QI 2x2

1. Hello and welcome to QI, the show which give thoughts wings, flies in the face of convention

2. and goes coo in the chimney of knowledge.

3. Roosting alongside me are Rich Hall, Phil Kay,

4. Jo Brand and Alan Davies.

5. First let me introduce the QI Spot The Nostril Competition.

6. Your task tonight is to draw a picture of a kiwi,

7. a bird that some say is a missing link between mammals and birds,

8. paying attention to its nostrils.

9. I will reward the best effort with a nest egg... You're staring at me. You do know what a kiwi is?

10. Yeah, I've seen one in New Zealand. They're nocturnal.

11. You have to go in a kiwi zoo. They have them in virtually every town.

12. It'll be someone's living room and you'll go in and there'll be a dark room and a little glass thing. Aw!

13. National bird. It is.

14. Never see it, can't fly. Rubbish!

15. But your task, if you choose to accept it, Jim, is to draw one.

16. Alan. Alan. Sorry. What's the national bird of England?

17. I'll tell you what it is for women. Thrush.

18. Do you know what it is for men?

19. Uh... Cock.

20. Sorted.

21. Cock and thrush. Yes. Good name for a pub. Good name for a pub.

22. There are pubs called The Cock Inn.

23. It's one of the jokes in Carry On where Charles Hawtrey is playing a detective following Sid James.

24. Carry On Loving, I think it is.

25. And he says, "Went for lunch to The Cock Inn. Had drinks with two other women. Left Cock Inn."

26. That implies you've got a left cock and a right cock.

27. So, cock, thrush, kiwi!

28. I've got to draw all three?

29. No, just draw me a kiwi, paying special attention to the nostrils.

30. Imagine if your nostrils were just above your anus.

31. It would be unpleasant.

32. Good. We want to know how you sound, so, Jo, sing to me.

33. Rich?

34. Phil?

35. Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh!

36. Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh!

37. That is extraordinary.

38. Hang on. Phil did not know that was the sound.

39. Let's make sure we weren't all having hallucinations.

40. Rise and shine, good morning!

41. And Alan goes...? ♪ Fruity, fruity, fruity!

42. There! Didn't guess that one, did you? No.

43. A voice in my ear has told me that the national bird of England is the European robin.

44. So let's head south for the winter. Alan, what's the difference between an ostrich and a lion?

45. Why the stars? Is that a clue? It's a clue to this rather weird story.

46. An ostrich is a flightless bird with a long neck, runs about 40mph,

47. lays big eggs and is edible, quite a delicacy, farmed.

48. Yes. Lion, king of the jungle, big cat, kill you with a single blow.

49. There are many differences. Is there any particular one you're thinking of?

50. One of the most famous African explorers was the Scotsman... David Livingstone. Thank you, Phil.

51. He wrote, "I can distinguish between them with certainty,

52. "only by knowing that the ostrich roars by day, the lion by night."

53. He described the idea that lions have an impressive roar as mere majestic twaddle

54. and said they sounded identical to ostriches.

55. Let's demonstrate that. This is a lion.

56. Jeez!

57. This is the sound of an ostrich.

58. Yes, Phil? David Livingstone worked in the mines. His ears were damaged. He couldn't be blamed.

59. Stanley was lucky when he said, "Dr Livingstone, I presume,"

60. he wasn't mistaken for a leopard and shot.

61. If Siegfried and Roy had worked with ostriches, not big cats, they'd still be working today.

62. Johnny Cash was attacked by an ostrich. Did you know that? No.

63. Very ferociously. Never quite recovered.

64. I saw one kick someone in the goolies on telly the other day.

65. Really caught him a treat! Can we get points for being interesting?

66. Yeah. In some countries, linoleum is a form of currency.

67. That's interesting, but is it true?

68. You said it was interesting, right?

69. We have a question for you, Rich.

70. Explain how to French-kiss a woodpecker.

71. You would have to seduce it.

72. You have to get it interested in you, put a toothpick in your mouth.

73. Say nice things to it. "Oh, that's nice plumage!"

74. Then you give it a date rape drug.

75. Should all else fail! Yes.

76. Does French-kissing mean kissing people with tongues?

77. Yes. Sorry.

78. Are you seeing anyone at the moment?

79. Yes, with tongues. I thought that was very attractive. Why would anyone want to...?

80. Woodpecker tongues are amazing things. Let's see one.

81. There you go. Oh! One of the strangest things in nature.

82. It extends to two-thirds of its body length, it's covered in sticky saliva, vicious barbs

83. and has an ear at the end of it.

84. So it can listen to its prey.

85. It uses the beak for pecking at bark. An ear at the end of its tongue?

86. A thing that detects sound. Can you say that again?

87. Absolutely. Pardon?

88. To fit it into its mouth, it has to wrap it round its brain.

89. Woodpeckers are very popular on creationist websites.

90. They argue that this is such an extraordinary creature designed so fit for its purpose

91. that it couldn't have evolved.

92. Sometimes up to 15 or 16 times a second it beats the wood

93. to make a hole and generates immense forces.

94. 250 times more forces than an astronaut endures. It's 1,000 Gs.

95. It has amazing muscles around its brain to stop it from shattering.

96. I think this drawing looks like - when you go to Ikea and they give you instructions...

97. Insert tongue A into groove B...

98. If the pecker's got wood, why go for tongue, you may argue!

99. But it is a pretty astonishing animal.

100. Could we have an offshoot of this programme called Quite Unnecessary?

101. Can I be on that? Absolutely.

102. I just can't quite see how different it would be.

103. Phil, does your bird like chocolate? My bird? Yeah.

104. My bird likes chocolate, yes. It's very popular.

105. - Have you got a bird then? - I don't know.

106. A parrot would like chocolate. Their hooked beak's great for getting right into the toffee.

107. A pelican doesn't like chocolate. It prefers toffee.

108. Owls quite like chocolate behind them. Then they can rotate and show off.

109. If you give a crow a Malteser, it's like, "No way!"

110. You can't give animals chocolate because it makes them depressed. That's right.

111. You have to buy special chocolate for dogs

112. which you can give to the kids and tell them it's dusty and old.

113. Christmas chocolate that's gone white and dusty.

114. I've eaten dog chocolate. It's like a phrase. "Oh, I've eaten dog chocolate!"

115. It's part of folklore. My bird don't like chocolates! You're quite right.

116. How many points does he get for that? He'll get some points maybe.

117. How good is their sense of taste, birds?

118. Absolutely minimal. "It's a seed, I don't care, get it in."

119. They only have 20 or 30 taste buds.

120. I thought it was less than that. Did you?

121. I thought it was 15 to 18.

122. And humans have how many, would you say? 25,000.

123. It's about 9,000 or 10,000.

124. Pretty close. But new ones grow every five days. Five days? They last about five days.

125. Chocolate would be toxic, it would kill them.

126. Kill them? It's poisonous to us, but the lethal dose is high.

127. Would a whole tin of Quality Street kill you? 22 pounds is the lethal dose for a human.

128. That's nothing. Nothing!

129. 22 pounds? A little Smartie would kill a small songbird, for example.

130. You sick...

131. A friend of mine had a hamster and it wasn't very well, so her dad gave it brandy.

132. Guess what happened next?

133. Severe alcohol poisoning.

134. Terminal alcohol poisoning? Oh, absolutely.

135. Oh, dear! "Is he better?"

136. "Go to bed. You'll see in the morning. Get down the shops!"

137. When I was a teenager, someone I know gave their dog LSD.

138. Oh, my Lord! They went to Glastonbury.

139. I went into a friend's house and on the landing they had this football.

140. In a merry mood I kicked it through the open window. I converted it.

141. I had never heard of these things that people who have hamsters have - these little balls.

142. I had kicked the hamster right out of the window.

143. Did it die? No, it survived. It seemed perfectly cheerful.

144. Have you seen these balls? Whoo-oo!

145. I bet it thought, "That new ball I got for Christmas is bloody brilliant!"

146. It's a pity Bill Bailey's not here.

147. Bill's girlfriend used to take their dog to work in an old people's home and it ate entire boxes of Daz.

148. And it would eat pants as well.

149. Like a washing machine. Poo out some white pants?

150. Pants would come out of its bum. Were they white? Well, "ish".

151. You wouldn't pop them straight on.

152. That's probably true. We had a cat that could open the fridge.

153. It would lie on its back with its paws under the fridge and yank it open. Really? Then he was in.

154. He had the turkey halfway to the cat flap before we found him.

155. That's like Tom And Jerry.

156. He was eating it really fast as we were running towards him.

157. We went to grab him and he jumped straight out the cat flap, hissing.

158. So, what weighs six pounds, covers 18 square feet and has to be changed once a month?

159. Someone's got to do it.

160. One of my sanitary towels.

161. Sorry. Jo Brand!

162. Did you think everyone else was about to leap in and say that?

163. I thought Alan might. Is that one of your sanitary towels up there?

164. Do you have wallpaper? I have embroidered ones specially made by a lady-in-waiting of the Queen.

165. Um, outdoors or indoors?

166. A flag? It belongs to each and every one of us.

167. Skin. Very good. Skin.

168. It's the largest organ in the body.

169. It may be in YOUR body.

170. I've got a huge cock. I think we'll forfeit you for that.

171. That's how predictable that was!

172. You almost fell exactly into our trap.

173. That counts as putting one foot into it, so minus five to you.

174. In a square inch of skin, there are 20 feet of blood vessels.

175. Just a single square inch of skin. 1,300 nerve cells.

176. And 100 sweat glands.

177. Cells of the human body are constantly being replaced.

178. We lose 50,000 cells a...? Second. Yes.

179. People get through around 900 skins in a lifetime.

180. True facts. Here's a question.

181. Does putting perfumed sachets in your drawers help conception?

182. It will help. It'll give a meadow-like feel to the bedroom and everyone will be relaxed.

183. Certainly in that sense and there's an even more direct sense

184. which is rather astonishing. Is it to do with lavender?

185. It's the lily of the valley. It helps your sperm count. Even weirder than that.

186. Sperm can smell.

187. Sperm can smell whether you've got clean underwear on and if you have,

188. it will come out to play.

189. Well, they can certainly smell the smell of lily of the valley.

190. Someone's sitting in a lab somewhere with sperm going, "Here's something." They're all going...

191. People will be alive because of that research in a few years.

192. You have great faith in science.

193. The thing is, the only people that smell of lily of the valley are old ladies, aren't they?

194. It's a Yardley fragrance. It is. So if you're an old lady, wahey!

195. I'm quite looking forward to it. You'll have the sperm chasing you down the bookies. Fantastic.

196. It has been a mystery how sperm can all go in the same direction,

197. so fast, and whether or not the ovum puts out a scent trail.

198. The closest German scientists at Ruhr University got to replicating it is this scent called bourgeonal.

199. They tried other smells?

200. Thousands of others. This one makes them align and race towards them.

201. They'll use it in fertility clinics.

202. Here's a thing. Work this out. Two brothers have a variety stage act.

203. One brother punches a member of the audience on stage

204. and the other brother is arrested.

205. Why would that be? Two brothers are doing a variety act?

206. They're Siamese twins. Absolutely.

207. Give the man full maximum points.

208. Chang and Eng Bunker was their name and they are why conjoined twins are called Siamese twins.

209. They came from Siam and went to America where they became an entertainment act.

210. They lived to the age of 63, each married one of a pair of sisters

211. and had 21 children between them.

212. It's hard to imagine. You try to conjure a scene of how it worked.

213. How many cocks did they have? They had one each.

214. They were not joined at the cock which would be unfortunate.

215. They got on incredibly well, though on that boat journey from Siam, they had a fight.

216. One of them wanted a cold bath and the other didn't and the crew and captain had to... Separate them?

217. That's it. Throw a bucket of cold water over them, I suppose!

218. The one on the left looks really serious. He was the straight man.

219. One of them took to drink and the other didn't.

220. Imagine that, your twin pissed.

221. "Come on, I'm getting you home!" "I love you!"

222. Chang, not unnaturally as the drinker, died first

223. and Eng woke up to find his brother dead and gave a howl of despair.

224. They ran to fetch a doctor to try and separate him from his dead twin

225. and he had coiled himself round his twin and died within an hour of this.

226. The post-mortem revealed that it was what was then called a broken heart. It was a nervous shock.

227. A lot of comedy teams have broken up and they've done very well solo.

228. Thank you for that tender remark.

229. I'm feeling much better about deformity, now we've talked it through. Absolutely.

230. They had a genuine dignity.

231. There we are. What happened was that Chang, the brother who landed the punch and became an alcoholic,

232. was guilty of assault, but the judge decided he couldn't jail the other one and set them both free.

233. Some advantage in being conjoined twins. Licence to whack people!

234. On to our own version of this barbaric ritual called QI -

235. the general ignorance round. What is the loudest thing in the ocean?

236. The blue whale. Blue whale? Oh, dear!

237. The blue whale is nothing like as loud as this. You can hear it for 10,000 miles. Another whale can.

238. It's not, in amplitude, the loudest thing.

239. Yes? Is it not the sea itself?

240. Ahh! No.

241. Crabs? Not quite crabs. A lot smaller. Lobsters?

242. Is it some sort of vibrating thing?

243. What Alan is doing is exactly right.

244. What I'm doing is exactly right. Imagine a trillion things with little claws doing this.

245. Crayfish? Lobsters? Smaller.

246. Shrimps? Yes. They're the loudest thing? It's quiet down there!

247. It's called a shrimp layer and there are trillions of them.

248. They do this at the same time and the claws don't make the noise.

249. It's the bubble of air popping that is created by this thing that comes out at 30 feet per second.

250. It pops and it keeps people awake if they come inland near the coast.

251. Trillions of them. Really vast.

252. They can white out a submarine's sonar and deafen the operators.

253. Subs below the layer hear nothing above it and subs above it hear nothing below it.

254. The shrimps are floating in the water? Yes.

255. So what's more likely? Being killed by lightning or by an asteroid?

256. Lightning.

257. Oh, dear!

258. No-one's ever been killed by an asteroid. That's rubbish. Prove it.

259. Oddly enough, it's rather unfair, in the UK you're more likely to be struck by an asteroid,

260. but in America being struck by lightning is more likely.

261. Research into NEOs, Near Earth Objects,

262. estimates that a large one strikes us once every million years with the likely death toll of a billion.

263. That's never happened! The chances of dying are one in six million.

264. It'll happen soon. It won't! The asteroid just needs to be two kilometres wide.

265. We've seen craters with ones wider than that.

266. It's due at any moment. Where would you like it to land?

267. Wherever it lands, it's gonna destroy everybody.

268. Yorkshire. Yorkshire!

269. They'd just be delighted it didn't land in Lancashire.

270. "Aye, it come to Yorkshire!"

271. Most people are struck by lightning on golf courses. That's true.

272. My aunt got struck by lightning. You have an ant? Oh, your aunt!

273. I'm so sorry. Yeah.

274. I do apologise.

275. I was imagining this little... That too. She had a pet ant.

276. My aunt... had a little pet ant.

277. She got struck between the first and second holes.

278. Oh, very good! Something in her stance.

279. Now, where do camels come from?

280. Phil? Over there.

281. Usually out of the shimmering, miragey horizon.

282. True. You may be pointing in the right direction.

283. Where do they originate from? Africa. Africa did you say? Yes.

284. No. Europe. Europe did you say? Yes.

285. Not Europe, no, but that wasn't a forfeit one.

286. Asia? Asia?

287. You're desperate for those points.

288. Is it Australia? No, it's not Australia.

289. America. You got some points back! Really? No!

290. They did. Cigarettes maybe. Like horses and dogs.

291. Like horses and dogs, camels grew up in the grasslands of America 20 million years ago. Rubbish!

292. Fair enough, fair enough.

293. The land masses would have been adjoin-ed.

294. The Bering Strait was land then, yes. In those days they were more like giraffes or gazelles.

295. The camel is the only mammal apart from humans that will smoke a cigarette and enjoy it.

296. What about beagles? The camel handlers give them a puff.

297. Beagles hate it. And they inhale and exhale smoke.

298. I totally made that up. That's rubbish.

299. But it was quite a good one and it got you going. It did.

300. They became extinct in North America during the last Ice Age and haven't been back, except in zoos.

301. So, next question. Why are flamingoes pink?

302. It's what they eat. Which is? Shrimps.

303. You really didn't know that, did you?

304. You were shocked. What are the chances of that?

305. They eat something that affects their pigmentation. They do.

306. It's blue-green algae. They stand on one leg.

307. If they lifted the other one, they'd fall down. They change them, otherwise their leg would rot.

308. Is that right? I made that up as well, but I'm doing quite well.

309. Twice I made you go, "Is that right?"

310. As well as green chlorophyll, the algae has blue and red pigments, so its bloom is often red,

311. violet, brown, yellow, even orange.

312. So from one silly bill to another, artists, we need to see your kiwis.

313. So we'll start at this end.

314. This is a sequential drawing of the nostril, there in situ and here sneezing, so as early movie footage,

315. it's "atchoo"!

316. I've drawn the assembly instructions for a kiwi.

317. Like you find at Ikea.

318. And this is where you screw on the beak, in "C".

319. With a Phillips screw. That's the completed project.

320. OK, very good. Jo? I just sort of did colouring in.

321. Oh, that's a beautiful bird!

322. Have you got the nostrils at the end of this crest? I have.

323. We discovered in an earlier round that birds have no taste.

324. This bird?

325. No! It's very charming.

326. Alan, let's have a look at yours.

327. I've done him... That's him with his shades on.

328. Even though it's night. Yeah. Well, it wouldn't matter.

329. And his nostrils are on the end of his beak for sniffing.

330. Whether through some random act or whether through brilliance,

331. you've got it spot-on, the nostrils are at the end of the beak.

332. Officially, you measure a bird's bill from the tip to the nostril.

333. Why would you want to do that? Well, quite!

334. So, officially, the kiwi has the shortest bill of all birds.

335. Its nostrils frequently get clogged up, but they're very good sneezers.

336. So let's count our chickens!

337. In first place, with a proud three points, it's Rich.

338. And in second place with one point, it's Phil.

339. In third place with minus eight, it's Jo.

340. What did I get minus for?

341. But a proud and flourishing last with minus 40, it's Alan!

342. Let me leave you with an extraordinary bird tale.

343. Tibbles, the lighthouse keeper's cat, arrived on Stephen's Island in New Zealand last century.

344. Soon piles of small bird corpses began piling up by the back door.

345. The puzzled lighthouse keeper sent off some samples

346. and learned that Tibbles had discovered a new species -

347. the only flightless perching bird in the world ever recorded.

348. But by the time the news arrived,

349. Tibbles had killed every last example of the Stephen's Island wren.

350. It's the only case of a single individual wiping out every member of a whole species.

351. On that note, from Jo, Rich, Phil, Alan, myself, goodnight.