QI 6x1

1. Good evening, good evening, good evening. Good evening.

2. Welcome to a QI Children In Need Special.

3. Are you sitting comfortably? Yes!

4. Excellent news. Then I shall begin. Joining me in my fairytale cottage are, in the littlest chair,

5. lovely little Pudsey "Baby Bear" Bear.

6. And, in the medium-sized chair, Ronni "Mummy Bear" Ancona!

7. And, in the big chair, David "Daddy Bear" Mitchell!

8. And Alan "Who's been sleeping in my porridge?" Davies.

9. Now our theme tonight, appropriately enough, is families.

10. We all have them. I must get on! I've got plenty to do here.

11. I've got a programme to do... Oh, my goodness.

12. If I could ask you to vacate the chair, please?

13. I've left a large gap in the studio down the road.

14. Terry Wogan! Oh...

15. Well, well, well, well, well. Oh, shucks.

16. Fabulous to have you from BBC One. Oh, for goodness' sake.

17. I've come to this poor little place just to make my contribution to a humble little programme.

18. Meanwhile, you continue to make a contribution. Keep that money rolling in.

19. You all have buzzers. Ronni goes...

20. David goes... ♪ Daddy, Daddy Cool

21. Terry goes...

22. That was lovely. And Alan goes...

23. Everyone started clapping along! The people want knees ups!

24. They don't want information-based panel shows. Just a knees up.

25. This crowd looks to me like they could do a Mexican Wave!

26. Oh, no, no!

27. Let's start with family wisdom. I want some old wives' tales. Do you know any?

28. Tell me some dubious tales.

29. My granny had a tale or two. I remember, "Love flies out the window when poverty walks in the door."

30. And the other one was, "It doesn't matter whether you are rich or poor, as long as you have money."

31. Cheese gives you bad dreams. Yes.

32. My granny had so many it's a blur.

33. "The higher cows build their nests, the redder a shepherd's face will be if he likes butter,

34. "unless the wind changes direction, in which case he'll turn blind unless he puts vinegar on it."

35. Yes, so many involve catching a cold and going blind.

36. Yes. W... makes you blind.

37. But I have contact lenses, so I can see fine. Contact lenses are the w... charter.

38. Is there much to see?

39. No, to be honest.

40. What about, "A crow follows a busy squirrel"? Eating your crusts?

41. It puts hairs on your chest.

42. That's what my granny told me and my two brothers. Why would she tell ME that?

43. The fact she was the Wolf Woman of Wick may be to do with it!

44. Now here's a burning contemporary issue and a constant niggle.

45. What have artists and composers ever done for Children In Need?

46. Lots! Lots? Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev did a sponsored skip across the Volga.

47. Dressed as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Manet sat in a bath of snails.

48. Rachmaninov ate 48 pies in 68 hours while playing his Second Piano Concerto.

49. Need I go on? It's a damn good start.

50. In some ways, the original Children In Need for London was the creation of an extraordinary institution

51. in the 18th century. Do you know what I mean?

52. There was a foundling hospital. Yes. There was a man called Thomas Coram, a great benefactor of the age.

53. This was an age in which 75% of all children died before the age of five in London.

54. 90% of all children who were born in workhouses died before they were five.

55. So Coram, a successful merchant, badgered people and two of the most influential people who helped

56. were Hogarth, the great artist of the day, and Handel, the composer.

57. They did extraordinary work for it.

58. It was hugely successful and there were so many children they had to have a lottery.

59. If a white ball came out, the child went in,

60. red was a waiting list, a black one, "Sorry, we can't take your child."

61. In 1756, the government said they would guarantee it for every child.

62. And that sort of worked pretty well, but what is phenomenal

63. is that we have lived, and our parents and grandparents probably,

64. in an age when such a thing is inconceivable, but we are a minority of the human race.

65. Most lived with unspeakable suffering, especially for children. And there still is, all over. Yes.

66. That's why Children In Need comes in.

67. We raised, what was it, £35 million last year.

68. We'd need to raise £150 million to make a real difference to the suffering that goes on. Hear, hear.

69. Thank you very much.

70. So the artist Hogarth and the composer Handel helped to establish the Foundling Hospital.

71. Now which of these ladies is more likely to bite off a baby's head?

72. I think it's Ann Widdecombe because she's a Catholic.

73. Terry? I'm not saying Catholics are more likely to bite off babies' heads, but that was once said.

74. Originally, of course, Margaret Thatcher was known as Milk Snatcher,

75. taking the pinta out of innocent babies' mouths, but I think it was Ann Widdecombe, who was misquoted.

76. Somebody said, "Are you hungry?" And she's a good trencherwoman and she said,

77. "Hungry? I'd eat a baby's arse through a wickerwork chair."

78. And that...

79. That is how it grew up from arse to head. An easy enough mistake to make.

80. So easy. What's the wickerwork chair?

81. Not only would I eat a baby's arse, but under awkward circumstances.

82. With chopsticks through a wickerwork chair.

83. Shows how little you know of roughage, lad.

84. He's a stranger to the lavatory, I fear.

85. The reason these two women... I think I know. Yes? Tell.

86. I think it's jelly babies. My dear! You're so completely right!

87. Women who have had children

88. will basically take a jelly baby and check it for nappy rash and cradle cap

89. and attempt to get it into a good school before eating it.

90. Women who haven't had children can enjoy the benefits of jelly babies knowing they can give them back

91. when they've had enough. Ronni, it IS about jelly babies,

92. but the odd thing about the research is that it's mothers who have had children who bite off the heads

93. and women who don't who don't.

94. So lots of points for knowing it was about jelly babies. It's an extraordinary mentality

95. that inquires which part of the jelly baby you bite off first! I know!

96. A lot of universities are short of funding so they have to investigate stupid things. Come on, boys.

97. I'll have a black one if I may.

98. There you are. I get a whole bowl.

99. Three million of these are eaten every week, you know.

100. What's the powdery substance? Cocaine.

101. It's starch to get the jelly out of the mould.

102. Back to family relationships. Ronni, what do new-born babies like best? As a mother of one,

103. I'd like to say crying. Crying.

104. The thing about babies crying is you just think, "What have you got to cry about?

105. "You have no financial problems, relationship problems, you're not haunted by past mistakes."

106. We should be crying on an hourly basis! You don't even have to get out of bed to go for a poo!

107. Lie back... Yeah.

108. "Make the most of it. What is your problem?

109. "These will be the happiest days of your life." Maybe they're stressed about all that's ahead of them.

110. Maybe they can pick up on the stress of all the adults. "This is a nightmare. It's OK now,

111. "but this is going to get worse. One day they'll say I'm not allowed to shit in my bed any more.

112. "They'll dress it up as growing up or something, but it's the first stage of a long surrender!"

113. Never stop soiling yourself! It'll be much better for you.

114. "If you had an ounce of self-respect, you'd soil yourself!"

115. Someone told me that 90% of the attention you garner in your life you receive under the age of three.

116. There's a thought, isn't it?

117. Not for us on television! Surely not us! No, that could be right.

118. A lot of mothers have been led to believe that it's incredibly important to have a bonding process.

119. But babies don't bond particularly in the very first days.

120. They respond, apparently, as much to the cries of a rhesus monkey as to the noise of their mother.

121. All that hard work for bugger all! Get a rhesus monkey in.

122. They get used to your smell after a few weeks and they do like you.

123. That child's clearly not going to bond with its parents!

124. You're crawling towards the age where you can again soil yourself with impunity. What do you mean,

125. crawl towards it? Oh, no! I just...

126. Oh, no!

127. I'm lucky I have the incontinence pants. Yeah, I'm so pleased.

128. Is there a Tena Gentleman? Or only a Tena Lady?

129. Why is it in those ads... What is it about laughter that makes women wet themselves?

130. You have the ads, they're jollying about, and then...

131. Ah. It is odd. I like it when babies soil themselves. My nephew, when he did it,

132. he put his hands on the high chair like that.

133. They get great concentration on their face.

134. While mothers may form an immediate bond with their baby,

135. babies respond equally well to the call of rhesus monkeys. Now what am I describing here?

136. Sustain followed by ululation, followed by sustain, but at a higher frequency,

137. followed by ululation, followed by sustain at the starting frequency.

138. The Arctic Monkeys. Very good.

139. Not Handel's Water Music, is it?

140. No, it's a sound associated with the jungle. It's Morse code for, "I'm stuck in the jungle. Save me."

141. No, think films.

142. Oh, I know what it is! It's the noise Tarzan makes. Yes! Let's hear the real one.

143. Oh, Johnny Weissmuller. I could have opened my mouth and you could dub that on later.

144. The thing that's noticeable about that is it's the same forwards and backwards. Here it is backwards.

145. A kind of simian palindrome. Done by an MGM sound technician with, Weissmuller claimed, his voice.

146. That was his yodel. When you hear it now, as distinct from your memory of it, it's a lot more...

147. .. savage and difficult, isn't it?

148. It's obviously no human voice, rather an ape man. Yeah, exactly.

149. One raised by apes. What's the most famous line from a Tarzan film? That one. "Me Tarzan, you Jane."

150. Except, of course, it never happened. What?

151. Why do these films always forget to put their most famous lines in?

152. No "Play it again, Sam," no "You dirty rat!" An odd thing.

153. Now we all know about the good work done by Children In Need and, of course, Terry's morning show,

154. but how has the Eurovision Song Contest made Europe a better place?

155. How? Because it has, as you can see the dove,

156. it has brought together the nations of Europe. Has it arse! It's divided east from west!

157. I mean... It has brought together the nations of Europe

158. on wings of song!

159. Whether they like it or not!

160. You only have to listen to my commentary to realise how much I believe that!

161. Absolutely.

162. One of the few I remember incredibly well because the winners were one of the most famous pop groups... ABBA!

163. It was ABBA. In the year... 1974. 1974, Brighton.

164. Exactly. With the song... Waterloo.

165. But there happened to be a song that Portugal provided that year.

166. They came second from bottom, only three points. Called Paddington.

167. But it was one of the most important Eurovision songs ever written, for an extraordinary political reason.

168. Are you saying that was the signal for the Portuguese revolution?

169. Yes! I am! It was called E Depois de Adeus, After The Goodbye, sung by Paulo de Carvalho.

170. I think you've got the year wrong. It was the following year when it was being held in Sweden,

171. after ABBA had won, that there was the Portuguese revolution

172. and they came out with guns with carnations in the barrels. Yes, called the Carnation Revolution.

173. We yield to you, but that song was used.

174. A man called Salazar, or his party, had run Portugal for years.

175. He didn't style his regime a fascist one, but he had three days of mourning when Hitler died,

176. so you can call him right wing. Not Franco, but... Pretty close.

177. Bizarrely, he had a stroke and after it he was relieved of command and a man called Caetano

178. became Prime Minister, but they never told Salazar. He went to the grave thinking he still ran it.

179. He was signing things, but he was of no importance whatsoever.

180. That's nice! It's such a lovely way of doing it.

181. That could be a fantastic scheme for so many dictators.

182. They don't get out much. All you need is the noise of some crowds playing on a tape outside,

183. big office, things to sign. I hope when I go mad someone pretends I'm in charge of a large country

184. and gives me things to sign, rather than sedates me and sticks me at a window.

185. How long do you have to have lived in a country to represent them with a song?

186. You don't. Precisely. Celine Dion represented... Switzerland.

187. And she's Canadian. It's a competition between songwriters, isn't it?

188. An Australian called Johnny Logan won twice for Ireland. His father was an Irish tenor. Was he?

189. Patrick O'Hagan. ♪ He used to sing in a very high voice like that all the time

190. How totally distressing!

191. The one thing we rule in, of course, is language at least.

192. 20 and a half, if you count some songs that are bilingual, of the 55 winners have been in English.

193. The French were furious that their singer sang in English. I love it.

194. It used to be the lingua franca and it isn't any more. The world is Anglophone.

195. It's disgusting. They give us such a hard time and use our language! They should be taxed!

196. An English tax - I love it! They should be taxed.

197. In fact, it's a very good source of revenue for us, potentially.

198. All these countries... Look at America, Australia. They're all such glorious nationalists.

199. Make up your own bloody language, if you want to borrow ours!

200. The 1974 Portuguese entry, E Depois de Adeus, was used as a signal to start the military coup

201. that overthrew the 42-year-old dictatorship of Antonio Salazar... in 1974!

202. So one of the... Five! Ignore him.

203. So to one of the few grim regimes without a general involved,

204. to a beastly experience with one in the iron grip of general ignorance!

205. Can you name the family in Swiss Family Robinson? Robinson.

206. No, there is no family called Robinson in it.

207. No. Swiss Family Robinson is a book by a man called Wyss, a Swiss man.

208. Is it a reference to Robinson Crusoe? It is. They are Swiss Robinsons.

209. They don't actually have a surname. They're Ma and Pa and Ernst...

210. But there have been films where they are called Robinson.

211. Are they even Swiss? Well, they are Swiss.

212. a family undergoing a Robinson Crusoe experience.

213. That got changed in 1818 to The Swiss Family Robinson.

214. A third of all the film and TV adaptations call them Robinson.

215. They need a better title altogether. It's like a shortening of the pitch.

216. Swiss family, like Robinson Crusoe. The two most entertaining things we could think of -

217. Robinson Crusoe and a Swiss family.

218. This is dynamite! As long as we can come up with a good title.

219. Now what do you call a boomerang that won't come back? A kylie!

220. A stick!

221. Ah, yes. A kylie is exactly what it is called. Yeah.

222. People say, "Are they called kylies after Kylie Minogue?"

223. But Kylie was a fairly common girl's name in Australia before Kylie Minogue and is named after that.

224. I thought they used them to throw at things, but they throw them behind birds

225. and it drives them towards them. Towards nets. Absolutely right.

226. Birds are spooked by this thing, they think it's a hawk.

227. But don't try to catch it or it'll take your hand off.

228. A boomerang that won't come back is a kylie. Most Aboriginal tribes have returning and non-returning sticks.

229. Who knows where the word kangaroo comes from? I do.

230. When Captain Cook first went to the Antipodes, nobody had much idea what the natives were saying.

231. One of the chaps who worked for Captain Cook said, "What is that animal called?"

232. And the Aborigine said, "Kangaroo."

233. And it was only several years later when they learnt the language

234. that they found that kangaroo means, "I don't know."

235. Oh, not true!

236. Look behind you there.

237. I'm so sorry to let you do that.

238. We knew that you thought that was the case. A common fantasy.

239. The problem is the story got twisted.

240. Gangurru is the Guugu Yimidhirr language for a large black or grey kangaroo.

241. 1,400 miles inland, where Captain Cook's party got,

242. they asked whether there were any kangaroos. There were 200 Aboriginal languages at this point.

243. And they had no idea what the other language's gangurru meant at all,

244. so it got confused, but I'm afraid it isn't true.

245. Well, I prefer it. I prefer it.

246. We started with old wives' tales. Let's end with that old feast of family fun - maths homework.

247. What does this prove?

248. It's not written in usual mathematical language.

249. It's not a message from Al Qaeda? No, it's not! It's written in symbolic logic, if that's any help.

250. Is it about the Portuguese coup starting in '75? It's not!

251. Who's the great logician of the 20th century? Derek Trotter. Sorry? Derek Trotter.

252. A campaigner against nuclear weapons. Bertrand Russell.

253. There he is.

254. He wasn't a barrel of laughs, was he?

255. They say his breath was not good.

256. It wasn't good? Very bad breath, but he was a remarkable man.

257. He wrote Principia Mathematica, a book determined to reinvent maths.

258. It seemed that nothing could be proved or complete in mathematics, which was a huge shock.

259. So he had to set out to prove that mathematics worked.

260. Very, very good at sudoku. Oddly enough, he was said to be not that good at mental arithmetic.

261. To prove mathematics from the very beginning, you establish the first principle of arithmetic.

262. That proves that 1 + 1 = 2.

263. It's a bit late, the 20th century, to prove that.

264. I'd say. A bit late?

265. We've got quite a lot riding, by the 20th century, on 1 + 1 being 2. A lot of engineering happening,

266. a complex international economy. If it doesn't equal 2, what do we do?

267. Burn everything! Anything could fall on our heads, money - you might as well eat it!

268. Forget civilisation! There is a thought that if the sound foundations of mathematics

269. were proved to be rocky, some of the ultimate answers of the universe may never be answered.

270. But a splendid effort. An extraordinary achievement and you bring up his halitosis!

271. It comes to something when you think you achieved that...

272. Imagine meeting him at a party. Old stinky Russell?

273. I met this bloke at a party. He stank. I asked what he did. He said he proved 1 + 1 = 2.

274. I know, but it's a very important principle to understand

275. that you can be gossipy about someone's private hygiene and think they are a great hero.

276. The two don't rule each other out. Similarly, you can have very nice breath and be an idiot.

277. Precisely the point. But Bertie was a great man.

278. "Bertie" to you! Bertie.

279. Bertie Russell. So anyway...

280. Proof that 1 + 1 = 2. Let's see if our scorers know that.

281. As our collective grandmothers almost certainly warned us, all good things must come to an end.

282. It's now time to add up the final scores. My word, my word.

283. This week's big bag of jelly babies, as it happens, with plus 5, goes to Ronni!

284. Ronni Ancona is our winner.

285. Thank you very much! Thank you.

286. We offer a consolatory sherbet dab to David Mitchell with plus 3!

287. And with minus 6 points in third place, a liquorice bootlace to Alan Davies! Thank you.

288. Oh, dear.

289. I am afraid, boys and girls, that on the QI naughty step tonight with minus 9,

290. Sir Terry Wogan!

291. Is this because I pointed out the error in...

292. 1975?

293. We wouldn't be so mean or so low.

294. Children, that's it. It's good night from Terry, David, Ronni, Alan and me.

295. We leave you with some homespun wisdom from George Burns.

296. Happiness is having a large, caring, close-knit family... in another city. Good night.