QI

Sandi Toksvig hosts a very varied episode, joined by panellists Ross Noble, Sara Pascoe, Sally Phillips and Alan Davies.

Topics

- The thing a vicar does in the jungle is look for insects. Arthur Miles Moss was vicar of the largest Anglican parish in the world, being vicar for the entire Amazon basin between 1912-45. He travelled everywhere by boat, and was obsessed with studying insects, especially moths and butterflies. He collected over 25,000 specimens, and his drawings and notes on them constitute a separate collection at the Natural History Museum today. He was the first European to record many butterfly species, and was particularly keen on the ones that mimic predators.

- XL Tangent: There are many other eccentric Anglican vicars. One was Harold Davidson, who was into amateur theatrics, so would spend much of his week in London, and christened himself the Prostitutes' Padre as he spent a lot of time trying to rescue girls form from future lives of prostitution. However, Davidson himself got caught in compromising situations, so he was defrocked. He then moved to Blackpool and did an act on the pier where for a while he exhibited himself in a barrel. Davidson then started acting out Daniel and the Lions in a cage, but one day he stood on the lion's tail and it attacked him. He wasn't quite dead when he was taken to hospital, so the doctors gave him insulin because they mistakenly thought he was diabetic, and the insulin killed him.

- Tangent: Sally is ordained. Her friends wanted to get married and for Sally to be the one who officiated the wedding. However, both were women and if Sally got ordained in the Church of England, she would not be allowed to marry them, so instead she got ordained online at Universal Life Church for £35. The couple still had to go to the registry office.

- XL Tangent: Another eccentric vicar was the Victorian John "Mad Jack" Alington, who wore a leopard skin instead of his black surplice, and liked being carried around in an open coffin, in which he would pop up and surprise people. He was also an early velocipede user, and would ride around his hall on it, whipping it like a horse.

- Tangent: Lancelot Blackburne, the Archbishop of York between 1724-43, was rumoured to have been a pirate in the Caribbean before taking his post. He once had a secret tunnel constructed so he could visit his neighbour's wife, with whom he was said to be having an affair. Satirist William Donaldson said of him: "His behaviour was seldom of the standard expected of a cleric. In fact, it was seldom of the standard expected of a pirate." Sandi was once speaking in St. Paul's Cathedral, and earlier that day she had tea with the vicar, and they revealed to her that there is a tunnel from the Cathedral, coming out at Lord Nelson's tomb, to the vicar's house. It was built so the practicing vicar does not get caught in the rain.

- Tangent: Edward White Benson was Archbishop of Canterbury for the last 13 years of his life (died 1896). His wife Mary wrote in her diary that she had no less than 39 lesbian lovers. One of them was Janet Gourlay, an Egyptologist, who she fought over with her daughter Margaret. Margaret ended up attacking Janet with a knife.

- XL Tangent: Sabine Baring-Gould, author of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers', kept a live bat in an old sock in his room, but it died when it was trodden on by a housemaid. He was married for 48 years and he 15 children. He was once at a party and asked a small child: "And whose little girl are you, my dear?" The girl burst into tears and said: "I'm yours, daddy."

- XL: A high-velocity question: if light travels at 186,000 miles per second, why does it not hurt when it hits us? The answer is because light has no mass. The interesting thing about this question is that it had not been posed until the 18th century. It was proposed by Emilie du Chatelet, the partner and lover of Voltaire. She concluded that light was weightless, reasoning that if a particle of light weighed even a tiny amount, it would hurt you. Du Chatelet appeared to mostly use her skill for maths to come up with effective gambling strategies. She would win money at cards in order to buy books to educate herself. Both she and Voltaire entered a Paris Academy of Science competition where they had to answer the question: "What is fire?" The answer is that is a chemical reaction. Neither of them won. The couple often disagreed on scientific matters, but Emilie was usually right. Both were big fans of Isaac Newton, whose ideas were not widely accepted in France, but they converted the French into accepting the theory of gravity, and du Chatelet wrote an annotated translation of Principia. The one she wrote is still the definitive French version. When she wrote it, she was 43, heavily pregnant and worked 18 hours a day because she wanted to finish it before her due date, due to death by childbirth being very common at the time. She did indeed die in childbirth, and the child died shortly afterwards. However, the baby was not Voltaire's, or her husband's.

- XL Tangent: After Voltaire died in 1778, his brain was swapped for good seats at the theatre. At the time, brains and hearts of dead celebrities were sometimes removed and embalmed and put on display. His brain and heart were boiled in alcohol to preserve them by an apothecary named Mitouart. He showed them to scientists and occasionally people would remove bits and set them on fire to see what happened. In 1924, Mitouart's family gave the brain to the Comedie-Francaise Theatre, and they were gifted two very good seats in return for the next 20 years. We don't know what happened to the brain afterwards. There is a rumour that it is in the base of a statue at the theatre, but they deny any knowledge of it. Voltaire's last words occurred when a priest asked him to renounce Satan, and he replied: "Now is not the time to be making new enemies."

- The role you can train for by lying in a coffin for eight hours a day is being buried alive. The practice of being buried alive is called "vivisepulture", and it was a competitive sport that big in the 1960s. One of the best exponents was an ex-nun called Emma Smith, who spent 101 days in a coffin underground in Skegness in 1961. People could pay a shilling to look down a tube at her face in a mirror. Food was passed down to her through the tube, and she had a closed-circuit TV so she could play bingo in the evenings. She went to the toilet through a hatch, and was observed by a doctor who had an 8ft extension to his stethoscope. Smith practiced by lying in a coffin eight hours a day. Smith was a nun in the Netherlands, and the order made the nuns sleep in an open coffin every night so that they were always ready to meet God. Smith's record was not broken until 1981, by her son Geoff who spend 142 days buried alive. Emma was motivated by wanting to beat Irishman Mick Meaney, who had spent 61 days underground. Meaney held his own wake at the Admiral Nelson pub in Kilburn, sealed in the coffin in the pub, put out through the window, and buried in the yard of a lorry depot. Meaney did not tell his wife that he was doing this, who learned of the news on the radio while she was pregnant with her second child. When the coffin was eventually raised, he was taken back into the Admiral Nelson and handed a beer.

- Tangent: Sally was once on a bus with a nun. She asked her why she became a nun, and got back the answer: "Jesus".

- Tangent; When Madonna and Guy Ritchie married in Bute, they had their son Rocco's christening the week before, and a paparazzo hid out in the chapel who had taped himself to a load of bin bags which he would go to the toilet in. However, between the christening and the wedding, he was discovered, and was trying to run away with the bags still attached.

- XL Tangent: Texan Bill White was been buried alive 61 times, spending a total of two years underground. To keep himself entertained, he took phone calls, and he ended up marrying a woman who called in. They were dubbed: "Mr and Mrs Living Corpse". Two years later, she wanted a divorce, and the divorce papers were lowered down the pipe into the coffin. There was one woman who was so annoyed by White that she dropped her pet boa constrictor down the pipe, but he beat it to death with the phone.

- Tangent: The fear of being buried alive is taphophobia, although the panel joke that this is actually fear of the Welsh. In the 18th and 19th century, doctors invented several ways of trying to detect if someone was dead to prevent people from being buried alive. French doctor Leon Collongues listened for a pulse by sticking a corpse's finger in his ear. Other methods included pinching corpses' nipples, and Edinburgh doctor George Balfour proposed in 1903 that you could insert flags into the hearts of the deceased to see if they waved.

- The panel are shown a picture of a building in Verona and are asked about a prominent architectural feature on it. What appears to be a balcony is actually part of a sarcophagus, most like one from the 13th century, and what people think is Juliet's balcony is not either a balcony or used by Juliet. It wasn't attached to the house until 1936 by Antonio Avena, director of the Venetian Civic Museums. It was put there as a tourist trap. Also in Verona is a statue of Juliet, where people rub the breast for good luck, but the breast has become so worn down as to have disappeared. Shakespeare never went to Italy, but Italian culture and literature permeated all of Elizabethan literature and drama. Shakespeare would not have known what a balcony was, as it is an Italian word, and the first mention of the word in English was in 1618, two years after he died. The balcony scene did not come until 1740s when David Garrick made a balcony for his production of the play. (Forfeit: Juliet's balcony; A balcony)

- The point of string vests is that they are good at keep you warm in cold weather and keeping you cool in hot weather. String vests were invented in 1933 by Norwegian military officer Henrik Brun by using two herring nets. He assumed that the air trapped in the holes would make good insulation, and he was right. As for keeping you cool, in 1955 the British War office ran trials both hot and dry conditions. Soldiers in Egypt were given different vests to wear. The string vest reduced the dragging and sticking that you get with sweaty clothes, but after the trial none of soldiers wanted to wear them.

- Tangent: Ross is given a string vest for the purposes of the question. Ross recalls that as a kid he went camping, and another camper got very drunk and fell asleep in the sun while wearing a string vest. Ross says that when he took the vest off, it was the most beautiful thin he had ever seen.

- Tangent: Alan remembers that he was kept warm by a string vest. Sandi asks if he ever wore string underpants. Alan says he didn't but he was reminded of a disgusting joke by Ricky Grover: a man goes to the doctor and says whenever he had a poo it comes out like chips. The doctor tells him to pull up his string vest.

- XL Tangent: Bulletproof vests are made from Kevlar, and are five times stronger than steel. Breast implants are partly bulletproof, in that the wound will be at least 20% shallower than usual. Ross has Kevlar trousers which he wears when motorcycling, as Kevlar protection around the buttocks, so if you fall off the bike you slide down. Sandi also has Kevlar trousers, but that is because she likes to chainsaw trees. Sara asks if this is because trees are taller than Sandi.

- XL Tangent: In 2023, a 34-year-old man's lungs were temporarily replaced by breast implants. David Bauer from Missouri got an infection that required a lung transplant, but the infection needed clearing first. If you remove the lungs, there is a large space in your chest which means your heart flops around. Thus they used DD-sized breast implants to keep the heart in place.

- We will never meet aliens from the planet Vulcan because there will never be a planet called Vulcan. In 2013, there was a vote to name Pluto's two newly discovered moons, and the overwhelming winner was Vulcan, as proposed by Star Trek star William Shatner, after Spock's home planet. However, it could not be used "Vulcan" already has another meaning. Vulcan was a name of a fake planet that had already been "discovered". Victorian astronomers thought they had discovered the planet Vulcan, which supposedly closer to the sun than Mercury. French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier claimed it must be real as it was the only think that could explain Mercury's odd orbit. People believed him as he had correctly predicted the existence of Neptune in 1846 just using maths. Le Verrier named Vulcan after the Roman god of fire and volcanoes. Later, amateur astronomer Edmond Lescarbault was given the French Legion of Honor because he had claimed to have seen Vulcan, but we now believe he just saw a sunspot. Both men went to their graves believing Vulcan was real. Now, we can explain Mercury's orbit using Einstein's theory of general relativity. As a result, because there was already a mistaken planet called Vulcan, no other planet can officially be called Vulcan.

- Tangent: In Star Trek, Spock was originally going to be a Martian, but the show's creator Gene Roddenberry changed this because he thought humans might get to Mars in his lifetime and find that there were no aliens on Mars. The Vulcan salute was invented by Leonard Nimoy, the saying: "Live long and prosper" may have been taken by scriptwriter Theodore Sturgeon from an ancient Egyptian phrase which translated into English as: "May you live healthily and prosper."

- XL Tangent: Leonard Nimoy wrote poetry. Arthur Smith did an Edinburgh Fringe show about Leonard Cohen, in which he talked about Nimoy's poetry and how he thought it was terrible. Smith was so annoyed about it he wrote to Cohen, partly to say how much his poetry meant to him, and also if Cohen thought if Nimoy's poetry was terrible. Cohen wrote back, and said that he did think Nimoy's poetry was awful.

General Ignorance

- Most Stone Age people made things out of wood and other organic materials. The Stone Age is a time when sharp stone tools were used, but it encompasses the earliest period in which humans existed. The first stone tools were developed three million years ago, but wood is easier to work with. Deposits in a waterfall in Zambia that was completely waterlogged revealed branches with interlocking notches, dating back to probably 480,000 years ago formed part of a rudimentary building.

- Tangent: Humans have made buildings using food. The Great Wall of China has sticky rice ground into it, and it has been shown to be strong than plain limestone mixtures. The Malian Empire (1236-1670) made entire forts out of salt blocks, which are not flammable and have good acoustic properties. People today are looking at salt as a sustainable building material.

- The definition of a brass instrument is that it involves embouchure, the vibrating of the lips. It is possible to have brass instruments that are not made of brass, such as the vuvuzela, wooden didgeridoos and conch shells.

- Tangent: The world's oldest brass instrument, the sheneb, dates back to 3000 BC. There is a recording made in the 1930s of a sheneb that was found in Tutankhamun's tomb being played.

Scores

- Sally Phillips: 6 points
- Ross Noble: 2 points
- Alan Davies: 1 point
- Sara Pascoe: -5 points