British Comedy Guide
QI. Image shows from L to R: Alan Davies, Sandi Toksvig. Copyright: TalkbackThames
QI

QI

  • TV panel show
  • BBC Two / BBC One / BBC Four
  • 2003 - 2025
  • 324 episodes (22 series)

Panel game that contains lots of difficult questions and a large amount of quite interesting facts. Stars Sandi Toksvig, Stephen Fry and Alan Davies.

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Series U, Episode 13 - Upbringing

QI. Image shows left to right: Alan Davies, Josh Pugh, Sandi Toksvig, Sally Phillips, Aaron Simmonds
Sandi Toksvig takes a look at upbringing with Sally Phillips, Josh Pugh, Aaron Simmonds and Alan Davies.

Topics

- A time when you would be utterly upstaged by somebody under six is when you play the card game Concentration. The game involves turning cards upside-down, and trying to remember which cards are paired with each other. Young children have better visual memory, also known as eidetic memory, than adults.

- Tangent: Sally says you are utterly upstaged after giving birth, because while you are pregnant the mother is the focus, but once you give birth the baby takes all the focus away from you. When Josh's wife was giving birth, he was taking pictures at her request, and he says: "My phone, you know when it makes a montage that you haven't asked for?"

- Tangent: Alan has a version of Concentration where you have to match the animal with their faeces.

- XL Tangent: There is a poo museum on the Isle of Wight which wants a celebrity wall. When Sally was on Taskmaster, she tried to persuade Bob Mortimer to donate one of his turds, but it would have cost £10,000 to desiccate it. Bob had no problem with donating, saying: "Oh, year, I did one of those for Harry Enfield." Sally has not been to the museum, but they sent her a pencil as thanks for mentioning them. The motto of the museum is: "Have you been?"

- XL Tangent: Sandi ask the panellists about their earliest memories. Aaron says he has a very clear image of his brother and himself mucking around whilst trying to take a photo for his fifth birthday, when Aaron himself was about two-and-a-half. However, he thinks he only remembers doing it because of the photo. About 40% of people will say their first memory's before the age of two, but usually it's something that has been quite carefully documented or is something that the family has talked about.

- Tangent: Josh believes his first memory was watching EastEnders and seeing an open-mouthed kiss for the first time, but he also has a memory of being in bed, his mother saying goodnight to him, and instinctively wanting to kiss in the same way.

- XL Tangent: When Alan was six, his mother died, but he does remember her putting him in a bath when he still had his socks on.

- XL Tangent: There are reportedly children who remember previous lives. QI elf Dan Schreiber once wrote a tweet which went viral, in which he recounted his son saying: "Daddy, I had a family a long time ago, and my mummy was called Sochi, and I was called Anke, and then I died and now I'm with your family."

- Tangent: About 14% of the British population believe in reincarnation, which Sandi has always been sceptical about, but she once took her then seven-year-old son to Leap Castle in Ireland, probably the most haunted building in Europe. While Sandi was doing a live broadcast from there, her son had been off doing something, and when she asked where he had been, he replied: "I've been playing with the girl with the broken leg." The castle owner went pale, because there was a story about the castle where centuries ago a small girl who had broken her leg on some stairs. There was no girl in the castle, and he could not have known about the story. When the broadcast was made, singer Billy Bragg recorded it reel-to-reel, and he discovered that in the middle of the broadcast you can clearly hear somebody say: "I died". Sally jokes she died on QI before.

- XL: The unhappiest year of your life is your 46th. The "U-bend of life" is a graph of people's wellbeing. People are very happy when young, then get more miserable when middle-aged, then get happier again when they are older, because they no longer care as much.

- XL Tangent: Sally reckons that whenever there are annuals polls of which countries are the happiest, with the results usually being topped by Scandinavian countries, that people are lying. She thinks that because they constantly top the polls, they just say they are happy to remain top. She once spoke to Meik Wiking, the Danish Minister of Happiness, and when she asked him if he was happy, he said: "I have to be happy or they fire me."

- XL Tangent: People who had a bad life at the age of 46 included William Pitt the Younger, who died aged 46 from cirrhosis, after his doctors suggested that in order to cure his gout he should drink a bottle of port a day. John F. Kennedy was assassinated aged 46. At the age of 46, physician Jerri Lin Nielsen was based at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica during the winter, with no chance of evacuation. While there she found a lump on her breast, so she carried out her own biopsy, discovered she had breast cancer, and then did her own chemotherapy for months before a plane was able to land and take her to hospital. She survived and later wrote a book about her experience.

