This programme contains some strong language
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello!
Hello and welcome to QI.
Tonight, we take a plunge into the pastimes of past times.
But let me preface that with the introduction of our players.
It's the triumphant Joe Lycett!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It's the victorious Phil Wang!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It's the indomitable Ellie Taylor!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And it's the taking part that counts.
Alan Davies!
LAUGHTER, CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Right, panel. Play me back to the past.
Joe goes...
PLAINSONG CHANTING
Oh, that's lovely. Phil goes...
FANFARE
Catchy. LAUGHTER
Ellie goes...
GAVOTTE
Oh, a gavotte!
LAUGHTER
Well, it was a short dance, but I liked it! Alan goes...
♪ Crazy horses! ♪
OK. How do you beat a bull at poker?
Mum?!
She wants to get some tweezers, I tell you.
Do you bring in loads of sexy cows to try and distract him?
What if the cards were red... Yes.
..on the back, like those. Yes. And then he'd go like that.
HE GROWLS
LAUGHTER
You'd have to deal him a lot of clubs and spades.
"What's the matter with the bull?"
"He's got all hearts and diamonds..."
"Get the cows in! Get the sexy cows!"
It's a genuine game, OK?
It takes place in a rodeo.
The Angola Prison Rodeo, which is where?
In Angola?
No. Louisiana.
There we are.
It's held one weekend in April,
and it is every single Sunday in October,
and it raises loads of money, about 450,000 for prisoner education programmes.
They have something called Convict Poker.
So four inmates play a game of poker,
seated in the middle of the rodeo.
And a bull is released, for the sole purpose... Oh!
..to unseat the poker players.
And the last man remaining seated is the winner.
Yeah. If you move at all, you're disqualified.
It's just the most astonishing... So the poker...
They could be playing anything. I suppose poker, like,
if it was Monopoly, the bits would go everywhere.
Yes, it would be annoying, wouldn't it?
Convict KerPlunk would a be nice one.
Oh, that would be very good!
Any thoughts why Louisiana State Penitentiary
is known as Angola Prison? Why might it be called that?
It started out as a fisherman's prison... Right.
..for anglers... Anglers, yes. ..who used the wrong bait... Yes.
..and went to prison for it. And then by a process of evolution,
the word changed to Angola. I like that. No.
It is the place where most of the African-Americans came from,
from Louisiana, the slaves came originally from Angola.
They have a round after Convict Poker called Guts And Glory,
and they tie a poker chip to a Brahma bull.
There it is, it's got a poker chip on it.
And the object is to get close enough to the bull
to win the poker chip.
Again, it's slightly on the violent side.
Do they have, like, the internet there, or anything? Like, do...?
Why is this their entertainment?
It is so popular in the United States.
There are loads of rodeos.
There's even, there's gay rodeo, there's black rodeo...
Oh, well, now you're talking!
It's not quite as violent... When I went to gay rodeo,
they did a thing called goat dressing,
where you have to try and put a pair of underpants on a goat.
It's not quite as...
We've all been there, haven't we, Sandi?
ELLIE: Is it in the prison? Is it, like,
in part of the prison complex...? Yes.
It's actually part of the prison.
I think it's the only prison in the world that also has a golf course.
So it's the only place you can go to a prison and play golf as well.
It sounds like a weird Center Parcs or something.
It's a classy joint. They have an execution chamber that can
be used for either sex.
What special requirements does each sex have to be killed?
I don't know whether the linen's nicer for the women, I don't know.
Maybe it's a bit like toilets. Because if you put two toilets
up, a boys' one and a girls' one, after a while,
the girls' one is just a bit nicer, somehow.
Yes, do you know what the secret is? Mm?
We wee in the actual toilet.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I've been doing it wrong all this time!
PHIL: I've been to an Indonesian rodeo.
Have you? In Sumatra. Right.
It's not so much a rodeo
as some cows in a field, but...
It's a paddy field flooded with water,
and men compete with each other
to surf off the back of a brace of buffalo,
without a surfboard, just their feet.
Just skimming across the water? Yeah.
So they grab each tail...
And then... Are you making this up?
No! I haven't... I haven't the imagination.
LAUGHTER
It's two bulls, you grab a tail each,
and that's your steering wheel. Right.
And then they go, "Go on, then, bull,"
and the bulls, the... "Go on, then, bull"?!
Are they yoked together? Cos otherwise, if, you know...
Yeah, could be awful. Whoa!
They...they are yoked together.
But I tell you what, doesn't help.
Cos they just... they'll go any which way.
And the audience watch from in front of the buffalo. Right.
And you just have to see if it comes at you,
and if it does, try and get out of the way!
And the winner is whoever isn't dead...
LAUGHTER
..at the end.
Wow. What's wrong with just a quiet game of Catch The Bus?
Catch The Bus? Catch The Bus...Stop The Bus. Oh.
I like Catch The Bus.
It's a card game my nan used to play.
It's called Stop The Bus? Stop The Bus.
I think it's a Birmingham game. So sweet!
I don't know how you play it, though. Do you just catch a bus?
LAUGHTER
"Here we go, Joe, it's time for Stop The Bus!"
"Put your hand out..."
"Hey!"
Wow, what fun. I know!
I have to say, Convict Poker
is not the worst prisoner sport story from America.
Not even by a long shot.
There was a thing called the Penitentiary Row All Stars,
and they were a baseball team that was set up in 1911,
and it was death row convicts from Wyoming State Penitentiary.
So they played as a team. If they won the match,
that could mean a little bit of a reduction in their sentence.
And if they lost, it could bring their execution forward.
So this was quite focusing for the baseball team,
as you can imagine. They played four matches, they won four.
And lots of people bet on them. 132,000 was wagered on them,
including bets made by three state politicians
who were raising funds for re-election.
But then they decided that it wasn't a good idea
and the whole thing was closed down, and unfortunately,
the star player, Joseph Seng, was executed.
So it's not a good story.
Tell us another bedtime story!
You go catch the bus, darling!
Now, from playing poker to playing possum.
How can you tell if your partner is dead?
It's becoming increasingly difficult.
Is this a real question, Sandi, or do we need to ring a paramedic?
I promise you, it's a proper question.
It is not to do with those extraordinary danceathons
that they used to have, which is that middle picture there.
It's an ancient way of working out if your partner, your husband,
or your wife, is dead.
Well, are they moving, breathing, speaking?
Are they nagging you and berating you for all your behaviour?
These are the things... Are they finding fault, Sandi?
OK, it's to do with tossing.
You toss them?
You do. You absolutely do.
It is the practice of people throwing,
or tossing people on blankets.
So...
This guy in the middle is called Johann Unzer,
he was a German doctor, and in the 18th century,
he was visiting Corsica.
And he wrote down about this - when a married man died,
it was common for villagers to toss the corpse on a blanket
for hours on end, which occasionally had the effect
of bringing him back to life.
If he didn't come back to life, then the local women would gather
and they would beat his widow as a punishment
for letting him die.
If it turned out he wasn't dead,
then I imagine she dealt with him.
It's not uncommon, it's not just in Corsica.
So you get it in Spain, it's called pelele,
and Prellen in Germany.
It's a bit like giving somebody the bumps on their birthday.
And it was a common thing to toss people up and down in that way.
Is there any, like, medical basis for that to work?
Like, jolting the heart? Well, it could be, but I mean,
it has a kind of a superstitious background to it.
So the idea of tossing things in the air to ward off evil spirits.
And it probably comes from winnowing.
So you know about separating the wheat from the chaff?
So the simplest way is to toss it in the air because the chaff
is lighter than the wheat and the wind will blow it away.
And so there's a sort of symbolic thing
of doing that with human beings.
"He's dead! He's alive! He's alive!"
"Oh, he's dead again."
"His neck's broken."
"Where's his widow? It's YOUR fault." Yeah, your fault!
One of the most famous recipients of a tossing,
Sancho Panza, from which book?
Oh, Don Quixote. Don Quixote!
Chapter 17, he and his master refuse to pay an innkeeper's bill,
and so he's grabbed by a group of lodgers
and they toss him up and down...
And Queen Elizabeth, she was tossed, wasn't she?
Queen Elizabeth I? II.
II? Yeah.
The day of the coronation!
Do tell! Well, they had a rehearsal,
and the Archbishop Canterbury and a few cohorts gave her a toss.
That's the tradition. People aren't familiar with it
because we haven't had a coronation for ages, but Charles is next.
Really?
Is that actually a thing?
Of course not, you fool!
APPLAUSE
I was so, like... No, darling! "Oh, my God!"
You thought your nan catching a bus was a game.
Bless your heart.
But there were strict rules about it,
but if you really wanted to punish somebody,
you would laden the whole thing with logs and tools and...
Oh! I know. And it wasn't just humans that were tossed.
There was actually a game called Fuchsprellen, or fox tossing,
played by German aristocrats in the 17th century.
And they had actual courts for fox tossing.
The winner was the team that got their fox highest in the air.
Oh! And the whole ground there, it's covered in sawdust
in case they missed, and that's to protect the fox,
it's to keep it alive for the next tossing, cos they're valuable.
The most famous match was held in Dresden.
There was a man called Augustus II, "the Strong", he was known as.
In this particular game,
647 foxes,
533 hares, 34 badgers
and 21 wild cats were tossed,
and the whole game finished off with a jolly good clubbing...
ELLIE: Oh, God! I know.
..for any animals that were still alive.
PHIL: And the Tories want to bring it back.
I like Augustus the Strong.
He liked to toss with just one finger, like that.
So he had a sling attached to the blanket...
Sandi, do that again!
He was an extraordinary fellow, Augustus the Strong.
He liked to break horseshoes with his bare hands, for fun.
You know what's worse than being tossed? What's that?
Indoor tossing. Oh, yes. Yes.
Pah!
Yeah. Especially for women,
because there's always the glass ceiling.
Very good!
A good tossing can save a marriage.
Wow.
From upward foxes to downward dogs,
how old are yoga poses?
PHIL: Well, some must be older than others.
So, like, standing, that's probably pretty old.
Yeah. Is that actually a pose, though, do you think? Just standing?
Yeah, I think it's, like, one of the beginner ones. Right.
Do you do yoga? I have done yoga. Right.
And did you get beyond standing, or just do standing?
I...
I did a bit of sitting. OK.
I did lying down. Advanced.
I felt great after doing it, absolutely great,
and I've never done it again. No. OK. Have you done yoga?
I've done that.
And that was the outfit I was wearing at the time.
So anybody? Any idea how old? Give it a guess.
Seven million years.
Wow. Is it very modern, then? Is that...?
It is extremely modern. Most... ALAN: Invented in the '40s.
Yeah, most of the yoga poses practised today
are late-19th and 20th-century inventions. Like fidget spinners!
Yes, exactly like that! Exactly. Oh!
So ancient yoga is a meditative and philosophical practice.
It's not what we think of it today.
And pretty much, it's almost what you said, Phil.
They just have one posture, but it's not standing,
it is just to sit comfortably. That's it.
Oh, my God... I'm doing yoga now!
You are totally into the zone.
I always thought I'd be good at yoga.
It's a win-win.
The lotus position might be an old one,
that may have some provenance, but the guide to yoga postures,
or the asana, they were created in the 15th century.
But these are not really recognisable
as the ones that we have today. Most of the 15 poses described
in a thing called the Hatha Yoga Pradipika,
they're seated or flat on your back.
The best bit about this book is not the yoga poses.
It has some instructions, for example, how to avoid death
by redrawing discharged semen back into your penis.
That is one of the...
AUDIENCE GROANS
It's like a boomerang on Instagram!
SHE SLURPS
Oh, you've been on my Instagram!
What a Gif. ELLIE: Yeah.
There's another one,
how to lengthen your own tongue so you can lick your forehead.
Who doesn't want that skill? Wow!
It's... Licking your forehead's not the first thing that comes to mind.
APPLAUSE
Phil, I'm sorry.
You seem like a nice boy, and I'm very sorry.
This is exactly what I came here for! OK.
So it wasn't till the 19th century that we begin
to get any work that resembles modern yoga.
This is an Indian prince called Krishna Raja Wadiyar III,
and he wrote a guide. And it has
122 poses, but they're mostly borrowed from gymnastics.
And then you start to get the westernisation of it.
And that's when it begins to evolve.
But it's really a very modern thing.
The most difficult yoga pose that we know of is called
a Yoganidrasana, and it is known....
Oh, God!
Yeah. It's the yoga sleep pose.
I don't even know what's happening.
I think he's trying to do what Alan was suggesting earlier.
I think that all that stands between that man and happiness
is two vertebrae.
"Will someone help me get my pants off!"
Yeah, where are his feet, actually?
They're tucked in under his chin. Some people tuck the feet
behind the head and use it as a sort of pillow,
that is the other way I've seen it done.
Just use a pillow!
It is very disturbing.
Full body yoga is supposed to be good for you,
it's supposed to lower blood pressure, treat depression,
musculoskeletal conditions, like lower back pain.
Although... Look at you!
