QI

Themes

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

Topics

- The panel are shown pictures of three demons and are asked which would be the most useful to summon. The answer is it depends what you want. One is the flame demon Ukobach, who invented both fireworks and fried food, and is responsible for keeping the infernal boilers alight. The second is Uvall, who comes in the shape of a camel, who can help you procure the love of a woman and to foretell the future. According to the 16th century Dutch physician and demonologist Johann Weyer: "Uvall is a great and terrible dromedary, but in human form, he above all procureth the especial love of women, and knoweth things present, past and to come." The third is a winged boy named Ualac, who rides a two-headed dragon and is good at finding hidden treasure.

- Tangent: In Malawi, the summoning of demons is still a thing. Satan is depicted as a white man in black robes and lives at the bottom of the Pacific.

- Tangent: Mammon is the demon of money. There is also a three-horned goat demon in charge of orgies called Leonard.

- XL Tangent: People have tried to calculate how many demons there are. Alphonso de Spina, a Spanish monk of the 15th century, claimed there were 133,316,666 demons.

- XL Tangent: When the London Underground was being constructed, opening in 1863, Scottish clergyman the Rev. Dr. John Cumming advised against it saying: "The forthcoming end of the world will be hastened by the construction of the railways, burrowing into infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil."

- The best way to toss a puffin is underarm. The chicks of Atlantic puffins, also known as pufflings, hatch in burrows, on cliffs in Iceland's Westman Islands. When they fledge, they fly from the colony and usually they then go out for several years to the sea, and then return to breed. Historically, they found the sea by following the reflection of the moon. However, today pufflings are mislead by the artificial light from the town of Vestmannaeyjar, which has lead to a local custom of people helping lost pufflings. In August and September, between 21.00 and 03:00, families go out with torches, scoop up all the pufflings and put them into cardboard boxes. On the following day, just before sunset, they lob the pufflings off a cliff to get them going.

- Tangent: Where Alan grew up, there was a pond nearby a road that became increasingly busy over the years. The frogs have to cross this road to get to the pond to spawn, but would get regularly run over. To help the frogs, neighbours would go out every evening with frying pans to carry the frogs across.

- Tangent: As well as saving puffins, the Icelanders also eat them. Sky fishing is the practice of putting up huge nets to catch puffins as they dive into the sea. Sandi has read that the puffin's heart, eaten raw, is a preferred delicacy, but she doesn't believe this because she once in Arctic hunting ptarmigans, ate it, and the locals told her the heart was a tremendous delicacy. She ate it, and the locals laughed at her.

- The sport that is easiest to play in a giant hooped undergarment is cricket. The laws of cricket today prohibit underarm bowling unless there is an agreement between the teams. However, until 1822, underarm bowling was the only permitted kind in cricket. According to one folklore story, a woman named Christiana Willes, whose brother John was a first-class cricketer. John would practice by getting Christiana to throw balls at him, but because her hooped skirt prevented her from bowling underarm, she bowled roundarm instead. John thought this method was really effective, so he started using it, but then the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) banned it. John used the technique in a match in 1822, but it was ruled as a no-ball, and he was so cross he never played cricket again. However, 30 years or so after this, roundarm bowling became the norm. The modern overarm style took over in the 1860s, but several people like WG Grace who used roundarm all his life. The story of Christiana is disputed, with cricket expert and former Prime Minister John Major saying that women's dress style at the beginning of the 19th century didn't necessarily involve wide-hooped skirts.

- Tangent: The first hoop used in basketball was a peach basket, but with no hole at the bottom, so people had to climb up to get the ball every time someone scored.

- XL Tangent: John Major wrote a 600-page history of cricket, which included a story about a boy who was the great genius-to-be of his time, scoring huge numbers of runs at schoolboy level and setting all kinds of records for his school, and would have become the greatest, even better than Don Bradman, but the boy died in the First World War. Major listed so many boys who had potential for cricket who died during the war, which Alan said was one of the most moving passages about the loss of potential he had ever read. Daliso jokingly asks if the boys threw their grenades overarm, to which Alan replies that when a grenade came towards them they would bat it away.

- The best thing to do if your best friend has terrible underarm odour is to pretend you are smelling cheese. To demonstrate this, Sandi claims that Dom the cameraman is bad-smelling, so Maisie is blindfolded and told that Dom is coming closer to her, and that she will smell him. In fact, Sandi hold some cheese under Maisie's nose to trick her while the normal-smelling Dom stands still. Research at Oxford in 2005 exposed test subjects to a smell. For some subjects the smell was labelled as cheddar cheese, and for others it was labelled as body odour. The ones who told it was cheese thought the smell was fine.

- Tangent: Maisie's mother uses code words to describe people with BO. For example: "Oh, there's very strong Wi-Fi over there." "Wi-Fi" meaning "whiffy".

- Tangent: Daliso used to live in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, where there was lots of fish. When he first arrived he thought he could not live there because it smelled so bad, but after a day or two he got used to it.

- XL Tangent: The first deodorant was Mum in the USA in 1888, but the version that really took off was called Odorono, pronounced "Odour? Oh, no!" It was put forward at the 1912 Atlantic City Exposition by a college student called Edna Murphey. Her father was a surgeon, and he had invented it to stop his hands sweating during surgery. Today, she is credited with creating a now $18billion deodorant industry. She hired an advertising copywriter called James Young who invented the idea that body odour was something that other people would notice, even if you yourself did not notice it, and also suggested that without it women would not be able to find a man, with their girlfriends discussing the problem behind their backs. In 1919, he ran an ad in the Ladies' Home Journal which read: "A woman's arm, poets have sung of it, great artists have painted its beauty. It should be the dainty, sweetest thing in the world, and yet, unfortunately, it isn't always."

- XL Tangent: In Elizabethan England, it was common for a girl to place a whole peeled apple under her armpit, and it would infuse the body odour, the idea being you would give the apple to a suitor and if he like the smell he would eat the apple.

- The greatest understatement of all time was when a British Airways pilot told his passengers they were trying to sort out a problem, when all four engines of the plane stopped working. Eric Moody was captain of a BA flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth, Australia, in 1982. However, he flew into a cloud of dust because there was an eruption caused by the Javanese Mount Galunggung. The dust melted into the combustion chambers, stopping all four engines and sandblasting the windshield so the crew could not see out. Captain Moody came onto the PA system and announced: "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We're all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress." He was trying to get a message to the cabin service director because the PA system had broken. The plane did without power and glid for 13 minutes, going down from 37,000ft to 13,500ft. They did finally reignite one of the engines, then a second one nine seconds later. They finally landed safely in Jakarta. When Moody was asked by a journalist what it was like to land on a dark night with no forward vision, Moody replied; "It was a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger's arse." Eric Moody is in the studio.

- Tangent: Maisie's grandfather had a heart attack on a cruise, needed to be airlifted to hospital, and when she and the rest of the family finally got to meet him and asked if he was all right, he replied: "Yeah, just had a bit of a dizzy spell." Daliso's university girlfriend once reminisced about a Christmas he spent with her family 20 years before, to which she said it was a bit awkward. Daliso said her mum was drunk and her dad was racist, which is more than awkward.

- XL Tangent: The British are using understatements less because of Americanisms. Maisie says understatements are used in comedy circles. For example, if they are performing at a big club on a weekend, and the venue manager meets the comics backstage and says: "They're quite boisterous tonight." That means there's about six stag dos who are cocained up to the eyeballs. Sandi has a friend who whenever anything bad happens, she just goes: "Excellent."

- XL: The panel are shown a photo of a man in a diving suit who is undertaking an extremely unusual religious role, and are asked where he stands in the Church of England. He stood below, because he was a diver named William Walker who stopped Winchester Cathedral from collapsing. Winchester Cathedral's construction began in 1070, and by the 1900s it started subsiding. They built it on top of a raft of long wooden poles driven into a gravel bed, leading to big cracks in the wall, some 18 inches out of perpendicular. They started underpinning it, but the trenches all flooded. Thus Walker was employed to dive under the cathedral and line the excavations with concrete-filled sacks in order to stop the water coming in and enable it to be pumped out. It was expected to take 15 months but it actually took six days a week for five-and-a-half years. On one occasion when people shouted: "Stop the pumps" to stop the water pumping out, the man pumping Walker's air thought he should stop the air pump. In 1964, a commemorative statue was unveiled, but it turned out to have been of the wrong person, because sculptor Sir Charles Wheeler used a photo of Walker standing next to civil engineer Frances Fox, which for some reason had Fox in a diving suit instead. In 2001, a statue that really was of Walker was unveiled. Walker married two sisters (one after the other).

- XL: If you have just left Buckingham Palace, slathered in bear grease and with some royal underpants stuffed down your trousers, your last job was town crier in Perth, Australia. During the reign of Queen Victoria, a boy named Edward Jones would cover himself in bear grease (which actually came from pigs) would repeated break into Buckingham Palace and steal Victoria's underwear among other things. He first did at the age of 14 in 1838, stuffing some of the Queen's underwear down the two pairs of trousers he was wearing, and they only came to light when he was grabbed and one pair fell down, but he escaped. At first, he was not tried for the underwear because they did not want the newspapers to know that Victoria wore underwear. However, in 1840 at the age of 16 Jones was found hiding under a sofa Victoria had been sitting on. He spent two days in the palace, some of it sitting on the throne. He was sentence to three months in prison. As soon as Jones was released, he broke into the palace again, and was sentence to three months with hard labour. He still however kept doing it. He was eventually sent on a boat to Brazil, but returned and tried again. He served in the Navy, but came back. He was transported to Australia twice, and still came back.

- XL Tangent: At one point Queen Victoria's underpants were so large that she had a 45 inch waist. The last pair was sold at auction in 2015 for £12,000.

General Ignorance

- Sandi suggests that you can't do too much exercise. Actually, you can. While it is true that most people in the UK could so with more exercise, excessive exercise can be harmful. One problem is that you secrete cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone, which normally abates once stress has disappeared. However, if it is produced through over-exercise, it doesn't disappear as quickly, which can wreck your immune system, reduce your bone density, and result in leaky gut syndrome, where you have weakened lining of the stomach and gut. (Forfeit: Right!)

- Sandi then suggests that if you do exercise, you should do some stretching beforehand. Again, not so. It is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive. If you do anaerobic sports such as weightlifting, athletes who do stretches lift as much as 8% less in weight. It is recommended to stretch after the event, but not before. Studies in aerobic exercise suggests that stretching before an endurance event may lower endurance performance and increase the energy costs of running. (Forfeit: Yes)

- The best medicine in the world is not laughter. In fact, it can do more harm than good. A study at the University of Birmingham showed that laughter can not only be dangerous, it can even be deadly. Laughter has been implicated in abdominal hernias, dislocated jaws, incontinence, headaches, asthma, fainting and infectious diseases. Sometimes laughter can help. For unknown reasons, laughter improves fertility in women. (Forfeit: Laughter)

- XL Tangent: Alan once went to see Dave Allen in concert, and he laughed so much his face and sides were hurting. Alan later interviewed Dave some time afterwards, and told him about this pain he had. Dave said to Alan that he had to be careful, because he did once break a man's rib with laughter.

- XL Tangent: A medicine the Japanese stand by is shinrin-yoku, which is walking in the woods, and being in touch with nature.

- You should not wash your body daily. If you bathe or shower too regularly, it can harm the human microbiome. If you use too much soap, you can change the pH balance of your skind, stripping it of the protective lipids, which are the fatty compounds that act as a barrier against infection. (Forfeit: Every day)

General Ignorance

- Jack Dee: 1 point
- Daliso Chaponda: -4 points
- Alan Davies: -10 points
- Maisie Adam: -13 points