QI (2003) s16e11 Episode Script
Potpourri
1 This programme contains some strong language.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Welcome to QI, which tonight is a bit of a potpourri - pounds and pounds of pungently perfumed petals of pertinent points piled precariously in a pot for your pleasure.
Mm, that's perfume.
That was very good! Thank you, darling.
Thank you! Not bad for a foreigner.
Mm, that perfume is a clue, just smell that panel-pourri.
The fragrant Cally Beaton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE The pungent Rhod Gilbert.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE The fruity Phill Jupiter.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH And the unmistakable waft of geranium, leather, moss, coffee, toasted cheese, Biro ink, musk, ox, Johnson's baby powder and football sock that is Alan Davies! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Right, let's hear their ringtones.
Cally goes TRADITIONAL TELEPHONE RING Oh, very nice.
Rhod goes MORE MODERN PHONE RING Phill goes NOKIA RINGTONE And Alan goes PHONE DISCONNECT TONE The number you have dialled has not been recognised .
.
you idiot! Sorry about that.
Wow.
OK, I've got a gift for you all now.
I've got your very own QI periscopes.
OK? Have a look.
What are you going to use them for? OK, have a look through.
Oh, that's a good idea.
Yeah It's very clever, because even though you're down below, you can still see the audience, even though you're below the desk.
You have totally understood periscopes! I can't see the audience now! I can't see the audience! No, you need your periscope, darling.
It's the thing My periscope doesn't work.
PHILL: Where's Alan gone?! Alan?! I can see your periscope, Phill, I can see your periscope! I can see yours as well! Are you under the desk? I am under the desk, Alan! I'm coming up! OK.
I'm now above the desk, Phill.
We toyed with the idea of having two five-year-old boys on the panel .
.
and then we thought, "No need!" This is me going down the stairs.
I'm coming up now.
Oh, I've forgotten something.
He's having so much fun under there, you should see his little face.
I really, really enjoyed that.
Phill, get up now.
You're all right.
I'm going to be honest Yeah, do you need a hand? .
.
Getting up takes a bit of a while I'll help you Come on.
That's I'm coming, I'm on my way.
Jesus! I'm on my way.
OK, OK Thank you.
Thanks, Mum.
Can I have this? Yes, you can have them.
Cos we've got quite a high garden wall and I've often wanted to look over it.
Didn't you build the high garden wall, Alan? Uh, yes.
I could It's true to say I could have a lower one.
But really, I want to go like that.
The high garden wall does that for you, to be honest.
Rhod, yours has got no mirrors in it Yes, we've established that.
.
.
because I had yours made in Scandinavia, because the last time you were on, you said it's not possible to see anything in Scandinavia because it's dark all the time.
So I have specially had a periscope made for you where it's just dark all the time.
About two years ago, for a joke, I said that there was no sunshine in Denmark, and you've been waiting there for two years, sitting there, biding your time Do you know, revenge served cold.
I mean, I say two years.
It's been two years for me.
It's probably the next day for you.
Yeah, that's true.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Oh, no! I stand by it! What would you use periscopes for? Let's work out what They're to see difficult things, aren't they? Like what? It could very much show your go-getting attitude at an interview for the Navy, bringing your own periscope.
I was thinking maybe submarines.
Yes.
So submarines, but they don't use the old-fashioned periscope any more on a submarine.
Did the cardboard get soggy? Is that why? Can I ask a question, Sandi? Yes, Rhod.
Is your periscope bigger than ours because you're the host? Well, what can you do? Or is it because of your diminutive stature? Yes, I think because I need the extra help with the periscope.
Imagine how much easier shopping's going to be for you now with that.
Do you know Alpen, they've got Alpen! On submarines, you don't want just one person seeing what's going on, so they project the image now onto monitors.
And here is a wonderful thing - the control panel for the ones you need on a submarine, it normally costs 38,000, and they did a survey of younger sailors who went, "Yeah, it's just exactly the same as an Xbox controller," "and they're 30.
" And they now can be bought in any world port.
The USS Colorado is now equipped exclusively with Xbox controllers and most modern submarines are going to follow suit.
So are they playing games against other submarines? Is that how it works? I think that is one way of referring to warfare, but There was a woman in the 1930s, a Californian woman called Dorothy Beck, and she wanted to draw fish under water.
So she used an inverted periscope, so she got, I think, a local man to hold it.
And he held it into the water, and she sat by the water with a This is not one of her pictures And she would sit by the water, and using the periscope down into the water, she was able to paint and draw fish in their natural habitat.
Periscopes, like telescopes, onlyperi-er.
Now .
.
everybody likes a bit of potpourri, even though, you know, it's both smelly and useless, and that's also true of something else these days - phone boxes.
So, can you suggest something useful to do with a phone box, please? You could put a couple of mirrors in it and get some poor bugger to hold it while you paint fish all day, couldn't you? I like your thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're shower cubicles in California, aren't they? The Calis love to buy them.
The Callys? I've never bought one in my life.
Wahey! You're absolutely right, they can be bought by anybody.
You can buy a phone box for £2,750.
If you're a community or a village, you can adopt one for £1 if you wanted to look after it.
But they have been repurposed in about, well, more than 3,000 ways that we know of.
There's one near us that's a coffee shop.
That's not a lot of customers they get No, well, the guy who runs it has to stand outside the phone box.
He hasn't thought it through.
They've been turned into defibrillator stores, they're art galleries, libraries, an unattended grocery store in Draughton in Yorkshire.
There was one made into an aquarium.
That's a Welsh one, that.
How can you tell that, darling? "Dim arian" Oh, "Dim arian, dim problem.
" "Dim arian, dim problem.
" Do they not have a Welsh word for "problem"? No, it's the English that don't have a word for HEAVILY ACCENTED WELSH: .
.
problem.
