Hello, and welcome to QI, where it is T time,
with an all types of T theme.
Before we tee off, let's see what we've got in the pot.
A splash of milk, it's Henning Wehn.
A spoonful of sugar, it's Ahir Shah!
A natural sweetener, it's Rosie Jones.
And do me a lemon, it's Alan Davies.
Let's hear your T chimes. Henning goes...
# Would you care to sit with me
# For a cup of English tea? #
Ahir goes...
# A cup of tea-ee-ee-ee
# Have a cup of tea. #
Rosie goes...
Tea For Two Cha Cha by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra
And Alan goes...
# So Charlie and me had another cup of tea
# And then we went home. #
Oh, I like that one.
Right, question one. Let's begin with some T words.
Can you put any of these words into a sentence?
Oh. Oh.
Shall we start with twiffler? Is it a person who twiffs?
It's a thing, it's an item. It's a thing for doing something.
It's an object, yes. To someone?
Well...
..it depends how posh you are, is the thing, is the truth.
Not posh enough. OK.
So, Alan, have you never... Have you never encountered a twiffler?
Oh, dear boy!
It's a plate.
It's intermediate in size, between a dessert plate
and a dinner plate.
It's called a twiffler. Oh. That's a twiffler.
Straight away,
you've already lost me.
Because what is the point
in any size plate?
Do you just want a massive plate?
No! No plate!
I normally eat out the pan.
It's from the Dutch "twiffler" - to vacillate, to be unsure.
Let's try throttlebottom. In the English language, you can...
Any old word, you can say,
"We used to ride out and then do like a hand gesture
"that you're not happy with it."
And then it's perfectly reasonable thing to say, isn't it?
Like, "Oh, yeah, oh, load of twiffler, what he's going on about."
And, "Oh, he's a right old throttlebottom."
You usually get away with it.
Actually, you could just put bottom on the end of virtually anything.
Yeah. It's an inept but harmless public official.
I'd give my right arm for inept but harmless.
What about testacel, do we think? Testacel?
Probably something to do with the education system.
Oh, OK. In what way? I don't know.
There will be some quango government body that just introduces more tests
to make sure only the people from a good background
make it into the good university.
That's from a throttlebottom.
It's a type of earthworm-eating land slug, with a tiny, little shell
on its back. I think I know what a
twattle-basket is. A twattle-basket?
That's one of my favourites. What do you reckon?
Is it another word for
knickers?
Oh, I've got biscuit crumbs in my twattle-basket.
How's that happened again?
Do you not want M&S to have a twattle-basket section?
This is not just a twattle-basket.
I've got a turdoid in me twattle-basket.
Pull down me twattle-basket. I'm going to have a twankle!
It's a chatterbox, and it's a word from 1688.
It's the first time it's recorded, twattle-basket.
It's where we get twaddle from.
You know, when people say, "What a load of twaddle, silly talk."
It's from twattle-basket.
Tootsicum is a term of endearment for a child or a small woman's foot.
Turdoid...something that... Hang on. Hang on.
A child or a woman's foot? Yeah.
What about men with tiny feet?
Well, they're never as popular as men with big feet.
Turdoid... It just means that it resembles a thrush.
How disappointing. I know, right?
I thought it was some sort of AI poo.
A poo that follows instructions and gradually learns.
The turdoids are taking over!
I thought it was a tiny poo.
Yeah, a tiny poo. You know when you
go to the toilet?
Yep. And you prepare yourself
for a biggun'? Yeah.
When you look round and you go,
"Oh, no.
"It was only a turdoid."
That was barely worth taking my twattle-basket down.
To twankle is to play idly on a musical instrument.
Yeah, whatever.
There's a couple of words that I need to check with you, Henning.
These are said to be German words, OK?
So, torschlusspanik.
Well, you're not doing it full justice. Oh, sorry.
Yeah, torschlusspanik. Do you know what it means, torschlusspanik?
Yeah, torschlusspanik is if something's all the rage, and then
you feel like you have to get involved as well.
And then you might jump into something, which then quite
frequently turns out to your disadvantage.
Brexit. Yeah.
What about this one? Teppischfrescher. Carpet eater.
Teppischfrescher, yeah.
That's someone who works really, really hard
and constantly exerts themselves. So...
In the national football team, you really want 11 teppischfreschers.
Yeah. Who really go to the absolute limit and beyond.
I love that that's the German attitude to a carpet eater.
We would just think it was somebody... Yeah.
The idea is they've already exerted themselves,
so they are on the deck, and then they don't give in,
but they carry on. Carry on. Exactly.
Eating the carpet. Yeah.
Well, apparently, it was a nickname for Hitler. Did you know that?
I've got a quote about him. It says, "Whenever he goes on a rampage, he flings himself
"to the floor and chews the edges of the carpet."
Hence the teppischfrescher.
Well, that sounds to me like foreign propaganda, to be honest.
I don't want anything in common with Hitler.
But now I do.
Yeah. You are both teppischfreschers. Yeah.
I would say, don't worry if you feel as though you've got
something in common with Hitler. You know, I'm a vegetarian.
Alan's only got one ball.
Is that true, Alan?
Not the last time I checked. Oh, fine.
Paired up nicely, thanks. Yes.
The twattle-basket nicely full.
So, there are some T words that might come in handy one day.
All part of the T service.
And speaking of T services, let's talk teapots.
Can you tell me about an assassin's teapot, a cricketer's teapot,
a cubic teapot, or Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot?
Any of those teapots.
A cricketer's teapot sounds like something you might put
in your twattle-basket.
Do you know what it is? It's a sporting term, a cricketer's teapot.
It's a response...
..if you're not pleased with one of your team-mates.
What, your hands like this? That is exactly right.
You get two points, Henning.
The German beating the Indian to a cricket answer is really...
It's a gesture of annoyance.
So the guy with the one hand, he's actually doing the teapot.
The guy with the two hands,
that's the double teapot - or sugar bowl - which I prefer.
And look, the fellow in the background as well. Yeah.
Two sugar bowls and a teapot.
I have here an assassin's teapot.
I will show you. Let me bring it out. Right.
So, have a look here. I'm going to pour you, for example, I'm going to
pour you some tea. So, here it is.
There's lots of nice tea going out like that.
Now, what you want is milk.
And so...
Oh!
Honestly, that is the sexiest thing ever!
So, two different liquids from the same pot without them mixing.
Why might you want to do that? For the poison.
Yes. You get two points. Absolutely. To poison anybody.
Students use that, don't they?
They've got it half tea and half Pot Noodle.
Well, to find out how it works,
we have an old friend of the show and YouTube scientist.
Please welcome science communicator Steve Mould.
Tell us how it works.
So, I made this 2D version for a YouTube video, so you can see
what's going on inside. There's two chambers.
The bottom chamber leads to the spout, but it also leads
to this hole at the bottom of the handle here.
The top chamber leads to the spout as well, and it has a little
hole as well.
So, if I cover these two holes and try and pour, nothing comes out.
But if I open this hole and try and pour,
a green drink comes out.
But if I open the bottom hole, a pink drink comes out, mostly
onto the table.
And if I open both holes, then a sort of kind of chocolate milk,
maybe, comes out.
So, why, Steve, why does it work that way?
So, it's a bit like when you put your thumb over a sort of a straw
on your drink and you lift it up. Some of the drink comes
with the straw, and that's because of surface tension
and atmospheric pressure and things like that.
But intuitively, you know that the drink can't come
out of the straw unless air can get in to replace the drink
that was there. And the air can't get in at the top, because you're
covering it with your thumb, and the air can't get in at the bottom
because of the surface tension.
But if you open the hole at the top, then air can get in and the liquid
can get out. No way. Yes, way, Henning.
Witch! He's a witch!
The assassin's teapot is essentially a fancy, weirdly shaped pair
of straws that you can put your fingers over to make things happen.
And you could kill somebody. And you can kill somebody.
If you're going to do that,
use the same coloured liquid. Otherwise... They might spot them.
Yeah.
Steve, thank you so very much for coming in.
So, the whole idea is you want to assassinate someone, right?
Yeah. But if you're that close to them, why don't you just knife them?
Because this is being done with good manners.
Don't be rude. Not at a tea party. Yeah.
The celestial teapot. It was a Bertrand Russell thing.
Any...? Yes. You do know this?
So, Russell was talking about... He was saying, like, "If I said
"that somewhere in the asteroid belt, there's just a tiny, little
"teapot floating around and everything, you can't prove that I'm wrong."
Yeah. And so he's illustrating the idea that if somebody makes a claim
that can't be proved one way or another, like the existence
of God, it's up to the person who's making the claim to prove it.
That's the point.
A, there isn't a teapot in space.
B, there's no God.
OK, that's two things knocked out from that.
The cubic teapot I have here, and indeed, I saw them quite often
as a child.
Why might you want a cubic teapot? For keeping on the shelves.
Stack them? Yes, on a ship. They were designed for Cunard,
by a man called Robert Crawford Johnson in 1917.
And the idea is that in rough seas, they won't tip over.
And I saw this often as a child because we used to go
by the great Cunard ships, and there were teapots like this.
And on one occasion, the stabilisers in the boat broke during a hurricane
and the boat tipped on its side.
And I remember that the teapots were unbroken, but the chef
was very upset and he kept saying, "I can cook nothing!
"The kitchen is ruined.
"I can only do lobster steak, maybe a baked Alaska."
Now, from teapots to tea pets, why would you want this little man
at your tea party?
There he is. Well, as a gay woman,
I would not want that.
He's got a tiny, little twankle.
It's more like an outie.
Nothing wrong with that size. No. Sorry. No.
It's a Chinese pee-pee boy, OK?
It's from the Song Dynasty,
so we're talking about over 1,000 years ago. And he urinates
hot liquid when you heat him up.
Have a quick look at this.
See? See that?
So... I never do that in the shower!
If you measure the distance that he pees, you can work out
the temperature of the tea.
It's probably the earliest known thermometer.
I mean, this predates Galileo's thermoscope by about 500 years.
And it didn't have to be just a urinating boy.
You can get ceramics in the shapes of pigs or toads or elephants,
dragons or whatever, and they're known as tea pets.
Is the thing that comes out of him
the thing that you drink? Like, do you have to put him
there and, like, try and get exactly the right angle?
Just like... Ah! No.
Oh. Another gif!
Basically, the hotter the water,
the more the air expands and the stronger the stream.
So the... I've been saying it for years.
It is very clever.
But why is a boy drinking a bowl,
with his willy out?
I mean, it's very hard to know what was going through his head.
Water. Water, yeah, absolutely.
Now, let's have a quick look at stirring our tea, shall we?
Because I've had an etiquette lesson from Whittard,
the tea merchants. How would you stir your tea?
Very, very fast. With gusto. With gusto?
With a pen, because I haven't got time.
So, you mustn't do a circular motion. Oh! Oh!
Oh, no!
You've already fallen on the first hurdle here.
Do you go like this?
You go from six to 12...
Six to 12! Six to 12! Six to 12, like that.
Three times. Two to three times. Yeah.
And then what do you do with the teaspoon?
It has to go on the right-hand side.
I don't actually ever use a teaspoon.
Do you make tea in the pan as well? Yeah.
Because I figure, having cerebral palsy...
..as it goes from the table to my mouth,
I've stirred it.
Sandi, when you're saying like, "Oh, you have to do it that way."
Yeah. Is there, like, an actual reason for that, or is it
just that if you did it the wrong way in front
of a duchess, she'd faint?
You can do what you bloody like, is the truth of it.
You can drink it out of a saucepan. And I do. Yes, there we are.
The thing about good manners is that you must do the thing
that makes the maximum number of people in that moment feel
comfortable. I'll tell you a very good story about manners.
The King of Denmark was having a dinner party,
and an old friend of mine, Patrick Lichfield, a wonderful
photographer, was invited.
And in those days, you wore a shirt and then you had a sort of false
front like this, and cuffs, right? And he didn't have enough money for a shirt.
He just had the false front and the cuffs.
It was an unseasonably warm evening in Copenhagen.
And the king decided that everybody should take their jackets off.
And, um.. And Patrick was mortified because he didn't have a shirt on.
So he took his jacket off, and the king said, "Good idea.
"Shirts as well." And that...that is good manners.
Now, onto a different type of T.
What's the most fun you can have in a Model T Ford?
# Tea-ee-ee... #
A massive shag.
Why would you say that?!
Why would you lower the tone?!
Lowering the tone. Absolutely right.
Cheapening the whole brand of QI. I know.
They build it up. You turn up, ruin it in a day!
That's not your job - it's Alan's.
The most fun you can have in a Model T Ford?
It is a sports thing. Racing them.
Well, this is so mad. You know polo,
played on a horse with a mallet?
For a brief while, there was auto polo.
So it's exactly like the horse version, only with a Model T.
The very first game took place in an alfalfa field in Wichita,
in Kansas, in 1912, and 5,000 people came to watch.
And it was incredibly dangerous, especially if you can imagine
the referee was on foot. OK. The referee...
I'd actually like to complain about my big buzzer
earlier, because you asked what's the most fun
you can have in a Model T Ford.
And you're saying that nearly dying in an alfalfa field...
..is just better than a shag. Like, wha...
Well, apparently, it was good fun.
People stopped having sex to take part! Yeah.
It started as a publicity stunt for Ford, but it became the most
expensive sport in the world. In the 1914 season,
2,000 wheels were smashed off Model Fords.
But it still looks a lot more working class than the horse polo.
Yeah, weirdly, doesn't it? So this doesn't exist any more.
It died out in the 1930s.
But you can still have elephant polo, canoe polo, bicycle polo,
but just not Model T stuff any more.
Here's another famous Model T driver.
What use did she have
for bananas and elephants?
The car is a clue to her name.
It's Aloha Wanderwell, is her name.
She was actually born in Winnipeg as Idris Hall.
She's fabulous. She's from the 1920s.
She was known as the world's most travelled girl, and she travelled
around the world in a Model T, and she frequently broke down.
And as you'd imagine, there were no garages.
So she improvised solutions.
She used crushed banana skins to grease the differential,
and rendered elephant fat down to use as a lubricant.
She is incredible. Where was she getting elephant fat?
Well, she travelled all over the world.
So her travels began in 1922, when she was just 16.
She was a convent school girl.
She saw an ad in a French newspaper for a young woman with brains,
beauty and britches to join an expedition as a secretary
to Captain Walter Wanderwell.
That's the guy there standing in the uniform,
looking very pleased with himself. He was a Polish adventurer.
Why do they require beauty?
Because what he wanted to do was to travel all over the world,
take photographs and film his adventures, and have a beautiful
woman on his arm and thus make money.
Oh, so you need to like
adventure, but you've got
to be fit. Yeah.
Yes, exactly that.
And she was basically a marketing ploy. And they spent seven years
travelling the world together. They drove two modified Model Ts.
They went through 43 different countries.
She became an honorary colonel in the Siberian Red Army.
She drove across India, from the Nile to Cape Town, first woman
to drive around the world, and they did eventually marry
and had two children.
And actually, her grandson, Richard Diamond, helped us
with the research on this question. Ah! Ah!
And he is, of course, curiously quiet about where his granny
was getting all that elephant fat from. Yes.
At one point, their plane they were on went down in the jungle,
and Aloha had to stay in the Amazon while Walter went
in search of replacements.
And so she made films of the Bororo people of the Amazon,
and they are the earliest recorded footage of those people,
and still highly regarded by the Smithsonian Institute.
I just love that she thought, "I'm not just going to sit
"here amongst all these fabulous people. I'm going to document them."
And so you can imagine, the 1920s, that was quite a thing.
Here's another workplace dispute. Where the hell
have all the teaspoons gone?
So you didn't have a teaspoon. I didn't have a teaspoon.
No. So where the hell are they?
I think teaspoons are getting bigger.
I've noticed that recently teaspoons appear larger than they used to.
Wait. Alan, are you buying tablespoons?
These teaspoons are enormous!
In 2004, there was a group of epidemiologists in Melbourne,
and they decided to set up a study using numbered teaspoons, and they
distributed them through the institution's tea areas,
and they concluded that the half-life of a teaspoon was 81 days.
What that means is within 81 days, half the spoons had vanished.
OK? And overall, they worked out.
this would mean 18 million teaspoons had gone missing every year
in Melbourne alone.
Just to help you, Alan, that is the equivalent in weight
to four blue whales.
Wow.
What are people doing with their teaspoons?
Well, it's really interesting.
Teaspoons are six times more likely to disappear than forks.
I think that's because a fork is very uncomfortable in your back pocket.
I do think that's why. My grandmother, a few years ago, told
me about when she first came to this country and was working
in a factory, and cutlery kept going missing from the factory.
And she said, "Oh, and one of these women who I was working
"with said that, 'Oh, she would have stolen them because she's
"'Indian and they steal cutlery.'"
And I was just like, "Is that a racial stereotype
"about Indians, that we steal cutlery?"
Is that what people used to think about us?
The thing is that everybody does, is the truth of it.
So there's an economic theory called the tragedy of the commons. OK?
And it holds that when individuals share property, they tend to exploit
it more for themselves at the expense, basically,
of the group as a whole.
If each individual takes a teaspoon, they think it doesn't matter.
But if everybody does it, it is actually going to harm
the whole group.
So, Ahir, did your grandmother in the end, did she give
the spoons back or not?
Actually, I shouldn't say this on TV -
she'll kill me -
but I know where all the teaspoons are.
Oh! My mum.
Every restaurant we go in,
she steals a teaspoon.
Oh... I don't know why!
Where are they?
In her drawer!
And she remembers where they're all from.
I'll have a teaspoon, and she'll be like,
"Milan."
It got to a point where we'd go
in a nice cafe,
and we go, "Don't.
"Don't." And Mum goes...
"I won't."
And we'll come out
and she'll be like...
Sorry, Mum.
Sorry.
But you need to be stopped.
Did your...your mother work in a factory at the same time
as my grandmother?
Nobody knows where the teaspoons go, but we suspect
they're stirring up trouble.
Wahey!
Now, let's look at time and towers.
Who was that Italian scientist who dropped his balls off a leaning
tower to see how fast they fell?
Galileo.
It was mentioned in the G series gravity show, the story that Galileo
physically dropped cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa
to demonstrate that different weights fall at the same speed
is regarded as apocryphal.
It was probably a thought experiment.
What was not mentioned on that show is his contemporary, who's
a fascinating guy called Giovanni Battista Riccioli.
And he did drop balls off the Asinelli tower in Bologna
and timed them very precisely.
Isn't it curious that we know about Galileo, but we don't know
about this guy? Yeah.
He didn't have a song written about him.
That's what I'm saying.
I think that's... Also, why are Italian towers so bad?
That leaning thing is your basic foundation.
This one's not as bad. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is 5.5 degrees.
This one is just 1.3 degrees.
I know how he timed that. He timed the drop
to exactly when there was a tourist
standing underneath, trying to do one of them pictures.
And then... Well, you mentioned that he'd timed it exactly.
He did need to measure time accurately,
so he calibrated a pendulum to swing precisely once per second.
Now, here's the question.
How would you do that at a time when even the best watches
didn't have a minute hand?
You just say you've done it.
OK.
Yeah, we're back to the celestial teapot, aren't we? Yeah.
"That is a second, and you prove me wrong."
"Yeah, but I can't
"because we haven't got any instruments for that."
It's going to be something in the natural world...
Uh... ..he copied.
So, knowing that there are 86,400 seconds in 24 hours,
he first measured a day by reference to the movement
of the star Arcturus, OK, across the Meridian Line.
This is the bit I like.
He got a group of nine Jesuit priests to chant in time
with a pendulum, counting out exactly 86,400 swings, OK?
So the poor guys had to chant exactly -
Boom, boom, boom.
Why didn't he do it?
Yeah, he's more, like, conducting. Yeah.
I really like him. He's really interesting.
He used logic to conclude, I mean, incorrectly, that the earth
was the centre of the universe.
And the reason he thought that is he thought that if the earth
was travelling through the universe, then you would see birds
constantly fighting against the motion, like that.
And then, there was a German astronomer called Johannes Kepler,
and his work showed that the planets moved in elliptical orbits,
and he thought, "Well, how can that be?
"How can planets move in elliptical orbits
"and the Earth be the centre of the universe?"
And his explanation was that God had come up with a very complicated
bit of mathematics that made the planets appear to have
elliptical orbits in order to give human beings the satisfaction
of working that out.
I love that a scientist can be so clever,
and then one day come to something they can't explain,
then they go, "Oh...God."
Yeah, yeah.
OK, it's teatime. Everyone likes a takeaway.
But how could we improve delivery services in this country?
Tip them better.
We are looking at a delivery system in Mumbai for our influence here.
This would be the dabbawallas, or the tiffin wallahs, as they were.
The tiffin wallahs, yeah. I love that.
Can you tell us about them?
So, this is a system where sort of lunches will get made
and packed up in the home, in these sort of tins
which stack on top of one another,
and then a whole network of people who get on cycles
and will load these things up onto trains,
and it will go into offices and stuff, and then,
they'll collect them and bring the boxes back at the end of it.
And through, like, symbols on the top to tell them
where it's supposed to go,
there are very, very few mistakes, despite hundreds of thousands
of these orders happening constantly.
It is astonishing that they have an accuracy rate of 99.99%.
There are about four mistakes per million transactions.
Because there's a caste system in India, it meant people
were unlikely to want to have food prepared
from someone outside their caste or even outside their home.
And so, in the 1880s, some workers decided,
"Well, why not have somebody pick up food from my home and bring it?"
And then, there was a guy called Mahadeo Havaji Bachche,
in 1890, saw an opportunity, and he hired 100 men
and started this thing.
And today, there's roughly 5,000 dabbawallas.
It's amazing. It's a phenomenal system.
It sounds great,
sure...
..but how do they fit my 18-inch pizza...
There used to be a similarly impressive delivery system in Tokyo,
but it doesn't exist any more - the demae.
And they could carry up to 100 soba noodle soups...
No way! Yeah. Oh, wow.
Isn't that amazing?
And how does he get it down?
Well, very carefully, I would imagine.
But they were a common sight in the 1940s and 1950s
that were banned, unfortunately, in 1961, because more and more cars
were coming into the city, and they were colliding
with the bicycles, so they don't exist any more.
But sometimes, you get races now, soba-delivery bicycle races,
and then you'll see the demae out again, and people proving
they have the skills of the old...
That is amazing. Isn't that fantastic? Yeah.
Your rider is approaching the restaurant.
Now, what's the most attractive thing a man can have printed
on his T-shirt?
"Trump 2024."
It's a study by an experimental psychologist
at Nottingham Trent University called Dr Andrew Dunn.
And if you put a large T on a white T-shirt,
it makes men 12% more attractive to heterosexual women.
If you put it upside down, it makes them 12% less attractive.
Apparently, the right-way-up T accentuates the broadness
of the shoulders and the slimness of the waist,
whereas the other way round, the person doesn't look as nice.
Now you mention it, all the people
who have got...like, all the seafarers who have got
big anchors tattooed, they must be livid.
Can the panel tell me anything else interesting about T-shirts?
They used to be underwear, and they've become outerwear.
Yes, quite right. We're talking about the 1890s.
They were called bachelor undershirts and it was for men
who couldn't sew buttons.
So, before that, you would have had some sort of long-john thing,
and you would have had buttons on.
It became outerwear in the 1950s, so you get films with Marlon Brando,
in Streetcar Named Desire, James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.
My favourite - Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's...
I mean, that's a sexy thing, isn't it, don't you think,
in a T-shit?
He doesn't need a T on his top, does he?
No.
And there's a curious thing - for big sporting events,
things like the Super Bowl, the clothing manufacturers,
in advance, they print thousands of T-shirts in the winning strip.
And then, of course, half of them are no good, right?
Because somebody loses.
And so, they give them to charities,
they ship them out to poorer countries, and so on.
In fact, we have an "Arsenal Champions League Winners 2006."
Oh.
That's not funny, Sandi. Sorry.
Sorry, if you don't know the story,
Barcelona came from behind to beat Arsenal 2-1.
It's the only football fact I know.
A record for the most T-shirts worn at once?
What do you reckon? How many?
68,000.
260, held by a man in Ontario called Ted Hastings.
Didn't want to pay extra baggage? Have you all got a T-shit? Yeah.
OK, I'm just going to show you a little thing.
So, this is a trick for folding a T-shirt, OK?
So, if you want to fold a T-shirt and you haven't got a lot of time,
all you do...
..is that. What? Yeah... Want to try?
So... Show us again. So, go here and here, and bring it down here...
No, hang on. Start again.
I'm here, I'm here...
..and then what? Here and here.
Yeah. And then bring it down to the bottom, pick it up...
..shake and fold.
There, there, now bring...
..bring your left hand down to the bottom.
No, no. Oh. Underneath. Underneath.
No, no. Ah!
OK. Let's do this. We'll get this. We'll get this. Right.
Put your right hand here. OK. Put your left hand here. Yeah.
Bring your left hand underneath, all the way to here. Yeah.
And pick up at the bottom like that. Oh, yeah.
Now bring it out. Shake, shake.
And... Yeah!
Yeah. You're damn right.
I mean, I wouldn't bother.
Now it's time to cast a tealight on a pot of general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Teeing off with a question about golf.
Which Scottish city is the home of golf?
St Andrews.
No!
Is it Glasgow?
We're going to go round Scotland. Yeah.
Edinburgh. Is correct.
The first formal rules were written in 1744
by The Honourable Company Of Edinburgh Golfers,
and then they had the first official competition there.
St Andrew's Royal, an ancient golf club which you mentioned,
was founded about ten years later, 1754.
Golf has been played in the town since the 12th century.
But we were talking about the original rules.
It's a curious thing about St Andrew's
is that Prince Andrew was the captain
of the St Andrew's Royal and Ancient. Ooh.
And he was captain because he was the son of the Queen.
But she, because she was a woman, was not allowed to join.
And women were not allowed to join until... Anybody have any idea?
Tuesday.
It wasn't till 2015... Really?
..that women were first allowed to join. My God.
But it's a very old game.
It had its roots in a Roman game called paganica,
a Chinese game called Chui Wan, meaning "stickball" -
there it is, being played in China around 1100 -
and a Dutch game called kolven from the 13th century.
But basically... I love that. It just... Do you not think
it looks like a page out of the QI History Colouring Book?
It's a sort of...
They look like they've been told "You've got to duck down
"or you won't fit in the frame." Yes.
We've said it before, but it does bear repeating.
It's one of my favourite things about golf.
During World War II, Richmond Golf Club had
the local rule, "A player whose stroke is affected
"by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb or shell
"or by machine-gun fire, may play another ball
"from the same place..."
Still exists. "..but there's a penalty of one stroke."
We can thank the University of St Andrews
for the great doctor Edward Jenner,
but what Discovery got him into the Royal Society?
What did he discover? Edward Jenner?
He's...he's thought of in relation to the smallpox vaccine,
but he wasn't the first person to come up with it.
And in fact... So, variolation to deal with smallpox
had been happening sort of in the Far East
and through to West Africa.
So, this was where people would essentially, like, take a bit
of dried smallpox wound and essentially just
do a fat line of smallpox.
And if you didn't die, you were golden.
Quite right. We can, of course, thank Jenner for the...
He helped develop the vaccine for smallpox.
His first major work, which I really like, was to explain
how baby cuckoos remove rival eggs from the nest, OK?
So, you know that cuckoos lay their eggs
in another bird's nest.
And it was long thought that it was the adult cuckoos
that got rid of those babies that were not their babies.
But in fact, he noticed that it was the chicks
that were murdering their rivals.
They were born with a small depression in the back, OK?
It's the perfect size for the eggs of the birds that they parasitised,
and they use that dent, the baby birds, to push the egg
and sometimes a rival chick out of the nest. Wow.
It's basically a deformity, and it goes away after 12 days.
It's there specifically for them to be able to push a rival's egg
out of the nest.
What's interesting, it was very controversial,
so anti-vaxxers of the time used it to say he was a quack -
because he'd come up with this stupid thing
about cuckoos, he clearly didn't know anything. Ah.
And therefore, it was a good way to have a go at him as a scientist.
Interesting. But there was a famous illustrator called Jemima Blackburn,
and she made a drawing of a cuckoo pushing a bird from its nest
with this depression, and the case was absolutely closed.
And Jemima Blackburn, she's also a fascinating woman -
huge influence on Beatrix Potter and almost certainly the person
that Jemima Puddle-Duck is named after.
Anyway, moving on, what's inside these bubbles?
Air.
Not air. Any more thoughts.
Water?
Well, if it's not air, that's the only other thing that's in there!
Yeah. The big bubbles in boiling water contain water vapour, OK?
They contain water vapour, not air.
What happens is, when you first boil water, the tiny bubbles
are indeed made of air,
that were previously trapped in the liquid.
But the big ones in this, what's called a rolling boil,
are the result of the water accumulating enough energy to turn
from liquid into gas.
Just to clarify - so it is water, just a different state of matter.
Yes. So I'm going to give you a point. Yay! There you go.
"Duck Shit Aroma" is a type of oolong tea,
which comes from the species camellia sinensis.
Can you name any other type of tea plant?
Duck Shit Aroma, that's a colour on the Farrow & Ball chart.
I think... Now, I might be wrong here, which doesn't normally happen,
but on this occasion, I might be wrong.
Isn't there only one kind of tea plant?
You are absolutely right, and you get five points.
Oh.
There's only one species of tea plant, the camellia sinensis.
The difference between the various styles are down to oxidation,
infused flavours, that kind of things.
Of course, not all tea bushes are of the same quality.
So, Duck Shit Aroma, which is a thing,
is harvested from a single bush and its cuttings
in the Guangdong province,
and it sells for 40 times the price of normal tea.
Oh. And do the ducks benefit from that?
No. Apparently, it's just the farmer called it that
to stop people nicking it.
It's good, isn't it? Yeah.
It actually... I don't know if you know this.
It's best grown in cold and wet conditions.
I think people think of it as tropical. Yorkshire.
Yorkshire?
Grown in the tropics, but only at high altitude,
so it needs to be cold and it needs to be wet.
Which brings us to the scores.
Tonight's winner with a "tea-mendous" 11 points
is Alan!
What?
Hot on his heels with ten points,
it's Henning!
Then, with three whole points,
Ahir!
And left stewing in last place with -22...
..it's Rosie!
Our thanks to Rosie, Ahir, Henning and Alan,
and I leave you with this,
from the eighth-century Chinese sage of tea, Lu Yu,
"The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot
"of Tatar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock
"unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,
"gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,
"and to be wet and soft
"like a fine earth, newly swept by rain."
I think we can all agree with that.
And I'll have six sugars with mine, thank you very much.
Thank you. Goodnight.