CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well, well, well, well, well,
howdy, howdy, howdy-doody and welcome.
Welcome to a QI that's all about hypnosis, hallucinations and hysteria.
And with me tonight are the hypnotic Ronni Ancona...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..the hysterical Robert Webb...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..the histrionic Phill Jupitus...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
..and His Majesty Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
With such a theme, we're all buzzing with excitement of course
and Ronnie goes...
'You are feeling sleepy.'
And Robert goes...
'Very sleepy.'
And Phill goes...
'Your eyelids are heavy.'
And Alan goes...
SNORING
So if I hypnotised you but then cut off your leg,
how much fuss would you make?
Doesn't it depend what you've gone in for the hypnosis for?
I mean, if you'd gone into stop smoking, I'd be a bit miffed really.
That's a very good point.
Assuming...
Assuming you'd gone in because you had gangrene
or you needed to lose your leg...
They never used hypnosis as an anaesthetic, did they?
Surely you'd be screaming in agony.
Oddly enough, no. It was used before ether in the 1830s very commonly
or reasonably commonly at least,
once Mesmer had sort of, as it were, introduced the world to the idea of hypnotism.
What seems to be the case is that most of the discomfort we feel -
even in an operation like sawing off a leg - is the ANXIETY of pain.
If you can relieve yourself of the anxiety,
an enormous amount of the pain goes
and a good example to prove this is people who are in some way
allergic to or resistant to anaesthetic
and so can't be put under because it's too risky.
So they're injected with Valium,
which is an anti-anxiety drug and all it does is tranquillise them.
It doesn't send them to sleep, it just makes them feel less anxious
and you can do extraordinary things to someone in that condition.
PHILL: If I was going in for surgery,
I'd feel anxious when I saw the man in the top hat with the crazy eyebrows.
It would be a worry, I agree, but it has a long history. In the 1830s
there was a Scottish doctor who did a lot of operations in India
where there is a really unpleasant disease called filariasis
which causes hydroceles of the scrotum.
Now anything scrotal you might say is a worry.
It makes your scrotum go into a triangle?
No, that would be isosceles!
LAUGHTER
This is hydroceles.
And he never ate Dairylea again.
These are large tumours
and the operation was so uncomfortable, people would go for years not daring to go to a doctor
but this meant the tumours grew very big, and when I say very big...
Oh! I mean 46 kg scrotum.
Literally,
there was a case of a man who was using his scrotum as a writing desk.
I'm sorry, but that is true. He'd just...like that.
- Writing... - That's a good attitude to have. - You're right.
I would get a Sharpie and I would paint the face
like the front of a space hopper on mine.
I'd make it look like a hedgehog...
winking.
This was the 1830s, of course,
when there was no general anaesthetic,
it was before ether or chloroform.
So this Scottish doctor's name was Esdaile. He would put them under and it worked.
- He saved a lot of discomfort. - SCOTTISH ACCENT: Your eyes are feeling heavy.
No' as heavy as my testicles, Doctor!
You're kind of suggesting
that a lot of pain is just a manifestation of anxiety, isn't it?
The fact is, pain is created by the brain. It's not a real thing.
- It's just information, isn't it? - Information.
The brain can create it, the brain can be told not to.
- It's bloody sore information! - It doesn't help.
You land a mallet on your thumb, "It's just information! It's just information!"
It doesn't really help. I tried to be hypnotised to stop smoking once
and he was such a nice man and it so wasn't going anywhere, I fainted.
- Even when it's a nice man, just save the embarrassment, you mustn't fake it, but I did. - Did it work?
- Do you smoke, have you given up? - No, I did give up,
- but with prescription drugs, not with hypnotism. - Superb.
Yes, hypnotic anaesthesia can be surprisingly effective
though it seems to work mostly by helping you relax.
You need answer only one of the following.
What's the best way to hypnotise either A - an alligator, B - a tiger shark or C - a chicken?
- I've seen them do it to sharks. - And what do they do?
- Don't they lie them on their backs or something? - Exactly right, you flip it over.
But I thought sharks had to keep moving in order to survive.
Which is why whales have learned to tip them over, to make them suffocate and it will kill them.
- There's a very small hammerhead shark being flipped. - That is a toy shark.
Or a really big diver.
