QI

Sandi Toksvig hosts a festive edition of the quite interesting quiz, with panellists Bonnie Langford, Joe Lycett, Sally Phillips and regular guest Alan Davies. The seasonal subjects starting with "S" include School Nativity Success Statistics and the secrets of Shiraz and Sprouts. Plus, a candlelit General Ignorance, unanswerable questions, questionable answers, and a scoring system even the Three Wise Men couldn't fathom.

Themes

- The panel are dressed as characters from the Nativity. Sandi is dressed as the Angel Gabriel, Alan as the Innkeeper, Joe the Virgin Mary, Sally a shepherd, and Bonnie a wise man.

Topics

- Based on what the panel are wearing, the person who is most likely to win the episode is Joe, because he is dressed as Mary and that character is the central figure in school nativity plays. A 2019 survey asked 2,000 people what nativity roles they played as children, then they looked back at their lives and see how they worked out. People who played oxen ended up earning the most; twice as much as those playing lambs or sheep. Those playing Mary were most likely to be content with their adult life, with Joseph coming second. Marys also had the most friends on social media, while the person with the fewest social media friends is the narrator. Narrators are also most likely to work in education and enjoy horse riding. Those playing the donkey are most likely to work in IT, do gardening and enjoy puzzles. Those playing Gabriel are most likely to work in marketing and communications.

- Tangent: In her school nativity, Sandi played the star, wearing a twinkly headband and popping her head over the stable.

- XL Tangent: The star in the Nativity was most likely not a star, but some other kind of event like two planets being close together.

- XL Tangent: People who played the Virgin Mary tend on average to earn £39,000, whereas the angels earn £25,000, the wise men £26,000, and the shepherds £29,000.

- Tangent: In France, it is illegal to display the nativity in public places if it demonstrates a public recognition or preference for a specific religion. The only way to get around the law is by proving it has some kind of cultural, artistic or festive significance. It cannot have religious significance. Some French mayors have protested against this, with the mayor of Beaucaire, Provence, in January 2021 insisted on keeping their nativity scene up in the town hall until Candlemas (2nd February), arguing that there is cultural history to nativity scenes, which is arguably true as they feature "santons", little saints, traditional Provence figures since the French Revolution. The mayor was fined €5,000 a day every day the scene was displayed.

- Tangent: As mentioned before on QI, in Catalonia the nativity includes a figure called the "caganer", who is seen squatting and defecating in a corner of the scene. Many modern celebrity figures have been depicted as the caganer.

- XL Tangent: Joe says he wants a caganer of Timmy Mallett.

- Tangent: In the 1980s, an English priest gave his congregation knuckledusters to repel attacks on local nativity scenes. There were hard-line Anglicans called "anti-ritualists" who were against all religious decorations. One of the leaders was Lady Cornelia Wimborne, who was also Winston Churchill's aunt.

- Tangent: Animal rights group PETA have a campaign against using real-life animals in nativities. There was one nativity in the USA where a man was arrested for having sex with a sheep being used for a nativity.

- There is always too much to do on Christmas Day because we try to cram all of the season into a single day, when back in medieval and Tudor times Christmas covered a much larger period. It could start on 1st November (All Soul's Day) and end on 2nd February (Candlemas Eve), with many feasts such as St. Martin's Day and Christmas Day occurring during the period. St. Martin's Day (11th November) started a full 43 days of advent. St. Martin of Tours is patron saint of geese, horses, innkeepers and reformed alcoholics. During the period a "Lord of Misrule" was appointed among the peasants to lead the revelry. In Lincolnshire, 1637, the Lord of Misrule was taken through a mock ceremony in which he married a fellow citizen, and after this fake marriage, one Victorian historian writes: "The affair was carried to its utmost extent in front of the crowds." There were also complaints at the time about "chambering" - people having sex - during the season.

- XL Tangent: One year, Bonnie got her daughter lots of presents, hid them all, and forgot where she had hidden them. When she was a child, Sally wanted a computer, and it took up an entire room, which was hard to hide from her.

- XL Tangent: Some people sometime dress as panders at Christmas, which is an old word for a pimp. In France, they held the Feast of the Fools, which included a song about the beauty of the donkey from the Nativity, and it was often accompanied by a donkey being led into church. This originally had a serious purpose, which was to thank the donkey for what it did in the story.

- XL Tangent: In Paris, disabled people were made to live outside the city except for one day where they had to parade through the city dresses as kings and nobles. This is something which happens to Quasimodo in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame".

- XL: The panel are all given stockings containing some unusual Christmas-related items.

- Sally - Soap: In 1910, the Ivory soap company created a short-lived tradition of leaving soap out for Santa Claus, so he could wash the soot off when he came down the chimney. Parents would leave a dirty towel and some soapy water by the fireplace for the children to discover that Santa had washed. However, as the panel point out, Santa does have to go back up the chimney and get dirty again.

- Joe - Birch rod: From at least as far back as 1800, naughty children would find birch rods in their stockings. The 1821 poem Old Santeclaus With Much Delight has Santa saying: "I left a long, black birchen rod, such is the dread command of God. Directs a parent's hand to use, when virtue's path his sons refuse."

- XL Tangent: Sally used to tell her children that animals spied on them for Santa.

- Bonnie - Sherry: The Tio Pepe winery in Spain leaves out a glass of sherry every day, with a little ladder, so mice can drink it. There are various stories regarding how this tradition started. These include a winery worker who like mice wanted to give it a treat, a mouse managing to sneak a sip from a worker's glass, or it could be a way of keeping the mice away from nibbling the casks.

- Alan - A cellophane fortune-telling fish: This works due to the way the cellophane is made. It is made with all the strands of cellulose lining up, with some being made with the grain going head-to-tail and some vice versa, which makes them move a particular way.

- XL: The people you would least like to jingle your bells at Christmas are carol singers. A 2020 YouGov survey asked 5,300 people what they thought about carol singers. 21% did not want them to visit because of Covid-19, 55% did not want them to visit whether there was Covid-19 or not, and only 13% actively hoped they would turn up. In 2009, Lancashire Police and local councils distributed signs to people's homes, libraries, GPs etc. reading: "Sorry, no carol singers, I will not open my door to you." People complained that large groups made them nervous coming to the door. On Christmas Eve 2018, North Yorkshire Police revealed they had a call from a woman in Harrogate reporting the presence of carol singers in her area, who said that she believed they were from Leeds and therefore up to no good.

- XL Tangent: Sally's local church had the worst choir in Britain, but she loved it. Sadly, they all got sacked. Bonnie says you have to be able to sing to be able to sing badly.

- XL Tangent: There is a Welsh version of carol singing called "Mari Lwyd", in which someone would parade around town draped in a cape and holding a real horse skull on a pole. Their companions dressed as undead attendants. Usually the jaw had a spring so it could open and close. If you wanted to keep them out of your house, you had to defeat them in a rhyming battle of wits. If they won, you had to give them ale and food. This was very popular in the 19th century, faded out in the 1920s, but is now coming back.

- XL Tangent: Around one Guy Fawkes Day, Alan was in Islington who said to him: "Penny for the guy." Alan told them they didn't have a guy, to which they replied: "It's not a penny anyway, it's a pound."

- Snow is mostly made out of air. Powdery, freshly fallen snow is made up of tiny crystals of frozen water, and each crystal is surrounded by air, making snow fluffy and porous. The total mass is between 90-95% air. This is why when snow melts so little is left. One inch of rain is equal to about ten inches of snow. The fact snow contains so much air means it is a good insulator, hence why igloos are good place to live in, because if it is -40ºC outside, your body heat is enough to make it +16ºC inside. Igloos are not made out of ice, although some use ice blocks as windows.

- Tangent: In Demark, it is advised that if you are out in the cold you should carry a tealight and a box of matches, because if your car runs out of petrol, a single lit tealight on the dashboard will be enough to keep you warm inside while you wait for help if you are stuck in snow.

- Tangent: Sally had a friend who went to the Ice Hotel. Sandi says she wants to go to it, but Sally's friend claims that it was horrible.

- XL: The panel are shown a video of a wave of ice coming up from a beach and approaching a road. This is an "ice shove", and is caused when ice is forced up over the edge of a lake or body of water by the currents underneath. These things are almost impossible to stop when they start. They can crush tress and houses in their path. During the Great Ice Shove of Montreal in 1836, one shove brought down an entire whisky distillery. (Forfeit: Timmy Mallett)

- The parasite that sticks around at Christmas and extracts food from the host is mistletoe. Part of the sandalwood family, it sinks its roots into tree branches and then suck the nutrients and water it needs out of it. They deposit their seeds using birds, their seeds having evolved to be sticky so when birds eat them the seeds stick to the bottoms of the birds, which can only be removed by rubbing them on a hard, angular surface. The word "mistletoe" comes from "mistel-tan", the "mist" being the Anglo-Saxon word for faeces, and "tan" the word for twig. The mistletoe genus is "viscum", from which we get the word "viscous".

- Tangent: Sally was once the voice of Canesten thrush cream. She did a voice different to her normal one to avoid embarrassment, but she still got recognised from the advert by a blind woman on the Tube.

- Tangent: No-one knows for sure why mistletoe is associated with romance. Theories include it being associated with fertility by the Druids, the white berries representing semen.

- In the original pantomimes, the lead character magically transformed the scene halfway through by waving around a magic slapstick. Pantos come from the early 1700s and were originally called harlequinades. Every show would begin as a rather serious melodrama, but then half-way through the play a magician called the Harlequin would hit bits of the scenery using a slapstick, with new scenery being revealed behind, and then the whole tone of the show changed, becoming farcical. In the 1800s, the modern slapstick was created, made out of two sticks joined by a hinge. It is considered one of the first special effects. (Forfeit: Wand)

- Tangent: The question is illustrated with a picture of Bonnie doing panto at Guildford, holding a magic wand. She says the key to using a wand is to always hold it upright, gripping it at the bottom and supporting the steam with the other hand like a sceptre.

- Tangent: An even earlier special effect used in the theatre was created by playwright John Dennis, whose 1709 Roman tragedy Appius and Virginia was poorly received, except for his thunder-making machine, which made really realistic sounds for stormy scenes. After a few nights the play closed and was replaced by a production of Macbeth, but this production still used Dennis's thunder machine, so they had, "stolen his thunder", which is where the phrase comes from.

- XL Tangent: The word "claptrap" comes from 1720s theatre. It is a phrase or gag put in by a performer to elicit easy applause. Bonnie remembers going to see "Hello, Dolly!" with Carol Channing, and her husband use to nip through the pass door, from the backstage through the auditorium, and would start the applause for her as she walked on. Sandi as seen performers, especially in musicals, as soon as they enter the wings start clapping and shout "Brilliant!" to get people clapping.

- XL: Charles Dickens cooked the goose of goose sellers because he helped popularise the idea of having turkey for Christmas dinner instead. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge gives the Cratchits a turkey which was seen as a luxury item at the time, and goose was seen as a poor relation. By the 1840s, elaborate Christmas celebrations were dying out in Britain, but Dickens rebooted it which his story. The goose had been the traditional fare since medieval times, but in the story it becomes a turkey instead. It is possible Dickens was just indicating a shift in societal preference anyway.

- XL Tangent: Queen Victoria was always served a boar's head for Christmas dinner. The German Emperor and King of Saxony would both send her a boar's head for Christmas, but her cook thought they didn't cook very well, so he just used a normal pig's head, dress it to look like a wild boar, and Victoria never noticed the difference.

- The best way to make Brussels sprouts bearable is to sip red wine between each mouthful. The wine's astringency, the dry mouth feel, possibly stops your saliva to pass the bitter taste of sprouts to your taste buds.

- Tangent: Sally's family make sprouts bearable by playing "fart tennis" at Christmas. The family eat as many sprouts as possible, then one half of the table play against the other half, trying to out-fart each other.

General Ignorance

- The panel light candles, and are then told to snuff them. While they are given candle snuffers to put the candles out, originally to snuff candles meant to make them brighter. The original way to snuff a candle is actually to trim the wick. (Forfeit: Not like that)

- Tangent: If you put out a candle, then hold a lit flame over the smoke, this is enough to make the candle light up again, as the smoke draws the flame down.

- Tangent: A candle salad consists of a banana mounted into a pineapple ring sitting on lettuce, with a cherry fixed to the top of the banana using mayonnaise. It was a popular American dish in the 1950s, used to introduce children to cooking, but it just looks phallic.

- The man who invented the four-slotted screwdriver was English John Frierson in the 1870s. What is now called the Phillips-Head Screwdriver was named after a businessman, Henry Phillips who spotted its potential, bought the patient, and introduced to General Motors. When World War II started all the military manufacturers used it. The technical term for the slot is the "cruciform orifice". (Forfeit: Phillips)

- Tangent: The panel all have cocktails. Sally has a screwdriver cocktail, which arrived after the end of World War II, either from the Armed Forces or oil workers, and most people claimed they used screwdrivers to mix their vodka and orange juice. Sandi has "SH-ampagne" because it is Series S.

Scores

- Sally Phillips: 13 points
- Alan Davies: 2 points
- Joe Lycett: -6 points
- Bonnie Langford: -8 points

...And Finally

- The episode ends with all the other panellists across Series S wishing the viewers "Merry Christmas".