- APPLAUSE - Ohh!
Bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir.
Bonsoir, mesdames et messieurs! Et bienvenue a QI.
Or Koo-Eee, as we should properly call it.
Tonight we fare forth into our favourite foreign fiefdom,
land of fromage, froideur and flageolet, la belle France.
Avec moi, ce soir, je suis delighted to welcome le grand legume, Phill Jupitus!
Et le bourgeois gentilhomme, Hugh Dennis!
- Merci. - La femme fatale, Jo Brand!
And Babar the Elephant.
CHEERING
But before we laissez les bons temps rouler, les champignons musicales, s'il vous plait. Phill goes...
PLAYS "La Marseillaise"
- Hugo va... - Hugo?
- D'accord. - # Boum-boum! Boum-boum!
# Boum-boum-boum brrrrrrr boum! #
- Et Jo va... - # Non, rien de rien... #
I have plenty!
# Non, je ne regrette rien... #
- And Alan goes... - # Je t'aime... #
Colour me very touched, Alan.
- Can I take my onions off now? - You can. - They are slightly restricting mon tete. - Yeah.
Of course. Ma tete - feminine. Minus five.
LAUGHTER
- I said "mon" because I am masculine. - It doesn't quite work that way.
- The word vagina is masculine. You're likely to be female if you have one. - You'd say, "mon vagina"?
- As it were, yes. - It sounds like a mountain somewhere, doesn't it?
- Funny looking mountain. - I was climbing Mon Vagina.
Many have. And many have fallen off.
So, bon, allons-y, mes copains.
A ce moment-ci, je vous donne des bonus points
si vous pouvez repondre en francais.
- OK? - # Boum-boum! #
Oui.
Very good!
Already a bonus point for Hugh.
# Rien de rien... #
Non.
Plus tard, nous verrons. Phill, comment ca va?
Er...
LAUGHTER
That is fluent.
Jo, voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
Er, pas demi! Not half!
Excellent!
Quatre points!
Alan, donne-moi un mot, s'il vous plait,
un mot pour un mammifere marin
qui ne peut avaler aucun plus grand qu'un pamplemousse?
LAUGHTER
What's a pamplemousse?
Ask the audience. What is a pamplemousse?
It's French porn.
- It's like grapefruit. - Like grapefruit. Do I?
For six years you have yearned for the answer to a question to be...
- The blue whale. - That is the answer!
Oh!
I've asked you to name a marine mammal that couldn't swallow anything bigger than a grapefruit.
- Right. - And that is a blue whale. You could have had such pleasure and joy. Never mind.
Here are some Frenchmen. What are they looking for in the swamp?
Where they've hidden their cameras, I think.
- Does the tide come in really, really quickly there? - The sea is not far.
We're in Gascony. In an area of France called Les Landes, south of Bordeaux.
- Je pense qu'ils cherchent mouchoirs. - They're looking- for a handkerchief? Yes.
Not because I think they are, but I don't know any other French words.
- Oddly enough, the first three letters are correct. - Handjob?
- No, no. You said "mouchoirs". And it's mou... - Moutons. - Moutons is right!
Sheep. They are shepherds.
- They are shepherds and... - No, they are not!
Are all the sheep on stilts as well?
Is there a French programme called One Man And His Stilts?
If you see the one on the left, he's got two stilts on his legs,
plus a stick to make himself a tripod to stand still.
They can go really fast around this 4,000-square-mile area. They see their sheep better.
And they negotiate this boggy terrain brilliantly. They carried on doing this up to the 20th century.
- When the pole got stuck right up their arse. - They were delighted when somebody invented the Land Rover.
I don't know if any French shepherds might be watching - get dogs.
- Might save you a bit of time overall. - Dogs on stilts. - Oh, don't get me started!
- Tiny dogs, like Corgis, on... - Massive stilts! - ..18-foot stilts!
- Towering over bigger dogs. - Yeah! - At last!
There was a famous shepherd who walked to Paris
and climbed the Eiffel Tower in his stilts, then walked to Moscow in 58 days in his stilts.
- What a remarkable man(!) - Wasn't he? - In 58 days?! - 58 days to Moscow.
That's 1,830 of your puny English miles.
Now you can go to Les Landes and see them dancing in their stilts.
It's a tourist attraction. They used stilts to herd their huge flocks
in country that was too rough and boggy to have tracks.
- What did French country people do in the winter? - WOMAN CACKLES
Nurse!
She's out of bed again!
- # Rien de rien... # - Jo?
I'd like to quote a man that I met in the Aran Islands just off Galway.
I said, "What do you do in winter?" And he went, "Fishing and BLEEP!"
