QI

Sandi Toksvig talks through a tantalising trunkful of 'T' topics with Guz Khan, Jo Brand, Sally Phillips and Alan Davies.

Themes

- This is a general show covering various different topics, all beginning with "T".

Topics

- The panel are asked to complete the following: "Sigmund Freud, Catherine the Great and Che Guevara walk into a karaoke bar..." The connection between all three is that they claimed to be tone-deaf. Freud claimed he was, and that when he sang he was almost totally out of tune. Catherine and Che do seem to have been totally tone death. Catherine was a patron of the arts, writing her own libretti for operas, but she couldn't personally perceive the music. Che wrote that he would ask a friend to nudge him whenever a tango was played so that he could dance. A friend nudged him one time, he danced a very slow, passionate tango, but in fact they were playing a quick Peruvian folk dance. "Amusia" is the technical word for tone deafness, and congenital amusia (untreatable tone deafness) affects about 1.5% of the population. This is caused by a loss of connectivity between your left and right auditory cortex, which jumbles the sounds.

- Tangent: Che Guevara was a rugby fan. He published his own rugby magazine called Tackle, and said that he didn't care if he died playing it.

- Tangent: Alan claims that the colloquial term for tone-deafness is "East 17". In the 1990s, he was on The Big Breakfast, and East 17 were on as guests. Someone came in with headphones and a clipboard asking: "Would the boys sing a Big Breakfast jingle?" East 17's manager said: "Boy's don't sing."

[i]- Tangent: Guz says there are a lot of facts in this show. To make him feel more comfortable, Sandi says that he should tell her something she doesn't know. Guz tells her that he once accidentally kicked a turtle off a roof in Morocco. He was wearing local slippers, someone pinged a size five football at him, and as he volleyed it a turtle came out from behind a plant pot, and both got kicked. Someone went downstairs to see if the turtle was alright - it wasn't.

- Tangent: Perfect pitch is more common than amusia. Probably one in twenty music students have it. If we all sang a song of which there's one famous recording, e.g. "Hey Jude", about one in five would probably hit the first note exactly. This is known as "remembered pitch", and this is possible to learn.

- XL Tangent: The show tries to find amusics on the panel by getting them all to sing a particular note, which is measured with a piece of computer software. They then do the same with the audience.

- The panel are given some chewing gum and are asked how to get Kylie Minogue's "I Can't Get You Out Of My Head" out of their heads. Chewing gum for three minutes can help get rid of what are known as "earworms" or "stuck song syndrome", which is when a particular tune gets stuck in your head. This tends to happen when your mind wanders, when you are stressed, or when you are overloaded with work. Other ways to get rid of earworms include playing other songs, thus replacing it with a different earworm; distracting yourself with a puzzle; listening to the song all the way through; but the best way to avoid earworms is to only listen to music you don't like. No particular songs are more likely to be earworms.

- XL Tangent: Sandi says she doesn't know if chewing gum would help if the earworm was Lonnie Donegan's "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?"

- Tangent: People have been chewing gum since the Neolithic period, about 10,000 years. Chewing gum predates brushing teeth. The ancient Greeks chewed mastic tree resin, the Mayans also chewed tree resin, and Native Americans chewed spruce tree sap. It may be just a way of freshening the mouth, or it might just be a nice kind of repetitive thing. Chewing gum has a better effect on performance than caffeine, and nobody knows why. We know it is not the sugar, as sugar-free gum has the same effect. There is also a thing called mastication-induced arousal.

- XL Tangent: The mother of comedy writer Peter Baynham had that Dad's Army theme tune playing in her ears solidly for 20 years.

- The item beginning with "T" the people use for fun today but was once a serious punishment is a treadmill. Treadmills were introduced in England in 1818 by engineer Sir William Cubitt, who devised a tread wheel with a handrail that acted like a sort of endless staircase. He put on into Brixton prison that ground grain for a mill. More were developed which acted as water pumps. Some were operated by up to 40 prisoners at a time. By 1865, every male prisoner over the age of 16 serving a sentence of hard labour was forced to walk the treadmill, but it turned into just a punishment rather than something practical.

- XL Tangent: Satirist William Hone recorded the amount of vertical feet claimed by prisoners at various British jails. At Warwick, in the peak of summer, prisoners were forced to climb 17,000ft in ten hours, which is about the height of Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa. If you fell of the treadmill and injured, you were punished by being flogged.

- XL Tangent: In 2012, a Brazilian prison gave the inmates the chance to reduce their jail sentences by generating electricity pedalling exercise bikes. They got a day off for every three eight-hour shift they did.

- XL Tangent: In 1889, the Broadway stage play version of Ben-Hur included a chariot race with real horses on stage running on treadmills. A panorama would move as the horses galloped, and then blowing machines below powder up so it looked like dust. In the same year, the Union Square Theatre in New York staged a play called The County Fair, which features a similar effect, in which a horse is pipped to the post in a race. The race took place live on stage, again using treadmills.

- The perfect underwear for the underworld is Tutankhamun's used panties. He was buried with hundreds of objects to use in the afterlife, and clothing included 12 tunics, 28 gloves, four socks with separate toe sections so he could still wear sandals in the afterlife, and 145 pairs of panties, all neatly folded, but they were all used. Sally is given a mock up to put on, which consists of a large piece of triangular cloth which is tied around the waste and then between the legs, so it is a bit like a nappy.

- XL Tangent: The panties still have not been cleaned in case new techniques come along to analyse them. The panties were discovered in the early 1990s in a box covered by a copy of the Egyptian Gazette, date just six weeks after the discovery of the tomb.

- XL Tangent: One of Jo's top-ten most-hated words ever is "panties". Jo says it is something that gynaecologists say and you know you should call the police.

- XL Tangent: Tutankhamun was also buried with a dagger. In 2016, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Milan found that the blade's composition of iron, nickel and cobalt strongly suggest an extraterrestrial origin. The metal is identical to than found in a meteorite in the city of Marsa Matruh, 150 miles west of Alexandria.

- XL Tangent: The soles of Tutankhamun's sandals were decorated with traditional images of African and Asian enemies, so that he could symbolically trample upon them as he walked.

- David Mitchell stands in the midday sun every day and yell the news to anybody who will listen because he is a town crier. David Mitchell (not that one) and his wife Julie are town criers in Chester and David is in the audience. His job is to report local news, mainly about lost items. The strap that is used to hold the bell used by town criers is called a baldric. There are probably about 240 town criers in the country. David claims that Chester is the only place in the world that chooses its town crier on the basis of their photogenic good looks.

- XL Tangent: Royal heralds informed townspeople of new proclamations, such as terms of truces and new taxes, and then there were non-royal criers such as David. One of the major duties of town criers in Goslar, Germany, was to ensure the purity of the local beer by reminding locals not to urinate or defecate in the local river the day before the water was going to be drawn for the beer.[/colour[

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: Town criers appear in the Bayeux Tapestry, with people carrying bells to announce the funeral of Edward the Confessor.

- XL Tangent: In Ribe, Denmark, during the summer they have night watchmen who sing to people that bedtime is approaching.

- XL: The anti-toast movement objected to alcohol and toasting people. Louis XIV banned anybody from toasting at his court. In 1628, Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne wrote an entire anti-toast tract in which he said that toasting originated with the devil himself. Prynne was pilloried, imprisoned, had his ears chopped off, and then went on to become an MP.

- XL Tangent: There is an International Toastmasters Alliance, which has small groups of about 20 people which share tips on being more mesmerising. Some have developed strange ways of giving speeches to get attention.

- XL Tangent: The word "toast" as in toasting literally comes from toasted bread, when in the 17th century it was a practice of wishing somebody good health by offering them a drink with spiced toast bread inside it. In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Falstaff calls for a quart of spiced win and says: "Put a toast in it." Toast was often moistened with wine. Toast water was a Victorian health drink made by pouring boiling water onto toast, letting it cool, then straining and drinking it.

- XL Tangent: A toastmaster's glass is mostly solid glass. It holds a quarter as much alcohol as a normal glass of the same size so that the toastmaster does not get too drunk during their work.

- XL Tangent: At the University of Pennsylvania, there is a American football team called the Quakers. Between the third and fourth quarters of each match, the band plays a song called "The Highball" which goes: "Tell the story of glory of Pennsylvania. Drink a highball and be jolly, here's a toast to dear old Penn." Then everyone used to drink at the last line of the song. However, the stadium banned alcohol in the 1970s, so now everyone throws slices of toast instead. Up to 30,000 pieces of toast are flung during a season, and lots of people show up to the games just to throw the toast and leave. The stadium has a special sweeping machine to clean up all the toast, and the students all donate to food banks to atone for wasting bread.

- The most thrilling way to come down from the top of the Eiffel Tower would be in a large bullet with nothing to strap you down. In 1891, engineer Charles Carron proposed a giant bullet that people would sit inside as it fell down from the tower into an enormous pool of water at the base. The fall of about 1,000ft would all 15 riders to reach speeds of up to 180mph whilst not restrained by a seat belt or anything else. The main problem was that they needed something to land in, so Carron proposed a dive pool 190ft deep shaped like a giant champagne flute. Another problem was how to get people out once they landed. The bullet was 11 tons, and Carron said that they would probably need to get everyone out of it quite quickly before people either asphyxiated or drowned. The Boston Globe suggested that those who survive will be decorated with the Medal of Legion to commemorate their bravery, and others will be decently buried by the state. The bullet was never built.

- Tangent: Jo's brother had a friend who when they went to scary theme park rides, he would take a massive rusty bolt with him. He would wait till the ride started, pick up the bolt and say: "I've just found that under my seat."

- Australian talking ducks say things like: "You bloody fool!". Musk ducks are part of a rare group of vocal language learners, which includes humans, some bats and elephants who can reproduce sounds that are around them. There is a duck at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in Canberra called Ripper in 1987 was recorded making a noise that sounded like a person saying: "You bloody fool!" The panel are played a recording of this. There is also a musk duck in Pensthorpe Natural Park in the UK that sounds like a snorting pony, and one in Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust that coughs like his keeper and squeaks like a turnstile.

- Tangent: There was a German vaudeville act called Don the Talking Dog. He went to America in 1912, but when people came to meet him he was too seasick to converse with anybody. He also only spoke German. He could say "yes", "no", "quiet", "cake", "have", "hunger" and his owner's name. Britain's most famous talking dog was Prince, who appeared on That's Life with his owner Paul Allen in 1979. He could say "Elvis", "Esther" and most famously "sausages". Host Esther Rantzen told Sandi that there was a time in the 1970s when she couldn't walk down the street without people yelling: "Sausages!" The panel are played the footage.

General Ignorance

- No particular kind of nail is more likely to give you tetanus. The bacterium that causes tetanus is most commonly found in human and animal faeces, but it is also in soil and dust. A sprig of holly would be a bigger threat tan a nail. (Forfeit: A rusty nail)

- The spot where an earthquake starts is called the focus or hypocentre. The epicentre is the point on the Earth's surface above the location where an earthquake starts. (Forfeit: The epicentre)

- Tangent: Guz experience an earthquake for the first time in his life recently in LA, where earthquakes are quite common, but he did not know that. He was in a hotel room wearing only his underpants when the earthquake happened, at which point he panicked, ran in the hallway and kicked down the door opposite his room, where a small Chinese man was sitting. Both ended up screaming in panic.

- XL Tangent: Alan was once in a hotel in Madrid, lying in bed, and he could hear a bit of activity on the balcony outside. The balcony door opened, and a little Japanese man came walking through the room, did a courtesy bow, and went tout into the corridor. The next day, a young Japanese man knocked on Alan's door, with the first man behind him apologising, and they gave Alan a $100 bill. Alan told them that he didn't need the money, he just wanted to know what happened. What happened was that the man was locked out on his own balcony, and he climbed across the gap to Alan's balcony (all of this was on the seventh floor), and he came in. Alan kept the money.

- XL: Neanderthals walked the same way to humans. Both species were similar and bred together. The reason people wrongly think they walked in a stooped, knuckle-dragging fashion is because in 1909 a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule reassembled the very first Neanderthal skeleton, and he found it was stopped over, as if it had a permanent slouch, and he thought he found the missing link between primates and humans. What Boule had actually discovered was an old man suffering from arthritis.

Scores

- The Audience: 15 points (Eighth victory)
- Jo Brand: 14 points
- Sally Phillips: 11 points
- Guz Khan: 7 points
- Alan Davies: -20 points