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 2 - Vocal

QI. Image shows left to right: Alan Davies, Ed Byrne, Sandi Toksvig, Jimmy Carr, Judi Love

Topics

- The panel are shown a word cloud of words beginning with "V" and are asked to define them. They are later told that if they can use them accurately later in the show, they will score bonus points.

- Vandyking: Making pointy, crownlike bits of food. Named after the collars that were worn by the painter Anthony Van Dyke.

- Vug: Somerset slang for hitting somebody with your elbow.

- Vaginula: A term for the sheath on moss stalks.

- Vatican roulette: Slang for the rhythm method.

- Vorlus snorlus: To not care negligently.

- Vegetable camel: A plant adapted to store water.

- Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas: Old slang for a drunken man who pisses under the table on his companions' shoes. An Admiral of the Narrow Seas is old slang for a drunken man who vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him.

- Velleity: Wanting to do something without putting any effort into it whatsoever.

- Tangent: Sandi compares velleity to getting a gym membership and never going. 75% of gym memberships are taken in January. Judi claims that most people who go to the gym don't wear underwear.

- Vape: Originally meant to completely annihilate somebody, i.e. to vaporise them.

- The panel are played a recording of a vervet monkey making a guttural call and are asked what it is trying to tell them. The call in question was to warn them of eagles. Vervet monkeys live in groups of about 70, and have different calls to warn them of different predators. When they hear the eagle call, the monkeys all leave the trees and head to the ground. The monkeys also having a clicking call, which is to warn them of snakes, and when they hear that the monkeys all climb into the trees. When the monkeys squawk quickly, it is to warn of leopards, and the monkeys go to thinner branches that won't hold the weight of the leopard. Vervet monkeys have about 30 distinct calls, but sometimes they use the same call for different things. For example, when the monkeys see a drone they do the eagle call. The monkeys can use their calls to manipulate each other. If one group is losing a fight, they will use calls to trick the other group into fleeing predators which are not there. Young monkeys make mistakes when learning the calls, for example they might make the eagle call when it is just a leaf falling. Other species can also understand the vervet monkey calls. For example, if hornbill bird hear the leopard cry, they won't flee because leopards cannot climb high enough to reach them, but if they hear the eagle cry, they will use their own alarm call. Vervet monkeys can get hypertension, anxiety and spite.

- Tangent: Vervet monkeys live in St. Kitts, where the monkeys developed a taste for alcohol when rum started being made. The monkeys have similar drinking habits to humans, with 12% drinking heavily, 5% to excess, and almost none being teetotal.

- XL Tangent: In 2022, a medicine was developed that reduced the monkey's alcohol consumption by 50%, which could be useful for humans. The name of vervet monkeys comes another monkey, the grivet, meaning grey-green, and the vervet look more green then them.

- XL Tangent: Vervet monkey testicles are bright blue. The brighter the colour, the higher the social standing of the monkey.

- Tangent: There is a vervet monkey sanctuary in South Africa where the monkeys have adopted a pet cat.

- XL: Sandi asks what she claims to be the easiest question in the history of the show: what is the best order to say vowels. The answer is I, E, A, O, U. The best order is that of ablaut reduplication, which is alternating vowels in a repeated word. In English, it is much easier and more natural to say; "bit, bet, bat, bought, but" than it is say; "but, bought, bat, bet, bit". This is to do with the vowels moving from the front to the back of the mouth. (Forfeit: A, E, I, O, U)

- XL Tangent: Jimmy asks if Y identifies as a vowel, which Sandi says it doesn't. Ed says it just helps out when they are busy.

- [i][colour=#000080]XL Tangent: Other forms of reduplication include simple reduplication with children, such as "no-no". Rhyming reduplication includes things like "easy-peasy". In Yiddish there is shm-reduplication, with "Quiz-shmiz".

[colour=#000080]- XL: The panel are shown a Czech tongue-twister and are asked to spot the vowels in: "Prd krt skrx drn, zprv zhit hrst zrn". Czech has a feature called liquid consonants. You partly close your mouth when you say the letter R and L, which makes a resonant, vowel-like sound. The phrase translates into English as: "A mole farted through grass, having swallowed a handful of grain." (Forfeit: There aren't any)

- The thing that vibrates their genitals at night is a hawk moth. These moths escape bats by rubbing their genitals very quickly. Nocturnal bats echolocate their prey in the dark, emitting ultrasonic sounds which are much too high for humans to hear. Hawk moths emit ultrasonic sounds using their genitals, which we believe jam the signals from the bat. Hawk moths can fly at up to 12mph and some have a four-inch wingspan. This was all discovered by researchers in Borneo, who took some moths and tied them to plastic twigs, played some bat noises and videoed the moths.

[i]- Tangent: Bats fall into two categories, the megabats and the microbats. It was believed that only microbats could echolocate, but this not necessarily true. We also used to think that bats were blind, which they are not, but we discovered bat echolocation by blinding bats. In the 1700s, Italian priest Lazzaro Spallanzani released bats and owls into a room lit by a single candle, and in the dim light, both were able to dodge obstacles. When the light was out however, the owls kept bumping into things while the bats could still avoid each other. Spallanzani then took out the bats eyes with a pair of scissors and discovered they didn't need their eyes to locate things. He went even further and burnt their ears off to see if they needed to hear.

- XL Tangent: Jimmy claims that when bats fly out of caves, they all turn right. Sandi says this is a myth, but Jimmy keeps saying it is true until he gets a klaxon saying "It's a myth, Jimmy". Jimmy sees the caption and claims he was also right about Y being a vowel in the word "myth", resulting in the Elves changing the spelling. (Forfeit: It's a mith, Jimmy)

- XL: Sandi asks the panel to do the best impression of a vocal fry. This is a croaky, stretched voice, it being the lowest register. It is caused by irregular vibrations of the vocal cords, and it is completely infected by people who do it. It is meant to make you sound informal and urban. It is associated with the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Sean Connery, Birtney Spears in 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', and George Sanders who did the voice of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. It;s called a "fry" because it is meant to sound like bacon sizzling in a pan. It occurs because there is not enough breath being pushed through the vocal cords, so they don't fully separate. It is a myth that this kind of voice makes you sound less educated is myth, as another person who did it was C. S. Lewis.

- XL Tangent: There is an early reality TV show footage involving Paris Hilton, who did the original reality TV show, and there's a clip of Hilton with her assistant, cleaning out her shoe cupboard. The assistant is Kim Kardashian.

- XL Tangent: It is possible to have voice lift surgery. It is done by taking the fat from the stomach and injecting it through the neck, which plumps up the voice.

- The one who talks like an illiterate four-year-old is a deaf Nicaraguan. In Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas and for much of the 20th century a dictatorship, only had seven special education schools. Thus, deaf children in the country were very largely isolated at home. In 1979, the new revolutionary government created a widespread programme of public education, meaning the deaf children came into schools for the first time. The children ended up making their own sign language, which included its own vocabulary, and children could conjugate. It is the only language known to emerge in a vacuum. (Forfeit: Donald Trump)

- XL Tangent: Jimmy was told that language is the best example of anarchy in the world. With language, there is no control from above, everyone just starts speaking a language, and it moves and changes through time.

- Tangent: Other examples of constructed languages or conlangs include Volapuk, created in the late 1870s by German priest Johann Martin Schleyer. Esperanto was created by a Russian called Zamenhof in 1873. Vatican Radio has an Esperanto version of its podcasts. No-one knows how many people speak Esperanto. Sandi says her mother uses a word that she doesn't think exists which is "ackle", meaning to fix something. Judi can speak back slng. There was a feature film made entirely in Esperanto called Incubus, which was a horror film starring William Shatner before his big break in Star Trek. The Klingon language was invented by a single man, Marc Okrand. In the 1990s, a linguist called Dr. d'Armond Speers tried to raise his son as a Klingon speaker, so for the first three years he only spoke to his son in Klingon, while his wife spoke in English. After three years, Speers realised it was hard to do because Klingon lacks useful everyday words a child would need. Eventually the child stopped listening to him.

General Ignorance

- XL: People's attention spans in the last 20 years have not shrunk. It just seems to have because there are now more distractions. People have learned to grab our attention more quickly. (Forfeit: What was the question?)

- XL Tangent; Goldfish actually have very good memories. They can remember landmarks. For example, if you drop a red Lego brick into a goldfish bowl, and you always put the food there, then remove the Lego a week later, if put the Lego back the fish will remember that was where the food was.

- XL Tangent: People have been complaining about technology ruining our attention spans for centuries. 12th century Chinese calligrapher Zhu Xi complained that block printing was shortening attention spans. 15th century humanist Erasmus said the printing press would weaken our brains. Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was very critical of books and reading.

- XL: The thing that has been on the cover of Vogue nine times more than men is dogs. Only ten men have been photoed for the cover, the first being Richard Gere back in 1992. Others have included George Clooney, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Harry Styles. Dogs have appeared more than 90 times on a cover. Other animals on the cover include a gibbon with Marisa Berenson, a python, a cheetah with Kim Basinger, a skunk with Reese Witherspoon, and an elephant with Keira Knightley. Women have appeared almost 300 times more than men on the cover of Vogue. (Forfeit: Women)

- XL Tangent: The British version of Vogue had a man on its cover a little earlier than the American version. Austrian movie star Helmut Berger appeared alongside his then-girlfriend Marisa Berenson. Berger used to a wear a gold straw around his neck which he used to snort cocaine that he cut with a gold razor blade. He is no longer alive.

- If you have lost your voice, the best way to talk is to sign language, warm your voice up, and keeping your vocal cords lubricated. Drinking honey infusions and/or gargling with salt water will help your throat, but it will not improve your voice because anything you swallow should not be near your vocal cords. Whispering will make it worse as it involves tensing your vocal cords. If you clear your throat incorrectly it will shift the mucus a little bit, so it best to give a fully throated cough.

- The panel are asked to give their best impression of a long-legged whispering bat. There are two types of bat, the long-legged bat and the Jamaican fruit bat, which used to be thought emitted rather quiet calls, and thus were nicknamed whispering bats. In 2008, the volume of the calls was measured and it turns out to be as loud as the front row of a rock concert, but it is too high for humans to hear. The mistake was made because when they first did the measurements, they took a bat in one hand and a microphone in the other, and squeezed the bat. There is another bat, the barbastelle, which does emit a tiny noise. There inaccurately named whispering bats avoid deafening themselves by closing off the muscles in their inner ears, but when they relax and are really listening, they are so sensitive to low frequency they can hear a ladybird walking on a leaf. Due to their constant echolocation, their vocal muscles contract up to 200 times a second, which is the fastest muscle movement in any mammal. They can locate objects to within less than a millimetre.

Scores

- Judi Love: -10 points
- Ed Byrne: -15 points
- Jimmy Carr: -16 points
- Alan Davies: -17 points

Broadcast details

Date
Tuesday 29th October 2024
Time
9pm
Channel
BBC Two
Length
45 minutes

Cast & crew

Cast
Sandi Toksvig Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Jimmy Carr Guest
Ed Byrne Guest
Judi Love Guest
Lewis Macleod (as Lewis MacLeod) Donald Trump (Voice)
Writing team
James Harkin Script Editor
Anna Ptaszynski Script Editor
Sandi Toksvig Script Editor
Will Bowen Researcher
Anne Miller Researcher
Mike Turner Researcher
Jack Chambers Researcher
Emily Jupitus Researcher
James Rawson Researcher
Lydia Mizon Researcher
Miranda Brennan Researcher
Tara Dorrell Researcher
Leying Lee Researcher
Joe Mayo Researcher
Lieven Scheire Researcher
Manu Henriot Question Writer
Production team
Ben Hardy 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

Video

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