Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, and God rest ye merry gentleviewers.
Tonight, QI is going to the Dickens with "E" for "Empire".
In the olde curiosity shoppe, we have great expectations of Jo Brand...
Our mutual friend, Sean Lock...
That witty chuzzle-martin, Bill Bailey...
And getting his knickers in one Oliver Twist, Alan Davies.
Well, it's nearly Christmas, so let's hear some carols.
Bill goes: ["Deck the Halls"]
Lovely! Jo goes: ["The Holly and the Ivy"]
Sean goes: ["Ding, Dong, Merrily on High"]
And Alan goes: [Neil Sedaka's "Oh, Carol"]
Just not trying, are you?
So, don't forget to keep your eyes and ears peeled for an elephant in the room.
- Oh, yeah. - Yeah.
If you see one, then you're looking at one big Christmas bonus. So, to our first question. What did Queen Victoria think of Mr Bean?
["The Holly and the Ivy"] Yes.
- "We are not amused." - Oh! [Forfeit: Klaxons sound.]
- Oh-h-h! - So soon!
Straight in! Albert would have liked him, because, er, he was German. And the Germans are mad for Bean.
- That's true. - I was on a Lufthansa flight once,
and everyone was howling with laughter all around me with headphones in.
- I couldn't understand why, and I looked, and they were all watching Bean. They love it. - Yeah.
There's a certain efficiency about it. "He does something and falls over! It is very amusing!
Before, he was walking in a straight line, then he walked into the door! This is genius!"
"This is what happens when you break the rules!" [laughs as though he were German]
[German accent] Ahh! Sometimes, I stay up very late.
Can I take this off?
'Course you can. Of course you can take it off, old thing. Yes. Is it uncomfortable?
It's Sean Lock!
- I suspect it's not that Mr Bean. Is there another Mr Bean? - No, it's...
It was a man called Mr John Bean.
He was one of three people who tried to do something to Queen Victoria, er,
just in the fourth year of her reign, when she was very... a slip of a thing.
Take her roughly behind the bike sheds.
No... Or, indeed, invent the bicycle, and then invent the shed that...
- Sell her tea towels door to door. - Kiss her. Kiss her on the mouth.
- Quite the other. - Oh.
Kiss her on the arse!
Was that... Was that a request? Is that how you phrase it?
- "Quite the other, if you don't mind." - Well, if you're a queen, you can have anything done, can't you, really?
"You there! Kiss me on the... " "All right!"
- As much as kissing someone is a friendly act, these were unfriendly acts. - Surely he didn't turn down her advances with knockers like this!
- Oh, goodie. - Kicked her in the shins.
- No. Three times in... in 1842... - Tried to murder her. - ...they tried to assassinate her. Tried to kill her.
And there was one called Mr Bean who had a gun, and he filled it with wads of tobacco, which didn't really do much harm.
Was he trying to give her cancer? I like the idea of Mr Bean trying to assassinate someone by, er, clumsiness.
Just sit there making her a cup of tea, and it just... the whole house collapses. The palace falls down.
Everywhere he goes, it's a sort of tornado of disaster, isn't it?
- Mayhem. - I was in a remote Australian sheep station once,
and the bloke went, [Australian accent] "Ey, you ever watch that Mr Bean?"
And I went, "Yeah," and he said, [Australian accent] "Bloke's a bloody idiot!"
- That's fabulous! - And then he goes,
[Australian accent] "Yeah, he wouldn't last five minutes in the bush!" Well, no, clearly not.
Well, there you are. They're all, rather, these, sort of, Carry On names. There was one foiled by a PC Trounce.
- Hence the... Hence the name, after that. - Maybe.
- Perhaps it was. He invented the trounce. - The trounce.
"I trounce your assassination attempt with my trouncing, er... stick."
Another assassin called John Francis was described by Prince Albert as "a thorough scamp".
- A thorough... scamp. - A thorough scamp.
What, so someone tried to assassinate his wife, and he said, "You're a scamp!"
"You're a scamp!" A thorough scamp. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tough.
