APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Goo-oo-oo-ood evening!
And welcome to tonight's QI.
Tonight we have a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of things beginning with H.
Joining me tonight are the humongous Phill Jupitus...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
The hyperbolic Ross Noble...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
The hygienic Jack Dee...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And ho-hum, it's Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
So, any time you want to say "Hi", give me a bell. And Jack goes...
CHURCH BELL TOLLS
And Phill goes...
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
And Ross goes...
CLOSE HARMONY: Ring-a-ding, ring-a-ding, ring-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding
Ring-a-ding-a-ding-a ring-ring-ring ring-a-ding!
Thank you. And Alan goes...
"GENERAL IGNORANCE" KLAXON
LAUGHTER
I'm sorry. I'm so, so not sorry.
So. Let's give this pudding a stir, gentlemen.
Why do bankers like long-haired men...
ROSS: Ooh, hello.
Is there any need for that? Really.
I mean, come on. And the scariest thing is, I'm wearing the same shirt.
You are!
That is appalling, isn't it?
I've got to hand it to you, Ross, you've got lovely legs.
- ALAN: - Oh, I've only just noticed you...
LAUGHTER
The full question is why do bankers like long-haired men and short-skirted women?
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
Bi-curious.
LAUGHTER
Is it like when you're in the bank, and you sort of like, lean forward
and the hair just brushes off all the little receipt stubs, like that?
LAUGHTER
And the bankers are sat there going, "Brilliant. I don't have to go around and clean that up."
It's like a sort of a reverse hoover.
Right, OK. Fair enough.
What do financiers look for? When are they happiest?
When they're rolling in money!
Yes, and when do they earn more money?
In the summer?
- LAUGHTER - No...
- In the sixties. - LAUGHTER
Yes!
What's the word for a period of prosperity?
- Boom. - As opposed to a bust or a recession.
Now, it just so happens that throughout the 20th century, the length of
women's skirts in fashion was exactly correlated
to the rise and fall of the stock market.
Skirts got shorter and shorter, right up to the Wall Street Crash,
the flapper skirts, and then instantly skirt lengths got longer again during the Depression.
And the long hair is... Correspondingly, long hair means a boom?
Yes, it's a negative correlation.
The further down the hair, the further UP the market.
Anyway, it seems that according to hemline theory, girls' hemlines
go up as the market goes up, and so when a banker looks at a girl's legs his mind is strictly on business.
Now, what starts with H and means that you'll always be the bridesmaid and never the bride?
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
- Phill Jupitus. - Hepatitis C.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Oh...!
Oddly enough, you're surprisingly close...
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
Herpes.
LAUGHTER
You got the right first and last letter.
- Halitosis? - Halitosis is the right answer. - Is it right?
I could have got the laugh in the first place.
LAUGHTER
Halitosis was made up. It was made up by...
- Listerine. - By the company that made Listerine, Lambert Pharmacal.
And they had this product that they named after Joseph Lister,
the father of antiseptic surgery, who made everybody wash everything.
And they used it first of all as an antiseptic, and then -
without changing the formula - it was for washing floors,
and then it was a cure for gonorrhoea...
and then they thought, "We'll call it a mouthwash."
The same thing!
Was there a point where that...was combined?
It was like a gonorrhoea thing - "Actually, my mouth's quite...
"Oh, me halitosis has gone, then." LAUGHTER
They invented essentially this new product.
Mouthwash had never existed before, there'd never been a need for it.
And so they had to invent a problem for it to solve.
And they started this campaign,
saying, you know, "Hotel clerks say that
"one in three guests who checks in have halitosis,"
and dentists saying, "83% of patients have halitosis,"
and people began to get very nervous about their breath.
Of course, people have dog breath, let's be honest.
And dogs, I dare say, have people breath.
- How can you tell someone? - It's so difficult.
That was part of... That was one of their campaigns, actually.
That's why packets of mints were invented.
If someone's offering me a mint, that's definitely...
LAUGHTER
It's true. These were the kind of things they used as advertising slogans.
They went from a tiny company to a vast one.
By inventing a name for something that was quite...
Kind of calling it a disease, and people thought,
"I've got halitosis, and this is a medical product that will deal with it."
And no-one before... People had probably eaten things to sweeten their breath before,
but er...
I had a picture taken once with a koala...
LAUGHTER
You could just leave that there.
