APPLAUSE
WHISTLING
Goo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ood
evening, good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI, where tonight we're looking at G for Gravity,
assisted by our weighty contestants and of course my OWN gravitas.
Distorting space-time for us tonight, we have four massive stars.
A gigantic pulsar, Rich Hall!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
A huge red giant, Bill Bailey!
APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING
A colossal supernova, Barry Humphries!
APPLAUSE, CHEERING AND WHISTLING
And a hypothetical black hole, Alan Davies!
APPLAUSE AND WHOOPING
And tonight, their buzzers are all weighty. Rich goes...
OBJECT PLUMMETS TO EARTH...
Aw, man... ..AND LANDS WITH A CLANG
Weighty, you see? And Barry's goes...
SOLDIERS' FEET CLUMP...
'Wait for it... Wait for it!' FEET STAND TO ATTENTION
And Bill goes...
SPEAK-YOUR-WEIGHT MACHINE: 'Your weight is 12 stone...
'two pounds, four ounces.'
You wish(!) LAUGHTER
Sorry!
How dare you. Sorry...
Oh... The new cockiness of the recently svelte. No, no.
And Alan goes...
BOING!
'Yaaaaaargh...'
I do, actually.
So, let's... LAUGHTER
..let's drop right in. My first question is, how can you get from here
to ANYWHERE on Earth
in exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds?
SOLDIERS' FEET CLUMP 'Wait for it!'
I meant to say, I like that tie very much.
LAUGHTER Why, thank you!
And coming from a man with your colour sense, that makes me so happy.
I was hoping I wouldn't be overdressed tonight.
42 minutes and 12 seconds. You can get to anywhere.
Through the Earth.
Ooh. Ah... Develop.
LAUGHTER Develop that thought.
It's a theoretical rather than practical... All right. Burrow then.
Burrowing... Yup.
..through the Earth, directly.
You'd have to be more vigorous than that. LAUGHTER
Well, that's just getting the... That's just getting the first soil off.
All right! LAUGHTER
You've got to start somewhere. You wouldn't start like that, would you?
Well, what speed would you have to go, to do it in 42 minutes?
At the speed that is determined by...
Gravity. Gravity, by maximum velocity.
The idea is that if you were to tunnel, straight through...
You mean, if there was a tube and you jumped down it,
it would take you 42 minutes to come out the other side? Exactly.
But would you drop... I'd like it if you dropped out the other end.
Yeah, you would accelerate all the way to the middle... and DECELERATE out.
So you'd JUST make it. You'd be in Australia.
Ah! That's the point...
I was going to say. Yeah.
But actually you could do the tunnel from London to Moscow. That's why I said to ANYWHERE from here.
Gravity operates at all angles. It doesn't just operate from the north to south, as it were.
Would you...? You could...
So from London to Paris
would be the same length of time... Yeah.
It would have to be the same time.
If I dug a tunnel, I could get from here to there in 12 seconds.
Yeah. There, you're right. The other 42 minutes is just...
waitin' for your luggage. LAUGHTER
But the Antipodes thing's interesting.
An antipode is an exact opposite point on the Earth, they don't have to be north-south.
There are antipodes are from one part of the EQUATOR to another...
I thought we were New Zealand.
Well, the interesting thing is we're nowhere-LAND,
and there was a contest
to make an Earth sandwich.
For someone to put
a piece of bread on one part of the Earth...
LAUGHTER
..and the others would put the piece of bread on the exact antipode...
There are not many choices. New Zealand was one piece of bread...
Iceland. Not Iceland...
Little further south. Tewkesbury. Spain.
Spain is the right answer! Thank you.
Ah. Brilliant, very good. LAUGHTER
But there was immediate controversy because they used baguettes...
LAUGHTER
..and so no-one was sure if they were oriented in the same direction. It might have been a cross shape -
you can't have a sandwich with baguettes crossing, can you? But anyway...
How do you get to be involved in these competitions? LAUGHTER
I fear the answer is you have to be Canadian.
They were Canadian brothers called Jonathan and Duncan.
But, anyway, they could have chosen Indonesia to... Oh. Erm... America.
You're going sideways rather than... South America, it's Colombia.
But one of the most interesting ones from a practical point of view, if you're a religionist,
would be the antipode of Mecca.
The exact opposite of Mecca is a tiny little atoll in the South Pacific...
BILL: Christmas Island.
Tematangi Atoll. It's also known as Captain Bligh's Atoll.
That's actually a photograph, amazingly. It's actually got a huge lagoon in it.
And if you were a Muslim, you could face any direction there and you'd be facing Mecca.
Because it's the antipode.
We were talking about the gravity train, weren't we? The idea of going through...
Is it feasible, then? Has Richard Branson already figured out some way of...?
It's not feasible on Earth. On the Moon it might be, because the Moon has no molten core.
Though, oddly enough, it would be 53 minutes.
Which moon are we talking about? Ah! Mmm. There's a sore point.
LAUGHTER
Just our usual, friendly moon. The one we look at.
Oddly enough, that would be 53 minutes to get through.
What?! Why would it take longer to get through the moon...
The gravity is so feeble. Yeah.
Yeah. And just, really... What's the point of it, really?
LAUGHTER
Ehhh... The antipodes are not that exciting, really.
"I'm on the moon and I'm on the other side..." Just as boring as... Exactly.
What, though, is interesting is who do you think worked out the 42 minutes and 12 seconds?
Patrick Moore.
No. Um... QI researcher.
LAUGHTER
I know. Alan Titchmarsh.
Keeps digging the garden, er... LAUGHTER
Charlie Dimmock.
Where are they now, eh?
Down there. Oh!
What's amazing is that it was a series of letters between Isaac Newton and Robert Hook
in the 17th century. They worked out the exact mathematics and it's not changed,
it's still as true as it was then.
You know the film, Brazil, where they put things in tubes and never know where they go?
Put it in a tube and it pops out in the antipodes...
You're too young, young scampy grace, to remember the change machines in shops.
Ah! You remember those? You're a scampy grace.
It was wonderful. What was the one in...Gamages, was it?
That's right. You gave the money - real money, no credit cards...
That's it.
..and a very nice girl, in black, with BO, she'd...
LAUGHTER
She took the money and wrapped it in the docket, it was called a docket...
Oh, yeah. And she put it in a cylinder...
Looked like a milkshake. ..it was immediately sucked into some other part of the store.
It was a vacuum, a sort of "wh-doop!"
So you put the fiver in there, put the docket in which said
you've bought something worth £3 7s 6d,
and there's the five pounds, and it would go... POP!
..or that "shhloop!" noise, as you say, and they'd wait there and chat...
They were subject to abuse, those machines. Were they?
LAUGHTER
Perhaps it wasn't BO after all.
AUDIENCE GROANS AND LAUGHS
Just aren't enough tubes, are there?
Are there not enough tubes in the world?
Things that work mechanically are kind of larky and fun.
Yeah, and they'd suck that big sucking sound.
I would like to know the force that an airline toilet...
LAUGHTER
It's frightening.
I had to cover my ears.
If you mis-timed it, your intestines would go
straight down and shoot out...! LAUGHTER
If you're sitting on it, and you've sealed round the rim...
You would lose your guts. You can lose your innards. Yup.
I've heard of that happening. Wow.
There's a guy where I live in Montana, cos we have prairie dogs,
and prairie dogs are like, that big.
They're cute, like a cross between a meerkat and a squirrel. But they dig tunnels,
and if you don't want to shoot them with a .22 this guy will come around and suck them out,
with a grain elevator. On the back of a truck.
A big Howitzer kind of nozzle, and he knows how many are in the tunnel,
he'll go, "There's four in that tunnel,"
and he turns this thing on and it goes "thp, thp, thp, thp."
The most amazing sound in the world.
Then they come through and they have this '80s blow-dry look,
they've just been sucked through at, like, 80 miles per hour,
they're like miniature werewolves...
And I said to him... So they don't get shredded? Not shredded.
It's not like Steve Buscemi in Fargo? No. But they are looking at you
like you owe them an explanation. LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I said to the guy, I said to the guy, "Doesn't this give them brain damage?"
And he went, "Yeah, of course."
But it doesn't kill them, that's the humane alternative.
I said, "What do you do with them?" He said, "I take them across the river and let them go
"and then I wait three, four days and work THAT side of the river."
To return to the original question,
if you drive a tunnel straight through the Earth,
a gravity train would take you where you want to be
in exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
Aristotle, as I'm sure you all know, thought that heavier objects
fell faster than lighter objects.
And it seems an intuitive and correct idea.
But Galileo worked out that they didn't. How did he do that?
BUZZER: 'Wait for it!'
He dropped two cannonballs off the Leaning Tower Of Pisa.
Ah! Well, did he? KLAXON
I'm sorry, my love. The reality is that he worked out
that this was the case from his head.
He then did some experiments with ramps and things that proved it
to be true. What's heavier, a ton of gold or a ton of feathers?
Exactly, that kind of thing. But he's saying is half a ton...
BILL: What's that?
Half a ton of gold... Gold and feathers?
It sounds like an Elton John party request.
Of course, the answer is that one of them IS heavier,
because gold is measured in troy weight,
rather than avoirdupois, they're different.
So a ton of gold is different to a ton of feathers.
Sorry! LAUGHTER
..I believe. I'm sorry.
What Galileo said was that half a ton of coal falls at the same speed
as a ton of coal. That's the point. Falls at the same speed.
If you let go at the same time,
they'll both hit the ground at the same time.
How do you get a ton of coal in the air? Indeed.
Galileo's reasoning was thusly wise.
He said that if you had a heavy object and you believed Aristotle,
it falls fast and the lighter one slow.
So, suppose you attach the light one to the heavy one.
Well, the heavy one falls faster than the light one
so it would make the light one fall faster.
Or the light one would hold the heavy one up
cos it's going slower. So by attaching them together,
you would make it go both faster and slower. That's impossible.
The only explanation is that they both travel at the same speed.
He then proved it. On Apollo 15, Scott, the astronaut,
thought he'd try and see if Galileo was right
and we have a clip of him doing it.
I'll drop the two of them here and hopefully
they'll hit the ground at the same time.
How about that? Mr Galileo was correct in his findings.
Isn't that cool?
Astronaut David Scott proving Galileo right with a hammer and a feather.
But Galileo established it by the power of his own thought.
Newton worked out the laws of gravitation and published them
in 1687, which was just 100 years before les freres Montgolfier,
the brothers Montgolfier, astounded the world with the first balloon ascents.
It was only one year after that that dashing Old Etonian George Biggin
and Letitia Sage were in a hydrogen balloon
and they took off from Southwark and I want to know
how far did George Biggin go?
Not to Biggin Hill, surely?
BUZZER: 'Wait for it!'
All the way.
Eh-h! Oddly enough, that may be the right answer.
It was one of the most extraordinary things you could imagine.
A balloon ascent was an astonishing sight.
150,000 people turned out to see the first one.
The Italian who brought ballooning to England
was called Lunardi. He put these two people in and thought it was probably too many,
so he jumped out just as it was taking off and left this couple
on their own, these complete first-time balloonists.
Were they tethered?
No. They took off... Did they just keep going then?
It became one of the sensations of the age because...
The Mile-High Club... They were the first members of the Mile-High Club.
They were seen, as they were going over Piccadilly, she was seen on all-fours.
Was it a glass-bottom balloon then?!
She claimed later she was fastening up the opening of the balloon...
Yeah, that old chestnut! "Me, officer? No, officer.
"Opening in the balloon, officer." Sandbags...
They got as far as 14 miles, as far as Harrow,
shouting down using a speaking trumpet to people below,
who must have been rather astonished. Slack-jawed yokels
from the village of Finchley.
"Work, you idle buggers!"
There became a great scandal about it and it became the issue of the age,
whether or not you could do it.
One of the most remarkable social records of that age
is the wager books. The betting books of the great London clubs,
particularly Brooks's and White's.
People used to bet on anything. The books still exist in their handwriting.
There is one here. Lord Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Lord Derby
to receive 500 guineas
whenever his Lordship "plays hospitals" with a woman in a balloon 1,000 yards from the Earth.
For "plays hospitals with" I think you can insert your own...word.
So, there you have it. Did he pay up then? Is that in the book?
We don't... "1,000 yards!" "Oh, you were only 900 yards."
It's true, they had no way of measuring.
What did they use for an altimeter? They dropped things and saw how long it took to hit the floor? No.
Barometers existed. There was different pressure at different levels.
It was quite accurate. A barometer was quite a hefty piece of kit, was it?
Yeah, you'd have to hang it up and tap it with the stem of your pipe.
As with flight, as soon as a new technology like this emerges,
as we saw with aeroplanes later,
there are various targets, you want to be the first person to do this...
We've seen the first person to "play hospitals" onboard a balloon,
but one of the great things is to cross the... Channel?
..Channel, exactly. With aeroplanes... M25?
Not the M25!
The Channel was an extraordinary business. There was a Frenchman,
called Blanchard, and his American backer.
But they hated each other and they loved their own countries.
So, the Frenchman... Can you imagine a Frenchman not playing fair?
Hard to imagine(!) Try and picture it.
He carried lead weights on a belt, this Blanchard,
so that he could claim to the American, "There's only room for one of us, unfortunately.
"I will have to do this record alone!"
The American saw the weight and made him take off his ballast
and then they accidentally dropped each other's national flags
out of the balloon. And then the balloon started to drop over the Channel too early
and so they threw out their food, their instruments, all... Obviously, the sand bags.
Then they took their jacket off,
they took their trousers off, then they peed and pooed out of the basket.
They're approaching cliffs and they're dropping, so they have a poo
and they just get over it, like that!
They land in the trees and the record is made.
It's not a very dignified way to break a record, with your trousers round your ankles.
No. "We've nearly done it! The press are here to meet us."
"Oh, dear."
One last push.
AUDIENCE GROAN
Anyway, that's Mr Biggin and Mrs Sage.
They went, as Barry correctly said, all the way,
from St George's Fields to Harrow. We won't have any truck with gossip here on QI.
So, what do you say to a gossypiboma?
BUZZER: 'Wait for it!'
Mind your own business.
KLAXON Ohhh.
We predicted that, I'm afraid. You've got a nice score building up, Barry. It's good.
Gossypiboma.
Bo..bo.. Boma? Is it a creature? I know what it is. Do you?
It's something a surgeon leaves behind inside you after an operation.
Oh, Barry, that is brilliant, that is the right answer.
APPLAUSE
That's exactly what it is. It's cotton or lint or sponge...
Or a mobile phone... Or indeed a mobile phone.
It comes from the Latin for cotton, gossypi, like a piece of cotton.
Cotton wool is the most basic one. In America, 1,500 cases a year
of things being left inside... Really?! That's cos a lot of people eat fridge magnets in America.
Cos they look like cookies or chocolate.
When they try and open 'em, all the tools just...
..shoot off the tray and...
It's a damn good theory...
And they stick to the sides of mobile homes.
54% of foreign bodies are left in the abdomen or pelvis,
22% in the vagina, 7.5 % in the chest, 17% in other places,
like the spinal canal, brain and face.
Do you think they do it for a bet?
What, the surgeons?
Yeah. Then they get more work, don't they? Getting it out again.
They probably get sued, though, I would imagine.
There was one chap who had a six-inch metal surgical clamp
taken out and they realised he'd already had an operation to take out a clamp.
He'd had two left in him and when they took the one out, they never thought to look for another one.
Extraordinary behaviour. Train set...
What would you imagine were the main risk factors? Why is it likely to happen?
There is a protocol whereby you count all the equipment, so why would it happen?
They do good work and they think, I want someone to recognise my work,
so I'll leave my forceps in here.
Apparently... People will go, oh, this is the work of Dr Bonner.
This is clearly a Bonner.
The reason they give is emergency operations that have not been planned,
and unplanned changes in the operation.
And patients with higher body mass index.
Fat people. They lose their stuff...
They put it down and...
It's sucked in, I don't know?
"There's a nurse in there!"
"Thank God you're here!"
This is where we need Hugh Laurie on the show.
He would explain, exactly. He would explain...
if the script was put in front of him. He's a gibbering idiot without it.
No! He isn't!
APPLAUSE
No, no, no.
There are specific words, the most common is gossypiboma,
which comes from the fact that it's cotton, the Latin gossypium
is cotton. But if it's a surgical instrument, it's called a "foreign-body granuloma".
Oh. Yes. The cheek of the surgeons is that they call it retaining,
as if somehow it's the patient's fault.
"The patient retained this object while unconscious on the slab.
"Nothing to do with us."
"His pancreas grabbed it."
"He wouldn't give it back. We had no choice but to leave it there."
There you are. Anyway...
I'm disturbed by this picture, it's really disturbing me.
It's like backstage at a puppet theatre. "Glove puppets, quickly!"
It's a lady with invisible breasts.
LAUGHTER
We like the thought of it. Well, anyway,
a gossypiboma is a piece of cotton left inside you by a surgeon.
What's the use of an underwater weighing machine?
BUZZER: '12 stone, 4 ounces.'
There you are!
I weigh a bit less underwater. Speak your weight.
Why do you have an underwater weighing machine?
Whales? Whales' weighing station. Oh!
KLAXON
He said the "whale weigh" station.
This is fabulous, you're thinking...
I just hope I get the worst marks because losing is the new winning.
I have to say, you're bidding fair.
Don't they weigh your mass body fat by floating you in a tub...?
Yeah. And what is a body mass index, do you remember?
Your height divided by your weight... Your weight divided by your height, squared.
More or less. But it's very faulty.
If you were very muscular, the BMI would argue that you were overweight
and obese and far too fat and you could be immensely fit.
Also, if you're a marathon runner and you have that slow twitch muscle as they're called,
then you'd be starving and considered malnutrited or whatever the word is.
So when they want to make really, really accurate measurements
of body mass index, they go underwater. It's considered the gold standard for body fat measurement.
What percentage fat should you be under not to be obese? Chubby.
20? Under 20. Brilliant. How did you know that?
20. No, you're fine!
No, that's just a baggy thing.
LAUGHTER
With women, should women have more or less body fat? More.
More, yes. They can be th... 300.
LAUGHTER
30%. 30%... I saw one in Budgens the other day that was definitely 300.
All she had in her basket was a massive, massive bar of chocolate.
Really serious expression on her face.
When I'm in Norfolk, there's nothing I like better than
having a good old bicycle ride round the Broads. That's not true.
You and I do it together.
LAUGHTER
Such larks we have, don't we? Forgot me hat again, don't believe it.
Home in time for lemonade and buns.
Isn't it funny, the faster I get, the more I stay stable,
but if I go very slowly, I wobble and fall off? I wonder why.
He said, "I know, Stephen, let's make that a question on the next QI."
So that's what I'm doing. Why, when you slow down, do you become less stable on a bike?
What is the physics of that? I have a better question. Why do you have a Hitler haircut?
Why is Alan wearing a hairnet? You need to put a little moustache under that nose.
That would be frightening.
Yeah. I dressed as Hitler once. I did a school play,
I played Arturo Ui, The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui.
I was Ui and I actually dyed my hair black, cut it in the Hitler style,
for the authenticity of the role, not cos I'm a Nazi!
And my mum said, "Oh, now, that DOES look nice."
LAUGHTER
"You look very smart."
I looked like Hitler!
Mum couldn't see any fault in that. "Well, you look very smart. You should keep it like that."
Oh, mothers! Why do we wobble?
I wobble because I'm scared to death when I'm on a bike. I wobble
even when I'm going very fast. What kind of bike is it?
Is it a penny farthing, by any chance?
LAUGHTER
It's whatever I can find in the street and hasn't got a lock on it.
You bastard, was it you, then?
That happened in Cambridge, it was sad.
They tried this nice, noble idea that they would have city bikes with a special number on
and you saw one leaning on a lamppost, you got on it and you bicycle to wherever you want to be
and left it outside and there were common exchange bicycles.
The perfect socialist dream, the Utopian ideal of free bicycles...
Two days, I think it lasted, before... A truck arrived from Oxford. Yeah!
The odd thing about it, bicycles are a pretty ancient invention by modern transport standards,
but it was only in 1970 that the physics of them was understood.
Is it there's more force working on you if you're going slowly?
So you're being pulled from other sides... People thought it was gyroscopic pull,
or a centrifugal one, in some way.
But it was demonstrated by a fellow called David Jones in 1970
that in fact it's not that, it's torque.
The other thing, it's called the caster effect, like a supermarket trolley.
The fact that the back wheel is a trailing wheel, it self-centres, it rights the whole thing,
as it trails along. I always get the trolley with the stiff wheel.
They're horrible. Ugh! Airports and supermarkets, I always get that trolley.
Get that, yeah...
I veer into old ladies with it.
Crash into displays.
I do that and blame it on the wheel.
"Pfft! Oh! Sorry. Bad wheel."
So, here's a thing. If you want to go left, you turn the handlebars of your bike slightly to the right.
Motorcyclists know this as a rule, but...
Counter-steering. Counter-steering, exactly. It's very quick, it's done automatically,
people don't know they're doing it. That's why kerbs are so difficult.
If you're close to a kerb, in order to steer away from the kerb, you have to steer into it first.
Otherwise you fall over. It's weird. It's an automatic thing people do. There's a way of testing it.
You're coasting along, take your left hand off... OK?
And you push the handlebars with your right.
With this, you can only force the handlebars left, obviously.
But you go right.
So the reason why bicycles are stabler when they go fast
is nothing to do with gyroscopes, it's all to do with torque and castering.
When you're cycling, the more revolutions, the better.
So imagine the red dawn has come upon us, gentlemen,
and we've overcome the hated oppressors and we're happy
and we've got guns and we shoot straight up in the air as you do.
Whee! Yee-ha! Is this a good idea?
I dunno, I've often thought where do those bullets go?
They come down and hit people right on the top of the head.
Does that often happen? Yes. Unfortunately it does.
What goes up must come down.
It won't happen to the guy who shoots, cos when it gets to the top
the smallest amount of wind will... It will go about a mile away.
Not a mile, but they did an experiment on a floating platform
where they fired 500 straight up in the air. Only four landed on the platform.
The rest splashed... Four dead... I think they covered themselves...
496 splashed.
A typical 7.62mm round fired vertically would reach a height of...
What do you think? Half a mile?
Longer. 2.5km nearly.
Straight into the couple shagging in the balloon.
LAUGHTER
Of course, of course!
STEPHEN LAUGHS
Talk about coming full circle!
So it would take some 17 seconds, then another 40 seconds or so
to return to the ground at a speed of about 70 metres per second.
So this gigantic thing would penetrate and smash the skull,
very, very dangerous cranial injuries.
You won't believe this. I sort of don't believe it myself
and yet I know it's true. It's counter-intuitive.
In this hand here, I've got a bullet.
In this hand level with it, I've got a gun.
I fire the gun and let go at the same time. Which bullet hits the ground first?
The one that you dropped.
That one? Yeah. No. They both hit the ground at exactly the same time.
Bollocks. I know!
LAUGHTER
I knew you'd say that. They both have exactly the same force acting on them.
Gravity. Yes, but the momentum would defy gravity, wouldn't it?
It would just describe a different thing. The speed of the bullet?
It could go 2km, that bullet.
But incredibly fast.
And then hits the ground...
It would have to do it at the speed of light.
Has this information come from Wikipedia?
Are there any scientists here who will back me up on this?
MALE VOICE: Yes. See? Some yeses.
Or any assassins?
It does seem incredible, but it is true.
You drop a bullet, at what height?
Well, you're standing. Your height. You're standing.
And you fire a bullet. That bullet from the gun will go into the ground.
Both at the same level. There are things that could stop it. If the bullet went 5 miles per second,
it would leave the atmosphere and never fall to Earth.
If it went far enough,
the curvature of the Earth would mean it had further to fall.
But assuming the gun doesn't have that range,
what I'm saying is true. Is there any practical application?
Well, there's enormous practical applications in the laws of physics
that say this must be the case.
I suppose there's a double assassination.
You kill a person and an ant.
Yeah, there's a source of personal pride to the assassin.
It would be. The offing of some insects at the same time.
So, if you're going to stop a bullet, the very worst way to do it
is with the top of your head. Nonetheless, viva la revolucion.
Let's say we've now entered the city which we've secured,
we've rounded up all the investment bankers, but a small group of them
have holed up at the Welcome Break motorway service station
at Scratchwood, which is the first one if you go north out of London on the M1.
But we, the revolutionary cadre, the compadres, OK?
We are in the City of London but we have to stop them.
We've closed down all telecommunications, so we can't give instructions
to other members of our brigade, we have to stop them from where we are, in the City of London
and they're in Scratchwood. How's that going to happen? Eh? Fire something at them.
A Ginsters pasty.
Um, this is just a bizarre fact. Without knowing it,
they've chosen the one place to get to where you can get to them with a gun that exists,
here, now, today, not far from this studio. We're on the river.
These weapons are on the river and they are pointed...
HMS Belfast? HMS Belfast is the answer.
She's a World War II ship and it has guns.
It's the only one with these guns working.
And they are pointed at Scratchwood. If you go onboard, as a tourist, which you can,
there's a sign saying they're pointed at Scratchwood Services.
I'd love to fire them. I would SO love to fire them.
Come on!
Weird, you may know this...
It's just a weird World War II ship story as well.
This is a US ship, it was known as the luckiest ship in the US Navy
in the 1940s, cos it was the only ship that was utterly unscarred at Pearl Harbor.
It was called the USS Phoenix. It was sunk in 1982.
But it had changed its name. Do you know what to? HMS Belfast.
It was named after a person of military rank. It had been sold to another country
and named after General... Pinochet. Bel... Grano. General Belgrano.
It was sunk by the British. It remains the only warship ever sunk by a nuclear submarine.
It was sunk with most hands lost. Over 300 people. Over 300 people.
That was known as the luckiest ship in the US Navy. Extraordinary history.
You almost want to make a movie, it's just bizarre. Well, I never knew that.
So, HMS Belfast may be docked in the City of London, but its guns are trained on Scratchwood Services.
So it looks like those bankers ARE for the high jump,
and talking of the high jump, why did Fosbury flop?
Gravity.
Why did he choose to flop? That's the Fosbury Flop, why?
People previously would jump forwards over the bar
and land in a sandpit.
He jumped backwards over it and landed on a big dirigible.
These are the previous ones.
..In 1968, old Fosbury appeared with this new move
and he won the Olympic gold and now every high jumper does it.
No-one will ever go back to any other way of doing it.
There's a reason why it's so efficient, why it works so well...
In the other ones, you have to get all of yourself at that height
at the same moment, whereas he kind of took himself a bit at a time.
You're right, it's where your centre of gravity is.
And on the Fosbury Flop, your centre of gravity is actually under
the bar. And on the other ones,
it's where... That dotted line there indicates the centre of gravity.
She's just realised there's no... thing to land on.
Well, that's the other thing... "Ahhh!"
The other thing about the Fosbury Flop is it did require a move from sand to rubber cushiony things.
Yeah. If you do the scissors one, that sort of stepping one,
your centre of gravity passes 30cm OVER the bar.
So, having a lower centre of gravity, you get extra height in exchange for no extra effort.
And also these records stay for a long time.
The male one was set in '93 and the female in '87 and they still stand.
So it looks as if we're reaching the limit of how high...
Gravity's getting stronger. That could easily... Hmm?!
And long jumps too, they stay for a long time, don't they?
Who held their world long jump record from 1935 to 1960?
Not Jesse Owens? It was Jesse Owens.
You're wrong by saying "Not Jesse Owens." You get a point for that.
Is there a limbo competition like...?
It would be a good idea... Olympic limbo. Should be.
I love limbo. Are you allowed to flatten your nipples?
Snip them off?
With "duct" tape?
AUDIENCE GROAN
Tape them down. I lost... a limbo-dancing competition.
I thought you were going to say you lost a nipple! Lost a nipple...
I lost a nipple... It was a razor blade! We were playing in prison.
Russian limbo. Ahhhh!
You lost a limbo competition?
I lost...
You amaze me. Someone got lower than you? Somebody...imagine that!
Someone more limber than me.
Oh, good gracious. It was actually Lionel Blair.
Obviously a dream. He won. No!
It wasn't! "Me and Lionel Blair were having a limbo competition...
"One of my nipples fell off." I'd had a bit of blue cheese before I went to bed.
It was for charity. It was a charitable limbo-dancing competition,
it was me, Sinitta and Lionel Blair.
LAUGHTER
Surely Sinitta cleaned up? You'd think, wouldn't you?
Sinitta, Lionel, me... No. I was third, Sinitta, but Lionel...
But he's a dancer to his fingertips. He's limber. He's also about 70! But he's limber!
Anyway! So...
The revolutionary thing about Dick Fosbury's flop was that the centre of gravity was under the bar,
an innovation which means current world records are likely to stand forever.
And so to a matter of the upmost gravity. The deadweight of general ignorance. Fingers on buzzers.
Hallelujah, it's raining wine.
How big would a cloud need to be in order to dispense for me
my recommended daily limit of wine?
BUZZER: '12 stone, 4 ounces.'
LAUGHTER
Does not compute!
That's your answer, is it? Yes. OK.
All right, the size of a car. Oddly enough, you're strangely using the same metaphor that we are.
We're using a form of transport.
A VW Beetle. Bus, train... Bus is the right answer. The size of a bus.
A wine cloud would weep the same amount, 250ml,
which is your recommended daily allowance of wine.
This recommended daily allowance business is very interesting.
In Britain, it's 21 units, whatever that means, a week, I think.
In Poland, it's 12½ units.
A tiny amount. But in Canada, it's 23¾, in America 24½,
South Africa and Denmark, 31½ and guess where it's 35, Barry?
Australia!
Australia, Australia fair. Yeah.
But, our limit is 21. There's a study that found that if you drank between 21 and 30,
you would belong to a group of people that had the lowest mortality rate in Britain.
So, in other words, we're being recommended to drink too little alcohol for our health.
In fact, it's been worked out, you'd have to drink 63 units a week,
or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same death risk as a teetotaller.
I think you'll find that most people are actually making that up themselves, instinctively.
Well, the odd thing is, the guy who came up with it has admitted they made the number up.
He said, "We had to say something, so we said that."
But is the assumption not that there are other lifestyle factors
associated with the sort of person who likes a bit of wine?
Having an accident is the main problem. But, nonetheless,
statistically and actuarially, you are likely to live longer if you drink between 21 and 30.
If you're a social animal, you're less stressed.
The physical effects of alcohol may actually be beneficial in those amounts.
Anyway, if clouds were made of wine, you would limit yourself to about a bus-full a day.
An easy one. How many bullets are there in a gunslinger's revolver?
Seven. Five.
BUZZER: '12 stone, 4 ounces.'
Six.
KLAXON
They're called six guns.
There's 6 chambers. Don't they have six in and one in the spout?
No, it's quite the other way round. Five. You're right. Why five?
Gravity.
SCATTERED APPLAUSE
I used to know this, but I've forgotten.
It's safety. Wyatt Earp, who could be regarded as something of an expert,
said, "I've often been asked why five shots without reloading
"were all the top-notch gun fighter ever fired with, when his guns were chambered for six?
"The answer is safety." The hammer rested on the empty chamber, so you couldn't discharge by mistake.
There was no safety catch. There, of course, the great Clint Eastwood.
I did a thing in America once and there was an armourer,
the guy who gives you the gun, takes it away, keeps you safe and gives you blanks, or whatever.
He told me a fact. He'd been doing it since the '30s, working on Westerns.
Only two actors he ever worked with, and he worked with them all,
didn't blink when they fired a gun. This is a shot of Clint proving that he was one of them.
The gun's going off and his eyes are open, as much as they ever were.
He was one, he never blinked.
John Wayne blinked, Anthony Quinn, Gary Cooper...
BUZZER: 'Boing!'
Who was the other? Kenneth Williams.
LAUGHTER
Carry On Cowboy!
Yeah.
STEPHEN IMPERSONATES KENNETH WILLIAMS
The idea that those butch American armourers called Rusty and Randy had heard of Kenneth Williams!
"It was your own guy, Kenneth God-damn Williams."
It was actually... Westworld is probably... Yul Brynner.
Yul Brynner. Yeah. Yul Brynner never blunk.
So, anyway, the answer is they have five bullets, not six.
So, to gravy.
You know when you're cooking a steak and all that red juice flows out?
What is it? Blood. Blood.
Blood? KLAXON
Oddly enough, it isn't. You'd think it was, wouldn't you?
But it's not. It's another proteinous substance. Not haemoglobin, but myoglobin.
It's the thing that's used to operate the muscles
but it isn't actually the blood that's coming out there.
It's not anything to do with blood then? No, it's called myoglobin.
It's related. Is it artificial colouring?
Nor is it artificial, it's real. It has two distinct functions.
When muscles are used for short, fast bursts of energy, glucose from the blood provides the fuel.
For sustained activity, myoglobin is used to oxidise the fat and that provides the energy.
I didn't realise this programme was so educational.
That's our promise.
A lot of it's lies.
What, the bullets? I know it seems...but absolutely...
I'm going to test that out tonight.
So, there it is, you can put it in the gravy.
If you put "it" in "gravy," you get... Gravity.
Gravity, exactly. So we go from gravity trains to the gravy train,
the circle is complete. So it's time for the scores, ladies and gentlemen.
Oh, I say, this is really interesting. We have a tie for the lead, ladies and gentlemen.
Rich and Alan are +3!
APPLAUSE
In... In third place, with -8, Bill Bailey!
APPLAUSE
How can I be -8?
But...failing to defy gravity the way Rich and Alan did and sinking like a stone, I fear,
however, what a welcome and gorgeous pebble, what a shining, lustrous, gorgeous stone,
at -36, Barry Humphries!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
That's your lot from QI. My thanks to Barry, Rich, Bill, Alan.
I leave you with one last interesting thing about gravity.
In the early days of television, it was widely believed
that television sets weighed more when they were switched on.
The main reason for this belief apparently came from reading the manufacturer's instructions,
which warned people always to switch off their sets before attempting to move them.
Good night.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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