Seven years was the maximum for trying to assassinate the queen in those days.
- Really? - Yeah.
Er, the line "We are not amused" was reported in the notebooks of a spinster lady,
published in 1919. But she had a childish sense of humour, in fact. Was amused by lots of things.
- Yeah, but especially them little crowns. Like them. - She loved little crowns, didn't she?
So anyway, yes. Queen Victoria took a rather dim view of John Bean,
one of the many people who tried to assassinate her early in her reign.
- What was Queen Victoria's... What was Victoria's secret? What was Victoria's deadly secret? - She was a... a man.
- She had a deadly secret. No, well, she wasn't a man. - Did she keep a load of snooker balls in a sock?
- Under there. "What happened to him?" "Nothing!" - It's a wonderful idea.
Was she just, sort of, poisonous, or something? She killed someone?
Well... indirectly. Not meaning to, of course. There was something about her that was...
- ...not exactly infectious, but-- - Was she an alien?
- She was a carrier. - A carrier of--
- Was it haemophilia? - She was a carrier of haemophilia.
And so, infected every single royal house in Europe. All the royal houses of Europe have had haemophiliacs.
Most of them had haemophiliac deaths. Her own son, Prince Leopold, died of haemophilia.
Only women can carry it but can't be haemophiliac, under... except under very strange circumstances
where their mother is a carrier and their father is a haemophiliac. But usually, it's the men in the family--
- Yeah, we like that. - Yeah!
"My favorite illness. Number one. Haemophilia."
Oh! It's a defective X-chromosome, in fact, that causes it.
Her daughter, Alice, princess of Saxe-Coburg, had a daughter, Alexandra, who was the Tsarina of Russia.
And many people believe it precipitated the Russian revolution, the fact that therefore her son, the Tsesarevich, Alexei,
was, therefore, a haemophiliac. And that's what got Rasputin involved in the royal family,
and that enraged so many people, that the force of the revolution gathered.
So maybe, if Queen Victoria had not been a haemophiliac, there wouldn't have been a 1917 revolution. - Was he the lover of the Russian queen?
- Oh, Ra Ra! Ra Ra Raspie! He... Well, they say he was! - "Russia's greatest love machine"!
Certainly.
- That's where I learned my history. - When we come, in many years time... When we come to our dotage, Series R, we'll cover Rasputin.
But it was pretty extraordinary, his life. And his death was even more extraordinary, wasn't it?
They poisoned him; they shot him; they drowned him in the lake; and he still wouldn't die. It was a very--
- Still singing that bloody song! - Still singing that song. Yeah.
- And then eventually, the... the red light in his eye just flickered and went out. - That's it. Exactly. He was finally crushed. He was.
- The Death of Rasputin, by Bill Bailey. - What's Bill doing? I can't move my head.
Oh.
You've got your own private cyborg show there. Very honoured.
Actually, this... this collar is pushing up and starting to hurt my ears.
It's pushing up; I'm going to have sore under-ears.
- Yeah. - Your ears are very big, aren't they?
They're showing off to their full majesty in that outfit, I have to say.
- You're going bald. - Yeah...
- Really, children. - I was trying to pay him a compliment without mentioning the--
How is that a compliment? "You've got big ears." I know I've got big ears!
- You've got huge ears! - Yes! - You look like a pork butcher from the 1950s!
Children, we must be of the Christmas spirit. Come on, now, remember?
- He started it. - Remember the date!
But one of the theories which has been put forward is the oddity of the fact that until her son died of haemophilia,
there'd been no haemophilia in the Hanover family or her family at all.
So either one of her parents had a 1-in-50,000 gene mutation, or she was the illegitimate daughter of a haemophiliac. So...
- I'm looking forward to next week's Heat magazine! - Yeah!
- Oh, yeah! - Absolutely.
They're gonna go crazy with that little tidbit, aren't they?
Yes. Queen Victoria was responsible for the fact that all the royal families of Europe carry the gene for haemophilia.
Now, at last, you may think, in the "E" series, we finally come to a question that you've all been waiting for on "erotica".
- Oh. - What kind of behaviour was forbidden in the Secret Museum of pornography?
- Was it-- - Flash photography.
- Flash photography! Very good. - Erm...
Was it fisting?
- Three innocent little words that somehow... - I'm sorry, your majesty.
"Was it fisting?" Queen Victoria just said "Was it fisting?"
The Queen would like to know, was it fisting?
- From what I know of myself, Queen Victoria was well up for it, wasn't she? She was! She was! - She had about 28 children.
She had a lot of children, and when she was a young girl, she was full of laughter and fun and loved dancing and music and was quite sportive, and, erm, yeah.
She wrote saucy letters sometimes. I mean, not saucy, but, I mean, you know. She showed she had a twinkle in her eye occasionally, I suppose.
Who's Frank Lampard looking at through that keyhole?
- Is that how you view the Museum of Pornography? - Not... No, to be honest. - It's a tiny, tiny museum... fit into a keyhole.
[as David Frost] "As we go through . . . the keyhole."
He can't do many, but they're good!
So, we come... to come back to the Museum of Pornography. To something that is forbidden--
- No school trips. - No.
- Well... It was opened in, erm, Naples. - "You can't have your packed lunch near the dildos, kids."
- It's gotta be something to do with Catholicism or the Mafia. - Not that, actually. What were they discovering...
- ...'round about the early part of the 19th century near Naples? - Pompeii. - Pompeii.
They were excavating Pompeii, and they discover... The first thing they...
Almost everything they discovered about Pompeii was pornographic. The first thing they found was a great, er,
statue of Pan shagging a goat, and then the whole thing is festooned with... - Filth.
- ...filthy graffiti, disgusting, erm... - Absolute filth.
You know... Graffiti just saying, about, "Ericus has the... the biggest knob in Pompeii,"
and then someone else writes underneath, "It's not as big as my brother's", and someone else...
- It was just... every... A clearly sexually-vibrant place. - Isn't not as crude in Latin, is it?
- Somehow not. - It doesn't make you go, "Oh, grow up." Someone's just written, "WANK".
- Or... Or they use... - "Wankacetum!"
Yeah! Yeah, so they got all the sexy stuff, as they saw it, and they put it into a museum of pornography.
Have a look at some of the most lovely buttocks ever committed to marble.
It's known as the Venus Kallipygos. The Venus with the beautiful bottom.
That is a very nice arse. Even I, who am no expert on the female anatomy, would say that is a very beautiful bottom.
She's looking around... "Are you gonna... You are gonna, like, stick... put a whole lot of clothes there, aren't you, when you finish this?"
So has she come out of the toilet and not noticed her skirt's caught in her ear?
According to Dr David Holmes, who is a psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, there is a formula to describe the beauty of a bottom.
- Is there? - Yeah. It is S plus C, times B plus F, all over T minus V.
That mean "nice arse; shame about your face"?
S stands for "overall shape", C is "circularity", B is "bounciness", F is "firmness", er...
- ...T is "skin texture", and V is the ratio of hips... hips to waist. - He sounds like a right old perv, doesn't he?
- He does a bit. - "I've just been noticing your bottom, and I've done some sums. Er... I have to say that, er..."
- He probably cracked the formula! - "Absolutely. It's perfect."
Well, there you are, and that's bottoms for you. And... And, er, what you weren't allowed to do you haven't told me yet.
- Oh. - Comment on the... Become aroused.
- Well, arousal was included. - Talk. Say anything.
- Laugh. - Laugh.
Laugh. If you laughed, you were ejected. That's the point.
- You were supposed to take a serious, scholarly appreciation of this as antiquity. And if you either laughed or became aroused-- - [Italian accent] No laughink!
- Yeah! - [Italian accent] No laughink!
[Italian accent] Laughink! "And the big e-stiff cock is-a not funny! Is not funny, all right?"
[Italian accent] You! You smiling: You gonna laugh now? No!
Anyway. Erm... Even today, you cannot go to that...
It was bricked up in the late 19th century, the... the Pornography Museum part of...
It's still there in Naples, but you have to get a special permit, and you can only go in with a guide.
But the fact is, anyway, to return to our theme, that the Secret Museum of erotica contained all the smutty stuff from Pompeii,
but you weren't allowed to laugh at it. That's the point.
So, erm, why was it easier to put your boots on in the dark between 1600 and 1800?
Well, people's eyes were better in the dark, weren't they? There wasn't so much electric lights.
People were virtually like owls then; big eyes. We were a lot shorter then, but massive eyes.
It was easier to put your boots on in 1600 than it was in 1400, though. Why is that?
- Zips. - No.
Was there a big drop in boot thieves around 1600?
- No. - They were luminous!
- Not luminous. - Were they both the same, so--
They were both the same! Well done, Jo Brand. That's exactly it.
There were no lefts or rights for those 200 years, so it didn't matter which one you picked up; you could just put your boots on.
Before that, you had lefts and rights in boots, and then after that, you had lefts and rights, as we do to this day.
- So what prompted the sudden, er... - Well, it's heels, you see, because they couldn't really make heeled boots...
- Ah. - ...in... in a left and right shape. It was just too difficult. But that's the reason.
So in the dark, you could just shove on whichever boot came first and know that it wouldn't matter.
Did it go... Did it extend to the whole... the whole of life? Left and right?
There was no left and right in anything. They just abandoned the notion of left and right--
for 200 years. "Where's it?" "Up there! I don't know."
Yeah. We have an expert who'd been telling us about this, who comes from the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery,
and Rebecca Shawcross is the "Shoe Heritage Officer". She gave us all this information.
- She's an officer of shoe heritage? - "Shoe heritage officer."
- Does she get to carry a gun? - I hope so. I would imagine. I'm sure she would!
- Keswick Pencil Museum. That's... That's pretty good. - Is it in Keswick?
- 2 Bs, and 2 Hs, and everything in-between. - Exactly. And there's places you can draw... Oh, it's brilliant.
In Reykjavik, there's a penis museum.
- There is! I'm not making it up. - Whose penises do they have in there, then?
- I've not visited it. - A blue whale? - Yeah.
- Perhaps a blue whale's penis. - Yeah. It's different species, exactly. That's the point. - Yeah.
- I wonder if Björk's got anything to do with it. - She does the audio commentary as you're going around.
Then you see a penis, and she goes: -
- Well, erm, yeah. - Gift shop would be good.
For 200 years... For 200 years, and for 200 years only, really,
left boots were exactly the same as right boots. Now, what are these?
- Hm? What are they? - Oh, these are--
- Elephant shoes. - Pop star Daleks?
Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
- Ahh! - Ah!
You've got the elephant. Absolutely right.
Bloody hell, I said "elephant", and I didn't wave my elephant!
- I can never get it right! - Yeah, I think we can be kind. As it's Christmas. We'll be kind to Tiny Tim.
Is that just after the elephant was frightened?
Jumped out of its boots!
Why do you make shoes for an elephant?
Because they're very sensitive in captivity. Elephants--especially elephants that work in circus
and things like that--they can get terrible abrasions on the soft underpart. They have very soft areas under their... If...
- But I've never, ever seen an elephant with any shoes on. Have you? - Would you like to?
- Yeah. - I would love to.
- I will show you. There is in fact... - I'd love it if one came in.
- Aww. - Jo, how could you turn that down?
- Yeah! - Would they be difficult to put on? Would the elephant be quite, you know--
They would have been much easier to put on between 1400 and 1600.
They... They were tailor-made. Each one was made specifically for each particular foot of each particular elephant. There you are.
And now, joy to the world! 'Tis the season to deck the halls with General Ignorance, so fingers on buzzers if you please.
Let's start with a cover-up. Why did Victorians put covers on the legs of pianos?
["The Holly and the Ivy"] Jo got there first.
Because they thought they were too rude. [Forfeit: Klaxons sound.]
Almost... Almost the words we had in mind. Exactly.
To... To... In case they were warped.
Kind of that. "To protect them" is the answer. This...