LAUGHTER
It was eating eucalyptus leaves, like they do, which are poisonous,
but they've got a 48-mile intestine or something and they can digest it.
But its breath was amazing.
- It's sweet. It's lovely, isn't it? - It was pure eucalyptus.
And even their fur smells lovely. It is gorgeous.
It was really amazing. It looked a bit...
LAUGHTER
"You're great, koala...!"
Is that the excuse you used when you started putting the moves on it?
LAUGHTER
"Koala started it. It was cuddling me.
"Next thing you know - beautiful breath, I thought I'd have a go."
None of that happened!
You SAY it didn't happen.
So if you had a really bad throat, could you get a koala bear and put it a big bowl and a tea towel...
LAUGHTER
That would be a way to cure it.
You wouldn't want your wife coming in.
No, no. "Sorry, darling, he just frothed in my mouth."
- LAUGHTER - Oh!
Oh, Lord!
AUSSIE ACCENT: "Why not buy one of my outback inhalers?
"They're cuddly and gorgeous."
Just suckin' on a koala.
- "Here he comes now, the little..." - HE INHALES
Australian asthmatics! Going, "Oh, dear... Getting the koala out."
LAUGHTER
That would have been brilliant if in Star Wars when they're taking off Vader's helmet
he just had a koala in there.
HE INHALES LIKE DARTH VADER "Oh, that's better."
LAUGHTER
So - halitosis was invented by an advertising agency to shift mouthwash.
Now, why would a hoplophobe be particularly nervous
of a Sturmgewehr vierundvierzig with a Krummlauf modification?
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
Cos he was French.
LAUGHTER
Yeah, kind of... It is of course a German something -
Sturmgewehr 44.
Is it a firearm?
- It is a firearm. - A machine gun?
- It's not a machine gun. - No?
- Funnily enough...I have one. - MAN: Assault rifle?
Oh, assault rifle. Somebody speaks German there. Sturmgewehr.
That was slightly scary, wasn't it?
LAUGHTER
- You know you said that out loud?! - "It's an assault rifle..."
"I've got eight in my bunker."
LAUGHTER
"I can't tell you where, it's a secret location."
"I've got hundreds of these as well."
"Come the day..."
- Would you like to see one? - "Come the day..."
LAUGHTER
"..we'll be ready."
- They're very big, very heavy... - All your Christmases have come at once.
You've got no idea what you're doing.
There's the Sturmgewehr, which is a German
Second World War assault rifle. The first assault rifle there ever was.
- But the Krummlauf is the interesting part. - Oh, I can see it.
The Krummlauf is this modification...
They don't like it up 'em(!)
LAUGHTER
So...this is a genuine article.
It's brought to us by our very nice friends
from the Royal Armouries in Leeds,
it's going to spend the night in the Tower of London tonight,
and this is this extraordinary Krummlauf...
- You can shoot over the trench. - You shoot over a wall or round a corner,
and this is a periscope. And so if I'm here, I can actually...
I assure you, it HAS been deactivated.
There's no chance, it's been checked and double-checked, but I can see
the audience in my... And I can see the sights as well in the periscope.
Yes, it's been converted into a waterer for flower baskets.
I can point at the back row of the audience,
or, as you rightly say, round a corner.
But there's another gun, isn't there, that actually shoots round a corner.
Yes, the Israeli army uses that. We might even have a picture of it.
It's a much more modern development.
There it is. That really is extraordinary.
And behind, though, is the first of its kind, a very simple invention,
an Australian invention in the First World War, where you see a genuine
rifle on top of the trench and a thing holding it
and a periscope, looking through the sight.
- Quite clever. - But, much cooler just to go...
- Oh, yes. You're so right. - LAUGHTER
There it is. 1943 it was invented, they started making them in '44.
It was too late - Jerry didn't win the war, as you probably know.
We gave them a bit of an old spanking, in fact.
LAUGHTER
But this was in great demand for the Panzer people, in their tanks...
Please tell me on the other side of the desk you've got the left-handed one.
ROSS: That one that goes round the corner -
do they have ones that go that way and ones that go that way?
Cos that would really annoy you if you ran up and you went, "Oh, no..."
LAUGHTER
"I've got to go all the way round the block!"
LAUGHTER
It was invented by a man called Hans-Joachim Shayede,
who was a washing machine manufacturer, in fact...
So it's got a spin cycle?
LAUGHTER
So was he just trying to drum up a bit of business -
on the adverts where they go, "It gets blood out.
"Oh, I tell you what... HE MIMICS RIFLE FIRE
"You'll be needing a washing machine."
And I said a hoplophobe, and a hoplophobe is someone who hates weapons.
I thought it was someone who's scared of hooplas.
LAUGHTER
According to urbandictionary.com - this literally is their definition -
"An irrational fear of weapons, generally guns,
"usually occurring as a result of a liberal upbringing,
"or the fact the person is just a wimp in general.
LAUGHTER
"Rather than deal with the fear, said hoplophobe will assign human characteristics to a weapon,
"ie. "guns are evil" or "guns kill",
"to justify the fear rather than deal with the core problem of being a sissy."
LAUGHTER
- I'll tell you something. - Yeah? - He wrote that.
LAUGHTER
He may have done. Assault rifle.
- ROSS: I bet he wrote it with a left-handed pen. - Don't play with it
because they did ask that nobody else touch it because it's very valuable.
I was going to make it go over the desk!
LAUGHTER
I'm sorry. I'm afraid I was given a specific, "Alan not to touch."
LAUGHTER
It's very valuable.
I love the fact that somewhere there's a memo that just says,
"Machine gun. For Stephen Fry's use only."
LAUGHTER
"What?!"
Anyway, yes - the age-old problem of firing guns round corners
has been sold by making guns that fire round corners.
Time to inject a bit of humour and hilarity, I reckon,
so why did the bomb disposal expert go to the joke shop?
Something you can get there that helps with bomb disposing?
- Fake poos. - LAUGHTER
- Take me through the chain of... - I don't know how...
Is it er...whoopee cushions?
Put a whoopee cushion under, to release the pressure plate?
That's quite smart thinking. It's not that, actually.
They're called ammunition technicians, and they use
a thing you might get in a joke shop or a party shop...
- A flower that sprays water. - It is something you spray.
- Oh, is it that squirty stuff... - ROSS: Silly string.
Silly string! Now, what use would silly string be?
Does it fill up the fuse area and block everything up?
No, it's not that. It's in case there are invisible tripwires -
and you spray it, and they fall on the tripwire without triggering it.
And particularly they have fluorescent silly string, so in dark corners where you might...
There's always the possibility, because so many bombs are booby-trapped.
It's nice that that's a real thing, but I just prefer them leaning over a bomb going...
HE MIMICS PARTY HOOTER
LAUGHTER
- In a big Margaret Thatcher mask. - LAUGHTER
With a rubber chicken.
I have to say, that would have improved that film The Hurt Locker.
- Yes! - "Hey-hey!"
PHILL MIMICS NOISEMAKER
PHILL MIMICS HORN
Anyway...
The army uses Silly String to check for tripwires in booby-trapped houses.
From houses to holes, you can't fit a square peg in a round hole.
So how would you make a square hole with a round drill?
That's the question. Can it be done?
Yes, Jack Dee?
I would drill four small holes that, don't laugh before it's happened...
LAUGHTER
I might surprise you yet. I'm thinking while I talk.
I would drill four small holes that would describe a square...
- The corners? - Corners and then with a hacksaw I would join them and knock the square through.
It's a way of punching a square into the surface, but there is actually a way of using a round drill bit.
Well, my way's better.
That would be brilliant if it had gone "woo-woo"
- at every word you said... - One day!
Don't laugh before you've...
There's a particular shape, a sort of circular triangle
which when it revolves, a part of it makes a square.
A circular triangle?
Well...
Oh, no, no, no!
This is your first time. This sort of thing happens all the time!
"It's a sort of circular triangle!"
Yes and it makes a square!
It's not the fact that I'm boggled by that,
it's the fact I now realise there's a possibility
that you could have a Toblerone-Rolo combo.
I've dreamt about that for years.
Do you know the weird thing? Do you know what will freak you out completely, Ross Noble?
Is the name for this form a triangle is a Reuleaux.
It genuinely is!
You have to have points for that. You somehow found a triangle that was a Reuleaux .
It's a Reuleaux triangle, that's what it's called. It's a very particular shape.
If we come on this show and we discover things,
what I like tonight is I've just discovered the best three words to hear in a Geordie accent
are, "Toblerone-Rolo combo".
Thanks, now everyone I meet's going to go, "Can you say Toblerone please?
"Go on, Geordie man, dance for us."
You've got to form a band now. Called that.
- Me and Cheryl Cole? - Yes!
LAUGHTER
Her, me and Jimmy Nail as a trio.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Toblerone-Rolo Combo!"
- You're not going to play the trombone? - The trombone?
My God.
Right, OK...
- Do you want to see a picture of this Reuleaux triangle? - Yes.
- A Reuleaux triangle... - Is it only available in airports?
No, let's roll it... There.
Now you see that's a sort of round-ended triangle.
There it is and that is the drill bit and it is describing a square, if you see, exactly.
Isn't that crazy?
How loony is that?
You've sickened me.
Now that shape may be familiar if you like cars and bikes.
It's a type of piston, rotary piston which is known as a...
- A Wankel. - A Wankel or "Vankel" if we prefer to say it that way.
- Wankel was a bloke though, wasn't he? - He was. Mr Wankel was indeed a bloke.
That's all you could do. If your name was Wankel.
You'd go, "What are you going to do?" "Well it's going to have to be engines, isn't it?"
"Or sex toys!"
And I for one, looking at that, am glad that he went the engine path,
because I can't see that being comfortable.
No. So you can make a square hole with a round drill but...
this is something more extraordinary in a way.
This is from an ordinary cylinder.
And all you do is just cut two wedges off it.
As long as the cylinder is as long as it is wide,
you cut the two wedges and you can do something again that you're not supposed to be able to do.
Ah! Wedge the door open on a rabbit hutch?
LAUGHTER
No, it's rather amazing.
You've got the three Play School windows, you've got the square, the triangle...
- You can push it into all of them. - That is a square now, look. See?
It's a square.
- Look. See, square? Square. - Go on. Put it through then.
Also it's...hang on.
It's also a triangle.
- Yes? - Triangle. And...it's a circle.
Isn't that amazing?
Can I...?
Can we just leave that, like at a playgroup and watch the kids' heads explode?
Right, the fact is thanks to the wonders of geometry, it's quite possible to drill a square hole
with a circular bit, which brings me round
to a hypothetical question - what's made of jelly and lives forever?
BICYCLE BELL TINGS
Shark-infested custard? Wrong joke.
- Is it a famous jelly? - Royal jelly. Bees?
No. What lives and is made of jelly?
- Jellyfish. - A jellyfish. What sort of jellyfish would live forever?
- The Highlander! - An eternal jellyfish.
An eternal, or as it is known, the immortal jellyfish.
- The immortal jellyfish, as I was about to say. - Yes, you were.
Turritopsis, is its proper name and the extraordinary thing about it is it doesn't die.
What happens is after it sexes, er, after it sexes...
I'm going to sex you!
I'm a jellyfish and I'm going to sex you.
After it's had sex is the normal way of saying it.
Have sex?
Marjorie, shall we sex?! Come on!
- We haven't sexed for a good week. - I can't talk now, I'm sexing.
Why don't we say that? It's perfectly logical.
- Some of us do say that! - There you are!
But anyway, after it's sexed, it can then turn back into a child.
It's cells change, function, the muscle cells and the sperm cells and the egg cells change back
and it literally goes as it were back in time and just starts again. But it's the same creature.
That would be a bit unnerving for its partner though.
You know what I mean? You've just made love and then...
Can we watch Grange Hill?
Of course they do die, because they get eaten or they get diseased but they don't die of old age.
I'm trying to work out which of those five phases is the emo one that doesn't talk to you for weeks.
Well, now what about human attempts to be immortal or to rejuvenate at least?
- What was the great popular one earlier in the 20th century? - Cliff Richard?
- True. - Being frozen. Cryogenic.
That doesn't rejuvenate, that's just waiting until there's a cure.
Monkey glands, royal jelly.
What do they mean by monkey glands?
The glands of a monkey!
They were not really glands though, were they? They were testicles.
Have... No!
Yes! It started as human testicles, I'm sorry to say.
They're perfectly round...
Get them into my thimble!
If you were to scale them up to the size of the Earth, they'd take hours to scratch.
LAUGHTER
Chinese farmers with rakes.
Monkey balls.
Monkey balls. There was a man called Serge Voronoff who was a Russian who lived in Paris...
Whoa! Hello, ladies!
And I'm talking about the dude in the middle.
It started as human testicles, he would inject parts of the human testicle...
Hang on, injecting parts of the human testicle?
Is that what he told the ladies, was it?
It was very popular and in fact Wolverhampton Wanderers,
they had a striker in the late 40s called Dennis Westcott
and the manager, the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers,
I like this period in English football when managers were called things like Major Frank Buckley.
You don't get many Majors managering football teams anymore.
Or indeed sexing.
I love the fact that you did one impersonation of me and now you can't use grammar at all.
"Next week's QI has been cancelled.
"Noble has infected Fry's brain."
- "Welcome to QI! Way-hey!" - Major...
"Get the monkey balls out, we're sexing it tonight."
ALAN IMITATES MONKEY
Major Frank Buckley insisted on his striker being injected with monkey testicles
and amazingly he went on to score 38 goals in 35 games. Then...
Then married hundreds of monkeys!
Then the manager of Plymouth made his team
inject themselves or be injected with monkey...
That's got to be an interesting team talk.
What I want you to do, lads...
But... It was very fashionable. The search for eternal youth.
And now, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
It's time for General Ignorance.
How do snakes manage when their lunch is bigger than their head?
- HARMONY: Ring-a-ding! - Yes, Ross?
They dislocate their jaw?
- Oh, Ross, you were doing so well! - KLAXON SOUNDS
I'm so sorry. This is a common misapprehension.
They don't do any such thing, they just have very stretchy wide mouths.
They have a special bone which in mammals has become our anvil and other ear bones.
The choice was I could either hear very well or eat something bigger than my head?
Yes, essentially...
Evolution!
He can't hear you.
But we've only got your word for it
that that is a snake eating a mouse.
That might be a new mouse creature that has a snake head.
- It might! It's a lovely thought. - I'll have them points back, please.
Doesn't it slip out or something?
No, it's a double-jointed hinge.
Is that what they use on snakeskin handbags?
To get the...
Gosh, that would be a very impressive handbag, wouldn't it?
But sometimes they do over-reach themselves. There was a case in 2005 in the Everglades of Florida
where a Burmese python attempted to eat a whole alligator
and it got into it, that is an alligator inside a snake.
But the alligator was still alive inside the snake and tore at the stomach and the python exploded.
- So... isn't that not extraordinary? - Who lived? Who survived?
I think the alligator was probably dead as well, unfortunately by this time.
- So not a happy ending? - There were no winners. - No, no winners.
What, you may ask, was a Burmese python doing in the middle of Florida?
- He was on holiday. - He was on holiday!
- A very popular destination! - It's a popular destination!
They're popular pets and that's the reason they're in Florida,
because they escape and they find the swamps very similar
to the Burmese swamp "where the python romp", as Noel Coward puts it.
So yes, snakes don't actually dislocate their jaws to swallow.
They just have stretchy mouths.
What does a judge do when he wants order in his court?
Here?
- Yes? - BICYCLE BELL TINGS
He bangs his gavel.
- No! - KLAXON SOUNDS
British judges have never had gavels. They do on some television programmes.
It may be because I think props people think it looks good but they've never had them.
Sometimes if they're conducting an auction at the same time, they do.
But it's unlikely that's going to happen.
Auctioneers do have gavels.
- Judges? - Judges don't have gavels. No. - You've got one there.
I was a judge in Kingdom and I had a gavel in that.
- You were. Oh, did you? - I think so, yes. I seem to remember.
- We got that wrong. - Another reason why that show was cancelled!
British judges have never used gavels, unlike American judges.
That's it! We've hobbled our way through higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge
and all that remains is the humiliation of the final scores.
My goodness, my gracious, my knee.
Holding his head high this week with a staggering plus 2 points is Jack Dee!
Yes.
APPLAUSE
And...
Holding his own in second place, a very creditable entry in to the QI stakes
is our newcomer Ross Noble with -6.
APPLAUSE
Oh, what a triumph here because holding out the hope of greater things, it's Alan on -8.
Well done.
Which means sadly...
hanging his head in shame on -10, is Phill Jupitus.
APPLAUSE
That's all from this heterogeneous edition of QI,
so it's good night from Jack, Phill, Ross, Alan and me.
And I leave you with this - good night.
APPLAUSE
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