuffling downstairs in our pyjamas
to the ill-stocked refrigerator that is general ignorance.
What were the first animals to be herded for food?
- # Food, glorious food... # The first ones would have been an experiment, so it would've been guinea pigs. - Ah!
- Very good. - Goats. - Not goats. - # Did you steal it...? # - Yes?
- Chickens? - No. - # Spam, spam, spam... #
- HOOTER I've done it again! - Yes, Johnny? - T-Rexes.
- Oh! - Pterodactyls?
- No. - Godzilla?
- If I tell you the Latin... - Eggs, eggs!
They were easy to move round the field.
- No. - You could be a very lazy shepherd. - If I tell you the Latin name, would that help? Helix helix.
- Helix helix? - They've got a spiral on them.
- The audience knows... - Snails! - Thank you for telling Alan. - They herded snails? That must've taken ages.
All they had to do was build a wall.
Snail farming seems to date back to 10,700 BC,
the earliest things archaeologists have found that we appeared to farm.
- An archaeologist on a dig site found a snail and went, "Oh, look"? - That's not quite...
"I've found a tiny snail farm. Send more money, Mother."
- They dug up a bunch of snails and went, "They must have been farmed"? - "I have proof!"
They wouldn't just say that, "We've found some snail shells, therefore it's a farm." One assumes...
- They found a tiny plastic fence and tiny plastic animals. - And some sheepdog bones near it.
- And a die-cast man with a whistle going... - Exactly right.
- Tell me about snails' sex lives. - They do it by themselves, don't they? - They're all hermaphrodites.
Did they find some spinach that someone has grown for the first time ever and just dug round there,
leaving their mess like dirty snail teenagers?
Possibly. They do dance and kiss for up to 20 hours before sex.
I know they do, but, you know, why do it on the plant?
Yeah. Good.
"It's my first harvest!"
- They have an optional... - You fork out on a grow bag and you feel life is gonna be different, don't you?
Snails have an optional sexual organ. D'you know what it's called?
- They can use it for sex, but they don't always because it's dangerous. - A second arse. - Second arse?!
It's called a love dart, actually.
- A love dart? - That's a happy coincidence!
- It's more like a 7 to 11 millimetre dagger. - Well, exactly.
- This is uncanny. - It releases chemicals to stimulate the mate.
- They stab their mate with the love dart. - Beautiful.
- It can result in injury if carried out inaccurately. - Of course. - Agh!
- Exactly. - "Should've done it in daylight!" - Sounds like an episode of Midsomer Murders!
It doubles the chance of offspring, using the love dart.
A bit like playing an elephant, it increases your options.
- Why don't they like salt? - It does something to their slimy bits. You salt a snail and... Eugh!
Why has it never been on Dragons' Den? There must be a chemical compound you can put on a tape.
You don't want to put salt on the ground when you're growing anything.
There must be something that's not damaging to the soil
- that would give the same chemical reaction to a slug or a snail. - I'm in, but I'm gonna need control!
I will give you £1 for 100% of the equity.
That's a brilliant idea.
- It's salt on Sellotape! - Yes.
I'll take that pound!
And live the dream.
- Let's never look back. - Oh, dear!
It might blow away. We should've used double-sided!
Yes, snails seem to have been the first animals to be herded for food
which is enough to make one feel quite ill, so what causes stomach ulcers?
- # Spam, spam, spam... # - Yes? - God, I went for this test!
- It's not the lining of the walls. It's overactive bacteria. - You're right.
It is a bacteria. It's called Helicobacter pylori.
- And it's like a volcano, a fire. - No, that's the Gaviscon advertisement.
And brushes come into your tummy and clean up.
Yeah, it was for a long time believed
that ulcers were caused by a mixture of bad diet and stress,
but two Australian doctors did remarkable research.
They were laughed at for suggesting it was this bacterium, then one drank a dish of this bacterium.
He downed it for a bet? That sounds like Aussie doctors!
- "Will you drink this?" "Yeah, mate." - It was a good bet. He got 750,000 for the Nobel Prize.
He got the Nobel Prize for downing a drink?
For proving the origins of what was the biggest killer of young men in the world, so rather important.
You could now clear up a peptic ulcer with antibiotics, rather than die of it, which is a good thing.
That is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
I refused the treatment because I prefer to think I've got sea monkeys living in my stomach.
- Did you get a Nobel Prize for that thought? - No, and I got nothing for eating that glass in a rugby pub!
Life is so unfair. His name was Barry Marshall. And he risked his own life, of course.
But Article 5 of the Nuremberg Code, set up after the Nuremberg Trials,
says it is illegal to use human subjects for medical experiments when there is a risk of death,
the only exception being...?
# Spam, spam, spam... #
Putting a fly's head on yours.
- It makes your wife very nervous. She's got to go out in the garden and find a little bit... - Absolutely.
- If you do it on yourself. - You can do it on yourself.
When the guy downed this thing and he got a massive ulcer, did they find the cure immediately?
- Or did his mate go, "I'll work on that"? - No, they knew it could be cured by antibiotics.
Or you send off for some female sea monkeys and they just calm down.
Werner Forssmann also experimented on himself - first person to insert a catheter into somebody's heart.
His own heart. He inserted the tube through his arm into his heart and X-rayed it to prove what he'd done.
It lost him his job, but he won the 1956 Nobel Prize.
- There's a theme emerging. £750,000, that prize is. - Who sacks a man for that?
"Oh, not you again!
"You're the one with the yogurt in his arse!"
Enough already.
Bacteria are the cause of stomach ulcers as Barry Marshall proved by infecting himself with them.
Which green vegetable has ten times more iron than average?
- I don't know, but you have to eat it if you're having rabbit. - Very true. - I do know that. - Very true.
Goes well with rabbit. Any other thoughts?
- # Spam, spam, spam... # - Spinach!
- HOOTER - Oh, hard luck.
Broccoli.
HOOTER
- Oh, dear. - Seaweed. - That's more intelligent, but still not true.
I call it a vegetable, rather than animal or mineral, but it's better known as a culinary addition.
- Parsley. - Like parsley. A herb. - Coriander. - Horseradish.
- Sage. - I can't give you any more TIME!
- Is it thyme? - Thank you.
- Why does your body need it? - Cos it'll go all floppy.
- What does iron do? - It helps the red blood cells transmit oxygen. - You're right.
It transports from the lungs around the body. Very good.
If you ate 3.5 ounces of thyme, you'd consume over 600% of your recommended daily allowance.
- Does that mean you could then eat rabbit for six days? - It probably would, yes.
I'd let you do that. So, unless anyone would like a coffee or liqueur, it's time to split the tab.
And what do we find? Well, in first place,
getting Michelin stars, would you believe...
..it's Alan Davies with minus 2!
APPLAUSE
Well...
our sous-chef with minus 3 points is Johnny Vegas!
APPLAUSE
And barely scraping a GCSE in Home Economics with minus 6 points is Jimmy Carr!
APPLAUSE
Finally, left washing the pots with minus 21, Phill Jupitus!
APPLAUSE
That's it from Jimmy, Johnny, Phil, Alan and me and from Dick Cavett
who says, "I eat at this German Chinese restaurant.
"The food is delicious, but half an hour later, you're hungry for power!" Good night.
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