So is that possible?
You'd have to find a lady who was wearing stilts.
- That is a major problem. - Or a lady in a first-floor window.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Wow. Are you tempted?
"Here they come again, the bastard shepherds!"
It's extraordinary. Until recently, a lot of French country people
did something not extraordinary for animals, but it is for humans.
- Hibernate. - Yes.
Not true hibernation. Their body temperature didn't drop and so on,
but they essentially kind of slept. They'd wake up once or twice, have a biscuit, go back to sleep.
Did they have to go in a cardboard box with a lot of straw?
- A lot of shared bodily warmth. - You got them out in March, had a look. "Not ready yet."
- They didn't hibernate as such - they were students? - Excellent.
- Basically, that's true. They all cram together... - "Lorraine Kelly's on! Quick! Get up!"
That is a really shit life, isn't it? You spend six months of the year on stilts and the rest asleep.
- It is tough! - As long as the other six months you're watching Lorraine Kelly, pas de problem!
French peasants used to hibernate in rural France until well into the 19th century.
What were 80% of French people unable to do in 1880?
- Count. Add up. - No, we're in the wrong discipline, as it were. - Write.
They couldn't write their own name or read it,
- but if they could read or write, 80% of them didn't read in... - French. - Exactly.
That's odd.
120-odd years ago, 80% of French people did not speak French. It was not the majority language of France.
- All kinds of regional dialects? - Not just dialects, but languages.
- Basque? - In Les Landes, they spoke sheep.
Yes. A stilted version of it.
Baa? Meh!
Very good.
- They spoke Occitan, Breton... - Occitane's what you put on spots.
- There is something called that! - It used to be a language in an acne-ridden area of France.
Franco-Provencal, Flemish, Basque - they were some of the major languages.
Completely unrelated to French. This is a map of the linguistic areas of France here.
There were 50, at least, dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects. Le bon francais, proper French,
- was only spoken by 20%. - Where did they speak Flemish?- Up near the Belgian border.
- What's the difference between a Belgian kiss and a French kiss? - Go- on. A Belgian kiss has more phlegm.
Hey! very good.
In 1880, most French people couldn't speak French.
According to a census in that year, only about 1 in 5 residents were fluent in French.
French, famously, has only a quarter as many words as English
so they quite often have to use ours, but sometimes they get it wrong and lost in translation.
Traduisez, s'il vous plait. What means "un people"?
- Look at that typical English person! - We in no way conform to stereotypes here on QI.
Here is an accountant and, for some reason, Arthur Daley.
That's not a Frenchman! "I've got two fingers for you 'ere!
"Look at that BLEEP hat over there! BLEEP!"
- He isn't French! - The white polo neck's French. - He's dropped his fag and hasn't even noticed.
- Do you know... - "I smell burneeng!"
- I wouldn't be surprised if he had a cigarette... - An invisible one. - ..but it's been photoshopped out
- as the British public aren't allowed to see cigarettes now. - The only advert I would do is for fags.
"They're bloody lovely and you might not get cancer." I mean, you know.
That's a very fine slogan.
It's a gamble.
Listen to sweary Bob. "She's BLEEP right! They photoshopped this BLEEP out! Oi!
"Hattie over there ain't BLEEP smoking! We do. It's BLEEP lovely!"
He's not French, Stephen, please.
- OK... - Let's at least get someone with onions in.
We're no closer to "les people".
Oh, the in crowd.
- The hip, now, happening... - Something even worse than that.
- What is our obsession? - Celebrities. - Celebrities are "les people"!
- Pathetic. - Oh, merde. - What is "un brushing"?
- Un brushing? - Un brushing.
- Is it a dental thing? - It's not dental,- but does involve the headal area.
- Cut your hair? - Someone would do it to you in a salon. - Lick your hair! - LAUGHTER
- Somebody licks your hair in a salon? - I pay for it! - Fair enough.
"I'll give you 40 quid to lick it."
Ohhhh! Ohhhh!
"It".
For 50 quid we'll get a cow to come in and lick it.
- I'm not talking about the hair on my head! - Oh, now, please! Enough already.
- My legs. - Blow dry. - Blow dry? - Un brushing is a blow dry.
- And what is un relooking? - A blowjob. - No.
Is it a double take?
- An excellent example of the breed, I may say. - A repeat.
Not a repeat. Another thing that was very popular.
- Oh! A clip show! - No, it's much more logical.
- It's weird. It's... - A reinterpretation of something?
- It's a makeover. - Oh, right. OK.
A makeover is a relooking.
- Is it? - Un relooking is a makeover.
