QI

Good . . . evening, good evening,

and welcome to QI

Tonight, we're quite interested in "engineering",

so, we've come equipped with four of the sharpest tools in the box

The steely Jimmy Carr

the power-driven Rob Brydon

well-oiled Bill Bailey

spanner in the works, Alan Davies!

Let's hear your precision-engineered sounds

Bill goes:

Jimmy goes:

And Rob goes:

And Alan goes:

Now, although tonight's manly menu mainly means "engineering" matters

don't forget our "Elephant in the Room" bonus, boys, will you?

For predicting the arrival of one or more elephants on the programme.

There it is.

Be ready. First question!

Who built Britain's railways?

Look out, there's . . . !

By the way, I have my own train here. Look at that.

Isn't that fun?

I have sweets,

which I can load on and deliver to any particularly interesting answers this evening.

So there's an extra incentive.

This is turning into my... my perfect house.

"More toast, please!"

This is like "Wallace and Gromit".

But you have, first, to address the question of who built our railways.

Richard Branson.

It was not "elephants"... Large creatures were trained to have

trample down areas of Britain to built very, very flat.

The railway mouse!

Well, you're right, actually

You're right, actually, comma,

in saying that railways had to be flat in the days when they were built in Britain,

which were the very earliest days, we were the country that invented the steam locomotive and the railway

and there weren't powerful enough engines to to go up hills and they had to be flat.

Were they built by the wrong type of builder?

They were called "navvies",

and were mostly Irish

and they were an extraordinary example of man muscle.

It took a year to train a navvy.

You fed them on meat and beer.

No Dagenham smiles there; very tightly-done trousers

"A Dagenham smile"?

The Birmingham-to-London track took five years to build,

the equivalent in work of building one and a half great pyramids.

Astonishing.

These people were incredible.

It took a year to train them; they lived on beer and meat,

and they could out-perform any other manual labourer who

Farmworkers would be exhausted after a quarter of a day that the navvies could do.

I heard once that the Trans-Siberian railway

which was meant to be a straight line

The Tsar got a ruler, and he said, "Want the railway perfectly straight

And he got the ruler, and he drew a line like that,

but his fingers were over the edge

And in a couple of places, it did a big, sort of, detour,

he went, "Build me that! Go away! You!"

"Oh, we better build it like he said."

So they had to build two great big curves

That's a lovely thought.

It's a lovely thought. Sweet!

Let's get someone on the scene and go straight there now to see what's happening."

It's absolutely pandemonium

Have you had your sweet yet? -No, I haven't had it yet!

Oh, it stops in the right place. Can't be a Virgin train, can it?

Why, for a sweet, and a point. Why are they called navvies?

"Navigational engineers."

I'm so impressed.

They were responsible for digging what were called the internal navigation system,

which was the canals

That's how they first came over; for digging canals. And then when the railway arrived,

did all the embankments and the tunnels and the,

extraordinary earth movement involved.

Horses were used for taking away the spoil, but everything else was human muscle.

Elephants as well. Did you realise?

No elephants

There were some

So, London-to-Birmingham was the equivalent of what, one and a half pyramids?

One and a half great pyramids

funny, if we'd put that to a vote. "Do we need just a half a pyramid?"

"Yeah, we just thought we needed it."

"Can we have the top half of the pyramid?" -It's on stilts.

That's a pyramid, the top half, isn't it? It's only if you have the bottom half

That's why I would choose it.

It's an odd platform.

So just keep slicing the pyramids

Thank you very much. -Curses!

the credit may have gone to engineers, of course, like Stephenson and Brunel,

but it was thousands of anonymous navvies who did the actual work.

Now, here's a big question. What happened when the Americans went off the rails?

Jesus!

This is during the Carter administration, when they tried to bring in a different form

Instead of rails. Because Jimmy Carter was a southern president

fried food is very, very popular

And they were hoping to, in build carriages with holes in the bottom.

People would sit take their trousers down, and after eating a lot of fried food, they would fart it.

And it would rise on a bed of noxious bottom gas.

Behind, people would open balloons, and let the air and it never worked!

A fool could have predicted it

But they did have a fool in the management. -For the first time in history.

Can you take the sweet off him?

Is the question "When did America go off the rails?"

No, when a locomotive went off the rails in America, what did they do?

They picked it up put it back on

It's as simple as that.

Tthey deliberately made their locomotives very small and light.

Those were the days!

They had no cladding and the passenger had to get out, pick it up, put it back on.

They had the advantage of the potato blight bringing over lots

of Irishmen to be their navvies in America as well, at just the right time.

Er, Stephen, they're navigational engineers.

Yes, thank you for that. Rob. Thank you.

I don't think you should call them navvies anymore. Now that we know the the full title.

Micks were, erm taken over to do the deed and they tended to do it in the east coast;

and who did it in the west? -The Chinese!

And they met in the middle when they've completed the entire link across America.

They could lay track particularly from the west;

a couple of brothers called Casement who devised this system

where the track was laid as fast as a man could walk.

Not as fast as, er, Gromit.

He was probably inspired by the Casement brothers

They would have a train on the existing track

Somebody would push off the one when it sort of had emptied itself and there would be one behind

and they would carry on. Incredible.

I suspect that they're standing apart for some kind of balance

Why would you ever stand like that? Unless you were five individuals

who happen to have bought single tickets.

If you've gone along with four friends on a train, you might stand

Having a chat.

The women-folk, perhaps, are with them

You may be right!

I think it's "top hats off" for that sort of thing.

Why didn't they build a railway at Slough?

At Slough? The town where I grew up?

Is there no station in Slough? -There is now, I suspect. Is there?

Yes.

But there's no railway.

It's a start.

When the railway was being built through that particular part of Buckinghamshire,

they were told they couldn't build a station in Slough.

In fact, the train would disregard it by stopping, and people would get on and off,

and they would sell tickets in the pub. But who was it who said "We won't have a station here"?

What school is nearby?

I do know it. It's Eton.

Eton College, they thought the boys would be tempted to go into London

There they are. Bless 'em

And take drugs. -And visit prostitutes and so on.

That'll be the first thing they do. "There's a train. Prostitutes!"

"I'd like a Prostitute Super-Saver, please!"

"But this prostitute seems to be a woman."

"Bloody hell. That's seriously unfair. No. Come on, actually."

"What am I meant to do with these?"

There was a travellers' handbook that advised women

should put pins in their mouth when trains went into a tunnel

so men didn't kiss them.

To protect themselves from unwanted kissing!

It's very sweet, to think that kissing would be the first thing that men would...

They come out of the tunnel; the bloke's got a pin in his cock.

It's a very direct approach you've got to cause

"I'll just pop this in her mouth; she'll come 'round, I'm sure. Yeah."

"It's dark; she won't even know it was me!"

"Magnet? Magnet? Anyone, a magnet!"

So, when 19th century American trains came off the rails,

the passengers got out and lifted them back on.

What did Isambard Kingdom Brunel get for eighteen birthdays in a row?

For the first time ever, simultaneous

An elephant!

How annoyed would you be, as well? "You got me one of these last year!"

"Did I?" "Yeah, look!

How could you miss that?"

Absolutely slaughtered. Plastered.

Couldn't remember where he lived.

A, er, socket . . . er, socket set.

Did he get a copy of "A Bridge Over Troubled Water"?

Jane's Fighting Ships.

Did he get a book by Jeremy Clarkson?

"If this book was a book it'd be a book! That'll do, won't it?"

A million sold.

What did he do? Let's think about what Isambard Kingdom Brunel did.

Engineer. Tunnels, bridges

Oh, Meccano! -Er, no

Which is the biggest tunnel he... -The Box Tunnel?

The Box Tunnel. And the Box Hill. Two miles long. There it is.

Or the opening of it, obviously. It's huge!

It created so much earthworks,

it was the biggest tunnel in the world at the time he did it

They built Whales with it.

There are vast holes down there. They're linked by tunnels. There are eighty miles of tunnels under there.

But in 1935 and 1940, the military took over,

and they built this extraordinary system of underground

30,000 square feet of office space,

with a lift and with an ammunition dump,

and a lot of people believe now that it's got an alien spaceship in it

and all kinds of other nonsense. -There's a lot of local folklore.

Cause I grew up near the tunnel. -hen you'll know all about this.

You grew up in that tunnel.

That explains a great deal.