CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening!
And welcome to QI.
Tonight, we are completely all over the place, a feast of O's,
with scrambled ovi.
Your ovations, please, for the overlooked Bill Bailey...
CHEERING
..the overexcited Jan Ravens...
CHEERING
..the overwhelming Grayson Perry...
CHEERING
..and all over the shop, Alan Davies.
CHEERING
Let's get their buzzers over with. Bill goes...
MUSIC: Over and Over by Hot Chip
Jan goes...
MUSIC: It's Over by Electric Light Orchestra
Well, I like that one. That one's good. Grayson goes...
MUSIC: It's Over by Roy Orbison
I didn't know how to tell you, Grayson.
- I just... - Yeah.
And Alan goes...
They think it's all over.
It is now!
CHEERING
It's finally one you like.
Ah, I love that!
So my first question is about ova, spelled O-V-A.
You can't learn to ski jump without breaking legs,
and you can't make an omelette without...
- BOTH: - Breaking eggs.
KLAXON Yay! And we're off and running.
But you're going to show us how you can.
You can make an omelette without breaking eggs.
In Japan, it's called a golden egg, as we shall demonstrate.
What you need to do is...
- Get a chicken. - An egg.
It's in a pair of tights.
It's in a stocking, so I'm going to pass this to you.
And what you need to do is you need to basically to break the membrane
that is round the egg yolk. That is called the vitelline membrane.
It's protein fibres. And what you do is, you spin it like this,
and you're trying to shake the egg and, actually,
it's one of the good things, when you let go, it does that.
I've got a very expensive suit on at this point.
- Ah, OK. Just spin it gently, would be the thing, yeah. - Yeah.
I don't think we've ever had anybody
who's worn expensive clothing on this show before.
Woohoo! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Just a really cheap children's toy, isn't it?
- Have you broken yours? - Yeah.
You spin it and you mix up the egg inside the shell...
- Right. - It's actually quite tough to do.
- AS SCOTTY FROM STAR TREK: - I cannae make it go any further, Jim!
And then you boil it, and it will, when you remove the shell,
it will reveal that it is an omelette.
It sort of looks like an old bollock, doesn't it?
I mean, some people would say it's more of a scrambled egg
than an omelette. But Escoffier's definition -
"In a few words, what is an omelette?
"It's really a special type of scrambled egg enclosed in a coating
"or envelope of coagulated egg, and nothing else."
So our version ought to qualify.
That's what a man looks like...
- It's a bloke, innit? - In tights.
Actually, we could ask Grayson.
This is what a man looks like in tights?
Grayson, I'm so sorry.
- I'll tell you, if my skirt was any shorter... - Yes.
Let's have a look at the below-the-desk cam.
Oh, look.
- Did you know, that is also possible to un-boil an egg? - Oh, that's...
No, I did not know that!
So essentially what you do, and I don't recommend you try this,
you inject wee really, it's urea, urine,
into the solid white mass and it will turn it back into liquid.
So would it then be a raw egg in terms of like the thing that
a pregnant women wouldn't be allowed to eat, kind of thing?
Oh, if it's been boiled and then injected with wee and then...
LAUGHTER
I think, you know, pregnant or not you wouldn't want to go near it.
You're on your own there.
You also need to stir it at high velocity to cause
the pieces of protein to unknot themselves.
I mean, it is quite a complex process
so because we haven't got time to do it,
here is one that we unboiled earlier.
- Oh, urine! - There we go. - Ah.
Actually, can I be completely honest? We cut out the middleman
on that one. We just didn't boil it in the first place.
Saving money for the licence fee payer.
I have now managed to get egg...
- And I have got way more eggs to deal with. - There's a towel there.
- Oh! Grayson! - Thank you, darling.
- What? - LAUGHTER
- Who saw my eggs? - It is all matching!
You have no idea how many eggs I'm going to bring forth.
Are you making a cake? Have you got confused about what show you're on?
- When you break an egg at normal atmospheric pressure... - Yes.
- And I did there. - As we all do.
The membranes inside the shell, they'll break at the same time
so they release the contents in a familiar way.
- Now, you are a diver, Bill, are you not? - Yes, I am. Scuba-diver, yes.
Yes. If you break an egg underwater, what is going to happen?
Because the pressure is...
- Ooh! - Where are you going to put your cooker? - Yeah.
LAUGHTER
- Imagine you just wanted to break it and not cook it. - Fish would come.
- Yeah, the fish... - Fish would come immediately.
Have a look. Have a look because we have some video of this.
- The external pressure... - Right.
- ..is actually sufficient to hold the whole package together. - Right.
And what you'll see is that the contents will remain egg shaped.
- Oh, that is beautiful! - Cor, look at that! - Is that extraordinary?
That's amazing.
I've never done that underwater
- but now I know, that's one more thing I know not to do. - Yeah.
This guy is going to burst this egg. Watch this, watch this.
- Wow! - It's worth doing that, is it not? - It's on my bucket list now.
Who knew there were so many time wasting activities to do with eggs?
- OK. I have a question for you all. - OK. - Here is a bottle...
- Right. - ..with an egg in it. How did it get in the bottle?
It's one of those tricks you read about in old encyclopaedias,
- isn't it? - Yes. - Yes. - And what do you think it is?
So you can't plunge that in a pan of boiling water
and then somehow extricate the shell.
So if I have another bottle, you can see that the egg...
Oh, I know how you do it.
You take all the air out of the bottle and it sucks the egg in.
So the way you do that is you're going to light...
Let me show you.
- She's good, isn't she? - Oh, good.
Can you light that, darling?
I've got such sticky fingers with bloody egg white.
- Do you want me to play some music or something? - Yeah, if you could.
HE HUMS
# Brazil... #
Oh, well, it's doing it.
It's like trying to get into your jeans, isn't it?
AUDIENCE: Hey!
CHEERING
That's amazing!
That is what happens when you get
Eric Pickles and you try and get him out of an aeroplane.
We've overbooked the flight, you're going to have to...
Actually, no, you can stay.
You go up to 30,000 feet and open the door.
I've got one more trick. So this is a little bit hit and miss.
- Go on. - But I will do my best. When it works, it's absolutely fantastic.
What is this?
- Oh. I have to be more confident... - Can you hit it the other way?
I've got to... No.
- No. - Go on. - Does it work?
AUDIENCE: Yay!
CHEERING
OK. Moving from eggs to bacon.
What did pigs finally manage to do in the 1930s?
- Uh... - Fly.
KLAXON
- No. - No?
Become self-aware.
- JAN: - Uncurl their tails.
Become a metaphor for socialism.
- Yeah. - According to the OED, pigs
oinked for the first time in 1933.
Before that, they just grunted.
Well, a few... Yeah, exactly. JAN GRUNTS
A few went... You do all kinds of impressions.
I do. I do animals, everything, yeah.
But it doesn't actually sound like "oink", that, does it?
No, there's... There are other things.
"Rout", they went, apparently, in 1650.
One went "wick" in the 18th century.
But the practice of oinking is an American practice.
The Washington Post, 6th June 1933,
mentions a small white pig oinking
its disapproval of the effete city folks.
So they didn't oink until the Washington Post decided that
was the thing that they had to do. Oink.
- Right. - In Denmark, they say "oof-oof".
French swine go "groin-groin," apparently.
- That's more like it. - I wonder if that affects how we view the animal,
because "oof-oof" sounds quite positive,
even though, you know, in Denmark, they probably kill more pigs
per capita than in any other country in the world.
And we have no problem with that.
They take real pleasure in it, Grayson,
- that's the tragedy about it. - I've got nothing against that.
You know, I think in many ways we should have videos
of animals being killed in all restaurants that serve meat.
Yes, constantly on a loop.
Have you seen that film by Simon Amstel called Carnage?
It's a vegan propaganda film but it's very funny,
where they anthropomorphise the animals so that they speak.
And the voice that they chose was Joanna Lumley.
LAUGHTER
- AS JOANNA LUMLEY: - Please, don't, it would be so lovely...
Perfectly sweet, what a perfectly sweet little calf.
Please don't take it away. You know? It's lovely.
Oh, look, this is fascinating,
I'm longing to have a little calf with me.
You know, it is just so sweet these little pigs with
- the Joanna Lumley voice. - BILL: - You wouldn't eat them, would you?
But if it was Ray Winstone and it was going, "Come on, have a go!"
Yeah, yeah.
That is what I was kind of try to say really.
If the pig is saying something like...
GRUNTS AGRESSIVELY
..you're more likely to give it the chop,
- but if it's going, "Ooh, ooh." - That's true.
- Do any of them say, "Pooh, I just wanted to be sure of you." - Yes.
Aw!
Now eat a bacon sandwich.
LAUGHTER
I'd still have no problem.
Yeah, yeah, still fine. The minute I smell that bacon, I'm on it.
The very first pig to fly in fact
came 24 years before the onset of oinking.
4th of November 1909,
an English aviation pioneer called JTC Moore-Brabazon,
he thought for a laugh he would
attach a wastepaper basket to a biplane,
and he took it on a 3.5-mile flight over the Kent countryside.
And he had to wait 100 years for YouTube to be invented.
Yes, I know. He went on to be the Minister of Transport,
but he clearly liked a bit of a flight.
"When pigs fly" is known as an adynaton.
It's a figure of speech in the form of hyperbole,
and they have wonderful examples in other countries.
The middle one is France - "when hens grow teeth."
- Yes. - The one on the right is Hebrew -
"when hair grows on the palm of my hand."
My favourite is the Russian one -
"when the crawfish whistles on the mountain."
And we say "when the Lib Dems reform."
Now, what makes the FBI say OMG?
- AS HILLARY CLINTON: - Hillary Clinton's e-mails, perhaps?
Is it Hillary?
Pointing and waving.
Everywhere she goes. Oh, my God.
- She does do that! Waving and pointing. It's... - Yeah.
You never see who she is pointing...
It'd be quite good to have cutaways of people just going, "What?"
- So, come on. FBI. - OMG.
Well, it's not going to be, "Oh, my God," is it?
So it's got to be something else.
It's to do with outlaws.
- Outlaw, ooh. - Outlaw?
Moving gradually.
Moving fast, it would be, in fact. It's outlaw motorcycle gangs.
- Oh! - They're known as OMGs to law enforcement.
- We got a OMG! - Hell's Angels. - Hell's Angels indeed.
- Oh, fab. - And do you know the term one-percenter? Do you know...?
They're the people with all the money.
Yeah, so the Occupy movement and so on,
they talk about the top 1% who control the wealth.
Because, you know, I've had motorcycles all my life,
and that used to be a badge I quite
often saw on those collections on denim waistcoats that people had...
Yeah, so what it was was that full badge members
wear the 1% to show their outsider status because there was
a claim by the American Motorcycle Association
that 99% of their members were God-fearing and family orientated.
And so the 1% wanted to make damn sure that everybody knew
that they were the bad guys and they were not God-fearing.
It's very hard nowadays cos they look like hipsters, don't they?
Basically. Beards, tattoos...
- It doesn't look quite so scary, does it? - No, not nowadays.
OK, while we're on the subject of Hell's Angels,
we're now going to play...
- What a game! - Can you pick that board up there, darling?
- Certainly. - So what I want you to do...
We have written on it for you, Alan,
- "Hells Angels." - "Hells Angels."
I want you to put the apostrophe in the correct place.
OK. Is it going to be angels belonging to Hell?
- That's it, isn't it? No? - KLAXON
- No. - Oh, you flippin'...
It was bound to happen, wasn't it?
- I hadn't even done it. - I know.
You were so keen.
After the S, up there, then?
Try that. Yeah, go on.
Go, go for it.
KLAXON
- No, it's a trick. There isn't one. - There isn't one?
- There isn't one. They don't want one. - Oh, they don't want one!
No, and who's going to argue with them, frankly?
- I've gone off them. - Until recently,
they had a note in the FAQs of their official website.
"Should the Hells in Hells Angels have an apostrophe
"and be Hell's Angels? That would be true if there were only one hell,
"but life and history has taught us
"that there are many versions and forms of hell."
Then people still carried on criticising them and saying it
should be Hells' - with an apostrophe after the S.
And so it's since been amended, and it now says,
"Missing apostrophe in Hells Angels - yes,
"we know that there is an apostrophe missing, but it is you who miss it.
"We don't."
You know, that's the kind of
punctuation-based rebellion that we need!
Every time I put on my leather jacket, I think,
"Yeah, to hell with punctuation!"
Sticking it to the man, one apostrophe at a time.
Yeah! Us and the market stall traders.
- Setting a poor grammatical example, that's the way we roll. - Yeah.
Hell's Angels, founded in 1948,
some of the gangs that amalgamated together,
one of them was called the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington.
Maybe too difficult to get on a jacket.
- That's a lot of studs. - I think that's really good.
Anybody know where the name Hell's Angels comes from?
- The origin? - Is it Paradise Lost or something?
It's a film, actually, by Howard Hughes.
- Apostrophe, apostrophe! - Apostrophe! - Apostrophe!
So the American air squadrons in World War II,
which is probably where the motorcycle gangs got it from,
- but the pilots got it from the Howard Hughes film. - Oh, right.
- Jean Harlow. - Jean Harlow, I know.
Harlow new town was named after her.
- Is that true? - No. No, it's not, it can't be.
Bluff! Oh, that's a different show.
- It's like Essex was named after Joey Essex. - Yes.
- I met him once! - Do you know what he said?
He was going round the Houses Of Parliament and he said,
"Does the King live here?" That's what he said.
"Does the King live here?"
"No, no, no, the royalty don't live there, and anyway there's a Queen."
And he goes, "Oh, I don't know anything about history."
LAUGHTER
- No, no, or the present. Clearly! - Anything at all.
Hell's Angels are fierce in the defence of their trademark.
They've sued Disney and Toys R Us and so on.
You can't wear... Back patches in general are frowned upon.
If you're a motorcycle dude,
if you're wearing a back patch and it's not an official registered one,
- you can get into trouble. - Can you? - Yeah.
When I was young, the Coggeshall Bastards were the local one.
And they were so tough that they
eschewed the leather jacket because they thought that was a bit effete.
- Oh. - So they wore pac-a-macs and Wellingtons on their bikes.
That was the myth, they were so hard they didn't...
- Their skin didn't need leather protection. - Nah.
I love the idea of the sound of a pac-a-mac rustling in the wind.
You can get good slogans.
I was at the motorcycle show once and there was a T-shirt and it said
on the back, "If you can read this, the bitch fell off."
I'm starting a motorcycle gang called The Fourth Wave Feminists.
Yeah! That's the way to go!
Anyway, moving on.
Can you name a female outlaw?
Well, not Jesse James.
- No. - Bonnie out of Bonnie and Clyde.
KLAXON
Strictly streaking, there is no such thing
as a female outlaw in British law.
Outlawry is when an individual
was placed outside the protection of the law,
and females denied protection of the law were called something else.
They were called waived women.
Isn't that awful?
So their right to any protection was said to be waived,
so left out or not regarded.
Can you name a male outlaw of the Wild West?
- Of the Wild West? Oof. - Yeah.
Billy the whatsit.
- Billy the whatsit? - Billy the Kid?
KLAXON
- The Sundance Kid? - Yeah, what's her name?
KLAXON
- Butch Cassidy. - KLAXON
We can go on and on. Uh, so, again,
there were no outlaws as such in the old West. Male or female.
- Oh, you amaze me. - So in the original meaning,
you didn't have to commit a crime in order to be an outlaw.
ALAN HUMS DRAMATICALLY
Yeah, that's a fantastic film, isn't it?
So these were... So none of them were outlaws.
In order to be an outlaw, you had to be set outside...
ALAN HUMS
Are you trying to hum the theme tune to The Magnificent Seven?
- Yeah. - Yes. - That's not the theme tune to The Magnificent Seven.
# Dun-da-dun-da-dun! Da-da-da-da-da-da! #
- No, that's Bonanza. - Oh, that's Bonanza!
- Oh, I liked Bonanza. - I thought Bonanza was...
# Da, da-da-la, da-da-la, Bonanza! #
Yeah, yeah, I think that was right. I think we need...
I demand that...
- That's the Muppets! - Someone Google it.
Does anybody know the bloody theme tune?
BILL HUMS: The Magnificent Seven Theme
BOTH HUM
Come on, everyone!
Everybody, join in!
AUDIENCE HUMS
- CHEERING - It's not that. It's not that!
High Chaparral!
You all join in with High Chaparral, what's wrong with you?
I'm going to Google it.
- Seriously? - It'll take a while. My phone takes 15 minutes to turn on.
Oh, I know the feeling. Erm...
APPLAUSE
So, an outlaw is mearly somebody who's been put outside the law,
so denied its protection.
So, Robin Hood of legend became a robber
because he had been declared an outlaw by the King.
He wasn't an outlaw because he was a robber.
So that meant that he could have been subjected to mob justice
and nobody would have cared. So in that sense Jesse James
and all those other outlaws of the Wild West aren't outlaws at all,
because if you see a wanted dead or alive poster
that suggests people are still interested.
- Do you like that, Grayson? - I've always wanted to be an outlaw.
- Have you? - No.
I think that people who sort of put great store in
the rebellious pose are misguided.
I think the counterculture
is basically the R&D Department for capitalism.
Yes. Discuss.
In England, an outlaw was said to have caput lupinum,
so a wolf's head because he might be put to death by any man,
as a wolf, that hateful beast, might. History's most famous outlaw?
Probably Napoleon.
Outlawed in March, 1815, by the Congress of Vienna,
when he had escaped exile and was marching on Paris.
In the weeks before Waterloo, he became an outlaw.
And we still talk about outlaws.
Every time the Queen's Speech happens the House of Commons then
returns to its own chamber to debate not the content of the speech
but the Outlawries Bill, and it's still the thing they talk about
even though it is not really a proper bill
and it is just to say we can talk about what we like,
we don't have to pay any attention to the Queen.
- AS THE QUEEN: - What? You mean you don't pay any attention
- to what I am saying? - No. - How perfectly ghastly.
I've been doing it all these bloody years,
putting this very heavy crown on, nobody's bloody listing.
- Does this happen? Is this still law? - It is still the law.
The idea was that they wanted to stop what they called
clandestinely outlawries, which is declaring somebody an outlaw
without giving them a chance
to say, "Hang on a minute, that's not quite right."
So back over to O-V-A, ova now.
What is the secret ingredient
of virgin boy eggs?
Oh....
- Yeah, it's... Oh, I promise you, it's... - Acne.
Like, taking it out with a syringe and sticking it in the egg?
Boy eggs. A pustule.
Done like a Walnut Whip.
GROANING
You see, I thought what I've got on the card is disgusting,
but it's possible you've topped it. I think that...
I think you can reverse acne by injecting wee into it.
- Well, stay with the wee. - Oh, all right.
Stay with the wee. It's a Chinese dish called tongzidan.
- What? - And it is literally virgin boy eggs.
They prepared by boiling hens' eggs in the urine of young boys.
- Ugh! - Now, come on,
it's a springtime delicacy
in the city of Dongyang in Zhejiang province.
- You're making this up now. - No, no.
So they soak them in the urine and then they bring them to the boil,
and then they're simmered for a day with fresh urine, a few herbs,
and at the end of the process, they apparently look like that.
The urine is from boys under the age of ten,
and what they do is they collect it in a bucket in primary schools.
And each of the eggs are sold at...
It's about 20p apiece.
According to one Dongyang resident, they taste a bit like urine,
but not too much.
- It's like goats' milk tastes a bit of wee, doesn't it? - Do you think?
- Well, it has that sort of... - It will from now on. - Yes.
Well, if you wanted to wash your virgin boy eggs down,
the best thing to do is baby mice wine.
This is available in the Canton region of China.
I'm afraid it does contain baby mice.
Travellers who have tried it say tastes a bit like petrol.
What could be nicer?
There are people who do drink their own urine for medical benefit,
- don't they? - There are, yes.
That is a horrible picture.
Apparently it tastes slightly sweet, bit salty. A bit like a margarita,
- I imagine. - Yes. - And...
Does he normally have it in one of those glasses?
With salt round the rim.
Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no.
You're saying salt round the rim, and then...
- Tastes a bit like urine, not too much. - Not too much.
There was a Mexican boxing champion called Juan Manuel Marquez,
and he rather famously showcased the practice of drinking his own urine
ahead of a fight in 2009, with Floyd Mayweather Jr.
But he lost.
Not a disgrace. Everyone loses to Floyd Mayweather Jr.
I don't think it would do you any harm
because, fundamentally, the toxins leave your body through the faeces,
- so... - Can only do you harm if it's off.
- Yes. - You've got to have it fresh and warm.
But if you drank some, and then you
urinated it out and then drink that,
and then urinated that out and kept on going...
- Yeah, you probably... - ..how many sort of goes before you...
Before it's completely nothing at all?
Before it's just a cube coming out, I guess.
Urine stock cube to use in your...
You go to the Chinese supermarket for a small boys' wee cube.
"You got any, uh..."
"I haven't got a bucket of boys' wee..."
"I haven't got time to go to the primary school.
"Can you give me some urine stock cubes?"
I spent time with the Mundari people of South Sudan,
and they used the urine of their
incredibly prized cattle to dye their
naturally black hair orange, so during the morning ablutions -
that's what's happening there - the men lower their heads into
the urine stream of a tethered cow, and they use the ash -
you can see his body is white there -
from burned cow dung smeared all over the face and body,
but it acts as a natural antiseptic and it stops mosquitoes.
- It's a mosquito repellent. - If he stays there too long,
he'll get a pat on the head.
GROANING, SOME APPLAUSE
Wow. Oh, now, now, the audience are rebelling again.
Some are going, "No, that was good."
- "No, no." "Yeah!" "No." - Don't encourage him. Don't encourage him.
The secret ingredient of virgin boy eggs comes from virgin boys.
For whom was it all over because of its ova?
Was it Edwina Currie?
Oh. Did she not have some egg...
- AS CURRIE: - She had an egg-based scandal, didn't she, Edwina?
Yes, she's actually morphed into
Hyacinth Bouquet as I sit here, but...
She is from the same neck of the woods.
- Didn't she have an affair with John Major? - She did, yes.
They said you could tell by the CURRIE stains on his underpants.
GROANING Hey!
Oh, now, you miss the pat on the head joke now!
Sorry, I just got a call here.
1982 want their jokes back.
OK, for whom was it all over because of its ova?
We are in a Bill Bailey area of information.
A bird. It'll be a bird, Bill.
- A bird? - Yes. - Was it stealing eggs, was it?
Well, yes, I suppose, there's a bit of stealing involved.
Let me show you.
- So I've got... - Oh, my Lord!
..some eggs here.
- Oh. - So this one is an ostrich egg.
- Isn't that amazing? - Yes.
- Wow. - This is roughly the size of the egg that I am talking about.
Now, you can't have a real one
because they're worth an absolute fortune.
- So this is... - Is this a prehistoric egg of some kind?
It is the elephant bird.
- The elephant bird. - The elephant bird.
And this is a Heston Blumenthal
chocolate egg that is roughly the same...
- Wow. - I know. And it's got something in it.
I don't know if we should open it and have a look.
Does anybody want to...?
- Oh, please, go on. - So what happened is, humans stole the eggs for food,
- Bill. - Yes.
Whoa!
- Wow. - Do you know about the elephant bird?
They were around until the 17th century.
They were flightless, they were about 10ft tall.
- Oh, right. - They weighed about half a ton,
and they lived on the island of Madagascar.
They had a ferocious kick, so you wouldn't have been able to
get near them, human beings. I mean, imagine such a big bird.
But the eggs of the elephant bird were 100 times the size of a
chicken's egg, so it could have fed a family for several days.
So you couldn't attack the bird to eat it,
but you could probably get hold of the eggs,
and so many eggs were taken that eventually the bird became entirely
extinct. And we still find fragments of the shell of the elephant bird
near where we know human beings lit fires.
David Attenborough, didn't he reassemble one?
From pieces he found on the beach?
Yes, he did, because they're incredibly valuable.
The last one that was sold at Christie's, which was in 2013,
sold for £66,000.
