CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to QI.
Prepare yourself for tiffs, travesties and tear-jerkers
because tonight, we've gone all theatrical.
Turn off your telephones for our dramatis personae.
The tragic hero, Ed Byrne.
APPLAUSE
Best tortured artist, Jack Dee.
APPLAUSE
Tonight's leading lady, Cally Beaton.
APPLAUSE
And understudying the part of Alan Davies,
it's Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Now, if they want my attention, they'll need their show stoppers,
so Ed goes...
BOOMING THUDS
Fee fi fo fum!
Jack goes...
Cinderella, you shall go to the ball!
Cally goes...
FANFARE
Lord Mayor of London!
And Alan goes...
To be or not to be? That is the question.
Oh, no, it isn't!
So much for the prologue.
Now it's time for Act One.
What's the most interesting thing to ever happen in a theatre?
Is it when Godot actually turned up?
I mean, Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre.
That was pretty interesting.
Not interesting to him, though, was it?
No. Just the thing the actors said afterwards,
"Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?"
There's been a few.
Didn't Moliere die in a performance of one of his plays?
He died in The Hypochondriac. Yeah.
And he had said he wasn't feeling well! There you go.
LAUGHTER
I was at the theatre with a boyfriend
who was quite distinctive-looking.
It was Les Mis.
I whizzed out to the loo and whizzed back into my aisle seat,
held his inner thigh lovingly.
It wasn't him. Er...
And it took until I Dreamed A Dream for him to tell me, so...
Ooh, that's a long way in, isn't it?
I meant the show. OK...
OK, possibly one of the most interesting things to ever happen
in the theatre is the founding of Belgium.
So there is an opera by a French composer called Daniel Auber called
La Muette de Portici.
It's about a group of fishermen in Naples and they rebel
against their Spanish rulers in the 17th century.
It climaxes with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the heroine
throws herself from the balcony into the lava.
Real lava?
I mean, that would only be one performance... Yeah!
Anyway, the opera was performed in 1830 in Brussels,
so at the time, Belgium belonged to the Netherlands
and revolution was in the air.
And there is a particularly stirring aria called
Sacred Love Of The Homeland,
and apparently after it was sung, the crowd poured out of the theatre,
they joined all the nationalist protests outside and, weeks later,
the rebel provisional government declared independence
and Belgians claim that this opera was responsible for the creation
of their country, so...
It would be really interesting if it was another country
other than Belgium. Right. Yeah. You know?
So, yeah, before that night at the opera,
posters had been hung up all over the city -
and I like this - it said,
"Monday the 23rd, fireworks.
"Tuesday the 24th, illuminations.
"Wednesday the 25th, revolution."
Heh! Ah! This was French Belgium, then. Was it done in...
Cos you know I speak Dutch.
Incredibly useful life skill.
Yeah. They have a funny Flemish saying and it goes, if something
tastes delicious, they say,
"Alsof er een engeltje op je tong piest" -
"As if a little angel is pissing on my tongue,"
so thank goodness... That's it if it tastes delicious they say that?
What if something doesn't taste nice?
Well, we don't want to go there, I think.
They do have the same word for "sex" and "poo".
They say, "..poepen" - "I want to have sex with you,"
same word as "poo", so... let's not go there now.
Right. "I just thought I'd say that!"
A country that has the same word for "sex" and "poo"
is a country I don't want to visit.
You'd have to be really sure of the context
of that sentence, wouldn't you?
"What did he just say?
"What's happening here? Is it sex or poo?"
That's how my first child was conceived, so...
Yeah.
I did a stand-up gig in Antwerp and I asked if anyone spoke French,
and I've never, with a single line, created such a hostile atmosphere.
When you're on the stage, you don't want to turn them.
No.
And the idea that anyone would admit publicly that they spoke French...
That was enough. So how have they kept this place together?
Cos they hated the opera.
And then when they came out, now they haven't got on for 200 years.
I mean, I'm going to guess that the opera was not
really what caused it all, but it is a wonderful bourgeois explanation,
isn't it, of the founding of a country?
"Ah, yes, it was that night at the opera. Absolutely."
We've had our own kind of rioting in theatre.
So in 1808, Covent Garden Theatre burnt down and, a year later,
they rebuilt it, and in order to offset the huge cost of the
rebuilding, they decided that they would put up ticket prices.
They'd increased all the prices,
they'd reduced the areas where poor people could sit and they'd
increased the number of very expensive boxes
for the very wealthy,
and this led to the Old Price Riots.
Why didn't they just do what they do now... What?
..and just introduce an "administration fee"
on top of the ticket price?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Look at the touring comedians nodding!
This went on for three months.
The police were called, the Riot Act was read from the stage
and then there was some doubt -
could you arrest people who'd bought a ticket to come in
because they'd bought a ticket to be there?
The people who rioted, they brought frying pans.
They were dedicated, banging the frying pans. Boxers were brought...
Oh, banging the frying pans? Oh, yeah.
I thought they were... No.
They just didn't bring them along in case there was another fire.
Yeah.
That's a very good idea.
When I was a child in New York, I lived in a very small town called
Mamaroneck and we had a volunteer fire department,
and there was a very smart restaurant that burnt down,
and when they realised that we couldn't save it,
they just waited for all the chickens to cook
before they put the fire...
But one of the main complaints, and it was all classes
that complained, but there were places that were known
as pigeonholes where you sat, it was the cheapest seats.
You could only see the legs of the actors.
It'd be fine if you were going to see Riverdance.
Yeah.
But they won. They won.
The rioters won and the prices were reduced again,
back to the old prices, so the Old Price Riots...
Three months. That's spectacular.
And this picture here is of a rather radical barrister
called Henry Clifford.
He's got written on his spectacles, "No private boxes."
Was that a thing, too, then? Yeah.
So what the people who owned the theatre wanted
was to have private boxes lavishly decorated,
where the wealthy would sit.
This is very much like Premier League football,
pricing out the poor people.
Yes. Bringing in the corporates. Yes, exactly. Ugh!
CLAPPING
Yes! Two people clapped then!
APPLAUSE
Don't hold back! It helps, cos after that Antwerp gig,
he's still a bit...
Other plays which have caused absolute furore -
before becoming a Hollywood star,
the great Mae West appeared in a play on Broadway, it was called
Sex, which I think gives you an idea of what it was about.
It was 1926.
She wrote it, she produced it, she was in it, she directed it.
This is a publicity shot from Sex.
And in those days, you were not allowed, a man and a woman were not
allowed to do horizontal kissing. Mm-hm.
You had to have one foot on the ground, didn't you?
Just like snooker.
It's exactly like snooker.
APPLAUSE
It was very popular and the entire cast was eventually arrested
for indecency, and Mae West...
Because of their involvement in the play or just coincidentally?
They all got arrested and she was offered the chance to just pay
a fine, but, of course, she thought it was a great publicity stunt,
this scandal, so she decided to go to prison
and she went to New York's Welfare Island in a limo -
it's now called Roosevelt Island - wearing a spectacular outfit.
The warden, of course, was overwhelmed to have Mae West there
and so she had dinner with him and his wife,
and she leaked to the press -
there's the warden, Henry O Schleth -
she leaked that under her prison uniform, she was wearing
the finest silk underwear.
It was absolutely, you know, publicity made in heaven, frankly.
Did you say "Welfare Island"?
Well, it used to be called Welfare Island.
Isn't that a documentary on Channel 4?
Now, criminologist Professor John Pitts once said,
"You cannot riot on your own, a one-man riot is a tantrum,"
so tell me, how do you tackle a toddler's tantrum?
Any thoughts?
One useful way that I discovered is you carry a hessian sack
around with you and just put it over the toddler.
Yeah. It can't be plastic cos obviously that's bad
for the environment... Yeah. ..but...
You know, hessian, hessian sack is enough.
And also, you can also whisper through it saying,
"I'm going to throw you in the Thames in a minute."
I don't want to keep banging on about Holland, but they have
St Nicholas, Sinterklaas, celebrations and they do,
they threaten to take the children away in a hessian sack, so...
Is that a thing? It's an actual thing. Yeah.
There was everyone thinking I was weird. Yeah.
My tour manager once,
his daughter threw a tantrum
and he just started filming her on his phone and then played it back
to her as she was having the tantrum.
Right. And that worked. And that's how TikTok started. Yeah!
And then she started laughing,
watching the video of her own tantrum.
Well, that's not a bad idea, you see, cos one of the things
that happens in a tantrum, you get anger and sadness
at exactly the same moment,
and it's really hard to differentiate between the two.
It's like the menopause. It is.
It's also, rather like before, Premier League football.
And the best thing to do is if you can move your toddler
from their sort of anger into sadness, because then,
of course, a sad child thinks, "Oh, I just need to be comforted,"
and it just seems to be better.
The problem is that the prefrontal cortex in a toddler, the bit
of the region of the brain that influences our sense of fairness
and our impulse control zone, has yet to fully develop,
and that's why, in general, children throw tantrums and adults don't.
And also it's ridiculous as well,
so it's hard not to laugh in their face when they're...
And that makes it even worse.
One of our daughters started with a dispute
about what she was going to wear when she went out
and Jane, my wife, said, "Look, you need to change the T-shirt
"cos it's filthy, it's got baked beans on it and we're going out,
"so we want you to change it."
And it got worse and worse to the point where she just blew up
and just screamed at Jane.
"Anyway, you think you're the fancy lady of all London town!"
APPLAUSE
One of the most cutting things my kid ever said to me,
when my youngest was very young, he was three or four years old,
and he's always had this thing about wanting to be older
and wanting to be a grown-up.
He was just really frustrated with it and he says, he just goes,
"I wish I was a grown-up."
And I said to him, I said, "Well, you know, when you're a grown-up,
"you'll have to go to work."
And he just paused, a perfect sitcom beat, and then went...
.."I wish I was a comedian."
APPLAUSE
We did time out. Did anybody else do that?
Yeah, I would do time out.
Leave them to it.
We did time out with my son,
if he didn't tidy his toys, he had to go and sit on the naughty step,
and I found him one day on the naughty step
and I hadn't said anything. I said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "Oh, I can't be bothered to tidy."
APPLAUSE
We had one like that, one that would do something
and then before you could say anything at all, just walk defiantly
to the naughty step. Yep.
Yeah! Yeah.
What's the worst bit of parenting advice you can think of?
There's a book now that's come out called
There's No Such Thing As "Naughty". Oh, right.
And that sounds like a shit book, doesn't it?
That's a book you should steal rather than buy.
But they used to have all those books, they had, like,
was it Dr Spock? Dr Spock, yeah.
It used to say, like, "Put your baby outside."
And then there was an earlier one, I think a 19th-century book,
about giving your children, basically it was morphine,
it was a soothing syrup.
I mean, who wouldn't want a little bit of laced Calpol?
Victorian children were calmed by all sorts of medicines like that.
There was a thing called Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric Syrup
and it worked fantastically.
It was very soothing for children because it was 50% alcohol
and contained 1 and 3/16 grains of opium per ounce.
SHOCKED LAUGHTER
Yeah, so... Oh, let's get a shot glass!
I mean, you could either give that to the child or you could take it
and not care that the child's not sleeping. Yeah.
Just have one each and do a cheers at bedtime.
"Goodnight, darling!"
Come on, which of us has not sneaked a tiny bit of Calpol in our day?
But there were all sorts of domestic manuals that used to give advice.
Some of it, I think, is a bit suspect.
There's an amazing woman called Lydia Maria Child.
She was an abolitionist, she was a women's rights activist,
a Native American activist and so on,
but she also wrote several books about bringing up children.
I don't know why - she had no children.
And in 1831, she wrote a thing called The Mother's Book,
and she advised women to speak with a look of regret
as they tied infants to armchairs.
SHOCKED LAUGHTER
She did, to be fair, frown on locking them in the closet.
Is that her look of regret? Because I'm not feeling it.
That's a face that says,
"I'm going to tie you to something in a minute."
They didn't have gaffer tape in her day.
In the early 20th century,
there were doctors who recommended dunking a screaming infant's head
under the cold tap until they shut up. Yeah.
And yet there was an intake of breath when I talked about my sack.
You should just... Just say that again. Don't talk about your sack!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Talk about low-hanging fruit!
This advice from an 1888 manual by a man called Thomas Hill
I think is absolutely right - never wake children up, OK?
The time will come soon enough when care and trouble will compel them
to waken in the early morning.
Let them sleep while they can.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Even on a school day?
Yes.
We tried to follow...
Talking about people who wrote children's books
that don't have children, but Gina Ford had one,
I think was The Content Baby or something like that,
which we tried to follow.
For three nights, we tried to do that thing of...
Was that keeping the baby...?
Let it get cried out, cry for so long...
Is she the nanny? Is she the nanny person?
I'm not sure. I just know I would feed her that book.
All these people who write books,
they're right bastards, aren't they? Yeah.
While we're on the subject of tantrums, what looks like a tomato
and screams when stressed?
Aww.
Is it me on holiday with my kids?
KLAXON WAILS
Literally, that was meant for me, no-one else. Got me.
Is it an animal kingdom one?
Er, no. Are we going to discover that plants scream
when they're distressed? Is it to do with that?
We are, so what might it be?
Is it an actual tomato?
It's an actual tomato! Two points.
Absolutely right.
So they did some research, 2019, Tel Aviv University, and they found
that tomatoes emit ultrasonic screams
when they are damaged or dehydrated.
Is that when they see the frying pan?
When they hear someone say,
"I'm quite peckish, I fancy some breakfast."
"Aaargh!"
I think it's actual damage.
They're called stress vocalisations and they are detected
at 65 decibels, so that's the same volume as human laughter,
but we can't hear it because it's a frequency
well above our hearing range.
The really weird thing is that things like fruit bats and mice
can detect tomato shrieks from as far away as five metres
and eat them anyway.
Ohhh.
They're just not that bothered. Oh, pity.
But we don't really know how they make the sound,
so probably what it is, the xylem fibres - that's the tubes
that transport water and nutrients and so on from the soil -
it's probably bursting air bubbles in the xylem fibres.
They have tiny charged particles called ions that send electrical
signals around the plant and alert it to danger, insect attacks,
that kind of thing, and it is
the thing that seems to make them scream. We just can't hear it.
There's a book called The Hidden Life Of Trees,
which is all about how trees communicate with each other
and run themselves like a society. I know this, this is marvellous.
It's an amazing book. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.
They made it into a film called Avatar.
LAUGHTER
It is incredible that trees will share water.
It's like a socialist system, a woodland.
It's like Denmark, isn't it? It's exactly like Denmark. Yeah, it is.
But they look at us and, to them, we're just like a fly flying by
because the lifetime of a human,
just as a little existential thought.
So they're looking down on us all the time? Yeah, all the time.
Well, I'm glad we turn them into books, then. Yeah, yeah.
ALAN MIMICS CHAINSAW
That book you read about The Secret Life Of Trees? Yeah?
Got a little story about what that book used to be. Yeah.
Every time you turn the page, it goes, "Aaargh! Aaargh!"
Tomatoes are really interesting.
They were feared in Europe for about 200 years.
They were known as poison apples.
Sort of fair enough cos there's about 18,000 varieties and they all
belong to the nightshade family, which produces a toxin called
solanine, which can kill you, but only in extremely high doses,
so even a very ripe tomato, there's hardly any of it in there. Yeah.
But all of those vegetables and things in that family,
belladonna, aubergines, tomatoes,
they all have been long considered aphrodisiacs
and so tomatoes were seen as a dangerous source
of sexual temptation.
Tomatoes are known as a dangerous source of sexual temptation?
See, I can never eat a tomato again cos it would be like cannibalism.
Yeah.
They were called love apples or wolf apples, they were.
We're back to Jack's sack again, aren't we?
LAUGHTER
I literally don't know what happened that I agreed with you.
I just...
It is the gift that keeps giving.
But there was a terrible fear of tomatoes.
Early 19th-century America,
they thought they were toxic and inedible.
There's an apocryphal story,
I don't think it is true, about a gentleman horticulturalist
called Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson in Salem, New Jersey,
and he publicly ate a basket of tomatoes with a doctor standing
by him just in case,
and the event is known as the Salem Tomato Trial of 1820.
And there's a wonderful description
from the Salem County Historical Society,
"He brought the tomato to his lips and took a bite.
"A woman in the crowd screamed and fainted, but no-one
"paid her any attention.
"They were all watching Johnson as he took one bite after another.
"The crowd cheered and the fireman's band blared a song.
" 'He's done it!', they shouted. 'He's still alive!' "
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
We discovered this thing, which I really love,
there was a guy in Japan called Nobumichi Tosa
and, for the 2015 Tokyo Marathon,
he invented a thing,
a robotic tomato dispenser,
which was worn as a backpack, OK?
The idea was that you wore it during a marathon
and it would help combat...fatigue.
Apart from you're wearing this tomato dispenser.
Let's have a look and see the guy having a go at
showing us how it works.
OK, so there's the tomatoes in the tomato dispenser.
This is the guy who actually wore it during the marathon.
That guy's never run a marathon.
Then it comes round...
And then you eat the tomato.
What a good idea. Yeah...! Yeah.
I do not know why that didn't take off. Yeah!
From screaming tomatoes to talking drums,
what message can you communicate by thumping on a drum?
Do you...? Anybody play the drums? Anybody?
My dad's a timpanist. Is he? Yes, he is. Well, that's very impressive.
Yeah, we used to have to walk home from everywhere because he needed
the space in the car for the drums. They're massive, so, yeah...
Going back to the whole parenting issue, I feel nothing says
"I hate you" more than buying your friend's kid a drum.
Yeah!
My son had a drum kit when he was 13. Did anyone's...?
Has anyone's kids had a...? Uh, not allowed. No... Yeah, I...
What about yours, Jack? You seem like a liberal parent.
We got one...of those electric ones where you can't hear it.
And then if it gets too much, you just you press a switch
and they get a little shock. It's not...
LAUGHTER DROWNS SPEECH
Sounds perfect.
I convey a lot of messaging through percussion and...
Well, a quick example will be...
HE MIMES DRUM SEQUENCE
That would go on for 12 or 18 minutes sometimes. And that...
That means, "I want this train carriage to myself."
It worked.
APPLAUSE
There are drums used all over the world, but in particular,
I'll talk about the Yoruba dundun,
which is the talking drums of Nigeria, and they're amazing.
They copy the sounds of human speech and convey messages
over a really long distance.
So the language itself is a tonal language, so words have
different meaning depending on whatever pitch you're using.
The dundun is a cylindrical double-headed drum,
and it can be tuned,
you can pull on the goatskin strings, and modulate the pitch,
and they can exactly mimic the rhythm, the intonation,
the emotion and the stresses of the language.
And it's exactly as if it's done vocally, but it's done on the drum.
Have a look at this interviewer.
This is an interview on Nigerian television and the guy drums
and the person interviewing is able to tell what it is he's saying.
HE SPEAKS YORUBA
HE SPEAKS RHYTHMICALLY, IN TIME
Wow!
HE REPEATS UTTERANCE
Love that you could do that.
But it isn't unique to Yoruba.
So there's the oja flute which mimics the Igbo language,
and in Ghana, the Asante Twi language is communicated
by ivory trumpeters.
What I like is they use it for things like announcing
drinking competitions!
Glad it's not used frivolously, then! Yeah.
And then, it's not just the boys, the Baka of Cameroon and Gabon,
they practise water drumming, or liquindi,
and it's usually the women. They go out...
It's the most wonderful noise. Have a look online,
there's quite a lot of examples of it, and the women beat out
these sort of gloopy rhythms on the surface of the river,
and the idea is to enchant the forest before hunting
and lure the animals in. Not the alligators, though. No.
So the only mammals other than humans are known to use rhythm
to communicate are lemurs.
The indri of Mada... Look at this picture. Aw!
Is that a ruffed lemur? That is an indri... An indri...
..of Madagascar. Aw! Is that lemur eating leaves
or has it got two tongues? It is a leaf, but
it does look like a tongue hanging out, doesn't it? It does. Yeah.
So they message each other using family songs.
It's a bit like a whale song, and they sing up to seven times a day
and it can be heard 4km away. Have a listen to this.
FLUTE-LIKE YIPPING
LEMURS SING
Oh, no!
SANDI LAUGHS
SINGING CONTINUES
Oh...!
It just sounds like being in a traffic jam! ..my God!
They're doing a disservice to the tourist board of Madagascar.
"You can't hear them near the hotel."
Right, your phone's dead, your TV's on the blink, the Wi-Fi is down,
how can you tell if a thunderstorm is on the way?
I live in the countryside, so if my Wi-Fi is down,
I'm assuming the thunderstorm has just been.
I live in the country - if the WiFi's down, I'm not surprised!
Do you have bees? Because if bees all go back in the hive,
that means there's a storm coming.
We are in the animal world and it was a specific thing invented
to tap into this innate ability of some animals.
And it's a thing called a tempest prognosticator, also known
as the Leech Barometer.
Invented in 1850 by Dr George Merryweather,
and it was used to predict oncoming storms.
So it's 12 glass bottles, pint bottles,
each one has a leech in it.
And what's very sweet is that George Merryweather put them in a circle
so that none of the leeches would get lonely... Aww!
..which I think is very sweet. Thoughtful. Yeah.
This is a 1951 replica. It's in Whitby in the museum there.
Merryweather was once the curator there.
This is the way it works - so it's 12 glass bottles, right?
And each has a thin piece of whalebone in the neck,
and what happens is, when there's an impending storm, there's
changes in atmospheric pressure, and it prompts them to climb up
the sides of the bottle and dislodge the whalebone
and causing the hammer to strike a bell,
and if the bell rang repeatedly,
then a thunderstorm was approaching.
A slightly overengineered solution. Mm-hm! Do you think?
If you had that in your house, people went, "What's that?"
"Well, that's just the case the Wi-Fi goes down..."
Imagine there's a satellite going round the Earth,
full of leeches.
Just as a backup.
Sounds like Elon Musk would come up with.
Merryweather was so pleased with this!
He wanted to make big ones the size of Indian temples and then
very simple ones, and he wanted to roll it out across the country.
I'm amazed that didn't happen.
I know! It's such a handy gadget, that, to have one of those...
The Government did not have any imagination, stuck with barometers,
but I think it's one of the best things I've ever seen.
I wonder how he came up with it. "I've got these leeches,
"these whale bones..." Well, he was a doctor as well.
He would have used leeches in his medical practice.
And indeed, leeches are still used today to prevent blood clots.
So they're putting stuff into the blood, are they? Yes.
They have something in the saliva called hirudin,
which is an anticoagulant. Ah!
Anyway, he intended to use his "hysterical aquatic bloodsuckers"
to create a whole range of barometers, old George Merryweather,
but it didn't happen. And then there's another guy.
In 1906, Professor Joseph Novak of Vienna, he promoted a tropical vine,
which is called rosary pea,
and he said this was a tempest-predicting plant,
in that it's got sort of feathery leaves,
and if they pointed up, that meant it was going to be fine,
if they pointed down, there was going to be a thunderstorm
and he claimed that it could predict the weather in a 3,000-mile radius
a week in advance.
LAUGHTER
Earthquakes... Nothing can predict that... I know!
Earthquakes, a month in advance.
ED LAUGHS HEARTILY
Unfortunately...
LAUGHTER
Unfortunately, he was never able to prove that it worked.
ALAN: No!
You don't say! I know.
I think one of the simplest ways to predict a thunderstorm
is to organise a picnic.
LAUGHTER
One year, I did a big outdoor origami festival, and...
..sure enough, it rained. Yeah.
And I was disappointed because I had all the experts
from all around the world coming and we had swans, poodles, elephants,
everything... I mean, it just looked like roadkill.
Has anybody ever seen a great big flash of lightning?
Anybody ever seen...?
I was knocked flat by...lightning once. Were you?! Yeah, I was.
What happened? I was knocked flat by lightning.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
What more did you want from the story?! Yeah, yeah.
Tell us something interesting, Daddy.
No, I was watching a cricket match,
and I was only about ten or something,
and just suddenly, I remember this massive clap of lightning
hit the cricket pitch
and quite a lot of the players were knocked over...
I was...flat...by it. Wow. Yeah, I was...
Felt really terrible the rest of the day. It could've been worse -
you could've been forced to watch the whole cricket match.
I could've, yeah, yeah!
APPLAUSE
So that probably won't ever happen again, will it? I...
There's a story of a guy who was hit so many times by lightning,
people couldn't believe it. He kept...
It was, like, five or six times, and then, when he died,
his grave was hit by lightning.
But in 2020, the single longest lightning bolt ever was recorded.
It was 477 miles long.
Wow. Wow. If we look at the bottom of the map there... Yeah...
..that's where it went, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, right across
like that, same distance as London and Hamburg.
I'm going to ask the question everyone's wondering -
how do you measure the length of a lightning bolt? Carefully. Yeah.
Cos it's hot. Very quickly, I'd imagine...
Quick, would've been quick... Careful, yet quickly.
It was filmed on satellite, so they could see how long it was.
Isn't that right? That's correct, yes. You got an extra point.
Do I? My God. Yes.
APPLAUSE
Anyway, moving on...
How can you turn your town into a tourist trap?
So traps... Not just a tourist attraction?
Is there anything relevant about it being a trap?
No, it's something that's... It's a con? ..on purpose.
So you have a big attraction, like a Ferris wheel,
but all around it you have really massive sticky pads,
and they just... When they walk on it and then they're stuck...
Pits with spikes in, covered with grass. Traps.
We are talking about the 1870s.
We're talking about a place in Nevada called Palisade,
and it had a reputation as one of the most violent places
in the United States.
It was known as the toughest town west of Chicago
and train passengers, who were en route to Chicago,
to San Francisco, for example, on the Central Pacific Railroad,
they would stop and stretch their legs and then they would see
gunfights and they would see brawls and robberies, and there
would be Native American massacres and hangings all taking place
in broad daylight, because that is what people thought
the Wild West was like.
In fact, it was one of the quietest, most law-abiding places in the whole
of the United States.
It was described by a local newspaper reporter as,
"unusually dull".
It's like my last Edinburgh show.
It didn't even have a sheriff!
It was a complete hoax. It was deliberately...
So they hear the train coming... Yeah. ..and everyone goes, "Oh, God,
"get your gear on, come on..." "Come on."
"Let's start shooting and pretending."
Bang, bang, bang, argh... Yeah.
And the local Shoshone, the local Native Americans
enthusiastically joined in. They did mock scalpings,
they agreed to be bound, hand and foot, and laid on the platform
and so on. They used blood from the local slaughterhouse
to enhance all the theatrics.
At the first staged confrontation, they wrote down what was said.
"Frank West and Alvin Kittleby exchanged words,
"with the former calling out, 'There you are,
" 'ya low-down polecat, I've been waiting for you.
" 'I'm going to kill you cos of what you did to my sister.' "
LAUGHTER
Sorry, what did you say? Sorry.
It's like Westworld, isn't it? Yeah.
The actual period of the Wild West is only about 20 years
in the United States.
You get the period where people start going west,
and then somebody invented barbed wire,
and once you could enclose all those big, vast open spaces,
it completely changed. It was just over.
And actually, it's a terrible disservice that a lot of films
have done to the Native Americans, because honestly, settlers
going west were much more likely to be killed by diphtheria
or some illness. Or Mormons. Mormons, darling!
Absolutely no... There was a big Mormon massacre.
HE STUTTERS, SANDI TALKS OVER HIM ..the Native Americans.
It was indeed the Meadow Massacre in Utah, where 120 people were killed
by Mormons, who were terrified of outsiders,
so you're absolutely right, I'm going to give you
an extra two points for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So, do they...do they knock on your door before they kill you? Yeah.
But there were more than 1,000 performances in this town
and no lives were ever lost.
Was it one of those things where, after a while, people knew it was
just a show and then it became a show, I wonder?
If it was, like... It was before TripAdvisor, though, wasn't it?
LAUGHTER
That's like Disney World before Disney World, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah!
So they deserved all they got for such creative tourist trapping.
But you're exactly right, it's in some instances considered
the first theme park in the world.
And fake tourist attractions are still very big business.
There's a Chinese town of Shangri-La.
And it is not the one from the James Hilton novel.
It used to be just plain old Zhongdian County Town,
and it renamed itself in 2001 as Shangri-La,
and now it's very popular tourist attraction.
They have this thing in Vietnam, if you open a restaurant
and it's doing well,
and say you call it Sam's Eatery or something,
then another restaurant round the corner will open up
and they will call themselves Sam's Eatery, and there's nothing
you can do about it.
So most of the restaurants just use a street number.
So we're number 47 and no-one else can be number 47. Yeah.
SANDI AND JACK: Oh!
So quite often, if you... So is that how McDonald's spread?
It's good they make such an effort, though, don't they?
Cos we could learn from that, over here, when we do our
fake winter wonderlands and stuff, they've brought people in,
and they've paid 40 quid and it's just a guinea pig dressed up as
a reindeer and a bit of fake snow, this is what we should be doing
to rip people off! Make a bloody effort!
To be fair, guinea pigs dressed as reindeer
is something I'd would want to see. Yeah...
Anybody seen Juliet's balcony in Verona?
The actual balcony? The actual balcony, it's a historic balcony.
So the house is 13th century, that's fair enough.
The balcony was added in 1936.
And also, Shakespeare did not base Juliet on a real person
and he never went to Italy. So there we are. There's a whole lot of...
But people go and take photographs
and there's a statue of Juliet in the courtyard.
There's a tradition of rubbing her right breast for luck.
No, that's to see if a thunderstorm's coming.
What do you think might be a reason to visit the Bude Tunnel
in Cornwall, which, in 2021, won the Travellers' Choice Award?
The Bude...?
You want to get out of Bude?
What kind of tunnel is it? Do we know? A tiny tunnel?
It is quite tiny. It's a little tiny tunnel.
It has its own merchandise shop, it sells postcards,
It has over 900 five-star reviews online.
Is it four foot long? OK...
Have a look. This is what it is.
It is a Perspex...
This is so British.
It is a Perspex rain tunnel
that connects a supermarket to its car park.
LAUGHTER, SCATTERED APPLAUSE
That is thoughtful, though.
In 2018, they decided to light it up, the supermarket,
with 100,000 light bulbs.
And everybody went mad! It was a literally decided, "It was a joke,
"it was a joke. We're just going to light the thing up."
Anyway, they eventually, TripAdvisor, had to ban people
from adding reviews.
So I thought,
"Well, this is marvellous, I've never been to Bude."
So I read a website called Top 10 Things to Do in Bude, Cornwall.
Number five was, "Visit Devon".
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Right, how might the gentleman in the middle here
make your children behave?
It looks like an early panel show, doesn't it?
Six white men, no women, and a shit host, so...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
ALAN: That guy on the end, saying,
"I can't believe I've been sat next to the robot AGAIN."
It's an early example of a smart home device, an early example
of an Alexa or a Siri, whatever it's called.
Herbert Televox.
And he could talk, he could switch the oven on, he could
flick the lights on and off. No, he couldn't. No, he couldn't!
I'm sorry, you've been told this, but... That's him with his inventor,
Roy Wensley, from the Westinghouse Company, invented in 1927,
and he could be programmed to spy on your children by reporting on
the sound levels in the house so you could ascertain whether the children
had had a party, you could ascertain whether they'd gone to bed...
You could ascertain if your children had unplugged him...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It never became mainstream.
No! No. No? That's weird, because I want one.
Yeah, great. I love it.
There were three Televoxes employed as reservoir watchman
in Washington DC, so they reported on the levels of the water
in the reservoir and could turn the flow of water on and off.
What I like, he had a sister, who was known as Katrina Van Televox,
and she... This is so awful.
She was dressed as a maid, OK? And the press release of the time said,
"She has all the characteristics of the modern woman
"except she doesn't talk back."
SHOCKED LAUGHTER, GROANING
Right?! And then Televox also had a grandson called Elektro
who could smoke cigarettes,
and appeared in a movie called Sex Kittens Go To College.
Just like a real sex kitten, except they don't ruin the carpet.
Wow. That sounds like experience.
What sort of pet shop do you live near?!
"This is a sex kitten."
He lives in the countryside, they make their own fun. Don't you?
So the thing is, he was controlled by sound.
So you played a combination of different pitches on a whistle
to trigger different features.
For example, two short high notes would prompt Televox
to operate the oven.
Whistles have long been used to control machines.
In the 1960s, in America, there were automatic telephone switchboards
that worked that way,
so if you played a particular sound at a particular level,
it would allow a long distance call.
And then a cereal company called Cap'n Crunch released whistles
with the boxes, and lots of teenagers realised that the free
whistle, coincidentally, produced the correct tone to get
a free, long-distance...call.
And using that theory, there was something invented called
a blue box, and they were devices that reproduced all sorts
of different tones that allowed you, basically,
to hack into the entire phone system.
And Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's first business venture together
was making and selling these blue boxes.
And Jobs once said, without them, there would have been no Apple.
It would never have happened. This was their first foray.
It's fascinating! That was their first thing?
Oh, I think it's amazing.
And so, our play is nearly ended and it's time for
the shocking denouement that is General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
What colour was George Washington's wig?
Is it not a wig?
Is the right answer. No! Oh...
APPLAUSE
It looks like a wig!
You're right. When he became president, so 1789,
wigs had been fashionable for a very long time,
but he didn't like to wear one,
so what he did was he did his hair as if he were wearing one.
As if he was wearing a wig?
Imagine if he'd become a High Court judge,
that would've taken ages. Yeah.
He just pulled it back into what's called a queue, so, you know,
a little ponytail there.
And then he would fluff out the sides to look sort of wig-shaped
and white powder, basically.
But it was a lot of work, the powdering of wigs and so on.
People wore a cape in order to keep the powder off their clothes,
they sometimes had a paper cone to cover their nose and eyes,
and the person responsible for the fact that men had to wear
these wigs for years and years and years was just one bald guy.
And that is Louis XIII.
He had premature balding and he didn't like it,
so he started wearing a wig
and then everybody who was upper-class and elite thought,
"Oh, well, I'll start wearing a wig as well." And it became a thing.
But by Washington's time, it was slightly falling out of fashion.
I was told that Frankie Howerd used to go in to make-up with his wig on,
and then you had to pretend, if you were putting a wig on for a sketch,
that you hadn't noticed that he was wearing a wig!
He had three different wigs at different stages of growth
to continue the idea that it was real hair. That it was growing.
Yeah. "Ooh, I've noticed, since lunchtime, you've got longer hair."
Washington's hair looked like a wig, but it wasn't.
Complete this Shakespearean phrase,
"I am sworn, brother, to a leash of drawers
"and can call them all by their Christian names
"as Tom, Dick and...?"
BUZZER: Cinderella!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Is Cinderella right?
I'm going to give you two points for timing. Yeah, thank you.
So, who is it? It's Tom, Dick and... Well, we know what it's not, then.
What is it?
Well, I'm not going to say because you'll give me the klaxon! Yeah!
That's not fair. Go on, you know you want to. This show is so cruel!
Yeah. Ed said... BUZZER: ..Fo Fum...
Harry.
APPLAUSE
Does anybody know the answer?
So this is Prince Hal speaking in Henry IV, Part 1.
Steve. Dave.
It's Francis. The answer is Francis.
This is a very curious combination of people.
Tom Allen, Dick Van Dyke and Pope Francis.
I like it very much, so...
Someone's dream dinner party.
Could be worse!
Tom, Dick and Harry doesn't come out until about 134 years later.
There's a song in 1734 called Farewell Tom, Dick and Harry,
"Farewell, Moll, Nell, and Sue".
There's an equivalent in French, "Monsieur, Madame Tout Le Monde,"
is the same. Mr and Mrs Everybody.
Is there a Dutch version of that?
It's just... Yeah, "poepen plus".
Won't translate it... "Shit where you like, mate." Yeah!
Cry, "God, for Frances, England and St George."
And that's the last question.
And so, after a truly heart-warming performance from our cast,
we come to the final curtain call
and, with it, the scores.
Booed off the stage, in last place,
minus 26, it's Ed!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Waiting out a storm of bad reviews with minus seven,
it's Cally!
Aw!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Watching tentatively from the wings with minus six,
it's Jack!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And receiving a standing ovation,
with a full three points, it's Alan! Me!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
WHISTLING
And that's all for this week's episode of QI.
My thanks to Cally, Ed, Jack and Alan
and, as a final theatrical flourish,
I leave you with this from that fine actor Glenda Jackson -
"The most important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry.
"If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.
"If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life."
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE