Good evening, and welcome to QI,
where, tonight, we'll be quarrelling with each other all night long.
Here to query everything I say, aw, quick to criticise - Jason Manford.
APPLAUSE
Constantly quibbling - Aisling Bea.
CHEERING
Quashing all opposition - Anuvab Pal.
APPLAUSE
And, oh, will you be quiet?
Alan Davies.
LAUGHTER, CHEERING
We've got some particularly pugnacious buzzers.
Jason goes...
CATS SCREECH
Oh, that's horrible, isn't it?
Hm. Aisling goes...
DOGS BARK
Sounds like my... SHE CLICKS HER TONGUE
So sorry. So sorry.
LAUGHTER
Um... Anuvab goes...
I was hoping the attention wouldn't come to me after that.
ARGUING Order, order!
CATS SCREECH
And Alan goes...
Oh, yes, it is! AUDIENCE: Oh, no, it isn't!
Wow.
They're so pleased with themselves, they can't carry on.
That was alarming. Wasn't it?
What happens when you quarrel with the bellower?
Quarrel's one of those things only English people say.
Why would you not say it? What's...? It's not a word I would use.
No, it sounds like something a teacher would say
if you'd had a proper fist fight with another kid at school.
You know, when they've got your mum and dad and they were like,
"I'm afraid Jason and Jamie have had a quarrel."
Sandi, I'm new to London, and I'm beginning to realise
that, when someone has a dispute or a quarrel,
the English language works at two levels.
Yes. I realised, in Britain, when someone says to me,
"Anuvab, I have a slight issue."
Yeah, yeah, it means I've killed their whole family.
LAUGHTER
That is entirely true.
OK, so the bellower is the nickname of an actor called James Quin.
He was the leading actor in London in the first half
of the 18th century.
What has he come as now?
Well, apparently that's him giving his Coriolanus. Is it, really?
I think it's more anus than corioly.
He was unbelievably quarrelsome, and he actually killed two people
in duels and wounded multiple others.
He had one of the loudest voices in show business.
He also did excessive gesticulation,
and he left extremely long pauses.
These were all the hallmarks of a great actor at that time,
so would-be actors were schooled in three different pauses,
and there was moderate, longer and grand.
And, because you're all natural performers,
I think we would see how you would fare on stage in Quin's era.
So we're going to act out what's written on the script cards
that you've got on the desk.
So, Jason and Anuvab, a bit of quarrelling, please,
from Titus Andronicus. Very loud, very big gestures.
Yes. Pausing. OK, here we go.
Villain, what hast thou done?
That, sir, which thou canst not undo.
Thou hast undone our mother?!
LAUGHTER
That's very good.
I was taken aback for a second. Yes. No. Do a pause! Do a grand pause!
Villain...I have done thy mother.
That's an early "your mum" joke from Shakespeare there.
He invented the word quarrelsome, actually.
It's, in fact, the only word he coined beginning with Q.
Comes up in As You Like It and in The Taming Of The Shrew. Right.
Alan and Aisling, I've got an EastEnders-style script for you.
I'm actually going to take a small part in this myself.
Oh! I know.
So, you know, big gestures, big pausing.
Here we go. OK.
Oh, Aisling.
COCKNEY ACCENT: I'm having some real Barney Rubble
with me old trouble and strife.
LAUGHTER
She found...
LAUGHTER
..a pair of your Alan Whickers in my Lucy Locket!
DEEP, GRUFF VOICE: Oh, Alan.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You absolute doughnut.
You need to be more careful.
COCKNEY ACCENT: NOW!
What's this all about?!
LAUGHTER
STAY OUT OF IT!
You cow. It's you, it's you.
Silence, cow. You're not me mum.
SANDI GASPS
Actually...
LAUGHTER
..she is.
EASTENDERS DOOF-DOOFS Very good.
APPLAUSE
I can see that making a comeback as a style.
So Quin killed two people. The first man he killed was an actor
who mispronounced kato as keto on stage.
I'm like that with Pacific and specific. Are you?
I'd just take him out long range.
So Quin mocked him in front of the audience,
and the guy decided to challenge him to a duel,
and, in fact, he was... HE mocked somebody? Yes.
LAUGHTER
What did the other bloke look like?
He only got done for manslaughter, and that was it,
and then he just went back to work, frankly.
He was a notorious womaniser.
There's a marvellous story.
He once invited a married woman to his boudoir,
and then he realised he'd forgotten his key,
so he thought, "Oh, no, I'll take her to a brothel."
Anyway, awkwardly, her husband happened to be there.
LAUGHTER
And the husband walked in on them, you know, in flagrante,
and, in the ensuing fight, Quin stabbed him in the leg.
This one of the funny things that used to happen in British India
during the Empire was that there would be a lot of duels
among English men for petty things.
They would fall in love with someone, locally,
or it would be over wine or whatever, which was very confusing
for the locals because they expected the guns to be pointed at them.
They were pointing at each other. And I came across notes between
two governor generals who were fighting, and one of the big issues
was back then, they couldn't get the logistics right, so they said,
"I'll see you on Thursday."
He was like, "Thursday, sir, I am taking my daughter for a walk."
"I'm going to kill you Thursday. I can't do Thursday."
"We've got five-asides Thursday."
What I loved is it went on for five years
where they couldn't fix a meeting!
I love that. Quin's big rival at the time - David Garrick.
Great, famous actor. Oh, David Garrick.
First actor, in fact, to move towards acting
rather than shouting.
"Where's my glove?! WHERE'S my glove?!
"Props!"
They were friends, and Garrick eventually wrote the epitaph
that is on Quin's tomb in Bath Abbey.
That's the Garrick Theatre named after him? Yeah.
I mentioned that James Quin was handy in a duel,
but now let's see how you fare.
So, for this question, please start with your hands on your heads.
We have changed your buzzers so they all make the same sound.
Which of you is the quickest at pressing your buzzer?
Go, go, go.
GUNFIRE BUZZER
GUNFIRE
LAUGHTER Have you...?
GUNSHOT BUZZER
Well, we know who was slowest.
I'm just going to check with VAR. Oh, yes.
Get the replay there.
Let's have a quick look. LAUGHTER
OK.
And the answer is...Jason!
Jason, you were the winner.
APPLAUSE Eh, there we go!
So...very good,
but how would a Victorian have done it differently?
A Victorian? Yes.
It's whether you think the Victorians would have been quicker.
Would they have beaten Jason?
No, I think slower. Why? Just cos it's a long time ago?
Partly, and there's less things to move out the way of quickly.
Are you agreeing?
Yes, I think... In that a technology like a light bulb would need
a bunch of chemical reactions and stuff to happen.
So would they, like, pull on something and a bunch of stuff
would happen and a part of the house would explode?
OK... You are thinking of Wallace and Gromit.
So here's the thing.
We would think, maybe, that we would be quicker today,
but, really, the Victorians had quicker reactions
than we do today. What?!
So in the 1880s and '90s,
there was a statistician called Francis Galton.
He tested thousands of people to see how quickly they could react
to lights and sound, and we have consistently got slower.
So, on average, about 10% over the past century,
and we don't really know why.
So, possibly, modern pollutants have had an effect on our brains.
That is a possibility.
Possibly... This one, I don't like at all.
It's because we are taller is one of the reasons given. Aw.
So our nerve impulses have got further to travel in our bodies,
and so they take longer to get to their destinations,
but it does seem to be that the Victorians
were a bit faster than us.
And do you think boys or girls are faster?
Say girls. I'm going to say girls. Be careful, Jason.
Nice try, Sandi! Girls.
It's usually boys. Aw!
But what they've discovered in the past 40 years or so
is that the gap has decreased. Boys are getting increasingly jumpy.
Yes.
Maybe because women are now doing day-to-day things like driving,
which they didn't do before.
That's what the boys are getting out the way of.
Are left-handed or right-handed people quicker?
Left-handed people are the devil,
so I would say right-handed people, Sandi.
I'm left-handed, so I'm going to say right.
It's left-handed people. And you did win.
Of course! I should have used my own experiment. Yes!
Dammit. It's probably because most right-handed people
are very, very right-handed.
In other words, most left-handed people,
so yourself at least, are more mixed.
The two brain hemispheres of the left-handers
tend to be more balanced and split, so they work more...
It's one of the lesser disabilities.
You know, I don't want everything, just the blue parking badge.
That's all I want. LAUGHTER
Left-handed parking bays!
The right-handed people coming out carrying their phones in their
left hand, "No, I'm left-handed!"
In the supermarket, throwing apples,
"You caught it with your right hand!
"You're in the wrong spot!"
The first scientist to measure reaction times
in laboratory conditions
was a Dutch ophthalmologist called Franciscus Donders in 1869.
He found that we take 0.1 seconds
to physically respond to a sudden noise,
so why might that matter that we know that?
Alarms? No, it's racing, sprinting races. So if you move
in less than 0.1 seconds after the gun has gone off, it's a false start
because you couldn't possibly have reacted that fast. Ah!
Actually, Donders made another contribution to our lives.
There is a gap between the back of the tongue and the hard palate,
known as the space of Donders.
Where is it? Between the back of the tongue and the hard palate.
Trying to find it now? It's hard to find, it's really more of a space.
LAUGHTER
There's nothing there at all.
No, there's nothing there, darling, that's correct.
I don't want to really know how he ended up finding that.
Now that I know that, I feel
like I have someone else's real estate in my mouth.
There is a sign - "to let".
A bloody weekend, that's what I call that.
Quickest reaction time of any animal is the Condylostylus fly,
or the long-legged fly.
This is an extraordinary creature. You find it mostly in the USA.
It takes just 2 milliseconds for this fly to respond to a stimulus,
so, see you tried to take a picture of it, and the flash went off,
it would have gone before the picture was actually taken.
How did they get this one?
I am afraid he's dead, Jason.
Its reflexes are about 100 times faster
than the fastest human reaction time.
Wow! I know.
Look at its funny hairy legs.
Imagine you just had four massive hairs on your leg.
And when you shaved your legs,
you kind of had to saw it a bit with a bread knife.
You must come over.
Now, nothing is more likely to cause a quarrel
than a badly ordered queue.
So my question is what's the best way to board a plane?
The people are in the lounge, and you want to board them
onto the plane. What's the most efficient way of doing that?
Minimise hand baggage. All those wankers who can't be bothered
to check their bags in.
Come on like mules, like pack mules.
Fill up all the overhead lockers, with their very important shit.
LAUGHTER
Then they sit down, farting all the way to Malaga.
Sorry, what was the question?
LAUGHTER
There's a lot of bitterness in this, isn't there?
I had a moment on a flight last week, actually,
when I was flying from Aberdeen to Shetland,
and I was with my tour manager, who's also a big chap,
and we sit next to each other cos we're pals,
and there was hardly anyone else on the flight.
It was only a small plane.
And the stewardess came over, and she said,
"Mr Manford, Mr Isaacs," she said, "would you mind separating
"and sitting on either side of the plane?"
LAUGHTER
Oh, no.
Weight distribution. Weight distribution!
You're as heavy as a wing.
What, so he's going to land like this if we...?
Well, that's what you should have done. "We will at the start,
"but during the flight, we're going to set you a series of challenges."
Zig-zagging about the plane.
First time in the history of the world where turbulence is a person.
That's how I'm going to think of you now, as turbulent. That's me.
By the back row, then the next row, then the next row.
That is the most common. Yeah, that is the most common way of doing it.
It is also the least efficient.
Or in the middle and then fan it out towards the back and the front.
Take the top off the plane...
LAUGHTER
..let them all swarm in over the top like ants.
So there's an astrophysicist called Dr Jason Steffen.
He made a computer model, and then he teamed up with a TV producer
to get people to act out boarding planes
in various different arrangements.
So he compared boarding from the front, from the back, at random,
and what he called WilMA boarding - which is window, middle,
and then aisle... Nice. Block boarding, by far the slowest.
That's the way the airlines currently do it,
so they say, "This group of seats, and then the next group of seats."
The absolute best way to do it is board first
the even-numbered window seats followed by
the odd-numbered window seats, then repeat with the middle seats,
and then repeat with the aisle seats.
It's rather complicated,
and so he actually recommends just board at random.
That would still be much faster than what we currently do.
You don't want too random, though, do you?
You don't want to be, like, 16 rows back, and the pilot's there.
LAUGHTER
I was boarding recently, and this lady announced,
"We are boarding everyone not in zone F."
And then she said, "And also not in zone A, B, C, D, E."
Then she paused and said, "We're just not boarding."
LAUGHTER
I think there's two types of passengers.
There are the ones who think that, if anything happened to the pilot,
they could probably be all right if they took over and got talked in.
That's me.
And there's the other ones who think there's no way they could do that.
I sort of fancy myself being able to fly a plane. You're right.
I think I could bloody give it a go. But don't you think that,
when you've watched a load of ER, for example, then you think,
"I totally could do that heart surgery"?
I sort of feel like I'd be naturally good in emergencies.
Like, I can't speak Spanish now, but I feel like,
if there is an emergency, I probably could give it a go. Yeah.
What kind of emergency suddenly requires Spanish?
I feel like... A Spanish girl, Sandi.
She's come in, she's choking, no-one else in the hospital speaks Spanish.
Right. Something's wrong with her.
Yeah. She can mime, but we're not getting it.
No. They haven't trained like me in the dramatic art of mime.
LAUGHTER
Respirato... Paella...e sombrero.
Eh, Venezuela...
And I'm like, "Don't worry."
PRETENDS TO SPEAK SPANISH
"..penicillin?" "Penicillin!"
And then it'll just be like that for...
That poor child is dying, and you're the last thing she sees.
LAUGHTER
Here's a Randi Scandi fact.
There's another queuing study from the fine country of Denmark.
Economists concluded the very best method of serving a queue
is to serve the last person first, so,
when you have a first-in, first-out system,
it encourages people to queue. If the last person got served,
nobody would start to stand in the queue
because there'd be no point in it. Queues just cause backlog,
and so it's much better to serve the last person first.
The way different people queue, you know, around the world,
can lead to problems.
I had a friend of mine recently in Manchester
went to use a cash machine. When he got there to the cash machine,
there was a man already using the machine, and,
six foot behind the man, there was a woman sort of waiting her turn.
So he says, "Are you in the queue for the cash machine?"
And she says, "I'm Nigerian, and my religious beliefs are that,
"because I don't know this man, and we're not related,
"this is the distance that I feel safe and respectful, you know,
"to what I believe in." So, cos Ste's a very thoughtful person,
he then stands six foot away from her.
You know, it's like a 12-foot, three-person queue out of nowhere.
Then the man moved, and the woman moved to the machine
to do her money business. Steve then stayed the six foot behind.
Perfectly nice. And he was in his sort of daydream when another man
come over and said, "Are you in the queue for the cash machine?"
and Steve went to explain but, not loaded with all the information,
said, "I am, yeah, but I'm standing here because she's Nigerian."
LAUGHTER
It's a minefield.
Even when you're trying to be nice!
So, anyway, why might you put a mirror next to a lift?
Any thoughts about this? We're talking about waiting.
Next to a lift or in a lift? No, next to it.
It's to do with looking at yourself. People dislike waiting in line,
but they do like looking at themselves.
People don't complain if the lift takes a long time to arrive
if they can constantly see themselves.
I love this picture, though. So we had an experiment to see
if we could recreate this with all of you.
So let's have a look. Are we able to do that?
There. What do you think? I know!
Oh, it's Top Of The Pops from the '70s.
LAUGHTER
I love it!
It's like a giant centipede!
That is brilliant. That is really good fun! Wow.
Can we do, like, the swimming thing where we go...?
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
This is beginning to look like a Bollywood movie.
Just keeps going after you've finished.
Do you know what I did there? I actually tried to catch myself.
Aw, there she is. You had me, you had me.
It's like synchronised swimming on your own. Brilliant.
Very good.
Our queuing advice is to really rile people up
by ignoring the instructions at an airport
and standing on the left of an underground escalator.
AUDIENCE GASP
That's really upset you! No, no, no.
That's the only thing I care about after Brexit. Yeah.
That's only down here that that's a problem. That is London.
Only London. It's not even questioned anywhere else.
Just stand wherever you want.
You stand wherever you want? Yeah, it's not a thing.
LAUGHTER Do what you want!
It's just a thing down here. You stand on the right.
Not anywhere else.
Fucking stand on the right.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Right. Who's famous for generating about 25,000 quarrels a year?
Piers Morgan.
KLAXON
Someone had to say it.
CATS SCREECH
Ah, who's that?! Donald Trump. What, Donald Trump? Yes.
KLAXON
You want another one? Yeah. Katie Hopkins.
KLAXON
LAUGHTER
We're doing well. That's the three!
What might a quarrel be?
It's a thing rather than it's a dispute.
Like a vase of some sort. Why do you think it's a vase?
That's a lovely idea. Why would you think that?
I have no idea.
LAUGHTER
Is it a hat? No, so...
So it's not a vase, and it's not a hat.
You haven't left us with much, Sandi.
We are going to go back in time.
So, between the 10th and the 15th century,
what was the principal weapon of war, do you suppose?
Stink bombs.
Plague. The plague? No, the crossbow,
and the bolt for a crossbow is called a quarrel. Oh. Oh.
And there was a man called John Malemont,
and he was England's chief quarrel maker in the 13th century.
He made up to 100 a day, so he made about 25,000 quarrels per year
And the earliest crossbows, I mean, this is sort of an image
of one of the earliest ones. They were really, really difficult
to operate because it was so tight to pull it back
so you had to get on your back, use the strength of both legs,
your back and your arms in order to pull the mechanism backwards,
then, eventually, they invented something called
the crossbow stirrup, which meant you could put your foot in the thing
and then pull back with...
I mean, that looks like it can backfire pretty badly.
That feels like before the adverts on You've Been Framed.
LAUGHTER
Harry Hill's like, "What's going to happen after the break?"
Can I ask you, Sandi, weren't there female crossbow people
who used to chop off their baps...? You're thinking of bows and arrows,
and you're thinking of the Amazons who allegedly cut off
their left breast in order to make it easier.
Actually, it depends on which... You'd cut off your right breast
so that the... You'd be annoyed if you cut off the wrong breast.
Yes, I know.
LAUGHTER
"Aw, you're joking." "Oh, no."
I was looking in the mirror, I was looking in the mirror.
It must have been really odd for them when
cannons and bullets came about.
This is the thing. What happened was guns superseded crossbows
in warfare, so you're talking about the 16th century, and, eventually,
crossbows became reserved just for recreational use.
I bet when guns come out, there were some pretty annoyed one-titted women
knocking about.
LAUGHTER
"I chopped off me tit for this!"
In the end it just became a sort of an entertainment thing.
There'd be a procession, it would be led
by a paddle master, who was like the ringmaster of the thing,
but he would punish anybody who shot extremely badly by spanking them
with his paddle. Oh!
So a crossbow is essentially a horizontal and more refined
version of the bow and arrow, which brings us to another Q - quivers.
Where did Robin Hood keep his quiver?
On his back?
KLAXON
Isn't it a quiver the thing you keep your arrows in?
It is the thing you keep your arrows in, but if Robin Hood existed,
he would never have pulled arrows from his back.
You realise there is a photograph of him on the screen.
No, no, that's Kevin Costner.
When he played Robin Hood, he went from Dover to Nottingham via
Hadrian's Wall, so I think he's probably not the best person...
..to ask anything.
The quiver is the sack you keep the arrows in,
but it was stored on the belt. The only people that we know for sure wore it on their backs
were Native Americans. There is one odd exception to this,
there is a single archer in the Bayeux Tapestry
with a quiver on his back. Top left there.
So here we are, we are saying that you don't have the
quiver on the back, apart from 50 million Native Americans
and people at the Battle of Hastings,
otherwise there is no other...
Except, darling, if you took this as the correct thing,
all of those people have got their arrows on the wrong side
of the bow, so it would immediately fall off, so I'm going to suggest to
you the person doing the sewing was not worried about technical detail.
So, Sandi, do you think this photograph was staged?
"Just stand still, OK, I'm nearly there, I've nearly got you."
Now, what causes quarrels in the Batcave?
Oh... Oh, is it his parking when he comes in after a fight?
Maybe that.
I used to love that show. Pow! It was wonderful,
I didn't realise till quite late in my childhood that it was a spoof.
Took it absolutely seriously.
I didn't know until NOW it was a spoof.
Was it a spoof? Well, they were playing for laughs.
So, I'm not talking about... Are you talking about actual bats?
Oh! You fooled us with the photograph!
Is it hanging space, not enough hanging space,
someone putting the light on in the middle of the night?
Well, weirdly you're right, Alan,
because it is almost exactly the stuff that we all fight about.
So researchers recently translated the calls and squeals of bats,
they played them to a computer with a machine-learning algorithm
and they figured out the patterns and the noises
and worked out what the sounds meant,
and mostly bats are complaining, OK?
So, most bat squeaks fell into four categories.
Arguing about who should get what food, arguing about who
should sleep where, the females - what were they complaining about?
Cold, they are cold but their men are too hot.
Unwanted male advances is what the females were arguing about,
and bats of either sex arguing
because they think another bat is sitting too close to them.
If you could improve one of your senses really, really a lot,
and maybe lose a bit on the others, what would you have?
I'd lose a bit of hearing. You'd lose what?
I'd lose a little bit...
LAUGHTER
I'm thinking bats, they can't see anything but they can hear
everything, which is probably what they're complaining about.
I think sight, I'd like sight... Yeah.
I'm getting laser eye surgery in a couple of weeks... Are you?
Well, my eyes are fine, but I'd love if they had lasers in them.
The other fascinating thing about bats is they have multiple different
dialects and they learn them from their mothers and their peers.
They use different tones of voice when they are speaking to
members of their group, and it's one of the only animals to do this.
I mean, humans do it, dolphins do it and monkeys,
but it is very, very rare, and they can actually single out
a single bat in the cave to communicate with,
and bearing in mind in some caves there are 20 million bats,
and when they are annoyed, what do they do? They raise their voices.
So, what the bat signal is really saying is,
"Get away from me and don't touch my food."
This next question is so controversial that Brazil
and France almost went to war over it.
How do lobsters get about?
CAT SQUEALS Yes, sir?
Oyster card.
APPLAUSE I know, right?
What can I do?
So, what do you reckon, how do they get about?
Yes? By black crab.
GROANING
What do you reckon? Do they just walk?
KLAXON
So, it depends which side you're on.
Brazil and France, they very nearly went to war over this.
1961, and the question was, do lobsters crawl or do they swim?
So Brazilian law stated that all sea creatures that walked within
certain distances of their seashore were exclusively theirs,
but anything swimming was fair game, so the French came along,
they found a nice spot to catch lobsters,
and Brazil claimed the lobsters were crawling along the coastal
shelf so they belonged to Brazil, France said they were swimming,
and therefore belonged to the fishermen who were catching them.
In actual fact, lobsters mostly walk but they do swim occasionally.
There was a Brazilian navy oceanography expert,
who argued that if lobsters can be considered fish when they swim,
so could a kangaroo considered to be a bird when it hops.
Very interesting. Anyway, tensions escalated. Wow!
Brazil sent an aircraft carrier, France sent a worship, I mean...
IN FRENCH ACCENT: Those Brazilians,
they come in here giving it all that!
You've all got lobsters, if you want to take them out,
you've all got lobsters.
Did you know that lobsters are left- and right-clawed in the same
proportion that we are left- and right-handed?
Yes, I did know.
If you look at that one in the picture, it is
clearly left-clawed, and 10% of lobsters are dominant
on the left claw, exactly the same proportions.
So, some of them are left-handed and some of them are right-handed.
It is 10%, exactly the same as humans. But they use their right
claw when they want to make it feel like it's someone else.
There is a long history of sea life causing international conflict.
There is a Turbot War, Canada and Spain.
The Crab War, North and South Korea.
The Oyster War, Mackerel and Cod wars, the Prawn War, the Squid War,
the Scallop Conflict.
Here's my favourite, the Sprat Spat.
Between Latvia and Russia.
Look at them all, they are a fantastic list of wars.
What a terrible way to get your medals,
like, no-one would really respect you if you were like, "Yeah, I
"was in the Scallop Conflict of 1970.
"I've never really gotten over it, you know?
And showing off as well, like, crustaceans sitting
around saying, "My grandfather fought in the First Prawn War."
Right, lobsters away.
How do you get a Dane fired up?
You tell them the end of the crime thriller series?
Yes, who did it!
There's a lot of dead people in Copenhagen, aren't there?
Vikings settling quarrels, how might they do it?
Well, it's not with a quiet chat. No.
So, the fired-up part is really important.
Do they make their weapons hot? It's called skin pulling.
There is a Nordic spin on tug-of-war,
and what you do is you get an animal hide, so walrus, seal or ox or something, and you use it as a rope,
and the complainants pull at either end until one is yanked over.
Here is the Scandi twist.
The whole thing happens over a fire,
so whoever loses is dragged into the fire.
I think er used to do that at the Scouts.
So, one of the sagas, there is a King Yngvi,
and he instructs the two opponents, Hastigi and
Hord, to a skin pulling contest, and Hastigi gets naked
but he thinks that's going to give him some advantage, but he's
eventually pulled into the fire, and the king regrets the whole thing.
It's a horrible way of settling a quarrel, isn't it? Yes.
The one I like is from 18th century Arabia, there was
a Scottish traveller called James Bruce, so 1730 to 1794,
and he reported on a town calle d Yanbu, so present-day Saudi Arabia,
and the locals had been fighting for days wasting the town's
ammunition, all firing at each other,
and in the end, to agree on how to end the conflict, they all agreed
that everything that had happened that was bad
was the work of one camel.
So they seized the camel, they put it on trial,
and they spent the whole afternoon shouting at it,
then speared it and killed it, and justice was done.
And now it's time for the hostile interrogation that we call
General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What's the most dangerous part of this ship?
DOGS BARK
Yes? Er, the buffet.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
So you can see it. You can see it in this picture.
The lifeboat.
It is the lifeboats. You are absolutely right.
They're the most dangerous bit? Yeah.
So there was a safety study carried out by
the Marine Accident Investigation Branch in 2001,
and lifeboats killed more people than they saved
in the UK and Australia over a ten-year period.
In fact, they found it was the most common cause of death
on board a ship.
It accounts for 16% of all lives lost.
Almost all of the accidents happen during training or maintenance,
and, in the same time period, no lifeboat was actually used
in an evacuation, so they didn't save any lives whatsoever.
It is considered a really serious problem.
Airplanes have a similar issue with their apparently
life-saving devices.
In fact, we can try them out now.
We're about to crash-land on water.
Fortunately, your life jacket is under your seat,
and, since we know you always pay attention
to the safety demonstrations, here we go. Brace, brace, brace!
KLAXON Go, go!
AIRPLANE ENGINE WHIRS
That's it! Toggle, toggle, toggle.
LAUGHTER
Stick it on, stick it on. Inflate it.
WHISTLE BLOWS Very good.
LAUGHTER
As far as we can ascertain,
life jackets have never saved anybody's life...
..in a modern commercial airline.
I feel like I overreacted then, if I'm honest.
So you're going to have to take them off. So if you just take them...
Can you get it off, darling? Can you...?
HE GRUNTS
INDISTINCT
No!
SCREECHING
LAUGHTER
Oh, my God!
APPLAUSE
Bloody hell! Are you all right?
Do you remember when that plane crash-landed on the Hudson?
I do, yeah. Oh, and Tom Hanks was in the plane. Yes.
Only 33 of the 150 passengers who were on board
had even managed to get hold of their life vests,
and, of those 33 who'd managed to find them,
only four were wearing them correctly.
They're only intended for planned water landings.
In other words, when there's been advanced warning,
and that hasn't happened for several decades.
Well, I often wonder that, when I'm flying Heathrow to Edinburgh,
they give it all that, "Well, it'd have to be a good shot, mate.
"Where are you going to...?"
Right into Windermere.
There's a woman called Cynthia McLean, she's the
Federal Aviation Authority's principal cabin safety investigator.
She says the best advice is leave the bloody life vest behind.
It takes too long, and, actually, the best thing you can do
if you land on the water is get off the plane.
So, they could save an enormous amount of weight, airlines,
if they just remove the almost useless life jackets,
they could save about a million gallons of fuel every year, but they don't do it. Why don't they do it?
Psychological comfort. Yes, we get psychological comfort knowing there's a life jacket.
Why don't they replace them with parachutes? I've never understood that.
Because if people can't put the life jacket on properly,
who the heck is going to manage...?
LAUGHTER
Why can't the plane be equipped
with two enormous parachutes?
Yes! Yes. That's a good shout.
When it's going down, they just release the two enormous parachutes,
and it floats to the ground. Yeah, like Wile E Coyote.
LAUGHTER
When you jump off a plane, you're strapped to another human being, right?
When you're...
All you mean sky jumping? Sky jumping, yes.
Quite good if every seat, there is already someone sitting,
strap them to them, and then in the event of an emergency
you jump with them. No, I don't want to spend any flight,
no matter how short, strapped to somebody else.
I do.
Right, moving on. Where did the Great Fire of London start?
Oooh.
Go on, then. You think you know. Go on.
Let the audience get it.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Pudding Lane!
KLAXON
Not nice, is it? It's not nice.
Makes you feel stupid, don't it?
At the monument. So, well, closer to the monument than we thought.
So it did start at a bakery. It was a baker called Thomas Farriner,
and he left his fuel out too close to the oven,
but they've now discovered planning documents from 1673,
there was an academic called Dorian Gerhold, and he revealed the oven
was actually situated on Monument Street,
so it's about 60 feet east of Pudding Lane, and, of course,
Monument Street wasn't called that then because...?
There was no monument. There was no monument. Yes!
So the monument was built in 1677.
Now, the thing about the monument is it's 202ft tall
because it was supposed to be 202 feet from where the fire started,
but it's probably now too tall
because it probably started much closer to the monument.
What happened was there were lots of printers in the area, and stationers
and book-sellers and so on, and they wanted to save all their paper,
and they rushed to the vaults of St Paul's
because they thought the thick walls would keep it safe.
In fact, this vast amount of paper just became kindling,
helped the fire spread, it destroyed the cathedral.
Apparently was a gruesome sight, the collapse of St Paul's exposed
corpses of people who'd been buried for hundreds of years.
And the fire smouldered for six months. God.
Destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches,
and if you imagine at the time, London, the most densely populated
urban settlement in the world.
How many people do you think died?
It's really low, it's about five or something.
So, it was mentioned on QI on the D series,
that they thought it was low, maybe five or six people,
but they now question that. It's almost certain that it was hundreds of people who perished.
And the real problem is the deaths of the poor and even the middle class,
nobody's that bothered, so it probably goes unreported.
How many people were living in London at the time, was it like a big place?
About half a million people living in London at the time. OK.
But some people so burnt that you wouldn't know even that there was a body there.
And also, for three weeks after the fire started, the bills of mortality,
which was the record of London deaths, went unpublished because the press itself getting burnt down.
Right, moving on. The Great Fire of London didn't start on Pudding Lane,
it started just next door.
How should you position your hands when holding the steering wheel?
Ten-to-two.
KLAXON
Used to be. Not any more. Why not?
It's no longer recommended. Well, it's definitely not that.
Something has changed in cars since
the origins of the ten-to-two idea.
What has changed? Seat belts?
No, not seat belts. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Airbags.
Airbags is absolutely right.
So, if your hands are too close together,
which is the ten and the two, it increases the risk of injury,
and some of the injuries are horrific.
Airbags inflate at up to 250mph. Jesus.
Broken hands, entire hands sometimes, requiring amputations.
There is a really stomach-churning injury called de-gloving.
AUDIENCE GASP What...?
Yeah. So lifeboats, airbags.
Like, what is...?
What, the paramedics just come round and slit your throat?
LAUGHTER What's going on?
The best thing is like that, nine and three,
because that way the airbag has got space to come up
between your hands. Keeps you out of the way.
I just steer with my cock.
LAUGHTER
Just loop it round once.
The British driving test changed in 2018.
What did they get rid of? Oh, that's good.
I failed my theory test three times last year.
Have you passed now? No, she hasn't.
I do believe I'm just too much of a genius
to grasp something so simple.
That's how I feel. I failed the practical six times.
What did they pull you up on?
I got to a junction, I looked right, I said, "All right your side?"
LAUGHTER
I failed my test cos, when I was meant to go forwards,
I went backwards.
LAUGHTER
They got rid of the turn in the road manoeuvre. That's gone,
and that reversing around the corner is gone as well.
Yeah, good. That was hard, that one. Is that because that's creepy?
LAUGHTER
I also think parallel parking should do one.
Because that's why we are so fat, because we keep trying to park
closest to the place we need to be.
But if you actually just find the nearest easy parking space,
sometimes you can be 2 miles away.
There's a wonderful survey they did in 2015 of
the most common reasons people fail their tests.
Unusual reasons for failing included -
"I thought a line of parked cars was a line of traffic
"so waited behind it."
"I went too far forward at a zebra crossing
"and bumped the bumper on a pedestrian...
"..and then argued it wasn't my fault
"as his outfit had made him blend in with the stripes."
LAUGHTER
"A good-looking man on a motorbike caught my attention,
"and, without realising, I started to drive directly towards him.
"The instructor had to enforce an emergency stop
"because I nearly crashed straight into him."
Driving instructors, just as a type of people, are quite mean. Mm.
I was getting my driving test. I just sat down.
He looked at me, and he said,
"I don't think you're going to make it."
Wow. Wow. At least he wasn't a doctor.
LAUGHTER
What is the definition of a species?
A type of a living thing?
A class of animal?
Well, here's the thing, there is no universal definition of a species.
Type of a living thing it is, then.
There is certainly at least 32 different definitions.
One of the things that people learn, if they are two different species,
they can't produce viable offspring,
so, mules, which are horse-donkey hybrids,
and horses have 64 chromosomes, donkeys have 62, so mules end up
with 63, which is an odd number,
you can't divide evenly into sperm and eggs, and so it is sterile.
But it is not the case with different species combinations.
So, bonobos and chimps successfully interbreed. And zoologists estimate
88% of all fish species could happily interbreed.
Quite a few fish species like the swordtails in Mexico,
the result of two different fish species.
What about human and chimp? Asking for a friend.
Many different species can successfully breed with one another,
although it is admittedly very hard
to make a whale have sex with an oak tree.
And, with that questionable image in your minds,
it's time for the scores.
Well and truly quashed in last place...with minus 37 -
it's Alan! Thank you very much.
CHEERING, APPLAUSE
How did I do that?!
In fourth place with minus 25 -
Jason!
Fourth? Is that not the same as last?
In third place with minus 17 -
Aisling!
CHEERING, APPLAUSE
In second place with minus nine -
it's the audience!
CHEERING, WHISTLING
And our winner today with a full four points -
Anuvab!
CHEERING, APPLAUSE
THEME TUNE PLAYS
Which only leaves me to thank Anuvab, Aisling, Jason and Alan,
and I leave you with this quick quotation from the quarrelsome
Elizabeth Gaskell.
"I'll not listen to reason.
"Reason always means what someone else has got to say."
Goodnight.