APPLAUSE
Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
and welcome to QI,
the panel show where fortune favours the brains.
Let's start with a lark.
We like to do larks on the L series.
I'm going to show you how your senses can deceive.
What you've got here is a perfectly obvious real hand,
your right hand, and a perfectly obvious fake hand.
And you've each got a brush.
So all I want you to do is brush each hand sort of simultaneously
and what you should feel, Adam and Sara...
Excruciating pain.
Not yet, is that...
As I shove hard into the hand until they roar!
Sara, scream!
We'll come to that. For the moment, just a gentle rubbing.
Eventually...
This hand will fall off.
Eventually, you will feel in the rubber hand the same
sensation you feel in your real hand.
Which seems extraordinary, but you will,
- and let me know when you do. - OK.
It may not have happened yet.
Then you will urinate.
You have to keep going, I'm sorry.
You have to keep going.
Look, I'm doing... I'm keeping going.
- It does now feel... - Have you started to feel it?
I am now starting to feel that this is my hand.
- That's what happens. - I'm having trouble distinguishing.
- Are you not, Sara? - No. - You're not feeling anything? Keep going, Alan.
Oh, that's nice.
- So you can feel that in the rubber hand? - Yeah, definitely. Lower.
You play your cards right, might get a happy ending with this.
You're not feeling anything, Sara?
- It feels very much like my hand... - Oh, it now does feel like your hand?
- Not that hand, MY hand feels like my hand. - That would do, yes.
My hand has never felt more like it belongs to me.
I'm going faster.
I think that will help.
- OK. OK, I've got it, I've got it! - You've got it.
I've got it. I've got it.
Faster is better, keep up the speed.
LAUGHTER
Right.
It's happening now! It's my hand!
- It's my hand! - It really does feel like it?
It's my hand now.
It's bizarre, isn't it? It's genuinely bizarre.
- And now you can get out the other brush. - What?! - What?
They've got another brush.
Which hand? Wait... No! no!
That's amazing, isn't it?
It is amazing, because I didn't believe it was going to happen.
No, you didn't believe, that's what's so good
is you really didn't believe.
We have borrowed some objects from the world-famous
British Optical Association Museum
and you each have...and I'm going to start with Phill, you have
an optical object and I'd like you to tell me
what you think it might be.
Oh. Right.
- Well, it's got a lovely leather surround. - Yes.
Right, so why would you want to see things this red?
- Yeah. - Is that literally rose-tinted glasses? Are you feeling...?
Ah, the '80s! The Style Council!
The Guardian with a decent header font. Oh!
Araucaria, his crosswords were easy then. Oh!
As you can see, they look like flying goggles
and that's what they are, but they're not for flying.
Then they're not flying goggles. Driving.
- Well, they are for... - Don't be picky, he doesn't like that.
They are for pilots. They're for night pilots.
It's so they can acclimatise their eyes for darkness.
Oh.
I would say that rather they make everyone you bump into
look like a Dutch prostitute.
- There is an element of that. - Dance for me, Stephen! Dance for me.
LAUGHTER
You made me.
All right.
You are a unique individual, if you don't mind me saying.
- Oh, I wish it wasn't. - Have a go.
Why can't I dance without people laughing? I don't understand.
You bring joy!
I missed that lesson that everybody else went to at school
where they were taught how to dance at a discotheque.
What did lucky old Edward VII use this for?
- Oh, I say. - I say "lucky". I mean, it's an extraordinary contrivance.
- Oh, God! - What do we know about this?
Ah, ah. No, quite wrong.
He didn't poo on yellow silk.
- I thought it was a... - You thought it lifted up into a commode.
Yes, I did, I thought it was... Is it sexual?
It was sexual, yeah.
It's sexual and I'm not going to say it on television, frankly,
I'll just be in trouble.
No, you won't. I mean, it's not, I mean it's...
Well, I will a bit. For what I've got in mind, if I said that...
I'll accept that, then.
