QI 1x4

1. Hello.

2. Hello and welcome to QI, the quiz that rhymes with Stephen Fry.

3. Let's meet the members of our happy band -

4. Alan Davies, Howie Goodall, Jez Hardy,

5. Jo Brand.

6. The rules are simple, I'm a pimple. No, that's enough rhyming.

7. The rules are a cinch, the questions are not.

8. If no-one gets one right, I award points for being interesting, and penalties for being obvious.

9. Each panel member has an attention-seeking device.

10. Ah! Howard goes...

11. Jo goes...

12. Alan goes...

13. Cashier number four, please.

14. Right, the first question which is, in fact, very easy.

15. So fingers on buzzers, please. What is the main ingredient of air?

16. Cashier number four, please.

17. Oxygen.

18. So early on!

19. No, no.

20. I'm afraid...

21. Nitrogen?

22. Nitrogen is the right answer, well done.

23. If you'd said carbon dioxide, you'd have lost 3,000 points.

24. There is so little in the air. The trees eat it all.

25. Trees get rid of carbon dioxide.

26. If you're in a lift with someone, after a while... Methane.

27. I'm second-guessing you there.

28. After a while there won't be enough air and that'll be carbon dioxide.

29. The cause of death would be... Take a tree in with you.

30. Yes.

31. You can hide, as well. Entertaining yourself.

32. It should be a fruit tree, so there'll be some food, as well.

33. A shelter from the burning light and possibly, a canoe to escape.

34. In the event of flooding.

35. Nitrogen is 78% of air, 21% of air is oxygen.

36. 300th of 1% is carbon dioxide.

37. Nitrogen is lethal.

38. If you breathed in nitrogen only, you would die. Yes, because you do need oxygen.

39. In scuba-diving, nitrogen narcosis means you get nitrogen bubbles in your veins.

40. Yes. That's called the bends. People think you go a bit... But you get stuck in odd positions.

41. Cos your body can't move properly because it's full of nitrogen.

42. No, that's when the wind changes when you're swinging on a chair and running with scissors.

43. From air to areas - what is the most boring place in Britain?

44. Is it the Big Brother house?

45. I'm feeling rather good about Big Brother, not that I've seen it.

46. But my agent got a call yesterday.

47. Um, I don't know what this means. They wondered if...

48. That blew the dust off the phone!

49. "Mr Fry's agent?"

50. What are they called - inmates? Housemates.

51. Yes, housemates. Apparently, they're allowed to have a book.

52. And one of the housemates...

53. No, they're not. They are. They can't read. They go like that.

54. One of them asked for one of my books.

55. The coffee table was a bit wonky.

56. I remember looking forward to... Day eight.

57. Wonderful. Newcastle, I believe.

58. Newcastle is far from being the most boring...

59. Thank you for dragging us back to the question. Has there been an actual survey of amenities?

60. "Survey" is a very good word because I'm talking technically the most boring place. Flattest?

61. Not... Argos.

62. Most Greek islands are very pleasant.

63. Next is a very good catalogue - you can see how the clothes would look if attractive people wore them.

64. Howard, I believe you were trying to buzz.

65. Moving up on Alan's idea - is this a place on the Ordinance Survey where there are no signs of any kind?

66. Absolutely right. Salisbury Plain? No.

67. It's not Salisbury Plain. Sorry, Howard.

68. I jumped in on your applause.

69. I should take away five points - Salisbury Plain has probably

70. the most important reference - Stonehenge!

71. Which is quite an interesting place.

72. It is.

73. My uncle stood on a landmine on Salisbury Plain on National Service.

74. The Army use it a lot. It really hurt, but...

75. He didn't lose a foot. If they'd known it would really hurt...

76. It was much worse than stepping on a drawing pin,

77. which really, really hurt.

78. A paper cut's the worst thing.

79. People say, "There's nothing worse than a paper cut. Not a sword, not a chain saw, nothing."

80. "Nothing worse than a summer cold. Not syphilis, grenade up the bum."

81. East Anglia. No, thank you very much.

82. As an East Anglian, I refute that with every fibre of my being.

83. You can't "refute it" - bad grammar.

84. You mean "rebut". No, I mean "repudiate". Fair enough.

85. If you weren't showing off, you could have said "reject". Yes.

86. Bad semantics, not bad grammar. Whatever.

87. I stand hideously corrected and shamed.

88. A field outside Ousefleet near Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire. Absolutely nothing in it.

89. Only an electricity pylon and some overhead cabling.

90. It's the blankest square kilometre in the country.

91. Is it not in East Anglia?

92. It's the north, Lincolnshire. There's a terrifyingly large moorhen in the corner.

93. Yes, there is!

94. Charles Dickens would not agree.

95. He'd have voted for Chelmsford - he called it "the most stupid spot

96. "on the face of the Earth".

97. He should know - he invented the word boredom.

98. Did you know that? Isn't that interesting? In Bleak House in 1852.

99. A quite interesting ripple ran round the audience.

100. What did Barbara Cartland do, in 1983, which involved a sofa

101. and a hot water bottle?

102. She was buried in a cardboard coffin underneath an oak tree at her house.

103. Five points for being quite interesting.

104. The tree was planted by Elizabeth I.

105. The mourners were given a leaf as a remembrance. That is very good.

106. That is very good. Why cardboard?

107. So it would perish? I presume to melt into the earth, the sod.

108. They weren't sure if she was dead.

109. The last 50 years, it was a bone of contention among most people.

110. Wasn't 1983...? She wrote a book.

111. She broke the record for writing the largest number of books. In a year.

112. 38, 39.

113. 32. Three points before you give me every number in the known universe!

114. 23 novels.

115. She got into the Guinness Book Of Records, writing only for...

116. I had that written down.

117. In 78 years, she produced over 600 books.

118. Has anyone here ever read one? Do you know anyone who's read one?

119. Has anyone ever seen one?

120. Hospitals is where you do see them. Psychiatric hospitals, mark you.

121. She said, "I'll keep going until my face falls off."

122. A face that reminded Clive James of two crows that had crash-landed into the White Cliffs of Dover.

123. Now, what is 15 miles away from everybody and smells of geraniums?

124. An out-of-town shop called World Of Geraniums.

125. "No" is the answer to that.

126. 15 miles from everyone? It must be straight up. Or down.

127. Or down. Or towards the Earth's core itself. Yes.

128. Like you're never over eight feet from a rat?

129. You're never over 15 miles from the smell of geraniums.

130. Space smells like a geranium? Mustard gas smells like geraniums.

131. Mustard gas smells like mustard.

132. It's a famous gas which forms a layer in our atmosphere.

133. Ozone!

134. No points, that was too easy.

135. Having said it was a famous layer, come on! Look, there we are.

136. The ozone layer, wedged in between the stratosphere and mesosphere.

137. Smells of geraniums? It does, faintly.

138. I put it to you, that were you to go into the ozone layer and sniff,

139. you'd die.

140. You would not have time to say, "It smells a bit like..."

141. Someone would go, "What's it smell like?"

142. Ozone is a poisonous form of oxygen.

143. Without it, the sun's rays would kill all land animals and plants.

144. Ozone is blue and smells faintly of geraniums.

145. My favourite layer is the Heaviside layer. Bit heavy, is it?

146. It's named after someone called Heaviside, a marvellous self-taught physicist.

147. "Self-taught" sounds like he writes it on the blackboard, runs round then sits down.

148. What resembles a half-melted rubber bulldog?

149. A description of a great actor.

150. Walter Matthau. Yes, it is Walter Matthau. Did I get that?

151. That's according to critic John Simon.

152. From actors to atomic physics - what are atoms mostly made of?

153. They are not most... They are just made of the thing that they are.

154. Yes?

155. They are not combined with other atoms, they are alone.

156. Therefore they are just an atom. It's not exactly a trick question.

157. They are mostly made of nothing.

158. Even a diamond atom is more nothing than it is solid. A tiny piece of nothing.

159. It has electrons, or is that a molecule?

160. Protons and neutrons in the nucleus and the electron that whizzes round.

161. An atom is much emptier than the solar system.

162. Rutherford, who first described the inside of an atom,

163. likened it to a few flies in a cathedral.

164. The simplest element is hydrogen, with a nucleus of just one proton,

165. around which orbits one electron.

166. Now, if the proton is the size of a drawing pin... Yeah, yeah?

167. The electron is a pinhead, 1km away.

168. If I put a pineapple on my head, I'd be Carmen Miranda, but I don't.

169. You're not quite in the spirit of this.

170. They're hard to divide up into more than one part.

171. Yes, the word means "no cut". "Can't split".

172. It's Greek, as in "appendectomy" - to cut out the appendix and so on.

173. A wonderful word - "tmesis" - the only English word that begins with the letters TM.

174. It's when you cut a word in half with another word like sen-BLEEP-ing-ational.

175. Scunthorpe. Thank you very much.

176. Now, what's the difference between a hydrogen atom and a grand piano?

177. Well, size. Yes. Shape. Yes.

178. Yes, it's a foolish question. And Iraq did have the capability of splitting a grand piano.

179. Very good.

180. Five points, Yes, but Howard, a musician.

181. Hydrogen was identified by an eccentric man called Cavendish.

182. He was a reclusive nutter who did lots of very good scientific things.

183. Brother of the Duke of Devonshire. He spent his life doing experiments.

184. He lived in Great Marlborough Street in Soho.

185. And if you walk from there to Jermyn Street, it takes three minutes.

186. He identified hydrogen in about 1770, something like that.

187. In 1770, the world's first grand piano was made by a man called Americus Backers,

188. who had his studio in Jermyn Street at exactly the same time.

189. So they probably met at the same coffee shop. Brilliant, five points.

190. - Peculiar man, peculiar man. - How odd, an English aristocrat who's also peculiar

191. Howard will get this - there are 89 frequencies to a hydrogen atom.

192. There are 88 keys on a piano.

193. But on an imperial grand, there are more than 88 keys. Are there?

194. That looks like an imperial grand, so it has four extra notes.

195. It's still beaten by the hydrogen atom.

196. Late-breaking news in my ear says a hydrogen atom has 100 frequencies.

197. Now for an easy one - how many wives did Henry VIII have?

198. Cashier number four, please.

199. Six.

200. Alan! The SIX Wives Of Henry VIII.

201. Just because other people have made the mistake, that's no excuse.

202. He had major commitment problems, didn't he?

203. I imagine every time he said, "Oh, it's not you, it's me."

204. They'd have a trial separation - a brief trial and a major separation. Of heads and shoulders, exactly.

205. Must have been very hard for the new woman -

206. "I see her face everywhere. It's on a pole."

207. Actually... Can I say something?

208. When he died and his body was moved from Greenwich up to Selfridges or somewhere.

209. Maybe Westminster Abbey, we'll check on that.

210. Possibly Kentucky Fried Chicken.

211. His guts were so rotten and it was such a hot day,

212. his stomach exploded - what a nice image!

213. He was syphilitic and a mess of a man. He sounds bloody gorgeous!

214. As a young man, he was considered one of the most attractive men in Europe.

215. I prefer syphilitic and bloated. I can't understand people who get a bit bloated.

216. It's an interesting fact - the real answer is three or four.

217. His marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled.

218. She was betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine.

219. All parties agreed no legal marriage took place.

220. That leaves five. The Pope declared his marriage to Anne Boleyn void.

221. He was still married to Catherine of Aragon.

222. As head of the Church of England, Henry declared that invalid -

223. a man could not marry his brother's wife.

224. Did he or did he not have six weddings? But that's not the question.

225. Did he not say, "This is my wife," six times? Six mothers-in-law.

226. And they all said, "He is my bloated, syphilitic son-in-law."

227. But he said he'd never been married before.

228. The family said, "We were there!" Not legal.

229. They'd wake up in the morning dead for saying that. No legal status.

230. How many toast racks did he have? Count the toast racks.

231. Can I ask about that painting? Yes. Is it all wrong in perspective?

232. It looks 2D. All Holbein's picture's are flat.

233. Like a pancake or an omelette.

234. He did a marvellous one you have to see from below. That's what he said after he bollocksed it up.

235. "You have to see it from below"!

236. It's really crap.

237. When you move underneath it, it becomes the right perspective.

238. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

239. Good Lord! You are extraordinary.

240. It took four years. Yeah. The same time it takes to paint the Forth Bridge in Scotland.

241. You're struggling towards being interesting there. Two points.

242. There's a wonderful line

243. in The Agony And The Ecstasy - Charlton Heston is Michelangelo...

244. Charlton Heston! An effete Italian homosexual!

245. Played by the president of the gun club! Athletic homosexual.

246. I thought he was a wussy. He may have preferred man-on-man action...

247. I don't... Doesn't make him Julian Clary!

248. Just because he read books like me.

249. I don't mean he was gay, I thought Leonardo da Vinci...

250. Other way round. I thought he was the hard case.

251. Michelangelo was an animal. He never washed.

252. He had a beard. Alan Yentob said this.

253. But yes, he did prefer to take it up the Gary Glitter.

254. So, depending on whether you believe the Pope or the King,

255. he either had four wives, or three.

256. What word rhymes with silver?

257. There is no rhyme for it.

258. Oooh.

259. A lot of people think there's no rhyme.

260. But there is. Bilver? No. Chilver? Yes! Dilver?

261. Well done. I don't know what it means. What is it, a chilver?

262. It's a ewe lamb. A me lamb? It's a lady lamb.

263. A female lamb. A ewe lamb.

264. Ewe. Ewe.

265. Ewe. Where do all the diamonds come from?

266. South Africa.

267. You've done it again!

268. No, all the diamonds come from volcanoes.

269. They're formed under immense heat and pressure beneath the Earth,

270. and are brought to the surface under volcanic eruptions.

271. South Africa is the fifth largest producer after Australia, Botswana, Congo...

272. Botswana. And Russia. Russia!

273. Well done, you. Diamonds are made of pure carbon.

274. As is graphite, the stuff that pencils are made of, but with the atoms arranged slightly differently.

275. Diamonds are the hardest substance - ten on the Moh Hardness Scale.

276. But graphite is one of the softest. As in Mo Better Blues.

277. No, M-O-H, the fellow who gave us this scale.

278. And graphite scores 1.2 or something like that.

279. What about Audley Harrison? He is well-hard.

280. Now, what is invisible and travels at 38mph?

281. Cashier number four, please.

282. Is it...? I think it's the air that we expel from our nasal passages.

283. It isn't that, I'm sorry to say.

284. It's got to be a ghost on a moped or a stealth Skoda.

285. Or a Virgin train.

286. No.

287. Is it a wind like the Mistral or something like that?

288. No.

289. It often travels much faster, but it has been recorded as travelling at 38mph.

290. You could overtake it on a bicycle. A fart.

291. It usually goes much faster. How fast is a fart?

292. Please! That's not very nice.

293. They've measured how fast you sneeze. Maximum speed.

294. No-one's measured how fast we expel gas.I wonder why?

295. You work in lab conditions all day, with Bunsen burners around. Exactly.

296. You could fart and someone'd be on the other side of the lab with a stopwatch. They'd go, "It's here!"

297. 38mph! Can I drag this above the level of They Think This Is All Over, or whatever it is?

298. Is it a tidal wave?

299. A tsunami? No. What's the fastest thing you can think of? Light. Yes!

300. It's the right answer. Is it?

301. Light usually, as you probably know... 186,000 miles a second.

302. I'll give you a few points for that.

303. Someone slowed it down. So they could get into bed before the light went out!

304. That's the only reason there is physics.

305. Top work.

306. No, you're quite right.

307. They put a laser light through ice, glass, frosty - something like that?

308. Much colder than that. Fridge. No! Even colder than that. Igloo.

309. Frozen vodka. So much colder than that. Blackpool.

310. No. Astoundingly, light is, first, invisible.

311. You can't see it, only what bumps into it, or it bumps into.

312. If you could, you wouldn't see anything else.

313. It's said the speed of light is constant, but it isn't.

314. Only in a vacuum is it 186,000 miles a second.

315. In any other medium, the speed varies. Through diamonds, it halves.

316. Is that cos it's going, "Woo-ooh! This is the hardest thing!"

317. But the slowest it's ever been recorded is through sodium

318. at minus 270 degrees,

319. where it travels at 38mph.

320. Now, fingers on buzzers, please, for a chance of an enormous bonus.

321. The final question is on animals. Complete the phrase -

322. "A chameleon changes colour to match its..." Cashier number four...

323. Environment? That counts as background! KLAXON BLARES

324. It's got to be considered hugely wrong. You fell for it. It doesn't.

325. It never has, never will. Temperature?

326. We'll give you a couple for that. JO'S BUZZER: Car?

327. Goes with background. It doesn't change colour to match anything.

328. It changes according to mood. Mood, temperature or emotion, like fear.

329. They change to the colour of the branch they're hanging on! That's the fallacy.

330. Has anyone told them? "I dunno what you're doing that for, we can see you!"

331. "I happen to be in a slightly dodgy mood. I'm not trying to look like this leaf."

332. It used to be thought of them. If you'd asked 100 years ago, "What's well-known about chameleons?"

333. They'd answer, "They live on air." Because they move so very little. They can rarely be seen breathing.

334. Also, their eyes swivel independently. Do they know that?

335. I'm sure they do. Or do they just think the planet's going...!

336. It leaves me to give you the final scores.

337. They are... quite interesting.

338. I fear that in last place is Alan with minus 24 points.

339. In third place, Jeremy with seven.

340. Second is Howard with 13.

341. In the lead is Jo with 36 points. Oh, my word!

342. That's about it from QI this week. There's time for me to thank Howard, Jeremy, Jo and Alan.

343. To finish, an interesting property of graphite, taken from the agony column of the Daily Mirror.

344. "Dear Marge, I noted in your column a few weeks ago the pros and cons of women going without a bra.

345. "I saw a small item in the paper which may help to settle the matter.

346. "It is said that if a woman is not sure whether she should go bra-less,

347. "she should place a pencil under her bosom.

348. "If the pencil stays, she should wear a bra.

349. "I would sign my name to this, but my wife has my pencil." Good night.