QI XL Series L Episode 15 - Long Lost
APPLAUSE
Bonsoir, guten abend, guten abend, guten abend, guten abend,
good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening and welcome, willkommen, bienvenue,
nache a QI, where tonight, at long last, it's the Long Lost show.
Let's meet the long-trousered Jimmy Carr.
APPLAUSE
The long-suffering Claudia O'Doherty.
The long-awaited Suggs.
And a lost cause, Alan Davies.
And now for some long-form buzzers. Jimmy goes...
GONG REVERBERATES
That is long-form.
- I'm not finished. - Thank you.
Claudia goes...
SUSTAINED ELECTRIC GUITAR NOTE
It's going to be a very long show.
Sometimes we shorten the cues - you'd be surprised. Suggs goes...
OUT OF TUNE SAXOPHONE PLAYS
I thought as much.
HITS DEEP NOTE
That's better.
And Alan goes...
FLY BUZZES
LAUGHTER
Ah, ooh, bitter, very bitter.
Now, we haven't been going long and already I've lost a lavatory,
so if you spot it, let me know by playing your Spend a Penny.
Spend a Penny and if you're right...
TOILET FLUSHES
..there'll be points.
If you're wrong, there may be deductions, it's up to me to decide. But that's your joker.
So, how could living in a tiny flat stop you from losing your marbles?
- CLAUDIA'S BUZZER - Yes, Claudia?
If you had a very small house,
you wouldn't be worried that there was a killer in the next room.
That's something that I worry about in my house.
- Do you? - Yes.
But if it was small, very small, one room, I would be fine,
I wouldn't be scared at all.
- Wouldn't you need a Jodie Foster-style sort of safe...? - A panic room. - The panic room.
- Well, the whole house is the panic room. - Oh, well, I guess it would be. - If it's a small flat, yeah.
- I guess it is, isn't it? - Yes. So how many points do I get for that?
- I think you may have come in with a rather optimistic frame of mind here. - OK, right.
Do you think you watched too many horror films where it's always the phone call came from in the house?
- They're calling from inside the house. - House. - Yeah.
Well, if they're not in the house, they can't get you. Your horror movies sound fine.
There's so many genres and sometimes
- there's the cabin in the woods genre, high school ones, different kinds. - There's camp ones.
- Camp ones, exactly. I mean, not camp in the sense of... - No, no.
But camp horror would be quite fun, wouldn't it -
"Ooh! Ooh! Ooh, you gave me a start!"
I think you've created a genre right there.
I think I may have done. I think I may.
Oh, something just stabbed me in the back!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.
Let's come back at the same time tomorrow.
What are you doing in the woods? Well...
Behave, all of you.
Now, let's return to the question, which was, Suggs...?
It was why would you be less likely to
lose your marbles in a small flat?
Apart from the fact if you're playing marbles,
- there's less distance for them to go. - That's a very good thought.
It's actually, we're actually being figurative here.
It's a very common thing that happens, when you've gone
into a room and you've forgotten what you've gone into it for. You know.
I've had that in...I had that at the Hammersmith Apollo once.
Walked out on stage and went, "What have I...? Oh, jokes, right. OK."
Shit.
I have a good thing I do so I don't do that, though,
which is, if I'm looking for a thing, so I don't forget what that thing is,
I just start saying the thing, so I just go, "keys, keys, keys, keys."
- That's right! - And then I find the keys. Pretty cool. You're welcome.
There was a study at Notre Dame, Notre Dame -
as they call it in America - University, which discovered
that the key thing that makes you forget is crossing a threshold.
In other words, going from one room to another.
If you have a one-room flat, it's unlikely to happen.
I don't want to stick on the horror theme too much,
but if there's a vampire, then, and they're planning to kill you,
- and they have to be invited into the house, by tradition... - Yep.
..and they cross the threshold, is there a chance when you invite them in, they go, "I forgot why came in."
Indeed. Not only that, if they're chasing you from one room to another,
"why did I come into the kitchen?"
- ALAN: - "Bite him in the neck, bite him in the neck, bite him in the neck..."
- "Blood, blood, blood, blood." - That's exactly it.
There's something that happens in the brain.
It may be an evolutionary thing when you move from one
sort of landscape - from a thicket to open country as it were -
the equivalent of a threshold, that for some reason, you no
longer need the same tools to cope with that particular environment
or habitat, and so you, you know, we somehow seem to forget it.
But, I mean, for instance, if you were in B&Q,
that's one big room, isn't it? I mean, you don't cross any thresholds. But...
True, when you go in there, you do forget everything you were meant to...
- I meant to get those Rawlplugs and the other things... - You forget the day.
- The butt plugs. - The reason why you're alive. - Where the car is, who you're married to.
Why you haven't killed yourself earlier.
Oh, Suggs, Suggs! Let's not go down there.
No, but I'm just saying, it is one big room. I mean, it is a big room, isn't it?
Yeah. Well, yeah, crossing a threshold makes you lose your thread.
What's the world's longest living thing?
SUGGS' BUZZER
Suggs?
A giant redwood.
Good answer. Not correct, but good.
They do live a very, very long time.
And it's not a klaxon.
- There was a clam. - A clam?
A clam that some scientists killed last year, that was 500 years old.
- That some scientists killed? - Yeah, it was an accident.
But they were like, "Guys, great news, we've found the oldest thing in the world!"
"We killed it, but it's really old."
And it was over 500 years old.
This is well over 500 years old. Possibly immortal.
Is that picture a clue?
There is some there, I think, well, you can see...
Shall we have a klaxon? Do you want a klaxon?
What are you going to say?
Brucie.
KLAXON
The biggest thing in the world, got to have a bit of fun.
- Obviously if you're watching this... - Love, respect, everything.
He loves the show. I invite him on, and he just, kind of...
He said, "look, I never went to any school, I don't really know anything."
- He knows loads of stuff, he's brilliant to hang out with. - I know! He's fantastic.
The problem with asking him to do things is he lives in a house with a lot of rooms.
Just off one of the halls in Wentworth, I think, is where he lives, isn't it, cos that's...
- Lichen! - Yes, is the right answer. Lichen.
But no... Nothing to do with the lavatory, but we don't count that as playing it.
It is lichen, lichen, there it is.
How many forms of life make up lichen, as it were?
Well, I don't even understand the question - how many forms of life?
Well, you know, sometimes you get symbiosis, which creates what
seems to be one thing but is in fact made up of other things.
- Okey doke. - Things living together, symbiotic.
And this is two organisms, it's fungus and algae.
- Fungus and algae. - Yeah. - Living together. - Yeah, that's right.
- Is it, we're making the worst ever sitcom? - Well, one provides... The fungus...
They're living together but they don't get on. Oh, they're so very different.
Fungus the Bogeyman and Algy, Algy from Biggles.
I've got Ebony and Ivory in my head now.
- Fungus and Algae. - Well, the fungus provides a cosy environment
and the algae has the equipment to photosynthesise, and they live
happily together on stones and in incredible environments.
- That's the oldest thing? - Well, there's a 9,000 years old one in Lapland,
probably the world's oldest living thing, as far as we know.
They're everywhere.
They're the dominant vegetation on 8% of the world's surface.
Not just they exist there, they are the dominant vegetation. They can be very tasty.
There's a...Pete Townshend, you know, you remember Pete Townshend.
- Indeed. - No, I don't mean Pete Townshend. That can't be right.
Go in another room, see if you can remember.
- Pete Waterman. - Aha!
Pete Waterman. Two very different animals.
They are, very different.
That's a very different set of jokes in my head.
- I've got very little in that category. - Neither of them are acceptable.
SUGGS: Dear, oh, dear!
So, Pete Waterman, his hobbies.
Model railway collecting.
- Model railways, very good. - Yes, yes.
- Where might you use lichen or...? - All over his face. No, sorry, no.
- I don't know what I thought there. - There's a kind of lichen that's known as Caribou Moss,
so it's a moss-like lichen. And that's it there.
And it's used by model railway enthusiasts for what?
- Grass. - Oh, who put that... To create grass. - Not grass. - Bushes.
- Bushes and trees. - SUGGS: And little furry green wigs.
Hang on a second, can we take a moment to look at that photo and ask
what the hell is going on there?
That feels to me like a zoo with an enclosure that's just gone...
Stick 'em in together.
There's been some budget cuts, they can work it out.
You can't put them in with them!
- It's so wonderful. Yes, you can. - A lot of those guys need water.
- Well, it's very near the coast, as you can see. - How is that near the coast?
It's slithering down, all the little waters running down to the sea.
Look at the poor fat fella at the back.
Look at him. He's just stranded there going, well...
- It does look a bit odd... - Hang on.
"Hello, this feels wrong. Hello?
"I shouldn't be in with the deer. Hello?"
The photographer is giving his usual lie, which is -
"Just one more, just one more."
"Hello? The deer have drunk all the water!"
They are reindeer.
FAINT GROANS
Come on, that's bloody good! "Rain-deer."
But lichen, "liken, litchen," however you want to say it.
it comes from the Greek, leikhein, to lick,
as limpets they lick rocks, it seems.
That's how people interpret it.
There seems to be no clear consensus as to whether it is lichen.
- Or cane toads. - Or cane toads, exactly.
But as the great performance poet Rory Motion put it,
"You call it liken, I call it lichen, let's call the whole thing moss."
AUDIENCE GROAN
Now what's...
What's long, begins with L and gets you sleepy, horny and pregnant?
- Suggsie. - Lunch.
Well, that's pretty true.
How do you know the pet name I've got for my penis?
That's just terrible.
Is it Larry?
"Meet Larry."
I would think it's probably Lancelot.
Oh, my goodness!
Well, it's actually called Lancelot, because of all the boils.
AUDIENCE: Ooh!
Hey, they booked me - what were they hoping for?
So it's horny, sleepy...?
Horny, sleepy, pregnant, yeah.
Is it, it sounds like Rohypnol.
No.
Lying down?
Lying down would kind of make you feel all those things.
This is a foodstuff.
- That makes you pregnant. - Leeks.
Leeks, good, good, you're in the right area,
- you're in the vegetable garden. That's where I want you to be. - Legumes?
- Lettuce. - Lettuce.
- Lettuce is the right answer. - What? - Lettuce.
Ooh, look at that. Phwoar! Oh, Stephen, oh!
This is a family show, take it away.
Imagine if those Inuits were here now, eh - forget the lichen,
- let me at that. - What?
I would ride that like a stolen bike.
You're bad.
Who gets horny looking at lettuce?
Are you now pregnant?
Hippocrates, the father of medicine,
as was known, his name lives on in the Hippocratic oath, which is,
"Oh, fuck, I've killed him again!"
Again?
- I've killed another. - I've killed another, that's what I meant to say.
Hippocrates lived on an island which was that shape.
And it was called the island of Cos,
but the island was named after the lettuce, because Cos was the Arabic for lettuce.
Cos, it was the Arabic for lettuce.
# Because, because, because, because, because! #
- He described its opiate qualities, as did Beatrix Potter, in Peter Rabbit. - Soporific?
- Soporific was exactly the word she used, very good. - Indeed. Yes. - Points for that.
And they very nearly ended up in Mrs McGregor's rabbit pie as a result of falling asleep.
Anyway, yes, lettuce is slightly soporific-making.
However, it's been bred less and less so.
But wild lettuce in really strong quantities.
Rather than, Claudia, it making you feel sleepy, it makes you feel...?
Horny.
Horny. Horny. Horny and bouncy.
- Right. We'll see. - And therefore it's a kind of stimulant, which is
tropane alkaloid, which is the same as is found in cocaine.
And so it can give you a bit of a kick.
I'm getting down the greengrocers.
Well, they did try and sell it in America under names like
L'Opium, with an L, and an apostrophe - and Lettucene.
But most were made from ordinary garden lettuce.
It has to be wild lettuce that you find. And it shouldn't be fed to rabbits,
cos it upsets their tummies, actually.
Peter Rabbit went back to the garden of the farmer who'd put his own father in a pie.
- Yeah. Mr MacGregor. There's kind of revenge in there. - Don't go down there, he put your father in a pie.
- Yeah. What he should have said is, - SPANISH ACCENT: - "Hello, my name is Don Peter Rabbit.
"You killed my father, prepare to die."
Big lumps of lettuce in one hand, a shooter in the other.
Victorian picnickers wrapped lettuce around what, for picnics?
- Their penises. - Meat?
That's, if in doubt, it's going to be a knob.
- It is a knob. The word knob is used with this substance. - Butter?
Yes! That's absolutely right. They'd wrap it round butter to keep it cool. Yeah.
Yeah, there it is.
- What do they wrap round their penises? - I don't know. - Butter.
And don't new mothers put cabbage leaves in their bras to
- cool their cracked, sore nipples? - Yep.
- I didn't know that, is that true? - Yeah.
Cracking... Cracking of the nipple is not a laughing matter.
- No, I wouldn't want... - Not a laughing matter. - Oh, ouch.
And it doesn't make the baby any less hungry.
And is it any easier if you express into a machine, or is that worse?
Well...
I don't know all the details.
No.
You agree to do two-thirds of the nappy work,
quite a lot of the driving round in a car when it's screaming.
I just remember the "Argh, ooh, argh!"
But it's a great way for new mums to express themselves.
Quite.
You're really groany today.
Just a joke. Relax.
Anyway, lettuce is good for all sorts of things,
except rabbits, apparently.
What's the world's longest experiment?
QI.
That's certainly possibly the world's longest failed experiment.
I've definitely had a couple of double physics on a Wednesday afternoon that dragged.
Hmm, I know what you mean.
This is really quite long for one experiment.
If I tell you when it started,
it may give you an idea of how old it is.
It was started in 1840, at least that's what we think.
It may actually have begun 15 years earlier than that.
And is it still, it's not still going?
It's still going. Yeah.
- Is it on animals? - I think they've got to just call a day on that, haven't they?
Just, that homework is going to be late, is all we know for sure.
- Oh, is it curing the common cold? - No, if I said it was a pile, does that help you?
Oh, is it? It's not like continental drift or something, is it?
No, the word "pile" - what does it mean in French?
Oh, pile.
Pile. Yes, in English how would we say that?
JIMMY DOES FRENCH IMPRESSION
Yeah. Battery, the French call the battery a pile, a pile, a heap, a stack.
And this one is in Oxford, in a scientific laboratory
and has been there since 1840.
And as you can see, below it are two domes and a clanger.
And when one clanger hits a bell, it causes a charge to make it go
and hit the other one.
It's rung ten billion times since it was started.
Oh, it's annoying for the neighbours, isn't it?
Fortunately, it's incredibly quiet,
because it's inside a double bell jar.
But the actual battery won't run out for 350 years, they think.
Really? Is someone periodically taking it out and doing that with it?
No. It's not like static electricity.
Are they licking it? How are they keeping it...?
They're not quite sure exactly what it's made of, because he didn't make notes.
He wasn't like... Dr Jekyll.
- You have to. - I know. - Aim, method, apparatus.
Yeah, I know, you're supposed to keep good notes.
But this was a reverend doctor of experimental philosophy,
which is what they called physics in those days.
He didn't keep those kind of good notes.
350 years. Could these people get in touch with Apple?
Because my phone runs out like about every hour.
I don't think you need worry, there's some good
scientists in Israel who've come up with an extraordinary,
almost you might call biological battery, which they've demonstrated
the concept by charging a phone in 45 seconds, fully charging it.
Really very impressive.
It will be ready to go to market in a couple of years.
I'm very impressed with 350-year battery life.
It is damn good, but it's a tiny amount that's needed in order to operate.
They could have done something more interesting with it.
- I mean, say what you want about the Duracell bunny, it's fun to watch. - You're right.
It has a lovely clang and it goes, you know, something.
The Guinness Book of Records, however, gives as the longest experiment
something that is happening down under, which started in the 1920s.
Which is a lot more recent, 120 years more recent.
- FLY BUZZES - Yep? - Is it... Is it Neighbours?
A grotesque social experiment that went horribly wrong.
Turned out to be a documentary all along.
And Madge was created.
Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland has shown
that apparently solid materials can flow like liquids,
and he chose pitch, which was used when hot as a sort of tar-like substance,
but when it's chilled down it becomes incredibly brittle.
If you hit it with a hammer it would shatter into thousands of pieces.
But he wanted to prove that it was liquid, so he suspended some over a funnel,
and at room temperature it's moving very slowly,
it's about 100 billion times more viscous than water.
The pitch drop it is called, the experiment.
Now, unfortunately, this really is...
I think they use that in McDonald's milkshakes.
I have a feeling they have a little bit of it in there, cos sometimes it can be quite...
And the brain freeze that goes with it, exactly. Yeah.
It has actually dropped nine times in 87 years. It's once a decade.
It's exciting, isn't it? Are there many people still watching?
No, the first eight all happened at a time when nobody was watching.
And the eighth was being recorded by video camera, but it malfunctioned at the critical moment.
And the ninth drop in 2014 snapped off because the apparatus was being adjusted, so it doesn't count.
So that's a very long experiment,
but one which really, unfortunately has never been observed, which is a pity.
- When will they stop it? - I don't think they will. I think...
I mean, I don't want to have a go at Queensland, but I don't think there's a lot else going on.
- I think, let's just stick with this. - Cane toads, that's a big problem.
- Cane toads, you can lick a cane toad. - Yeah. - What do you mean you can lick a cane toad?
- You hallucinate. - Do you? - Yeah, if you lick the back of the cane toad.
Who found that out, how many toads had they licked?
"This one's good!"
I was told when I was a boy that if you took the wax from a dog's ear
and rubbed it on the engine of a motorcycle,
it would melt and go up into you and give you incredible hallucinations.
I tried it and it didn't work. I think someone was...
I think you were hallucinating when you dreamt someone told you that.
I think someone was pulling my leg. You know how it is when kids go, "apparently..."
I just love the idea of you with a Q-Tip and a dog going, "Come on. Come on.
"Here, boy. Daddy needs to get high."
You must have done that when you were a kid, surely.
I don't know about the earwax from dogs, no.
There was a certain... It was drying banana skins and smoking that, it was pretty unpleasant.
And then of course I joined a rock and roll band, and things changed quite dramatically.
Yes. You sobered up completely.
So, excellent. Yeah. There you go.
That's the Clarendon Dry Pile,
the world's longest scientific experiment.
It's been quietly ringing bells in the City of Dreaming Spires for 174 years.
What use is half a copy of the Daily Telegraph? That's a very pleasing photograph.
Makes your butt look good. Look at that, that looks good.
Yes, it does, doesn't it? That is a fine, fine pair of nates.
Footballers used to put magazines down the back of their socks,
in the days when you were allowed to tackle from behind.
- Well, that's interesting. So to stop them getting hacked. - Where they got kicked in the legs.
- Is it, well, they used to put newspaper, fish and chips were... - Yes. - ..sold in newspaper,
and it was because it was the cheapest way to get a clean wrapper.
Absolutely, but I'll draw a line now,
because you'll get it just by default.
It's the Spend A Penny question.
- The lavatorial answer. - So half a copy of the... - Daily Telegraph.
- Wow, that's a lot going on... - I know what you're thinking of,
you're immediately thinking of essuyage, of wiping, aren't you?
That's not the answer.
I'm thinking of something else. At football matches when I was a kid, when people stood,
there was, I think more than an apocryphal side of the fact that
when something warm ran down the back of your leg, there was a fella,
two people behind you peeing in a rolled up newspaper.
So you got past the person in front of you.
He got the blame, but it was the bloke behind him who was actually peeing.
You're too squashed in to do anything about it,
but it wasn't that, obviously, and it wouldn't have been the Telegraph at the Chelsea Shed.
- No, I don't think so! - That's where it all went wrong.
It was used until the 1970s as a test, as an index, to test?
- Oh, if it could flush away. - Yes? - The length of time spent on...
- Not that, that's a very good... - But if you put it down the toilet, flush that away... - If you could flush it.
A lavatory had to be powerful enough to be able to flush down half
a Daily Telegraph.
- That's quite a lot to flush away, isn't it? - Yeah.
- It's a lot to flush, isn't it? - It is, it is. And it's...
Hell of a lot of shit in the Daily Telegraph.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
- Very good. - Boom, boom.
Ha, ha, nice one.
- Not a unanimous round of applause, I noticed. - Not unanimous, no.
They now use a synthetic sludge stimulant.
- SUGGS: What, to read? - No!
- Christ! - No, that would do it.
- It's in the Daily Mail. - Yeah, that's the Daily Mail.
- No, it's... - LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It's synthetic sludge stimulant,
a mixture of yeast, water, seed husks, peanut oil,
miso paste and shredded tissue, otherwise known as fake poo.
Unilever developed it for their Domex Toilet Academy,
which is in India.
They hope to be able to install 24,000 new lavatories in India,
for World Toilet Day, 2015.
It's a very important thing though, a third of the world's population don't have a flushing toilet.
Absolutely. In India, a staggering 90% of Indians own a mobile phone,
but only 50% have flush loos.
- Yeah. - Priorities, and it's all priorities.
According to insurance claims, a staggering 800,000 mobile phones
- are accidentally flushed down the loo in Britain each year. - At least they don't have that problem.
Quite, exactly.
- So... - They just needed a packet of vegetarian sausages, take it from me. - Really?
- That would probably be the closest poo replica you can find. - Yes.
- But they're absolutely delicious. - I'm sure they are.
So let's go to the Victorians, who are, of course, as always,
more ambitious when it came to the loos.
George Jennings, he was the man. His pedestal vase.
He flushed down, to show its capacity,
ten apples, four pieces of paper,
a flat sponge and an apprentice's cap.
Swept away in a single flash at the public debut of his pedestal vase.
It's like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
He install the first-ever public lavatories for the Great Exhibition in 1851.
It was a great success and the loos had 827,280 visitors.
How would they know it was that number?
- Counting. - Goodness me. - To count everyone who goes to the loo is just ridiculous.
But there's another thing you can count.
The amount of water you use? the right of loo roll you use?
- Penny! - These were the first public loos.
- You paid a penny. - Spend a penny! - They count the pennies.
They counted the pennies and it came to 827,280.
And for that penny you got a clean seat, a towel, a comb, a shoeshine
and a nice hole in the partition, just in case.
Er, no. No.
So, anyway, that was the beginning of the euphemism "to spend a penny."
There it began, and still it goes on in some families.
What would you do with the world's longest corkscrew?
Undo the world's most convivial bottle of wine.
- Well, exactly. That's perfect. - Obviously.
I would make, I would make a sex toy for pigs.
Oh, that's very good.
- Because you know about the fact... - The pig's got a little corkscrew...
- ..a little curly corkscrew of a knoblet. - Not just pigs as well.
- Oh, is it not for taking out plugs... - Ducks.
LAUGHTER
Have you been looking for someone who goes the other way?
As it were.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Oh, dear.
- I love it when it's a genuine... - I know!
So, this is a helical structure. It's not really a corkscrew,
but it's the longest that occurs in nature.
And I have one.
I mean, I say I have one, I don't have one growing about my person,
I have one on my person, as it were, now it's on my person.
I can't believe you're being so blase about this, you've killed a unicorn!
- LAUGHTER - Yeah.
- You're a monster! - Oh, JK Rowling gave me permission.
Um, it's not a unicorn,
though some believe the unicorn myth sprang from this...
- Is it the narwhal? - Narwhal! Absolutely right. And... - Very good.
- I'm pretty sure that's made up. - Yeah. - What is a narwhal?
- This guy. - There it is. - What? - I know. Isn't it astonishing? - No way!
You think it's been glued on by someone at the Natural History Unit in Bristol,
but it is a real creature.
It's a whale, and the word narwhal means dead body, 'Nar' in Norse,
because it's a rather grey, unappetising-looking flesh.
But what do you think it is? Do you think it's horn, or tooth, or what?
- I imagine it's hair, always hair, isn't it? - In this case it isn't, it is actually a tooth.
It's a tooth without enamel. It is a single tooth that bursts out of it.
I mean, it's phenomenal.
And nobody quite knows, A, why it's corkscrewed
and what it's for.
The assumption people make, because it's on the male,
must be that it's for fighting other males for the right to mate.
But nobody's ever observed two... Oh, well, hang on...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
No. They rub them together as a bonding thing,
it's not fighting, they don't hurt each other.
- Rub them together as a bonding sort of thing? - Yeah. - That's right. - They've been to private school.
Keep telling yourself that, Stephen, I don't know who you're fooling.
SUGGS: It's the only way they ever get to chew.
They get a grape between them and kind of...
- They're very much the Ken Dodd of the oceans. - They are, aren't they?
They actually eat their food by hoovering it up
and just inhaling it, virtually.
They're not krill eaters, like a lot of the larger whales.
The most common form of death, which is strange,
cos you might think they could get out of it with this,
is they get trapped under the ice.
Massive entrapments can sometimes kill as many as 100, which is very sad.
And they're called sassats, these entrapments.
You'd think maybe they could get them down and poke up.
- Exactly, twist open a hole in the ice. - Yes.
But it's fascinating that a creature like that, you know,
we think we cover the world with our natural history documentaries,
there are whole channels devoted to it,
and people go out in boats and they're quietly watching.
But we still just don't know what that's for.
That's...I think it's nice when there's a mystery about animals.
We're very grateful to Raff Fells, who lent us his snooker cue, and...
- Maybe they are just attractive to the female whales. - It may be that.
- Yeah, it may just be that. - It may be like, ooh, I like your one. - Yeah.
- It must be awful when you have to give birth to a boy one. - Ooh!
- I think it grows. I hope. - Let's hope it grows afterwards.
Yes, anyway. What has a long tail and loses long jumps?
SAX PLAYS
Oh, dear! Seems to be getting worse. Yes?
The conga. The human conga.
Of course, you are famous for your congas.
Not the conga. But a particular person
who had long hair and lost a long jump. It's that simple.
My little boy said to me this morning, he's two, he came up to me and he goes, "I'm a dog."
"I'm a dog." And I said, "Can you wag your tail?"
And he said, "I haven't got a tail."
I said, "You haven't got a tail?" He goes, "I'm not a real dog."
I like the way he thinks.
- They have trained him well. - I do love him so. - Aww!
- It's animal kingdom? - It's in the animal kingdom, it's human, I'll give you that.
- And it had a long tail? - Mmm. Which made them lose the long jump.
- The tail... The tail lands in the sand. - Yes.
- And makes your jump shorter. - Exactly. What sort of tail would that be?
- Ponytail. - Ponytail. Yes, and there she is.
She made a fantastic jump in the World Championship in 2011. It was 6.9 metres.
She was from Belarus, her name was Nastassia Mironchyk-Ivanova.
And there you can see exactly what happened.
A great jump, and that tail counts, I'm afraid, so she came fourth on that basis.
Still a good jump.
It looks to me, that photo on the left, it looks as if she is treating that sandpit like a cat would.
But long jump doesn't seem to have changed much.
Run along, you bounce off the wooden or whatever it is made of these days,
and you fly through the air and you jump.
Can you think of any innovations that might have been tried?
It used to be, in the first Olympics, it was a standing jump, wasn't it?
It was the standing jump, yes.
But in terms of long jump, they did try a rather obvious innovation to make them go further.
SUGGS: Marshmallows.
JIMMY: Custard would be interesting, wouldn't it? Custard.
It was the jumpers themselves who tried it. They were banned by the International Athletic Federation.
- Springs. - No, that would be good.
Springs, I like that. Very Beano, somehow, isn't I? Very comic.
Steroids.
What did Dick Fosbury do to the high jump? He revolutionised it.
- He jumped over backwards. - He jumped over backwards, it caused the Fosbury flop.
- Were they jumping forwards? - Exactly.
They dived.
They tried to somersault in the air,
like someone who has just scored a goal.
And they found that that got them further.
Unfortunately they tried kind of off-season,
- and the International Amateur Athletics Federation... - Landed on their heads.
..saw it happening and ruled, in rule 185.1C, as you well know,
that an athlete fails if he employs any form of somersaulting whilst running up or in the act of jumping
because they thought it was so far off the original.
And in fact they would have done that to Fosbury,
if Fosbury hadn't been smart enough to save his flop for the actual Olympic Games.
He was awarded a gold medal, so it was too late for them to change it.
So if you turn up now with giant marshmallows tied to your feet, on the day,
there's nothing they can do about it.
On the day they can't touch you.
Anyway, what human endurance record
- gets broken every eight months? - Pregnancy.
LAUGHTER
Just stop and think now.
How is that an endurance record?
Every eight months, on average, the world's oldest person...
- Dies. Or something like that. - Brilliant Claudia, absolutely right.
Every eight months on average, yeah, the world's oldest person dies.
At the moment they may be the oldest person in the world somewhere in,
I don't know, Kazakhstan, or somewhere.
- There are certain places... - It's normally Japan.
- Well, Japan is... - It's always Japan. - ..Japan, Costa Rica,
nearly always near the sea. Sardinia is another place.
- Bournemouth. - Bournemouth, maybe. - LAUGHTER
Who's that? Do you remember her? She is a very extraordinary exception,
who stayed the oldest person for a very long time.
She died in 1997, aged 122
and 164 days, so 122 and a third and the rest.
She was a smoker and she hogged pole position for more than two years.
She died in '97, she knew van Gogh.
And Bruce Forsyth.
- LAUGHTER - And Bruce Forsyth, of course, absolutely.
She was a fabulous figure.
She said, "the only wrinkle I have, I'm sitting on."
LAUGHTER
But terrific, terrifically humorous and extraordinary woman
and her name was Jeanne Calment.
And that's exactly where she lived, around Arles. Extraordinary.
Lots of olive oil, obviously. That seems to be good.
There are parts of the world where people seem to live unusually long,
they're called "blue zones" and you can see them there.
Loma Linda, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Sardinia, Icaria,
which is where Icarus is said to have dropped into the sea,
and Okinawa.
All of them by the sea, so maybe seafood is a good thing,
and omega 3s which come from, sorry, am I in the way?
- I'm just checking Australia. - Oh, no, I'm afraid...
- Doesn't look good, does not look good. - No luck there.
They say it's less dairy, don't they?
Good red wine, good, sort of, ordinary red wine.
- I'll tell you where a great place to live is, the sea. - Yes.
LAUGHTER
- It really feels like... - That's very blue.
- ..it really feels like you could last there. - Yeah.
- Highly blue. - Dry land seems to be holding us back.
Is it genuinely a scientific fact about bringing booze home from your holiday
that makes it taste different when you get home?
- I know, it does. - The most delicious old plonk
when you're sitting on the beach, you get it home, and your neighbours' teeth fall out.
- It's so true. - There's like, there's only a couple of tastes,
but there's a million different flavours, because it's the nose,
and what you're smelling when you're on holiday is the beach and there's other things around.
It's particularly true of cold wine.
And you've got your feet up and you're relaxed and lovely, and it's beautiful, of course.
It's very cold and you're hot, and when it's cold you taste less of it.
Chilled Retsina is a perfect example.
I do remember being on holiday recently in southern Italy, and this delicious chilled rose.
And I said to the fella after much pidgin Italian,
"What is this? It's absolutely fantastic."
He went to his missus and he came back and he went,
"it is wine, signore."
Stupid English pig. What do you think it is?
I was with a couple in Ischia, and they said, this wine is liquid sunshine, they said.
"What's it called?" And they looked at it, Lachryma Christi.
They turned to me and they said, "What does Lachryma Christi mean?"
I said, "It means the tears of Christ."
They went, "My goodness, we shouldn't be drinking this!"
This ought to be valuable.
Bloody hell, he was upset!
He must have been gutted. Did they lose at home?
Anyway, sorry. Very strange.
So, anyway, there we are with age.
Someone breaks the world's oldest living person record every eight months,
which brings us stumbling into the long lost land of General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers if you would, please.
- What is cryogenics? - Where they freeze someone's head, right.
- No. - KLAXON SOUNDS
- Ah, you see? Thank you. - No problem at all.
My problem with that is, OK, you get an incredibly wealthy guy,
like your Walt Disney, and you go,
OK, we're going to freeze your head so they can find a cure for what killed you.
Brilliant idea.
Will they be able to find a cure for being decapitated?
So, what is cryogenics, then?
Cryogenics is the study of what happens to things under extreme cold,
almost approaching absolute zero, but it's not
what happens when you freeze people in order to wake them up again later.
Does anyone know what the actual freezing of people is called as opposed to cryogenics?
- Winter. - Cryonics. - Cryonics, well done. Winter, very good!
- Cryonics is the right answer. - Thank you. - Clever you.
So, don't confuse cryonics with cryogenics.
Though it must be said, if you follow the OED online,
they keep up with usage, and in science fiction
they use "cryogenically frozen" to mean cryonically frozen.
But to be precise, because there is a real study, cryogenics which is very important
for superconductivity and other things, and that's cryogenics.
- Also fish fingers. - And for fish fingers.
So, good, excellent.
Can you name a famous person who is kept in cryonic preservation?
GONG SOUNDS
Walt Disney.
KLAXON SOUNDS
You were doing so well!
He was. He definitely was!
- Everyone knows that! - Quite a few people believe in cryonic preservation,
but Walt Disney. I'm sorry.
You need to do that in a more Scottish voice. Once again, more Scottish.
- SCOTTISH ACCENT: - Quite a few people believe in cryonic preservation, but Walt DISNAE.
APPLAUSE Good!
No. He died of lung cancer in 1966 and was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
And his daughter was astonished by this bizarre urban myth that Walt Disney was cryonically frozen.
She's going to be even more astonished
when he's thawed out and comes back.
Ta da!
There is... Probably the most famous person that was cryonically preserved
was Professor James Bedford of the University of California.
Pretty much the father of cryo-preservation.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the definition of famous.
I know, he's famous in one community.
He's not Miley Cyrus, is he?
Who?
January 12, 1967 he was frozen,
and amongst the cryonics community, January 12 is known as Bedford Day.
That was his name. So he's famous amongst that particular group of people.
Which is not huge, I grant you.
Cryogenics is the study of very cold things, freezing dead people is cryonics.
What colour is the dark side of the moon?
Well, you can't see it, Stephen, so no-one really knows.
Oh, that's not true at all.
The dark side of the moon is the part which is dark when it's...
That dreadful Pink Floyd album that won't go out of the charts.
- That lasted.... - That thing, yeah.
..a very long time, sold 50 million copies and counting.
But you can see a horned moon or a new moon,
you can see the sliver and then the dark bit.
It reflects, what does it reflect?
It is light, we'll show you a bit of horned moon here.
There's a horned moon
and there's a shine on it that comes as a reflection of the Earth.
So, it's actually a kind of blue, but it's not really blue,
it's turquoise, according to the Mauna Loa lab,
the observatory in Hawaii.
So it has earth-shine, which is turquoise.
That's what the colour of the dark side of the moon is.
- In case you wanted to know. - It's lovely. - Very nice.
At least, I say "the moon,"
but how many moons does the earth have?
- Oh, God! - Yeah... - LAUGHTER
BUZZER Most definitely only one.
- Oh, dear. Oh, dear. - Of course. KLAXON SOUNDS
- It had to be that. - Of course. - Yeah.
- It is THE moon, I think I'm with him. - They've changed it.
- KLAXON SOUNDS - They call it...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
SUGGS: The one and only moon!
- Well, there are moons around, around other planets... - The moon in June, all them songs.
- They're all about "the moon." - There are lots of orbiting objects, aren't there?
- Some of them are far away. - Lots of orbiting objects, yes.
We gave an argument there were hundreds, last time, to confuse you,
but there's another argument which seems compelling and interesting, which is that there are none.
Which is to say that the moon is not a moon.
- The moon actually qualifies... - Christ!
We've discovered it's turquoise and now it's not there.
- LAUGHTER - No, it's there,
but it maybe qualifies as a planet.
A wanderer, a planet...
Well, the Clangers lived on it, didn't they? We know that.
- Soup Dragon and all that. - That's true.
In order to be a planet, the International Astronomical Union, in 2006, laid down definitions.
These were the ones that booted out Pluto, I think.
- So, it has to orbit the sun... - Right.
..it has to be massive enough for its own gravity to make it round.
It has to have cleared its neighbourhood of smaller objects.
The moon comfortably fulfils the first two.
On the third it makes more sense to say that the Earth and moon
TOGETHER have cleared their neighbourhood.
The Earth certainly hasn't cleared the moon,
so they are a binary system, like binary stars.
- Like lichen. - Yeah, exactly, exactly.
So, there is a genuine possibility some people...
LAUGHTER
And the sun's gravitational effect on the moon
is more than twice that of the Earth's.
So we don't have nearly as much gravitational effect.
There is a good reason to suspect
that we are actually in possession of a fellow planet.
All them songs binned, eh?
You're a musician. There's a gap in the market. Write a song called The Little Planet Out There.
# Out tonight, the planet... #
Come with me with my planet, Janet.
You know? Come on. The moon in June, and the planet with
Janet Street Porter.
It goes round the earth, though.
- The earth orbits the moon as well. - What? - Yeah. - Does it? - Hmm.
- I know. Go use an astrolabe... - LAUGHTER
So we've been consistently inconsistent about this,
but tonight we're saying that the Earth doesn't have a moon at all. So there.
That was a slightly mean question to end on, so let's have a liquid lark.
I've got some liquid here in the form of our very own QI water,
as you can see. And what I'm going to do is pour some,
I'm going to not use the sporty... Oh, God, I can't even open it.
I'm going to have to use the sporty bit, there we go. Mmm.
- There we go. - That's as much exercise as you get, is it?
LAUGHTER Oh, so sporty.
What we do is we flatten this card on it
and we turn it upside down
and I want you to try and do this if you can.
And, Oh, God, please work, please work, please work,
please work, please work. There you go, holds up.
Hurray.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So you should, you should be able to try that. Whoa.
- Terrific, terrific fun. - Yeah.
This could not possibly end in tears.
- No, no, try it, honestly. - It could go on and on.
You just, you just turn it over...
There you are you see, it does work!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hang on, so, hang on. And...
- Yay! - Hurray!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Wahey!
And do you want to know something really extraordinary about this?
Watch. This should work.
SUGGS: Oh, leave it out.
GASPING AND APPLAUSE
- JIMMY: Shut up! Shut the front door. - How about that?
- That's pretty amazing, isn't it? - You're actually made of magic.
LAUGHTER
- Go on, let's have a look. - Not bad, is it?
SQUEALING AND APPLAUSE
That's why we gave you these!
Whoa!
LAUGHTER
- Well, hang on a second. - Oh! - What happened there?!
- I know you know JK Rowling, but how is that done? - So,
on that water-bombshell, at long last...
..at long last it is time for the scores.
And it's pretty exciting.
- In first place, it's Claudia with plus nine. - Oh, my goodness.
- WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE - Thank you.
In...
..second place,
with minus eight, is Alan Davies!
- CHEERING AND APPLAUSE - Thank you very much.
In third place,
with minus 16, it's Suggs.
APPLAUSE
Which means our runaway loser,
with minus 37, is Jimmy Carr.
- And this is why! - APPLAUSE
END OF SHOW JINGLE
So, it's goodnight from Claudia, Jimmy, Suggs, Alan and me
and I'll leave you with the last words of the great hotelier,
Conrad Hilton:
"Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub."
Those were his dying words. Goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
WHISTLING