- A frighteningly big diver. - I think we'd have heard of him!
- I think we would. - 'Your lids are heavy.'
I think I know how to do chickens.
- Yes? - It's weird because it actually looks like you're...oppressing them
- quite violently, but you have to hold them to the ground and draw a line. - Yes!
You draw a line from their beak along
and they just stare at it.
That's what they do. It's called tonic immobility in animals and that's an example of it.
There's another way to do it to chickens. Take a stick or a paddle...
In this case, a light flagellation paddle I happen to have in the house. You fix eyes to it
and hold it up to it and it will apparently stare at it forever.
Our producer tried it on his - we're the kind of show whose producers have chickens -
and he says it didn't work at all, they just went off to eat things.
You just made that up, didn't you?
No, no, it is in all the books. It says that that is a way to hypnotise them.
- ROBERT: - In all the books?!
In all of the chicken-hypnotising books? All of them?
How many are there?
This is why you can't ever let your chickens watch the Muppets.
LAUGHTER
Frogs, lizards, crocodiles, sharks, all go into a trance
if they're turned over onto their backs and held there for just a few seconds.
Rabbits and guinea pigs do the same if you stroke them or roll them over first.
Do you know how you wake up rabbits and guinea pigs if they're in that state?
You let a dog in.
The kinder way is to blow on their nose.
- On the nose? - Yes, a little blow on the nose will do.
- What have I hypnotised, do you know? - Hugh Laurie.
- STEPHEN LAUGHS - No, I did on a television programme.
When I was in Maine, doing this documentary about America...
- What is the most famous animal in Maine? - A lobster?
A lobster, we have a lobster in here.
- Ooh! - There it is.
- Now how did I do this? - LAUGHTER
I stroked... I remember. There you are.
You stroke him here, that's it.
He goes completely still.
I remember the one I did in Maine, it was...
I could stand him up on his own.
You can see, there it is.
They seem smaller there.
There he is, completely still, not moving a muscle.
- PHILL LAUGHS - A mussel!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
There he is, completely still,
and if I lift him up,
his tail will come up usually
and he'll wake up.
Erm...have I killed you?
No, there he is.
He's all right. He's still asleep.
- Anyway... - LAUGHTER
There we are, he's quite active now, under there.
So dinner's sorted.
So he's going back to the zoo, Stephen?
Of course, I'm going to throw him back into the sea, naturally.
You truly are a Renaissance man.
I wear tights, put it that way.
What about, though... I mean that's humans hypnotising animals.
Can animals hypnotise humans?
There was a dog - Oscar the hypno-dog -
who was... There he is, look.
- Those are pretty amazing eyes. - ALAN: - I'm feeling it now.
I'll go and get the biscuits.
The thing is,
he can keep up that stare into a human's eyes for a very long time.
LAUGHTER
- ROBERT: - Depending on what human wants to be stared at!
- Does he charge hourly? - ALAN: - Pack it in, Oscar. Stop looking at me.
Hugh Lennon was his trainer. He did go missing and a reward
was posted for his return, though the public were warned not to look into his eyes.
Does that sound like a publicity stunt to try and get tickets?
"Oscar the hypno-dog is loose! Don't look at him!"
"I've seen him. He's in the park."
Presumably when he's running around, someone thought they'd find him and go, "It's Oscar the hypno-dog,"
and he'd go, "I'm not the dog you're looking for.
"I'm a Pomeranian."
So, yes, dogs can apparently hypnotise humans. Snakes...
maybe not humans, but they're said to be able to freeze a rabbit by staring at them.
- They're very gullible, rabbits. - Oh, please! - They believe anything.
- They're quite grumpy. - Grumpy?
- Yes. - They can be aggressive.
They're not supposed to be very good pets. They're very grumpy... and violent.
I like the Dutch ones you can ride.
Surely not?
They're huge, they're massive!
OK, maybe not ride.
Crush.
- That is a rabbit costume. - A Dutchman wearing a rabbit costume.
DUTCH ACCENT: "OK, I am wearing a saddle and it's time to go."
I love rabbits.
Oh, my...
"Wow, I am thinking maybe I should have had a smaller celebrity."
So, yes, many animals can be put into a trance,
but it's probably better to practise on the ones lower down the food chain first.
You're at death's door. Why is your whole life flashing before your eyes?
- Is it...? - 'Very sleepy.'
Is it the influence of the early-'80s film Flash Gordon
where Dr Zarkov, played by Topol, has his... They try to empty his brain.
It's a myth that it ever happened before Flash Gordon.
Since we saw Topol, since we saw it happen to him,
that's what we all think will happen.
That's my...
theory.
- I love it. - ALAN: - Hard to disprove.
It's hard to disprove except
in quoting a letter from Admiral Beaufort,
who gave us the Beaufort Scale.
- Jiffy Beaufort? - Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort.
He had a narrow escape from drowning in Portsmouth harbour in 1795.
He saw everything. "Each circumstance associated with home were the first reflections.
"They took a wider range - our last cruise, a former shipwreck,
"my school and boyish pursuits and adventures.
"Every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection
"in retrograde succession in minutest detail."
There are many examples of people talking about it, so why do we think this happens?
Is it some sort of panic response? It's just like the brain just downloads everything.
- Yes... - It's doing your best bits.
- Doing your best bits? - Just prior to...
- It's a montage. - Maybe it's your brain trying to find
a piece of your life that can help you in your present situation.
Yes, very good, Ronni, that is the current and most convincing theory
that if you are in a crisis situation, your brain,
which registers almost everything that happens to you in your life - not always consciously, it goes in -
and something weird happens and it plays back all the incidents of your life to find a match, as it were.
This happened and then this.
There was a recent case of a man who was attacked by a great white shark. He was about to die
and he remembered a DVD his son had been watching years before
in which someone said, if a shark comes,
plunge your hands into the gills and he did that and he saved himself.
It's quite risky though, if you're on the brink of death and you're re-running
and you're like, "No, not my Dad's 70th birthday!
"No, not that time!"
- Probably nowadays... - The point is, I think, if you're a doctor or a fireman
or something with a level of expertise,
you're in a bad situation, all kinds of similar scenarios play out
and with what seems to be uncanny instinct you say, "We need to do this."
Sometimes even before the event, before the building has fallen,
because you've been in buildings where things have fallen.
You've unconsciously registered a creak, a bending of the wall and you say, "Get out!"
But the point is, when you're dying or drowning, there is nothing, so your brain just dumps everything.
It tries every scenario that seems mismatched and people genuinely get...
It'd be handy if you get to the end of your life flashing before your eyes and this woman says,
"And now that life is available to watch on BBC iPlayer."
Or if you lose your keys, just put your face down in the basin,
start drowning yourself until you get to the point you last had them.
It might work.
APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH
It would be terrible if you're drowning and then it's Topol's life.
- Yeah. - That would be someone else's life. - "Oh, no, Fiddler?
"I wasn't in Fiddler."
- IMPERSONATES BRIAN BLESSED: - Or Brian Blessed on the birds in the trees.
IMPERSONATES BRIAN BLESSED: I've been up Everest, you know.
Do you think with rising crime,
that death's door has become more security-conscious?
Do you think they've got an entry phone
or a couple of bouncers going,
"Well, we used to be able to leave death's doors open
"but now we have kids coming in, nicking bodies, drinking."
You see people sitting forlornly on Death Avenue saying, "I put the wrong number in three times.
"I've got to wait an hour before it accepts my next input." It's possible.
- You wouldn't mind being turned away though. - Possibly not.
In many languages, there's a phrase for your life flashing before your eyes,
showing the prevalence of the idea.
Persian, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, German, Norwegian,
Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabian, Dutch and French.
So it seems to be a common phenomenon and may be explicable.
It seems people's lives do flash before their eyes in a crisis
though it doesn't normally do much good.
Maybe it's hypnotherapy you need,
so why not consult Zoe D Katze, PhD, CHt, DAPA?
That's a pretty good series of...
I would say...
- Anagrams. - Hell of an anagram.
Is she invisible? There's nobody there.
'Your eyelids are heavy.'
- Is she an animal hypnotherapist? - She is an animal hypnotherapist.
She's a cat.
- Eh?! - Zoe D Katze is a cat with a PhD,
a CHt and that diploma.
LAUGHTER
Oh, Zoe! I think Oscar is sitting opposite her.
It's a man called Steve Eichel who is an academic
who wanted to demonstrate the ease with which you can get
a doctorate online or any of these apparently important professional
Hypnotherapy Association qualifications,
- all of which were given to a cat. - Oh, great.
The point is once you get one, you can use the others to parlay
until you get a whole list of them.
She has a doctorate in counselling psychology from a mail-order university
and the CHt is a certified hypnotherapist -
in the National Guild Of Hypnotists, no less -
and the DAPA is a Diplomat of the American Psychotherapy Association,
both qualifications which are supposed to connote genuine professional standing.
There you are, do be on the lookout, gentlemen and ladies, when you go to see them. If you can get a cat...
Oh, my cat's only got a BA!
LAUGHTER
It is astonishing, isn't it?
There are also what are called diploma mills and degree mills,
which give out either a fake diploma from a real university
or, as it were, a real one from a fake college that doesn't exist,
like they make up one that says "Christ's College, Oxford" or something.
Are those hats falling from the sky or are there hands beneath them?
- There are. - Is that how you get your hat? They're dropped out of a plane and you have to catch one?
Throw it in the air at your excitement of having got a degree.
I like to think that underneath that photo there's about 60 cats.
Miaow!
The thing is, that if you were a cat,
because of the tassels, you wouldn't leave them alone, would you?
I've got diplomas for all of you. Alan, you can put that on the wall.
ABSO?
Ronni, ABSO. That's a QI award.
- Academy of Advanced Banter. - It actually has...
Do you get letters from the American Biographer's Association or something?
And they say, "You have been selected as one of the men of the year..."
- Oh, it's a scam. - "..by the American Biographer's Association for expertise in your field."
All you have to do is pay 700.
And it says, yes, "If you would send 695, we'll send you a plaque."
I've got 12.
- LAUGHTER - Well, there you are, yes,
pseudo-credentialing, it's a big issue.
Other qualifications which the same Eichel who gave Zoe the cat her...
or managed to get her these qualifications,
he found energy therapist qualifications easily got,
past-life regression therapist and alien abduction therapist.
- That's sad. - I want to do that course.
Yes. I'm going to get a guinea pig and make it an alien abduction therapist.
Show me where they probed you.
"Are you qualified to do that?"
"Yes, I am."
Yes, the Zoe the cat is a cat, but that doesn't make her a bad person.
I need your help. How can we persuade the audience to elect me Pope
without them noticing that we've done it?
That's odd.
That's wrong.
My hand is not that liver-spotted!
I'm having that.
You wouldn't wear such cheap cassocks either.
No, I wouldn't either. No, that's so odd.
Is there a technique?
Suppose I wanted to sell them something without telling them.
- Some sort of mass suggestion. - Subliminal advertising.
Subliminal advertising...
KLAXON BLARES
Horribly cruel of me to try and pull it out of you
and then punish you for it.
No, the fact is, subliminal advertising has never been shown to work, it's a complete myth.
Although it's banned by most broadcasting authorities and the FCC in America,
it's not actually ever been shown to work.
In fact, the person who invented it in 1957 - a man called Vicary - in 1962
he admitted he'd falsified the evidence.
He claimed he'd used it and sold lots of cola and burgers
by putting in a flash frame, a single frame out of 24 frames a second.
Obviously the eye doesn't consciously register...
LAUGHTER
It just hasn't been shown to work. I remember they did one in the Young Ones.
- They did it all the time in the Young Ones. - Yes, they did.
It's like going back to my childhood and I'm remembering it all now.
- Your childhood?! - Well...
- Yes, Ronni, deal with it. - LAUGHTER
Anyway, sound - do we know any stories of audio subliminal messages?
Oh, the court cases about "backward masking" they call it, which is, you know, satanic messages.
- Judas Priest. - Yes, perhaps the most alarming story was two boys
who committed suicide, or attempted suicide,
- and their parents took Judas Priest to court. - They did.
Do you know what the message was supposedly in the track?
- It was... "Do it, do it now." - "Do it, do it now." Yes.
So Halford, as part of the court case, went in with a load of records
and played them backwards and then just read out a list of things you could hear
in records when played backwards just to show how...
He also said, "I don't wish to paint myself as greedy,
"but if we were going to put a message in it would be, 'Buy more of our records.'" He also said,
"Do it doesn't mean kill yourself."
- Stephen, the song WAS called Suicide Solution. - Oh, was it? - Yes.
Finally, being in a pop quiz pays off!
They say that you can put things under your pillow,
like students have lectures on tapes and they put them under the pillow and while you're asleep.
Yes, hypnopaedia, it is called. I know it sounds...
like interfering with a child while they sleep.
"We thought it was one of them hypnophiles."
Yes, paedia as in Wikipedia and encyclopaedia, as in learning, and hypno as in sleep.
There are pillows you can buy now that actually have speakers built
into them, but frankly, there is no real evidence that it works in terms
of what's being taught, but if you sell someone classical music
and say, "Contains subliminal music that will increase your self-confidence,"
it is shown that that will work, even if it's just the music.
Back to self-hypnosis, if you bang your head on the pillow the number of times...
Do you know, weirdly, I found that worked.
At prep school, I used to do that to get up early to raid the kitchen and things like that and do stuff.
- What did the banging... - If you want to wake up at 4am,
you bang your head four times on the pillow.
- Or you have a child. - It sounds mad...
- Or you have a child, obviously. - It's just the power of suggestion,
this is the thing, isn't it? But also hypnosis is if you keep telling yourself something will happen...
- Yes, a self-fulfilling prophecy. - Yes, it's kind of like autohypnosis, isn't it?
It kind of is, yes.
Other subliminal images have been seen, Lenin, for example, was seen by some in the Labour Party rose,
I don't know if you can there.
- That's someone from Planet of the Apes. - It's more like that, isn't it?
But there we are. So, yes, subliminal advertising doesn't...
work. Seriously though, I'd be very pleased.
Anyway, what kind of behaviour would you expect from a superstitious pigeon?
They always wear their feathers in exactly the same colour and exactly the same order every day.
Well, it is just that sort of superstition that pigeons have been found to exhibit.
It's quite interesting, a very well-known American psychiatrist called B F Skinner,
he found that if you feed pigeons at predetermined intervals,
the pigeons, because they can't predict when the food is coming,
they seem to register what they were doing at the time the food arrived
and repeat the action to make the food come next time, which is a very human thing.
It's like humans blowing on dice before a game of craps.
They would walk in anti-clockwise circles because maybe twice they were walking anticlockwise
when the food arrived and they think that must be why the food comes.
- That's not superstitious, that's just hopeful. - It's superstitious.
Last time I won this game, I was wearing one red sock and one blue, so I'll wear
a red sock and a blue sock again, sportsmen do it all the time.
- They repeat actions that happened before... - People do it all the time.
- It's called magical thinking, where you think you're having an effect on the world. - Exactly.
- And you're not. - You're not.
I can't watch this match because the last round, I didn't watch and we won.
Or I was standing up when England scored a goal, so I've got to stand up for the rest of the match.
- I'm going to go to the toilet now, we'll definitely score. - All that. We do it all the time.
- My uncle, when he lights a cigar, we always score. - Yes, it happens to all of us.
They're all dead now, because I killed them.
It's almost like a form of megalomania, isn't it, in a bizarre sort of way.
- That we could possibly affect the outcome. - Yes. - That is the nature of superstition.
It's quite hard, it has to be said,
to find any definition of superstition that doesn't also cover religion.
It makes the same promises, the same suggestions of individual actions...
You convince yourself you're involved
in the world somehow - if I wear my lucky scarf, then I'm really in the game.
- And you're just wearing a scarf. - Yes, that's right, it is.
And each religion will regard other religions as superstition and theirs as not being.
I am religious, you are superstitious.
In the Catholic Church, it is a sin to be superstitious.
- You'll change that when you're Pope. - I'll change that when I'm Pope, yes.
- APPLAUSE - No, no, stop.
What are we going to do with the gold?
"And as Pope Stephen walks out onto the balcony, underneath the ladder, with several black cats..."
American psychologist B F Skinner managed to train pigeons to be superstitious
by giving them arbitrary food rewards and keeping his fingers crossed, and best of luck to him.
Now, what's hysterical about wandering womb trouble?
- Wandering womb. - Hysterical as in, that's Janet Leigh in Psycho. - It certainly is.
- But she didn't have a wandering womb, she was being stabbed to death by a maniac. - She was.
- She was hysterical for a very good reason. - Yes. What does hysterical mean? Where does the word come from?
'You're feeling sleepy.'
- I think this is something to do with hysterectomies. - Yes.
Originally...
The Greek word for uterus is hystera, so the word hysteria?
Yes, it was Hippocrates also who thought
that there was a correlation between mental unbalance and the womb becoming wandering around the body.
He thought the womb, like an animal, moved around the female body.
I've got a very good female friend who's a gynaecologist who was telling me.
That is how the word hysteria came about,
it was associated entirely with women from the same root as hysterectomy.
- She's hysterical, slap her! - Yes, slap her, that was the attitude that men had towards women's illnesses or
particularly neuroses, that somehow it was to do with them being women, and women of a certain age
were associated with all kinds of what were called hysterias, hysterical responses.
But it was Freud who said that almost
for every real condition, you might have a hysterical version which was created by the mind,
but it was as real, it wasn't feigned, that's the point.
- This was before hysterical became a synonym for hilarious? - Yes.
"You have a hysterical condition." "Well, it doesn't feel very hysterical to me!"
But there is such a thing as hysterical blindness and muteness,
people will lose the ability to see, although physically there is nothing wrong with their eyes at all.
So, what about Hitler?
What about Hitler?
- Leave Hitler alone. - Week after week, you have a go at Hitler.
Do we know about Hitler and blindness? I mean, he's not blind there, obviously.
- But do you know any stories about his blindness? - No. I thought he was colour blind.
In the First World War, after a gas attack, he apparently went blind and dumb for some time.
- That was close, wasn't it? - Yes.
Someone else would have taken his place.
It was in hospital, during that, that he had a vision
that he would lead Germany to greatness, unfortunately.
- But it's quite interesting... - That went very well, didn't it?
Don't listen to visions when you've just had a gas attack.
- Yes. - Wouldn't it be terrible if that was an evil Labrador,
like Oscar, and it just said, "You will rule the world!"
- Hypno-dog. - Hypno-dog, yes.
An American psychiatrist called Walter Langer wrote a report
on Hitler during the war and it was quite interesting.
He said both that he thought it was hysterical blindness and speechlessness,
they were definitely that, but also predicted - this is a Freudian analysis -
that in Hitler's symbolic vision, as it were, Austria is his father in 1914, old, exhausted, dying,
and Germany is his symbolic mother, young, vigorous, married to Austria and about to be violated.
Whatever you make of this, it is undoubtedly the case that unlike almost all Germans,
Hitler called Germany Mutterland, not Vaterland. Motherland, not Fatherland.
Langer went on to say that the most likely outcome of Hitler's life was that he would
commit suicide, probably, he said, in a symbolic womb,
which is quite an impressive piece of prophecy.
Maybe there is something in this Freudian lark after all.
Anyway, hysteria, as Ronni rightly knew, used to be attributed
to the womb roaming about the body, interfering with other organs.
Doctors thought it would cause anything from a nervous breakdown to blindness.
Now a question which will test your reflexes. Watch the film here of the setting sun.
All I want you to do is to hit your buzzer at the moment the sun has dropped below the horizon.
It's speeded up, obviously.
'Eyelids are heavy.'
You got there first.
KLAXON
Well too late! Well too late!
That is the moment at which the sun is below the horizon.
What we see is a mirage.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.
You're looking at me as if to say...
- Is this to do with how far away it is? - It's to do with
the bending of light and the eye not accepting it, but it is genuinely below the horizon.
Physically, the Earth has turned such that it is not there.
I know you're looking very cross and "That can't be true!" about it.
That's a film of it, though.
I know, but you can get thermal mirages and there's nothing there, on the roadside, water puddles.
You get rainbows and they're not there.
That's a photograph, but it's not there. There's no water there, it's just air.
I'll try and explain. Light from the setting sun passes through our atmosphere at a shallow angle
and gradually bends as the air density increases,
not dissimilar to the image of your legs in a swimming pool. The effect artificially raises
the sun in the last few minutes of its decline, and by coincidence,
the amount of bending is pretty much equal to the diameter of the sun.
So it's exactly as it's there, but it's actually disappeared.
- I hate this show. - Oh, Phill!
- Be interested, please. - The sun is there. - I know.
And you're like, "No."
"It's the sun!" "Not there. Mirage."
Have you ever seen a mirage?
- Yes. - Where? - Travelling through the desert in America, you see them all the time.
The standard ones in the roads. What appear to be huge puddles of shimmering lakes of water,
which are not there. You must have seen those in the roads.
Yes, but I grew up in Scotland, and they are there.
- Fair enough. - In New Zealand, you get quite bad sunstrike off the roads, causes accidents.
And what does that entail?
Because New Zealand is so low on the planet, if you see what I mean,
and the sun comes through quite a lot of atmosphere to get to it,
and the angle of it when it hits the road causes a lot of blindness in the eyes of drivers.
- Right. - I daresay that the drivers in New Zealand, as they see
the sun setting, are reassured to know that it's not there.
APPLAUSE
Yes, the fact is that despite Phill's reluctance to understand it,
that the setting sun is actually below the horizon the moment
that its lower edge seems to touch the sea.
So to the place where everything you think you know proves to be an illusion,
the nightmare that we call General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What shape is this staircase?
'Eyelids are heavy.'
- Yes, Phill. - It's not there.
Now, Phill!
APPLAUSE
'Very sleepy.'
Spiral.
KLAXON
I'm very happy for you.
- 'Eyelids are heavy.' - It is a helix?
Yes, it's helical, well done, exactly right.
It's terribly pedantic, but a spiral is when it gets bigger and bigger and wider and wider,
- and a helix, it stays the same, as a staircase does. - (I knew that!)
But you just wanted the forfeit, didn't you? Yes.
Very well, so what's that?
- A double helix. - A double helix, exactly, and that is?
That is... What is that? Tell me what animal that is, Stephen.
- I can't tell you by looking at it, I'm afraid. - That is a Hypno-Labrador.
DNA. We've got a lot of it in our bodies. If it was all stretched out, how far would it reach?
Is it something mega, like to the moon and back?
It's so much more mega. A tenth of a light year, outside the solar system,
that's how long that much of it is,
50 trillion cells, 23 chromosomes per cell, 220 million base pairs per chromosome.
That really does kick the "If you get your skin out, it's half a tennis court" in the knackers, doesn't it?
Half a light year... a tennis court.
So do you know about the Argentine blue bill or lake duck?
- It has a part of his body that is corkscrew shaped. - Is it going to be its neck?
It's not going to be its neck.
- Legs? - Nor its legs. It's its penis.
There are quite a few animals that have spiral penises.
When it procreates, does it kind of spin in like a screw?
If push comes to shove and you're in Argentina with a bottle of Merlot...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- A very decent... - It's a win double, because you get your wine out
and you get a pleasured duck.
HE QUACKS LOUDLY
Oh, this is corked.
Then you ask the wine waiter to bring you the bill.
Not only does it have a corkscrew, it has the longest penis, relative to its body size, of any vertebrate.
- It's the length of its whole body. - Did you know that or did the duck tell you?
"It's as long as I am." What about the earwig, hasn't the earwig got a penis?
- The earwig doesn't have a brush at the end of its penis like that animal does. - A brush? - A brush.
- Wow, it can clean up after! - What do you think the brush is for?
Brushing down the curtains.
What you think the brush is for on the lake duck's penis?
What is the one aim of the male of the species?
For brushing the feathers out of the way of the lady duck's doodah?
No, what is the purpose of the male's...
- Sorry, the lady duck's punani. - Releasing spermatozoa into the...
- Releasing yours. - Oh, right. - Not anybody else's, that's why males fight with other males.
- So the brush is to remove any sperm from the previous drake who may have been there. - No, stop it!
- So you clean out the previous sperm, so it's yours... - A little spring clean!
And the weird thing, even weirder, is the lady duck,
her vagina is corkscrewed, but it's corkscrewed in the opposite way.
"I can't believe it, a left-hand thread at this time of the night!"
- It is quite astonishing, isn't it, it really is. - I feel bad talking about it.
And you know the other thing, Stephen? Male duck's imperial, lady duck's metric. Nightmare!
So true. Ridiculous. There you are, nature.
Wonderful nature. So, strictly speaking, a spiral staircase is actually helical.
So why are there so many lavatories in the Pentagon?
Er, one each?
- Do you know how many people work in the Pentagon? - Thousands.
23,000.
There aren't 23,000 lavatories, so, no, I'm afraid it's a really ghastly reason.
- Where is it? - Virginia.
Virginia is a southern state and it had laws, not nice laws.
- Oh, no. - Segregation. By law, you had to have one lavatory for white people
and one for black people, so there were double the number.
I'm afraid it's true, it's a horrible truth.
It shouldn't have happened, because it was built in the '40s under the presidency of FDR,
who had specifically outlawed racial segregation in federal...
he couldn't legislate for the states but he could say that no federal building...
So when he arrived for his first inspection, he was told,
he was furious that there were all these lavatories.
Well, it's not very PC, it's true, but have you ever been for a queue in the ladies' loo?
So it's nice for you that there are so many, yes. You racist.
But although they built them all for that reason,
they were banned from using it and they were never racially segregated.
Look at all the tennis courts they've got as well.
That centre bit alone, just to give you a sense of the scale of it, is five acres, just the middle bit.
17 and a half miles of corridor, at least 284 lavatories, six separate zip codes,
just the Pentagon, but apparently, it takes only seven minutes to walk from one place to another.
Only one cleaner, they have.
Yes, poor darling. Racial segregation in Britain, did it ever happen in the Second World War?
I assume yes, judging by the leading question.
- For one reason only. - Because of the Americans.
Because of the Americans and in fact it is at least something we can be vaguely proud of, is that
the Americans in the bases who used pubs insisted that they had pubs for whites and blacks only
and the British public said, no, we're not going to do that.
White Americans would come in and see black people and start fights
and the British would fight with the blacks against them. We thought it was intolerable.
There were propaganda films that they showed American GIs
who were going to be stationed over here before they came,
with a little old lady coming into a railway carriage
and there is a black GI and a white GI and she says,
"Oh, you must come round for some tea, both of you."
And the voice-over is, "This would never happen in our country, but you will have to be prepared."
- And they were preparing GIs... - That the British would invite black people...
- Yes. - Preparing them for the horrors of tea.
It's rather eye-watering to think that in our parents' lifetimes, such a thing might have happened.
- "You may be offered buns." - Yes. - "These are safe to eat."
Anyway, they built twice as many restrooms as they needed
in the Pentagon so they could keep them racially segregated.
Name something invented by Vyacheslav Molotov.
'Very sleepy.'
A Molotov cocktail.
Oh!
KLAXON
He didn't invent the Molotov cocktail.
He invented the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall.
- Which he is drinking there. - Yes, having one right now. Pina colada.
Well, he invented some grim things like death lists.
The Molotov line, like the Maginot line, a defensive line, various other things.
- He was a Bolshevik. - He was a Bolshevik, he was the Foreign Minister under Stalin, all the way.
He lived until 1986.
A very exciting job, Foreign Minister under Stalin.
- You can imagine, absolutely. - Every day, "What are we going to do today?"
"I don't know. Have you asked him?" "He hasn't woken up yet."
He claimed his country, in the war against Finland, was dropping food parcels
when it was dropping cluster bombs.
So the Finns called them Molotov's breadbaskets, these bombs that came down.
When they fought against the Soviet tanks... Don't forget, the Finns beat the Russians.
It was quite an amazing war. They used petrol bombs and they said,
"These are Molotov cocktails to go with the bread you're giving us,"
so it was kind of their joke. But they humiliated Russia, Finland,
- it was an extraordinary achievement. - Very, very well done. - Yes, very well done, Finland, absolutely.
Which brings me to the real matter of the scores, and my goodness, are they interesting or not?
Well, they are quite interesting.
I'm afraid in fourth place, with minus 32, it's Robert Webb.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And in third place with minus 17, Ronni Ancona.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
- In second place, Alan Davies with minus eight. - Thanks very much.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Which means our runaway winner,
our solar sceptic with minus two, Phill Jupitus.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I'm not here. I'm not here.
That's all from QI. Goodnight from Ronni, Robert, Phill, Alan and me,
and I will leave you with this thought.
You will tune in again next week, you will. Goodnight.
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