- Un relooking extreme! - Yeah.
- How does the Academie Francaise allow this? - It doesn't.
They would not accept these, but they are used all the time.
Usage is the final arbiter, surely.
Finally, vaselin-ay?
- To grease yourself up, Stephen. - Oh, dear. No.
Vaselin-ay? That's like the two Spanish firemen. Hose A and Hose B.
- A Spanish joke. - Very good. - To butter someone up. - Yes!
- That's exactly right. - Yes! - To flatter, butter someone up.
Excellent.
Now what are the symptoms of Paris Syndrome?
- It exists. Paris Syndrome. - LAUGHTER
- It had to be explained to me who that was. - Is it auditory- hallucinations in the third person,
knight's move thinking and an inability to crochet?
No.
Very specific, and I like that. You have to picture the Japanese,
who are taught that Paris is the centre of sophistication, elegance, artistry,
cosmopolitan elan and savoir faire. And they arrive in Paris and almost everything the French do
is something that Japanese people find very difficult.
Almost everything in the French language is to them offensive, plus they have to walk miles with jetlag
and they suffer from Paris Syndrome. An average of 12 people a year have to be expensively repatriated
to Japan. There is a 24-hour helpline in the Japanese Embassy in Paris
for Japanese people who are traumatised by the disappointment, horror, offence to their sensibility
- of Paris. - Extraordinary. - Isn't that fabulous? - It is.
- I think it reflects well on the Japanese. - I definitely had that when I went there. Miserable bastard.
If you are traumatised by Paris, you'll be traumatised by the French medical system.
- Whatever ailment you have, they give you a suppository. - You're quite right.
- It's their answer for everything. - Yeah. - So Paris Syndrome is an extreme form of culture shock.
Now Napoleon once said an army marches on its stomach.
Why would you want a Frenchman by your side in a fight?
- I'll give you five points if you know who that is. - Andre the Giant.
- It is. You're absolutely right. A well-known wrestler. - Yeah. - And starred in an excellent film...
- The Princess Bride. - You're right. - Trivia points, yes, but not real points. - Excellent.
Which is his normal body colour?
He's going to a party at Judith Chalmers' house in one and in the other he's going round the Smurfs'.
We use him as an example of a French soldier. Why is a French soldier a good person by your side?
- Are they good at fighting? - That's the point, yes.
- Despite their reputation for being cowards... - Always losing.
..they didn't. It seems, according to Niall Ferguson,
of 125 major European wars fought since 1495, they fought in 50,
more than Austria, which has 47, and England, 43.
And they achieved an impressive average. Out of a total of 168 battles fought since 387 BC,
- they've won 109, lost 49 and drawn 10. - Stephen?
- That's pretty good. - Put the glasses back on. - Yes.
Now people flicking over to the channel may think they are seeing a Benny Hill retrospective...
"Hello, viewers!"
- There's a touch of that. - If only Henry McGee was on tonight!
"We are speaking with Mr Fred Scuttle..."
"Yes, we are, sir! I have been hosting quizzes...
"for some 20 years.
"My father used to build concrete barriers to stop cars." "Bollards?" "It's true, sir!"
We miss him dearly. The world needs Benny.
What did Groundskeeper Willie famously call them?
- Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. - Yes.
Despite that reputation...
There was a time when, if you googled "French military victories", Google returned,
"Did you mean French military defeats?"
- Extremely unkind. - They've had a bad recent record.
- You're going from 387 BC. - Obviously, Napoleon ultimately lost. - A lot of victories on the way,
but then we got the cane out of the cupboard and gave him a damn good thrashing.
APPLAUSE
Now, les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus. Nous sommes arrives at le point in the show
where the TGV of savoir-faire hits the brick mur of je ne sais quoi
avec la ronde qui s'appelle General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers.
What did the Romans like to wear?
- The Romans. - Togas.
- HOOTER - Er, sandals.
- Sandals? - They did wear sandals. Although they did wear togas, they did not like wearing them.
- What? - They were huge and unwieldy. - "I'm sick of this thing!"
Augustus had to pass a law making Romans wear them in the forum.
But they were huge things.
They were vast and very hard to put on. You had to keep your left arm up so it didn't slip off you.
- That is a toga. That semi-circle... - What?!- That mandarin slice is a toga
- next to a human being. A great semi-circle of material. - It's a man windsurfing.
- We had a toga party at my house in 1982. - And I'm sure you used much more convenient togas.
- Sheets. - Exactly. - Duvet covers with a hole in!
My friend Danny had a pink sheet with Pontin's Holidays on it!
- How stylish! - He did not get off with anybody.
I laughed all night.