Doing some there, doing a few moves there. I like that!
Can you do the sleep pose? Yeah.
But it causes as many injuries as any other sport.
So it's not necessarily... People are always knackering themselves.
Yes. That's why I think - just sit still.
Go for a walk! Yeah. I've got two pieces of practical advice
for people to avoid injuries from yoga.
This was from a 2013 review of yoga case studies.
First of all, avoid headstands,
and secondly, don't practise yoga
while under the influence of psychoactive drugs.
Good to know. Good to know!
I haven't even thought of that second one.
Yoga, as we know it, is largely a modern invention,
and anyone who says otherwise is merely posturing.
When was the first American Civil War re-enactment performed?
I reckon it was while it was going on.
You reckon it was while...? Yeah. You're absolutely right.
The next day - they went back and said, "This is what happened."
Do you know what, I'm going to give you five extra points for that because...
..that is exactly what happened. So they were known as practice battles
or sham battles. It was partly for practice but partly
exactly what you're saying. It was like a sort of newsreel
of the time. So they could update people back home
as to how the war was looking.
And it began just after the very first battle of the war.
So, mostly Unionists, that's the ones from the North.
The Confederates didn't do it so often,
the ones from the South, because they didn't have any money for
blank ammunition. And they solved this in the winter
by having snowball battles with full, apparently,
military tactics and... Aww.
They seem like really nice guys!
Nice guys, yeah. And there are lots of people who do this,
they're called live-action role-players, or Larpas.
Do you know about this, Phil? You are nodding. Oh, yeah.
In 2014, there was a Larpa in Portland called
Conrad Bass, who was arrested
after running into a busy
intersection in full armour, while on acid.
PHIL: At least he wasn't doing yoga.
He unsuccessfully tried to joust with a car.
I saw an English Civil War one, as a kid.
It was quite entertaining but then they would get
shot and they would lie down for about 15 seconds,
and then they'd get up and join in again.
And that, to me, that slightly spoiled it. Yeah.
They should just lie there. Do you want them to go method and die?
Yeah. What war had this guy in it?
It's like Game Of Thrones got very low-budget.
The interesting fact about all of them is that they are all virgins.
But it's not a new thing.
The pageantry of staged battles, it goes back, well,
certainly as far as the ancient Romans.
They used to stage a thing called naumachiae.
They were sea battles that were put on
for the public, and they had a specially constructed theatre
for the audience, and ships were crewed by
thousands of prisoners of war,
or slaves and condemned men,
and they actually often used to fight
to the death. That's theatre, innit?
That is proper theatre. Les Mis is shit!
This is what it's about.
So the first one that we know about, the first naumachiae,
was staged by Julius Caesar,
and he was celebrating the end of four different wars
that he had been in. And so a basin was dug near the Tiber,
capable of holding full-sized ships, and more than 2,000
combatants and 4,000 rowers, all of them prisoners of war,
had to fight in it. I mean, it's astonishing. Wow.
I know, it is incredible.
So, and there's always been these
vast battles with lots of people, so, Alan,
I'm going to ask a specific question to you -
what was the first "beautiful game"?
Well, A Beautiful Game is famously
the title of Pele's autobiography.
Right.
So, is that the answer?
No, it's... Not football? No, it isn't football.
So, in Italy, there used to be battles involving
the entire city.
A thing called a Ponte dei Pugni.
The Battle at the Bridge of the Fists.
And it was held every year in the 17th century in Venice.
And men of the city would have a mass fist fight.
And you can sort of see what's going on here.
There is two rival factions.
The Castelanni are the ones in red. They are from the industrial east.
And anybody who's in black,
or in a darker colour, that's mainly the fishermen
from the west of the city, that's the Nicolotti.
Really rounded up some very good paintings for this episode.
Isn't it fantastic? It's really fantastic.
And in 1494, the diarist Allegro Allegretti
referred to the Sienese pugni as -
"un belissimo gioco".
"A beautiful game".
And that is one of the first origins of that phrase.
They hold one of these in my local Wetherspoon every Saturday night.
It's so popular. There's a bridge called the
Diedo bridge at San Marziale, and it opened in 1670,
and it actually included marble footprints to show
where the fighters should take their marks, to get themselves ready
for the battle. It's fantastic, it's astonishing.
For a second, I thought that blue thing in the middle was a sheet,
I thought they were sheet tossing.
A bit of tossing in the middle, as well? No.
But it is tossing, but into the canal.
And possibly one of the greatest re-enactments of battles
was the St Louis World's Fair in 1904.
And they produced what they said was the greatest and most
realistic military spectacle in the history of the world.
They featured a British Army encampment,
they had native Zulu and bushmen and so on.
And then, twice a day, they would re-enact major battles
from the Boer War. And they had several generals
and 600 veteran soldiers, both from each side of the war.
And then at the end of the show, the Boer general,
Christiaan de Wet, he would escape on horseback
by leaping from a height of 35 feet
into a pool of water.
What is astonishing about it - those people in that war,
it was a bitterly fought war, and they hated each other,
they ended up in showbusiness together.
It's a classic showbiz story, really.
Now, can you name a European paradise?
Birmingham.
To which, I believe, you can catch a bus!
You can.
Right, what would you say was a European paradise?
I went to Kavos in 2002.
That was pretty... That's pretty cool.
Free shots if you flashed your boobs.
Is there something about the word "paradise"?
Yeah. It's actually a mythical land of
plenty. It was know as the Province of Cockaigne.
Is that Soho now? Yeah.
The description of it is fantastic - nobody grows old,
houses are made of food.
There are ready-roasted pigs
which walk by, so that you can take a bite out of them.
The sky's made of cheese. That's just a kebab shop!
Monks can beat their abbots. There are lots of pictures
of nuns flipped over to show their bottoms.
And you even get paid for sleeping, yeah. Oh! It does sound good.
There actually are two lines of cocaine on the table. Yeah.
Yes, that's well pointed out.
The Cockaigne Palace was built in 1747
in front of the Palace of Naples.
And it was to celebrate the birth of King Carlos's son,
Felipe, and every inch was covered in food.
And what they did was - they allowed a crowd of starving commoners
into the grounds
to grab as much as they could while the royalty watched.
But the actual word, "paradise",
is actually a Persian gardening term.
Which comes from "pairi", which means around, and "daeza" - walled.
So it was basically just a walled garden,
which we've sort of adopted as an idea of
the place of paradise.
Is this paradise now? Is that what we're looking at?
Yeah. There's a cow tickling a cheetah. Is that what happens?
It's a painter's desire to imagine...
A very lazily planned zoo. Yes.
This is all the animals waiting for the zoo to be finished.
Yeah. "When can we move in?" - that lion is shouting at tortoises.
Shouting? "Move quicker!"
"I'll eat you." "You won't. I'm a tough nut to crack."
OK. Now for another question about the passage of time.
Which of you thinks this show
is dragging the most.
This particular recording?
This time that we're spending together.
It's about how we actually perceive time.
Oh, hang on, where's north?
Sorry?
Are you trying to place Birmingham again?
He needs to know which way to get the bus.
Why do you want to place north, darling?
In my head... Oh, good heavens.
..wherever north is... Yes.
..then I can work out which way the Earth is spinning.
Cos time goes faster depending
on, or slower, depending on your momentum, doesn't it?
So, I can't work out whether... Based on where we are on the...
No, we're all going at the same speed. None of us are
really moving all that differently to each other.
Is there a gender thing? No, it's not a gender thing,
but it is to do with differences between the five of us.
Is it to do with age? It is absolutely to do with ages, yes.
Time races along when you're older.
It's only just been Christmas!
That is exactly right.
Time really does fly when you are older.
So, the person for whom it is dragging, is the youngest
amongst us. Who is the youngest amongst us?
Sandi, it's you, isn't it? It's probably me.
So they did a study, the US Society for Neuroscience,
so if you look at the group here -
we've got 19-to 24-year-olds in one group,
and another group 60-to 80-year-olds, and they
asked them to judge how long it took for three minutes to elapse.
So they just sat them in a room and they had to guess.
And the younger group's guess was
three minutes and three seconds.
And the older group's guess was three minutes and 40 seconds.
So a longer time to an older person feels
quicker, it is exactly that.
"Good heavens, is it Christmas again?"
Yeah.
Is that to do with cos it's sort of relative
to how much you've lived? Yeah.
For example, a four-year-old, her fifth birthday is a
quarter of her life away. Whereas, to a 50-year-old, one year
is only 2% of their lifetime away.
Also, I think, when you are four,
your next birthday is a really very pressing engagement... Yes.
..that you start to think about the day after you were four.
Whereas, we don't really want to have any more birthdays, do we?
Oh, no, I'm looking forward to mine, I'm going to get my bus pass.
CHEERING
Oh, Sandi, have I got a game for you!
But what you said, Joe, is also very interesting
cos another strange thing is to do with physics,
about how we perceive time.
So, according to Einstein's theory of relativity,
the faster you travel, the slower time passes.
So that's something called time dilation.
There's a really neat thought experiment
that proves that if you travel at the speed of light,
time stops.
So you just have to imagine there's a clock
behind you. And you get on a really fast bus, let's say it's
going to Birmingham.
And you get on this really fast bus and you can see the clock behind you.
But if you are travelling at the speed of light,
the light that's coming off the clock can't be faster
than you. So it stays the same. Yeah.
Ah! That's amazing. Absolutely right.
They did this wonderful study in 2014 at Leicester University.
How far the twins Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia -
how far their ages would have drifted apart
in the film Star Wars Episode V, so that's
The Empire Strikes Back.
Cos they travel separately around the universe
at different speeds for different distances,
and they are subjected to different gravitational
fields, and so by the end of the film,
Luke is one and three quarter years younger than his twin sister!
I was flicking through the telly the other day,
and I stumbled across
Jim Davidson
being interviewed by Piers Morgan.
Wow.
And the time it took me to change the channel,
felt like the equivalent of four years.
Agghh!
Actually, on the twins thing, there was
a very good story - in 2007, there were
twins in America, and they were born
during the autumn clocks change.
So, Peter was born first on
Sunday morning, and his sister,
Alison, arrived 34 minutes later.
Are these babies magnetic?
They are. They appear to have swung around.
But because of the daylight savings time, she was recorded
as having been born 26 minutes earlier.
Oh... I know. And their father told reporters,
"We'll let them work it out between themselves,"
"I don't want to get into the middle of it."
Now, what can you tell me about the authors of these poems?
Joe, read this one out for me, darling.
LAUGHTER
OK, that was lovely.
Let's do another one.
Alan, you could maybe read this one for me, darling.
OK. What is wrong with both those poems?
They're shit. They're... Yes.
Is the correct answer!
They were both written by...?
What do we reckon?
A bad poet. No.
They were written by a computer.
Oh! They were written by a computer program.
So there's a man called Jack Hopkins, who's a researcher
at the University of Cambridge, and he fed huge amounts of poetry
into what's called a deep learning program
to teach it to produce its own,
and that is what the computer came up with.
But I have to say, in terms of bad poetry,
we don't need any help, do we?
I think human beings are perfectly capable.
Anybody know who's widely considered
the worst poet in the English language?
PHIL: Ed Sheeran.
I rather like Ed Sheeran.
Why does he do that funny thing with his hair?
ELLIE: It's just being ginger.
APPLAUSE
It's a mistake.
William McGonagall, probably considered the worst poet
of the English language. He lived 1825 to 1902.
One of my favourites,
his ode to the Tay Bridge rail disaster of 1875.
Terrible disaster.
A bridge collapsed under a train during a storm,
it killed everybody aboard. And he wrote...
So... It's just so beautiful! I know.
This was arguably bested, or possibly worsted, in 1873
by a British Museum employee called Theophile-Jules-Henri Marzials.
Here's his poem, A Tragedy.
It's considered one of the worst poems of all time.
These are the final lines.
I've often wondered what I wanted read at my funeral.
Isn't it perfect?
So before the show, I asked everybody to write a poem
to see if we could beat Mr McGonagall,
or indeed, Theophile.
So I've got one. Here we are.
"What would we be without Alan?"
"Totally unbalan-ced."
"That's where."
It's a haiku.
Do you like it? Yes, very much!
Yeah, it was written by my agent. I hadn't got time.
Do you want to begin? I've written a haiku, as well.
Oh, go for it, darling. Ahem.
"First time on QI."
"Must not swear and let Mum down."
"Piece of fucking piss."
APPLAUSE
She'll be so proud.
Thank you, Sandi. Joe.
Can I have absolute silence?
"I really like to go on QI."
"It is better than if I die."
"Sandi Toksvig is so nice,"
"but Alan Davies has got lice."
APPLAUSE
I have actually...
I have actually been treated for that.
Phil? Oh, I've written a poem
on the theme of pastime, which is the theme of the episode.
And it's called One T Or Two.
"Does pastime have one T or two?"
"I haven't the foggiest, do you?"
"I suppose it doesn't matter. We're only here for the patter."
"Does anyone else need a poo?"
I sort of panicked at the end, I think, cos...
APPLAUSE
Do you want to hear some of my tries? Yes, please. OK.
"Denmark, what a lark!"
"Everyone agrees."
"Sandi Toksvig's at her tallest when she's climbing trees."
And then I ran out of ideas.
People do take their poetry very seriously.
There was a man called Roderick Maclean, and he once tried to
shoot Queen Victoria because she didn't like his poetry.
He sent her a poem,
and he got a less than generous reply, he felt,
and he fired at her at Windsor Station on March 2nd, 1882.
He missed, and was subdued by two Eton schoolboys
who hit him with their umbrellas.
I think, out of all of those,
I'm afraid I'm going to vote Phil's the best one.
I think that was very good. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Now, here's a pet hate of mine.
Why did the ancient Chinese give wine to their dogs?
What do you reckon?
♪ Cos they were legends! ♪
Was it to see if it was OK?
You know, like, in a restaurant, they bring you
a little bit and they go, "Go on, then." And you have to go
like this. So they put a glass of wine in front of the dog
and the dog would pick it up and
spin it around. I love that.
Yeah. "Is that a Chateauneuf-du-Ruff?!"
So it's miniature Pekingese that we are talking about.
They were also known as sleeve Pekingese.
They used to keep the dogs up the sleeves,
it's partly to keep their hands warm,
but it's also a form, hilarious form of self-protection.
Because if anybody comes near you, you just go, "Bah!" like that,
with the dogs up your sleeves.
So obviously, if you've got a sleeve Pekingese,
you want them to be as small as possible,
and one of the things they thought was,
if you gave rice wine to puppies,
it would stunt their growth. Oh!
I tried this with my children,
and honestly, they're enormous, so... No idea what happened there!
And they used to squeeze them as newborns
to try and keep them small,
and they used to fit them with a wire mesh waistcoat
to try and... Oh! I know! It's awful.
I have no idea why they thought giving wine to a dog
would keep it small. It...
I have to say, do not give alcohol to dogs.
Their kidneys are not adapted to process it.
And in fact, the practice was banned eventually
by an Empress Dowager Cixi in...
She died in 1908. She stopped it.
Oh, look at the Ferrero Rocher that she... Yes...
Expecting the ambassador! Can't give that to a dog, either.
That's very naughty. No, no chocolate.
No, do not give chocolate.
I'm from Borneo. There's a tribe in Borneo
that cooks food, meat, by passing it
through the digestive system of a dog -
and so you feed the dog like chunks of meat and squeeze...squeeze it
so that it gets cooked by the acid,
but not long enough for it to get digested,
and out the butt comes a lovely little sort of ceviche.
Like a magician, like pulling a sleeve.
Yeah. How are you doing with that - that thought?
I don't like it.
There's a lovely story about how the Pekingese breed came about.
The story is that a lion fell in love with a butterfly.
And they both knew that their difference in size
meant that it was too much for them to overcome.
And together they went to see the Buddha
and he allowed their size to meet
in the middle. So the Pekingese is a love story
between a lion and a butterfly. It's lovely, isn't it? Aww.
It's not true, Joe.
They are known as temple dogs. The idea was that they were so small,
they could get to all the demons in the corners of
the temples. But they could be very vicious.
And they were used to scare away anybody who was
threatening the courtiers. Once they got out the pot,
they were livid. Yeah.
But they were revered. Commoners would have to bow to the dogs,
they were really important within the palace.
How old do we think the Pekingese breed is?
Seven million years.
Same as yoga, then.
1,000 years. It is really old.
It is one of the oldest dog breeds. Dog remains have been found
that look a bit like them in the Middle East and in Europe dating
back 12,000 years.
They're one of the least genetically diverged dogs from the wolf.
You wouldn't think it, would you?
Especially the one on the top left...
Yes. That has been blow-dried.
That's been held under a hand-dryer.
Just up and down in one of those Dyson ones for ages.
The first ones that came to Britain -
was part of the Second Opium War,
so in 1860 they were taken from the Summer Palace near Peking,
during the plundering by the Anglo-French forces.
And as the English stormed the palace, all the dogs
were slaughtered, but five of them survived and one
of them was given to Queen Victoria.
She named him Looty.
But keeping dogs in sleeves -
no stranger than putting them in a handbag.
So, in New York City, the subway prohibits dogs
unless they're carried. You sure that's a dog?
If not, it wants shaving.
Texting his doctor. Yeah.
"I can't even get it in my trousers now."
Now on to the penalty shoot-out round
that we call General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What pastime that begins with P was illegal in New York
for 30 years?
Is the picture a clue?
Well, we are in New York there, and we do have the letter P, so...
FANFARE Pinball.
Pinball is exactly right. Pinball.
So the very first pinball machine patented in 1871,
the first commercial one is 1931, and then the early 1940s,
they began to be seen as a game of chance,
and therefore a form of gambling,
and so they banned it in 1942.
Slight overreaction.
It's Prohibition-style stuff, darling -
they smashed them up, they burned machines.
So politically incorrect and ecologically unsound -
they dumped all of them in the river -
and then eventually it became like a secret thing,
they were in the back rooms of seedy establishments.
The one in the back on the right, there,
is clearly rubbing the pinball machine against his genitals.
Clearly. Clearly only to you.
And it was finally overturned as late as 1976.
Ding-ding!
Tilt! Oh, sorry.
Pinball jizz-ard.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
The ban was overturned because there was an association
called the Music And Amusement Association,
they hired a 26-year-old called Roger Sharpe,
and he proved that it was a game of skill and the ban was overturned.
So now you can play pinball. Pinball prohibition lasted twice as long
as alcohol prohibition.
Which country is the home of golf?
GROANING Oh, that's not fair!
I bet it's China. Everything was invented in China.
You are absolutely right.
Yes, it is indeed.
APPLAUSE
The oldest form of golf is in China.
It's called Chuiwan - literally hitting ball -
and they were playing this form of golf about 1,000 years ago,
and it's described in something called the Dongxuan records,
written sometime between 1050 and 1100 AD.
A Chinese magistrate tells his daughter to dig goals in the ground
so that he might drive a ball into them
with a purposely crafted stick.
What the Scottish did
was they brought all the aspects of the game together.
The first time we hear about golf is when it's banned in Scotland - 1457.
It was thought to be a distraction from practising battle skills.
Also they had the links, didn't they?
They had the land between farmland and the sea,
which was unusable sand dune,
you couldn't grow anything, so they played there.
Yeah. Have I been playing golf wrong?!
In the wrong outfit, certainly!
What is that happening there?
It's a golf re-enactment.
In World War II, they didn't stop playing golf,
despite the fact the Battle of Britain
was going on overhead. They just had a few specific rules
related to wartime.
So here's a local rule for Richmond Golf Club -
"A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous"
"explosion of a bomb, or shell,"
"or by machine-gun fire,"
"may play another ball from the same place."
"Penalty - one stroke."
Which country do pinatas come from?
Not Mexico. Not Mexico.
Where else might they come from?
Wales. Scotland. China.
China!
Thought to have been brought to Europe from China by Marco Polo.
Speaking of Marco Polo, the stories are absolutely fantastic.
One of my favourite stories is about Kublai Khan's niece,
Princess Khutulun, and she was unmarried
and Kublai Khan wanted her to get married
so she said, "Well, that's fine, I will marry the first man"
"who wrestles me and wins - and if he wins, I'll marry him,"
"if he loses he has to give me 100 horses,"
and Marco Polo writes that Princess Khutulun
concluded her life unmarried
with 10,000 horses!
I love that. So there's a Chinese tradition
which Marco Polo wrote about,
and basically they made an ox
or a sort of cow-shaped papier mache structure
and they covered it in coloured paper and they filled it with seeds
and then they hit it until they spilled,
and supposedly it brought good luck and brought the harvest.
So pinatas are also an ancient Chinese invention.
Where does Chinese checkers come from?
It's not going to be that, is it?
PLAINSONG CHANTING
Mexico.
It's a German invention.
So there was a game called Stern-Halma,
but the company in the United States that made it
thought it sounded more exotic to call it Chinese checkers -
but it's based on an earlier American game, also called Halma.
Chinese checkers is one of the few inventions not actually Chinese.
All of which brings us to the puffed-up perorations
of the final scores.
In joint first place, with one point each,
it's Ellie and Alan! APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
In third place, with minus four,
Phil! APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And, winning isn't everything - our wooden spoon goes to Joe,
with minus 18! APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Our thanks to Ellie, Joe, Phil and Alan. That's all from us,
but I leave you with this - in 1980, American tennis player
Vitas Gerulaitis finally beat Jimmy Connors
after losing their previous 16 encounters.
In the post-match interview, Vitas triumphantly said,
"Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row!"
Thank you, goodnight.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING