APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Good evening, good evening!
Good evening and welcome to QI,
where tonight we are obsessed with films and fame.
Parading their false modesty
down the red carpet tonight are the very famous David Mitchell.
APPLAUSE
The fantastically glamorous John Sessions.
APPLAUSE
And, Hell's teeth! It's only Emma Thompson!
APPLAUSE
And who is that bloke getting out of the car behind her?
No, not him, the one behind him. You know, the curly hair?
The one off the telly. Who is he?
ALL: It's Alan Davies!
So it is!
APPLAUSE
And tonight...
Tonight our buzzers have come over all cinematic. David goes...
PEARL AND DEAN JINGLE
Emma goes...
INDIANA JONES THEME MUSIC
John goes...
# There's no business like showbusiness!
# Like no business I know...! #
And Alan goes...
Th-th-th-that's all, folks!
And so it's lights, camera and action as we roll out the first question.
Now, you're all very good at what you do,
but what is this picture trying to tell you?
# Show business! #
Oh! Johnny got there first. Yes?
It is a painting by Man Ray of Ingres and it is known
as the Violin d'Ingres, because it's a kind of a pun.
But a Violin d'Ingres is actually more than a hobby,
because the famous French painter Ingres was a brilliant violinist,
so it is like a very, very hotly pursued hobby, a Violin d'Ingres.
Well, what you've done is saved us a lot of time
by being completely, 100% right in every particular! That's very good!
Yeah. It's a photograph. Of course, it's a photograph of a real model,
Kiki of Montparnasse, who was a favourite model
of a lot of the Surrealist artists.
And this is a painting by Ingres,
the neo-classicist French painter who died in...
1864, I think. Are you going to be like this all the way through?
This is a complicated point we have to get across.
The French have a phrase, which is Ingres violin,
which means somebody who does something they are not famous for,
but does it almost as well, i.e.
they have a whole other side, a whole other string to their bow.
And in the case of Ingres, it was that he was a talented violinist,
as well as a great painter.
And so to a question about a man who definitely, definitely
has one more string to his bow.
How would you like to have Cedric Gibbons nude on your mantelpiece?
It's not Stanley Gibbons the philatelist? No!
He's a Hollywood figure, remarkable Hollywood figure, Cedric Gibbons.
He was the premier art director/production designer
of Hollywood, for MGM.
And in 1928 he was asked to design something. What might that have been?
Gone With The Wind? No. The Oscar?
Thank you! The Oscar!
And not only did he design it, he won 11 of them.
He was nominated for 36 and won 11.
Almost all Oscars, as you know, were won by Walt Disney who won how many?
109. 26!
And Cedric Gibbons won 11, and all the rest went to Emma Thompson.
Oh, look! There she is!
A lovely winning smile. Do you remember which one that was?
That's Sense And Sensibility.
Or Howard's End? Howard's Way. I nearly said Howard's Way!
That interesting boat script I wrote!
But you were nominated for three others.
Yes. Do you remember what they were?
Umm... Remains Of The Day.
Remains Of The Day. In The Name Of The Father.
Best Supporting Actress.
And you were also nominated for Sense And Sensibility. Oh, yes!
OK, I had forgotten that. I can remember all the GCSEs I did.
I would definitely remember every Oscar nomination!
I think when the rest of my brain had melted
and I had to be fed through a tube, those five names of films would still come out.
The best film one year was Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.
Do you know what... They altered the Oscar to some extent. They made him a midget?
They made him one big one and seven little ones.
It must have been a grim year because that is a boring cartoon.
I made an Oscar. I actually made a genuine Oscar.
I went to the factory in Chicago where they were made.
Is it a mould, like a jelly mould?
There is a mould, but it is pure metal. Britannium.
Or do you have to hue it over weeks? You give it a damn good buffing.
If you have to hue it, and I'm not being rude, but if I was winning
an Oscar this year, I'd say, can I have one of the ones
made by the professionals rather than the one Stephen Fry ballsed up?!
I was well supervised. To be honest, I did a bit of buffing. On the bum area, I bet!
And then dipping...
You bad. You very bad man.
A good buttock flossing!
And then dipping him in nickel and then in that gold.
So, you didn't really make one. No, I didn't make him. It's like the Queen pulling a pint.
Basically, that's more or less what it was like.
So, who was the Best Actor in your year you were Best Actress? Al Pacino.
And your other Oscar, of course, was for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Yes. For Sense And Sensibility. I should have won that Oscar, as a matter of fact.
Actually, yes, you should! Yeah. You rescued it. Yeah.
Yes. I had one of those steam powered computers and the screen
had done something to the script.
It had transmogrified into hieroglyphs, into just....
Not words, not anything that I could recognise, just funny shapes.
I got the computer bloke round and he couldn't work it out.
So, finally, I took the computer out of the wall, still in my dressing gown, got in a taxi, went
with the computer round to Stephen's house, set it down and said, please!
Find my script!
And I did it like that, because I'm an actress.
If I'm upset I make sure people know it!
And he said, OK, but it took him seven hours! Hmm, I did that.
APPLAUSE
Advantages of being a nerd. Probably what really happened was
he couldn't do it, and he thought, "Shit, I can't let on."
"I'll quickly write one!" "I'll just write it.
"It will be much quicker if I just adapt the novel."
And I looked at it and I'd forgotten, obviously, because my brain doesn't hold
any information for any length of time at all.
Just looked at it and thought, that's my script and I handed it in.
I'll send the Oscar round tomorrow.
Now, time to test your hearing.
What is this a representation of?
DRIPPING AND SQUELCHING
THWUMP!
It's Roy Chubby Brown eating a hobnob.
It's Gladstone being...
Eating an ice cream and then being beamed up by the Martians.
It's giving birth. Yes!
Brilliant! Brilliant! That's exactly what it is. It is a lamb being born.
God!
In fact, this is a sound effect.
We can actually see the sound being made.
DRIPPING AND SQUELCHING
THWUMP!
LAUGHTER
Has he listened to lambs being born and then done that, or has he said,
no one knows what a lamb being born sounds like, I'll do any old crap.
I'll drop a towel! She is oddly named Lizzie Calf, oddly enough!
And she used to do the sound effects for the Archers, amongst other things.
She's now our sound wizard,
but there is a name to this science of sound effects, as used in movies.
What sound recordists need is clean dialogue and all the sound effects,
footsteps and other noises, guns being cocked and the rustle of clothing,
the lighting of a cigarette, almost all that is done afterwards, by someone called a foley artist.
And here is an example of some of the early foley artists making their noises.
All kinds of different things are used.
If you close your eyes,
let the audience see how it is being made, you see if...
Ah! Ah! Alan!
When I say close your eyes.
When I open them, you won't all have gone, will you?
You close your eyes, we'll let the audience and everyone at home see
some more sounds being made. See if you can see what these are.
SCRAPE! THUD! CLUNK!
So, what was that? A guillotine!
A guillotine, all right.
Very good. How was it made?
With a guillotine and a person!
And a bucket. No, they wanted the sound of cabbages being chopped up,
and so they had to kill a guy.
Oh! Very good! It was indeed.
I had my eyes shut long after the sound had finished.
I am so obedient. It was indeed a cabbage.
You slide a knife along a scaffolding pole and then chop
a cabbage and drop it into the bucket. It's pretty good.
We've got another one. Close your eyes.
CLIP, CLOP, CLIP, CLOP
What was that? Somebody pretending to be a horse!
That sounds exactly like some coconut shells.
Oh! You're so cynical!
That's a two-legged horse wearing some awkward shoes.
EMMA: It's a horse clapping.
Don't you think it sounds like a horse? EMMA: It does!
You've seen it many times in films without knowing it was coconut.
If you see the visual thing,
then it works. Close your eyes. What you think this sound is?
CRACKLING It's fire. Exactly.
They use this for fire ripping through straw. This is a good one.
This is weird because you see it and think no, bollocks.
It's a plain piece of paper coming out of an envelope.
Taking off a shirt? No. This is what they genuinely used at Elstree.
The electric doors in Star Wars!
Paper being taken out of an envelope. As simple as that.
You watch Star Wars now and you think, oh yes, so it is.
We thank our sound expert and apologise if she's in tears having been mocked by David.
I am perfectly willing to accept with the pictures there
you buy the whole effect.
We invite you to use your own sound effects for your YouTube films.
I'm sure you'll come up with all kinds of exciting things...
for vomit and sexual activities and so on.
Now, speaking of soundtracks, where have you heard this before?
MAN SCREAMS
In the green room about half an hour ago. LAUGHTER
Tom And Jerry.
You might have heard it in Tom and Jerry, actually.
You might well. It's a sound effect scream that has been...
library-stocked and has been used repeatedly...
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, I'm gonna have to give you points, this is right.
It's been used, it's estimated, in about 140 movies,
including every Indiana Jones movie,
every Star Wars movie, it's been used in... ALAN: The Likely Lads.
LAUGHTER
Madagascar, Planet Of The Apes,
The Lord Of The Rings - only in two of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, oddly enough...
Imagine haw disappointed they were. "We'll have to go elsewhere for the third film.".
Reservoir Dogs...
Batman Returns, Poltergeist... Did they use it as a joke? "We've gotta use that scream,"?
You're kind of right. It was used as a stock scream,
and a guy called Ben Burtt, who was a young, up-and-coming sound-effects editor,
heard it in lots of films, and he is now a very successful sound editor, and he and his friends
whenever they sound edit a film, to put this scream in somewhere.
Hence, it is in all kinds of movies. On YouTube,
someone has compiled 23 different films with the scream,
showing the scream in it. We can't show it, cos we'd have to pay all kinds of money,
but I wish we could. Anyway, it's believed to be a man called Sheb Wooley singing,
and it starts on the note of C - there's Sheb Wooley -
it descends through four semitones to G sharp, and they used it in a film called Distant Drums
in 1951. It's called the Wilhelm scream, for some reason,
and you can hear it again. C, semitones, G sharp.
WILHELM SCREAM PLAYS
It's quite a warm scream, isn't it? It is. Yeah.
You're not really traumatised by it. No.
It's not as if you're being raped by a warthog or anything. LAUGHTER
The most ubiquitous line of film dialogue - do you know what that was?
Apparently, this line - in a survey of 150 American feature films
from '38 to '74, showed it was used at least once in 84% of Hollywood productions.
More than once in 17%...
INDIANA JONES THEME PLAYS Is it...
"Why are you telling me this?"? That's a very good one.
That is one of the really annoying cliches, isn't it? Like...
The other one that really annoys me is, "Don't you die on me!"
LAUGHTER
It almost never means actually ON the person, does it? Yeah!
"I got a bad feeling about this..."! Oh...!
Shut up! "Is that an order, Sir?", Well, since you asked me, Lieutenant, yes, it is."
The one that, oh, I just really want to punch is, you know,
when they're about to go on an operation and they go, "Showtime!"... Oh...! Oh, dear. No.
"This is what we trained for!" "Gentlemen, we have a situation here." Or the...
The other one that really drives me mad is, "I'm getting too old for this shit."! Christ!
Christ!
Apparently, the line is, "Let's get outta here,". Oh, yeah. Anyway...
That, what you heard, was the Wilhelm scream, the most ubiquitous sound effect in film history.
Speaking of ubiquitous sounds, what's the good thing about an English accent in Hollywood?
You are always a villain. That's basically it.
Or you're gay. Often a gay villain!
Or people think you are Australian so you get bar work!
A high octane version of the English villain,
is to get an English villain to play a German villain.
As in the Die Hard films.
Die Hard has some of my favourite dialogue of our great friend Alan Rickman.
When he says, after he's shot the man in the head,
"Mr Takagi, I will count to three, there will not be a four."
And then he goes downstairs and says,
"Mr Takagi won't be joining us for the rest of his life."
LAUGHTER
Very good! That was brilliant.
APPLAUSE
There you see him, on the left there in Die Hard, and on the right?
Robin Hood. Giving us his Sherriff of Nottingham. The extraordinary thing about Robin Hood,
the most famous Robin Hood movies, I suppose, are the Errol Flynn one and the Kevin Costner one,
both basically played him as an American... Kevin Costner made no bones about it! Completely American.
Just come straight from the airport. Yeah.
In a Virgin limo service, putting his tights on in the back...!
To be honest, I can't think it would be a better film
if he was struggling with a kind of Dick Van Dyke, Cockney accent...
I just wonder, genuinely, is it because we're too good-natured to moan about it?
We're the last country left who won't scream, "Racism!". Exactly.
We don't shout, "It's so racist to make us the villain. Or is it that, the villains
are kind of... have to be fiendishly clever,
and they suspect us of something Machiavellian, deep down somewhere?
Always. And tyrannical, cos we are the country they fought, originally,
to create their democracy. And we're essentially unwholesome. Yes.
Really. Unwholesome. And we have bad teeth. That's the thing they really can't forgive us for.
The British Book Of Teeth in The Simpsons. Alan's got great teeth,
but he does this thing where he's able to talk without actually
letting his lips touch his teeth.
So...
Alan is so good at playing villains, as you all know,
but he HATES being good at playing villains.
He wants to play the lovely guy in the white shirt... He did, in Sense And Sensibility.
As Colonel Brandon, absolutely. But he was at a party once,
and kids are fantastic, they always say the thing they're not meant to say,
and this kid said to him, "Alan?"
SINISTER, AS ALAN RICKMAN: "Yes?"
"Why d'you always play villains?" Whoo! You know, the last thing you're meant to say to him!
And Alan went, "I don't play villains...
"I play very interesting people."
I'm going to give you a few English actors,
Can you to tell me the villains they have played in movies?
Peter Cushing. JOHN'S BUZZER RINGS OUT
I don't know. Well, don't buzz!
Let other people have a chance. Yes?
Dracula. No, I don't think he ever played Dracula.
Not in a Hollywood movie, certainly.
Is it Tarkin? Very good. The Grand Moff Tarkin.
Steven Berkoff?
Beverly Hills Cop. Very good.
And Rambo, in fact, if you remember. Christopher Lee?
Hollywood movies. Scaramanga, The Man With The Golden Gun.
He did. That's kind of made in Britain too, but actually...
He was a bad wizard in the Hobbit films.
He was an awfully naughty wizard! A turncoat wizard.
He was very angry not to be cast in the third one. Furious.
He hardly catches a break.
He was also in Star Wars, apparently.
Was Christopher Plummer British?
Canadian, actually.
I had a friend who worked with Christopher Plummer in a film and he arrived at the airport.
The runner was there to say, "Go straight to the bar of the hotel.
"Chris will be there, don't mention The Sound Of Music."
"OK, OK, OK."
So he stays around, into the bar, Christopher Plummer comes in
and half an hour later he was playing Edelweiss on the piano. Weird.
What did he see in the Baroness in the first place, she was vile!
LAUGHTER
She was a bit stiff and grumpy and not very good with children.
Do think it would have been better if they'd made the Baroness obviously wonderful and gorgeous?
Why's he shagging the staff?!
She could have been Mary Poppins and then they could have had a Maria/Mary face-off.
Like Alien Versus Predator.
"I can get hat stands out of carpetbags!"
"I can make a whole outfit out of curtains in two hours for six people."
"And snap my fingers and make drawers open and close."
"I can defeat the Nazis." And then...
That's my trump card played.
The thing that's never mentioned in that film
is that he's an old naval captain,
presumably from the Austro-Hungarian navy,
now living in a country with no coastline.
He'd be quite pissed off turning up for work, first day.
Rowing round the lake!
Just signed the Treaty Of Versailles, very exciting, what next?
What's funny about The Sound Of Music is, it's the sort of picture Hitler would have liked,
if only the people hadn't been running from the Nazis.
Yeah, it probably would have appealed to his sentimental... Yeah.
It's got that little Austrian dance. I did a film with Julie Andrews,
and it happened to be around the time there was the, erm...
the total eclipse. It was supposed to be in Cornwall, but we were filming in the Isle Of Man,
and we went on to a hillside to watch the total eclipse, and half the population of the Isle Of Man,
while this great cosmic miracle was going on, was staring at Julie Andrews, going...
The sun had gone out, "We can't see her now,"!
Just our luck! The one day Julie Andrews turns up, and there's an eclipse!
I watched it on TV, it wasn't happening where I was. It was on Sky News,
And this is the thing, they really do know to the second when it's gonna happen,
and they still went there an hour early to film,
and, er, and then they showed a replay of it,
and the anchorman said, "And there's our old friend, the Moon, very much...
"getting in the way".
Anyway, the point is if you are an English actor,
there is a good living to be made being beaten up by American action stars.
Now, speaking of stiff upper lips, what does it tell you about an Englishman
if he spells his name with a double-F at the front?
He's from the 15th century, I'd have thought.
Er...might be...
Is it...? OK, this is a bit of a reach...
Once upon a time, there was a posh man with a son who'd developed a stammer...
LAUGHTER ..and his name was Foulkes,
and, erm, in order to prevent himself being embarrassed by his poor son who had a stammer,
he put two Fs in front of it so that everyone who had to introduce him had to go, "F-F-Foulkes,"
as well, as his son. He'd have to conceal that fact from his son,
otherwise his son would try and pronounce both Fs... Oh, no!
So it would be, "F-F-F-F-F-F..."
No, the fact is, people think it's rather posh, but it's not.
It's not a double-F as in music? Fortissimo! You're supposed to say the word very loudly.
No, it's a mistake that was made in the 18th century,
by people looking at their family records, and the way a capital F was hand-written in records,
it looked like two small Fs, and there are people to this day who have the two small Fs.
It's just a mistranscription. They never put it in capital letters?
They never do, no. Two small Fs, that's how it's officially spelt.
So if your ancestors spelt their names with a double-F,
they were Welsh or semi-literate thickos, I'm afraid.
So, now, fame, at last. What on Earth is going on here, please?
WOMAN SINGS, ACCOMPANIED BY PIANO Nothing to see.
# ..Showbusiness... #
Florence Foster Jenkins. Very good, it is. Tell us about her. Florence Foster Jenkins was
a very rich heiress. Yeah.
She's actually a man. LAUGHTER
She does seem... Her breasts have tumbled rather far south, haven't they?
Um... JOHN: She used to rent out Carnegie Hall
to do recitations... In fact, I think Maureen Lipman did a show about her.
She might well have done. She just wanted to be an opera singer?
Rich enough to rent out... It became a cult, she could have sold out Carnegie Hall ten times over.
Cole Porter was so enamoured of her that he wrote a song for her.
Did she not notice the whole audience pissing themselves...?
LAUGHTER Yes, but she rose magnificently above it.
She did say, "Some say that I couldn't sing, but no-one can say that I DIDN'T sing,".
She was left a great deal of money when her father died. She sang at Carnegie Hall at the age of 76.
Sold out weeks in advance. 2,000 were turned away at the door.
And it was 20 apiece, so she actually made a lot of money. That's about 400 a ticket in modern money.
If you paid to see that show... Yeah.
..you'd think... At the first bit, you'd laugh, think she's terrible,
but the joke doesn't really go anywhere. No. By the end,
you'd just be so bored, listening to this terrible singer. It was visually quite interesting.
She did her own costumes and would change them regularly,
telling the audience not to go away while she changed! LAUGHTER
I used to do that to him, actually.
Make sure that he couldn't get out when I was changing. You did. Yeah.
Cos it was very good fun. She used to show me her "breests".
Very embarrassing. This fantastic effect I used to have on him,
I could make... I could do it now, but I'm not going to...
AH! I could make him scream. No, don't. Not just... Not like that scream that we just heard,
but a real, actual, sort of, scream of terror,
and fright, um, just by appearing nude at the top of his stairs.
LAUGHTER And doing what I like to do,
which was locking all the doors at the bottom, so that when he tried to get out,
as I came down the stairs, going, "Yes! Baby...!
"They're all yours!", he couldn't get away. And by the end of which,
he was in a state of such extreme panic, and it's great to make someone very clever,
um, fall apart like that. I... LAUGHTER
Well, publicity is what it's all about, there's no sense
hiding a light under a bushel, which prompts me to ask,
how did the ancient Greeks cover up the naughty bits on their statues?
They didn't, did they?
That's the point, they didn't.
Then the Victorians chipped them all off.
Earlier than the Victorians. In the 16th century, it started happening.
Chipped them off? Chipped the willies off.
I collect Greek willies! Yup.
In some antique shop somewhere, there will be a huge barrel of Greek willies.
Help yourself, I'm giving them free!
Spent £40, you get a willy!
It's 3,000 years old.
There is a room in the Vatican which contains the chipped off bits.
There is a proud Greek statue.
Is he about to bash himself on the cock?!
ARGH!
Make yourself attractive, it shows you are really ready.
It was about 1860 they started putting those pervy-looking cabbage leaves round them.
It was really the Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe.
They had these people like Calvin and Savonarola who was a fierce proponent of all things pure.
Suddenly, having been a wild place, everything became incredibly... It was like 1950s America.
You see those there... That reminds me of Ruskin marrying Effie Gray.
He, the great Victorian art critic, you know, who married this very young girl,
and on the wedding night, um, was...
Couldn't...have anything to do with her, cos she...he didn't know
that naked women had... had pubic hair, had hair.
He thought they all looked... Like that. ..like that.
He didn't shag her for seven years, and finally she thought, "Hang on, I'm not being shagged here,"
and they divorced. But, in fact, the sad thing about that story is that it's not true.
It's a lovely... It first appeared in the 1960s, this idea
that Ruskin didn't know that women had pubes, and was shocked by the idea of it and vomited, you know...
It's true he didn't shag her, for seven years. It seems to be so. The ironic thing now, Stephen, is,
women generally DON'T have pubes anymore. Well, indeed.
This is right. I kind of have a slightly fond memory of pubes, from the '80s.
LAUGHTER It's something called a Peruvian, isn't it? Something like that.
The excuse, apparently, is that pants are too small. You can't get your Yorkshire Terrier in the pants.
Big pants, nice bush. What's wrong with that?
LAUGHTER Seems fine to me.
Do you wax yourself down there, darling? D'you want to see...?
NO, I DON'T WANT TO SEE!! No, I do not...!
APPLAUSE
And you know I'd do it. I know you would!
She would, she'd envelop me in her skirt! Lock the doors! Lock the doors!
Oh, ye are faint of heart, leave immediately.
Not you.
What's the thing...? This is the new thing...
Now, are they - is this true - bleaching bumholes?
Oh, no. Is that right? Yes, bleaching them, in LA.
David? I don't know why I'm looking at you...! LAUGHTER
That happens. It's true? Yup. Yup. What...What...? To what end?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE I...
To a... To a pinker, cleaner end. Hm.
I dunno... The porn stars do. The porn stars bleach their...
Bum'oles. ..rusty Sherriff's badge.
LAUGHTER
Wow!
At least, for a porn star, it's tax-deductible, I suppose. Yeah. OK, erm...
Anyway, the ancient Greeks went commando.
It was only in the later Middle Ages and Victorian times that fig leaves were placed on statues.
What's so upsetting about this film?
THEME FROM "JAWS" PLAYS
MUSIC BUILDS TO CRESCENDO AND STOPS ABRUPTLY
Do you know what's going on here?
There are beetles.
Is it a disease?
It's not a disease.
It was 1903 and it was a very popular science-ish film,
but it outraged the cheese producers of the world.
It's bacillus in cheese.
It's cheese mites.
It is little creatures that exist in cheese.
So that's what cinema was like in 1903?
Five hours of footage of cheese mites.
Sounds pretty good. Amongst other things.
I don't know what it did to the sales of cheese. Possibly it wouldn't have helped them.
But it increased the sales of cheap microscopes.
People became fascinated about the little things that go on.
They could see their own little swimming...things...
I remember a documentary that your father Eric Thompson narrated
called something like The Life That Lives In Man. Yes.
It was all about the tiny creatures that live...
like billions and billions of things in our beds all the time even if you
do turn your mattress every month.
I don't think turning a mattress is going to kill the things...
ALL TALK AT ONCE
The Titanic of the insect world is coming.
And in your eyelashes... We all have little creatures living in our eyelashes.
There's one of those adverts that says there are more germs on your
chopping board than on your loo seat.
To which the answer is, clearly that's fine, then.
We are not all dying or having diarrhoea...
We are starting to die because we're cleaning them up too much.
They are saying in the advert the very thing we are selling you is unnecessary.
Exactly! Exactly...
That's exactly... Exactly right, cos it's fine.
The fact is there was a big excitement about this, except from cheese producers
who tried to suppress the film because it showed that in cheese, which is an organic thing,
it contains these special mites which live there and do you no harm at all.
Cheese is a good thing.
Who remembers Charlton Heston?
How was Michelangelo lying when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
INDIANA JONES THEME Yes?
Didn't he not do it? He didn't do it. He lied about it.
That is the sense of lying we wanted. He didn't lie down to do it,
as he did in the Charlton Heston movie The Agony And The Ecstasy.
Did he jump up and do a bit at a time?
Yeah, he stood on the scaffolding and did it that way and cricked his neck.
Vasari writes about it in his biography.
There is apparently some extraordinary little secret joke
that Michelangelo painted in the fabric behind God.
There is God with a bit of sort of swaggy stuff behind him.
That swaggy stuff, according to at least four professors,
who are neuroscientists, neurosurgeons from four universities...
They are absolutely convinced
that that particular shape, do you know what it might be?
JOHN: Female part?
No, it's not a female part.
For once in QI's life, we're not in the downstairs lady area.
Is it a brain? Brain!
It's the transfer section of the sagittal area of the brain.
What it argues is that he was present at some dissections that were very popular,
but completely illegal
in Italy at this time.
And the suggestion is that his idea of God, one of God's greatest miracles was the human brain
which he had seen sliced through and so he has got, literally,
if you take away the brain from that superimposition...
Seems to be a bit of brain. There's a museum in Oregon, which is dedicated to
replications of the brain made of fabrics. It's an odd kind of museum.
We can actually show you a perfect brain with brain stem
made by some American knitting person. There you are. LAUGHTER
Yeah. Including brain stem, which is impressive.
Are you sure that's just not the most unsuccessful attempt at a cardigan ever?
LAUGHTER
It's something of a disaster. "No, it's meant to. It's a brain." Some mad granny.
It actually, genuinely, has a po-faced warning on the website showing it,
saying it's a perfect reproduction of the brain using applique, embroidery, knitting
and crochet. "While our artists make every effort to ensure accuracy
"we can't accept responsibility for the consequences of using fabric brain art
"as a guide for functional magnetic resonance imaging."
LAUGHTER
Or indeed, home-based surgery.
Either you've got a tumour or they've dropped a stitch. LAUGHTER
Michelangelo may have been lying about his illegal dissecting activities.
Why he'd risk painting a huge piece of incriminating evidence
on the ceiling of the Pope's chapel is anybody's guess.
Which brings us blinking out of the darkened theatre and into the blinding light of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
What happens to a hedgehog if you remove its fleas?
PEARL AND DEAN JINGLE PLAYS David? It dies.
KLAXON BLARES
David! Davidy-wavedy-woo!
No, there is a myth to this effect, but it's not true at all.
It's perfectly possible if you covered it with anti-dog flea powder it would die from the powder,
but not from the lack of fleas.
They're very happy with their fleas. It doesn't kill them, with or without.
What mustn't you feed hedgehogs?
Bread and milk. Exactly. People do it and it gives them diarrhoea and they dry out.
You shouldn't really feed bread and milk to any mammal, including humans.
There is a Radio 4 show... Oh, come off it!
You shouldn't feed humans bread and milk. Not really. What do you mean,
"Not really?" It's absolutely, demonstrably fine.
No, it's not very good for you. It's fine!
We've been drinking milk and eating bread for ages, why is it suddenly a massive problem?!
"We're actually supposed to live till we're 250
"but we've been eating all this poisonous bread and milk all the time and can barely limp past 98."
LAUGHTER It's just ridiculous!
Of course we're supposed to eat bread and milk. Not JUST bread and milk.
Poor Alan, don't bully him. Poor Alan.
You shake hands and be friends. Sorry, Alan.
Despite what you may have heard on Radio 4's programme... Oh, yes!
..presented by David Mitchell. What's your programme called? The Unbelievable Truth.
One of the unbelievable truths turns out to, unbelievably, to be not true. You claimed...
People give you this shit and you read it out.
Brilliant! I've no idea what you mean(!)
LAUGHTER
Anyway, we are very happy to put you right on your otherwise excellent programme.
Hedgehogs don't mind if they have fleas or not,
although they wouldn't be happy if you poisoned them with flea powder. Shakespeare mentions football twice.
How often does he mention the cricket? He doesn't mention cricket cos it didn't exist then.
KLAXON BLARES Oh...
Cricket certainly existed in the 16th century. Oh, right.
In 1550, there's a mention of cricket and that's before... Are you sure that's not the small insect?
Three times he mentions the insect, you're right.
But not the game. He never mentions the game, to be honest.
To be honest, that "Never" I said was right... LAUGHTER
You asserted on the 26th May, Mr Mitchell
that the game of cricket didn't exist in Shakespeare's time. It did
although he doesn't mention it. So is this whole round...? LAUGHTER
Cos radio shows don't have the same budget, you know...?
If you want to kill off the medium then that's fine, but it brings
a lot of people a lot of pleasure.
Shakespeare mentions the cricket three times though he was, of course,
referring to the insect. But the game did exist in his day
despite what you may have heard on The Unbelievable Truth,
the EXCELLENT Radio 4 programme... It is excellent.
..which I'd urge you to listen to. What hair do head lice prefer?
INDIANA JONES THEME PLAYS Yes?
Clean hair.
Clean hair. You say "clean hair"? KLAXON BLARES
No, you see, people thought it was dirty hair.
This was repudiated and replaced by another fallacy
that it was clean hair. Any hair will do to a louse, they don't mind.
As long as there's an adequate blood supply, there's no preference for clean or dirty.
The hair of a living person. You have to be alive and have hair. Eurgh.
What are nits? I thought they were the same thing, a slang term for them.
No, nits are the egg cases and they stay on and you can't get rid of them.
They stay on sometimes for weeks after the actual louse has escaped.
Now, how does a flu jab work?
It gives you...a minor version of the illness.
KLAXON BLARES Ooh, no!
That's the point. It doesn't give you a mild case of flu.
Oddly enough it's not that kind of a vaccine.
Most people think it is and they often think they've been given flu
by the jab because it might happen that they get the jab around the time flu's arriving in the country,
and it's perfectly possible to get real flu and you assume
it's the jab that's given it to you. It's an inert, inactive virus
so you have no flu. It doesn't give you flu. But even though it's inert,
your body's... It's still enough to get your antibodies prepared for it
but only for that particular strain. Anyway,
what's the most depressing day of the week?
In research?
Oh... Yes? Monday...? KLAXON BLARES
Ooh! I knew it! Oh, I'm sorry, no. Sort of obvious. Oddly enough,
if you ask people which they think is the most depressing day of the week,
they will say Monday, but if you then ask even the same people,
over a long period of time and a lot of them, on each separate day,
are they more depressed today or yesterday, it overwhelmingly is...? Tuesday.
No. Oddly enough, Wednesday.
You could argue it's because... In fact, there's a French joke,
why should you never arrange a meeting with an Englishman on a Wednesday?
Because you'll screw up TWO weekends of his.
Cos they think of us as very lazy...
Do they?! Do they?! Yes, how dare they(!)
You know, I know, obviously, we're always keen to slag each other off as countries,
but... Lazy's odd. Lazy? I don't think we are,
and we don't think THEY'RE lazy. No, not particularly. They're, sort of, cowardly,
idiotic and... LAUGHTER
..and riddled with, er... Cheese-eating. Diseases. ..venereal diseases.
LAUGHTER And finally,
bringing us back to film, which popular film, made by the British multinational Innovia Films Ltd,
made more than £360 million this year, and made about as much they year before as well?
Oh... A film? Yup. A FILM film? Made by the Innovia film company.
I've seen it. In fact, you've seen it.
it's not, like, some teach-the-Chinese-English thing? No, no, no. No. Here it is.
Cellophane! Cellophane. AUDIENCE: Ah!
It's British film. That is...
the most successful ever British film? Yeah.
Yeah. Apart from Nanny McPhee, obviously.
I... I have got a question... Yeah?
You know the word, "luvvie"?
Yeah... What do you all feel about it?
I don't get as upset as some actors do. Some say,
"We do a bloody hard job, at work." Yeah.
"We're serious people. We.. You know, it's a coalface, doing a play."
LAUGHTER Mm. "How dare they call us luvvies!" I mean, that's a bit overdone.
But it is a bit tedious when the Daily Mails says, "Luvvie couple..." X, Y and Z, or something.
Well, you get it as well... Do you know what the first citation of it is in the OED? No.
It's you. LAUGHTER, STEPHEN GASPS
No! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I can't believe... Did I invent the word? Yeah, it was you, at some time in the 1980s.
Did I? I'm ashamed... LAUGHTER
On that bombshell, ladies and gentlemen,
the time has come to tot up the box office takings for this evening and see...
Oh, my word, it's absolutely fascinating!
This week's blockbuster, this week's winner, ladies and gentlemen,
with plus 4 points
is Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
How about that?
Oh!
Can you believe it?
In second place, a modest success on the art-house circuit, John Sessions with 1!
APPLAUSE
Garnering a few points at a festival you've never heard of,
but a creditable first appearance, minus 10,
Emma Thompson! Minus 10?!
APPLAUSE
And, er...I'm afraid, going straight to video with minus 15,
David Mitchell!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And so it's goodnight from Emma, John, David, Alan and me.
And huge thanks to our mothers and agents and everybody who believed in us and made it possible.
You're all wonderful. You're all family.
And I leave you with this account of a successful family publicity stunt.
The great American showman, PT Barnum, created an exhibit entitled The Happy Family -
which consisted of a cage containing a lion, a tiger, a panther
and a baby lamb - which was extremely successful.
And one day he was asked about his plans
for The Happy Family which had toured everywhere.
"The display will become a permanent feature," he said,
"if the supply of lambs holds out."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE
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