Did they have different tog ratings of toga?
Big old Romans...
The toga pulla was a dark toga and a toga picta was patterned.
And the toga candida. Candida is Latin for white.
- The toga candida was worn by those entering an election, from which we get... - Candidate.
- Candidate. - Points! - Definitely a point or two for that.
Why do racing cyclists shave their legs?
Well, I hesitate to say for aerodynamic purposes...
- HOOTER - You hesitated, but still said it.
- That's what they do in Breaking Away. - You've done the Tour de France. - I've done a leg of it.
I believed it was for the reason Alan said. I don't want the buzzer. Is it a sweat thing?
Not quite that. There's an odd series of reasons. There's no aerodynamic advantage.
And they know that because they have scientists.
Swimmers have a 2% advantage by shaving in water.
The main reason given is it's easier to clean out a wound, sticking plasters stay on better,
- they have their calves massaged an enormous amount... - And look far better in stockings.
Yes, you're right. Personal aesthetic considerations. It's part of le look.
Austrian cyclist Rene Haselbacher had his shorts ripped off in the 2003 Tour
and it emerged that he shaved the whole area. Rather a Brazilian.
But still designer stubble. How odd is that?
- Shaved from neck to toe. - It's a shame it doesn't make any difference.
It was my excuse for going five hours slower than the guy who won.
- Which stage did you do? - There's an open stage every year, an amateur stage.
- You're allowed to join in? - Two weeks before they do. 8,000 of us.
And by the end there were 4,000 of us left.
I started in 2,400th place and finished in 3,400th place.
- Oh, no! - 1,000 people overtook you?! - I was passed... by a thousand people!
And it took me nine hours to catch up the bloke with one leg.
- Ohhh! - LAUGHTER
I'm full of admiration for you, Hugh. Absolutely wonderful.
Why do Spaniards lisp when they speak?
- Because the King lisped, and everyone copied him. - HOOTER
There is no evidence whatsoever for this. If it were true, they'd lisp all the time.
They'd say Ethpagna, but they don't, except in very small areas, but that's considered bumpkinish.
- It's just a story that's got around and isn't true. - Do you know that story about Arnold Schwarzenegger?
When they made Terminator and did a German version, he said, "Can I dub it back into German
"because I speak German?" And they said, "No." Because he's Austrian and sounds like a farmer.
- COUNTRY ACCENT: - Now where's John Connor?
- Oi've come from the future. - "Hastar la vistar, baby!"
- What a thought. - "Oi want your jacket."
It has nothing to do with sucking up to the King.
It isn't technically a lisp, but a feature of pronunciation,
no different from the curious Northern British pronunciation of bath and grass.
- Talking of kings, what did they call the man who won the Battle of Hastings? - Harold.
- No, he lost, didn't he? - Yes.
- William... - The Conqueror.
- HOOTER - No.
- We call him William the Conqueror. What did they call him? - William Le Conqueror.
The fact is the word William didn't exist at all as a name at the time of the conquest.
He was Guillaume le Batard, William the Bastard. That's how he was known by the French.
- It wasn't rude to call him that. - The bloke on the left appears to be riding a llama.
And he's got a parrot. A random pirate has arrived in the middle!
"I've arrived on a busy day here in Hastings. Who's doing the embroidery? Get my good side!"
As you might see in the top left corner,
- the word William is developing. It's become Wilgelm. - No, it's Wil 6 Elm.
Normanno. I like that.
Is that like medieval text speak? They never put the whole thing in.
"We've invaded Britain. lol" LAUGHTER
O...M...G! Very good.
So... They have indeed. That's basically the point.
All the Saxon names disappear within 50 years of the invasion.
Earwigs and Ethelreds and those names. They became Hugo and Robert and Richard and William.
William - one in every seven men in England was called William within 50 years of the conquest.
But sacre bleu and zut alors, it is zat time, ladies and gentlemen.
Garcon, l'addition, s'il vous plait. I have the scores in front of me.
Here is the damage. Well, well, well, well, well. We have an outright winner.
- With 15 clear points, it's Hugh Dennis! - Alors!
In second place, with cinq, it's Jo Brand!
Not bad for a girl.
In third place, with minus deux, it's Phill Jupitus!
But with a magnifique, minus trente-neuf - minus 39 - Alan Davies!
Well, well, well.
It only remains for me to wish you au revoir, a bientot, adieu.
And to say thank you to Jo, Hugh, Phill and Alan.
I leave you with the perfect French-baiting headline from the Daily Telegraph of 1929.
"Great storm in Channel. Continent isolated." Salut, maintenant. Merci.
Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd - 2009
Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk