CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
We'd like you to draw now...
You should have a card if you haven't sawn it in half.
We'd like you to draw the world's first novelty teapot.
LAUGHTER
Alan? Sorry, it all went... There's quite a draught in here, it turns out.
What did I ask you to draw? The world's first novelty teapot. Damn, you WERE listening!
It's gone out that side, but when you asked me, it was still in the middle. Get drawing. World's first?
You mean we're inventing one or there is one we should know about?
This is nice. I like it when the class get on with... They're busy.
They're busy and quiet. Teacher sits at the front texting her friends.
Do you know that rhyme? "I'm a little teapot, short and stout, here's my handle...
"Oh, bugger, I'm a sugar bowl!" LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
How are you doing? Is anyone ready to show yet?
David, have you finished? Yeah, I have. I'm very pleased with it.
Is it an Indian goddess or a crab?
It's a novelty teapot. Oh, yes.
Sorry. I thought they have a lot of tea in India and their goddesses are a bit like that.
The best bit, the business end of a teapot is the spout,
so someone might have invented one with lots of spouts.
A multiple spouted teapot? You have to pretty much surround it with cups.
And that thing on the front that looks like an ear, which is not an ear, that's...
The handle? The handle. Does it come with a cream to treat scalding and burns?
No, but it came in a society in which the burning of various members of it
was not considered important by those in charge. Good satirical point. What have you got then, Rob?
I've come up with a thing called "handy tea".
It's a teapot... This actually, all jokes aside, this could be a goer.
The finger is cocking a snook to authority, so that will appeal to the youngsters.
But the rest of it... And I've called it "handy tea". Yes.
Which finger is that? The thumb.
That's weird. It's a very long...
Unless it's the left hand...
Which has got five fingers!
You're absolutely right. Yes.
It's not anatomically correct.
LAUGHTER It's only a prototype.
It's not anatomically correct. "Contents may differ upon delivery."
I think you'd have to agree there's something for everyone on that.
It's very wise of you to have signed it.
If you hadn't, I would have nicked that idea. I'd probably leave the recording now to capitalise on it.
Dara, what have you got? It's supposed to be an Egyptian character.
Oh, yes. I thought you wanted something historical.
The Egyptian character is doing the traditional hieroglyphic thing,
but it pours out of its arm.
That's very clever. Unfortunately, I can't draw Egyptian clothes, so I've made him wear a small tuxedo.
Fair enough. And a little dicky bow.
He's on the way to some sort of black tie event, maybe the opening of a pyramid, for example.
You've signed it and put a copyright notice on it.
Just in case that isn't correct.
Superb. Can I just say to David, I've also now copyrighted mine.
Very good. You have to put the date in if you copyright something. Shit.
Do you think I should copyright mine or do you think...
I wouldn't rush, no.
I wouldn't bother. Save the ink.
Alan, what have you got? What I've done is I've done a bloke with a beak.
It's a long, tall pot. Oh, yes.
You can fill the feet as well.
That's his arm and then it'll all come out of his beak. That works.
Then his little baseball cap, that's the lid.
The only drawback here is you will need long, thin tea bags.
I think that's going to be a hell of a difficult thing to clean.
You shouldn't clean a teapot. You don't clean a teapot.
You never clean a teapot? No. Under no circumstances?
Not under no circumstances. Provided you only put tea in it. OK...
If it's used as a teapot. Not if you couldn't find the loo one night!
Call it a hunch, but I sense a hypothetical situation here.
It's not a hypothetical situation. I've only ever used a teapot for tea,
but if you make tea in a teapot once in a blue moon in a vague attempt to seem more civilised than you are,
you leave it, it's still got a bit of tea in it...
You rinse it out. No, you don't. You're tired of being civilised and you want to go to the pub.
You leave it there for weeks and months, then when you look in it, it's gone disgustingly mouldy.
It's talking to you. At that point, the flavour you'd get if you didn't wash it for your next cup of tea
is, if anything, too characterful.
There is an animal that uses the golden spiral shape to capture its prey.
Big cats? No. Looping round to avoid the offside trap? If I use the word "gyre", will that help?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre? Otters? Does that mean anything to you?
Otters! LAUGHTER
"The falcon cannot hear the falconer." Is it a cow?
"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold." Stephen, is it a cow?
I thought you hadn't heard. Sorry. No. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer"? Is it a falcon?
A mouse! You are bad. ..Yes, a falcon. The gyrfalcon.
It uses that shape. Its very strong centre part allows it to keep its head still.
I thought a falcon does that? No.
It flies round in a circle.
I thought he was on about the falcon and the mouse because the barley can't hear. Say again?
The mouse hunts the barley, doesn't he? The mouse hunts the barley?
Mice eat barley. Oh, I see, yes.
You were talking about the falcon and what can't hear.
The mouse can hear the falcon, but the barley can't hear the mouse. No.
Really, the mouse could approach the barley straight off, but it doesn't.
He mimics his hunter. Yeah.
Even if the barley could hear the mouse, there's not much it could do about it.
APPLAUSE
At some point the alarm clock's going to go off and I'll go, "God, that was a weird nightmare!"
Yeah, but as medical science moves on, barley will develop legs, obviously.
And the mouse has had the foresightedness to learn to hunt his prey,
should GM crops develop further than the mouse's capabilities.
Is that what mice say to each other?
"Thank God, when the barley develops legs, that it's deaf." Of course it does!
It doesn't benefit the barley to not be eaten. No. It needs to be eaten.
Barley wants to be eaten.
Oh! That's why the fruit hangs on the tree and glows brightly and wants to be eaten.
I've always looked at barley and gone, "Tart!"
Maybe the barley... "You want to be bait." ..has got legs, but just doesn't use them.
Just hides them underground. Maybe barley stalks mice.
You mean barley's a slut?
Right, um... LAUGHTER
If everyone could roll their tongues for me...
Very good.
Get a close-up on Graham.
What the hell...? LAUGHTER
I think it's supposed to be an illustration of a child of two geniuses
may not necessarily be a genius.
I don't know that it says that. APPLAUSE
Yes, rolling tongues - where does that gift come from?
A fish.
You asked. Yes, I did. And you gave an answer.
You avoided the trap to say "from your parents" and it's not.
Some people can do it and some can't.
It isn't related to the fact that if your parents can do it, you will be able to do it.
There are other things some people can do and some people can't like asparagus and urine.
Does it make your urine smell? It makes everyone's urine smell. No, it doesn't. Maybe not ladies.
Mostly women don't have the problem.
Put your hand up if you've never noticed an effect of asparagus in the smell of your urine.
You've never noticed? Never.
You've hardly finished chewing... I know. And then you're peeing and it stinks. They used to call it...
Other diners are pointing at you.
Saying, "You should be doing that in the toilet!"
"That stinks and he's doing it in here!" They used to call it "housemaid's despair".
If someone had had asparagus, the housemaid took the chamberpot. "Ow!"
I find... Maybe I'm wrong.
I find the smell of urine quite distasteful anyway.
Yeah, but believe me...
If you've got stinky pee, you need to see someone. I don't.
There's something wrong with you. You've got a disease.
Your pee presumably doesn't make you go, "Eugh!"
No, it just makes me go, "I'll not drink that."
Yes, if you peed out a Chardonnay, that would be something else.
Best to leave that alone, I feel.
I leave it alone because I've just done it into a toilet.
I didn't say that I was flavouring stuff. If you decanted it, that would be different.
When I was a child, Sugar Puffs made it smell of Sugar Puffs to me. Anybody else? Yes. Good.
It's so nice not to be alone, isn't it?
People are a lot more interested in their wee than they'll admit.
That's certainly true. People are interested in what comes out of them as a general rule.
Not in a kind of an icky way, but there is an element of...that.
I just wanted to say that if you ask someone about their interests, they will say, "Walking, cinema, books."
They won't say, "Primarily, the smell of my own farts I'm always fascinated by.
"But they don't come all the time, so I while away the rest of the time with cinema, books and long walks.
"If I could just fart all day and smell it, I'd be a fascinated man."
You're so right. Most psychologists would agree with you and say it is true, but it's an unspoken truth.
Ask anyone on Earth, when they've just farted and smelt it, who's bored?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
You know what that means. It means when you see someone reading a book, if they go like that...
LAUGHTER
They're not thinking about the book. They've just let one go.
Now, why don't we have more women as guests on QI, you may well ask? Oh, I know this.
Sorry. No, no, after you. No.
Is it because women are just not funny?
Oh! Yeah. That's right, but we're good at other things. We're good at raisin' kittens and knittin' cakes.
I've heard that women aren't funny and I think there's a truth in this.
There is a scientific relationship between a sense of humour and the male sex organ.
People are always laughing at mine. There you are.
LAUGHTER
Is this to do with the fact that people say there aren't as many female comedians as there are men?
Because there are loads of female comedians.
We just don't see them because they are systematically rounded up and kept in a pen just outside Harwich.
Harwich? Yes, but you can go and see them and you can adopt them online.
You can visit them and feed them lines and you might get a joke back sometimes.
Sometimes some of them escape and they disguise themselves as male comedians,
but you can tell which ones are male comedians. They have beards, just like Life Of Brian.
Bill Bailey. Phill Jupitus. Clearly a woman(!)
It's really rare to be allowed to sit next to a female comedian.
I don't know if they're worried that our cycles will suddenly synchronise.
I'm in disguise. I'm Rory Bremner.
Is it cos once you get them started, they don't shut up?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Whoa!
Here's a good gag. What sort of person wears one of these?
Good Lord!
You could try it on yourself if you like.
It's got little... Uh-oh! The sound of polystyrene! I know. Agh, agh!
There you are. Sorry. It is, isn't it? This is a tongue thing. Yeah.
It stops your lady talking. I can't remember what they're called.
Does the word "ponyboy" come in this answer? Ponyboy? Yes.
That's it. Oh, I say, it fits you rather well.
LAUGHTER
Oh, and it's got stuck. It sounded like you were having an idea then, Stephen.
LAUGHTER It's quite disconcerting.
Giddy-up!
"You've given me a thought there, Alan."
"Have him scrubbed and brought to my room!"
Don't bother to have him scrubbed.
They're called... Anybody know?
MUMBLES: A witch's bridle? So close.
Not "witch's". I can't talk!
What's the answer, Alan?
Just do the letters. One for "yes", two for "no".
Is it "A"? Uh-uh.
It's... Is it a device used for pigs when they're constipated? I'm pretty sure that's one of those. Eugh!
Sorry, Alan. I probably should have said before.
What they do is they strap it on and they ram it home.
So it's a sort of chastity belt for the face?
Yeah, it's known as a scold's bridle.
So when she's being ducked in the river... You've got to get it before he does it.
The other more common punishment was what's called a cucking stool, often called a ducking stool.
Quite wrongly. It is actually a cucking stool.
"Excuse me, that's the wrong word!
"Get me off the cucking stool!"
Bouncy castles, they're the best.
I hired one for my son's fifth birthday.
Is it really fun? When all the kids had gone, here we go!
What do you do? You just fling yourself about. It's brilliant.
When they set the bouncy castle up for me, they handed me the safety instructions.
I was trying to read the safety instructions with all these kids bouncing around.
Within two minutes, one kid had got mullered in the face.
And he's bleeding. A few hours later, some parents came to pick the kids up.
The safety instructions for the bouncy castle were on the table with blood on it.
"Yeah... Yeah, it went fine."
Presumably, like those slides on aeroplanes in emergencies, they tell people to take off their high heels?
That's an important first step.
I always used to get nose bleeds on them and someone would always wee on those things.
They get incredibly excited, the young kids,
and there's always a wet patch, as if a puppy has been on there.
They didn't exist when I was a child. Really? No. We had to make do with pigs and...
Big, fat men. Big, fat men? Yeah.
LAUGHTER
Wahey!
Oh, I see.
Bouncing on the tummy. You remember! Uncle's tummy.
"Come on, come on." At the country fete. "Come on, kids." "We're going up the Sumo Park. Come on."
"Someone's wee'd on me." Yes. The Vicar has volunteered again.
"Come on, Vicar!"
You know when you buy Parmesan, I've never understood why it has a sell-by date on it
cos it just never goes off, does it?
You could put it on a rooftop in Nairobi for a year.
Why do they have to have a sell-by date? So that you will destroy it and buy some more.
You buy cheese at the supermarket and it says, "Consume within two days of opening," or something.
It's a vast amount. How much cheese do you think I'm going to get through? I mean, why? It's fine!
They know it's fine. It has a label on it saying, "20 years aged."
Yes, exactly. And two days before it's completely inedible, you sell it to me!
It is true. It's gone off already, cheese, basically, hasn't it?
That's its point, exactly. It is the celebration of what happens when milk goes off big time styley!
Yeah. It should just... LAUGHTER
You should work for the Milk Marketing Board.
"Get some lovely English milk gone off big time styley!"
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I'll have a milk gone off big time styley and tomato sandwich, please.
That's the best description of cheese I've ever heard.
Aren't those sell-by dates just over-cautious?
You could leave it for ages. They're covering themselves.
Get it out the bin a couple of weeks later and you'll be fine.
Put it down your pants, go in the sauna.
Sean, Sean... Take it out.
Obviously, reshape it again.
Sean, you're not alone. There are people here.
You're saying it out loud. You're not thinking it.
We had a tortoise once and it had very bad arthritis in its leg.
They said, "We can operate and replace it with a wheel." That's fabulous.
They do that. Casters, so they can go in all directions.
We thought about taking all his legs off and putting wheels on them.
That would have been wrong. And then a little engine on the top.
Send it down the shops for a paper.
With an aerial on a spring.
You could have some peanuts on it at parties.
I bet you couldn't do that. I bet someone would object if you motorised a tortoise.
Really(?)
You can have lorries like giant...
It's political correctness gone mad, Jeremy!
You can't even mutilate a tortoise any more(!)
I'm not suggesting you mutilate it. It could keep its legs.
I'm thinking of something like a Bigfoot truck in America.
Big wheels that could be detached, so that it could be a tortoise, run round and eat weeds. Its legs go up?
When you want it to go shopping, just send it off to the shops. A Transformer tortoise? Yes.
There's great big ones in the Galapagos Islands.
They could bring substantial pieces of furniture back.
You could put wings on them and they could take off. You could, yeah.
MIMICS ENGINE REVVING UP
Now, the socks that that man in the middle is wearing are very long socks.
That's something that I've turned to recently.
I now favour the longer sock.
Can you take me through your reasoning? Yes, I'll show you.
The gentleman's sock. The half hose.
Now, Jo, you, as a lady, are going to think this sock is going to stop a lot sooner than it does.
So, watch this. Look at that.
Surely we've reached the peak. Oh, my goodness me!
Surely we've peaked. Oh, my word!
He's wearing tights!
Ah! APPLAUSE
Can I say...? Not so much for Jo, but Stephen, Alan and Sean.
I urge you to give it a go
because it gives you a feeling of security.
They do make you look like a knobhead.
Sorry, Rob. One of the problems men have... They do.
There's a problem men have, Jo, which is that we wear away the hair on our shins by tight, short socks.
Is that one of the things you're afraid of?
By just carrying on the conversation, you imply that you agree with what Jo has said.
What was going through my mind is how difficult it would be for a man to say that to a woman.
I'm not going in that direction. We let women be rude to us. Could you come down on one side or the other?
You're with me or her. It's just as true that women make themselves look ridiculous occasionally.
It doesn't make you look cool. Nobody's going to go, "I'm going to get a pair of those."
At the risk of turning this into Ready Steady Cook, why don't we let the audience decide?
All those who think Rob is on to something with the gentleman's half hose, as they're technically called,
the long sock, the Brydon long sock,
could you please shout out, "Long sock"?
SOME SHOUT: Long sock! It's not good.
I fear without having to ask... There's no need to carry on. No, OK.
APPLAUSE
There's Pascal's Wager. You know Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher?
He said, "Let's just make a bet because if there is no God and there is no after-life,
"when you die, that's the end of it.
"But supposing there is one and it may be billions to one that there's an after-life,
"why not bet that there will be one because if you're wrong, the same will happen - nothing."
If you're wrong and bet there isn't a God, you've got a poker up your bottom for eternity,
which is a real bore.
The nuns told me, "He knows what you're thinking." Yes, that's it.
"He knows." As soon as you've made the bet, you're as good as dead.
You are. But what if there's a third option and there is an after-life
that you only get to go to if you were an atheist?
Oh, I like that one.
That's an amusing one. Cos then you'd get all the Christians - dead.
And then a load of bitter atheists going, "Worst of all, I was wrong!"
And they've got an eternity to worry about it.
Yeah, exactly, with these lovely angels offering them cream cakes. "Sod off!"
What would you use this for? I have a picture of them here.
To frighten the children.
It's a German invention. Put a torch behind it, then creep up into their bedroom when they're asleep.
Just move it very slowly across the room.
It's a thing that is used in the lavatory. Air freshener? No.
It's for men to do something when they go to the lavatory.
Is it anything to do with the seat? It is.
To dive off it into the toilet? No. Noble guess, but doomed.
Do they sit down in Germany? So they don't have to touch the seat?
It's if they lift the seat, which men tend to do before having a pee,
this... I have one here. Here it is.
'Hello. This is your toilet speaking. Wouldn't you rather like to sit down?
'You prefer to stand? Then you may leave now.'
Poor German men don't actually get to go to the toilet then, do they?
No wonder they're wearing lederhosen and slapping themselves all the time!
No, in Germany, they think it's somehow unhygienic because there's splashing.
They want the men to sit, so that's how it's attached. When you lift up the seat, it speaks at you.
Loud enough in a public lavatory for others to hear, so that men sit and have a pee.
That's the idea. Here's a problem. We've got builders in at the moment and they're all using the lower loo.
It is like the Center Parcs log flume in there at night.
LAUGHTER
Is that why... Is that why you've got the long socks?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
There's this thing that when you write an email at a certain time,
it makes you solve a mathematical puzzle before it will send it.
How marvellous!
You kind of go..."You!" Or, "I've always wanted to sleep with you," you've sent to the Prime Minister.
Then you press "send" and you have to do this.
By the time you've done it, you think, "Thank God I didn't send that!" Sobriety test. Yeah.
Or the other one that won't let you send it till the next morning. It's very clever. Good idea. Isn't it?
Yeah. But then if you were pissed, you'd go, "I won't use that one. I'll use a different one."
There are always ways round it. Just phone them up. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
Go round. Yeah.
Even better. Shout out something... "Oi!" "I'm glad you're in!"
Oh, Lord! "You've only just thrown me out."
What if you did that pissed with a Ouija board, contacting dead people, going, "I'm glad you're dead"?
"I hated you when you were alive.
"You were a pain in the arse. You made my life a misery."
I turned into a Steptoe then. "Dad!"
Are Ouija boards outgoing as well?
What tariff are you on?
You're going to think I'm making this up, but when I sit down,
if I'm wearing a heavy cord, a jumbo cord, for example,
one of the things that annoys me more than anything else
is when I put my trousers down and sit down, sometimes it catches the long sock
and takes it down to the ankle.
Oh, horror! And I sometimes will pull the sock up while I'm sitting there
just to have that nice feeling of control of the sock reaching the knee.
Do you know my dilemma in that situation?
If I'm sitting on the toilet, I often take my glasses off as I don't like wearing them... For distance.
I don't need them. I'm sat there for a while. I don't need my glasses.
I take my glasses off and the pants act like a little hammock for the glasses.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It gets worse because if I put them in there... I might be sat there for some time
because my diet isn't the healthiest.
I eat far more meat than I should,
so I might have sat there for 10 or 15 minutes,
then when I've finished, I stand up to pull my trousers up, I forget about my glasses. Oh, no.
I go, "Oh, my glasses!" And I've rammed my glasses deep into my under regions.
Whoa! And I cleaned this pair, I think. Eugh!
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