LAUGHTER
Anyway, Alan, what have you got that's optical?
- It looks like an ordinary pair of glasses. - Yeah, it is.
But it has three...
Put them on and describe what you see.
You won't be surprised to hear that my vision is somewhat obscured.
Yes.
Look at the audience. What do I...what can you see?
They're kind of like binoculars, where you can really see...
- Can you see me doing anything? - No.
Are they not working, Alan? Dance.
Dance!
Whoa!
APPLAUSE
Are they meant to be for peripheral vision, then?
- They were designed for drivers who had... - Jesus!
..who had bad eyesight and it was to improve their peripheral vision.
But it clearly doesn't work.
There'd be no chance of driving in these!
You'd just be like that all the time.
I found a very odd...I didn't know this was a rule. Recently, I always
get headaches when I'm on tour, so I thought, "Well, I may as just
"stock up on paracetamol, because I go through a couple a night."
So I tried to buy about 48 packets of paracetamol.
No, no, no, no, no. That'll kill you.
Obviously I wasn't going to take them all at once,
- but obviously there's a rule. - They don't know that.
You're only allowed to buy...
I just thought to myself, "That's saving no-one, is it?"
No-one's got to that point and gone, "Oh, can I not?
"All right, I'll stay alive, then, thank you very much."
I go into a newsagents and order a bottle of vodka
and they give me a quarter one now
because they've heard bad things about me.
Although there was a moment when the woman embarrassed me
in front of a queue of people, where she said,
"I can't sell you that many paracetamol," and I went,
"Why is that?" and she said, "It's in case you kill yourself."
She said those words to me and I... This was my panic, I went,
"What? But there's a load of freezer stuff in there!"
Like, that was my actual...
LAUGHTER
Like, that was the logic, you know?
"Look in my trolley there, there's some long-life milk.
"Why would I go?"
"Do you think I'm mad? Do you think I'd waste that?"
"There's some Findus crispy pancakes I'm looking forward to!"
"There's a Solero in there, I've got so much to live for!"
Next up is Josh. What have you got?
They're very fashionable, aren't they?
If I were to tell you that these are... Despite their modern look,
they're actually way over 100 years old.
They're mid-19th century
from the open carriage days of railways onwards,
because of steam, smuts, so on, people got really stung in the eyes.
I'm sorry, who's speaking now?
Railway spectacles.
LAUGHTER
That makes no sense...
..and yet it's funny.
I think I could tell what they do better, Josh, if you'd dance for me.
Whoa!
APPLAUSE
Now, what's this? Pass it down.
All you've got to do is tell me what it is, have a taste.
It's, I promise you, not poison, despite being green.
It's not wasabi, is it?
Wasabi, there we go!
ALARM BLARES
You would be served this if you were to go out around London and go
to most Japanese restaurants
and we can have a taste and it's... Whoa!
- Pretty hot. - I can't. - Do you find it too hot? - Yeah.
I can't even... My mother thinks tomato and basil soup is too spicy.
- Jesus! - "Oh, that's too spicy for me! What's in that, Aisling?" "Salt."
That is as close to wasabi as you could get without it being wasabi.
I nearly took a mouthful of that, you know, it's not a joke.
I can't take chilli, but I can take as much mustard...
I put a load in because you said it wasn't...
- You said it was not wasabi! - It's not wasabi.
- Well, it's... - I'll tell you what it is.
I'll tell you what it is.
It's killed a man over there.
This is not Jackass, it's QI!
LAUGHTER
What you're eating there is horseradish.
You may say wasabi is Japanese horseradish,
but the wasabi you get sold in British restaurants
is almost always ordinary British horseradish dyed green.
- No! - Yes.
Because real wasabi, although it's related to horseradish,
takes two years to mature and it's very expensive to transport.
So it's much easier to use the British stuff - which grows
on railway sidings and is cheap as chips - to use that instead.
Do you know what, Stephen, that would have been lovely just
if you'd explained it and used some bloody pictures...
I'm sorry.
..rather than give us some and go, "Put that in your mouth!"
I'm so sorry.
I'll swear to God, I mean I can hear things like a dog does!
It's done things in my head.
It's like I've been waiting all my life to become a superhero
and all you had to do was give me a bloody spoonful of that!
Yeah. It's opened...
I'm seeing through walls!
It's opened your Eustachian tube and your sinuses.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Cancel my car, I'm flying home.
LAUGHTER
Jo, it's your turn.
Oh, you've got a bonnet.
Lovely bonnet.
Oh, and something hanging from it, there you are.
How cool is that?
That's great, isn't it?
You are Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park.
It's a Jane Austen moment.
If there had been a character from Mansfield Park in Colditz, she...
LAUGHTER
GERMAN ACCENT: "So, so, you wish to escape from my prison camp.
"Not before we have done a little embroidery, no?"
LAUGHTER
I think it's more sort of Dickensian, isn't it?
Like Mrs Gamp, the Elderly Prostitute.
"I say, sir, let me see your penis."
Now, this is what these goggles were for!
"Even with my monocle, it's awfully small."
Oh!
And now, in honour of Victoria, QI does Only Connect.
Cue music.
END OF ONLY CONNECT THEME
- The greatest programme on television, after QI. - Oh, hello.
Yes, does that ring any bells with you?
Can you choose, please, an Egyptian hieroglyph?
Oh, my goodness, I've never had the chance to do this before.
Obviously the eye of Horus.
Eye of Horus it is.
You have to find the connection between these five things.
First...
John F Kennedy, Profiles In Courage.
Lots of points, of course, if you get it from one.
Anybody else is allowed to buzz if they think they know.
And the second one.
Schumann, Theme And Variations In E Flat.
- Hmm. - Whoa.
LAUGHTER
- Cue patronising Jack. - You can all piss off!
What's it got to do with the Eye of Horus?
No, that's... You choose... Have you never watched?
- You've never watched Only Connect? - Not a whole one, no.
Not a whole one?!
All you have to do is find what's in common. Only Connect, literally.
I think the F stands for his middle name.
That...
How does that connect him?
I don't know about Schumann, but if I was on a team
on Only Connect, I'd ask them - is it like the second thing they wrote?
Oh, that's very good. Let's have the third one,
because I don't think you're getting it from two.
John Prescott, Prezza.
Goodness me.
Schumann's nickname is Theme And Variations.
Oh, was that one of the Sugababes' line-ups?
So I think we'd better have a look at the fourth one.
Fewer points, but this might help.
Alcoholics Anonymous and The 12 Steps.
- I so can get this. - The last one will give it to you.
- The last one is only for one point. - OK, hold on now.
You can see why I never got to the end of the show.
You'll see the last one and I think...
- Struggle for the buzzer. - They all had ghost writers!
Yes!
Yes! Yes! Come on!
Well done.
APPLAUSE
Well done, Jack.
CHEERING
Aargh!
Steady.
Steady, whoa.
Sorry, sorry.
You've made a happy man feel very old.
LAUGHTER
You have Christmas trees in America, obviously.
I have a year-round Christmas tree, actually.
Well, you have a house that is just the most...
It's year-round also.
It is bizarre, it is the most bizarre. An extraordinary house.
My house is 100 years old
and in America, that's, like, prehistoric.
Wow.
But Bette Davis lived there and Robert Armstrong,
who was in King Kong.
- And your mother lives there, Debbie Reynolds. - We're neighbours now.
Yeah. She lives in your garage, let's be honest.
- Some nights, yes. - I'm using the American pronunciation of garage.
Debbie Reynolds was in Singing In The Rain.
She was?
Did she never tell you that?
She doesn't come up, no.
- No. How, how old was she...? - I can't stop thinking about it.
She was 19 years old. You'd better stop thinking about it.
- She was 19 in that film? - Yeah.
My God. What were you doing when you were 19?
Nothing, that's right.
She says that Gene Kelly rehearsed her until her feet bled.
Yes, and she also said that Gene Kelly French kissed her
and she vomited.
LAUGHTER
- During? During or after? - So romantic(!)
- Was that part of the film? - No.
- That's in the blooper reel at the end. - Oh.
They did not... Donald O'Connor
- and my mother were not wild about Gene Kelly. - No.
- Oh, wow. I love this, more of this. - It's great.
Well, but apparently he's not a good kisser
and he didn't have a good sense of humour, but a great dancer.
- Was Donald O'Connor a nice chap? - Yes, he was great.
- Because he's...I love him. - What's Chewbacca like?
IMITATES CHEWBACCA
He also... Try and ignore Stephen.
AMERICAN ACCENT: "Laugh it up, fuzzball!"
LAUGHTER
I have the most delicate from this museum, it's a fan.
It's an eventail.
Beautiful fan for fanning yourself, obviously,
but it has a secret lens in the middle
so I can see what you are doing.
So it allows people who apparently are fanning themselves
and not taking any notice of anyone else, to have a very...
- I'm not going to lie to you... - Yeah?
There is a slight different technique
when you start looking at me to when you're fanning yourself.
Hmm.
You are fanning yourself very slowly there, Stephen.
HE GROWLS SUGGESTIVELY
I think I'm putting these back on.
You must get this everywhere you go, you're going to get it everywhere.
No, I've gotten used to it, you know, it'll take a couple
of minutes for the navicomputer to calculate the coordinates.
Yes. No, that's exactly it.
That wasn't even my line and I... we all started saying those things.
You still started to say it, that's right,
for the jump into hyperspace. And it goes...
MIMICS HYPERSPACE JUMP
I remember you with Harrison Ford where he said he had a problem
with the dialogue generally.
He said, you can write this stuff, but you can't say it.
"You can type it." It's very specific.
Yeah, no, you cannot say,
"I have placed a couple..."
I can't say mine, "I've placed a couple..." No, I can't remember it.
Come on, come on, come on. What is that speech that I did?
You'd know it.
I'll tell you what we've done, we've brought 300 nerds,
- look that way. - Yeah.
Oh, I know - "I've placed information vital
"to the survival of the rebellion of the memory system of this R2 unit.
- "My father will know how to retrieve it." - That's it!
Control, alt, delete.
APPLAUSE
And then there was the syphilis outbreak
in the 16th and 18th centuries.
- Oh, then the party's over. - Yeah.
- Filthy donkeys. - And goat wet-nurses were used there.
And unfortunately they were used very unkindly because...
- What's he up to? - Milking a goat?!
Oh, OK, fair enough.
"This better be for the baby!"
I think that's a different bloke that usually does it,
according to that goat's face.
"Hang on a minute, that's not the grip I'm used to."
"Oops. Hello!"
"That's a bit firm!"
Do you know what I've found odd about...? I don't have kids,
so maybe women in the audience will know. But that... When you're
breast-feeding your child, if you are say in a supermarket or something
like that and someone else's baby cries, you leak, like a spider sense.
- Yes. - Is it not true...? Any women have had...?
- Yeah... - Yeah, it is. - There's a bloke up there going, "Yep."
"I always leak when I hear a baby crying."
LAUGHTER
I don't even know why that's funny.
Is that true, though? It is, isn't it?
But if you have, you've presumably expressed into a pot and given it
to the baby-sitter, because that's what happens, isn't it?
Why would the baby-sitter want some?
- "Thanks a million!" - There was an ice cream shop...
- Shot glasses. - "Dinner would have been fine."
"Help yourself to anything in the fridge."
There was, for a very brief time, an ice cream shop
here in London, which sold baby...
human breast milk ice cream.
You say a very brief time
because it's the worst business plan of all time.
I guess you're right.
You try it once, I think, like incest or country dancing.
LAUGHTER
I wish that were my own.
You've not been to Devon, Stephen.
