QI

Sandi Toksvig is joined by Ed Byrne, Cally Beaton, Jack Dee and Alan Davies answering theatre-themed questions.

Topics

- The most interesting thing to ever happen in a theatre is arguably the revolution which resulted in the creation of Belgium. Daniel Auber's opera La Muette de Portici follows a group of fishermen in Naples who rebel against their Spanish rulers in the 17th century. The opera climaxes with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the heroine throws herself from a balcony into lava. In 1830, the opera was performed in Brussels, at a time when Belgium belonged to the Dutch. The opera contains a stirring aria called "Sacred Love of the Homeland", and after it was sung the crowd poured out of the theatre, joined the nationalist protests outside, and weeks later the rebel provisional government declared independence. Today, Belgians claim this opera was responsible for the creation of the nation. Before the night of the opera, posters had been posted across the city which read: "Monday the 23rd, fireworks. Tuesday the 24th, illuminations. Wednesday the 25th, revolution."

- Tangent: Another candidate for the most interesting thing to happen in a theatre is the assassination of President Lincoln. Moliere died during a performance of his own play The Hypochondriac, having said he wasn't feeling well.

- Tangent: Cally was at a theatre watching Les Misérables with a distinctive-looking boyfriend. She went to the toilet, came back to her aisle seat, held his inner thigh lovingly, and discovered that it was not her boyfriend.

- Tangent: There is a Dutch saying meaning is something tastes delicious: "Alsof er een engeltje op je tong piest", which translates as: "As if a little angel is pissing on my tongue." The word for "sex" and "poo" is also the same: "poepen".

[i]- Tangent: Alan did a gig in Antwerp where he asked if anyone spoke French. He says that: "I've never, with a single line, created such a hostile atmosphere."

- Tangent: The British have also had theatre riots. In 1808, Covent Garden Theatre burnt down, was rebuilt a year later, and in order to offset the huge cost of the rebuild they jacked up ticket prices. They also reduced the areas where the poor could sit, while increasing the number of expensive boxes. This lead to the Old Price Riots, which lasted three months, and all classes complained. The police were called, the Riot Act was read from the stage, there was doubt about if you could arrest people who'd bought a ticket to come in, and he rioters brought frying pans to bang. One complaint was about pigeonholes, which were the cheapest seats, where you could only see the legs of the actors. The rioters won and the prices were reduced again. Ed satirically asks why theatres don't do what they just do now and introduce an "administration fee" on top of the ticket price, while Alan compares it to modern Premier League football with the poor being price out while the rich are in corporate boxes.

- XL Tangent: Ed asks jokingly if the rioters didn't just bring in frying pans in case there was another fire. Sandi adds that when she was a child in New York she lived in a very small town called Mamaroneck, which has a volunteer fire department. One day a very smart restaurant burnt down, and when they realised they couldn't save it, they just waited for all the chickens to cook before they put the fire out.

- XL Tangent: Before becoming a Hollywood star, Mae West was in a Broadway play called Sex in 1926, which she wrote, produced, directed and starred in. A publicity shot of the play showed her being embraced by a male actor, and in those days a man and a woman were not allowed to horizontal kissing. The play was very popular, and the entire cast was eventually arrested for indecency. West was offered the chance to just pay a fine, but she decided that going to jail would make for a better publicity stunt. She went to Welfare Island (now named Roosevelt Island) in a limo, wearing a spectacular outfit, she had dinner with the prison warden Henry O Schleth and his wife, and leaked to the press that under her prison uniform she was wearing the finest silk underwear.

- The best way to tackle a toddler's tantrum is to move them from anger into sadness. One of the things that happens is that you get anger and sadness at the same moment, causing confusion. If you can make the child less angry, then they realise they just need to be comforted. The problem is that the prefrontal cortex of a toddler, which influences our sense of fairness and impulse control zone, has yet to fully develop, and this is why generally children have tantrums and adults don't.

- Tangent: Jack jokingly suggesting the best way to deal with tantrums is to put the toddler in a hessian sack. In the Netherlands at Christmas, St. Nicholas threatens to take away naughty children in such a sack. Ed's tour manager once had a daughter who threw a tantrum, and his response to film her on his phone and play it back to her as was having the tantrum, and she started laughing while watching the video. One of Jack's daughters started a dispute about what she was wearing while going out, and his wife Jane told her to change a T-shirt because it was stained, and the row got worse, until she just screamed at Jane: "Anyway, you think you're the fancy lady of all London town!" Ed's youngest child said to him, around the age of three or four: "I wish I was a grown-up", to which Ed replied that when he was, then he would have to go to work, to which the child paused, a perfect sitcom beat, and then said: "I wish I was a comedian."

- XL Tangent: Another way to stop tantrums is to do a time out. If Sandi's son didn't tidy his toys he would just sit on the naughty step. Sandi found him on the naughty step despite not saying anything to him, so Sandi asked what he was doing he replied: "Oh, I can't be bothered to tidy." Alan had a child who would do something naughty, and before Alan could reply, would just walk defiantly to the naughty step.

- Possibly the worst bit of parenting advice ever was to give them drugs. Victorian children were sometimes given Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric Syrup, which was very soothing for children, because it was 50% alcohol and contained 1 and 3/16 grains of opium per ounce. There were also plenty of manuals which had suspect advice in them. Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist, women's rights activist and Native American activist, also wrote several books about bringing up children despite having no kids herself. In The Mother's Book from 1831, Child advised that women to speak with a look of regret as they tied infants to armchairs. She did however frown on locking them in the closet. In the early 20th century there were doctors who recommended dunking a screaming infant's head under the cold tap until they shut up. In 1888, a manual by Thomas Hill suggested that you should never wake children up.

- Tangent: There is a parenting book called There's No Such Thing As "Naughty", which Cally says sounds shit, and Ed says sounds like a book you should steal rather than buy.

- XL Tangent: Gina Ford, who also doesn't have child, wrote a manual called The Content Baby which suggest just letting the baby cry naturally. Ed says he would feed Ford her own book.

- The thing that looks like a tomato and screams when stressed is an actual tomato. In 2019, research at Tel Aviv University discovered that tomatoes emit ultrasonic screams when they are damaged or dehydrated known as "stress vocalisations". That reach a level of 65db, the same volume as human laughter, but it is at a frequency well above human hearing range. They can be heard by frit bats and mice from five metres away, but they eat them anyway. We don't know how the noise is made, but it is most likely burst air bubbles in xylem fibres, which are the tubes that transport water and nutrients from the soil. They have tiny charged particles called ions that send electrical signals around the plant and alert it to danger and insect attacks. (Forfeit: Me [for Cally])

- Tangent: The book The Hidden Life Of Trees covers how trees communicate with each other. Trees share water, so it acts a bit like a socialist system.

- Tangent: Tomatoes were feared in Europe for about 200 years. They were known as poison apples, which is arguably fair enough because there are about 18.000 varieties and they all belong to the nightshade family, which produces the toxin solanine, which can kill, but only in extremely high doses. Everything in this family have long been considered aphrodisiacs, so tomatoes were long seen a source of sexual temptation, nicknamed "love apples" and "wolf apples". In early 19th century America it was believed tomatoes were toxic and inedible.

- XL Tangent: There is an apocryphal story about a gentleman horticulturalist called Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson in Salem, New Jeresy, who publicly ate a basket of tomatoes with a doctor standing just in case. The event became known as the Salem Tomato Trial of 1820. The Salem County Historical Society wrote: "He brought the tomato to his lips and took a bite. A woman in the crowd screamed and fainted, but no-one paid her any attention. They were all watching Johnson as he took one bite after another. The crowd cheered and the fireman's band blared a song. 'He's done it!', they shouted. 'He's still alive!'"[/colour

- [colour=#000080]Tangent: Nobumichi Tosa of Japan tried to run the 2015 Tokyo Marathon while wearing a robotic tomato dispenser he designed himself, which he wore as a backpack.[/colour

[colour=#000080]- You can communicate many messages by thumping on a drum, depending on the drum. The Yoruba dundun are the talking drums of Nigeria, which copy the sound of human speech and convey messages over really long distances. The language is tonal, and the dundun is a cylindrical double-headed drum, which can be tuned to exactly mimic the rhythm, intonation, emotion and stresses of the language. Other talking musical instruments include the oja flute which mimics the Igbo language; in Ghana the Asante Twi language is communicated by ivory trumpeters, who use it to announce drinking competitions. The Baka of Cameroon and Gabon, have women who practice water drumming known as liquindi, which is done to enchant the forest before hunting to lure the animals.

- XL Tangent: Jack says he communicates by drums, saying that a drum solo lasting about 12-18 minutes means: "I want this train carriage to myself."

- XL Tangent: The only mammals other than humans known to use rhythm to communicate are lemurs. The indri of Madagascar message each other using family songs. They sing up to seven times a day, and it can be heard 4km away.

- If your phone is dead, the TV is not working and the Wi-Fi is down, you can tell if a thunderstorm is on the way by using leeches. The tempest prognosticator, also known as the Leech Barometer, was invented in 1850 by Dr. George Merryweather, and has 12 glass pint bottles, each containing a leech, and arranged in a circle so the leeches would not get lonely. A replica was built in 1951 and can be found in a museum in Whitby. Each bottle has a thin piece of whalebone in the neck, and when a storm is coming the change in atmospheric pressure causes the leech to climb the sides of the bottle and dislodge the bone, ringing a bell. Merryweather wanted to make versions the size of Indian temples, as well as smaller ones, and roll it out across the country. The government however stuck to normal barometers.

- Tangent: In 1906, Prof. Joseph Novak of Vienna promoted the use of a tropical vine called rosary pea to predict tempests. He claimed that if the feathery leaves pointed up it would be fine, but if they pointed down there would be a storm. He also claimed it could predict the weather in a 3,000 mile radius, a week in advance. He also said it could predict earthquakes a month in advance. He was never able to prove that it worked.

- Tangent: Jack was once knocked flat by lightning, when watching a cricket match when he was about ten. The lightning struck the middle of the pitch, which also knocked over a lot of the players. Ed says it could have been worse, in that he may have been forced to watch the whole match.

- Tangent: There is a story of a man who was hit so many times by lightning that people couldn't believe it. When he died, his grave was hit by lightning.

- Tangent: In 2020, the single longest lightning bolt ever was recorded. It was 477 miles long, travelled over Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, (the same distance as London to Hamburg) and was measured using satellite imagery.

- You can turn your town into a tourist trap by staging face fights. Palisade, Nevada in the 1870s had a reputation as one of the most violent places in the USA. Nicknamed the toughest town west of Chicago, train passengers en route from Chicago to San Francisco on the Central Pacific Railroad would stop there to see all the fights. There were gunfights, brawls, robberies, Native American massacres and hangings in broad daylight. Actually, Palisade was one of the quietest, most law-abiding places in the whole country, with one local newspaper reporter describing it as: "unusually dull." The town didn't even have a sheriff. All the fights were a complete hoax designed to attract tourism, with the local Shoshone Native Americans enthusiastically joining in, performing mock scalpings, and agreeing to be bound hand and foot, and laid on platforms. Blood from the local slaughterhouse was used to enhance the theatrics. The first staged confrontation was this: "Frank West and Alvin Kittleby exchanged words, with the former calling out, 'There you are, 'ya low-down polecat, I've been waiting for you. I'm going to kill you cos of what you did to my sister.'" There over 1,000 performances and no lives were ever lost. Some consider it to be the first theme park in the world.

- Tangent: The actual period of the Wild West was only about 20 years in the USA. There is a period of people starting to go out west, but then barbed wire was invented, and once all the big vast open spaces were enclosed, the period ended.

- XL Tangent: A lot of films have also done a disservice to Native Americans, because settlers were much more likely to be killed by diphtheria or illness than them. Mormons were more of a danger to Native Americans, with the Mountain Meadow Massacre in Utah seeing 120 deaths by Mormons of Native Americans.

- XL Tangent: There is a fake Shangri-La in China. It was originally Zhongdian County Town, but in 2001 it renamed itself and it is now a popular tourist attraction.

- XL Tangent: In Vietnam, if you open a restaurant and it does well, rivals will open an identically named restaurant around the corner, and there is nothing the original can do about it. To avoid this, most restaurants just use a street number which can't be copied.

- Tangent: Another tourist trap is Juliet's balcony in Verona. While the house the balcony is on is from the 13th century, the balcony was not added until 1936. Also, Shakespeare did not base Juliet on a real person and never went to Italy. There is a statue of Juliet in the courtyard, and there is a tradition of rubbing her right breast for luck.

- A reason to visit the Bude Tunnel in Cornwall, which in 2021 won the Travellers' Choice Award would be to keep yourself dry when travelling between a supermarket and a car park. The tunnel has its own merchandise shop, sells postcards and has over 900 five-star reviews online, but the tunnel is just a small Perspex rain tunnel. In 2018, the supermarket lit it up with 100,000 light bulbs as a joke. Eventually, TripAdvisor had to ban people from adding reviews.

- Tangent: Sandi read a website called "Top 10 Things to Do in Bude, Cornwall". No. 5 on the list was: "Visit Devon."

- The panel are shown a photo of some men are asked how the one in the middle might make children behave. The one in the middle is clearly a humanoid machine. Named Herbert Televox, it is an early example of a smart home device like Alexa or Siri, and was invented by Roy Wensley from the Westinghouse Company in 1927. Herbert could talk, switch the oven on, turn lights on and off, and could be programmed to spy on children by reporting on the sound levels in the house, and so could tell if they were partying, had gone to bed etc. Herbert never became mainstream. There were three Televoxes employed as reservoir watchmen in Washington DC, reporting on water levels, and who could turn the water on and off. Herbert also had a sister called Katrina Van Televox, who was dressed as a maid and the press release at the time said: "She has all the characteristics of the modern woman, except she doesn't talk back." Televox also had a grandson called Elektro who could smoke cigarettes, and appeared in a movie called [i]Sex Kittens Go To College. Herbert was controlled by sound, using a combination of different pitches on a whistle.

- XL Tangent: In the 1960s, in the USA, automatic telephone switchboards that worked using whistles, meaning a particular sound would allow a long distance call. However, the cereal company Cap'n Crunch released toy whistles as a promotion, and teenagers discovered they could get free long distance calls using them, as they coincidentally played the right tone. Using this theory, a device called a blue box was created that reproduced all sorts of different tones that allowed you to hack the entire phone system. Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's first business venture together was making and selling blue boxes, so without them we might not have Apple.

General Ignorance

- George Washington's wig did not have a colour, as he never wore a wig. He styled his hair to look like one. He pulled his hair back into a queue, then fluff out the sides so it looked like a wig.

- Tangent: The reason why wig wearing became fashionable was due to one bald man: Louis XIII of France, who wore one to cover his baldness, and then everyone in his court copied him. By the time Washington became president it was falling out of fashion.

- XL Tangent: Frankie Howerd used to go into make-up with his wig on, and you had to pretend it was real hair, Thus, if he had to wear a wig for sketch, you had to put a wig over his normal wig. He had three different wigs at different stages of growth to continue the idea that it was real hair.

- The panel are asked to complete this Shakespearean phrase: "I am sworn, brother, to a leash of drawers and can call them all by their Christian names as Tom Dick and...", the final name being Francis. The line is spoken by Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I. The phrase "Tom, Dick and Harry" did not appear until about 134 years later. There is a song from 1734 called "Farewell Tom, Dick and Harry, Farewell Moll, Nell and Sue". There is French equivalent of the phrase: "Monsieur, Mademe Tout Le Monde", meaning "Mr and Mrs Everybody". (Forfeit: Harry)

Scores

- Alan Davies: 3 points (Alan's 42nd victory)
- Jack Dee: -6 points
- Cally Beaton: -7 points
- Ed Byrne: -26 points