And also, when they are found now, the Malagasy government claims them,
and so any ones in private ownership or in museums or whatever are
incredibly rare. So that's why we've got the chocolate one.
- Yes. - What a shame it died out, isn't it? - Yeah.
Easter eggs, anybody know who thought of Easter eggs?
How long have we been colouring Easter eggs for?
- What, chocolate ones or real eggs? - Well, either.
It's a really old form of art, people deciding to colour eggs.
We have accounts from Edward I, so the accounts from 1307.
There's an entry for 18p for 450 eggs to be boiled and dyed
or covered in gold leaf and distributed the Royal household,
so a really long time back.
The chocolate ones are a German invention,
they start in the 19th century.
There was a bit of a hoo-ha about them this Easter, wasn't there?
- Didn't Theresa May get involved in it? - Oh... - The National Trust.
- It was the National Trust. - They started saying...
- They left the word Easter off Easter eggs. - Yes.
And she got very... You know, because she's the vicar's daughter.
Yes, and a National Trust member.
You know she goes on all of those walking holidays, you know,
and I'm going to get up for a minute.
She has got a very funny walk, Theresa May
cos she kind of walks like she's carrying a drip trolley.
That's why she goes on those holidays
cos she has to take those sticks with her.
She wields those sticks
and it's like she has been sent into a minefield to clear it.
You understand how all this is going to play on Dave in ten years' time?
- BILL IN RUSSIAN ACCENT: - When we are ruled by Russia.
Hello. Welcome to QI.
APPLAUSE
Here is egg. Ha-ha-ha.
Some facts about urine...
The elephant bird went extinct
because humans went to work on its eggs.
There's been a report of a cyber attack at a power plant.
- Who's the most likely to be behind it? - This Russian.
KLAXON
Yes, it was me.
Hands up, it was me.
It is most likely to be squirrels.
- Oh, yes. - Oh, I was going to say that. - Yes.
So there is a security researcher called Chris "Space Rogue" Thomas...
Go, Chris, with the name.
..and he's set up a spreadsheet of this measure of every time
there has been a cyber attack on a power station anywhere in the world.
There's been more than 1,000 since he started.
The vast majority are false alarms but there have been 876 successful
attacks against the infrastructure of a power station by squirrels.
Russia has been blamed in recent years for two attacks
on the Ukraine, and everybody's assumed that Russian hackers
were behind these attacks but they have in fact been
successfully attacked more frequently by frogs.
So that is an example of Occam's Razor.
- Does anyone know what Occam's Razor is? - Yes.
Occam is kind of the more likely explanation is probably
the one that it is, rather than looking for some conspiracy theory.
- Exactly that. Don't overcomplicate. - Don't overthink it.
Don't overthink it, so Occam is one of the major thinkers
actually of medieval thought.
14th-century philosopher friar, William of Occam in Surrey.
But the principle itself goes back much further to Aristotle and so on.
- It is. - It is known as...
- It is a lovely present for the man who has everything. - Yes.
- Got you an Occam's Razor. - A full range of men's toiletries.
Occam's...
- Occam's aftershave balm. - Occam's beard oil.
Yes, I never go anywhere without my Occam's beard oil.
So lateral thinking puzzles. OK, so here's one.
A man goes to a restaurant and orders albatross soup,
takes one mouthful and then rushes out and kills himself?
You get in lateral thinking puzzles a lot of people
who kill themselves. So what has happened here?
I know this one. He's lost at sea and he's with his other sailors.
- Yeah. - They're saying to him,
"Oh, we have got some food, it's albatross."
So he eats and he thinks, mmm, you know.
And the first thing he does when he gets to land, he says,
can I have albatross soup?
And he eats and it doesn't taste like what he had on the boat
and that's when he knew he was eating human flesh.
Dun-dun-duuun!
So that is the really complicated answer.
Much more likely...
A man is on his way to kill himself
and he happens past a restaurant which is serving albatross soup
and he thinks, "I might as well try it," he does like it because,
you know, it's albatross soup,
he has one mouthful and goes and kills himself.
- Yeah, that's not funny though. - Is not that likely though, is it?
This Occam's Razor is a real party killer, isn't it?
Bit of a killjoy, isn't it?
"Is it a magical thing, Occam?" "No."
- "Was a Russian conspiracy theory?" "No." - "It was a squirrel." - Squirrel.
"Good night, sleep tight."
"Oh, Uncle Occam, you're such a boring story teller."
- But clean-shaven. - Very clean-shaven.
According to Occam's Razor the simplest explanation
is likely to be the most likely.
Now, here's a simple question.
Who spends all day fossicking in the mullock?
- Yes, Alan? - I do. - You do?
I feel like I'm doing that right now, after I've eaten that egg.
It sounds like you are sort of looking in the washing basket for a
clean pair of pants, the cleanest pair of pants, doesn't it?
Well, you are looking... You are looking through dirt.
Is it between tides?
- Scavenging and... - Scavenging.