- The toilet U-bend was invented by Alexander Cumming. Thomas Crapper invented the ball-cock, and patented a design for the U-bend but did not invent the U-bend itself. It was a slight improvement on the Cumming's S-bend, invented in 1775. The purpose of both is to stop odours emerging from the toilet. Cumming also designed equipment for a polar expedition in 1773. In the Norwegian archipelago there is an island named after him in his honour: Cummingoya. The flushing toilet was invented in the Bronze Age. In Santorini, Greece, there is a flushing toilet dating to 1700 BC.

- Tangent: The toilet in Alan's dressing room is faulty, because it is constantly flushing. Sandi says he should have just asked her because she is a lesbian. She always carries a penknife, which includes a screwdriver which she could use to help fix it. She jokes that when she quits TV she will start a company called Dial-A-Dyke.

- The panel are shown a list of uncles and are asked which one is most likely to give you money. Of the list, it is Uncle Three-Balls, which is slang for a pawnbroker, in reference to the three balls that traditionally hang outside the shops. The balls are a symbol of St Nicholas, who according to legend saved three young girls from destitution by loaning them each a bag of gold before they got married. The other uncles are all examples of rhyming slang. Uncle Bert: Shirt. Uncle Willy: Silly. Uncle Dick: Sick. Uncle Mack: Smack (heroin). Uncle Wilf: The filth (the police).

- Tangent: Wagner's children used to call Hitler "Uncle Wolf".

- XL Tangent: In the 1920s, a Lancashire company which made sweets called Uncle Luke's Mint Balls, sued a rival company for copyright which was making a similar product called Uncle Jack's Mint Balls. The judge said they could not sue, as the word "uncle" could not be copyrighted, as there are so many of them. It said in the judgment: "Uncle Jack is as entitled to offer his balls to the public as Uncle Luke." In the end both were superseded by a third company, Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, which because the dominant firm in the industry. This fact is illustrated by a commemorative photo of the two billionth mint ball produced in the toffee factory in Wigan. The mint ball has been encased, embalmed in resins, and was in the Wigan Museum of Life.

- You can tell if a bee is having a midlife crisis because it is working as an undertaker. Bees life for eight weeks, so their mid-life is at 10 days, and 25% of middle-aged worker honeybees become undertakers, removing dead bees from the hive, preventing disease and creating more space in the hive. Most don't do this job for very long, but studies at the University of Connecticut and Indiana showed a bee they named Yellow 54, which liked being an undertaker, and removed 114 corpses in 13 days, then was seen hanging around the bottom of the hive in case a body fell out.

- You could utilise a millennial whoop at a funeral if you are Arabic. The millennial whoop is an ululation that you can find in several 21st century pop songs, including "In the Shadows" by The Rasmus, "Good Time" by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen, "Live While We're Young" by One Direction, and "The Mother We Share" by Chvrches. It alternates between the fifth and the third note in a scale, but it is a bit like a child's taunt. This style of whoop can however be heard at Irish funerals, where it is known as "keening", and in Arabic weddings where it is known as a zaghrouta. You also have traditions where soldiers do a similar whoop running into battle. You can find mentions of it in Aboriginal records, in Ancient Egypt, and in the Bible. It is mostly women who make the noise, and there are professional Greek mourners called moirologists, who arrive in groups and do an impromptu song about the deceased's life.

- Tangent: In the USA, the Navajo have a person called the watermelon man who makes people happy. Alan says they should be referred to as a watermelon person. Josh says that this whooping would be mandatory at his funeral, to which Alan says it should be "persontory".

- Tangent: Funeral wailing has a very strict ritual in China. Top mourners are highly sought and paid highly. A woman performing under the stage name Dragonfly gets chauffeured hundreds of miles in a Mercedes to perform at funerals, brings a troupe of six dancers or entertainers, and she sings about the dead person. She drops to the ground, crawls towards the coffin, and then finishes by belly dancing round the coffin. In Madagascar, there is a tradition of digging up dead bodies and pouring wine on them as a celebration. Alan says that when he dies, he would like to be buried vertically in a Calippo tube, and then get squeezed up every five years. In The Divine Comedy, Dante wrote that all the bad popes were buried upside-down, with flaming feet.

- XL: You can make an unborn baby smile by eating carrots. Research at Durham University shows that foetuses pull crying and laughing faces. One of things that first develops in foetuses is taste, and the amniotic fluid has a flavour that changes depending on what the mother eats. If the mother eats kale, the foetus will frown.

- XL Tangent: If you envisage three balls arranged in a triangle, with two at the top one at the bottom, to a foetus it appears as a face. Scientists at Lancaster University in 2017 moved light patterns across 34-week-old pregnant women (to which Alan corrects her to say "pregnant people"). 195 tests were carried out, and in 40 cases, when the lights were arranged in this way the foetus follows it. Only in 14 cases was the inverse image followed. The theory is that people are sensitive to face shapes long before we are born.

General Ignorance

- The country which is home to the world's oldest mummy is Portugal. The oldest ones we used to know about came from Chile and were 7,000 years old. However, about a dozen 8,000-year-old mummies were recently discovered in the Sado Valley. (Forfeit: Egypt)

Tangent: The Leeds City Museum had a 3,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian priest named Nesyamun, which they were able to scan and make a 3D print of their larynx. Thus, they were able to make the mummy speak, which is weird because the inscriptions on Nesyamun's coffin said he would like to speak after death. However, the mummy can only make one vowel sound, which is an indifferent-sounding: "Aah."

- XL Tangent: The best preserved mummy ever discovered comes from China. Lady Dai, also known as Xin Zhui, died over 2,000 years ago. However, he veins are still red, her fingerprints and footprints are still distinguishable, and she still has nose hair. Her tomb was discovered in 1968 in Hunan Province, and she was buried inside four progressively smaller coffins.

- In 1880s, the world's fastest mode of transport was the log flume. In the mountains of Nevada and California, loggers would send down logs in these flumes. Some flumes were dozens of miles long and had scaffolding around 70ft high. Flume herders were employed to ride down in small boats to inspect the flumes. At the end of the day, if they were brave enough, the loggers could travel in little V-shaped boats and travel down them. In 1886, a journalist did this and travelled 16 miles in 8:40, which is just over 110mph. The last functioning one did not close until 1986 in Washington State.

- XL Tangent: Human cannonballs were around at the same time as log flumes, but they only travelled at 70mph. It worked by using a series of rubber springs. The first person to be a human cannonball was a teenage schoolgirl called Zazel, but eventually retired after breaking her back.

- The main difference between Mrs Carter and Miss More was seniority. They were both guests at a dinner party held by Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1784. Mrs did not used to signify marriage, but instead indicated age, wealth or status. Mrs Carter was a distinguished academic of a similar age to Johnson, while Miss Hannah More was a writer and anti-alcohol reformer. It was not until the 19th century when women who were married were referred to as Mrs, and until the turn of the 20th century, England was the only country in Europe where a woman took her husband's surname after marrying. Today's about 90% of women in Europe take their husband's name.

- XL Tangent: About 50% of LGBTQ+ people change their names when they get married. Two football players, Tanya Kalivas and Martha West, got married in the USA, and couldn't decided what to do with their names, so they decided to have a match to see who would keep their name. That match was a draw, so both kept their own names.

- Tangent: "Ms" as a title dates back to the 17th-18th century. Surgeons being called "Mr", "Mrs" or "Miss" rather than "Dr" arose in the 1800s. Physicians were, by definition, doctors who had a university medical degree, while surgeons very seldom had formal qualifications.

Scores

- Sally Phillips: 13 points
- The Audience: 3 points
- Josh Pugh: 2 points
- Alan Davies: -6 points
- Aaron Simmonds: -19 points

- Tangent: Alan's dressing room toilet has been fixed.

Broadcast details

Date
Tuesday 16th April 2024
Time
9pm
Channel
BBC Two
Length
45 minutes

Cast & crew

Cast
Sandi Toksvig Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Sally Phillips Guest
Josh Pugh Guest
Aaron Simmonds Guest
Writing team
James Harkin Script Editor
Anna Ptaszynski Script Editor
Sandi Toksvig Script Editor
Will Bowen Researcher
Andrew Hunter Murray Researcher
Mike Turner Researcher
Jack Chambers Researcher
Emily Jupitus Researcher
James Rawson Researcher
Miranda Brennan Researcher
Tara Dorrell Researcher
Henry Eliot Researcher
Leying Lee Researcher
Manu Henriot Researcher
Joe Mayo Researcher
Lydia Mizon Question Writer
Production team
Diccon Ramsay Director
Piers Fletcher Producer
John Lloyd Executive Producer
Nick King Editor
Jonathan Paul Green Production Designer
Gemma O'Sullivan Lighting Designer
Howard Goodall Composer
Aran Kharpal Graphics
Helen Ringer Graphics
Sarah Clay Commissioning Editor

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