This idea that Victorians were prudish about piano legs or furniture legs is...
is actually nonsense. What's quite interesting about the whole piano leg thing is that Victorians laughed at Americans,
'cause they thought Americans were prudish, and that it was an American thing to cover piano legs out of modesty.
'Cause Americans are extremely puritanical. Well, they were founded by Puritans, in some ways, the culture, wasn't it? - Yes.
I mean, they changed words like "titbit" to "tidbit", 'cause it's... you know...
- "Bottom" to "fanny", strangely! - Yeah.
No, the point is that Victorians never covered their piano legs at all.
- Noo. - It was just to protect them from being damaged, if they did.
Why did the Victorians legislate against male homosexuality, but not against lesbian--
Oh, Christ. Oh, whoa! That's, er... Moving on. Moving on.
Why... Why... Oh, dear. Why... Why didn't they legislate against lesbianism in the same--
["The Holly and the Ivy"] Yes.
'Cause I, Queen Victoria, simply didn't believe that women got up to such scurrilous activities.
[Forfeit: Klaxons sound.]
Yes, it's... You're really going right for them, aren't you?
- How did you get that one? - Merry Christmas to me!
No, the fact is, there's no truth in that odd rumour that Queen Victoria had them cut out any reference to lesbianism
because she thought it didn't exist. Even if she questioned the law, she would have sparked, virtually, a revolution.
She had no power whatsoever to have any influence on any legislation. It would have been completely unthinkable.
Do you know the name of the law? It was in 1885. It was called the Labouchère Amendment.
The first famous case of anybody being sentenced under the Labouchère Amendment was Oscar Wilde, who got two years' hard labour.
And in fact, the judge said that, "You have been the center of a circle of young men; it is impossible to doubt it.
This is the worst case I have ever tried. It is my duty to sentence you to two years at hard labour,
the maximum the law allows: In my opinion, nothing like enough." And a week earlier--
'cause he said this was the worst case he had ever tried... A week earlier, he'd tried a case of child murder.
- Right. - That's the kind of attitude they had there.
- Would you say he was a closet? - He may have been! But it was an extraordinary thing, though.
Of course, the Wilde case obviously precipitated an immense change in British cultural life, in many ways.
Soldiers, like your good self, used to walk arm-in-arm in Hyde Park. They had done for a hundred years.
- Yeah. - Men would walk arm-in-arm, or arm linked, as they do on the continent, still.
And as soon as the Wilde case came up, everyone... Just... Men stood, exactly. Never touching each other.
- There was a... It was a whole different way of behaving-- - That's 'cause they...
That's because the bloke used to nick my medals. I used to have hundreds of medals; only have one. And that was from a Quality Street tin.
Legislation against lesbianism seems never to have been considered. Certainly, Victoria would have had no power to block it, had it been.
Er, you would have noticed, that there is that rare thing that we're enjoying at the moment,
and that's a Christmas show that hardly mentions Christmas. We've had the odd mention of it, but...
I want to know what Winterval is. Does "Winterval" mean anything to you? Have you ever...
["The Holly and the Ivy"] - Yes.
Political correctness gone mad! [Forfeit: Klaxons sound.]
Oh, I can't believe it! I do not believe it! Jo Brand!
It's all getting a bit weird now. Jo's becoming psychic.
Is there a special award, if you get every one of these...
- There should be! - Then they're all completely null and void!
But, er, no. There is... It's this typically British thing.
I guarantee, reading a newspaper today, 'round about Christmas,
there will be some tiresome old fart who will have written about, "Yeah, there aren't any more office parties.
And for political correctness reasons, there are no decorations in offices. And...
And they're calling it 'Winterval' so as not to offend minority religions." It's absolute bollocks.
It just isn't true. 95% of all offices are decorated. There are more office parties year-on-year, every year.
And 'Winterval' was simply a commercial, er, campaign--
- Bloody hell! - What was that? - Yeah! There it goes.
- Something just ran across there really fast. - It was a... I think it was a velociraptor!
Erm... Well, that's the point. It was a promotional campaign. It was nothing to do with--
- I remember the Birmingham City Council. - Birmingham City Council?
