QI

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to QI.

Does anybody know where the word "quiz" comes from?

As we're doing a kind of quiz.

I feel like I do know, but I can't remember.

Do we get a point for that?

Yeah, Alan can have a point for that, I'm fine with that, yeah.

When you say it, I'm going to go... HE MUMBLES

Watch, watch. OK.

We don't really know.

So, it used to mean a sort of eccentric person.

How it has come to mean asking people questions for points,

we don't really know. There's a story that Richard Daly,

who was a theatre proprietor in Dublin,

in 1791 made a bet that within 48 hours

he could get a word into common parlance,

and he distributed the word "quiz"

to be put up on walls all over Dublin,

and it became part of the language.

So really when they say - "Police are quizzing the suspect" -

that's wrong, isn't it?

No, that's from "inquisitive" and "inquisition".

So that's a separate... Very good.

You've got it, you're in the right chair.

I had a little cold feeling, then!

I think with hook-a-duck they do that.

I think they purposely... In "hook-a-dook"?

"Hook-a-duck." "Hook-a-duck."

I knew what you meant. I'm foreign.

Hook-a-duck, oh, in the fair! At the fair?

Our vowel sounds are very similar to yours.

I did a gig in Norway,

and they could understand me more than in Cheltenham.

Yeah.

Nowadays you can't fail at hook-a-duck. Why?

Cos kids will kick off if they don't get something.

So, what do you get? You don't come away with nothing from anything in the fair any more.

Cos you used to get a fish in a bag,

and it would teach you about life and death.

Usually very quickly!

Those fish, they're not dead when they're floating on the surface, necessarily.

Can you make them better?

Yeah, feed them and put them in a proper tank!

But when they grow, they grow to fill the tank.

You can get one about this big.

Really?! Oh, yeah. Goldfish in the wild are about 40-foot-long!

Absolutely huge!

I don't think that's true,

they don't just keep filling the space, mate.

No, I don't mean like they become a square fish!

A big rectangular fish, like...

"It's tight in here!"

I want to win one of those!

Are you a good sleeper, Noel, do you sleep well?

Yeah, I can sleep a lot, yeah.

Apparently what you should do to find out how much you need to sleep,

is you should spend a week not having an alarm clock at all,

and you should let your body just wake up when it needs to,

and log how many hours, and if you need six hours,

and you need to get up at 7am,

then you know what time you've got to go to bed.

Yes, but, Sandi, you'd need a wee at five.

Yes. No matter what.

Yeah, it's very annoying.

It's not like you particularly have that much wee to do.

You get there and you think, "Why have you woken me up for that?"

"I would rather have just left that in the bed.

"We could have just dealt with that...in the morning!"

I would say sometimes, in-the-middle-of-the-night wee,

you can start thinking about something stressful,

or get frightened by noises in the house.

Best just to stay asleep until it gets light.

Really the solution is some sort of an apparatus where you can sleep on the loo.

My father was in hospital and he had a catheter fitted for a

couple of weeks, and he said he'd never slept so well

for about 50 years.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

It's like when you go and stay in a hotel and they say

never use the kettle, because people pee in it, apparently. No!

What?! You see, I don't want to know those things! No!

What? I mean, how far away is the bathroom?!

I always think that must be a man who pees in that kettle.

Pee in a kettle?! I can say on behalf of men

all over the country, we do not piss in kettles!

You've got to take the lid off, you've got to unplug it,

it's way too much effort.

I'm not making it up, it's a well-known fact.

I wouldn't come on QI and talk bullshit,

I'm straight up with the facts.

When you go to a hotel room, and there's water already in the kettle,

that's a bit suspect. I always get rid of that.

To be honest, boiled piss, it might change the flavour of the tea,

but it's not a bacterial threat, is it?

Another thing, never eat the chocolate on the pillow.

Where's that been?!

Anyway, moving on.

In 2015, they were very busy, they also discovered that giraffes hum.

For pleasure? Well, we don't know.

They recorded giraffes at three different zoos,

and they found they make this really deep sound,

it's just within human hearing range.

They don't know if they're snoring or sleep-talking, or just saying,

"It's all right, I'm still here, don't you worry,

"light will come in the morning." They don't know what it is, but they hum at night.

Could they be a three-part harmony, like the Beverley Sisters?

The Three Degrees, or the Beverley Sisters, yeah.

That, to me, looks like the giraffe version of going into the loos with

one of your friends when she's about to vomit...

LAUGHTER

The one on the left's going, "Don't take a picture now!"

That one on the left looks so drunk,

it's trying to have sex with that tree.

She's only got one leg, but I'll have a go!

She's still here, she can't be going anywhere!

I spent part of my childhood in East Africa,

and we had some neighbours who had a Mini which they were very pleased

with, and they had brought it all the way from England, this Mini.

And one day they didn't come home,

and everybody was very worried about them. It turned out a giraffe had

taken that rather interesting shape there, and tried to hump their Mini!

And got stuck over the car!

They couldn't open the doors, and then the giraffe couldn't get off.

I guess they drove it back to England...

"We'll knock him off in the Dartford Tunnel!"

Astonishing thing, twice a day the tide in the bay

rises 28-foot-six-inches, to the point that it overtops

the waterfall over which the Saint John River normally flows,

and the river flows backwards.

Wow. Isn't that amazing?

We've learnt so much, haven't we?!

You've got to be careful with this show, what you take away from it.

Because you can hear people in pubs, and they'll say this happened,

and you go, "No." And they'll go, "I saw it on QI."

Like, it's become that.

I was chatting to a friend of mine,

I said I was thinking about going to Venice.

He said, "I don't do Venice, it's full of racists.

"It's a racist town." I said, "How's it a racist town?"

He says, "Yeah." He says, "All the gondoliers,

"they've got to be black. They have to be black." What?!

I said, "I don't think that's true."

He said, "No. It's true, I saw it on QI."

He said, "Honestly, I don't know how they've got past the EU with it,

"but every single one of them has to be black."

I said, "I don't think that's true."

Anyway, about three days later, he rang me up.

He went, "I meant gondolas. The actual gondola."

The gondola has to be black.

So here's the thing, we're going to make our own nuisance call this evening.

There is a number that anybody can ring in Sweden,

and it's a scheme set up by the country's tourism authority

to celebrate 250 years of free speech in Sweden,

and it's called Ring A Random Swede, OK?

It's a genuine random thing.

We have no idea who we're going to get.

We've already pre-selected a question from a member of the

audience, and the question is, why do you eat rotten fish?

Does anybody speak Swedish?

Here's the marvellous thing about Scandinavians,

is that their English is really coming along(!) OK.

So, the marvellous, marvellous sound department are going to put a call through now,

and obviously we'll have to explain what it is that we're doing to this person.

LINE RINGS, NUMBER DIALS

LINE RINGS

LINE RINGS

INDISTINCT SPEECH OVER PHONE Hello?

Hi, my name is Sandi, I'm ringing from London, who's that?

Robin! Hi, you're my random Swede that I'm ringing!

'Yeah.'

Is it your first phone call from an English person?

So, this is kind of exciting, Robin,

because I'm ringing you from a live television studio in London.

So you're on the BBC right now, is that OK?

OK. So, I'll tell you what,

we'll have a round of applause from our audience,

maybe you can hear that.

APPLAUSE

So, what do you do, Robin?

Are you actually in the shop?

OK.

So, we have a question from our audience.

you may be buying this now, what do I know?

Why do Swedish people eat rotten fish?

is the question we want to ask you.

It was lovely to speak to you, Robin!

You know when people say,

like, an old woman died in her flat, and she was eaten by her cats.

I mean... What kind of a world do you live in?!

People peeing in kettles, and old women...

Three days.

Three days and your cat will eat your face. Yeah.

Because it will have loosened up enough for it to get purchase.

Yeah. NOEL: What sort of show IS this?!

They never say that, do they, about aged meat on a menu,

with 20-day aged beef,

they never use the phrase,

"It will have loosened up enough to get purchase".

Say you took an average of every single person here in this room,

and we took height, and shoe size,

and collar size, and all those things,

you won't find anybody who's average in all respects.