I come from Norfolk, for God's sake!
You know this thing now that you're interactive
with your audience, so actually, as you're broadcasting live
you have a screen in front of you with a Twitter feed on.
- Not advisable, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say. - God!
It's a very good moral and spiritual discipline, as everything you say
is immediately commented on by some regular twitter...
With #SaturdayLive, or #RichardColes is a...
#Smug-MeisterTwatVicar.
LAUGHTER
I swear there is someone who does #Smug-Meister
and another one #TwatVicar...
Oh, that's horrible.
- Oh, Richard, that's so unfair. - ..and it's my mother.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- The Father of History, what's he called? - Herodotus.
Because it must have been a lot easier when he was around.
- I'm not having a go at him... - No, fair point.
..but less things have happened back then.
Fewer things, I think you mean.
Some of the audience had you there.
Common usage, I play common usage card.
It's so like being back at school, it's unbelievable.
Apparently you can say "less" if you want to now, apparently you can.
Apparently you can just say what you like these days.
You can literally say less if you want.
Apparently you're not allowed to scream "idiot" at people.
What was the point in getting an education at all?!
I know how to use the apostrophe, apparently now it doesn't matter!
APPLAUSE
What I want, I want the time it took me to learn that back.
We need to be less bothered about this, or fewer bothered.
You need to be fewer bothered about this kind of thing.
Just let it go, be fewer upset.
Who fancies a quantum-locking levitation lark?
And to help me tonight we have Professor Andrew Boothroyd
of the Physics Department of Oxford University.
Hello, Andrew.
APPLAUSE
So what have we got here, Andrew?
We've got here a piece of ordinary-looking black ceramic
which, when we cool it down to very low temperatures,
- acquires a very extraordinary property. - OK.
So if you'd just like to cool it down with liquid nitrogen.
- I shall baste it with liquid nitrogen. - Oh, my word.
- There we are. - And we have a second one over here.
- Oh, right. - Do that one, too. - I'll cool that as well.
This is like the beginning of every pop video in the '80s.
Tell me what's particular about this?
It loses all its resistance - its electrical resistance -
and becomes what's known as a super-conductor.
And the other thing is that it acquires the property
that it can bend magnetic field lines.
All right. So let's pick it up and pop it...
Oops.
There it goes.
Whoa!
- Cool. - Yeah, it's pretty good, isn't it?
Literally.
That makes no effect and you can just give it a tip.
Oh, that's very strange.
Yeah. There we are.
And as it warms up, it'll slowly sink.
- Oh, wow. - There you go.
Is this what you do most days at the Oxford University?
Almost every day.
It's not a bad old job.
This one here is very exciting.
And now it's nice and slidey.
But look at this.
And what's happening there?
It's the magnetic field, isn't it?
- That's correct. - It's interrupted by this superconductivity.
But it's not like a normal magnet because a normal magnet would repel
when it's up that way and then it would just fall off. Yeah.
So this is both repelling and attracting at the same time.
I'll give it one more little go and then we can try it on...
on the track.
I thought you were going to say, "And then we can try it on Alan."
- That would not be nice. - "No!"
Upside down in a bucket of nitrogen.
There we go. Pop it there.
Oh, wow! Fantastic.
- Round it goes. - That's cool.
Isn't it good?
It's got a little trail. It's like a steam train.
And it's got a stream train. It can go the other way.
We could put the wrong type of leaf on the track.
LAUGHTER
And is this going to get us to Mars? That's the main question.
What do you think, Andrew?
Are there any practical applications we can think of?
You could use it as a piece of transport like that,
but it's quite expensive because of the cost of cooling the nitrogen.
Oh, right, so it's not efficient.
But if we could find a superconductor that worked
- at room temperature, then it would be viable. - Right.
Are you working on that? We are, yes indeed. Yes, I am.
I trust you. JOSH: I bet they're not.
They're just playing with this all the time, that's what I'd be doing.
I know, isn't it gorgeous?