My brother's was on the phone to me; he's going, "Yeah, bloody Birmingham City Council, and 'Winterval', all PC gone mad..."
And it's all nonsense. It wasn't anything to do with that. It was a campaign for local businesses.
It was just a thing when, you know, from November to January--
- There it is! - I don't see it.
You're very upset by that, aren't you?
It's... It's running all the way around the building! It's just going across... He'll be back in a minute.
- Oh, dear. So... - Just... we'll wait for it. - Okay.
Could be ages.
I don't want to look at that one now, 'cause I'll miss it.
- Forget it! He's not coming. - Don't change channels. - Hey!
He's all the way out, on the South Bank...
You know, there'll be... there'll be people watching this going, "Christmas ain't what it used to be, I'll tell you that!
We used to have the Morecambe and Wise show! Angela Rippon tap dancing! Now we're watching a strange animal scurrying away!"
- Ahh, it's the little things in life. - It is.
The point is, despite what you're probably going to read in your newspapers, written by some whorey-borey old...
It's your fault for reading the Daily Mail! Let me put it that way.
Yeah. Contrary... Contrary to stories carried in the papers every year at Christmas,
Winterval is not a PC attack on Christmas Day by the City of Birmingham or anyone else.
It... It was simply a promotional campaign that they ran for one year... eleven years ago!
Lastly. Not so much a question as a piece of solid, practical advice.
What's the best way to stop your children peeking at their presents before Christmas Day?
["The Holly and the Ivy"] Yes, Jo Brand.
- Don't get 'em any. - Ah!
- I got it. - Yeah.
You do what I do, which is buy all your presents on Christmas Eve. From a petrol station.
- You really are the spirit of Christmas, aren't you. - Yeah. And everyone's face when you open the barbecue fuel.
Ooh! Special... Haribo! Lovely.
Blind them.
Blind them? Well, that would certainly do it.
- Yeah. A little extreme, perhaps. - When they climb up to the top of the wardrobe, just...
- Right. - Bury them in the garden?
Well, this is a story from last year. In Rock Hill, in South Carolina.
A mother convinced the Rock Hill police to arrest her twelve-year-old son,
er, after he unwrapped a Christmas present early. The police came to the house, and he was arrested.
- "Right, that's it. I'm callin' the po-lice." - "--the police." Exactly that!
- Was it a gun he'd unwrapped? - I think... I think we may understand a little more about the family
when I say he was a twelve-year-old son; the mother was 27 years old, which means...
- Oh, my God. - ...she must have been fifteen, I think, when she... ? - Fourteen in conception.
And it was a Nintendo Game Boy Advance that was under the tree, and his great-grandmother
--who was only 63--erm, specifically told him not to open this particular popular handheld game console. And, erm--
- How old is the boy's wife? - Yeah. Yeah.
Go and help his wife, who was in labour!
Anyway, "He took it without permission. He wanted it; he just took it," said the great-grandmother,
and so they called the police. Er, he was released the same day, but apparently, "he showed no remorse".
I'd love to be around their Christmas dinner. What a... What a happy day that would be!
"Where's the cranberry? You forgot the cranberry." [American southern accent] "I'm dialin' 911! You bitch! Why...
Oh, dear. Well. My goodness. Erm, that seems to be it.
So, speaking of remorse, and not showing it... it's time for the scores.
Which tonight, I think, er, should be in old money. So, in last place--it can come as no surprise...
With minus thirty-three farthings... Jo Brand!
And in third place, with minus eight pennies, Sean Lock!
In second place, with eight bob, Bill Bailey!
Do my eyes deceive me, ladies and gentlemen? It can only be Christmas. Our winner, with a grand sum of ten guineas, Alan Davies! Whoa!
So, the wind of change blowing about our ears; it's time to pull down the flag for the last time in this series,
and to say good night from Mister Bailey, Master Lock, Miss Brand, my rascal Davies, my humble and obedient self,
and from the show on which the sun never sets. Very happy Christmas from me, and good night.
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