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 V, Episode 13 - Veggies

QI. Image shows left to right: Alan Davies, Jason Manford, Sandi Toksvig, Ahir Shah, Holly Walsh
Sandi Toksvig takes a look at veggies with Jason Manford, Ahir Shah, Holly Walsh and Alan Davies.

Topics

- The person whose ideal dinner party guests would include Vlad the Impaler and Frankenstein's monster would be Alan, because both were vegetarians. Vlad was the 15th century ruler of Wallachia (now Romania), who was properly named Vlad III or Vlad Dracula, meaning: "son of Dracule". Vlad has a rare condition called haemolacria, meaning he cried tears of blood, but he never drank blood. Microscopic analysis of bodily fluids on Vlad's handwritten letters showed that there were no animal products in his diet, so the chances are he was vegetarian or vegan. In Frankenstein, the monster says: "I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite. Acorns, berries afford me sufficient nourishment." He did however eat milk and cheese, so he was just vegetarian.

- Tangent: Vlad the Impaler's brother was called Radu the Handsome. In 1462, Vlad filed a field full of 20,000 impaled Turks.

- Tangent: The word "vegan" was coined in the 1940s by a Yorkshire woodwork teacher, and it was invented in the 1930s to describe alien life forms. The modern use of the term was coined by Yorkshire's Donald Watson and his wife Dorothy, who founded the Vegan Society, and took the name the beginning and end of "vegetarian". However, the word had previously been used by sci-fi writers to describe alien from a solar system belonging to the star Vega.

- Tangent: One of the conditions placed on Mahatma Gandhi by his mother before he came to study law in Britain was that he must not eat meat. One of the first things he did living in London was join the Vegetarian Society, which was a relatively new movement in the 1890s.

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- Tangent: In the 4th century, Christians regarded vegetarianism as heretical, because it was practiced by groups who did not strictly adhere to other Christian values.

- XL: The panel are show a list of dishes and are asked which is the vegetarian option.

- Cholera: A vegetarian Swiss dish. A savoury pastry containing potatoes and vegetables, sometimes fruit and cheese too. Two reasons given for the name was that it was first made in a time of need when the cholera disease stopped trade, or from the local word for coal: "Chola".

- Volcano soup: A non-vegetarian dish,, traditionally from Cerro Rico in Bolivia. The notion is that this soup is made out of yellow corn, chillies, meat, and a hot volcanic rock. However, this idea is probably been created to lure tourists, as the local volcano has been dormant for a long time. Today people just insert a rock that they pre-heat.

- West Virginian vulture vomit: The vomit itself is vegetarian, made out of apples, jalapenos and onions, but it is unlikely to be eaten by vegetarians because it is only served during the West Virginia Roadkill Cook-Off in Marlinton. It is usually served with a dish of Fender Fried Fawn. The Cook-Off cooks food animals normally found dead on the road rather than animals that have been run over.

- XL Tangent: During the Covid lock-down, Jason signed up to an app called Borrow My Doggy, in which you can walk other people's dogs. He and his children were walking an Alsatian, when they come across a cat. The Alsatian barked at it, causing the cat to run into the road, and it was run over. After they kids returned home and Jason returned the Alsatian, his wife told him to get the cat, but it had already gone by the time he arrived. Jason thus called his friend Steve and asked him to ring his house, pretending he is from the RSPCA, and say that he was part of an Ambulance Service for animals who took the cat. Steve called up, but was egging the call, joking that the cat was taken for a Cat scan among other things. The call however went too well, as that night Jason's wife believed that the RSPCA have ambulances.

- Garbage plate: A non-vegetarian dish from Rochester, New York. A student arrived at Nick Tahou Hots Restaurant and said: "I'll just have all your garbage on a plate." He was handed a plate which had meat, hamburger, hot dog, Italian sausage, mashed potato, beans, cauliflower cheese, macaroni and other things. This since became a famous dish in the area, where you just have whatever is left.

- XL Tangent: Jason asks what are the legal ramifications of eating someone else's leftovers in a restaurant. Holly was once in a restaurant, and the people next to her went out, leaving two-thirds of a pizza. Holly took and ate the rest of the pizza, only for the people to return having just been out for a smoke.

- XL: The thing you can make with a million tomatoes is a festival. The La Tomatina festival in Bunol, Spain sees people throwing tomatoes at eat other. 120 tonnes of ripe tomatoes are used every year. 20,000 people take part in a town that normally has a population of 9,000. At one point 50,000 people attended, but it had to be limited. Festival rules say you have to squish the tomato in your hand before you throw it. At the end of the festival, everyone is washed down by fire trucks and garden hoses.

- There is annual festival in Oaxaca, Mexico where people carve giant radishes. Noche de Rabaninos sees 100 competitors taking part. The radishes are carved into people, animals, monsters, and traditional scenes like the nativity. The festival was made official in 1897, but it began with people in veg stalls selling their products. Categories in the festival include multimedia and freeform. The festival ends with fireworks and radish salad.

- Tangent: At the world's largest gathering of women, at a Hindu festival in Kerala known as Pongal which is attended by 4 million women a year, they make a specific type of rice pudding. It contains banana, coconut and sugar cane, and it is offered to the goddess Bhadrakali to annihilate evil and protect the honour of women. Jason complains that he has not been offered any rice pudding. Sandi decides to leave the men out, and mentions that in the USA there are 12 different testicle-eating festivals.

- The thing you can learn from throwing a load of asparagus is the air is the future, if you believe in fortune telling. Before Brexit, the last British foodstuff to be given "EU protected" origin statue was Vale asparagus, grown in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire. The village of Bretforton hosts the British Asparagus Festival, which includes tying, songs, appearances from Gus the Asparagus Man and Eve the Asparagus Fairy (played by a man). There is also a woman named Jemima Packington, who is the world's only Asparamancer and is thus nicknamed Mystic Veg. She predicts the future by throwing asparagus into the air and seeing how the spears land. She correctly predicted England winning the Cricket World Cup in 2019, but wrongly predicted that Brexit would happen smoothly.

- If you buy a hundred spears of asparagus from a guy in the pub and ate 20, you should have 100 left. This is because a hundred used to mean 120. The British Asparagus Festival features an auction where you can by rounds of gras, which is a local term for 15 spears tied together. The highlight of the sale is selling the hundred, which is 120 spears. The word "hundred" comes from the Old Norse "hundrath". "Hundum" is ten and "rath" means reckoning up. However, in ancient Germanic cultures, the decimal system ran in parallel with the duodecimal system. The Norse used to talk about the long hundred, which was 120, and the short hundred of 100. (Forfeit: 80)

- Tangent: Only male asparagus is eaten. Jason asks how you can tell the different, to which Alan says that one is a big stick and other is a bush.

- The best place to literally drop a dead donkey is in Somerset. One traditional way to fertilise the soil in an asparagus patch was to bury a dead donkey there before you planted the seeds. The seeds need to grow for at least three years, and need large amounts of nutrients in order to grow. There is an eight-week period where you can harvest asparagus, and harvesting has to be done by hand.

- XL Tangent: Alan wonders if donkeys eat the asparagus grown using fields containing dead donkeys. Holly once made a risotto and used chicken, and she used chicken stock from a previous chicken. Thus, she was boiling a dead chicken in the juice of an ever deader chicken. Sandi describes it as the fundamentals of French cooking.

- Tangent: Jason tells the following joke: "What do donkeys at Blackpool Beach get for their dinner? Half-an-hour, like everybody else."

- XL: Sandi asks which is better for you: 250g of whale meat or 12 packs of fruit pastilles. The answer is the whale meat. Fruit pastilles are 25% fruit juice, and 12 packs would contain the same amount of vitamin C as a medium-size orange, but also loads of sugar. Whale meat also contains vitamin C, and thus is consumed by the Inuit who don't have easy access to oranges. The Inuit would get their vitamins from muktuk, which is a mixture of whale skin and blubber, with the skin containing most of the vitamin C. The most common way to eat it is with HP Sauce.

- XL Tangent: During WWII, there was a vitamin C shortage, and a botanist from Kew Gardens pointed out that rosehips contain far more vitamin C than oranges, so the Ministry of Food advised a daily dose of rosehip syrup. Children from north-east England harvested rosehips. By 1943, 500 tonnes of rosehips were being collected annually, saving the need to import 2.5 million oranges. Rosehip berries are nicknamed itching berries, and in Devon they are called Tickling Tommy. They used to be used in itching powder.

- A question on vegetating: Sandi asks how the panel if they would like to live in a place where nothing much happens. The quietest time in history was the Boring Billion, where between 0.8 to 1.8 billion years ago, nothing much happened on Earth. The weather was pretty much the same; it smelled a little bit of rotten eggs; there were no earthquakes; and the most advanced form of life was slimy sea algae, which was the ancient ancestor of all animals, plants and fungi.

- Tangent: The most boring day of the 20th century was 11th April 1954. Computer scientist and entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe went through a database of 300 million facts to site this information. Lots of people have tried to prove him wrong, but it appears no-one has got close. As previously mentioned on QI, on 18th April 1930, the BBC said there was no news and instead aired 15 minutes of light piano music. However, things were happening that day, such as a large uprising of Indian nationalist rebels, leading Jason to say there was no white news.

- Tangent: When Jason answers the question about the most boring day, he first jokes and gives the year 1939. Holly then says 1958, then Jason says 1956. Holly at first is given the point, but Jason asks for VAR, doing the TV mime, and the score is corrected.

- XL Tangent: Sandi's wife Debbie and her family come from Lancashire, and due to so many of her family working in mills, often people mime and talk. Debbie's Auntie Betty came up to Sandi and did a mime for: "You're off the telly", which involved turning a knob on a box, and it took Sandi a while to figure out the mime.

- The panel are asked to name a blue berry. You cannot, because blueberries are not blue. Blue is a colour that is vanishingly rare in nature. Bird like kingfishers might have a blue, but have no blue pigment, and they get their colour because of the way that light bounces around on the structures, on their feathers. The wax on the outside of a blueberry makes it look blue, but if you cute the berry it is yellowy-green. If you blend blueberries, the mixture turns red. If you buy a blueberry drink that is blue, then food colouring has been added to it. (Forfeit: A blueberry)

General Ignorance

- XL: There is not a medicine that comes from the bark of a willow tree. Aspiring was first made by a chemist working for Bayer, Felix Hoffmann, in 1897. He used salicin from the meadowsweet plant. Willow tree bark does contain salicin, but it irritates the stomach, so aspirin was made as a synthetic alternative. (Forfeit: Aspirin)

- XL Tangent: As well as inventing aspirin, Hoffmann invented heroin. Bayer planned to release it as a cough syrup, and it was designed as a non-habit-form type of morphine. The name comes from the Latin for "hero", because it affects the user's self-esteem. However, the man at Bayer who was in charge of new products went for aspirin instead.

- Tomatoes are tastier when they are ripened anywhere. Tomatoes start to ripen when they reach full size. When they are half-ripe, there is a layer of cells across the stem which seals the fruit off from the vine, so nothing is going to move from the vine into the fruit. After that point, it doesn't matter where the tomato goes. Thus, the idea of vine-ripened tomatoes is false. (Forfeit: Aspirin; The vine)

- Tangent: Tomatoes have less flavour than they used to, because producers over the last 50 years prioritise size, yield, colour, disease resistance and transportability over flavour.

- Tangent: The best way to store tomatoes is upside down, because they lose moisture faster if the stem is exposed. It also stops the tomatoes from rolling away.

- The panellists are given a set of scales and a selection of vegetables, and are asked which vegetable weighs about the same as one of their hands. The answer is a cauliflower, with both weighing about 400g. Because we carry our hands with us at all times, we do not think about the weight of them.

- Tangent: If you take out three matchboxes, put some coins in one of them and leave the other empty, and pick up all three at the same time, the three boxes together will feel lighter in comparison to just lifting the one matchbox containing coins. This is possibly due to the fact we perceive greater volume to be heavier, so you expect it to be heavier. If you lift up the boxes while blindfolded, you won't notice a difference.

- Tangent: Just before the show ends, a man called William comes out from the audience and gives Jason a carrier bag full of rice pudding.

Scores

- Ahir Shah and Holly Walsh: -10 points
- Alan Davies: -13 points
- Jason Manford: -18 points

Broadcast details

Date
Tuesday 21st January 2025
Time
9pm
Channel
BBC Two
Length
45 minutes
Recorded
  • Tuesday 19th March 2024, 14:45 at Television Centre ('Vegetables' with Jason Manford, Ahir Shah and Holly Walsh.)

Cast & crew

Cast
Sandi Toksvig Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Jason Manford Guest
Holly Walsh Guest
Ahir Shah Guest
Writing team
James Harkin Script Editor
Anna Ptaszynski Script Editor
Sandi Toksvig Script Editor
Will Bowen Researcher
Anne Miller Question Writer
Mike Turner Researcher
Jack Chambers Researcher
Emily Jupitus Researcher
James Rawson Researcher
Lydia Mizon Researcher
Miranda Brennan Researcher
Tara Dorrell Researcher
Leying Lee Researcher
Manu Henriot Researcher
Joe Mayo Researcher
Lieven Scheire Researcher
Production team
Diccon Ramsay Director
Piers Fletcher Series 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
Chris Reid Graphics
Sarah Clay Commissioning Editor

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