So you'd think it would almost be like a maglev train.
- That's what it would be like. - Oh, there we go again. I love that.
And this of course can go on here as well.
That's my favourite one. That actually is...
Boing!
Oh, it's coming round, it's coming round!
Unfortunately, this one is less insulated and it'll probably get...
- Oh, that's stopped it. - It's doing pretty well.
- It is, isn't it? - Oh, my God, that's coming for me. Oh, no.
- Cool. - Oh, there you go. Bless its heart.
That would be like the best Christmas present
in the world, wouldn't it?
So you need... What is the magnet made of?
It's rather exciting names. Boron and...?
The magnet is made of neodymium, iron and boron
- and that's what the track is made of. - Neodymium.
Wonderful. Very good element...
The superconductor is made of gadolinium, barium,
copper and oxygen.
But you can just use sticky-backed plastic and a Fairy Liquid bottle.
And old egg cartons.
Was it the Six Million Dollar Man when Steve Austin...?
It would obviously cost a lot more now than six million...
Oh, I could say.
Steve Austin got a bionic eye...
Lee Majors, yes.
..and all they gave him really was a zoom facility...
Yeah - dung, dung, dung. Exactly.
- ..so he could see things further away. - Yeah.
That was pretty feeble,
- but because they'd given him about eight extra cones... - That's true.
- ..and he could have seen so much... - How could they have shown that to us?
- X-rays. - Now we have the Instagram Eye and you could make it all sepia
- and old-fashioned. - That's right.
Yeah, but then our eyes would still only have three cones
to watch him seeing something, so it would still look like our eyes.
Extremely good point.
He'd have needed a sidekick to say, "But what can you see?"
"Like a bird, I can see ultraviolet light, which is where
"the villain is revealed by this.
"Let me run over there fast."
And also, while we're on the subject of the Bionic Man,
he had one leg that was really good and yet they showed him
running at 70 when the reality was he would have been hopping
at 70 because the other leg would have just been destroyed
by the speed at which...
Biomechanically, it would have been unable to cope.
You've ruined my childhood.
They would've been better off
if they'd taken off both legs, given him two bionic legs...
Yeah. Given him wheels, Adam, wheels.
And his sex life would...
And the sex would have been amazing.
Yeah.
- Bionic sex. - Well, there was the Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner,
- and she had ears, didn't she? - Yes, she could hear anything.
Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner.
- Well before anybody in this audience was born. - Fictional people.
- Yes, they were totally made-y-uppy. - Yes, good. - I'm sorry.
Before your time as well. Oh, God, we feel so old, don't we?
Yeah, but it was great being in the '70s.
- It was, yeah. - Almost perfection.
We could go to university for free. Ha-ha-ha-ha!
(Up yours!)
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Let's have a liquid lark.
I've got some liquid here in the form of our very own QI water,
as you can see, and what I'm going to do is pour some...
I'm going to not use the sporty... Oh, God, I can't even open it.
I'm going to have to use the sporty bit, there we go.
That's as much exercise as you get, isn't it? That's the...
Oh, so sporty.
Now what we do is we flatten this card on it and we turn it
upside down and I want you to try and do this if you can.
And... Oh, God, please work, please work, please work,
please work, please work.
There, holds up.
Hurray.
APPLAUSE
So you should... You should be able to try that. Whoa.
Terrific, terrific fun.
- Yeah. - This could not possibly end in tears.
- No, no, try it, honestly. - It could go on and on.
You just...you just turn it over.
There you are, you see, it does work!
APPLAUSE
Hang on, so, hang on. Where.
And...
Yay!
Hurray!
CHEERING
And do you want to know something really extraordinary about this?
Watch. This should work.
Oh, leave it out.
Shut up!
Shut the front door.
That's pretty amazing, isn't it?
You're actually made of magic.
Go on, let's have a look. Whoa!
Ah!
That's why we gave you these!
Whoa...
- Well, hang on a second. - Oh!
What happened there?!
APPLAUSE