- Beachcombing. - Beachcombing, yes.
So "fossick" is possibly from the Cornish meaning "to search out",
and "mullock" is Middle English for "dust" or "rubbish".
It's the business of grubbing around,
that's the fossicking, in the spoil,
the mullock, of numerous mounds left by opal miners around Coober Pedy.
- Coober Pedy! - They call it "noodling."
It's a small town in the vast desert outback of South Australia.
- Yes. - Have you been there? - I've been there. - And they have underground
- hotels... - Did you fossick? - I did fossick briefly, yes,
in the minibar.
What is this, the "what" capital of the world?
- The opal capital of the world. - The opal capital of the world.
Provides about three-quarters of the world's opals.
Better known as Vauxhall, in this country.
It gets so hot in the summer, they have to live underground.
And I met a bloke there who went there when he was 20,
and he was digging around... Just... You can...
- Noodling. - Noodling away. Noodling away.
And the bloke next to him found a 7 million opal.
And that's it, he never left!
And he was still there, after all this time.
Well, you can buy a permit for less than £40.
- Yeah. You could. - So it is possible you could make your fortune.
You talked about those underground places -
cos it's all sandstone, they built these astonishing...
- I stayed there! - Did you? - Yeah. - Astonishing buildings.
Serbian Orthodox underground church!
It is. Half the town's residents...
There's 3,500 people live there. Half of them live underground.
And, in fact, the name Coober Pedy is
an Anglicised version of the aboriginal "kupa piti",
which means "white man in a hole."
Do you play golf at all, Bill?
- I do, yes. - Cos one of the top ten extraordinary golf courses in the
- world... - I didn't play there, but it looked extraordinary.
It's a unique golf course.
There is no grass.
- That's right. - So you get given a little tiny turf of grass,
- anybody who plays golf. - It's just all bunker!
It's all crushed rock.
And the greens are made of sand mixed with sump oil,
so that the sand doesn't blow away.
And to avoid the daytime sun, which can be incredibly hot,
they often play at night, and they use these...
- These eggs! - Yes. ..these glow-in-the-dark balls...
Can we just turn the lights out and see if these will actually function?
I'm going to see if I can...
So there's a glow in the dark...
Sandi's shirt, as well!
- Wow. - Did you know it's the only golf course in the world that has
reciprocal rights with the Royal And Ancient?
- So the home of golf. - Of course!
What happened was they wrote to the Royal And Ancient
and they thought they'd try their luck.
"Would you mind giving us reciprocal playing rights?"
And they wrote back and said, "Would you mind giving us an opal mine?"
So they gave them a little tiny square of land, which might possibly
have opals in it and so they did give them reciprocal rights,
but what they gave them was they can have two rounds of golf a day
for up to eight people, only in January.
In Scotland. Yes.
It's an extraordinary place.
People do... I mean, there's mining, that's it.
- It's all there is. - But look at that...
It's funny in Australia, though, cos it's all kind of "no worries",
you know, and, "Yeah, great, no worries."
And you kind of think, "Oh, that's great, they're such a
"happy-go-lucky, lovely people."
And by about a week in you're thinking,
"Can we actually worry about something now?!"
There's all that good weather.
I was out in Sydney and I was listening to the radio
and they said, "Now, the weather. There's no weather today."
No, it's all just great. No worries.
There's a great expression they have there which is "too easy."
You ask them, "Can I get a beer, mate?" "Too easy." You know.
It's a lovely thing. It's like, "Too easy, mate. Don't worry."
And it gets annoying after a while.
I was in the hotel, and this bloke phoned me up and said, "Mr Bailey,
"there's a package for you." I went, "OK."
He goes, "Do you want me to bring it up?"
I went, "OK," and then he went, "Too easy."
"All right, then. Well, fly it up, then!"
"Make it more difficult!"
I expect there's Australians at this very minute
on a panel show going, "They always ask, 'How are you?'
- "but they don't want to find out!" - That's true.
And if you're in LA,
you go down to breakfast, and the waiter says to you, "Hey, there,
"how's your day been so far?!"
You think, "I'm just coming down to breakfast.
- "Nothing much has happened so far." - Nothing.
"I've drunk me own urine, and now I want some eggs.
"Can you boil them in a bucket of boys' piss?"
- I once had a waitress in Los Angeles... - Did you, now?!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I didn't mean for that to get out. OK...
Now it's time to go straight over to General Ignorance,
fingers poised over buzzers, please.
What happens if you put a frog in cold water
and then heat it up to boiling point?
MUSIC: Over and Over by Hot Chip
Yes, Bill?
It turns...
..inside out.
No...
MUSIC: It's Over by Roy Orbison
- It gets a little bit warm and it jumps out. - It does jump out.
The myth is that the frog will stay in the hot water.
It's often used as a sort of political parable -
Al Gore used it in The Inconvenient Truth, about climate change.
The idea that because it happens so slowly, you don't notice,
and then eventually you're going to die.
- But frogs are not that stupid. - No. - They're just not that stupid.
But, if you put it the other way round,
so if you put a reptile in a warm tank and you gradually reduced the
temperature, it might very well allow itself to freeze to death.
Cos it's cold-blooded, it would respond to the dropping temperature
by shutting down its systems, basically.
It would go to sleep, and then it would freeze in its...
- He's a jolly chap on the left there. - He's fab, isn't he?
Hey! Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boo!
You could get a dead frog to jump out of a hot pan,
that is perfectly possible. Because frogs are cold-blooded, so...
- If you injected it with urine. - No, the thing is they are cold-blooded
and so rigor mortis doesn't set in as quickly as like a chicken.
So what happens is, when they are being cooked, the fresh frogs'
legs twitch and also if you have fresh frogs' legs on a plate,
just the legs, not the rest of the frog, and you put salt on them
they will dance and twitch, they will jump about... I know!
Isn't that unpleasant? It's a chemical reaction in the muscles.
If a frog can't stand the heat, it gets out of the saucepan.
OK, you see a baby bird that's fallen out of its nest,
what is the one thing you should never do?
Put it back in the nest?
KLAXON
- Bill? - It depends.
It depends, if it's, you know, fledged, then...
- Which means it's got... - It has got the feathers. - Yes.
Then it means it has fallen out and the parents won't be far away.
If it's un-feathered then you should put it back because birds
are not so clever that they will notice a human having touched it.
If it's got feathers it's probably left
the nest on purpose and it won't thank you
if you try to put it back, or it's been rejected
by the parents, and again they won't thank you if you put it back.
Within five minutes, it will be eaten by a crow
so don't worry about it.
But if you find a sea turtle washed up on the beach,
do not put it back into the water,
because the ones that are stranded in our part of the world
almost certainly are suffering from hypothermia
- and if you put it back in the water it will freeze. - Freeze. - Yeah.
But the opposite is if you find a desert tortoise,
don't pick it up at all, because the way
they defend themselves is by emptying their bladder
and that will lead to death by dehydration,
so it will piss all over you and then it'll die.
- Just like any bloke on a Saturday night. - Yes.
We got that fact from the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum,
it's listed under "Fun Facts."
And lastly, it ain't over until...
The fat lady sings.
KLAXON
- Yup. - Why do we say that?
Opera, is it, and the fat lady comes on and sings,
and then when she's done that, it's over?
- Is it that? - The usual explanation is that it is Brunnhilde in Wagner's
- Ring Cycle. - The Ring Cycle.
- Look at those bosoms! - Yeah.
Requires a substantial soprano.
Madonna's gone to seed, hasn't she?!
# Like a virgin...
# Touched for the very first time... #
OK, that's it, get out!
She sings one of the longest
operatic arias in history at the end,
but her aria is not quite the final sung part of the opera.
The last words go to the villain of the piece, Hagen.
He's an evil, scheming, Burgundian warrior who sings Zuruck Vom Ring,
"get away from the ring",
as he's dragged by the Rhinemaidens to the river.
MUSIC: The Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner
# Zuruck vom Ring... #
I bet the queue at the loo is already forming,
as those bars are playing!
Do you know that wonderful story about the end of Puccini's Tosca?
There's a marvellous moment when the soprano's supposed to leap to her
death off the walls, and Eva Turner, who was a famous British soprano,
was doing this at the Lyric Opera in Chicago,
and she complained that the mattress she was supposed to fall on was not
really springing enough, so they
replaced it with a trampoline, and...
..she reappeared three times!
There's an American saying, "It ain't over till it's over,"
which is a sort of variant on the fat lady singing,
and it's usually attributed to Yogi Berra,
who was the much-loved catcher of the New York Yankees,
but he was celebrated for his wonderful turns of phrase.
He said things like, "It's deja vu all over again," which I like.
"The future ain't what it used to be."
And the most famous thing he's supposed to have said is,
"It ain't over till it's over."
But now it really is all over, barring the scores.
Now, here's the thing, OK? Because Jan and I have been friends for
a really long time, and I know that Jan can do an impersonation of me...
I've got a blonde wig...
..and I'm going to give you my glasses...
- OK. - Can I be you, and you be me?
- OK. - OK, marvellous.
This is a marvellous thing.
- OK. - OK.
So I'm going to shift myself over, next to Grayson...
- OK. Right, so... - Yeah.
- AS SANDI: - Curiously, all you have to do with Sandi is remember the tune
goes up and down a lot, and, er...
So that brings us to the scores.
All over the place, it's Alan with minus 77 points.
Slightly overwhelmed, Bill with minus 7 points.
Over a barrel, Grayson, with plus 3 points,
but, OMG, this week's winner...
SHE LAUGHS
Well, it's JANDI, with five points!
CHEERING
So it's thanks from Grayson, Jandi, Bill, Alan and me,
and I leave you with this piece of advice from WC Fields -
"Start every day off with a smile, and get it over with."
Good night.