They didn't have any problems till the English turned up! Tom Jones bought one, presumably, and then had it exported to LA.
I met Tom Jones once.
I was producing a play, which Tom Jones was going to be in, and I was due to meet him at the Dorchester Hotel.
When I arrived, they said, "Mr Jones would like you to go up to his suite.
" I said, "Fair enough" So she went up there I went up That was the press outside the window! And I knocked on the door, and he opened the door, and he was wearing the SHORTES dressing gown I've ever seen in my life.
It just came to here.
Did you see little Tom? No! Anyway You were about eye level with little Tom, I imagine He's actually charming, we got on very well.
It was also, which you might like, the world's smallest pub for a single day, The Dog And Bone, in the Cambridgeshire village of Shepreth.
They dispensed everything in very small quantities, but unfortunately, they ran out at 10:30 and had to call time.
Dog and Bone, rhyming slang - I see what they've done there.
Yeah, you see what they've done.
For flyering in Edinburgh and postering, we put them all up in the phone boxes, don't we? Well, you guys have people to do it.
I put my own up I enlist my kids to help me put posters up, and this year, I was saying to my daughter, I was like, "Just get in there and put the bloody poster up.
" She was like, "I can't, Mum.
I said, "Will you just do it?!" She said, "There's people having sex in there, Mum - I can't.
" Anybody know who designed the classic phone box? Phoney Box o' the Box family.
Mr Phone Box.
Did all the boxes.
His brother Pill did the pillbox.
Sir Giles Gilbert, there's a Gilbert in it! Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
That's why I knew.
Very, very good.
The man who also had a hand in the design of the Battersea and Bankside Power Station, so currently Tate Modern.
Supposedly, he was inspired by the mausoleum that was designed by the neoclassical architect Sir John Soane for his own tomb, which you can see Oh, you could put a phone in there! Yeah, well, it looks exactly just like it, doesn't it? Yeah! It's at St Pancras Old Church in London, and the different Is that why every time you pick up the phone, it was dead? CROWD GROANS Shut up, shut up! LAUGHTER So there are lots of worthwhile things you can do with a phone box, but what about something that isn't worthwhile? What pointless and puerile phone box prank propagated prolifically from place to place? It was people stuffing themselves in, wasn't it? Yeah, you're absolutely right.
1959, the year of the great phone booth stuffing fad.
It began in Durban in South Africa.
25 students were crammed into a phone box.
It's a world record that has still not been beaten.
I take a very dim view of that.
Some of those guys have only got a toe in.
You're absolutely right.
There was a Canadian school who claimed that they'd got 40 students in, but they had an outsized fraternity hall booth, they laid it on its side.
So, just like you, they decided to bring in some rules.
Right.
So the rules were About time.
.
.
the booth had to be upright, it had to be a normal size, everybody had to have at least half a body inside it.
Only half a body? Half a body.
The stuffing fad spread to lots of other objects - cars, outdoor lavatories, there was a hollow tree at the University of Maine.
Then the next phase was hunkering.
Anybody know what that is? I've heard the phrase hunkering down - that's it.
CALLY: Do you go into holes? SANDI: No, you literally go down onto your haunches for as long as possible.
Is that to hunker, is it? To hunker, yes.
To hunker down? Yeah, so this was apparently a fad - how long could you hunker for? That was a fad?! Yes.
Some people hunkered in phone booths.
That was a thing.
On car roofs Like sitting like this - has this ever been a big thing? Well Anybody else ever done other student pranks? Things like a Chinese fire drill? I grew up in New York - we used to do it all the time.
So you turn up at the lights.
You need a full car of people.
As soon as the lights turn red, you open all the doors and you have to run all the way around the car, and whoever's not in the car when the lights turn green is left behind.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Why is it called the Chinese fire drill? I have absolutely no idea.
We had Chinese burns, didn't we? Oh, yeah, they were very Yeah, do you remember those? Yeah But I like a prank! So there was a Harvard-Yale football match in 2004, and some Yale supporters disguised themselves in Harvard colours, and they gave out red-and-white cards to spectators on the Harvard side of the stadium.
And they said, "If you hold them up above your heads", "it'll say, 'Go Harvard!'" And in fact, it spelled out, "We suck".
Possibly the greatest prankster of all was a Roman emperor.
He was called Elagabalus, and he was only emperor for four years - from 14 to 18 - and he was unbelievably eccentric, decadent, even by standards of the time, and he was a very keen practical joker.
So he once filled a full ceiling above a banqueting hall entirely with flowers, and then had them dumped onto the diners below.
And some of them smothered to death.
It is the only death by potpourri that we know of.
Elagabalus, he was amazing, so he would Quite often, people were having dinner, he would let in lions and bears and leopards while they're eating, and LAUGHTER And not tell anybody they'd been defanged and declawed and it was perfectly fine, and some people died of fright.
He would also let the same animals into people's bedrooms while they were sleeping.
And he was particularly fond of inviting poor people to dinner and giving them paintings of food.
If you were one of those wild animals, though, and you'd been defanged and declawed, your heart wouldn't be in the prank, would it? No, not Stuffing phone boxes was the ice bucket challenge of its day.
Did anybody do the ice bucket challenge? No.
No.
I had the weirdest experience with that.
So I didn't know anything about it, and my son phoned me up and he said, "Mum, Daniel Craig has just challenged you "to the ice bucket challenge.
" Now, I've never met Daniel Daniel Craig?! Yeah.
Anyway, as chance would have it, that evening, I was at a party and there he was.
So, I went up to him and I said, "You bastard.
" "Why have you challenged me to this thing?" I said, "The chances of us ever meeting again, very slight", "let's do it straight away.
" So, we were backstage at the Royal Festival Hall, we went into my dressing room and into the shower, and I have a video of me and Daniel Craig in the shower doing the ice bucket challenge.
Do you spend your whole time with showbiz men, semi-naked, in? Did he come out wearing a very short dressing gown? Sandi, I thought I understood you, but I'm I don't I'm like a magnet.
He was perfectly charming.
Now, to give the show a bit of a "Philip", there have been two King Philips of Macedon, six King Philips of Spain, six King Philips of France, and of course, one King Phillip of QI.
Yay! But when? When will we get a King Philip of England? We're not.
Not never.
Never say never.
In the future.
No, not in the future.
We've had one.
We've had one, but he is not normally taught in the school monarchs.
King Philip of England, he reigned for four years - 1554-1558.
He was actually King Philip II of Spain, but he was king of England and Ireland by virtue of his marriage to Queen Mary, so not a consort like Queen Elizabeth's Prince Philip, but actually crowned king in his own right.
So both their faces were on the coins.
Parliament was called under their joint authority, and he actually lived in England, just under a year, July 1554-1555.
He married her, he was 27, she was 37.
It's kind of an odd thing.
He only spoke Castilian Spanish, so the whole marriage must've been conducted through an interpreter.
I wonder what attracted her to him at 27 when she was 37.
Who knows? It's rather sweet, when she died, he wrote, "I felt a reasonable regret for her death.
" Maybe it's better in Spanish.
He proposed marriage to her half-sister, of course, Elizabeth.
Classy, classy move.
Classy, classy.
The Philippines are named after him, he ruled the Spanish Empire.
He had very slim legs! It does look like they've photoshopped his head onto the body of a child.
Yeah.
In the potpourri show, it's finally time for a bit of Popery.
Ooh.
Potpourri? Potpourri, potpourri, potpourri show Potpurri, yes.
.
.
and time for a bit of Popery.
Popery, ah Yes, do you see? Why would you say the Pope's name three times and then whack his ring with a hammer? His ring? Because Because he forgot the safe word.
APPLAUSE Bloody marvellous.
I live for those moments.
He doesn't say a lot, but when he says it, it lands.
Are you talking about the Pope now? The answer is because he's A nail? Oh Francis, Francis, Francis! Bang.
Because he's dead? Because he's dead, you're absolutely right.
Why do you have to hit his ring with a hammer? OK, so, there's a thing called the Apostolic Camera.
So it's an office of the Roman Curia that is a largely ceremonial office, until the Pope dies.
At this point, the camerlengo, he's the cardinal in charge of the Apostolic Camera.
IN POOR ITALIAN ACCENT: Cardinal in charge.
And he comes.
I'm in charge of it.
His duty is to ceremonially verify And whack you with a fucking hammer.
Bang, bang, bang! Francis, Francis, Francis.
Boom! Right in the ring hole.
Well, kind of.
So he has to call the Pope by his baptismal name three times, so the Pope's baptismal name is Jorge, so he says "Jorge, dormisne?" Jorge! "George, are you sleeping?" And then he has to destroy his Fisherman's ring, so that is the signet ring that he wears of the picture of St Peter fishing, along with the papal's seal.
It is sometimes said that they also have to hit the Pope on the head with the hammer.
I think this seems very improbable, but the Vatican will neither confirm nor deny.
We have asked.
Sticking with priests for the moment, who was the Mad Monk of Russia? Here it comes.
Rasputin is I thought I'd take that for the team.
Take one for the team, thank you, Cally.
Why was he not the mad Monk of Russia? He wasn't mad and he wasn't a monk.
He wasn't a monk, is the truth of it, he was never a monk.
The guy who referred to himself as the Mad Monk was a one-time friend of Rasputin's, he was called Sergei Trufanov, also known as Iliodor, there he is.
And he wrote his memoirs, they were published in New York in 1918, and he published them as the Mad Monk of Russia.
And that book is one of the primary sources that we have for the life of Rasputin.
So the Mad Monk is the less famous Iliodor and not Rasputin, but because we know so much about Rasputin from this book, The Mad Monk of Russia, that is why we associate him.
I think everybody knows that Rasputin was a faith healer, and he parlayed his claim to be able to help the son of the Tsar into a position of tremendous influence in the Russian Imperial court.
There's a theory, a sort of rogue theory about Putin being the reincarnation of Rasputin, and there was a thing that was about, they took some of Putin's pubic hair and then they took some of Rasputin's residual testicular fluid, and the DNA was exactly the same.
I'm struggling with the whole of that story, so Yeah.
I do like the phrase "residual testicular fluid".
Yeah.
I'm going to need I shall be using that again, I'm not sure when.
Can I have a vodka residual testicular fluid, please? So they're going to need an unwashed sheet of some kind? Yeah, Putin left his pubic hairs everywhere.
Yeah, they scraped it off the back of a tiger.
The Mad Monk of Russia wasn't Rasputin, it was some bloke you've never heard of.
Now, we know that Rasputin was a massive player, but who is the most dangerous football player of all time? Stanley Knife Matthews.
Are we talking about offences committed on the field or in another life as an assassin or carpet bombing? No, I'm talking about actually on the football pitch.
Does it have something to do with the early, very early origins of football? It does.
Yes.
In the 16th century, if somebody died accidentally during a football game, all of the players were put on trial for manslaughter.
And, in theory, the person who was responsible for the accident was liable to be hanged.
Now, the courts were reluctant to do this, so the coroner would return a verdict of murder, but the name of the culprit was always John at Stile.
So, it's a legal fiction, it's a bit like John Doe today.
So, on paper, John at Stile is still the most dangerous footballer in history.
There's a wonderful professor in Oxford called Steven Gunn, and he studies I like, I like people to study very specific things.
He studies accidental death in 16th century England.
And we have established, through his work, that football was unbelievably dangerous.
It caused more deaths than sword fighting in the 16th century.
There were at least seven deaths in England, I have to say, beaten only by 56 people who died in archery accidents.
Of the seven football deaths, two accidentally were stabbed with a knife while tackling.
Joint third, sword fighting, wrestling and bell-ringing - three deaths each.
Hammer throwing - two deaths.
One person died in a game of quoits.
I have no idea why.
In one of the archery deaths, there was a man who accidentally shot himself in the head in 1552.
That's quite hard, isn't it? It's quite tricky.
He was called Henry Pert, from Welbeck.
Just got the bow the wrong way round? Well, he drew the bow to full extent Plunk! .
.
and the idea was to aim it straight up into the air, and the arrow lodged into the bow, and so he leant over to have a look.
No! Yeah How did the bell-ringers, like, did they fall? No, they go high, have you seen in The Sound of Music, and they go down, there's that one kid that's going up and down for the whole intermezzo, isn't there, in that? Yeah, I didn't think that was a documentary, though.
Do the bells fall on them or do they go up and then fall? No, the bells They fell.
So they went back up and then they fell? Yeah.
See, I was right.
Handgun accidents, they don't start to overtake archery until the 1550s.
The very first one was 1519 in Hull, so there was a Hull woman, she was accidentally shot by a Frenchman, rather brilliantly called Peter Frenchman That's got to be a nickname, that.
She had never seen a gun before, she didn't know what it was Friday night in Hull.
She just walked in front of it while it was being fired.
Saying that, my dad walked in front of a dartboard and got a dart straight in the side of his head.
Did he not know what a dartboard was? I mean, she had an excuse, she'd never seen a gun before.
Yeah, well, he was shit-faced.
That's fair enough.
Lots of people died drowning, most people couldn't swim.
There's a story of a Cambridge baker, he drowned, he fell into a cesspit while relieving himself.
So you said more people died during Than sword fighting.
.
.
football than sword Yeah.
But it's a bit like hippos are more dangerous than sharks.
Do you know, I once went to a barbecue in Mozambique where we had hippo, and it was deeply unpleasant.
For you or for the hippo? I just had fermented shark in Iceland.
Oh, in Iceland! I was there last week.
So was I.
Were you? Yeah.
It's so dark, I didn't see you.
You know what that's like, Sandi.
I'm standing by my "Denmark is pitch dark" That's why you export all your bacon, cos it's so dark over there, you haven't got time to do a cooked breakfast, there's no point.
You've hardly got time for a soft boiled egg, it's so dark over there, you just grab a handful of dry cereal before it's night-time again.
For a man who thinks it's a place where there is no sunshine, you spend a lot of time in Scandinavia.
He means the supermarket with the frozen food, that's Now for our weekly portion of jiggery potpourri, huh? Thank you.
The general ignorance round, fingers on buzzers, if you please.
In 1580, Francis Drake and his crew became the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the The globe.
Well, the question was, what did they call their ship? Is it a famous ship? Yes, Sir Francis Drake, famous ship, what did they call the ship? The Golden Hind.
The Golden Hind is not correct.
So when he set sail, he set sail from Plymouth, December 1577, the ship he was in was called the Pelican.
There is a popular account that it was renamed the Golden Hind and that this apparently happened at the Straits of Magellan, but there is no evidence that the crew used this new name at any time.
Certainly, Drake's second in command, John Wynter, he used the name the Pelican throughout.
But it appears likely that the ship now called the Golden Hind was actually called the Pelican by the crew throughout the entire voyage.
Anyway Drake Passage is off the southern tip of South America, does anybody know what the southern tip of South America is called? Cape Horn.
It is Cape Horn.
Does anybody know what the southern tip of Africa is called? Yes.
The Cape of Good Hope.
It's not called the Cape of Good Hope, you crazy fool! I don't care, I don't care.
I don't care.
It's good not to care.
Bring it on.
The southernmost point of Africa is actually called Cape Agulhas.
There it is, about 90 miles away, you can see the Cape of Good Hope.
There's not much to see there, there's a sort of rocky beach, they placed a bit of a plaque so that you can see.
It marks the dividing line between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, so a relatively cold one and a relatively warm one.
The Cape of Good Hope is the bit that the Flying Dutchman couldn't get round.
Does anybody know, while we're on southernmost parts, the southernmost part of the north American continent? Well, it's all connected up, isn't it, to the south American continent? Oh, no.
The north shore of, of the, of the canal, of the Panama Canal.
It's really an astonishing thing, it's actually Australia.
Geologists have discovered that there is an area around Georgetown in northern Queensland that was once part of North America more than a billion years ago.
It's got rocks in the area that are unlike any other rock deposits in Australia.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go again.
What? With this show's This, the QI ceaseless bullshit.
It's Australia! Sorry, have I upset you, darling? Oh, no, it's like the sun not being there when it was there and all those other things that happened The southernmost point of mainland Australia is rather brilliantly South Point.
But which is wider, Australia or the Moon? Ooh, that's a good one.
Hang on.
Um The Moon.
Are they the same? Australia.
Well done.
The Moon is somewhat less than the width of Australia.
Is it? So, Australia's about 4,000 kilometres and the Moon is 3,500.
If you're observing from the Moon, Australia would look the same size as the Moon does to us.
Yeah.
But which one's got the greatest surface area? The Moon.
Yeah, cos it's a sphere.
Yeah.
So it would obviously Exactly.
APPLAUSE So, let's see how all the little petals in my potpourri have done.
Coming up smelling of roses with 4 points and the winner, it's Phill! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Lightly perfumed with -6, it's Rhod.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I'm very happy with that, very happy.
Very happy.
Lightly musty with -11, Cally! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A bit of old stinkwort with -44, Alan.
-44?! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It only remains for me to thank Cally, Phill, Rhod and Alan.
I leave you with this - the great French marshal, Lyautey, once asked his gardener to plant a tree.
The gardener objected that the tree would not reach maturity for 100 years.
The marshal replied, "In that case," "there's no time to lose, plant this afternoon.
" Thank you and goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Welcome to QI, which tonight is a bit of a potpourri - pounds and pounds of pungently perfumed petals of pertinent points piled precariously in a pot for your pleasure.
Mm, that's perfume.
That was very good! Thank you, darling.
Thank you! Not bad for a foreigner.
Mm, that perfume is a clue, just smell that panel-pourri.
The fragrant Cally Beaton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE The pungent Rhod Gilbert.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE The fruity Phill Jupiter.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH And the unmistakable waft of geranium, leather, moss, coffee, toasted cheese, Biro ink, musk, ox, Johnson's baby powder and football sock that is Alan Davies! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Right, let's hear their ringtones.
Cally goes TRADITIONAL TELEPHONE RING Oh, very nice.
Rhod goes MORE MODERN PHONE RING Phill goes NOKIA RINGTONE And Alan goes PHONE DISCONNECT TONE The number you have dialled has not been recognised .
.
you idiot! Sorry about that.
Wow.
OK, I've got a gift for you all now.
I've got your very own QI periscopes.
OK? Have a look.
What are you going to use them for? OK, have a look through.
Oh, that's a good idea.
Yeah It's very clever, because even though you're down below, you can still see the audience, even though you're below the desk.
You have totally understood periscopes! I can't see the audience now! I can't see the audience! No, you need your periscope, darling.
It's the thing My periscope doesn't work.
PHILL: Where's Alan gone?! Alan?! I can see your periscope, Phill, I can see your periscope! I can see yours as well! Are you under the desk? I am under the desk, Alan! I'm coming up! OK.
I'm now above the desk, Phill.
We toyed with the idea of having two five-year-old boys on the panel .
.
and then we thought, "No need!" This is me going down the stairs.
I'm coming up now.
Oh, I've forgotten something.
He's having so much fun under there, you should see his little face.
I really, really enjoyed that.
Phill, get up now.
You're all right.
I'm going to be honest Yeah, do you need a hand? .
.
Getting up takes a bit of a while I'll help you Come on.
That's I'm coming, I'm on my way.
Jesus! I'm on my way.
OK, OK Thank you.
Thanks, Mum.
Can I have this? Yes, you can have them.
Cos we've got quite a high garden wall and I've often wanted to look over it.
Didn't you build the high garden wall, Alan? Uh, yes.
I could It's true to say I could have a lower one.
But really, I want to go like that.
The high garden wall does that for you, to be honest.
Rhod, yours has got no mirrors in it Yes, we've established that.
.
.
because I had yours made in Scandinavia, because the last time you were on, you said it's not possible to see anything in Scandinavia because it's dark all the time.
So I have specially had a periscope made for you where it's just dark all the time.
About two years ago, for a joke, I said that there was no sunshine in Denmark, and you've been waiting there for two years, sitting there, biding your time Do you know, revenge served cold.
I mean, I say two years.
It's been two years for me.
It's probably the next day for you.
Yeah, that's true.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Oh, no! I stand by it! What would you use periscopes for? Let's work out what They're to see difficult things, aren't they? Like what? It could very much show your go-getting attitude at an interview for the Navy, bringing your own periscope.
I was thinking maybe submarines.
Yes.
So submarines, but they don't use the old-fashioned periscope any more on a submarine.
Did the cardboard get soggy? Is that why? Can I ask a question, Sandi? Yes, Rhod.
Is your periscope bigger than ours because you're the host? Well, what can you do? Or is it because of your diminutive stature? Yes, I think because I need the extra help with the periscope.
Imagine how much easier shopping's going to be for you now with that.
Do you know Alpen, they've got Alpen! On submarines, you don't want just one person seeing what's going on, so they project the image now onto monitors.
And here is a wonderful thing - the control panel for the ones you need on a submarine, it normally costs 38,000, and they did a survey of younger sailors who went, "Yeah, it's just exactly the same as an Xbox controller," "and they're 30.
" And they now can be bought in any world port.
The USS Colorado is now equipped exclusively with Xbox controllers and most modern submarines are going to follow suit.
So are they playing games against other submarines? Is that how it works? I think that is one way of referring to warfare, but There was a woman in the 1930s, a Californian woman called Dorothy Beck, and she wanted to draw fish under water.
So she used an inverted periscope, so she got, I think, a local man to hold it.
And he held it into the water, and she sat by the water with a This is not one of her pictures And she would sit by the water, and using the periscope down into the water, she was able to paint and draw fish in their natural habitat.
Periscopes, like telescopes, onlyperi-er.
Now .
.
everybody likes a bit of potpourri, even though, you know, it's both smelly and useless, and that's also true of something else these days - phone boxes.
So, can you suggest something useful to do with a phone box, please? You could put a couple of mirrors in it and get some poor bugger to hold it while you paint fish all day, couldn't you? I like your thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're shower cubicles in California, aren't they? The Calis love to buy them.
The Callys? I've never bought one in my life.
Wahey! You're absolutely right, they can be bought by anybody.
You can buy a phone box for £2,750.
If you're a community or a village, you can adopt one for £1 if you wanted to look after it.
But they have been repurposed in about, well, more than 3,000 ways that we know of.
There's one near us that's a coffee shop.
That's not a lot of customers they get No, well, the guy who runs it has to stand outside the phone box.
He hasn't thought it through.
They've been turned into defibrillator stores, they're art galleries, libraries, an unattended grocery store in Draughton in Yorkshire.
There was one made into an aquarium.
That's a Welsh one, that.
How can you tell that, darling? "Dim arian" Oh, "Dim arian, dim problem.
" "Dim arian, dim problem.
" Do they not have a Welsh word for "problem"? No, it's the English that don't have a word for HEAVILY ACCENTED WELSH: .
.
problem.
They didn't have any problems till the English turned up! Tom Jones bought one, presumably, and then had it exported to LA.
I met Tom Jones once.
I was producing a play, which Tom Jones was going to be in, and I was due to meet him at the Dorchester Hotel.
When I arrived, they said, "Mr Jones would like you to go up to his suite.
" I said, "Fair enough" So she went up there I went up That was the press outside the window! And I knocked on the door, and he opened the door, and he was wearing the SHORTES dressing gown I've ever seen in my life.
It just came to here.
Did you see little Tom? No! Anyway You were about eye level with little Tom, I imagine He's actually charming, we got on very well.
It was also, which you might like, the world's smallest pub for a single day, The Dog And Bone, in the Cambridgeshire village of Shepreth.
They dispensed everything in very small quantities, but unfortunately, they ran out at 10:30 and had to call time.
Dog and Bone, rhyming slang - I see what they've done there.
Yeah, you see what they've done.
For flyering in Edinburgh and postering, we put them all up in the phone boxes, don't we? Well, you guys have people to do it.
I put my own up I enlist my kids to help me put posters up, and this year, I was saying to my daughter, I was like, "Just get in there and put the bloody poster up.
" She was like, "I can't, Mum.
I said, "Will you just do it?!" She said, "There's people having sex in there, Mum - I can't.
" Anybody know who designed the classic phone box? Phoney Box o' the Box family.
Mr Phone Box.
Did all the boxes.
His brother Pill did the pillbox.
Sir Giles Gilbert, there's a Gilbert in it! Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
That's why I knew.
Very, very good.
The man who also had a hand in the design of the Battersea and Bankside Power Station, so currently Tate Modern.
Supposedly, he was inspired by the mausoleum that was designed by the neoclassical architect Sir John Soane for his own tomb, which you can see Oh, you could put a phone in there! Yeah, well, it looks exactly just like it, doesn't it? Yeah! It's at St Pancras Old Church in London, and the different Is that why every time you pick up the phone, it was dead? CROWD GROANS Shut up, shut up! LAUGHTER So there are lots of worthwhile things you can do with a phone box, but what about something that isn't worthwhile? What pointless and puerile phone box prank propagated prolifically from place to place? It was people stuffing themselves in, wasn't it? Yeah, you're absolutely right.
1959, the year of the great phone booth stuffing fad.
It began in Durban in South Africa.
25 students were crammed into a phone box.
It's a world record that has still not been beaten.
I take a very dim view of that.
Some of those guys have only got a toe in.
You're absolutely right.
There was a Canadian school who claimed that they'd got 40 students in, but they had an outsized fraternity hall booth, they laid it on its side.
So, just like you, they decided to bring in some rules.
Right.
So the rules were About time.
.
.
the booth had to be upright, it had to be a normal size, everybody had to have at least half a body inside it.
Only half a body? Half a body.
The stuffing fad spread to lots of other objects - cars, outdoor lavatories, there was a hollow tree at the University of Maine.
Then the next phase was hunkering.
Anybody know what that is? I've heard the phrase hunkering down - that's it.
CALLY: Do you go into holes? SANDI: No, you literally go down onto your haunches for as long as possible.
Is that to hunker, is it? To hunker, yes.
To hunker down? Yeah, so this was apparently a fad - how long could you hunker for? That was a fad?! Yes.
Some people hunkered in phone booths.
That was a thing.
On car roofs Like sitting like this - has this ever been a big thing? Well Anybody else ever done other student pranks? Things like a Chinese fire drill? I grew up in New York - we used to do it all the time.
So you turn up at the lights.
You need a full car of people.
As soon as the lights turn red, you open all the doors and you have to run all the way around the car, and whoever's not in the car when the lights turn green is left behind.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Why is it called the Chinese fire drill? I have absolutely no idea.
We had Chinese burns, didn't we? Oh, yeah, they were very Yeah, do you remember those? Yeah But I like a prank! So there was a Harvard-Yale football match in 2004, and some Yale supporters disguised themselves in Harvard colours, and they gave out red-and-white cards to spectators on the Harvard side of the stadium.
And they said, "If you hold them up above your heads", "it'll say, 'Go Harvard!'" And in fact, it spelled out, "We suck".
Possibly the greatest prankster of all was a Roman emperor.
He was called Elagabalus, and he was only emperor for four years - from 14 to 18 - and he was unbelievably eccentric, decadent, even by standards of the time, and he was a very keen practical joker.
So he once filled a full ceiling above a banqueting hall entirely with flowers, and then had them dumped onto the diners below.
And some of them smothered to death.
It is the only death by potpourri that we know of.
Elagabalus, he was amazing, so he would Quite often, people were having dinner, he would let in lions and bears and leopards while they're eating, and LAUGHTER And not tell anybody they'd been defanged and declawed and it was perfectly fine, and some people died of fright.
He would also let the same animals into people's bedrooms while they were sleeping.
And he was particularly fond of inviting poor people to dinner and giving them paintings of food.
If you were one of those wild animals, though, and you'd been defanged and declawed, your heart wouldn't be in the prank, would it? No, not Stuffing phone boxes was the ice bucket challenge of its day.
Did anybody do the ice bucket challenge? No.
No.
I had the weirdest experience with that.
So I didn't know anything about it, and my son phoned me up and he said, "Mum, Daniel Craig has just challenged you "to the ice bucket challenge.
" Now, I've never met Daniel Daniel Craig?! Yeah.
Anyway, as chance would have it, that evening, I was at a party and there he was.
So, I went up to him and I said, "You bastard.
" "Why have you challenged me to this thing?" I said, "The chances of us ever meeting again, very slight", "let's do it straight away.
" So, we were backstage at the Royal Festival Hall, we went into my dressing room and into the shower, and I have a video of me and Daniel Craig in the shower doing the ice bucket challenge.
Do you spend your whole time with showbiz men, semi-naked, in? Did he come out wearing a very short dressing gown? Sandi, I thought I understood you, but I'm I don't I'm like a magnet.
He was perfectly charming.
Now, to give the show a bit of a "Philip", there have been two King Philips of Macedon, six King Philips of Spain, six King Philips of France, and of course, one King Phillip of QI.
Yay! But when? When will we get a King Philip of England? We're not.
Not never.
Never say never.
In the future.
No, not in the future.
We've had one.
We've had one, but he is not normally taught in the school monarchs.
King Philip of England, he reigned for four years - 1554-1558.
He was actually King Philip II of Spain, but he was king of England and Ireland by virtue of his marriage to Queen Mary, so not a consort like Queen Elizabeth's Prince Philip, but actually crowned king in his own right.
So both their faces were on the coins.
Parliament was called under their joint authority, and he actually lived in England, just under a year, July 1554-1555.
He married her, he was 27, she was 37.
It's kind of an odd thing.
He only spoke Castilian Spanish, so the whole marriage must've been conducted through an interpreter.
I wonder what attracted her to him at 27 when she was 37.
Who knows? It's rather sweet, when she died, he wrote, "I felt a reasonable regret for her death.
" Maybe it's better in Spanish.
He proposed marriage to her half-sister, of course, Elizabeth.
Classy, classy move.
Classy, classy.
The Philippines are named after him, he ruled the Spanish Empire.
He had very slim legs! It does look like they've photoshopped his head onto the body of a child.
Yeah.
In the potpourri show, it's finally time for a bit of Popery.
Ooh.
Potpourri? Potpourri, potpourri, potpourri show Potpurri, yes.
.
.
and time for a bit of Popery.
Popery, ah Yes, do you see? Why would you say the Pope's name three times and then whack his ring with a hammer? His ring? Because Because he forgot the safe word.
APPLAUSE Bloody marvellous.
I live for those moments.
He doesn't say a lot, but when he says it, it lands.
Are you talking about the Pope now? The answer is because he's A nail? Oh Francis, Francis, Francis! Bang.
Because he's dead? Because he's dead, you're absolutely right.
Why do you have to hit his ring with a hammer? OK, so, there's a thing called the Apostolic Camera.
So it's an office of the Roman Curia that is a largely ceremonial office, until the Pope dies.
At this point, the camerlengo, he's the cardinal in charge of the Apostolic Camera.
IN POOR ITALIAN ACCENT: Cardinal in charge.
And he comes.
I'm in charge of it.
His duty is to ceremonially verify And whack you with a fucking hammer.
Bang, bang, bang! Francis, Francis, Francis.
Boom! Right in the ring hole.
Well, kind of.
So he has to call the Pope by his baptismal name three times, so the Pope's baptismal name is Jorge, so he says "Jorge, dormisne?" Jorge! "George, are you sleeping?" And then he has to destroy his Fisherman's ring, so that is the signet ring that he wears of the picture of St Peter fishing, along with the papal's seal.
It is sometimes said that they also have to hit the Pope on the head with the hammer.
I think this seems very improbable, but the Vatican will neither confirm nor deny.
We have asked.
Sticking with priests for the moment, who was the Mad Monk of Russia? Here it comes.
Rasputin is I thought I'd take that for the team.
Take one for the team, thank you, Cally.
Why was he not the mad Monk of Russia? He wasn't mad and he wasn't a monk.
He wasn't a monk, is the truth of it, he was never a monk.
The guy who referred to himself as the Mad Monk was a one-time friend of Rasputin's, he was called Sergei Trufanov, also known as Iliodor, there he is.
And he wrote his memoirs, they were published in New York in 1918, and he published them as the Mad Monk of Russia.
And that book is one of the primary sources that we have for the life of Rasputin.
So the Mad Monk is the less famous Iliodor and not Rasputin, but because we know so much about Rasputin from this book, The Mad Monk of Russia, that is why we associate him.
I think everybody knows that Rasputin was a faith healer, and he parlayed his claim to be able to help the son of the Tsar into a position of tremendous influence in the Russian Imperial court.
There's a theory, a sort of rogue theory about Putin being the reincarnation of Rasputin, and there was a thing that was about, they took some of Putin's pubic hair and then they took some of Rasputin's residual testicular fluid, and the DNA was exactly the same.
I'm struggling with the whole of that story, so Yeah.
I do like the phrase "residual testicular fluid".
Yeah.
I'm going to need I shall be using that again, I'm not sure when.
Can I have a vodka residual testicular fluid, please? So they're going to need an unwashed sheet of some kind? Yeah, Putin left his pubic hairs everywhere.
Yeah, they scraped it off the back of a tiger.
The Mad Monk of Russia wasn't Rasputin, it was some bloke you've never heard of.
Now, we know that Rasputin was a massive player, but who is the most dangerous football player of all time? Stanley Knife Matthews.
Are we talking about offences committed on the field or in another life as an assassin or carpet bombing? No, I'm talking about actually on the football pitch.
Does it have something to do with the early, very early origins of football? It does.
Yes.
In the 16th century, if somebody died accidentally during a football game, all of the players were put on trial for manslaughter.
And, in theory, the person who was responsible for the accident was liable to be hanged.
Now, the courts were reluctant to do this, so the coroner would return a verdict of murder, but the name of the culprit was always John at Stile.
So, it's a legal fiction, it's a bit like John Doe today.
So, on paper, John at Stile is still the most dangerous footballer in history.
There's a wonderful professor in Oxford called Steven Gunn, and he studies I like, I like people to study very specific things.
He studies accidental death in 16th century England.
And we have established, through his work, that football was unbelievably dangerous.
It caused more deaths than sword fighting in the 16th century.
There were at least seven deaths in England, I have to say, beaten only by 56 people who died in archery accidents.
Of the seven football deaths, two accidentally were stabbed with a knife while tackling.
Joint third, sword fighting, wrestling and bell-ringing - three deaths each.
Hammer throwing - two deaths.
One person died in a game of quoits.
I have no idea why.
In one of the archery deaths, there was a man who accidentally shot himself in the head in 1552.
That's quite hard, isn't it? It's quite tricky.
He was called Henry Pert, from Welbeck.
Just got the bow the wrong way round? Well, he drew the bow to full extent Plunk! .
.
and the idea was to aim it straight up into the air, and the arrow lodged into the bow, and so he leant over to have a look.
No! Yeah How did the bell-ringers, like, did they fall? No, they go high, have you seen in The Sound of Music, and they go down, there's that one kid that's going up and down for the whole intermezzo, isn't there, in that? Yeah, I didn't think that was a documentary, though.
Do the bells fall on them or do they go up and then fall? No, the bells They fell.
So they went back up and then they fell? Yeah.
See, I was right.
Handgun accidents, they don't start to overtake archery until the 1550s.
The very first one was 1519 in Hull, so there was a Hull woman, she was accidentally shot by a Frenchman, rather brilliantly called Peter Frenchman That's got to be a nickname, that.
She had never seen a gun before, she didn't know what it was Friday night in Hull.
She just walked in front of it while it was being fired.
Saying that, my dad walked in front of a dartboard and got a dart straight in the side of his head.
Did he not know what a dartboard was? I mean, she had an excuse, she'd never seen a gun before.
Yeah, well, he was shit-faced.
That's fair enough.
Lots of people died drowning, most people couldn't swim.
There's a story of a Cambridge baker, he drowned, he fell into a cesspit while relieving himself.
So you said more people died during Than sword fighting.
.
.
football than sword Yeah.
But it's a bit like hippos are more dangerous than sharks.
Do you know, I once went to a barbecue in Mozambique where we had hippo, and it was deeply unpleasant.
For you or for the hippo? I just had fermented shark in Iceland.
Oh, in Iceland! I was there last week.
So was I.
Were you? Yeah.
It's so dark, I didn't see you.
You know what that's like, Sandi.
I'm standing by my "Denmark is pitch dark" That's why you export all your bacon, cos it's so dark over there, you haven't got time to do a cooked breakfast, there's no point.
You've hardly got time for a soft boiled egg, it's so dark over there, you just grab a handful of dry cereal before it's night-time again.
For a man who thinks it's a place where there is no sunshine, you spend a lot of time in Scandinavia.
He means the supermarket with the frozen food, that's Now for our weekly portion of jiggery potpourri, huh? Thank you.
The general ignorance round, fingers on buzzers, if you please.
In 1580, Francis Drake and his crew became the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the The globe.
Well, the question was, what did they call their ship? Is it a famous ship? Yes, Sir Francis Drake, famous ship, what did they call the ship? The Golden Hind.
The Golden Hind is not correct.
So when he set sail, he set sail from Plymouth, December 1577, the ship he was in was called the Pelican.
There is a popular account that it was renamed the Golden Hind and that this apparently happened at the Straits of Magellan, but there is no evidence that the crew used this new name at any time.
Certainly, Drake's second in command, John Wynter, he used the name the Pelican throughout.
But it appears likely that the ship now called the Golden Hind was actually called the Pelican by the crew throughout the entire voyage.
Anyway Drake Passage is off the southern tip of South America, does anybody know what the southern tip of South America is called? Cape Horn.
It is Cape Horn.
Does anybody know what the southern tip of Africa is called? Yes.
The Cape of Good Hope.
It's not called the Cape of Good Hope, you crazy fool! I don't care, I don't care.
I don't care.
It's good not to care.
Bring it on.
The southernmost point of Africa is actually called Cape Agulhas.
There it is, about 90 miles away, you can see the Cape of Good Hope.
There's not much to see there, there's a sort of rocky beach, they placed a bit of a plaque so that you can see.
It marks the dividing line between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, so a relatively cold one and a relatively warm one.
The Cape of Good Hope is the bit that the Flying Dutchman couldn't get round.
Does anybody know, while we're on southernmost parts, the southernmost part of the north American continent? Well, it's all connected up, isn't it, to the south American continent? Oh, no.
The north shore of, of the, of the canal, of the Panama Canal.
It's really an astonishing thing, it's actually Australia.
Geologists have discovered that there is an area around Georgetown in northern Queensland that was once part of North America more than a billion years ago.
It's got rocks in the area that are unlike any other rock deposits in Australia.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go again.
What? With this show's This, the QI ceaseless bullshit.
It's Australia! Sorry, have I upset you, darling? Oh, no, it's like the sun not being there when it was there and all those other things that happened The southernmost point of mainland Australia is rather brilliantly South Point.
But which is wider, Australia or the Moon? Ooh, that's a good one.
Hang on.
Um The Moon.
Are they the same? Australia.
Well done.
The Moon is somewhat less than the width of Australia.
Is it? So, Australia's about 4,000 kilometres and the Moon is 3,500.
If you're observing from the Moon, Australia would look the same size as the Moon does to us.
Yeah.
But which one's got the greatest surface area? The Moon.
Yeah, cos it's a sphere.
Yeah.
So it would obviously Exactly.
APPLAUSE So, let's see how all the little petals in my potpourri have done.
Coming up smelling of roses with 4 points and the winner, it's Phill! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Lightly perfumed with -6, it's Rhod.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I'm very happy with that, very happy.
Very happy.
Lightly musty with -11, Cally! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A bit of old stinkwort with -44, Alan.
-44?! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It only remains for me to thank Cally, Phill, Rhod and Alan.
I leave you with this - the great French marshal, Lyautey, once asked his gardener to plant a tree.
The gardener objected that the tree would not reach maturity for 100 years.
The marshal replied, "In that case," "there's no time to lose, plant this afternoon.
" Thank you and goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE