QI

Time to talk turkey! Sandi and Alan gather round the tree with Gyles Brandreth, Chris McCausland and Aisling Bea to tear into toys, teddy bears, and other festive topics starting with "T" ... featuring personal appearances by the President of the Magic Circle and probably the world's most popular bear.

Topics

- Each of the panellists have been given a gift from Sandi. Chris has a toy turkey, Gyles a roughly-made teddy bear, Aisling a spinning top, and Alan a stick. According to toy experts, the stick is the best toy there has ever been. The US National Toy Hall of Fame, which has several modern toys in it, inducted the stick into their collection in 2008, because children play with them a lot. The Hall of Fame also includes cardboard boxes and sand.

- People prefer their Christmas presents not to be a surprise. Several studies show that the most successful gifts are the ones where you give the recipient exactly what they asked for. Only the gift giver cares about the monetary value of the present. People also wrongly focus on the moment of receiving the gift, when most of pleasure is long-term. Another error is people obsessing over uniqueness of gifts.

- Tangent: Gyles once spent Christmas with a sheikh, who gave his wife a present of Shiekh Yamani's love poetry, badly translated into English by the head of his army.

- If you were one of the three wise men and forgot a gift, you might give the baby Jesus is chervil. This is French parsley, which has similar properties to myrrh. However, while myrrh is a symbol of death, chervil means "leaves of joy" and thus represents new life. Myrrh as a symbol of death dates long before Christianity. The British Museum contains the Franks Casket, which displays two stories on it: a pagan story on the left-hand side, and the three wise men on the right, and the man carrying the myrrh has a Viking symbol of death over him.

- Tangent: The vessel into which you put frankincense and swing around is called a thurible. The person who swing the thurible is a thurifer.

- Tangent: Sandi says that Aisling may like to know that myrrh has painkilling and anti-inflammatory properties. It can be used as a natural toothpaste, as a gargle, and some women use it to treat thrush. Aisling sarcastically thanks her for making her thrush being made public.

- The biggest Christmas present ever was US President Andrew Johnson pardoning everyone who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War on 25th December 1868. Widely regarded as one of the worst presidents of all time, Johnson took over from Abraham Lincoln after he was assassinated. Johnson was supposed to have been assassinated the same night as Lincoln, but his assassin got drunk instead. The pardoning was controversial even at the time. Before it, people had to apply for an individual pardon, with the government granting 13,500 of them. Johnson's blanket pardon was brought about mainly to free up time.

- Tangent: Chris at first suggests the Statue of Liberty. The problem with it however is that nobody wanted it. It was meant to be a gift from the people of France to the United States, but nobody wanted to pay the transportation costs.

- Tangent: Lincoln was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth, who was famous for playing Romeo. John Wilkes had a brother, Edwin Booth, who was famous for playing Hamlet. A few years after Lincoln's assassination, Edwin was touring and leaving a train station. As a train was moving out, a man fell off the edge of the platform and onto the line. Edwin managed to rescue the man, who turned out to be Abraham Lincoln's only son Robert. Thus the brother of the man who shot Lincoln, saved the life of the son of Lincoln.

- Tangent: Other large Christmas presents include the TV producer Aaron Spelling giving his children a truckload of snow that was shipped to his garden over night, so the kids could wake up to a white Christmas in Los Angeles; in 2012 Angelina Jolie gave her then-husband Brad Pitt a $1.6million waterfall as a joint Christmas and birthday present; and in 1956 Harper Lee, who was working as a BOAC ticket agent, was given by her friends Michael and Joy Brown a year's salary, which gave her enough time off work to write To Kill A Mockingbird. Chris studied To Kill A Mockingbird for GCSE English Literature, and because his eyesight was poor at the time he was given a laptop. However, he never read the book and had it on the laptop. Thus, when a question about Boo Radley came up, he just searched for the name, found the appropriate bit and wrote it down. He still only got a B. Aisling and Sandi ask the audience ask if listening to an audiobook counts as the same as reading the book proper, but they respond by putting their hands up, which Chris can't see.

- The name of the toy bear depicted in the books Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner was Growler. The bear as illustrated for the books, drawn by EH Shepard, was based on his own bear called Growler. AA Milne's son, Christopher Robin, did have a bear that was called Edward Bear, but Milne renamed it for the stories after a famous Canadian black bear in London Zoo called Winnie, short for Winnipeg. Winnie was first found by Harry Colebourn, who was on his way to Europe to fight in WWI, when he came across a hunter who killed a mother bear, Colebourn bought the cub who became Winnie for $20. Somehow he managed to bring Winnie on the boat across the Atlantic. Growler meanwhile ended up being eaten by a neighbour's dog. (Forfeit: Winnie-the-Pooh)

- Tangent: Gyles has shook hands with the real Christopher Robin. They became friends when Christopher Robin was in his 60s and working as a book-seller. He had a troubled childhood as he did not like being the boy in the stories, and accused AA Milne of building his reputation, "by standing on a small boy's shoulders."

- Tangent: Gyles and his wife have a teddy bear museum with over 1,000 bears and he has brought to the studio several of the bears from it. These include the original Fozzie Bear given to Gyles personally by Jim Henson; Nookie Bear, the puppet used by Roger De Courcey; Barbara Cartland's bear, given to Gyles in her will, which she claimed thought he was the Indian prince of love; the original Paddington Bear from the 1970s TV series; Super Ted; and Judi Dench's childhood teddy bear. Aisling visited The Muppets set in LA and says that all the puppeteers are like bin men, in that they have one really solid good arm, and a visited Miss Piggy's dressing room which contains genuine Chanel material. Miss Piggy once punched Sandi after she found out she was Danish. Frank Oz, the voice of Fozzie Bear, does not like Gyles because he could not believe Henson gave Gyles the puppet instead of him. The original Winnie-the-Pooh in contrast is in New York, because Milne's American agent gave the bear to the New York Public Library. Gyles says he is ready to broker an exchange between the two bears.

- The turkey would play the Virgin Mary in a Nativity play, because female turkeys do not need a male in order to reproduce. Up to half of unfertilised turkey eggs will develop into live embryos. The vast majority don't survive long enough to carry on, and most don't have their own offspring. In turkeys' the resulting offspring are all male. There are no mammals capable of virgin births, aka parthenogenesis, but 80 kinds of fish, reptiles and amphibians are capable of it.

- Tangent: Gyles claims he was 16 before he heard the word "breast" spoken at home. His parents always referred to breast meat as "white meat". When he was 16, he had Christmas dinner with some other people, who referred to it as breast, and everyone, "had a pink face for the rest of the meal."

- Tangent: Male turkeys blush when they see an attractive female.

- The panel are show a film of a top spinning in midair, and are asked how it is done. It is due to magnetism. If you drop the positive side of a magnet onto the positive side of another magnet, the dropped one will rotate and then stick. In the 1970s, American inventor Roy Harrigan found a way around this and turned a magnet into a spinning top by using torque. This is demonstrated by the panel by using large spinning tops with string attached to them. When the top is spinning and you hold the string, the top spin up the string. They also attempt to demonstrate it with Aisling sitting on a swivel stool, while holding a bicycle wheel spinning around a central axel. If you tilt the wheel in one direction the torque should turn the stool, but Aisling fails to do this.

- A guest is introduced: Megan Swann, who in 2021 became the first woman and the youngest person to become President of the Magic Circle. The Magic Circle did not allow women to be members until 1991. She uses her magic to teach environmental issues, which she demonstrates using a trick with a box shaped like a die. Megan says that when she was given presents, she was more interested in the box it was in, and she keeps her box inside the toy - she opens up her die and takes a box from inside it, the die being bigger. The packaging usually ends up as waste, and the UK throws away 5.9million tonnes of packaging every year, and like the problem, the inside box has been growing, to the point that the big die now fits inside the small box. Megan says waste doesn't need to be a problem if everyone recycles, and from the small box, she pulls out what was the die, but it has now transformed into a box covered with the recycling symbol.

- Tangent: Gyles says he is an environmental magician too, having become a vegetarian, and demonstrates a trick when by using a knife, you can make a banana look like a pig.

- The most inappropriate Christmas present possible seems to different between each generation. For example, Sandi and Gyles are old enough to remember smokers' paraphernalia made out of chocolate. There were also kits for keeping butterflies which included poison. In 1982, there was "A War In The Falklands Board Game". In 1950, there was the Atomic Energy Lab, a kids science set which included four samples of uranium ore, and the set invited kids to hide radioactive samples in the bedroom and challenges others to find them using Geiger counters.

- Tangent: As an adult, about 15 years ago, Chris got an electric tin opener as a present. He was excited until he realised all his tins had ring pulls on them. To use the opener he had to hold the tins upside down. As a child, Sandi had no interest in dolls, but she was given Girl's World, which was a doll's head whose hair grew when you pressed a button. She doused this toy in lighter fluid and set fire to it in the garden. Chris bought his daughter some toy cars in an attempt to break gender stereotypes, and straight away she called them mummy car, daddy car and baby car, fed them and put the cars to bed.

- Tangent: In the 1920s there were dolls for grown-ups, which caused a moral panic. Boudoir dolls were dolls for adult women, often dressed as flappers, who wore make-up and smoked, dressed immodestly, and became a big fad in the USA and Europe, especially France. Anatole France claimed that women were "forgetting their duty" because the dolls were so distracting.

- Tangent: There is a doll currently on sale which pees colourful glitter and poops surprise charms, which you collect to make a bracelet.

General Ignorance

- Pinocchio's nose started growing because he was carved and he was hungry. In the original story by Carlo Collodi written in 1881, the nose grows twice; when Geppetto carves him, and when he is hungry, but never when he lies. When Collodi extended the story, he incorporated the nose growing as a punishment for lying, but even then it only happens twice, and Pinocchio lies a lot more than that. In the original story, Pinocchio is so annoyed by Jiminy Cricket being so pious that he kills him with a hammer. At one point a snake jumps out at Pinocchio, and the snake find his reaction so funny that he bursts an artery laughing and dies. Pinocchio is also hanged from a tree by a fox and a cat who leave him to suffocate. (Forfeit: He lied)

- Tangent: In the Disney version of Pinocchio, the Pleasure Island in it was originally called "Boobyland", but it was renamed just before the film was released.

- According to Time Magazine, Bambi is one of the all-time top 25 film in the genre of horror, alongside Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The 1942 film, based loosely on the book of the same name, sees both Bambi and his mother shot by hunters, the mother fatally, and the forest burning down.

- A bird that you can see at the South Pole is the south polar skua. Penguins stay on the coast and spend 75% of their lives in water. The skua has been seen at the geographic South Pole. It is also very aggressive, stealing the food of other birds and eating the chicks of other birds - lead Chris to argue that if the skua is stealing the food of other birds and eating the chicks of other birds, then there must be other birds at the Pole. (Forfeit: Penguin)

- Tangent: There is a makeshift gold club 13 degrees above the South Pole, run by the New Zealand Antarctic Programme. It has a rule saying that if a skua steals your ball you get a one-shot penalty, but if you hit a bird by mistake, you get a birdie.

Scores

- Gyles Brandreth: -2 points
- Aisling Bea: -7 points
- Chris McCausland: -8 points
- Alan Davies: -19 points