Good evening and welcome to QI.
Tonight, we are quintessentially Q,
and taking their cues from me
are the quirky Holly Walsh...
APPLAUSE
..the quizzical Cariad Lloyd...
APPLAUSE
..the quixotic Josh Widdicombe...
APPLAUSE
Don't know what it means. Don't know what it means.
..and, for the quadrillionth time, it's Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And their buzzers are quintessentially QI.
Holly goes...
QI THEME'S FIRST THREE NOTES
Cariad goes...
SECOND THREE NOTES
Josh goes...
NEXT THREE NOTES
And Alan goes...
HOOTER, FORFEIT KLAXON
ANNOUNCER: Tottenham Hotspur 6, Arsenal 0.
# Fruity, fruity, fruity! #
It was a... It was a mishmash...
It was. Yeah. ..just for you.
Right, here we go.
This is a portrait from the "Ching" dynasty.
First of all, how would you spell "Ching"? Anybody?
With a Q. Yes, Q-I-N-G.
So why is this woman so made-up?
Did she walk too slowly through the make-up department
at Army & Navy in Guildford?
Oh, that is the most terrifying thing, isn't it? Yeah.
My mum paid for me to go for a makeover in one of those.
Did she? Yes. Er, recently?
No, when I was about 17. Right.
I honestly looked like a woman in her late 80s.
I actually looked like Mary Berry.
That was what happened.
This is a portrait of Prince Xun.
He was the uncle of the then emperor,
so we're talking mid-18th century,
and his wife, who was called Lady Jinse.
He's about 60 and she's 14.
ALL: Wow!
Yeah, it's one of those, you know,
spring and autumn... Oh. ..kind of a...thing.
But it's very typical of court paintings of the Qing Dynasty
because it was traditional for the wives and, indeed,
the concubines of the Emperor and his family to be hidden
from public view.
So this posed a problem if you wanted to do a painting... Yeah.
..because you weren't allowed to actually see
what the woman looked like.
They had to decide to paint the concubines to look like bits...
From sketchbooks, basically.
We have no idea what she actually looked like.
This is entirely a made-up portrait.
Is that why... Yes? ..her face is kind of neutral... Yes.
..compared to, like, his detailed face? I know.
Hers looks like... You know when you buy a kid a colouring book
and it's like, "You could add whatever face you want"? Yeah.
Like, that's the basic start of a painting.
It looks like they've started on him, they've really nailed it,
then they realise they've got five minutes to do her face. Yeah.
She looks like an emoji, doesn't she? Yeah, yeah.
But the whole concubine thing, I mean, it was considered
absolutely crucial to Qing Dynasty court life.
So the idea was you wanted to make sure that the emperor
had, you know, multiple offspring,
so you wanted to make sure he had a very healthy sex life.
In fact, in the 1670s, they started a government branch
called The Office Of Respectful Service.
So there's, like, a guy outside the bedroom, seeing how many times
a woman has been in and out that week. Wow. Wow.
And it mattered because if you went in and out that week, say,
three times into the Emperor's chambers
then you would go up in the... Yeah. ..in the concubine standings.
Sounds quite exhausting for the Emperor. For him.
Do you think when they go in, he's just saying,
"We could just watch TV and have a chat"?
"Let's have a cup of tea and a pillow fight."
There are some fantastic empresses, so these are the chief consorts.
There's one in particular called Empress Cixi.
So she started as a 16-year-old,
you know how you do, a bit of work experience, low grade...
..you know, concubine. Hand jobs. Yeah. Getting up.
Well, she started out in the lowliest position
and then she got herself, over 40 years, to the highest position.
She killed quite a few people on the way...
She killed people?! What? She did.
With her hat? Well...
It does look like a mortar board, doesn't it? Yeah.
It looks like a mortar board with a toilet flush on the side. Yeah.
The night before she died, and she knew that she was dying,
she's thought to have poisoned her own nephew
so that he couldn't take power. Wow! I know.
She's really a vicious thing.
Wow, let's hope the Queen's listening.
What an end to The Crown that would be!
She presides over a period of technological
progress in China that is unparalleled,
because it's the beginning of trains and cars, which was a real issue
for them, because she couldn't really travel in a car,
because all protocol dictated that whenever she was travelling,
everybody needed to be at a lower level than her.
Sunroof. Yeah.
That would have been the thing. Holding her hat on like this.
They couldn't have a chauffeur, because the chauffeur couldn't sit
below her, so that was a serious issue.
And then the British decided to give her a steam train in 1865.
It only had 500 metres of track.
But it was considered too shocking,
and it disturbed the feng shui of the areas.
The first successful train they had came later from Germany,
about 20 years later, and it had three kilometres of track,
and she used to take it every day to go to lunch.
But she didn't like the sound of the engine,
so the carriages were pulled by eunuchs tied to long yellow silks.
Why doesn't British Rail pick that up?! I don't know!
That'd be amazing, wouldn't it,
instead of a rail replacement bus service?
Ladies and gentlemen, many apologies.
The eunuchs have not turned up today.
We've got the wrong yellow silks, I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen.
Never mind about that, we've got the wrong eunuchs today, I'm afraid.
One of them's got a penis. We've sent him home.
Right, moving on. What do bacteria talk about?
Is it Love Island?
Other bacteria who aren't in the room.
I love it when by complete chance you're correct.
So they are communicating about where the other bacteria are.
It's something called quorum sensing.
They actually emit and detect each other's chemical signals,
and what they basically do is they take a head count
to see how many bacteria there are.
And they base their activity on how many bacteria
they have detected around them.
Like a fight, like there's ten of us and four of them.
It's like the army gathering and going,
"Right, we're ready to go over the top now because we've got enough."
Lots of bacteria that cause human diseases,
so cholera, pneumonia, staph infections and so on,
they use quorum sensing.
So they wait harmlessly inside us until they agree that there's enough
and then they go. It's a bit like social media, right?
So one person tweets but then it is repeated and repeated and repeated
until it goes viral
and you have enough to make it a story for a lazy journalist.
It was very first observed in the 1970s.
There are some bacteria called Vibrio fischeri
and they live in the bodies of the Hawaiian bobtail squid.
Isn't that beautiful? Wow.
So the squid gives them accommodation and sugar
and amino acid for food, and in return,
the bacteria gives the squid the most
ingenious defence mechanism,
by glowing, all of them, all at once
and generating bioluminescence.
So the squid is able to control this light,
which is created by all these bacteria living there,
and basically any potential predator that is looking up at the squid
will think it's looking at the moon,
because the squid can point this light downwards.
What? Isn't it clever?
I know, so it's working with bacteria in order to do this trick.
It's called counter-illumination,
and the squid can even use its ink to dim the lights.
And it's useless for the bacteria to glow
unless there's enough of them.
That seems like a really fair payment. Yeah.
You get that incredible party trick just from getting some bac...
Like, if I got that every time I'd had thrush, I would...
I am so in love with the idea of getting thrush
and suddenly being bioluminescent. Yeah!
It would definitely be literally the silver lining. Yes.
APPLAUSE
It'd be also a conversation starter cos I'd walk in and I'd go,
"Holly, you look great.
"Got through the thrush?"
She looks like the moon but she's so itchy.
Oh, wow!
What I love is that it has another way of concealing itself
if it doesn't have enough to create the light. Have a look at this.
It is able to bury itself in the sand.
What?! So, this is the other way of doing it. Look, look!
Oh, wow! It's just the eye. And then covering the eye.
That's amazing. Isn't that beautiful? And he buries himself,
and then does he just wait for the bacteria to multiply?
Yeah, Holly is, frankly, doing better in the pants department.
Would you bury yourself in sand?
Well, that's how I got thrush in the first place.
Grit...!
A roller-coaster might make you queasy, but what can it cure?
Yes?
Thrush.
Actually, thrush, with that thing between your legs,
that's going to make it worse.
HOLLY: God, I went and did Go Ape yesterday.
It was quite something in terms of the harness.
It's not comfortable.
Been used by a lot of other people.
Are you suggesting it has chafed many thighs?
I'm suggesting that the harnesses can communicate with one another.
So, what happens on a roller-coaster?
Hiccups? Will it cure hiccups? I would imagine it might cure hiccups.
I got stuck on a roller-coaster at Alton Towers.
Oh, see? My idea of hell.
Yeah, I got stuck in the Black Hole. What?!
This is the kind of audience I want with my anecdotes.
What is the Black Hole?
So it's a roller-coaster in the dark. No! Nightmare.
If I'd have been there, you would have felt a hell of a lot happier.
Lighting it up.
And it's one of those roller-coasters
where you're straddling someone.
Sorry, what?!
So you get on and you're both in, like, a cart,
and one of you has to sit with your legs out
and then the other kind of sits like... Oh, OK.
And you were the one with the legs out?
I was the one with the legs out.
You were with a stranger? Yes! Oh!
Why? Where were your friends?
I was in a three, and those two paired up. HOLLY: Oh, awkward.
And I wasn't going to, like, miss out on the Black Hole,
and then we just ran out of momentum.
I mean, the cart, not, like, the conversation.
And we were there for about five minutes, just sat there.
At one point, you could hear the other carts coming down.
It was absolutely terrifying.
And then they got us off in the end and they went,
"You can have free tickets to go again." We were like, "No!"
Just the guy had a soaking-wet back from where you pissed yourself.
So it is the back that we are thinking about, OK?
Sciatica. Well, no, something much more painful.
Possibly even more painful than childbirth.
It's considered to be one of the most painful things
you can have in the world. Oh, kidney infection.
It's kidney stones. Kidney stones. More painful than childbirth.
I have had them. Unbearably painful.
So in 2018, an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to two urologists
who discovered a really quick way to quash kidney stones.
So they had several patients who said they'd passed kidney stones
when they were on a roller-coaster,
so they made a silicon cast of a kidney.
They filled it with actual urine,
they added three artificial kidney stones
and they took it on Disney World's Big Thunder Mountain.
And apparently most effective is riding at the back of the coaster -
passage rate of 64%. Wow!
Compared to 17% if you sit at the front.
So much better to sit at the back.
Is there somewhere, like, just pictures of two people
then a picture of a kidney on a roller-coaster?
Anyway, the roller-coaster study - not the first time that frightening
rides have been used in medicine. So, this is bizarre.
In the 1920s, doctors prescribed scary plane flights
to cure deafness. What?! What?!
There was a theory that some deafness had psychological origins
and you could overcome this by being terrified!
He thought he was just going out for a bike ride.
Well, what they were told as they got onto the flight was that it
was the altitude that was going to cure them.
They were not expecting any acrobatics.
So you can imagine when they did a loop-the-loop that,
if it was psychological, the deafness definitely went -
everybody could hear them screaming at that point.
Awww! Yeah. Even the great aviator Charles Lindbergh advertised deaf
flights on his business card. It was considered quite a thing.
Did it...? There's no evidence that it worked at all. None.
Now, what can you tell me about Philip the Missionary's position?
I once sat behind him on a roller-coaster.
Who's Philip the Missionary? Also known as Philip the Evangelist?
Anybody had a religious upbringing at all?
I can sing Lord Of The Dance, if that's what you mean.
That's so tempting! Go on.
No! I... Why did I say that? You brought it up.
# Dance then, wherever you may be
BOTH: # I am the Lord of the Dance, said he
# And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be
# And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he. #
So in a word, no idea who he is.
Is he in the Bible, then?
Which bit of the Bible? He'll be in the New Testament, surely.
It's in the New Testament, you're absolutely right. It's in Acts.
He's an evangelist, so he tours the Middle East performing miracles.
You couldn't get tickets, though, could you? It's hard.
So his...
So weird when all your hair is on the bottom of your head.
It does look like you could flip his head, just flip it over like that.
And then your mouth would be at the top, though,
that would be weird, and your eyes would be under your mouth. Yeah.
And every time you ate, you'd get food in your eyes.
But at least your hair would be in the right place.
But then when it rains, all the water would go down your nose.
It'd be so beautiful. It'd be like the, erm... Those...
..fountains in...
What are those fountains called, the fountains called in Las Vegas?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Bellagio!
Bellagio. My God, I cried when I saw those.
Are those the ones where they fire out and land in a hole?
No.
They're my favourite fountain.
Honest to God, it's like being in an old people's home.
He toured the Middle East, did he? He toured the Middle East!
Right. Josh wants to sing Lord Of The Dance again!
I saw a fountain once! Did you?
OK. So he toured the Middle East.
Tell us about the dark room again!
Er... ALAN LAUGHING
When we going on the roller-coaster?
You said we was going on a roller-coaster!
I never pissed meself.
I've got thrush!
Who pulled the train? What kind of person pulled the train?
Eunuchs! Eunuchs!
So this is him baptising a eunuch.
Here's what happens. When the eunuch lifts his head...
Oh, I didn't know what you were going to say.
I really didn't!
So what happens is the eunuch lifts his head up, he's been baptised
and Philip has disappeared.
So the eunuch never saw him again, but went away on his way rejoicing.
Meanwhile, Philip found himself further north at the town of Azotus,
so it seems to provide the Bible's only example of teleportation,
because there's a moment he's there
and the next minute, he's in a completely different town.
So here's the question - Philip aside... Yes.
..do you think that humans will ever teleport?
Mm... JOSH: No. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. OK, Holly, why?
If you think about it, ten years ago, we didn't have Uber
and now we've got Uber.
And that's as good as teleporting. Yeah, just the same.
There's been times when I don't remember how I got home
and then I've looked at my e-mails and I've realised
I've got an Uber receipt, and I thought that's as good as...
Teleporting. ..teleporting.
Well, here is the extraordinary thing. It's that we have already done
it, although not to ourselves. We are heading into quantum physics, but
fear not, it is not difficult at all.
So, quantum physics, essentially the study of extremely small
particles, so atoms, electrons, photons, which are...?
Molecules? ..light particles. Light particles.
So, in 2017, China teleported information from a photon
into outer space using a process called quantum entanglement.
So, now, let me explain this to you.
I want you to imagine this is
a single energised photon.
What you can do with a photon is you can fire
it from a laser into a crystal,
and you can effectively turn it into two not-quite-so-charged photons.
So, you have to imagine now that this is two photons,
but they are effectively still the same banana, the same photon,
it's just that we have separated them.
Now, I'm going to take this bit of it and I'm going to chuck it to you,
Cariad. Oh, God! So, I need you to imagine that you are in a spacecraft,
you are 500 kilometres away from the Earth on a Chinese spacecraft.
Are you ready? Yep.
There we go. Fantastic. OK. I tell you what, at least
you didn't make a meal of it.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to write something on this.
And this is the astonishing thing. It is 500 kilometres away.
I have written "Alan".
If you then show yours, imagining that it is now 500 kilometres away,
it, too, says "Alan" on it.
Whatever you did to the photon that is left on Earth, exactly
the same thing will happen to the photon that has gone out into space.
And we don't know why. We shouldn't feel bad that we don't know why.
Einstein did not understand it at all. It freaked him out.
He called it Spooky Action At A Distance.
HOLLY: No, I get it. So, here is the weirder thing.
We could pair this bit of banana, if you like, with an orange.
Wait. Pear, orange or banana?
If I then did something to the orange, it, too,
would appear on that bit of banana.
I'm trying to use fruit as an example, but, basically,
I could pair another photon, a third one, to this one on Earth,
but it is still having the same existence. I feel really weird!
So, basically, when you teleport, you're going to make a version
of yourself elsewhere and then you can do whatever you like to it.
In a way, you're right, Alan. The trouble is that we just don't know
enough about it. I do know, though. I know what it is. OK.
Two words for you. Yes.
Fax machine.
APPLAUSE
What I like is how you've kept so up-to-date.
I did a documentary about quantum physics for Horizon. Did you?
I can highly recommend it.
And... Go on. ..once all the experts had left the room,
oh, my God! I can't really retain it or use the knowledge.
They showed me a laser beam split in two in the
National Physics Laboratory, and they told me that it was impossible,
and then they did it.
Were you at a magic show?
Then they chopped Debbie McGee in two!
Hopefully, it's on YouTube and you can watch it. I will check it out.
Anybody know why teleporting took place in Star Trek?
What was the reason for it? Oh, was it like a budgetary
thing for the show? Yes. They didn't want to have to show the transition?
It was too expensive to show the Enterprise always landing
and taking off on different planets, so Gene Roddenberry,
who was the creator of Star Trek, that was his workaround.
They couldn't afford for the...
ALAN IMITATES STAR TREK THEME
I'm just doing a background. Carry on.
I thought you were making sex noises.
Wow, Holly, it really has been a while, hasn't it?
When you're having sex... You're in the dark room...
IMITATES STAR TREK THEME
..coming from another car elsewhere.
IMITATES THEME LOUDER
No, that other car is singing Lord Of The Dance very quietly.
I'm trying to explain quantum... You're doing very well.
When's lunchtime?
Watch the Horizon documentary. Move on. All right.
If any topics come up with shows that I've done,
can I plug them, as well? Yes.
It is seriously like an old people's home now, isn't it?
I used to be on the television, you know. Yes, years ago.
I've got thrush.
Right. Moving on, where would you go for a six-week quickie?
Josh? Alton Towers.
So, what kind of quickie things are there that you might do in six weeks?
A quickie in six weeks...?
Divorce. A quickie divorce. Oh! Yeah. Six weeks?!
From the turn of the 20th century, people travelled from all over
America to Nevada. It was the place to go for a quickie divorce.
So, they reduced the residency requirement for seeking
divorce from six months to six weeks.
And also, they made it fantastically easy.
There were nine grounds why you could get a divorce,
and they applied them unbelievably broadly.
There was a man who got a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty,
and it was because his wife had too many cats.
I mean, it really was... She had too many cats? Yes.
Did they name how many? They didn't say how many. For me, one. Two!
"There's one there, I go upstairs, there's another one!"
And this carried on right up until the 1970s. In fact,
they think it's how the state survived the Great Depression,
because no other state allowed such lax grounds for divorce.
And there were divorce hotels, where you could go,
and the couple could do the six weeks of residency.
They especially targeted women, and "dude ranches" were developed,
where women would go for six weeks, sunbathing, riding horses,
drinking cocktails, fraternising with the famously attractive male staff.
It was marketed as "Reno-vation",
because it was in the town of Reno, one of the most popular places.
And women would often arrive with a male "cousin",
who they married as soon as the divorce went through.
And they held an annual wedding derby to see who had officiated
at the most marriages in a year, and in 1947, Judge William McKnight won.
He had officiated at 5,888 weddings, pretty much 16 a day.
Whoa! Just going through.
And now for a classic snack to go with a classical question,
so...
Anybody want some snacks here? I'm looking forward to these. Yeah!
How can you squeeze the maximum number of Quavers
into the smallest possible space?
Yes, Josh.
Oh, no, Josh!
APPLAUSE
Want to share yours now, Sandi?
Oh, my.
Unbelievably delicious, aren't they?
Bad luck.
I like Twiglets. I met a man in Sainsbury's dressed as a Twiglet.
Erm...
You were dressed as a Twiglet?
No! No, I didn't even know it was a job you could do.
I would have definitely done it.
Anyway, quaver, where do we get the word from, do you think?
The actual word "quaver".
Is it French? No, we're going to go Middle English.
What do you think it meant? Middle English, did you say?
Middle English. What, so Quavers have been around
since medieval times? No, the word.
I think this batch has been around since medieval times.
Does it mean to quiver? It does mean to shake. It's the letter S.
Look at that. Isn't that weird? Ooh, look!
You are so easily pleased.
That is how I imagine the scene from Alan's documentary.
So it began as a meaning of shaken.
Then it became singing in a sort of tremulous voice.
Do you remember when women in church always...?
SHE VOCALISES
# Da-a-a-nce, then, wherever you may be
# I am the Lord of the Dance, said he. #
Yep. It's like Josh was in the room.
And then it became the name of a musical note.
Anybody know how long a quaver...?
A quaver is half a minim.
It's an eighth. There are semiquavers, which are one 16th,
followed by a demisemiquaver, which would be... Half of a... ..a 32nd.
A hemidemisemiquaver, which is...
64th. ..a 64th, and a quasihemidemisemiquaver,
which is a... A Danish wizard.
APPLAUSE
We almost went for the same Quaver.
What did you say, Josh?
128th? 128th. 128th.
So these notes are quite rare.
Why is it so rare?
So it's rare because it's so fast.
So if you took a work in 4/4 time,
so with a tempo of 100 beats per minute, a quasihemidemisemiquaver
would last for just 0.02 seconds,
so that is too short for the human ear to distinguish. Oh, yeah, yeah.
But in fact, Beethoven and Mozart used them to describe brief rapid
sections in particular movements.
The shortest note in any published work
is a 1,024th note, which should be called a
quasihemidemisemihemidemisemiquaver.
That's his brother! Yep.
And it appears in Anthony Philip Heinrich's
Toccata Grande Cromatica,
which was written around 1820... CARIAD LAUGHS
Look at that guy! Somebody's pleased with himself, aren't they?
"I've used a semidemiquaverquaver..."
Those glasses look no use to anybody, do they? They're too small.
They're smug glasses.
They're intended to make you feel stupid.
So this is one of the rare uses of this 1,024th note,
but in the very first manuscript, an extra bar was added to the note,
which meant it was actually miswritten as a 2,048th note,
which would be a demisemihemidemi- semihemidemisemiquaver.
Oh, my God. There it is. Look at that.
That is... I mean, how fast would that...? Madness. Bonkers.
So could we hear...?
Like, what's the shortest note that we could hear?
There is a thing called extremepianochannel on YouTube.
Whoa!
Do you know what else is on a YouTube channel?
You've all got some instruments beside you.
Why don't you bring out your instruments?
TRIANGLE CHIMES
What I want you to do -
you've got five seconds -
I want you to play the same note as many times as you can
and count how many times... Counting and playing?
Did you used to do that game at school where you'd try
to start and stop a stopwatch as quickly as possible? Oh, yeah.
I loved that game and I was so good.
OK, ready? Five seconds, going now.
Up!
OK? Holly. How many? TRIANGLE STILL RINGING
Alan! Alan!
Alan, the bus is here!
How many, Holly?
I lost count about...
..erm, 12.
After about 12. Alan? You've no bloody idea.
Cariad?
34. 34?
Honestly? Yeah.
37.
Oh! Josh wins that one.
That's very impressive.
But, I mean, it's a hollow victory if you have to give your own score
when you know what the other scores are.
The most piano key presses in one minute is 824... What?!
..which is 68 and a half every five seconds.
It's a Portuguese-American pianist, he's astonishing,
called Antonio Domingos, and you can see his work on extremepiano.
Does he just do all the same notes again and again
or is it like a tune? No, it was just one note
but he played it with two fingers.
Most claps in a minute, how many claps do you think?
Well, flamenco people can go very, very fast. About 400.
No, 300.
About 300, anybody else?
200.
1,080. Wow!
By a nine-year-old.
What?! A nine-year-old?
He's called Seven Wade.
180 every ten seconds. What, just for fun?
He's not even doing flamenco? He had his toe in a plug socket.
I'd absolutely love him in my audience on tour.
Right, Quavers away, instruments away.
For what sort of business would you want to use a queer plunger?
I once had a nightmare with a plunger.
So we had a New Year's Eve party
and then the next day our toilet was blocked,
and I thought, "Oh, I'll nail this."
I'd never used a plunger before.
They're difficult to use.
Yeah, I thought I'd just whack it down there,
whacked it down and it suctioned just onto the bottom of the toilet,
brought it up, all I had was the piece of stick.
And now I didn't just have to unblock the toilet,
I had to get my hand in there to get the... Oh!
OK, so queer plunger - what might you plunge into?
The ocean. So, water, you might plunge into water.
It was a term given to con men who took advantage of the rules
of the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.
So, it was set up in 1774.
So, two London doctors, they were worried that too many victims
were being wrongly pronounced dead and sometimes buried alive,
and so they developed new techniques of resuscitation.
They offered a reward of four guineas, which is over £500 today,
a lot of money, to anybody who successfully brought
a drowned man back to life.
Well, swindlers paired up with each other so one would throw themselves
into the river and pretend to drown
and the other would jump in and rescue him from the brink of death
and the two of them would then share the four guineas,
and they became known as queer plungers.
How many of you around the table know about WC Fields?
The cricketer. No. That's WG Grace.
He was an amazing early 20th-century actor and comedian.
One of his very first jobs was to drown several times a day.
So he worked at Atlantic City and he would pretend to swim out
and then he would pretend to drown
and somebody would come and rescue him
and a great crowd would gather,
and they'd all applaud because he'd been saved
and they were all so thrilled
and then they would buy beer and hot dogs,
and it was the beer and hot-dog guys who paid WC Fields
to drown several times a day. No!
The Netherlands was the first country to have
a society for resuscitation. Why the Netherlands?
People falling in canals. Lots of water, yes.
Sometimes it's just a really simple answer, isn't it?
Do they have fjords as well?
No, they don't have fjords there. God's sake! No.
The Netherlands is famously flat and fjords are famously steep.
Right. So, no.
Do you know what? I'm just glad I didn't say it
on national television.
No, that's a good thing.
So the very first society, 1767,
the Netherlands Society for Resuscitation,
and they had incredibly strict rules about what you should do
in order to bring a drowning person back to life.
So first of all, you've got to take them inside and you've got
to take their wet clothes off and then you've got to rub them
with woollen materials to warm them up.
And maybe, if you really feel it's necessary,
give them tobacco smoke up the rectum.
They used to do that in London as well.
Do you know how I know that? Yes. We had it on this show.
They did indeed.
It was considered an effective means of resuscitation.
My sister fell in a canal. Did she?
One of the best days of my life.
So we went on a canal holiday in Birmingham and...
ONE PERSON LAUGHS
Does that go through fjords?
It's got more miles of canal than Venice, Birmingham.
I do know this. Doesn't make it a better holiday. No.
And my sister fell in and there was panic
and my dad was shouting, "Get the camera!"
And then she found her feet cos it was only about that,
and my brother threw the plastic Polo
and it hit her on the head and knocked her out.
I thought you were going to say your brother threw her the camera.
So there are other things you had to do,
you had to do bleeding of the arms and neck,
you had to pour liquor down the throat and then place the person
in a preheated bed with a naked person next to them.
Yeah, well, that makes sense.
To provide natural heat. Yes, yes,
because that's what happens when you're a keen bivouacker
like I was as a teenager. You, erm...
No wonder you've got thrush.
You learn that if somebody gets quite severe hypothermia
that you should both strip off, get inside a plastic bag together
and just keep each other warm.
OK, who told you this?
Was it someone holding a massive bin liner?
"Come on, Holly! Come on, in you come!"
"We've got to stay warm, Holly! Akela said!"
Is this why you were at Go Ape yesterday?
Now we come to the quintessentially QI brand of torment
that is General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What's the tallest building in Europe?
The Shard.
KLAXON
It isn't the Shard.
Well, it is the Shard, so...
I'm in charge. It's not the Shard.
I will give you that the Shard is the tallest building in the EU
at the time of recording.
Possibly not at the time of broadcast.
The top four are all in Russia.
Oh. The Lakhta Center in St Petersburg tops the list
at 463 metres.
Look at that. Isn't it astonishing?
Tallest building in the world?
Anybody know? I think I went up it in Dubai.
It is in Dubai, you're absolutely right. It's called the Burj Khalifa.
This is astonishing. It is nearly a kilometre high
and it means that at the top of it,
the sun sets more than three minutes later than at ground level.
That is how high the building is.
And during Ramadan, there are clerics who have pointed out
that Muslims who live and work there, they have to stop fasting
at different times depending on what floor they're on.
So one Dubai cleric reckons that people living above the 80th floor
should fast for an extra two minutes
and those on the 150th floor and above
should fast for an extra three minutes.
I was doing a gig in Dubai with Jack Dee.
We went up to the top of that.
You've never seen someone...
..less excited.
Europe's four tallest buildings are all in Russia
with the Shard coming in a paltry fifth.
What shouldn't you do to a sleepwalker?
Kill them.
Absolutely fair. Shouldn't do that. That's one thing.
Oh... Go on, say it. Go on. Yeah, it's wake them, up, isn't it?
KLAXON
All that good work undone!
You were winning up until then.
Now you're stuffed.
Contrary to popular myth, there is
nothing wrong with waking a sleepwalker.
I mean, they might be slightly disorientated at first, but it's
much safer than leaving them to walk around the corridors unconscious!
It's just not as funny.
Depends how you wake them up, doesn't it? Yeah.
Boo! If you wake them by picking them up and putting them
in the middle of the road...
Here's the thing. Injuries are not uncommon...
ALAN STILL LAUGHING
Injuries are not uncommon amongst sleepwalkers,
because they walk into things, and it's better to save them,
although - here is the thing - the most recent studies show
that you don't feel any pain when you are sleepwalking.
You're so relaxed. You're just very chilled.
Of the 47 sleepwalkers in this study who reported suffering
an injury while they were asleep, only ten actually woke up.
There is a thing where people actually act out their dreams. Yeah!
So, sleepwalking tends to happen at the deepest stage of sleep.
There's another disorder called REM behaviour disorder, or RBD.
So, what they do, people often crawl or run in their sleep.
My grandad used to cycle!
He used to kick the covers off, and his legs would be going like that,
and my granny would be like, "Stop it, Bill, stop it!"
He actually won a stage of the Tour de France.
I had a dream the other day that I was in New York,
and my husband said I was lying in bed doing this.
What was that, darling? I think it's just me walking down a sidewalk.
I love it that when you go to New York,
you get a kind of American-Italian attitude.
Did you think you were in Saturday Night Fever?
If you see someone sleepwalking, wake them up before they hurt themselves.
What age did women tend to get married in the olden days,
say 300, 400 years ago?
So that's like, what, 1700?
Wow.
Maths AND geography!
An irresistible package! I know!
So, what do you reckon? How old do you think women were when they got
married? Is the picture a clue? No, it's just a really cute picture. Oh.
Is it older or younger? It's either going to be 14 or 28.
KLAXON What do you want to guess?
I'm going to go 28. You're going to go for 28!
Is it older than we think? Is it sort of like 25?
It is older than we think. So, we're talking about the 1700s.
21. I was right! Thank you! Can I get a point for that?
You're lucky still to be having a chair, frankly.
The average age for women was 25 to 26 to get married, and men were 30.
And then that was actually older than in the 1970s.
All those men coming out of that tent on the right with the hats.
# Tiny people marrying Ding-ding ding-ding-ding! #
I didn't know you sang the Bee Gees!
It's a show called Tiny People Marrying that I did.
I've got it on YouTube. I'll find it for you.
That's interesting... Thank you. ..because in Pride And Prejudice,
what's the name of the vicar?
Mr Collins! Mr Collins. Mm. So, Mr Collins is always played
as, like, this 45-year-old man, but he was actually about 28.
In the actual book? In the actual book, yeah.
But we have warped this sense that they were all much older.
I think we get a lot of it from royal marriages. So, this picture
is Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. So, they were 15 and 16 respectively.
For the average person, they were much older. Even in medieval times,
women didn't marry till their early to mid-twenties.
But also with the royal marriages, they would be "married",
but then they would be... Well, sometimes they got married at birth.
Exactly. Then they weren't, like,
putting a flat together with some toasters and a kettle.
Today, the average age for women in the UK to get married...?
62.
30? 29.
It's 31, and men are 33.
But apparently, the best age to pair off is 26. That's interesting.
There's a Princeton professor called Tom Griffiths,
and he has proposed that this is the best age because you are 37%
through completing a task within a set timeframe,
and at this point you have reached the perfect point in which to decide.
It's probably the worst marriage proposal. It is, yeah.
What they're suggesting is that if you choose too
early you're going to miss out on better options later on.
If you choose too late, better options will already be off the
table. There's similar maths choosing the best toilet at a music festival.
To maximise the chances of getting a clean one, apparently the same maths
works. Because you don't want to waste time looking at them all,
if there's a row of 100, you should check the first 37
and decide which is the cleanest of those,
and as soon as you find a cleaner one than that, use that one.
So you still have to look at 38, 39, 40 toilets.
I've got a system with festival toilets. Have you?
So, you stand and you wait and you look at... As people come out,
if they can look you in the eye, that toilet's fine.
But if they look at you and they come out with a kind of fear,
don't go in that toilet! I'm the same with planes.
When you see the pilot coming, if they can look you in the eye...
Choosing a partner is a lot like choosing a Portaloo.
You might end up wishing you'd just done it in the woods.
Right, final question.
What activity causes carpal tunnel syndrome?
Masturbation.
KLAXON
APPLAUSE
I hope it's not masturbation, because my grandma had it
and she didn't seem the sort.
It's an RSI thing, right?
Isn't it quite common with typing and that sort...?
KLAXON
Who knows what carpal tunnel is?
It's where the tendons get inflamed in your wrist?
Yes, so it's the canal that connects the arm and the hand.
It's in the wrist, and various tendons pass through it.
And what happens is when one of these swells up, it compresses
on the nerves that are inside this channel
and leads to pain, numbness and tingling. It's really painful.
It's unbelievably painful.
You won't get it pretty much from typing or from playing video games
or any of those things. Those cause problems like tendonitis.
Yeah. It's idiopathic, so idiopathic means we don't know.
It is an unknown cause, the swelling.
And yet I'm still wrong twice.
And that's been our pleasure.
But the chances of getting it are increased with obesity, pregnancy,
smoking, arthritis, diabetes, any of those things.
The only work-related activity that we absolutely know
it is related to is the long-term and repeated use
of vibrating hand tools.
So in a way...
..Alan was right. KLAXON
In 2018, Kim Kardashian, she revealed that the doctor
had warned her to stop taking selfies
because she had injured her wrist from doing so many. What?
So when she was filming an advert,
she recruited one of her production assistants
to take her selfies for her.
Now, this is a marvellous concept, to have somebody...
You're so rich that you have your own selfie taker.
So I have decided we needed a selfie elf,
so, Anna, if you're going to come on, please, and be our selfie elf.
Thank you very much. APPLAUSE
I've got a stick now. So if you could all come in for the selfie.
I reckon this is going to be more popular
than the Ellen DeGeneres one.
You've got this, but you can't be in it, darling.
No, because you're the selfie elf I'm not having you in it.
AUDIENCE: Aw! No.
So are you in? Are you in?
If you're taking selfies or playing computer games,
you won't get carpal tunnel syndrome,
but you should probably get out more.
Which leads us to the scores. In first place with...
No, it's supposed to be on here. Where is the thing?
Oh, there it is. Oh, no! What?!
In first place, with two points, it's Holly!
APPLAUSE
In second place, with one point, it's Cariad!
APPLAUSE
In third place, with minus five - Josh.
APPLAUSE
And in last place, with minus 27, it's Alan!
APPLAUSE
My thanks to Cariad, Josh, Holly and Alan.
And I leave you with this quintessentially QI quote
from quondam quipper Oscar Levant.
"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility.
"There are so few of us left."
Goodnight.