QI (I series)

QI Series I
Starring	Alan Davies Guest panellists
No. of episodes	16
Release
Original network	BBC Two
Original release	9 September 2011 (2011-09-09)
Season chronology

This is a list of episodes of QI, the BBC comedy panel game television programme hosted by Stephen Fry. This series aired on BBC Two, rather than BBC One as it had in recent years. It is the ninth series of QI.

Episodes

A recurring element in this series was the "Ignorance" or "Nobody Knows" card. In each episode there was one question to which the actual answer is unknown; if a panellist correctly spotted it and played their card, they were awarded a sizeable amount of points. Most of the Nobody Knows bonuses were won by Alan Davies.

Guests who made their first appearance in this series were: John Bishop, Brian Blessed, Nina Conti, Prof. Brian Cox, Dr. Ben Goldacre, Sarah Millican, Al Murray, Frank Skinner and Henning Wehn.

Episode 1 "I-Spy"

Broadcast date

• 9 September 2011

Recording date

• 7 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (–11 points)
• Jimmy Carr (–4 points) 18th appearance
• Lee Mack (–5 points) 3rd appearance
• Sandi Toksvig (Winner with 12 points) 6th appearance

Buzzers

• Sandi: dreamy female voice saying, "aye, yaaai"
• Jimmy: Yobbo-sounding "oy-oi?"
• Lee: Mexican-sounding "aye-yai-yaaai!"
• Alan: I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts as performed by Merv Griffin

Topics

• The ai is a sloth native to South America; it only comes down from trees to defecate, and needs to bask in the sun to start its metabolism. The aye-aye, on the other hand, is an endangered nocturnal lemur native to Madagascar with an elongated middle finger which it taps on trees to draw out and eat grubs. It is considered a curse by the native Malagasy people, and often killed on sight.
• In the Royal Navy, "aye" is an assent or agreement; "aye-aye" is an acknowledgement of orders.

Tangent: "Order hands to bathe" is an order given in calm waters for all crew to go overboard to swim and bathe.

• If the subject of a painting is depicted as having a gaze fixed on the viewer, the subject's eyes will always appear to "follow" the viewer—that is, the eyes will always appear to be looking at the viewer, even if the viewer is not in a position that would expected to catch the gaze. Well-known examples of paintings exhibiting this phenomenon include the Mona Lisa and Laughing Cavalier. Similarly, if the gaze is depicted as cast downward, it will always appear this way, even from below.

Tangent: A plastic mask of Einstein's face is rotated before the camera, resulting in a remarkable optical illusion [The Hollow-Face illusion] making it appear convex when it is concave. A five-pound note is also made to cause its image of Queen Elizabeth to appear happy or sad by creating a concave bend between her eyes.

Tangent: Gaze detection has been used to determine that when meeting a person, women will look at the face, whereas men will look at the face and groin—regardless of the gender of the person they're looking at. According to the American Kennel Club, the same is true when meeting a dog. Gaze detection has also been used to determine where are the most valuable locations for product promotion in stores.

• In addition to tying one's shoes and dealing with rabid dogs, the all-time best-selling Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell contains entries on dealing with the following remarkable subjects:
  • Suicide: "Where a man has gone so far as to attempt suicide, a Scout should know what to do with him. In a case where the would-be suicide has taken poison, give milk and make him vomit, which is done by tickling the inside of the throat with a finger or a feather. In the case of hanging, cut down the body at once, taking care to support it with one arm while cutting the cord. A Tenderfoot [novice] is sometimes inclined to be timid about handling an insensible man or dead man, or even seeing blood. Well, he won't be much use till he gets over such nonsense."
  • Slaughtering cattle: "If you're a beginner in slaughtering with a knife, it's sometimes useful to first drop the animal insensible by a heavy blow with a big hammer or the back of a felling axe on top of the head."
  • Stopping a runaway horse: Rather than standing directly in front waving one's arms, as is often believed, one should stand to one side, easing the horse toward a wall.
  • Saving someone who's fallen in front of a train: "If the train is very close, lie flat between the rails. Make the man do the same till the train passes over, while everybody else will be running about screaming and excited and doing nothing."

General Ignorance

• Nobody Knows: It's not possible to determine the age of a lobster, whose DNA contain a protease enzyme called telomerase which replaces lost DNA during cell division so that cells remain young after each replication. It's not known how large or how old lobster get; the largest lobster ever recorded, caught off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1977, was 3½ feet long. The vast majority of lobster are dark in color, but they are occasionally blue or red. Lobsters detach themselves from their old shells 25 times during the first 5 years of their life in a dangerous procedure which involves pulling out the lining of its own throat, stomach, and anus each time. They also communicate by urinating. Alan gets the bonus.
• Despite its spelling differences, the typical novelty writing in the "Ye Olde Curiositye Shoppe" vein would not, at the time it was widespread, have been pronounced much differently than modern English. Most final e's were silent, and at the time printers simply chose to substitute the 'y' character for the Anglo-Saxon thorn (Þ, þ) character that was previously used in writing—both of which were equivalent in pronunciation to the modern 'th' that ended up being the standard convention. Thus printed 'ye', formerly written 'þe' by hand, was pronounced exactly as current 'the'. Another word incorporating the thorn was the abbreviation 'yt' = that.
• Crime increased by 57% in London during the Blitz. Looters would sometimes pose as wardens, conning bystanders into helping them move stolen goods. Benefit fraud increased as well; one man claimed for bombing benefits 19 times before he was found out. Ordinary people also participated in black market trading of rationed goods.

Tangent: Alan's grandfather was an ARP warden.

QI XL Extras

Tangent: A 17th-century book for young women carried advice on the marriage bed, by analogy to food. As paraphrased by Sandi: "Of the marriage bed we cannot speak of your husband's appetite, so we will describe it in terms of food. You must feed him whenever he's hungry, and feed him a variety of meals or you will soon find he's eating next door."

• A jackal will only be friendly if it is rabid. Docility is a symptom of rabies; animals don't always froth at the mouth.

Tangent: When Sandi canoed the Zambezi, her guides brought dogs with them—not as pets, but as a sacrifice in case the canoes were attacked by crocodiles.

• It is not entirely certain how Grigori Rasputin died. Prince Felix Yusupov claimed, and for a long time was believed, to have been Rasputin's murderer when he poisoned, stabbed, and shot Rasputin—after which, when Rasputin was still alive, Yusupov threw him in a river. (Later, his dead body was burned, at which time he appeared to sit up.) The original postmortem claimed Rasputin died of drowning; however, an [unpublished] autopsy revealed this not to be the case. Rasputin was notoriously promiscuous (due to his peculiar theological belief that the more he sinned, the more holy he became), and among his rumored lovers was Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, over whom he held great political influence. Rasputin went to great lengths to influence Russia to withdraw from World War I, which there were many parties with a vested interest in preventing—including the British government, who needed the German army to remain occupied with the Russians on the eastern front. It is now known that the last bullet to enter Rasputin's head was from a gun which could only have come from an MI6 officer, suggesting a British plot played a part in ensuring Rasputin's death.
• "Durable" Mike Malloy was a remarkably tenacious murder victim in New York City during American Prohibition. He was befriended by some speakeasy owners who attempted to effect a life insurance scam using alcoholic clients, by coaxing them to take out policies benefiting the owners and then offering their marks free drinks to induce death by alcohol poisoning. They coerced Mike to take out three insurance policies totaling $2000, but after offering him free drinks for several weeks, seeing that he was in no danger, the conspirators became impatient. Initially they tried to poison him, adding antifreeze to his drinks; after this didn't kill him they tried turpentine, horse liniment, rat poison, rotten oysters in wood alcohol, and sardines mixed with carpet tacks. When none of this worked they got him drunk, stripped him naked, dumped him in a snowbank in bitter cold, and poured 5 gallons of cold water over him. He returned the next day, having been found by police and hospitalized. They then paid a cab driver to run him over; after two attempts and weeks of hospitalization, Malloy returned. At this point the speakeasy owners got him drunk again and actively gassed him to death. A few months later the conspirators began to fight amongst themselves and were found out, eventually being executed by electric chair at Sing Sing.
• There are a vast number of insects in the atmosphere. Using radar it was discovered that in a square kilometer of sky, at all times, there are billions of insects. The record height at which an insect has been found was a termite at 19,000 feet.
• In the US, there are laws determining the maximum acceptable amounts of unsavory materials and insect matter allowed to be contained in everyday food items. For example, peanut butter is allowed to contain up to 30 insect fragments, and one rodent hair, per 100 grams. Tomato juice is allowed to contain ten eggs or two maggots from the Drosophila (fruit fly) per 500 milliliters; ginger is allowed 3 milligrams of "mammalian excreta" (i.e., feces) per 100 grams; fig paste can contain 30 normal insect heads per 100 grams; ground marjoram can contain 1,175 insect fragments per 10 grams.

General Ignorance

• The American War of Independence was the only war in which both sides fought under the Union Jack (forfeit: English Civil War). The British flew the Union Flag; the Americans flew an early George Washington–designed flag which had the same stripes as the modern American flag, but which incorporated the Union Jack into the canton (quarter) where Betsy Ross later put stars. Hawaii is the only US state whose flag now incorporates the Union Jack.

Episode 2 "International"

Broadcast date

• 16 September 2011

Recording date

• 11 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (–10 points)
• Bill Bailey (Winner with 4 points) 23rd appearance
• Jack Dee (–27 points) 5th appearance
• David Mitchell (–44 points) 15th appearance

Buzzers

• Jack: "Icelandair to Inverness, gate B."
• Bill: "Iran Air to Istanbul, last call."
• David: "Air India to Islamabad, now closing."
• Alan: "Unexpected item in the bagging area."

Topics

Tangent: Bill gets three points for mentioning the fact that nobody knows how the QI scoring system works.

• If you were on an aeroplane in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had fallen ill, it would be incredibly difficult for anyone else to land the plane down safely. Simulations have been carried out in the USA with people with civil private pilot licences. In these cases one person could not move the seat that moved them towards the control, another turned the radio off, and another turned off the autopilot and crashed the plane immediately. One of the first problems is getting into the cockpit, which is much more secure these days following 9/11. If the plane was on autopilot you could continue to fly level, and once you began to land people would talk you through the procedure, but there are so many variables that it is really difficult. The chances of an intelligent person landing the aircraft in such a situation are 1 in 10 if it is in autopilot, and 1 in 100 if it is not in autopilot.

Tangent: Jack claims that in his uniform, Stephen looks more like a bursar, getting him confused with a purser.

Tangent: The pilot and co-pilot on a plane always have different meals from each other in case one of the meals makes one of them feel ill. In the case of extra long haul flights there are three pilots instead of two.

Tangent: Autopilot was invented in 1914, during the Paris Air Show. It was an American invention and used a gyroscope.

Tangent: The shortest commercial flight in the world is in the Orkney Islands, from Westray and Westray Papa. It usually takes two minutes, but the shortest it has ever taken is 58 seconds. The distance is shorter than the runaway of Edinburgh Airport.

• In the state of Madhya Pradesh policemen are paid 30 rupees more for growing a moustache. They believe that policeman with moustaches are less intimidating, get on better with the local community and are more respected by the public.

Tangent: In the British Army between 1860 and 1914 it was a regulation that every soldier had to have a moustache. If you shaved it off, you could be imprisoned. Stephen then puts on a fake General Melchett-style moustache to show what kinds of things people used to protect their moustaches. These included cups and spoons to prevent your moustache from getting wet when drinking or eating soup, as well as a cover to prevent your moustache from messing up while you slept. The world's longest moustache is 14 feet long. The man who has it has made a living from it, appearing in the film Octopussy.

• Mussolini wanted Italians to eat risotto to make them big and strong. He had a national propaganda day devoted to risotto, and wanted Italians to stop eating pasta. The Italians resisted this, but he did have the support of the Futurists, an art movement akin to the Dadaists. One, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, said pasta made Italians lethargic, pessimistic and sentimental.
• The international head of state who snubbed Jesse Owens after his triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Owens claimed in his autobiography: "When I passed the Chancellor, he arose, waved his hand at me and I waved back at him. Hitler didn't snub me; it was FDR who snubbed me. The President didn't even send me a telegram. When I came back to my native country, I couldn't ride at the front of the bus, I had to go to the back door, I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I certainly wasn't invited the White House to shake hands with the President either. Owens won four gold medals at the Games. (Forfeit: Hitler)

Tangent: During the discussion about Hitler, a picture is shown of senior Nazi figures at the Berlin Olympics saluting to the crowd. Alan then notices that the figure on the far right of the picture looks like he is sticking his hand up to his nose as a sort of silly rude gesture. They then realise that the man doing it is Hermann Göring. David jokingly says that everyone in the picture is in the far right.

Tangent: Sammy Davis Jr. could not go through the front door of the hotels in Las Vegas where he was performing.

• Nobody Knows: Nobody knows where the water in the North Two Ocean Creek in Wyoming flows. Water on one side of it will flow into the Pacific Ocean and on the other side will flow into the Atlantic. However, no-one knows where the water goes when it lands in the creek itself. Alan gets the bonus.

General Ignorance

• The world's largest pyramid is Cholula, which is an Aztec pyramid. Although it is not as tall and has a flat top, it has a bigger cubic capacity of 4.3 cubic kilometres, as opposed to the Cheops' 3.36 cubic kilometres. (Forfeit: The one in the middle)
• The First World War was first named as such in 1918. Lt. Col. Charles à Court Repington wrote in his diary on 19th September 1918 that he met with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University to discuss what the war should be called. Rejected names included The War and The German War. Then Repington suggested The World War, and they mutually agreed to call it The First World War. It had also been known as "The Great War", but before that the other Great War was the Napoleonic War. (Forfeit: 1939; After the Second World War; During the Second World War)

QI XL Extras

Tangent: The man who does the scoring for QI is called Colin. He works for Lumina, a company which also works for Pointless and Eggheads.

Tangent: There are 400,000 people in the air at any given time.

Tangent: The only Action Man toy with a beard was the adventurer, which was in the Navy. The Navy is the only branch of the armed forces in which you can have a beard.

Tangent: No-one working at Disney is allowed to have facial hair. Some years ago, an angry email was sent by Disney's HR department to their employees saying that anyone who described Disney as Mousewitz would be fired. Within half an hour the employees started calling Disney Duckau.

• Out of a Vickers machine gun, a tomato and a jellyfish, the jellyfish is the odd one out because it is the only one not improved by adding urine. The idea that jellyfish stings can be cured with the use of urine is an urban myth. Human urine is a very good fertilizer for growing tomatoes. The Vickers machine gun would often overheat so it was cooled using a water-cooled jacket. The water is poured from the top and collected in a jerry can at the bottom so it can be used again. However, in places where there was very little water, urine was used to keep them cool. The International Brigade often used the phrase Pass the piss.
• In 1953, Italy's biggest export was accordions. They mostly came from the town of Castelfidardo, which still makes them. (Forfeit: Urine; Pasta)

Tangent: Stephen talks about a restaurant in Berlin which is completely dark and you are served by blind people. As you cannot see the food you use other senses to enhance your experience. Stephen says that he often likes to torture his mother when he goes to restaurants by refusing to tell his mother what he wants.

• The Italians have rules about what sort of sauce goes with what sort of pasta. A stronger sauce would go with shell-shaped pasta to contain it. Hollow pasta is usually given a tomato like sauce because it runs through the tube and fills it.

Tangent: Stephen admits that he loves spaghetti hoops on toast.

General Ignorance

• The country with the fattest people in the world is Nauru. Out of a population of around 10,000 97% of men and 93% of women are obese or overweight. The people are offended at being called obese and claim that they are a stocky people.
• The colonel-in-chiefs of the Royal Dragoons and the First King's Dragoons Guards failed to turn up for duty at the start of the First World War because they were leading the German forces. Kaiser Wilhelm was colonel-in-chief of the Royal Dragoons and Franz Joseph Habsburg was colonel-in-chief of the First King's Dragoons Guards.
• The stiff arm salute as used by the Nazis was originally used by the Olympic movement until 1936 and by American school children taking the Oath of Allegiance until it was dropped following the rise of Hitler. The idea that it was first used by the Romans has no evidence to support it. This idea was however used by French classical artists such as David who believed they did. (Forfeit: Romans)

Episode 3 "Imbroglio"

Broadcast date

• 23 September 2011

Recording date

• 17 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (–21 points)
• John Bishop (Joint winner with 4 points) 1st appearance
• Sean Lock (–14 points) 25th appearance
• Frank Skinner (Joint winner with 4 points) 1st appearance

Buzzers

• John: A buzzing fly
• Frank: A yapping dog
• Sean: A crying infant
• Alan: The forfeit alarm; "Wrong again!" shows on the screen

Topics

• The French for innuendo is double entente or double sens. Double entendre is an example of a French phrase which the French do not use but the English do.(Forfeit: Double entendre)

Tangent: Frank had a friend who read somewhere that if you slept upside-down you would become more intelligent because the blood would flow to your brain. Frank became obsessed with the idea that he would have a wet dream and die.

Tangent: The Greeks have a phrase which is, Katatraya stayeftika which means, Who gives a shit?, but translates literally as, There is trouble in the gypsy village.

• The songs I'm Leaning on a Lamppost and When I'm Cleaning Windows were not written by George Formby, but his wife and manager Beryl insisted that he was credited as a co-creator so that he could get royalties. Many of Formby's songs were ridden with innuendo.
• How Ironic is That?: A series of situations are given and the panel are asked how ironic they are and why. There are various kinds of irony. These include verbal irony, which include phrases like, "As clear as mud"; comic irony, like the famous line in the Peter Sellers film Dr. Strangelove, "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room"; dramatic irony, in which the audience knows what is going to happen but the characters do not; and Socratic irony in which you are pretending to be dumber than you really are. Examples given are:
  • John Kendrick, an American sea captain, pulled into Honolulu Harbor in 1794 and was killed by the cannon that was fired to salute him - is comedic irony.
  • Clement Vallandigham, an Ohio lawyer, died in 1871 while defending a man who was accused of murder during a barroom brawl. In order to show the jury how his pistol might have gone off accidentally, Vallandigham took a gun, put it in his pocket and re-enacted how the event may have occurred. During the re-enactment he fired the pistol, shot himself and died of his wounds. The defendant was acquitted before Vallandigham passed away - an example of situational irony.
  • Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre while John F. Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln - not ironic, just a coincidence.
  • In 1989 convicted murderer Michael Godwin had his sentenced reduced from death to life imprisonment, after waiting five years to go to the electric chair. He died after being accidentally electrocuted by sitting naked on his steel lavatory seat. He was trying to fix his TV set and bit into a wire - is ironic.

Tangent: Frank quotes an example of dramatic irony from Richard III: Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes.

Tangent: Stephen argues that the TV series Columbo is the greatest ever made. Frank once had an argument with David Baddiel about the series. The actor who played Columbo, Peter Falk, had only one eye. Frank and David debated whether or not Columbo's fake eye was playing a real eye or not.

• Stephen shows the panel a nut and asks what is inside it. The answer is Brazil nuts. Brazil nut trees cannot be cultivated, so only wild trees give nuts. Brazil nuts have a complicated system of reproduction. They can only be pollinated by a particular bee, and the bee will only be able to pollinate it if there is a particular orchid in the area. The Brazil nut also has a unique feature, in that it is the only nut that can be transmitted sexually. If a man makes love with someone the nut could pass onto the partner they inseminated, so if he has eaten nuts and then makes love to someone with a nut allergy, he might provoke their allergy.
• Nobody Knows: No-one knows why in a packet of mixed nuts the Brazil nuts always rise to the top. Alan gets the bonus.
• Nobody Knows: The signal bars on your phone mean nothing. Different networks use different frequencies. No-one gets the bonus.

General Ignorance

• An inflatable anchor is used when you wish to anchor in sand. Liquid is inflated into the anchor and it lodges into the sand.
• The animals which Richard I had three of on his shirt were leopards. At the time they were not aware of the difference between lions and leopards.

Tangent: The song Three Lions has appeared in the charts in 1996, 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010. The song also got into the top ten in Germany. After the Germans won Euro 96 they felt that they won the song as well. John claims that this is ironic.

Tangent: It costs £4,255 to get a coat of arms. Sir Christopher Frayling, former Chairman of the Arts Council, has as his motto: Perge Scellus Diem Perficias, which means, Go ahead, punk, make my day.

• The only animal in the world whose taxonomical name is exactly the same as its common name is the boa constrictor. The scientific name for a gorilla is gorilla gorilla and is not the same as it is repeated twice. Several plants also have exactly the same common and taxonomical names such as aloe vera. (Forfeit: Gorilla)
• Bananas grow pointing upwards, not downwards as we usually see the in shops. Bananas are faintly radioactive, luckily the isotope in bananas is present in our bodies and is harmless. The half-life of the radioactive element of a banana is 1.25 billion years.

QI XL Extras

Tangent: A friend told Frank that in China, a Chinese burn was a form of torture. John was also told the same thing when he was at school.

Tangent: Frank's favourite George Formby double entendre is I wonder who's under her balcony now, who's kissing my girl. Does he kiss her on the nose or underneath the archway where the Sweet William grows?

Tangent: Frank went to George Formby's grave, which is a massive great white stone with a big face on it, with the words George Formby on it. However, he realised that this was actually the grave of Formby's father, George Formby, Sr., who was himself a huge music hall star. Formby Jr. is only mentioned at the bottom of it.

Tangent: George Formby's wife Beryl was hugely jealous of any woman who got close too George and would insist on any woman getting remotely close to George should be sacked. George used to claim that Beryl would only give him 5 shillings worth of pocket money a week, but his brother claimed that this was a trick so that he would not have to pay for drinks in a pub.

Tangent: The British tradition of innuendo and double entendre does not appear to exist in other nations. Many have phallic ideas but are usually depressing, such as Ibsen's play The Master Builder's in which a man tries to build a huge skyscraper.

Tangent: Another example of an innuendo ridden show was Round the Horne, which used gay Polari slang to push the boundaries even further, especially with the camp characters Julian and Sandy, played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick.

• Stephen gets both the panel and the studio audience to shout out their favourite colour at the same time, and then gets the panel to ask what the favourite colour of the panel member sitting next to them was. The problem is that it is very difficult to listen to someone else talking when you yourself are also talking. Alan though managed to get the colour that Sean shouted.

Tangent: John used to do similar courses during his normal working life before he became a comic. He did training days, and at times he thought it might help, but then they would get everyone to draw a random drawing for seemingly no reason.

• An interrobang is a punctuation mark which is a mixture of a question mark and an exclamation mark (‽), but is normally represented by the two marks following one after the other.Other marks included the sarcastrophe, which uses the caret accent around the word or phrase ^like so^.

Tangent: Frank thinks that on a keyboard the colon should have greater importance than the semicolon.

• The panel are shown a picture of a sheep which has been sheered and is now wearing a woolly jumper - is ironic.

Tangent: Sean once saw an advert for a meat supplier which read Caring for pork, from farm to fork.

General Ignorance

• The country which produces the most Brazil nuts is Bolivia. (Forfeit: Brazil)

Episode 4 "Indecision"

Broadcast date

• 30 September 2011

Recording date

• 14 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (–14 points)
• Jimmy Carr (–1 point) 19th appearance
• Rich Hall (–2 points) 23rd appearance
• Phill Jupitus (Winner with 10 points) 25th appearance
• The Audience (4 points)

Buzzers

• Jimmy: A GPS voice saying, "Turn right. Turn right."
• Phill: A GPS voice saying, "Turn left. Turn left."
• Rich: A GPS voice saying, "Turn around. Turn around."
• Alan: A policeman saying, "Excuse me, sir, is this your vehicle? Are you sure? Would you blow into this bag, please?"

Topics

• John Lenahan, exposed the secret of Find the Lady on an episode of Des Lynam's How Do They Do That?. The panel are given some fake money and are shown the trick, betting on the outcome. When Stephen collects up the money lost, a man runs onto the set and steals it.
• Just about everyone expected Spanish Inquisition because you were given 30 days notice to prepare your case. It was set up in 1478 under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella in order to find Jews who the Spanish believed had not truly converted to Christianity. You had to be Christian to stay in the country.

Tangent: The Roman Empire did not really fall as such. It just changed and became Roman Catholic Church.

• Given the choice the next best thing to having a Nobel Prize winner in the audience would be to have an Ig Nobel Prize winner. This is the award given to serious yet bizarre academic research. Stephen then reveals that they do have Ig Nobel Prize winner in the audience: Prof. Chris McManus, who won the Prize for his paper Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and In Ancient Sculpture, which was published in the journal Nature. McManus showed that most men have their right testicle higher than the left. In Ancient and Renaissance sculpture the left lower testicle is bigger, but actually it is the bigger testicle which is the higher one so they got the sculpture wrong.

Tangent: American comic Denis Leary jokingly said that he would kill to have the Nobel Peace Prize.

• If you have big decision to make in 40 minutes time the best thing you can do now to make sure you make the right choice is drink lots of water, because you are at your best at making decisions when urinating. You also make better decisions when you are angry.
• The big decision that the driver of the No. 78 London bus had to make in December 1952 was jump over Tower Bridge. There was a mistake with the warning sign when Albert Gunton was on the bridge and he realised the bascule was already rising, so he made a snap decision, accelerated, jumped the gap, and managed to land safely on the lower, second bascule. No-one was injured and Gunton was awarded £10.
• The problem with identity parades is that they are not always reliable. Today the police use a system called VIPER. To demonstrate how unreliable some identity parades are, Stephen organises a Never Mind the Buzzcocks style parade in which the panel have to identify the man who stole Stephen's fake money earlier on.

General Ignorance

• The first person to go around the world in 80 days was American investigative journalist Nellie Bly. She worked for The World, the newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. After the publication of the novel Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne in 1890, Pulitzer decided to see if such a trip was possible. Bly insisted that she should do the trip otherwise she would leave the paper. Pulitzer agreed and Bly completed the journey in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes, from New York to New York.(Forfeit: Michael Palin)
• You can tell if a chick is male or female by doing a slight squeeze and feeling for the differences in the ridges and bumps in the cloaca tract. In 1927 at the World Poultry Congress in Ottawa it was announced that the Japanese had discovered how to sex chicks. The discovery reduced the cost of eggs worldwide overnight. At the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School the students were taught in such a vigorous way that only between 5-10% of students got accreditation, but when you passed you were paid very well. The best chicken sexers can work through 1,200 chicks an hour. (Forfeit: Nobody knows)

Tangent: Stephen once did a corporate gig for Phillips Small Appliances.

Tangent: In Norfolk there was a team of Vietnamese turkey sexers working for Bernard Matthews.

• The Moon, like the Sun, rises slightly in the east and sets slightly in the west. (Forfeit: Which moon?; The opposite)
• Nobody Knows: If you are shown a picture of some mussels and asked how many different species were shown you could not say, because you cannot tell the difference just by looking. You have to use the genome. Jimmy gets the bonus.

QI XL Extras

Tangent: The shill is the person who is in on the Find the Lady scam and "wins" money in front of the crowd.

Tangent: Alan visited a Museum of Torture in Spain where he saw all kinds of things used to punish people during the Spanish Inquisition. One was a spike which would go through your anus, miss all your vital organs and then come out of your shoulder. You would then be left for days on end. They also used spiked cages and left people trapped inside them outside city walls.

Tangent: At the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony the winner is expected to make a speech. However, in order to stop the speeches from going on too long, after 60 seconds an eight-year-old girl called Little Miss Sweetie Poo comes onto the stage and says, "Please stop, I'm bored", over and over until the winner stops. When McManus won, Little Miss Sweetie Poo was played by his own identical twin daughters.

• Between a mouse and a hippopotamus the mouse is more mammaly, in the sense that it is faster for someone to categorise a mouse as a mammal than a hippo. This is because we consider a hippo to be less mammaly than a mouse because the hippo lives in water. Similarly, if you were to categorise different kinds of fruit, we would almost instantly recognize apples and pears to be fruits, would take a bit longer to recognize figs and raisins as fruits, and even longer to recognize olives and pumpkins as fruits.

Tangent: Phill says the picture of the mouse looks like it is clicking its fingers like it is in West Side Story or if it is rolling up a Rizla paper. The correct way to pronounce the word Rizla is Ri-la, from the French for rice, riz, and the company that makes them, Lacroix.

• What you would not call an Irishman with no nipples is King. In ancient Ireland one of the ways to show loyalty to the king was to suck his nipples. In order to become King of Ireland people would fight each other and if they were considered not suitable they would have their nipples cut off, meaning they could never be king.
• The national colour of Ireland is St. Patrick's blue. The coat of arms of Ireland has a shield depicting an Irish harp on a St. Patrick's blue background, and the Irish Guards have a St. Patrick's blue patch on their bearskin helmets. The idea of green being the national colour comes from a rebellion in 1798. It became the colour associated with Irish nationalism and began to take over from St. Patrick's blue.

Tangent: According to Herodotus when the Persians wanted to make a decision they would make it when drunk, and if they thought it was still the right move when they were sober they stuck with it. Alternatively they would make the decision sober and would stick to it if they through it was right when they were drunk.

Tangent: When Marilyn Monroe was engaged to Arthur Miller she was very nervous about meeting his parents for the first time who were Jewish intellectuals. They went to their small house in New York and at one point Monroe went to the bathroom. She then realised that the bathroom was directly above the dining room were everyone else was, so to disguise the sound of her urinating she turned on the taps. The next day Miller asked his father what he thought of Monroe, and he said: "Nice girl - pisses like a horse".

• If one of two identical twins had committed a crime, and you had eye-witness reports, DNA testing and fingerprints, it would still be incredibly difficult to get a conviction because there is a danger of imprisoning the innocent twin. In January 2009 $6.8million worth of jewellery was stolen from Berlin's Kaufhaus des Westens department store. Two of the suspects were identical twins, Abbas and Hassam Qmurat, and they walked free despite there being DNA evidence, because although they could deduce that one of the brothers took part in the crime, they did not know for certain which one.

Tangent: Alan was once in a café and he saw someone steal a scooter using some bolt cutters. When the police came around he said that he was an eye witness. The police asked for a description and he said that the scooter was painted metallic gold. Then the victim pointed out it was metallic silver. A few moments later Alan spotted the stolen bike being ridden by the thieves. Alan gave chase and phoned the police to report what had happened, but they never came.

Episode 5 "Invertebrates"

Broadcast date

• 7 October 2011

Recording date

• 31 May 2011

Panelists

• Alan Davies (–1 point)
• Jimmy Carr (–24 points) 20th appearance
• Sarah Millican (2 points) 1st appearance
• Johnny Vegas (Winner with 4 points) 5th appearance

Buzzers

• Jimmy: A loud, low buzz
• Sarah: A cricket
• Johnny: A high-pitched buzz
• Alan: A fly buzzing, then getting swatted

Topics

• Apart from making honey, the other thing that bees do better than dogs is smell things out. While it takes about 3 months to train a sniffer dog, it only takes a bee 10 minutes by putting it in a box and making them associate a smell with sugar as an award.

Tangent: An old joke is that the best way to smuggle drugs is via a dog's buttocks because when the sniffer dog arrived it would look like the dog was just sniffing the dog's backside.

Tangent: Sarah's father once punched a bee. He said it was like punching a velvet tennis ball.

Tangent: Stephen has a selection on insect related foods. They include lollipops with ants in then, a scorpion brittle, dried bugs and ants in chocolate. Stephen tries to persuade the panel to eat them by eating a chocolate ant himself. However, it repeats on him, makes him cough, gives him acid problems and there is a bit stuck at the back of his throat.

Tangent: Johnny has eaten smoked insects at Bug World in Liverpool. He claims they had a bad aftertaste.

Tangent: The website beedogs.com features pictures of dogs dressed as bees.

• The best way to charm a worm is to vibrate the ground. It is believed that the worm thinks there is a mole nearby and the worm escapes by going to the surface.
• The thing with the amazing eyes did not escape from a tank. The Mantis Shrimp is a crustacean from Vietnam that has split eyes so that they can see ultraviolet, infrared and circularly-polarised light. It is the only creature on Earth that can see circularly-polarised light, meaning it could see a 3D film without the glasses. They can accelerate through water at 10,000 times the force of gravity, which is so fast it makes the water in front of it boil. They can break out of aquarium glass with one strike of their claw. It can also punch pray.

Tangent: Johnny decides to eat Stephen's scorpion brittle, which takes him ages to break into two. Johnny pretends that the effect of the scorpion poison gives him superpowers and he does a forward roll across the set. Alan decides to eat a chocolate ant which he finds disgusting. Stephen fails to persuade Sarah to eat anything, saying that her mum told her she did not need to put anything into her mouth she did not want. It is suggested that this is her version of sex talk and Alan suggests she should put an ant lollipop up what Sarah calls me nunny.

General Ignorance

• A vertebrate with no backbone is called a shark. Sharks are classified as vertebrates but their backbone is made out of cartilage. They do not have a spine or a rib cage.
• The strongest creature for its weight in the world is gonorrhea, which is a bacterium that can pull 100,000 times its own weight. The original cure for gonorrhea was to put an umbrella up the urethra which would scrape the inside.
• Nobody Knows: Nobody knows why moths are attracted to light. One theory is that they are attracted to moonlight and that other sources of light disorientate them. Alan gets the bonus.

QI XL Extras

• Nobody Knows: No-one can tell if a dog has a guilty conscience. Owners think that they can but it is all in their mind according to various tests. No-one gets the bonus.
• There are no vegan Venus flytraps because in order to trap their pray it needs to hit the trigger hairs at a certain time. Plant matter cannot do this but animals and insects can.

Tangent: The South American bolus spider traps its pray by making a silk thread lasso which it swings around to catch flies.

• You would go out with a bucket full of ladybirds at night because they are used as a form of pest control as they eat greenflies. However, if you release them during the day they will just fly away. So you release them night, when they do not fly, and when dawn breaks they eat the nearby greenflies in your garden, then become full up so they do not fly off.

Tangent: Stephen had a similar pest control problem in a conservatory, so he used gall wasps.

• An ant mill goes around and around in circles until it dies. When ants lose the pheromone trail made by the leaders they start following each other in a circle constantly until they die.

Tangent: Sarah has a rule saying that if an insect comes into her house she can kill it, because it is in her home, but not if it is outside because it is their home.

• The thing that you should not breathe in if you are a stink ant is the spore of the cordyceps fungus in the rainforests of Cameroon. If it does it gets into the brain, sending the ant mad, then makes the ant walk up the tree where the fungus lives, consumes the rest of the brain and the soft flesh of the ant, then a new spore grows out of the head.

General Ignorance

• Oystercatchers mainly eat cockles and mussels, not oysters. An oystercatcher can consume 500 cockles a day. (Forfeit: Oysters)
• The animal with the most genes is the water flea, which has 8,000 more genes than humans. They play an important role in the food cycle of sea creatures. (Forfeit: Jeremy Clarkson)

Episode 6 "Inventive"

Broadcast date

• 14 October 2011

Recording date

• 25 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (1 point)
• Bill Bailey (-3 points) 24th appearance
• Nina Conti (Winner with 5 points) 1st appearance
  • Gran (4 points) 1st appearance
• Sean Lock (3 points) 26th appearance

Buzzers

• Bill, Sean, Nina/Gran: High-pitched bells, each higher than the last
• Alan: An electrical discharge

Topics

• You should be glad that you did not invent the flying car, the parachute suit and the web rotary press because the people who did invent them were killed by their own machines. William Bullock, inventor of the rotary press fell into the machine's works and was killed by them. Austrian Franz Reichelt invented a suit with a parachute in it and tried to prove it would work by throwing himself off the Eiffel Tower in 1912, but it did not work and he fell to his death. Californian Henry Smolinski invented a flying car, in which you drove to an airport, collected the wings, attached them to the car, then flew to another airport, took off the wings and drove away. In 1973 one of the struts broke off and Smolinski and his co-pilot fell to their deaths.

Tangent: Bill claims a man fell through a tunnel the size of a CD and he managed to survive. Alan then claims that he is now however in a redundant format.

Tangent: Nina once lost Gran on a plane which she claims for legal reasons she cannot mention, but Gran says it is Ryanair.

Tangent: Stephen has a friend who has micro-pigs. When they travel via air his friend puts the pigs in the hand luggage without telling anyone. The phrase Pig in a poke comes from dishonest pig sellers who would hide a dog in a sack and claim it was a pig. The phrase is also hard for ventriloquists to say, but Nina manages to get Gran to say it successfully.

• The well known invention which lurks in the belly and deserves to dwell in the cesspool is ventriloquism. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, who once excommunicated the Pope, used this phrase to describe it. The word means belly speaker and ventriloquism has a dark history. People originally would just throw their voice anywhere and people thought it may have been demonic possession or a divine utterance.

Tangent: The other members of the panel are given their own puppets and try to do ventriloquism themselves. Bill in the process accidentally breaks his buzzer.

• Imaginary friends among children are more common place than we may think. It is believed by some psychiatrists that having imaginary friends is a good thing because it improves social interaction with real people and their verbal skills.

Tangent: Yasser Arafat said that the history of religious wars is the history of people fighting over their imaginary friends.

• Each member of the panel has an old invention from the Maurice Collins Collection, and is asked to identify what it is.
  • Bill: Has a wooden finger stretcher which was used by pianists to increase the range that they could play with one hand. Bill can play from notes C to E, which is a wide reach.
  • Sean: A glass water grenade which was once used by firemen to put fires out by throwing them into the middle of the blaze.
  • Nina and Gran: A wooden tube-like device which is inserted into the rectum in order to administer a solution to help with hemorrhoids. It comes with a screw lid which is turned and forces the solution out of the holes in the bottom.
  • Alan: A pair of glasses which allow the wearer to read a book while lying down, without having to hold the book up high.
  • Stephen: A policeman's Lady Reviver, which contained smelling salts and was used by the police in order to revive women who had fainted.

General Ignorance

• Nobody Knows: Nobody knows how dinosaurs had sex. While the most common theory is that they did it like reptiles and birds do it today using a cloacal sack, no sexual organs survive because the flesh has all rotted away. We have only been able to sex dinosaurs in the last 15 years. Alan gets the bonus.
• No diseases are spread by feral pigeons according to pigeon experts.

QI XL Extras

Tangent: Alan does not like flying, but despite this he was brought a flying lesson for his 40th birthday costing £99.

Tangent: Ventriloquist acts were once popular on radio. One of the most popular BBC comedies was Educating Archie starring Peter Brough. However, Brough made the mistake of moving the show to television and it was shown to everyone that his lips moved all the time.

Tangent: Nina was taught ventriloquism by Ken Campbell, and he excited her by saying that people tend not to say the first thing that comes into their head but the second, and in a way she could say what she was really thinking using her puppets. Campbell's puppets were given to Nina in his will and Gran used to belong to Campbell.

Tangent: The idea of a ventriloquist doll taking over the actual ventriloquist is most famously seen in the film Magic. Nina confesses that she sometimes wonders why Gran is not saying her line, despite the fact that Gran cannot really talk.

Tangent: The actress Candice Bergen claims that she had an imaginary brother, who was Charlie McCarthy. He was the puppet belonging to Edgar Bergen, Candice's father and the most famous ventriloquist in America.

• Edwin Beard Budding's invention affected an army of men with wooden blocks strapped to their feet because it put them out of work. Budding's most famous invention was the lawn mower. Previously, lawns were cut by scythe men who made sure the grass was level by wearing wooden blocks on their feet and matching the height of grass to the height of the block. Once the lawnmower was invented it put them out of work.

Tangent: There is a British Lawnmower Museum in Southport which has over 300 exhibits, including the lawnmowers belonging to Vanessa Feltz, Alan Titchmarsh, Nicholas Parsons, Brian May, Roger McGough, Albert Pierrepoint, Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

• The man who invented the idea of having bacon and eggs for breakfast and the phrase Torches of Freedom was Edward Bernays, who it could be argued to also invented public relations. At the time American breakfasts were very light, but he collected 5,000 doctors and he made testament to the fact that a heartily breakfast was better for you and promoted the idea of having bacon and eggs. This worked and the dish became a staple. The phrase torches of freedom was created by him to promote cigarettes to women.

General Ignorance

• The internet was invented by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who were responsible for the internet protocol. The first internet was called ARPANET. The first communication took place in California, from Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute (over 400 miles), and read Lo. The full message was Login but the system crashed mid-way through the message. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. (Forfeit: Tim Berners-Lee)
• The right conditions for dry rot are that it has to be damp. According to architects rising damp does not exist, although it is mentioned in building regulations. It is believed that it is normal damp that comes from a leak.

Episode 7 "Incomprehensible"

Broadcast date

• 21 October 2011

Recording date

• 18 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (2 points)
• Brian Cox (Winner with 5 points) 1st appearance
• Ross Noble (–6 points) 4th appearance
• Sue Perkins (–17 points) 3rd appearance

Buzzers

• Sue: A baby babbling
• Brian: A descending electronic sound
• Ross: A telephone "chatter" sound effect
• Alan: A series of Alan's voice samples overlapping each other, ending with "dirty old bag"

Topics

• The panel are played a recording of a prairie dog squeaking and are asked what it is saying. According to Prof. Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University it is saying that, "there is a human approaching wearing a yellow shirt." They can tell the difference between different types of predator, humans, badgers, geometric shapes and coloured shirts that humans are wearing, though they do not seem to be able to distinguish between gender of humans.

Tangent: The director on one of Brian's documentaries had a PhD from Oxford studying frog communication.

• When the Pope's librarian, Leo Allatius, first saw the rings on Saturn he said that it was possible that after Christ's ascension into Heaven that the rings could be Christ's foreskin. Allatius wrote about his theory in a paper called "De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba", which in English roughly translates as "A Discussion on the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ".

Tangent: Galileo thought that the rings around Saturn looked rather like the ears of a jug.

• Nobody Knows: Nobody knows how the rings of Saturn formed. There are two main theories. One is that they are the remains of a moon that was destroyed, but as the rings are made of ice and moons are made out of rock this seems unlikely. The other theory is that it is something to do with the formation of the planet itself and something may have spun off it in some way. Brian gets the bonus.

Tangent: In terms of there being any life on Saturn's moons, one possible contender is Enceladus, which is about the size of Britain, but has fountains of ice rising from the surface, which may mean there could be liquid water underneath. Ross then asks Brian which moon is most likely to be the home to the Ewoks from Star Wars. Brian claims it would by Titan because it has a thicker atmosphere than the Earth so you would need to be furry.

• The main use for the second commonest gas in the universe is for MRI scanners. The gas is helium and is used in refrigeration. However, there is so little naturally occurring helium on Earth that the planet may run out of it by 2035. (Forfeit: Making your voice go funny)

Tangent: Ross asks Brian that due to the effect of the magnets what impact the LHC has on cows wearing Swiss cowbells. Brian says that as particles are fired at 99.999999% the speed of light, meaning the particles are travelling around the 27km circumference of the LHC 11,000 times a second, the cows would weight 7,000 times more.

• According to archaeologists the present is 1 January 1950. It was decided that due to the atmosphere being messed up with due to nuclear testing no carbon dating after the point would be reliable.
• Stephen performs an experiment. He takes a box containing candles and lights them. He then takes a jug and puts in it some powder and some liquid. This produces a certain gas. Stephen puts his hand over the jug to prevent it escaping, then "pours" the gas into the box. The gas "flows" in and puts the candles out. Stephen asks what is going on. What happened is that Stephen mixed sodium bicarbonate and vinegar, which produces carbon dioxide. As the carbon dioxide is poured in it pushes out the lighter air which is needed to burn, and thus puts out the flames.

Tangent: You cannot carry liquid nitrogen in a lift because if you spill it, it produces nitrogen gas which is also heavier than air. This forces all the oxygen towards the top of lift causing you to suffocate. Stephen remembers a chemistry lesson in which his teacher put a rose in liquid nitrogen for a second then took the rose out and smashed it on a desk.

Tangent: The surface of Titan is so cold that it has lakes of liquid methane. It behaves exactly like water on Earth, thus you have methane rain, snow, ice and lakes. One lake on Titan is as large as Earth's Lake Superior. Because of this Ross realises that you could dip an Ewok into the lake and then shatter it. Because methane is the main constituent of a fart, Ross gets even more excited by the fact you can shatter an Ewok in a "lake of fart". Unlike methane gas, the methane liquid would not be flammable because there is no oxygen on Titan.

• Nobody Knows: We do not know what variety of lettuce was served upon the Titanic. There were 7,000 heads of lettuce saved from the ship. No-one gets the bonus. (Forfeit: Iceberg)

Tangent: The most valuable icebergs could be on Uranus or Neptune because the crushing pressure might create lakes of liquid diamond and solid diamond icebergs.

• The panel are asked to fill in the gaps in the following slogans.
  • County Donegal: Up here it's different.
  • Northumbria Police: Total policing.
  • Welcome to Northamptonshire: Let yourself grow.
  • Welcome to Tower Hamlets: Let's make it happen.

General Ignorance

• Nobody Knows: There is no absolutely official definition of a galaxy. There are scientists trying to come up with one. They launched an online survey to which QI was the first organisation to be allowed to read the results so far. Based on the results there is already one new galaxy which fits their definition, which is a globular cluster, Omega Centauri. Sue gets the bonus.

Tangent: The image displayed on the screen during the question is the Hubble Deep Field image, which contains the oldest known galaxy, which is 13.2 billion light-years away. As the Earth is 5 billion years old, the planet has not been around for most of its existence.

QI XL Extras

Tangent: For a treat the panel are played a clip of another prarire dog which has been dubbed over and appears to be shouting "Alan" over and over, before correcting himself and shouting "Steve".

• Spacemen follow penguins around by looking at their trails of poo. Originally scientists used bands around the wings, but there was a 44% increase in the mortality rate of penguins that had these on. Then a German scientist discovered that penguins squeeze to defecate four times harder than humans, so they leave a streak of faeces 30 cm away from their bodies, which can be tracked up in space.

Tangent: Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman had a theory which was there may only be one electron in the entire universe, and this is visible at all points in space and time, travelling backwards and forwards through time. This came about because all electrons are the same.

• If you were on the bridge of the Titanic and see the iceberg to your right the command you should give to the helmsman to avoid it is: "Hard starboard". Until 1933 you gave to opposite command because at the time there many ways of steering the ship, the wheel being just one. (Forfeit: Port)

Tangent: A jet-ski does not have a rudder.

• The Scottish tourist board: Welcome to Scotland. The Scottish parliament and the Tourist Board of Scotland in 2007 spent £125,000 coming up with that slogan.

Tangent: Stephen's favourite slogan is for Kentucky. All the American states have their own slogan, but Kentucky's references the two most famous things it is known for in America, which is horse racing and bourbon whiskey: "Unbridled spirit". Stephen is also a Kentucky colonel, as appointed by the state governor. In theory he could be called up in defence of the state. When Stephen made his documentary series in which he visited all the states of America he was asked what his favourite state was and he said Kentucky. Three months later Stephen got a letter from the governor with a certificate, a baseball cap and other things, saying he had been made a colonel in the Kentucky army.

Tangent: Ross has the key to the Australian city of Port Pirie. He once performed a gig in the city in which the mayor was present. Ross asked for the key to the city and the mayor agreed. Ross came down to the office where he worked, and the mayor gave him an old shed key with a bit of ribbon tied to it.

Tangent: Alan was once in America and driving a car with SatNav. He wanted to drive from Atlantic City to Lexington Avenue, Manhattan, from where he hired the car. However, the SatNav instead sent him to Lexington Avenue, Staten Island, which was just an ordinary residential street.

Tangent: Stephen has just done a SatNav voice. Alan is worried that Stephen did as if it was talking to him. Alan once programmed the SatNav in his own car so it had his voice on it.

Tangent: During a tour of Australia Ross programmed the SatNav on his motorbike to take him down from Port Pirie along the Nullarbor Plain, the longest straight road in the road. The SatNav told him to drive straight ahead for 2 days and then turn left. He forgot to turn left.

Tangent: Because of the gravitational pull of the Earth on satellites, SatNav systems would be 38,000 feet out a day if they were not regulated. Light travels almost precisely one foot in a nanosecond. When Brian went to visit the GPS Centre in Colorado the SatNav he used took him to a field.

General Ignorance

• Insects that spin webs include moths and web spinners. Spiders are not insects, but arachnids. Goats can also be made to webs by implanting a spider web spinning gene into them, causing the milk to contain silk. (Forfeit: Spider)

Episode 8 "Inequality and Injustice"

Broadcast date

• 28 October 2011

Recording date

• 1 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (–1 gazillion points)
• Clive Anderson (second place with 7 points) 15th appearance
• Sandi Toksvig (Winner with –54 points) 7th appearance
• Henning Wehn (–60 points) 1st appearance

Theme

Stephen first claims that the theme of the show is: "inattention and ineptitude". He then asks Alan what the theme was and Alan repeats what Stephen said. He then gets an unfair forfeit because the actual theme is injustice. (Forfeit: Inattention and ineptitude). In a twist on the "injustice" theme, the points were unfairly given out before the quiz began (as the buzzers were "tested" at the beginning of the show), and Toksvig was named as winner despite having a worse score than Anderson. The true scores were not revealed at the end.

Buzzers

• Sandi: An audience cheering
• Clive: "Objection, milord!"
• Henning: "Don't mention the war!"
• Alan: An audience booing

Topics

• Sandi is asked what she can tell about the man depicted in a particular statue called "The Puritan". The answer is that he looks like the typical 19th century depiction of Puritans, which we still have but is totally wrong. During the 1600s they wore the same clothes as everyone else, but when they had their portraits done they wore their Sunday best, which tended to be black. (Forfeit: He's a puritan)

Tangent: The story of the American Pilgrim Fathers is totally made up. They did not land in Plymouth Rock, but in Provincetown, Massachusetts; they did not sail on the Mayflower; and they did not flee from religious persecution. In fact, they wanted to carry out some religious persecution and create a country from which they could be no dissent from Puritanism.

Tangent: Sandi once did a trip sailing all the way around Britain. When she got to Northumbria she saw a house with a painted sign saying: "Bed and breakfast, hot and cold water." Sandi thought only in this country would you feel you need to advertise you have both.

• The key role that a Puritan pig played in the trial of George Spencer in 1641 was that it was a victim and a witness. Spencer was an ugly man who was bald and had one eye, living in New Haven, Connecticut. He was accused of breaking Leviticus 20:15; "If a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death, and ye shall slay the beast." One day a sow farrowed a litter of piglets, one of whom looked very similar to Spencer. He was brought to court and accused of lying with the pig. He denied it, but then the court said, "There shall be mercy shown, should you be open and honest." Spencer then thought he should pretend to confess and he did, but the court said that it would be God who would show mercy, and they took his confession seriously. However, in order for him to be executed the court needed two witnesses. One was Spencer, the other was the pig itself, who they brought into court and they claimed the pig confessed to the crime. As a result, both were executed.

Tangent: Legend has it that during the Napoleonic Wars the people of Hartlepool hanged a monkey thinking it was a French spy. The reason normally given is that in cartoons at the time Frenchmen were depicted as monkeys and the locals had never seen a monkey before, so they assumed it was a Frenchman.

• The New Haven Puritans abolished trial by jury because juries are not mentioned in the Bible. Thus they thought they had no place in life.
• The man who got the blame when the Prince of Wales misbehaved was the whipping boy. If the Prince of Wales did something wrong at school the teachers and elders needed to punish him, but because he was royal a common teacher could not harm him physically, so they whipped another boy instead. Charles I had a whipping boy who later became the Earl of Dysart.

Tangent: Corporal punishment in UK state schools was not banned until 1986. In public schools it was not banned until 1999. It was an incredibly close vote: 231 to 230. The person most instrumental in the original 1986 ban was Sarah Ferguson, albeit by accident. The day the vote was to take place was the day she was getting married to Prince Andrew. As a result the traffic the wedding caused meant that some MPs who were likely to vote against the ban could not make it to the vote in time.

• The wood used in corporal punishment on the Isle of Man was hazel. Up until 1976 you could be birched for crimes, but they did not use birchwood. When the ban was first suggested people defending birching suggested that people could keep their trousers on while they were punished. (Forfeit: Birch)

Tangent: In some parts of America there is the tradition of birthday spanking, where you get spanked with a paddle as a treat on your birthday at school. Some people want to ban it for being cruel but others want to keep it because it is tradition.

Tangent: Stephen and the panel tell the old joke about a British couple who adopt a German baby, who does not talk. After several tests they find nothing wrong with the baby, but when he is five he is served apple strudel, and German child says: "This apple strudel is tepid." The parents ask the child why he had not said anything after all this time and the child says: "Up until now everything had been satisfactory."

Tangent: Henning complains that when people talk about the war it is always World War II and not some other war. He says that everyone in Britain takes personal credit for winning it. Henning claims that the people who most annoy him are British people in their 70s who take personal credit for the war. He claims that at the time they would have been 10 years old, so they did not help much, and if anything were a drain on British resources and thus effectively every 70-year-old Briton today fought on the side of Nazi Germany.

• From 1875 to 1956 the next best thing to a first-class train ticket was a third-class train ticket. There was no second-class on British trains during that period. William Gladstone insisted that a third-class should be created for poorer people. The train companies hated this and thus ran useless third-class services known as Parliamentary trains just to apply to the law. Then they had a better idea which was to upgrade third-class to second-class, but still call it third-class. (Forfeit: A second-class train ticket)
• In 1771 cricketer Thomas White invented a bat that was wider than the wicket. He noticed that there were no rules defining how big a bat could be, so he turned up with a huge one in a match between Chertsey and Hambledon which today would be Surrey v Hampshire. In 1774 a new law was brought in limiting the width of cricket bats to 4.5 inches. (Forfeit: The Googly)

Tangent: Other sportsmen have also exploited the rules. One was American footballer Lester Hayes, who played for the Oakland Raiders. He was defensive player of the year during the late 1970s, but this was due to the fact he covered his hands and gloves in an adhesive called Stickum. Another was a jockey in Belmont, New York in 1923 who won a race even though he died of a heart attack while he was on the horse. Although there was a rule saying that the jockey had to be in the saddle there was no rule saying the player had to be alive, so the bookies were forced to pay up.

General Ignorance

• The statue of Justice at the top of the Old Bailey is looking out. There are several different statues of Justice, some of which are blindfolded, some of which are not. (Forfeit: She's blindfolded)
• Lepers carried bells to attract people and to collect alms. It was not until after the Black Death when people viewed it as a warning and stayed away. Leprosy is not as infectious as people think it is. 90% of people are immune to it and limbs do not fall off. (Forfeit: To keep people away)
• Out of the panel, no-one has fewer hairs than any other member. According to Dr. George Cotsarelis of the department of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, bald people have the same number of hairs on the scalp as everyone else; it is just that they are microscopically small. (Forfeit: Me)

QI XL Extras

Tangent: In France in the year 1710, a man was spotted having sex with a donkey. Several character witnesses were brought in to testify on behalf of the donkey saying that the donkey was good and a victim of the crime, so the donkey was left off and just the man who mated with it was executed.

Tangent: Sandi claims that in Alabama it is illegal to wear a fake moustache in a church that causes laughter.

Tangent: The former Lord Chancellor Lord Mackay of Clashfern was a member of the Wee Frees. He was thrown out of the church after going to the funeral of a judge who happened to be Catholic. He was also once holding a tea party for some lawyers at which he served toast and a tiny pot of honey. One of lawyers looked at it and said: "I see Your Lordship keeps a bee."

Tangent: Alan claims that people still have odd flashes of Puritanism today. He tells the story of a woman actress who played Lara Croft who did a BBC Radio 5 Live interview. She was in the news because the film's poster had her nipples airbrushed out, because they were showing through the costume. The actress was complaining about the airbrushing and the presenter said: "Well, perhaps they thought they weren't suitable for children?" The actress said that was a stupid argument, seeing as how you breastfeed children and babies.

Tangent: Sandi did a Channel 4 sitcom with Mike McShane in which McShane played a sex expert. It was decided that his flat should be full of sexual things and thus his coat rack should be made entirely of penises. Channel 4 said: "You can have the penises as long as they're not erect," forgetting that if they were erect you could not use them as coat hangers.

Tangent: A school master from Swabia, south-western Germany, kept a book logging all his punishments. Over his 51 year career he administered 911,500 canings and 121,000 floggings. Punishments ranged from 700 boys being made to stand with peas in their shoes and 6,000 were made to kneel on the sharp edge of a stick.

Tangent: The idea of someone else baring your sins appears in religion. In Christianity it is Jesus Christ. In Judaism it is the scapegoat.

• A French book that could never be translated into German was written by Louis Pasteur, after whom the word pasteurisation is named. He was viciously anti-German following the Franco-Prussian War. After the war, the Germans discovered a new form of yeast which allowed them to store beer extremely well. It became hugely successful and annoyed Pasteur so much that he studied the science of brewing and came up with his own yeasts which made even better beer. He took his recipes to America, Belgium, the Whitbread Company and to Denmark's Carlsberg Company, but refused to take them to Germany. He then wrote a book all about it, ordering that it should never be translated into German.

Tangent: When France tried to get rid of their gold bullion when they were invaded by the Germans during World War II, all the gold went on a single ocean liner to Canada called the SS Pasteur.

Tangent: The train system had an influence on London suburban housing. Train companies would not sell third-class tickets in the outer suburbs because they did not want the trains to be full of poor people who did not pay as much to go on. As such there are bigger houses on the outside of London and smaller houses on the inside.

Tangent: During World War II there were new laws brought into golf which included: "If a players stroke is interrupted by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb or by machine gunfire they may take the stroke again, but there is a penalty of one stroke."

Tangent: Stephen once did a play with Paul Eddington. Eddington kept with him a sign from a Bristol hotel room dating from the war, which was a card with a bit of cord. The card read: "Please hang outside your room if you wish to be awoken during an air-raid."

Tangent: During a game of cricket on Saint Helena a man ran back to catch the ball. He did catch it, but then fell of the edge of cliff. The result was put down as: "caught (dead)". During late summer in a village cricket match in Norfolk a fielder dived in to catch the ball but instead caught a swallow.

Tangent: There is a P.G. Wodehouse story about cheating in boxing. An American boxer was fighting someone who was stone deaf. The deaf boxer asked the American if he could tell him when the bell went because he could not hear it. The American agreed and during the match he told the deaf boxer the bell had gone when it had not. When the deaf boxer heard the lie he let his guard down and the American knocked him out.

Tangent: A further example of actual sporting cheating with regards to exploiting the rules came from the 1951 St Louis Browns baseball team, who brought in a 3'7" tall player called Eddie Gaedel out to bat. He crouched over the plate, and thus the strike zone the pitcher had to hit was one-and-a-half inches high. The pitcher could not get anywhere near it so he pitched four balls, after which he walked to first base and was subbed.

General Ignorance

Tangent: If you come across a Welshman in Chester after sunset you cannot kill him. The idea that all these silly laws still exist such as this one is nonsense. This wartime command came into pass under Henry V at the time of Owain Glyndwr. However, any other laws covering manslaughter or murder cancel out the old law. The same is true with the silly American laws, including the one that Sandi mentioned earlier on, which actually do not exist. Stephen had planned as part of his American documentary series to break a supposedly silly law in each state, but he was always told the law did not exist.

Tangent: Sandi read law at university and was taught under Lord Denning. She helped to compile the index of his last book and Sandi asked him: "Why is it so complicated to look up legal cases?" Denning looked over his glasses and said to her: "Well, we don't want just anyone doing it."

Episode 9 "Illness"

Broadcast date

• 4 November 2011

Recording date

• 10 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (-7 points)
• Jo Brand (-24 points) 26th appearance
• Dr. Ben Goldacre (5 points) 1st appearance
• Andy Hamilton (Winner with 8 points) 7th appearance

Buzzers

• Andy: A cough
• Ben: A sneeze
• Jo: An ambulance siren
• Alan: A funeral dirge

Topics

• You would swallow a pill made from a poisonous metalloid as it worked as a morning-after pill. During the medieval period, people swallowed pills made from antimony as a morning after pill and also used it as a suppository for constipation. As it was made of metal you could reuse the same pill again, so after you used it you would rummage through your leavings, take the pill out and use it again. The same pill would also be past on from generation to generation as antimony is a rare metal.

Tangent: There is a mnemonic for remembering laxatives which is that they are: "bulkers, lubricants, irritants, softeners and explosives". Ben claims that explosives work like cholera.

Tangent: In Ancient Egypt there was a doctor who specialised in giving enemas to the pharaoh known as the neru phuyt, which means, shepherd of the anus.

Tangent: Humans are the only beings to insert liquids up anuses. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, gave patients at his sanatorium yogurt enemas, administrated by the Rear Admiral.

Tangent: A man attempted to kill a Middle-Eastern prince by packing his own anus with explosives. The man planned to shake the prince by the hand and then trigger the explosion. However his anus managed to absorb the explosion so much that all that happened was that he jumped a bit in the air and then fell on his knees.

• Nobody Knows: Nobody knows how placebo sugar pills work, but they definitely do work, even when you tell the patient that it is a placebo. It is also shown that the more pills you take the better the condition gets and a fake injection is better than taking the pills. Andy gets the bonus.

Tangent: Pacemakers start working before they are switched on. Knee surgery also tends to work even when nothing has been done to the actual knee - you have just been cut open and sown back up again.

• The condition that astronauts suffer from which is measured on the Garn scale is seasickness. It is the most common illness that astronauts suffer from in space. 47% of all the medication used by shuttle astronauts is to combat it. The Garn scale is named after Senator Jake Garn, who was also an astronaut who suffered from it terribly in 1985.
• Intelligent falling is a parody of intelligent design. Some schools, especially in America, believe that they should teach intelligent design along side the theory of evolution because no-one is certain about evolution.
• The last British monarch to be deliberately killed was George V in 1936 at Sandringham. On the 15th January the king retired to his bedroom. On the 20th January he was comatose and clearly dying. The King's doctor, Lord Dawson, was of the opinion that the world at large would be better served by hearing about the death of the King in the morning papers rather than living a bit longer and it being reported in the evening journals. So Dawson went up to the bedroom and according to his diary: "I therefore decided to determine the end and injected morphia and shortly afterwards with cocaine into the distended jugular vein.
• You would call a man that eats literally anything a polyphagist. Sufferers will eat anything, including metal and soil. It also occurs in animals such as horses were it is known as a depraved appetite. (Forfeit: Michael Winner)

Tangent: One popular method of weight loss was to swallow a pill containing a tapeworm egg.

General Ignorance

• You should not sleep with your dog because dogs carry illnesses, including bubonic plague. The illnesses you get from animals are often worse than the ones you get from people.
• If you are having a panic attack the best thing to do is capnometry-assisted respiratory training or CART, which encourages the sufferer to take shallow breathes rather than deep ones. Breathing into a paper bag or holding your breath are not recommended. (Forfeit: Breathe into a paper bag)
• If you want to wash the bacteria off your hands the water would have to be at around 80 degrees centigrade. The temperature of the water is not what gets rid of bacteria, but the vigorousness of the washing.
• Each country in the world has their own idea of how many portions of fruit and veg you should eat every day. The reason it is five in Britain is because doctors are of the belief that you cannot persuade the public to eat more than that. In Japan they recommend eating nine portions, in Denmark it is six, in France it is ten, in Canada it is between five and ten.
• The thing that burns when you set light to your farts is hydrogen. Only a third of people produce methane in their farts. (Forfeit: Methane)

Tangent: During the Great Plague of London doctors recommended that patients should store their farts in jars, and if they felt unwell they should smell the fart to make themselves feel better.

QI XL Extras

• The panel are asked to fill out the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, which is a questionnaire asking how likely you are to fall asleep in certain situations and thus if you have a healthy sleep cycle. They are asked a series of questions to which the panel rank a score of zero to three. A score of zero means: No chance of dozing, one means: Slight chance of dozing, two means: Moderate chance of dozing and three means: High chance of dozing. The results are revealed just before General Ignorance.

Tangent: Alan knew someone who was recommended to take arnica for a Caesarean scar, so she went to her obstetrician and asked if it would help. The obstetrician told her that with homoeopathic medicine there are no proper medical trials. However, arnica is one of the things that has been tested and it has been shown to have no effect at all.

Tangent: Ben explains that the trials for homoeopathic medicine are crudely rigged. Ben claims that the pharmaceutical industry is even worse than the quacks when it comes to this.

• The symptoms of drapetomania and dysesthesia aethiopica tend to involve wanting your freedom and running away from your master, as these are conditions invented by white American doctors in the 1850s as reasons why black slaves wanted to escape.

Tangent: In Russia and China they had political mania, which was a disorder which involved convincing the need for political change. In China the symptoms listed included carrying banners, shouting slogans, and expressing views on important domestic and international political matters. In the 1960s and 70s the Russians turned the psychology backwards with paranoia being defined as a yearning for truth and justice.

Tangent: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is a book listing all kinds of mental disorders, some of which are rather trivial. People submit their idea for a disorder in the hope it will be included, sometimes because they can use it to sue their employer. Possible candidates for the fifth edition coming up in 2013 include sluggish cognitive tempo disorder (laziness), relational disorder (not getting on with people), negativistic personality disorder (whining) and intermittent explosive disorder (adult tantrums).

• The results of the Epworth Sleepiness Scale are handed in. The questions asked are how like you are to doze off during the following situations: "Sitting and reading", "Watching TV", "Sitting inactive in a public place, e.g. theatre or meeting", "Travelling as a passenger in a car for an hour", "Lying down to rest in the afternoon", "Sitting and talking to someone", "Sitting quiet. The average is 7-8, and Ben is closest to it with 6. A score of 6 or less means you are getting sufficient sleep. Jo scores zero. Andy scores 14 and Alan scores 19, having answered 3 to everything except "Sitting and talking to someone".

General Ignorance

• If you are feeling angry the best thing to do is to try and relax, perhaps bottle up your anger. You should not let it all out by punching something, because that makes you more aggressive. The hypothesis is that blowing off steam may reduce stress in the short term, but it later acts as a reward mechanism reinforcing aggressive behaviour. According to psychologists at the University of California Santa Barbara it is best to make decisions when angry.

Episode 10 "The Inland Revenue"

Broadcast date

• 11 November 2011

Recording date

• 3 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (-22 points)
• Al Murray (-13 points) 1st appearance
• Dara Ó Briain (6 points) 12th appearance
• Sandi Toksvig (Winner with 11 points) 8th appearance

Buzzers

• Sandi: A call from an ibis
• Al: A groan from an ibex
• Dara: A roar from a SEAT Ibiza's engine
• Alan: I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi (I Like You Very Much) by Carmen Miranda

Topics

• The world's most exotic tax inspectors are in Pakistan. If you refuse to pay your tax you are shamed into paying it by receiving a visit from a team of tax inspectors who are all transgender. They would then sing and dance in your place of business until you paid up.

Tangent: Al was once given a going-over by the taxman after he took some ill-advised tax advice from Harry Hill. Sandi on the other hand once spent three days with a tax man who investigated all of her accounts. In the end he did not find anything and the taxman said: "To be honest Miss Toksvig, I just wanted to meet you."

• The advantages of being a drug dealer in Tennessee compared to those of being a bank robber in the Netherlands is that the drugs cannot be charged tax, but the robber's gun can be claimed against tax. In Tennessee they attempted to put a duty on drugs, so when the drug dealers went to prison they also had to pay a tax on their drugs. However, constitutionally it was discovered that this went against the American Bill of Rights as this counted as double jeopardy so the state had to give all the money back. Meanwhile, a Dutchman was found guilty of holding up a bank at gunpoint, but the gun was an allowable expense and so it was deducted from the cost of the fine.

Tangent: Eric Morley claimed his racehorses as a tax expense. In court he said that he was in the business of being Eric Morley, which including owning racehorses as part of his lifestyle. He won the case.

Tangent: Sandi once brought a racehorse by mistake. She was holding a charity auction in Epsom where a racehorse was one of the lots. No-one was bidding so to get everyone started she bid 3,000 guineas. Still no-one bid and she ended up buying the racehorse herself. She sold it back to the original owner, but at a loss to herself.

• Some houses had windows bricked up to make the house look more symmetrical. Not all houses with bricked up windows did it to avoid window tax, although some did. The window tax was repealed because it was damaging the glass industry and the poor were not getting enough light. (Forfeit: Window tax)

Tangent: In Amsterdam they taxed houses by their width, which resulted in people building very slim, tall houses. Because the doors would be very thin they used pulley systems to get things in and out of the house. Alan suggests that these houses should have fireman's poles, which leads to Al suggesting that firemen should work in bungalows. Stephen visited a fire station in Indiana where he was told to slide down the pole, but Stephen did not want to. He did, but it was very squeaky.

• The best paid sportsman of all time was the Roman charioteer Gaius Appuleius Diocles. He was a Lusitanian Spaniard who retired in 146 AD, having won 1,462 races, resulting in winning 35,863,120 sesterces in prize-money. Comparing this to the average wage of the day and using all the calculations, this means he won an equivalent of $15billion in today's money, compared to Tiger Woods who is the first sportsman to earn $1billion, which makes him the best paid sportsman of our age, but not of all time. (Forfeit: Tiger Woods)

Tangent: In the original silent film version of Ben Hur people were killed during the filming. The connection between Ben Hur and Billy the Kid is that the man who wrote the original novel Ben Hur was the same man who signed Billy the Kid's death warrant.

Tangent: Stephen then performs a correction for Dara. In the episode "Horrible" there was a question about a type of louse which attaches itself to the tongue of a fish, eats the tongue and replaces it. Dara said at the time that fish do not have tongues and Stephen dismissed this. However, Dara was actually right. Instead they had what is called a basihyal, which has no taste buds and is not a muscle.

Tangent: Dara then goes on to talk about a similar incident in which he said in Series B that the triple point of water is 0°, but then in the next series he was deducted points because viewers had written in to complain that the actual triple point is 0.01°.

• Nobody Knows: No-one knows what a fish's basihyal is for. No-one gets the bonus.
• The smallest uninteresting number simply in terms of arithmetic mathematics is 12,407. However, the fact that it is the smallest uninteresting number does make it interesting culturally.

Tangent: Stephen tells the story of the mathematicians Hardy and Ramanujan. Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician from Tamil Nadu. He worked with G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge, but then Ramanujan contracted TB, went to hospital and was dying. Hardy went to Ramanujan's bedside and tried to make conversation by saying that the car that took him to the hospital had a very dull number on the licence plate: 1,729. Ramanujan then told him it is an interesting number as it is the smallest number that is expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

• The MoD wanted the PM to join the AA so that he could use the telephone in case of a nuclear attack. Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister at the time, and the Ministry of Defence knew that US President Kennedy had a system, meaning he could retaliate against the Soviets if they should launch a nuclear strike, from anywhere in the country. The original idea was people to go around with radios, but this was too expensive. So they used the same system used by the Automobile Association, which involved sending a signal from the AA to the PM's car if the Soviets struck. Thus the PM could get to the nearest telephone and issue the order to counter-strike.

General Ignorance

• The floating eye on the US dollar bill represents an All-seeing Providence. The symbol was not used by Freemasonry until after the dollar was designed. Benjamin Franklin was a Freemason, but he was not on the final committee. (Forfeit: Freemasonry)
• A mute swan makes the same noise as all the other swans; it just makes them quieter, hence their name. (Forfeit: No noise)

QI XL Extras

Tangent: In Andhra Pradesh tax inspectors use drummers to get people to pay tax, by standing outside the place of business and banging on the drums loudly until they pay up.

Tangent: Dara once knew an actor who tried to claim his carpet against tax because of the wear and tear he caused when he walked up and down while he learnt his lines. Dara himself once tried to claim for a bed but failed, while Sandi attempted to claim for some paintings in her office, failing as well. She told the tax inspector that no-one could possibly work in an office which had no art in it. Sandi looked around the inspector's office and saw that it had just one poster in it, which explained the Heimlich maneuver.

Tangent: Alan complains that fire engines no longer seem to have a ladder on the top of them which sometimes comes adrift and dangles off the end going around corners. The only recent film he can think of which features such a ladder is Terminator 3, in which the Terminator was hanging off the end of one and went through buildings, which Alan guesses was done on a computer.

Tangent: Nero used to do chariot racing and always won the races he was in. If he fell out of a chariot, everyone would stop and pretended that their horse had something wrong with them until Nero got back in, then continued the race.

• Nobody has to return to their birthplace for their census. The idea that Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem is nonsense, as is the whole idea of a census taken by Caesar Augustus of the entire Roman world. The story comes from Luke's Gospel. Out of the four Gospels, Luke was the one who tried to make the story of Jesus fit as closely as possible to the original prophecies, so he came up with the idea of the census to help fulfil it. (Forfeit: Mary and Joseph)

Tangent: There is a debate about whether Santa Claus lives in either the North Pole or Lapland, with Lapland declaring that it is there were Santa lives.

Tangent: There are many books which were not included in the final edition of the Bible. Many of these concerned Jesus as an infant. One passage reads: "Mary dismounted from her beast and sat down with the child Jesus in her bosom, and there were, with Joseph, three boys, and Mary, a girl, going on the journey along with them, and lo, suddenly, they came forth from the cave many dragons. When the children saw them, they cried out in great terror. Then, Jesus went down from the bosom of his mother and stood on his feet before the dragons, and they adored Jesus and thereafter retired."

• The 2001 census revealed that the fourth-largest religion in Britain was Sikhism. All the ones that were marked as Jedi were not counted and classified as being: No religion. 14 Scots marked their religion as Sith. When the census was published the press release joking read: "390,000 Jedi there are." (Forfeit: Jedi)

Tangent: For many years, if you were a member of the AA, staff of the AA would salute you.

Tangent: With regards to the original security plan, the government also considered buying membership to the RAC as well.

Tangent: After the Cuban missile crisis it was discovered there were no protocols in place for firing British nuclear weapons. As a result, when a new Prime Minister comes into power they write letters to the Trident captains. These are sent to the submarines and when the captain gets the letter he burns the previous one which is locked in a safe and replaces it with the new one. When you become Prime Minister you are told there are four options of what to tell the captain. First is nuke Moscow, the second is to surrender, the third is to go to America and hand yourself over, and the fourth is to go to Sydney. No-one knows what is written in the letters and they are always destroyed when the government changes. Also, submarine captains use the Today Programme as a warning. If they wake up at 6am GMT and the programme is not on, they assume the worst and open the safe. Sunday is an exception as the Today Programme is not on.

General Ignorance

Tangent: Stephen talks about the old pub quiz question about how much woodland is cut down to make American dollar bills. The answer is that they are not made out of paper, but of linen.

• Before the Europeans arrived the inhabitants of Mexico were called the Mexica. Aztec was a reference to an island in the middle of the lake from which they traced their source. (Forfeit: Aztecs)

Tangent: Burrito is Spanish for little donkey because of their shape.

• Prince Albert invented a lock for the bedroom door which he and Queen Victoria could operate from their bed. The myth about the cock ring grew up in the 20th century, because Albert wore very tight trousers. Thus he supposedly needed something to anchor his penis to one side of his body so that it did not show. (Forfeit: The cock ring)

Episode 11 "Infantile"

Broadcast date

• 19 November 2011 (XL edition)

Recording date

• 8 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (6 points)
• Ronni Ancona (-7 points) 5th appearance
• Dave Gorman (Winner with 10 points) 2nd appearance
• Lee Mack (5 points) 4th appearance

Buzzers

• Dave: A connection tone
• Ronni: A dialing-out tone
• Lee: A disconnect tone
• Alan: An automated answering system for touch-tone phones, with several unusual options

No normal-length edition was broadcast in this week due to the Children in Need telethon on 18 November. The episode was eventually aired 29 December 2011 on BBC Two, in the much later timeslot of 11:30PM. It was thereby listed on iPlayer as the 18th episode of the series.

Episode 12 "Illumination and Invisibility"

Broadcast date

• 25 November 2011

Recording date

• 13 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (-45 points)
• Chris Addison (-9 points) 2nd appearance
• Jack Dee (-1 points) 6th appearance
• Rich Hall (Winner with 3 points) 24th appearance

Buzzers

• Jack: A lightsaber
• Chris: An exploding firework
• Rich: A lightning bolt
• Alan: A misfiring igniter, followed by an explosion

Episode 13 "Intelligence"

Broadcast date

• 2 December 2011

Recording date

• 15 June 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (-16 points)
• Jo Brand (-8 points) 27th appearance
• Phill Jupitus (-4 points) 26th appearance
• David Mitchell (4 points) 16th appearance
• ASIMO (Winner with 32 points) 1st and only appearance

Buzzers

• David: The beginning of the Mastermind theme
• Jo: The middle section of the Mastermind theme
• Phill: The end of the Mastermind theme
• Alan: "Uhhh... pass."

Topics

• Geese do not recognise eggs on the basis of size, only by their blue and grey-speckled colour and general round shape. As a result, a volleyball could be painted to match a goose egg and a goose will still attempt to sit on and hatch it. It is an example of a phenomenon known as 'supernormal stimuli,' which occurs in many species and an analogy can be made between the lack of a goose's preference for egg size and the lack of any human upper limit for food intake.
• Corvids have been determined to be the smartest family of birds due to their ability to solve problems and use tools. A film is shown featuring a crow deducing how to retrieve a bucket of food from a plastic tube by using a hook to hoist it out.

Tangent: Owls have eyes which take up 65% of their skull cavity, making their brains significantly smaller.

Tangent: Cormorants can count to 8. This has been observed in cormorants used to help Chinese fishermen, where they will gather seven fish for the fisherman, but keep an eighth for themselves.

• Job interviews only need to last 12 seconds, as most of the time people decide on appearance alone whether or not to give someone a job. If an applicant does not impress their interviewer in some way within this time frame, they are unlikely to be considered. There are a number of questions that interviewers are not allowed to ask, including: "Are you originally from the UK?"; "Do you have children which will need to be looked after?" and "Do you plan to have children in future?". Attempting to subvert any question about weakness by naming a strength (e.g. "I'm a terrible perfectionist") is transparent and likely to be seen passed. A more successful strategy is to reveal a weakness which you are actively trying to improve.

Tangent: Alan's wife once went out shopping for an ironing basket and was accosted by a shop assistant who had never heard of such an object.

Tangent: Phill and his friends would frequent a Chinese restaurant on Wardour Street because the staff were astonishingly and hilariously rude. On one occasion, Phill and his friends were moved mid-meal to a different floor of the restaurant without adequate explanation, much to their amusement.

• Corn flour mixed with water forms a non-Newtonian fluid, which behaves as a liquid under standard conditions but changes viscosity and takes on the properties of a solid when put under pressure. To demonstrate, Stephen pours some corn flour paste into a bass speaker and turns it on; the corn flour begins to form odd patterns, which sustain their shape as if solid.
• Robots exist which are designed to iron shirts; shirts are hung on the robot as if on a rack and the shirt is dried and decreased. ASIMO is then brought into the studio and then demonstrates his ability to run and dance (with Jo).

Tangent: Despite popular belief, ASIMO is not named for Isaac Asimov, rather ASIMO stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility.”

General Ignorance

• Nobody Knows: There are no figures for number of piano tuners in the UK. Even the British Association of Piano Tuners has no idea, but they quote the number as being somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. Since piano tuning is often a part-time job they are not counted on the census. Alan gets the bonus.
• Time Immemorial refers to political and legal history before July 6, 1189 (the beginning of the reign of Richard I) and defines the boundaries of legal memory; legal claims before this are still valid. The enactment of Time Immemorial was the first statute of Westminster.

QI XL Extras

• The Enigma code was first solved by a Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski in 1932, who deduced how the machine producing the code worked. There is a statue of Rejewski in Bletchley Park to commemorate his contribution. The Germans later changed their method in the late 1930s, and were able to produce 364 possible settings, making it a challenge to break the code. The Lorenz code used for communications between German High Command and Hitler during the Second World War was so complex that it required the construction of the world's first super computer: The Colossus, which was the brainchild of Alan Turing. The breaking of the code was a combination of luck and espionage, as the crypographers at Bletchley relied on German officers being sloppy and using code words relating to their private lives.

Tangent: Turing is often considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his day. Turing committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple after being chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Some believe that Apple's logo is designed as a reference to Turing's tragic death. Stephen recalls asking Steve Jobs if this was true, to which he relied "It isn't true, but God we wish it were."

Tangent: When Stephen visited Los Alamos he was told that China is launching 1 million cyber-attacks per hour on US front end security.

• It isn't possible for somebody to know that they are incompetent; incompetence requires you to be unaware that you have done anything wrong.

Tangent: Stephen tells the story of Saleh al-Jahaleen, a terrorist who planted a bomb in a cinema in Jordan which was showing pornography. He placed the bomb under a seat, but then became engrossed in the film and sat down on the the seat which he had planted the bomb under. The bomb exploded, removing both of his legs.

• The hands of an analogue clock cross 22 times each day since there is a roughly 65 minute gap between each time they overlap; 1440 minutes per day divided by 65 is (roughly) 22. (Forfeit: 24)
• The biggest clock face in the UK is on the front of the Shell Centre on South Bank in London. (Forfeit: Palace of Westminster)
• A breakman's job in bobsleigh is not to slow the sled down, but to push the sled at the beginning of the race. Breakmen are normally the strongest in the team and the last to get on the sled. (Forfeit: Braking)
• The Caribbean country of the Dutch Lesser Antilles came in 29th in the 1988 Winter Olympics bobsleigh event; Jamaica came 30th that year. The film Cool Runnings is loosely based on this event. The Netherlands Antilles broke up in 2010, so the country of the Lesser Antilles no longer exists; it's anthem was Anthem without a title. (Forfeit: Jamaica)

Episode 14 "Idleness"

Broadcast date

• 4 May 2012

Recording date

• 20 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (Winner with 12 points) 14th win
• Jeremy Clarkson (1 point) 9th appearance
• Ross Noble (4 points) 5th appearance
• Dara Ó Briain (-15 points) 13th appearance

Buzzers

• Ross, Dara, Jeremy: The exact same generic buzzing sound
• Alan: Several seconds of silence before the same buzzing sound

This episode premiere, scheduled for 9 December, was pulled following Jeremy Clarkson's comments on BBC's The One Show about the recent strike action earlier in the month. It was replaced by a repeat of Episode 1 of Series I. The XL edition was nonetheless available on iPlayer for a short period on the evening of 10 December.

Episode 15 "Ice (Christmas Special)"

Broadcast date

• 29 December 2011

Recording date

• 10 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (Winner with 9 points) 15th win
• Brian Blessed (-2 points) 1st appearance
• Sean Lock (-8 points) 27th appearance
• Ross Noble (-3 points) 6th appearance

Buzzers

• Sean: Sleigh bells
• Ross: Tiny musical bells
• Brian: Musical church bells
• Alan: A party horn

Episode 16 "The Immortal Bard (Shakespeare Special)"

Broadcast date

• 27 April 2012

Recording date

• 24 May 2011

Panellists

• Alan Davies (3 points)
• Bill Bailey (-14 points) 25th appearance
• David Mitchell (Winner with 6 points) 17th appearance
• Sue Perkins (-10 points) 4th appearance

Buzzers

• David, Sue, Bill: Orchestral trumpet fanfares
• Alan: A Latin-style trumpet tune