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.
- Continues on Tuesday 31st December on BBC2 at 9pm with Series V, Episode 10
- Catch-up on Series V, Christmas Special
- Streaming rank this week: 195
Episode menu
Series V, Episode 5 - Visual
Topics
- The panel are shown a photo of some dogs and are asked what they are thinking. The answer is that while we do not know what they are thinking, they can manipulate humans with their eyes. The white of the eye, called the sclera, is not visible on most animals, but it is on dogs, and it is useful on humans because you can tell which way someone is looking. Domesticated dogs were probably bred that have visible sclera for their use in hunting, although it is possible we bred them so dogs could have more human facial expressions.
- Tangent: The military expression: "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes", is alleged to have come from the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, during the American Revolution. This fact is illustrated by a painting of Major General Joseph Warren, one of the USA's Founding Fathers. Paul Revere, the man who warned that British were coming, was asked to do so by Warren. When Warren was killed in the battle, he was bayoneted and beheaded. Revere, who worked as a silversmith, was able to identify Warren because he made Warren's false teeth. It is the first recorded case of someone being identified forensically by their teeth.
- Tangent: Kiri still has her baby teeth. Her mother kept them when they fell out. Since then, the teeth have gone missing from Kiri's house, leading Kiri to claim she can't move house, because if she did the next owner would find some children's teeth and call the police.
- XL Tangent: When Sandi's daughter Megan lost her first tooth, Sandi told her the tooth fairy is going to come, unless it is a trainee in which case they might take Megan instead of the tooth. Megan didn't sleep for months. Alan once left £4 for his daughter's tooth, and the following morning she said that this was tooth much and Alan was clearly the one who left the money. Jack has a friend who son lost a tooth, and put it under his pillow saying there will be a £2 coin instead. Jack's friend believed this was tooth much and should just be 10p. The child had a complete meltdown because everyone at school said it was £2. The friend thus put in £2 under the pillow. At 4am, the child woke the friend up grasping the £2 and shouting: "See?!" Alan's middle child had an operation on his ear, and when he was put under anaesthetic the doctor told him to count, and for every number he counted he would get £2. He got up to 11, they did the operation, and when he came around he said: "£22!"
- The colour of the back of your eyes is red, because everything inside the body is red due to the blood. When you get red-eye in photos, it is because the light from the camera is going right to the back of the eyes.
- Tangent: Alan says you can pop your eye out of your head. An optician in the audience tells him that you can't.
- Tangent: Kiri remembers an article she read in Take A Break magazine, about a boy whose photo had been taken and there was red-eye in just one of his eyes. They took the boy to a doctor and revealed the eye had a tumour, because the tumour prevented the light being reflected. Sandi asks if these are the sorts of article that appear in Take A Break because she has never read it. Maisie says a story like that would be followed by a crossword containing the names of characters from Coronation Street. Kiri says it will feature a story about someone being in love with a piece of cheese, and someone trying to get a ghost from their house evicted. Alan references back and says he read a story about a woman who keeps all her baby teeth around the house.
- The thing a wasp (which form part of the family vespidae) can see that a human cannot is a particular colour called bee purple. It is a combination of yellow and ultraviolet. Most humans can see about a million different shades of colour.
- Tangent: Maisie's husband is red-green colour-blind, and when she first brought him to her native Yorkshire, she showed him the Dales. On a big walk, her husband was unimpressed by the sight of the Dales, leading to an argument. Her husband showed Maisie an app of what a colour-blind person is actually seeing, and Maisie says that the colour-blind version of the Dales is an awful beige. 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour-blind. Cuttlefish and blue whales are also colour-blind, meaning the blue whales do not know that they are blue.
- XL: If you are left alone with a cuttlefish and some Velcro, you can attach some 3D glasses to them as an experiment. In order to work out how cuttlefish judge distance, the cuttlefish work the glasses and played footage of shrimp. The cuttlefish believed the shrimp were real, so attacked them. This meant that the 3D glasses worked on the cuttlefish, and thus they judge distance the same way humans do, by getting separate information from each eye, and comparing the two.
- XL Tangent: The correct name for colour blindness is daltonism, after British scientist John Dalton. Dalton created the first periodic table, measured the height of almost all the mountains in the Lake District by climbing up them and measuring the air pressure with a barometer. As previously mentioned in Series J, Dalton bought his elderly mother a pair of stockings for her birthday, not knowing they were scarlet, causing a scandal as they were both devout Quakers. Dalton and his brother both thought the stockings were blue, so he correctly deduced that colour-blindness was a genetic condition.
- The person who spent hours looking at sperm they had got out of a van was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. A 17th century Dutch lens maker, he is credited with great improvements in the microscope. In 1677, he became the first human to see sperm cells, which are the smallest cells in the body, describing their swimming movements in a letter to the Royal Society. In the letter, he makes it keen that everyone understands where he got the sperm from. He wrote that the sample was, "what, without sinfully defiling myself, remains as a residue of conjugal coitus." At the time, a masturbating scientist was seen as more sinful as getting his wife to help with the collection process. There are accounts of elderly scientists sitting around at dinner carefully examining each other's sperm through one of van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes. While Robert Hooke has lenses that could magnify 50 times, van Leeuwenhoke's lenses could magnify 250 times. Sandi produces a replica of one of the lenses, which is between two brass plates, and the sample you want to look at is on a screw that you adjust.
- XL Tangent: Kiri was at a wedding where she sat next to someone from school she had not seen for years. She asks Kiri what she was now doing, and told her she was a comedian, and the friend ask her how she can make a living doing something as weird as that. Kiri asked her friend what she did, and she said she times how fast bull semen swims in a lab, leading Kiri to complain that in fact her friend had the weird job.
- The largest thing the US military has ever attacked was the planet Venus. In 1945, the USS New York fired on a silver sphere in the sky, thinking it was a Japanese balloon. It was actually just Venus. Venus has been mistaken of other things multiple times. During the Manhattan Project, they tried to intercept a bright light in the sky only to discover they were trying to shoot down Venus. The Indian Army spent six months watching Chinese spy drones violating its airspace, only to discover it was Venus. (Forfeit: The Moon)
- Tangent: The first person to look at Venus through a telescope was Galileo. One of Galileo's middle fingers was removed from his body 95 years after he died, and preserved in a museum in Florence.
- The best place to put your nose if you are feeling queasy is within your visual range. People using gaming virtual reality (VR) headsets can become sick when using them, because your brain and inner ear think you are moving when you are not. This is an old problem. In 1993, Sega pulled their VR headset because it also made people feel sick. However, they noticed that if you put a fixed visual reference on the screen, e.g. a driver's dashboard or a cockpit, people felt less sick. Thus, if you put the end of your nose in the virtual reality, it may help reduce the sickly feeling.
- Tangent: Maisie's friend has a VR headset, and they play a game where you are swimming in the sea, and suddenly a shark appears and you have to swim away from it. Kiri played on a VR headset, which was a simulation of a mouth which is used to train dentists. Maisie asks if Kiri was using to extract teeth to put around her house.
- XL Tangent: American entrepreneur Palmer Luckey founded a gaming headset called the Oculus Rift system, which was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. He is considered the father of modern VR. Luckey then designed a helmet that would kill the wearer if they died in a video game. The headset is rigged with three explosive charges. He said: "Pumped-up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real."
- Tangent: Kiri's brother went to see a 4D film, and it was so stimulating it shook a poo out of him. Sandi asks how grateful her brother is now that Kiri has mentioned this on TV. Kiri says that she has two brothers, "but it was Alistair".
- XL Tangent: VR has been tried on cows. A Russian herd was fitted with VR sets showing nice fields, and it cows improved the quantity and quality of their milk.
- You would use of a mouse cleaver in eye surgery to help with cataracts. The mouse cleaver was created Gordon Cleaver, who was nicknamed "Mouse" ever since his school days because of his appearance. He served in the RAF, where again everyone called him "Mouse" to the point that many people didn't know his real name. He flew a Hurricane, the canopy of which was made of Perspex. He was shot at, the canopy shattered, and the Perspex splinters went into both his eyes. He lost the sight in one of his eyes, but he was able to land his plane and the sight in his other eye was saved. 18 different operations were needed to save the good eye, but the surgeon, Harold Ridley, noticed that the splinters were not being rejected by the eye. The eye was actually tolerating the splinters. This led to the development of intraocular lens implants, where the lens of the eye is removed and is replaced by a plastic lens.
- Tangent: Sandi has had this eye surgery done on her. To do it, the old lens is broken up, use something like tiny vacuum cleaner to remove the broken pieces, and the plastic lens is inserted. Sandi says she has one eye for distance and one for close-up, but her brain is able to work out the sight. When she took the bandage off for the very first time, she claims it was like she had never seen colour before. Maisie says she is going to take Sandi to the Dales.
- Tangent: About half of over people over 80 have cataracts. Cataract operations date back to the 5th century BC. At the time they used a technique called couching, in which a sharp needle into the eye to dislodge the cataract. It often went wrong. In India, in 600 BC, there was a variant were an incision was made using a needle, then the patient would do a "Valsalva", a deep breath while holding the nostril, and hopefully the lens material would shoot out. In 18th century Europe, they used a spatula to remove the cataract.
- XL Tangent: Jiwon Kim of John Hopkins University has made a robot that can administer an injection through the sclera and precisely into the vein the back of the eye. It is called the Steady-Hand Eye Robot. The idea is the robot could administer drugs directly into the retina to stop degenerative blindness.
- XL Tangent: A hypodermic needle is being developed that goes floppy after it is inserted. It is made out gallium, a soft, silvery metal which is rigid at room temperature, but goes soft at body temperature. It would decrease the amount of tissue damage.
General Ignorance
- XL The country that drinks the most whisky is India, primarily because it has the biggest population of any country on Earth. Half of the world's whisky is drunk by India, despite the fact that 85% of the population do not drink. However, India's population is 1.43 billion, so 15% of the population is still makes up a size that is three times the population of the UK. India consumes on average 1.5 billion litres of whisky. (Forfeit: Japan)
- XL Tangent: Jack went to a whisky bar in Scotland, and they had a bottle of whisky that is so expensive that they are only allowed to buy it if they smash the bottle when it is empty, to prevent counterfeiting. Jack jokes that this is what happens in a lot of Scottish car parks anyway.
- XL Tangent: The country that drinks the most whisky per capita is France, closely followed by Uruguay. The French now make their own whisky, with the first malt being sold in 1998. France now has 86 distilleries, which is twice as many as there are in Ireland.
- XL Tangent: The tiny French archipelago of Saint Pierre and Miquelon is the last remnant of France's New World Empire. Home to about 6,000 people, it is 16 miles off the coast of North America, uses the euro and they speak French. It also became a very popular spot to visit when the USA brought in prohibition in 1920, because it was still legal to drink there. Between 1911-18, they imported 14,000 litres of whisky a year, but ten years later they were importing 4 million litres a year.
- Using the well-known scale of London buses, a London bus is slightly longer than a London bus. The old Routemaster was exactly 30ft long, but modern London buses are 36ft 10⅛ inches long. Thus, a London bus is now 1.23 times the size of a London bus.
- Tangent: Other unusual units of measurements which have since changed include the volume of Olympic swimming pools and the size of Wales. Olympic swimming pools are no 25% bigger because two extra lanes were added due to no-one wanting to swim at the side. Regarding Wales, surveyor Myrddyn Phillips, a specialist in mapping mountains, says that Wales may be slightly smaller than the size of Wales. He measured all the mountains on the border with England, and says that the Ordnance Survey has marked it as 12m too far into Wales for at least 350m.
- XL: The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that features a load of pirates held its world premiere in a south-west English town beginning with P - Paignton. It was done so to avoid piracy. Their previous work, HMS Pinafore, had been copies loads of times in the USA, so Gilbert and Sullivan did not get any royalties. To make sure you get the copyright on a show, you have to perform it. Thus The Pirates Of Penzance premiered in New York's Fifth Avenue Theatre on 31st December 1879, but to make sure they got the English copyright, they did a performance the day before at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton. It was performed by a company touring HMS Pinafore, but who performed in their Pinafore costumes with handkerchiefs on their heads so they looked like pirates. In the Paignton programme, there was a character in Penzance called James, but nobody knows what James did and he never appeared again. (Forfeit: Portsmouth; Plymouth)
- The inventor of the YMCA dance was a TV studio audience. In the video for 'YMCA', the Village People do a Y-shape stance, but are clapping. When they performed the song on the TV show American Bandstand, the audience created what we now know as the dance. Singer Victor Willis tried to copy it, and the show's host Dick Clark said to him that they could work it into their routine. Willis said they would have to, and it became famous. (Forfeit: The Village People)
- Tangent: The Village People were formed through an advert which read: "Macho types wanted. Must dance and have a moustache."
- XL Tangent: When 'YMCA' was released, the Young Men's Christian Association sued for copyright infringement. The original YMCA was set up in the 1880s to house single men who were moving from the country to cities. In the end, the YMCA ended up embracing the song. In comparison, another Village People song, 'In The Navy', was not embraced by the US Navy. They did consider using it as a recruiting tool until it was explained to them that it might not be the right image for them.
Scores
- Maisie Adam: -4 points
- Kiri Pritchard-McLean: -6 points
- Alan Davies: -17 points
- Jack Dee: -18 points
Broadcast details
- Date
- Tuesday 19th November 2024
- Time
- 9pm
- Channel
- BBC Two
- Length
- 45 minutes
- Recorded
-
- Tuesday 12th March 2024, 14:45 at Television Centre ('Visual', with Maisie Adam, Jack Dee and Kiri Pritchard-McLean.)
Cast & crew
Sandi Toksvig | Host / Presenter |
Alan Davies | Regular Panellist |
Jack Dee | Guest |
Maisie Adam | Guest |
Kiri Pritchard-McLean | Guest |
James Harkin | Script Editor |
Anna Ptaszynski | Script Editor |
Sandi Toksvig | Script Editor |
Will Bowen | Researcher |
Anne Miller | Researcher |
Jack Chambers | Researcher |
Emily Jupitus | Researcher |
James Rawson | Researcher |
Mike Turner | Question Writer |
Lydia Mizon | Researcher |
Miranda Brennan | Researcher |
Tara Dorrell | Researcher |
Leying Lee | Researcher |
Manu Henriot | Researcher |
Joe Mayo | Researcher |
Lieven Scheire | Researcher |
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 |
Sarah Clay | Commissioning Editor |
Video
What can a wasp see that you can't?
Did you know wasps can see a shade of purple that we can't?
Featuring: Sandi Toksvig, Alan Davies, Kiri Pritchard-McLean & Maisie Adam.