QI 2x5

1. Hello! Hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Q.I.

2. We trawl the trackless ocean of knowledge,

3. only to find that everything smells fishy.

4. On the seafront of understanding, three winkle-pickers and a cockle-warmer. Bill Bailey,

5. Jimmy Carr,

6. Jo Brand and Alan Davies.

7. This evening's Q.I. brainteaser is on the little podia beside you -

8. year five Q.I. module, and the theme is letters.

9. Letters. Show the boys and girls.

10. Right. There. Throughout the show, you'll have the time, we hope,

11. to make up some interesting phrases from your letters. Just work on them as we go?

12. That's right. To keep you occupied. When do we show them - just when we've got one good? If you like.

13. Or towards the end. All right. I've got one too, and I'll show you something I came up with earlier.

14. I'm trying to make "vagina". See? "Q.I. is a..."

15. Came from my arrangement of the letters, you see. It's a play on the initials.

16. Jo's done "quim". Have you?

17. You put the Q.I. in quim.

18. Very good. That's the first time my quim's got a smattering.

19. Look at that! "Vagina doom". Oh, Lord!

20. It might get in the way of the game, but do ask a question. I will do.

21. Fox!

22. I think we get the idea.

23. You must be a blast by the fridge.

24. First, we ought to do an equipment test. Jo, how do you go?

25. Woop-woop-woop! Ne-ow! Very good.

26. Jimmy goes...? HONK!

27. Bill goes...? HO-O-O-OT!

28. Alan goes...? Ahoy! Hello, sailor.

29. Well, we're gonna... Hang on. Who was that?

30. Ahoy! Hello, sailor.

31. Anyway. Let's start firmly on dry ground. Question 1.

32. Would anyone like some koala soup?

33. HONK! Jimmy. Presumably a hungry koala. Of course. It would be a hungry baby koala,

34. because koalas are the only animals to make what is called a soup, or pap.

35. What, in a bowl? They make it in the bowl of their body,

36. and it comes out of their... Arse. Bottom. Yes, their arse.

37. Do I get a point for that? You get a point for knowing "arse", yes.

38. They make soup with their arse? They make a soup for their young with their arse.

39. That's careless parenting, isn't it?

40. Why haven't they had that on the Bush Tucker trial in I'm A Celebrity...?

41. A very good question.

42. They'd bring a koala out and hold it over you...

43. "Koala soup, sir?"

44. It brings a horrible new meaning to "Waiter, there's a hair in my soup."

45. There's a koala there! Behind you!

46. They're not koala bears. They're not bears. Well done. They're marsupials.

47. What are they most closely related to? Fish. Kangaroos. A wombat.

48. Wombat. Although wombats don't have soup, they have cubical faeces.

49. Do they? Little dice. Cubicular? Cubical. He can't get the leaf down.

50. Look, he's been chewing it for ten minutes. Well, no...

51. Isn't that because he's eating the leaves of the eucalyptus tree? He is.

52. It acts as a powerful hallucinogen on the koala,

53. so a lot of the time, they're just saying, "Heh-heh. Whoo-ooah!

54. "What did I come up here for?"

55. Is that how they got the idea...? Well, it's an analgesic, rather than a hallucinogen.

56. They're left numb. I always get those two mixed up.

57. Painkiller. Painkiller. It's poisonous. Well...

58. They have an incredibly long intestine, about a mile long,

59. to digest all that poison that would kill a human. Yes. It's interesting.

60. That's what we're here for, to be quite interesting. You think?

61. They can tell, which scientists can't, the age of a eucalyptus leaf.

62. It has to be between a year and 18 months. If it's any younger,

63. it has no value whatsoever to them.

64. They sleep for 20 to 22 hours a day. I'll give you two points for that.

65. Absolutely right. I won a night out with a koala.

66. Did you? We were out all night. Went to a restaurant and a club.

67. Soup of the day?

68. What do they drink? What did your koala drink? Becks.

69. Oh, they did.

70. In Darug language, "koala" means "no water".

71. The main thing to remember about koala bears is they're not bears.

72. So that leads us to... Where do bears do their business in the winter?

73. Ahoy. In the woods.

74. In the woods, did you say?

75. I'm afraid it is. That's minus 20 points, Alan Davies. 20? For BLEEP's sake.

76. HONK! Jimmy. Is it the Cayman Islands, for tax purposes? No.

77. No. The fact is, for the seven months of the year that they're hibernating,

78. bears do not either urinate or defecate. They must be busting to go when they get up.

79. They have a very clever device. Firstly they recycle the urea as protein in the body,

80. so they don't need to pee, and their body makes a thing called a tappen,

81. which is composed of faeces and hair and different things, and it's a sort of butt plug

82. that seals up their anus. Are they available in the shops yet?

83. She-bears give birth when they're hibernating. When they're asleep?

84. Well, they sort of wake up, rather briefly, to give birth... Jesus.

85. .. and apparently they forget about it afterwards and go back to sleep.

86. They can give birth to up to four cubs, from four different fathers.

87. Sounds like the royal family.

88. Do they live on an estate, by any chance? Do they...?

89. Did you just say "Do they live on an estate?" Well...

90. What you're saying is white-trash bears? Yeah.

91. They sound a little bit white trash.

92. Now. Bear in your bathroom, what shouldn't you squeeze?

93. Toothpaste. Yes! It will make it crazy with desire. Crazy with desire.

94. Lust. Well, a sort of lust for the toothpaste. You'd be safer

95. carrying a freshly-butchered elk leg, in terms of... There was a recent...

96. In the bathroom?

97. Marks & Spencers? Six butchered elks' legs?

98. Bears go crazy for toothpaste. They trashed a tourist camp in the Arctic, polar bears, recently.

99. Toothpaste does something to dogs as well, gets them going.

100. Absolutely right. So even though they are relations...

101. There are dog toothpastes, but they're flavoured in odd ways.

102. Peanut butter, beef, things like that. Trouser leg.

103. So there you are. Don't use toothpaste near a bear.

104. What has huge teeth and only one facial expression?

105. Janet Street-Porter.

106. Oh dear, oh dear. We've got that written up somewhere.

107. I took a fall, but it was worth it.

108. No, it's an animal.

109. Huge teeth and one facial expression? A shark!

110. That's just had quite a bad stroke.

111. All down one side, so it swims in a circle like that.

112. Or a Botox-ed panther.

113. That would qualify.

114. What about a beaver? Beavers have big teeth, and they don't vary their face much.

115. This has the biggest teeth of any mammal. It's a bear.

116. It was thought to be a member of the raccoon family, but it's not. It's a member of the bear family.

117. It's a giant panda!

118. And the giant panda's teeth are so enormous, it constricts its face which is as stiff as a board.

119. You can see one there. It was only 1996 it was discovered to be a bear.

120. It was a cat in a bear suit?

121. This is where science goes very odd,

122. because it was designated a carnivore,

123. although everybody knows... It doesn't eat meat.

124. Most living pandas are actually vegetarian by choice. Yes. They should be eating meat.

125. Bamboo, as we know. Bamboo shoots.

126. And they have to do that for 12 hours a day, cos it's so lacking in nutritive quality.

127. So they're the only bears that don't hibernate. Cos they can't afford it, calorifically.

128. Why are they so cute? They are cute, aren't they? Adorable.

129. Aesthetically, what's going on there? Is it...? Look at the eyes - they're piss-holes in the snow.

130. They certainly are. Have they ever been successfully bred with other bears?

131. Why are they so un-libidinous? I don't know. Do you want to know about their penises?

132. Er... are they those barbed ones that lock in and don't come out again? They point backwards.

133. Into themselves? Ejaculating up...

134. "Oh, sorry, love."

135. Hence the old joke about "Eats, shoots and leaves," I suppose.

136. But it's... I don't know whether that is the reason.

137. Ingrowing genitals won't help breeding. No, it won't.

138. That's obviously it. That must be such a turn-off.

139. "Do you fancy...?"No, not really."

140. "I really don't fancy it at all. It's my species."

141. What can you tell me about bamboo?

142. Hello? You've attracted someone else on to your side.

143. In Hong Kong, and probably elsewhere in south-east Asia,

144. they use bamboo as scaffolding. You're quite right.

145. It's incredibly lightweight, but extraordinarily strong.

146. And they use it over huge buildings! It has a tensile strength greater than steel.

147. Over 5,000 uses of bamboo have been recorded, including desalination, use as a diesel fuel...

148. Tarzan uses it for swimming away from people. Exactly right. Breathing in water.

149. As a cane, to give people a thrashing. Have you been caned with bamboo? Certainly.

150. At school, I was caned almost daily. Two uses of bamboo...

151. And that was just by yourself. Never did me any harm!

152. Are we going through all 5,000 uses? No, we're not.

153. It grows incredibly fast - some species grow up to four foot a day.

154. You can actually watch it grow. It was used as a torture by the Chinese. Four foot a day?

155. Torture as in they would make someone sit on it as it grew? Yes.

156. They'd tie you down over a bamboo cane and it would grow into you. But what is bamboo?

157. It's a plant. What sort? Which is used for growing runner beans... What class of plant?

158. A tree. Tree. Bark. Wood. Grass. It's a grass.

159. It is a type of grass. Well done.

160. Well done. They flower - some of them flower, only it takes them 120 years.

161. Bill used to have a cactus. Yup.

162. Huge cactus, it was all knobbly,

163. and it flowered once every 25 years. Once every 25 years.

164. He only had it 2 weeks, and it flowered!

165. You're a blessed man.

166. I know. I remember...

167. We took it... We didn't take it, we BOUGHT it off an old couple...

168. Left them laying in the passage.

169. You swine!

170. "Quick! Get away! They're coming round!"

171. "You bastards! It's going to flower any minute!

172. "23 years!"

173. And speaking of bamboo,

174. how many Edisons does it take to change a light bulb?

175. Woop-woop-woop! Ne-ow! Yes, Jo?

176. Very good.

177. Well, the answer's very peculiar.

178. He had a belief that in the human mind there were little people,

179. 15 to 20... Oh, for God's sake. He believed that. He did not. He did!

180. When you die, they move into someone else. When you were a psychiatric nurse, if someone came in to you

181. thinking they had little people in them, what would you do? Punch them.

182. Very good. What a loss to the profession you were.

183. Edison did use bamboo as a filament.

184. In his light bulb.

185. Tabloids. You know.

186. Edison believed there were little people in the Convolutions of Broca

187. where memory, among other things, was housed.

188. This is where 15 little people were.

189. The 15 tiny little people, did they have 15 people in them? That's a very good question,

190. but I don't think he got that far. Edison was reckoned to be one of the great inventors.

191. There are 1,093 patents filed to his name. What did he invent?

192. I'm so ashamed. I don't know anything he invented.

193. I thought the light bulb... No, that's... .. gave off more heat than light.

194. The first light bulb was a German called Walter Goebel.

195. Does Alan not get a point for that? For what? More heat than light?

196. That was a guess, though. No, it was not a guess!

197. Hello, sailor!

198. I learnt that in physics. What, "Hello, sailor?"

199. The point about Edison is that he was like... Typewriter!

200. He... Phonograph! The phonograph is, again...

201. He's credited with inventing it. But one thing Edison DID invent -

202. a 100% genuine Edison invention that we use every day, probably...

203. Is it nasal hair-clippers? No, it's not even an object.

204. It's not an object? No. So it's a way of being? Sarcasm.

205. Yeah, he invented sarcasm. Right, yeah. Sure!

206. Oh, yeah. It's actually a word.

207. A word? Yeah. Er...

208. Is it zugzwang? No. The Germans have that, but very good.

209. You wouldn't use that every day. Not unless you were a chess player.

210. I've used it four times today. You're fine till Thursday, then.

211. Crikey? No, not crikey.

212. It's... Floccinaucinihilipilification?

213. He didn't invent that word, but well done for knowing it. It means?

214. The act of assessing something as worthless. Correct. Ooh!

215. Yeah.

216. The word is a simple word of greeting.

217. Hello! That's the word. He invented hello?

218. He invented hello. H-E-L-L-O.

219. The word that existed before as hullo - H-U-L-L-O -

220. was never a greeting, but an expression of surprise. "Hullo! What have we got here?"

221. We still use it in that sense. Do we? "Hullo, what's that?" Don't we?

222. Yes, when we live our life like a 1950s detective film!

223. I often go to my fridge and go, "Hullo! We're out of milk!

224. "I say, Mother, where's the milk?"

225. You beast, you beast, you utter, utter beast.

226. Now we've got Jeffrey Dahmer... What's wrong with me? ..so we're, "Hello!"

227. It's a little camp, I think. Is it? Oooh, hello! Hello!

228. I'd say that was a greeting. Hello, sailor.

229. There's surprise as well. Hello! There's more surprise in that. He-llo... Can we play the game?

230. Anyway. Oh, 'ello. Ahoy, sailor.

231. Originally, it was the word "hallo"... 'Allo! All right.

232. Thank you. There's a story about hello.

233. There was a competition to find out what you say when you answer the phone.

234. And people voted on it, and "hello" came out number one.

235. And what came second was "ahoy-hoy".

236. Which, if you watch The Simpsons, is how Mr Burns answers the phone. Yes. Absolutely.

237. What it is, that was Alexander Graham Bell's favoured method of answering the phone.

238. Ahoy-oy. Which I still use. Do you? Oh, yeah.

239. Whereas I get mocked for using "Hullo!"

240. Not on the phone! That's perfectly acceptable!

241. It's a surprise!

242. "Good Lord!"

243. Stephen, what was the last thing that made you go, "Hullo!"?

244. It was a genital wart. I knew it!

245. I knew it would be something to do with genitals. I knew it!

246. "Hello" happened to be one of Edison's favourite words.

247. When he first recorded sound, he shouted "Halloo!", which is a cry from the hunting field.

248. Halloo was the first recorded word, and he reckoned it sounded very clear.

249. He discovered this while testing Alexander Graham Bell's prototype.

250. The first written use of hello with an E is...?

251. In a letter from Edison in 1887. And Alexander Graham Bell preferred "Ahoy-hoy!" In our house,

252. if you ring me dad, he answers "What?"

253. "Yes?" Like that. Well, of course, the telephone is a fantastically rude thing.

254. It's like going, "Speak to me now. Speak to me now. Speak to me now."

255. If you banged on someone's desk and said "I will make a noise till you speak to me!"

256. you'd consider it unbelievably rude!

257. That's what they had before telephone. "Speak to me now!"

258. "Speak to me now!" Exactly.

259. And then you've got, "Call waiting! Call waiting!"

260. Exactly.

261. So there we are. Edison's really useful invention - the word "hello".

262. Now, how do you know...? I don't know, it's like occupational therapy in an old people's home, really.

263. Just extraordinary!

264. What have you got here?

265. "Put Smarties tubes on cats legs - make them walk like a robot."

266. Brilliant!

267. That is absolutely wonderful.

268. Used all his letters!

269. That is unbe-BLEEPing-lievable.

270. It makes sense! Yes. It would walk like a robot.

271. It doesn't make a LOT of sense. It's an idea. It's like giving people an idea.

272. I don't know if you saw, I was on Countdown. Puts this to shame.

273. Look, I can't even imagine how you managed to do that!

274. I'm sure you can't. I'll try that.

275. It does work, actually. It's a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

276. If you get them going down the stairs, it's especially good.

277. It would make a very good splint for a broken cat's leg.

278. Sometimes it's how they break their legs. You just leave it on.

279. Hullo! That cat's broken its leg!

280. I say! Mother, do you have any empty Smarties tubes?

281. What's with the Biro in the mouth?

282. He's given up smoking, but he needs a substitute!

283. One of my proudest facts is that I am possibly the last ever Pipe Smoker Of The Year.

284. New government rules have made it unlikely there will be another one.

285. I saw an interesting article - you were in it - in The Chap magazine.

286. You were talking about pipe smokers, and the fact that actually, the act of having a pipe

287. does bestow trustworthiness. Out of two builders, you'd choose the one with the pipe, cos...

288. Is it sort of classier?

289. Absolutely right. Brilliant.

290. You've jotted the lines in a little tableau.

291. Thank you. Wonderful.

292. Now, our weekly report from the frontiers of knowledge,

293. which those who ought to know better call General Ignorance.

294. Name a dinosaur beginning with B. Ahoy.

295. Brontosaurus.

296. Brontosaurus. ..is a dinosaur. No, it isn't.

297. WAS a dinosaur. Never was.

298. It was a misnomer. There's never been a category of dinosaur called brontosaurus.

299. Where does brontosaurus come from, then? It's a complicated story.

300. There was a skeleton which was once labelled with the name brontosaurus,

301. but it turns out to have been a mis-identified apatosaurus.

302. The mistake arose because the apatosaurus's body was mixed up with the skull of a camarasaurus.

303. They just got a load of bones in a crate...? A bit like this.

304. That had been named first.

305. "Tiberius can look mad." Very good.

306. Oh, hello! Er, pterodactyl.

307. A bterodactyl? A bTyrannosaurus Rex! I've got one here.

308. That's a brontosaurus! No! A brachiosaurus! A brachiosaurus. Five points for you.

309. Have you brought all your toys in?

310. It belongs to young Luke Fletcher, the son of one of our researchers.

311. We thank him for lending it.

312. Thank you, Luke. Isn't Barney...? Very good! Two points.

313. Very good indeed. Barney the purple dinosaur on the play-mat.

314. You could have had barosaurus, barapasaurus,

315. bagaceratops, obviously... We didn't want to go for the obvious ones.

316. becklespinax, byronosaurus, and my personal favourite, which is bambiraptor.

317. Aww! Bambi-raptor! A savage baby deer? Yes!

318. Right. Fingers, again, on your mushroomoids.

319. How long can a chicken live without its head?

320. Ahoy! HONK! HO-O-O-OT! Alan.

321. Er... 15 to 30 seconds.

322. No. Does it have private medical cover? Woop-woop-woop!

323. As long as it takes it to cross the road.

324. I know how long it takes a live chicken to become a Pret a Manger sandwich. Do you know that?

325. No. Do tell. 55 minutes. Good Lord! That's fresh.

326. It's fresh. It is. Don't you mean "Hello!"?

327. It's not always "Hello!". They run around for half an hour. No.

328. You'll be amazed. 48 hours? A week or two? No, much longer.

329. Seven years. Two years.

330. Two years? Two years. Two years? No, no, it's famous!

331. I give you Mike, the headless chicken, from... Mike? Where are you?the town of Fruita

332. in Colorado. He was in Time magazine, Life magazine... A really big six-foot chicken,

333. who looked a bit like a bloke? No.

334. His head was chopped off, but enough jugular vein and brainstem remained

335. Wait a second...! Honestly. Check it out.

336. I'm going to check that out. Do. He was fed with an eye-dropper.

337. Why don't they just cook him?

338. He lived a happy and famous life! When Col Sanders was after him...

339. He actually... The first thing to come up on a search engine for "mike the headless chicken"

340. is miketheheadlesschicken.org, and it's Mike the Headless Chicken For President!

341. There you are!

342. He is a cult. There's a Mike the Headless Chicken song!

343. "Mike the headless chicken A legend of the west

344. "No farmer's axe Could stop his heart

345. "A-beating in his breast." Fingers on buzzers.

346. Who discovered penicillin? Ahoy! Woop-woop-woop! HONK!

347. Fleming. Obviously. Oh, dear.

348. I mean, he did. No, he didn't. He did! No, he didn't.

349. He did! On mouldy bread, which you rub in your cuts.

350. No. Woop-woop-woop! Yes?

351. Was it Bob Fleming, from the Fast Show?

352. It wasn't Bob Fleming. Nor was it Ian Fleming. Alexander the Great!

353. Nor was it any Alexander.

354. I want you to think of young Arab stableboys rubbing things into their inner thighs. Mouldy bread!

355. Lumberjacks, when they cut their fingers, mouldy bread.

356. Yep...

357. Ernest Duchesne was a Frenchman

358. who like watching Arab stableboys rub things into their thighs. How would we have known?

359. He noticed that what they rubbed to get rid of saddle sores

360. was the mould on the side of the saddle. The nomadic Bedouin have been doing this for 1,000 years.

361. They were observed by Duchesne, who wrote a paper, submitted it to the Institut Pasteur,

362. who didn't even acknowledge receipt,

363. and he died completely uncelebrated.

364. But then, in 1949, five years after Alexander Fleming,

365. he was posthumously awarded with rediscovering it.

366. So Fleming only re-rediscovered it. What did he die of?

367. Ironically, he died of TB, which penicillin would have helped.

368. Ah. Just one of those sad things. There we are.

369. Now, here are some pictures for us, boys and girls.

370. Four famous brainboxes - which is the odd one out? We have, reading left to right,

371. Arthur Conan Doyle, Niels Bohr - Nobel prize-winning physicist -

372. Dmitri Shostakovich, composer, and another Nobel prize-winner, Albert Camus, novelist.

373. Who's the odd one out? Woop-woop-woop! Yes?

374. There's only one with glasses on.

375. Camus is the only one smoking? No, there's two smoking.

376. Is he the only one that played in goal for Algeria?

377. Right area! Not the only one. The only one with Algiers...

378. Did Shostakovich play for...? No.

379. Forget Algeria. They were all first-team goalkeepers. Three of them were.

380. Conan Doyle believed in fairies.

381. He also played in goal for Portsmouth. Did he? Did he?

382. Yes. He was a proper goalkeeper. His stance was like that.

383. Niels Bohr played in the University of Copenhagen first team. Presumably...

384. Albert Camus, as you've said, was goalkeeper as well, for University of Algiers, national.

385. Could that be acknowledged, that I...? I'm giving you five points.

386. Shostakovich was a centre-forward.

387. Banged in 40 a season with Sparta Moscow. So he did!

388. He was an official official. He was a qualified referee.

389. There he is. Imposed on the body... He's got tubes, going round...

390. .. of Pierluigi Collini, I think.

391. Do you know a Shostakovich tune? I could give you one of his goalkeeping moves, but...

392. Even though he was a referee? Oh, sorry, yes. That's all right. Just keep up.

393. And so to the final whistle!

394. In-n-n-n... last place...

395. Any reason for that? .. with minus 35... Oh, God!

396. Alan Davies.

397. Thank you! In third place, with minus 5, it's Bill Bailey!

398. In second place, with eight points,

399. it's Jo Brand!

400. But thanks to his way with an anagram, in first place, with 15 points, Jimmy Carr!

401. And that's it from Q.I. this week.

402. To Bill, Jimmy, Jo and Alan, there's nothing left to say but the words of the immortal Swedes -

403. the winner takes it all, the loser standing small. Goodnight.