QI (D series)

QI Series D
Country of origin  United Kingdom
No. of episodes 13
Broadcast
Original channel BBC
Original run 29 September 2006 – 15 December 2006
Series chronology
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Series E

This is a list of episodes of QI, the BBC comedy panel game television show hosted by Stephen Fry.

The dates in the lists are those of the BBC Two broadcasts. The episodes were also broadcast on BBC Four, generally a week earlier (as soon as one episode finished on BBC Two, the next was shown on BBC Four).

Contents

D Series (2006)

Series D was the first in QI's history where each and every edition had a specific theme and official title attached to it from the start. The majority of episodes also contained at least one QI debutant. Ronni Ancona, Vic Reeves and Liza Tarbuck made their first appearances while Rory Bremner, Julian Clary, Graeme Garden, Jessica Hynes, Roger McGough, Neil Mullarkey, Andy Parsons, Jonathan Ross and Johnny Vaughan all made what have so far been their only appearances to date.

This series contained a few other notable firsts. One was the first victory of an episode by "the audience", while another was the first recording (broadcast episode 10) where Alan Davies was not present. This was also the first season longer than the original regular length of 12 episodes.

Episode 1 "Danger"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Sean was once arrested for knocking a security guard's hat off.
Tangent: If you cut off the legs of a duck, it can still swim.
Tangent: A story from the French Revolution says that two decapitated heads were put in the same basket, and one head bit the other so hard that they could not be separated.
Tangent: The biggest kite in the world weighs nearly a tonne, measures 40 feet (12 m) by 36 feet (11 m), has to be flown by 50 people, and has 200 strings.
Tangent: The 3rd person to go down Niagara Falls was a British man called Charles Stephens. He tied his legs to an anvil as he went down. All that was found of him was a severed arm inside the barrel, which had a tattoo which read, "Forget me not, Annie".
Tangent: A pirate ship filled with animals was sent over Niagara Falls, only two geese lived. Two bears crawled out, and were shot.
Tangent: George W. Bush is the most famous cheerleader in America.
Tangent: You can get a detached retina from bungee jumping. You can also get detached breast tissue if you bungee jump naked.
Tangent: The Darwin Awards.
General Ignorance
Tangent: 3,000 white people died in the San Francisco quake, the Chinese dead weren't counted.
Tangent: People during the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco decided to set fire to their houses, because they were insured against fire, but not against earthquakes.
Tangent: Policemen were told to shoot 3 men who were trapped at the top of the Windsor Hotel, San Francisco. It was watched by 5,000 people. Someone else asked to be killed in a fire and the police took his name and address and shot him in the head.

Episode 2 "Discoveries"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Babylonians first developed the seven day week.
Tangent: Many zoologists participate in a Phylum Feast on Darwin's birthday (12 February) where they eat as many different species as possible.
Tangent: Disgusting foods: you drink the blood of the cobra when eating its beating heart (a delicacy in China); this led Alan to talk about eating ear wax.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Old English Sheepdogs are now referred to as "Dulux dogs". They have done more to popularise the dog, rather than the paint.

Episode 3 "Dogs"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Jeremy owns a labradoodle, the same kind of dog as Graham Norton. There is a type of dog called a Yorkiepoo, a cross between a Yorkshire terrier and a poodle.
Tangent: Sharks do not have to keep on moving in order to stay alive, though they do need water flowing through their gills.
Tangent: The largest egg in the world was laid by a whale shark.
Tangent: The German for "dog" is "Hund" as in the English word "hound". No-one knows where the word "dog" comes from. "Dogger" is said to come from a Dutch word meaning "a type of ship".
Tangent: The area before Fisher is Dogger. Viking is always the first to be read out. Alan used to call the shipping forecast the "Chicken forecast" because that is what it sounded like when he was a kid.
Tangent: There is a sport called Canary Wrestling, similar to sumo.
Tangent: La Palma has a volcano on it, which could cause a tsunami that could wipe out the Eastern American seaboard if it erupted.
Tangent: "Karate" means "Empty hand" and "Judo" means "The gentle way".
Tangent: The first two planes shot down by Spitfires in World War II were Hurricanes.
Tangent: Jeremy's favourite VC winner is Ferdinand West, a pilot from World War I. World War I pilots often had diarrhoea because bearings were lubricated with castor oil.
General Ignorance
Tangent: A Manx Shearwater in Cokeland Island, Northern Ireland was tagged as an adult (at least 5 years old) in July 1953 and was re-captured in July 2003, making it at least 55 years old, making it the oldest bird in the world.

Episode 4 "Dictionaries"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Alan was once performing at a concert with Phil Collins, who was singing a song called "Where's My Hat?" and he was wearing a hat throughout. (However, the song is actually called 'Wear My Hat', a song from Collins' 1996 Dance into the Light album.)
Tangent: Didcot Power Station was the third worst eyesore in the UK according to a poll by "Country Life". Number one was Wind farms.
Tangent: Didcot has the second oldest yew tree in the country. It's 1,600 years old.
Tangent: Ronni's impression of Mary Kingsley.
Tangent: Diana Mosley and her liking of Adolf Hitler.
Tangent: Stephen's time in prison.
Tangent: If a clergyman is knighted, the Queen doesn't use a sword.
Tangent: The last public degradation in Britain happened in 1621 to Sir Francis Mitchell.
Tangent: Denier and tights.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Scottish schools omit everything about the History of England, with the exception of the Battle of Bannockburn.
Tangent: The English soldiers were called "Tommy lobsters". The Battle of Culloden was the first battle to use bayonets.
Tangent: Dolphins can't distinguish between hunger and thirst and will not eat if they drink fresh water.

Episode 5 "Death" (Halloween Special)

Broadcast dates
Panellists

(Despite the audience being announced as the winner, Alan Davies was announced as having come third, suggesting that the audience's victory was in fact unofficial. In this case, Parsons was the winner and thus the fourth debuting contest in succession to win.)

Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: A man with manic depression took apart his car during the manic phase, labelling every part, then got his depressive mood swing and lost all interest, just throwing all the parts around and ruining the project.
Tangent: Exercise and swimming with dolphins is proven to help with people who have depression.
Tangent: People committing suicide by throwing themselves off Beachy Head.
Tangent: Stephen's dislike of the United States Army, mainly generals wearing sunglasses.
Tangent: Alan tells how a general once tried to get through to young troops by quoting MC Hammer.
Tangent: Out of the 250 drownings in the UK each year, one-third are intentional.
General Ignorance
Tangent: The original Great Fire of London in 1212 killed more than 3,000 people.
Tangent: Not saying "Bless you", when you sneeze.

Episode 6 "Drinks"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: John's problem with birds in his house.
Tangent: Darts commentator Sid Waddell's odd quotes.
Tangent: Absinthe was banned in Belgium in 1905, Switzerland in 1912 and France in 1915 due to wormwood being poisonous. It was re-legalised in 1926 after they removed the wormwood. It has never been banned in Britain because it was never popular.
Tangent: The difference between weight and mass.
Tangent: The great-great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, who created London's sewage system after "The Great Stink", now runs Endemol.
Tangent: During World War II, Veronica Lake was forced to get her hair cut. She previously had her hair combed over one eye, and many women copied this style. However, the women then worked in munitions factories, and their hair got caught in the machinery.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Beer goggles.

Episode 7 "Differences"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Women have twice as many pain receptors on their skin as men.
Tangent: On Alan's 30th birthday, he was so drunk, he forgot that people had been distributing sparklers throughout the house. Photographs showed he was even holding one.
Tangent: Dara not being married, and his fictional Filipino wife.
Tangent: The average height of an eskimo is 5' 4". The average life expectancy of an eskimo is 39 years old.
Tangent: The entire eskimo population would fit into the Los Angeles International Airport car park, if you put 5 eskimos in a car.
Tangent: Inuit throat singing, and Alan's impression of Andy Kershaw.
Tangent: 1 in 10,000 have their organs the wrong way round. The condition is known as Situs inversus.
Tangent: Alan does the British Sign Language for "bullshit" and "drunkenness".
Tangent: Julian farting in front of the Queen backstage at the Royal Variety Performance and shitting himself.
Tangent: He also complained to Alfred Tennyson about a poem he wrote.
Tangent: Table tennis was banned in Russia as it was thought it would affect people's eyesight.
General Ignorance
Tangent: W. C. Fields once wrote a film under the pseudonym "Mahatma Kane Jeeves".
Tangent: Mahatma means "great soul" in Sanskrit.
Note: Alan Davies answered "Randy", and as a result was docked 150 points. The final scores were then revealed almost immediately afterwards, and Alan was on -144 points, a record lowest score in the show's history. To add insult to injury, without the 150 point penalty from the earlier question, Alan would have won with 6 points!

Episode 8 "Descendants" (Children in Need Special)

Broadcast dates
Panellists

(All scores in this game were multiplied by 1,000,000 as a generosity gesture from Stephen Fry, on account of it being for Children In Need. Therefore, the actual scores were -29, 2, 1 and 3.)

Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Winston Churchill famously said "A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal".
Tangent: If Barbie was a 5' 6", her feet would be a size 3 and her breasts would be 39 inches (990 mm) and she'd fall flat on herself, she also wouldn't have the necessary 17-22% body fat to menstruate.
Tangent: Barbie first got a navel in the year 2000.
Tangent: Barbie's first words spoken in 1992 were, "Will we ever have enough clothes, I love shopping, math is tough."
Tangent: William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with the co-creator of Wonder Woman.
Tangent: Children invented earmuffs, the calculator, the trampoline and the Flag of Alaska.
Tangent: Alan mentions a Sherlock Holmes film, in which people were being murdered around a circus. An hour into the film, Holmes said to Dr Watson, "Pygmies".
Tangent: Jonathan's experience in France, when he saw a tiny elephant doing performance tricks and at the end of show, it was unzipped and a small dog was inside it.
Tangent: Oliver Postgate (the creator of Clangers) and his other creations including Noggin The Nog, Pogles' Wood and Bagpuss. He and Peter Firmin created each episode in a barn and they each took a month to make.
Tangent: The highest amount of viewers the Clangers got was 10 million, when they appeared on an episode of Doctor Who called The Sea Devils.
Tangent: Stephen reads out a letter from the son of Peter Hawkins, correcting an earlier mistake made on QI saying the language was Flobbadob (See QI Series "B", Episode 10).
General Ignorance
Tangent: The Nokia company produces 6½ mobile phones a second.
Tangent: Stephen's complete misunderstandings of Geordie slang.
Tangent: Wogan holds the record for the longest televised putt with a 33 yarder at Gleneagles.
Tangent: The first Children in Need in 1980 raised £1 million.

Episode 9 "Doves"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: It was once awarded to a cat that was aboard HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze incident in 1949, when it ate all the rats aboard.
Tangent: The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon.
Tangent: Giacomo Puccini enjoyed hunting snipe from his window while writing operas. He could kill fifty snipe in one shot with his handbuilt gun.
Tangent: Pablo Picasso was a pigeon fancier and his father was a painter of pigeons and never painted again when he saw how good his son was. He collected fan tail pigeons and he named his daughter "Paloma", which is Spanish for pigeon or dove.
Tangent: The Fountain is signed "R. Mutt". The R stood for "Richard", which is French slang for "Moneybags".
Tangent: One person was fined US$6,500 for urinating in it. It's valued at $3.6million.
Tangent: The dodo is related to the pigeon. It was forgotten until 1860, when it appeared Alice in Wonderland.
Tangent: Sperm whales have a bone in their penis, like a badger.
Tangent: Nevison never harmed anyone as a highwayman.
Tangent: Dick Turpin went to live in York, adopted John Palmer as a pseudonym, and engaged in cattle rustling He shot the landlord's rooster, and the police couldn't find out his real identity. Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law to ask for a character reference, but his brother-in-law turned the letter away because he saw "From John Palmer" on the letter, and at that time to receive a letter one have to pay sixpence. The letter went to the postmaster who coincidently was the same man who taught Turpin to read and write, and the postmaster informed the police. The hangman also happened to be an ex-partner of Turpin, and became a hangman in exchange for a pardon from the death penalty.
Tangent: Timothy Spall's film about Pierrepoint, which revealed that Pierrepoint took 7 seconds from leaving his cell to hanging a prisoner.
Tangent: The life expectancy in some parts of America is lower than on Death Row.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Medical students rarely get to dissect a human in their studies any more.
Tangent: Fluffers in the porn industry aren't used any more, because of Viagra.
Tangent: There is a statue of the Mozambique-born Eusébio (their most famous player) outside Benfica's stadium.
Tangent: Laurence Llewellyn Bowen's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? controversy
This was a bonus question for 50 points was supposed to subsequently asked, only for Fry to accidentally provide the answer before asking the question. Alan Davies then answered the question regardless, and earned the 50 point bonus. As it turned out, he would still have won without the bonus had nobody else answered the question correctly. In his words: 'That was supposed to be the answer to the bonus question and I fucked it up completely!'

Episode 10 "Divination"

Alan Davies was absent for the recording of this episode, as it clashed with his favourite football team, Arsenal, playing in that year's UEFA Champions League Final - the biggest game in their history. Close-up shots of him in his chair at the start were taken during the recording of episode 8 (to match with Phill Jupitus being seated on his right). The customary opening long shot of the whole panel was accomplished with a lookalike taking his seat.

The final edit then showed him dematerialising after pressing his buzzer, which supposedly teleported him to the football match (accompanied by the TARDIS sound). His other brief contributions - which earned him forfeits, ensuring that he still lost - were also pre-recorded and played in the studio as a voiceover.

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Margaritomancy is divination using pearls and spatulamancy is divination using sheep's shoulder blades, ornithomancy is reading the flight patterns of birds and hippomancy is using the behaviour of a horse for divination purposes.
Tangent: Horses are as intelligent as tropical fish, in terms of brain power.
Tangent: Derren Brown's trick when you have an empty seat on a train.
Tangent: The word "donkey" first came into the English language in the late 18th century, but it was pronounced as if it was a rhyme for monkey. Before then it was just the word "ass".
Tangent: When you breed a male horse and a female donkey, it is called a hinny.
Tangent: Donkey milk cannot be used to make cheese. Babies in India are all fed on donkey milk. Cleopatra bathed in asses milk and Nero's wife Poppaea Sabina had 300 donkeys milked for her bath.
Tangent: Garry Kasparov accused IBM of cheating, after he planted a trap which he claimed that could only avoided by thinking creatively.
Tangent: Stephen's experience of watching a match between Kasparov and Nigel Short in London.
General Ignorance
Tangent: A bus company in Moscow changed one of its routes from 666 to 616. The A666 is found in Lancashire between Pendlebury to Langho
Tangent: The numbers on a roulette wheel add up to 666.
Tangent: The fear of the number 666 is Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. The fear of the number 616 is Hexakosioidekahexaphobia.
Tangent: Midgeley died aged 55. At the age of 51, he contracted polio and invented himself a harness to get himself out of bed, but one morning it swung around and in the ensuing struggle he strangled himself to death.

Episode 11 "Denial & Deprivation"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Sigmund Freud's fear of the number 62 and his refusal to book into hotels with more than 61 rooms.
Tangent: William Taft and his idea of diets as he was so fat, he couldn't get out of his bath. This then moved to Hollywood. In the 1950s, people used a tapeworm pill, which is when you swallowed a tapeworm egg. Alan's friend had a tapeworm that was 3 feet (0.91 m) long.
Tangent: The Marquis de Sade's imprisonment in the Bastille, and the loss of his work. He was moved prisons for shouting obscenities at the other people in the prison through a tube.
Tangent: There are many misconceptions that the Tower of London was a poor place to be kept in, it was a very civilised place to be kept prisoner.
Tangent: Ronnie Kray's homosexuality, and the twins' relationship with David Bailey.
Tangent: David Puttnam used to manage the Kray twins.
Tangent: A poem about Hoover the talking seal is written by Roger.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Tibet supposedly smells of butter and the buttermilk sculptures of animals.
Tangent: A female yak is called a nak. A wild yak is around 6' 5", a domesticated yak is around 4' tall.
Tangent: Yak hair is the longest of any animal. A lot of the wigs found in the BBC store were made of yak and beards for people pretending to be Santa Claus are very likely to be made of yak hair.
Tangent: A poem about crabs by Roger.
Tangent: A Crab louse has 6 legs. Crab louses are so named because they latch onto the follicles onto pubes, eyelashes, or even beards.

Episode 12 "Domesticity"

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers

(Stephen jokes that the buzzer noises see the respective genders "comfortably assigned their tasks".)

Topics
Tangent: "Dry cleaning" is a term used by spies to see if they are being followed or not.
Tangent: Neutrinos are mainly invented to make all mathematics in modern physics work. They have no mass and travel through lead which is light year's thick without a trace. Correction: It was discovered in 1998 that neutrinos do have mass, albeit very small.
Tangent: Davis is the in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest person ever to win the Nobel Prize, aged 88.
Tangent: Jo tries to guess her own quote: "How do you know if it's time to wash the dishes and clean your house? Look inside your pants, if you find a penis in there, it's not time."
Tangent: Cochrane's grandfather was John Fitch, who invented the steamboat.
Tangent: The 1893 World's Fair also had the first Ferris wheel on display, made by the inventor George Ferris.
Tangent: In Britain, the odds of being killed at home are the same as being killed in a car crash. In 2003, a woman in Scotland was killed in a freak dishwasher accident, when she slipped on the floor and was impaled on a knife that was sticking out of the dishwasher. Stephen cut his palm doing that once.
Tangent: Phill mocks Stephen for his mention of copper kettles and later mentions Stephen's Twinings adverts.
Tangent: Door hinges were originally made of wood.
Tangent: Stephen and Hugh Laurie's plasterers were Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse. Phill then does his impressions of Hugh & Stephen.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Stephen's story about a man called "Heinz", who was discovered wanking in a can of baked beans, while at school.

Episode 13 "December" (Christmas Special)

Broadcast dates
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: More than £20 billion is spent in the United Kingdom during Christmas. 1/3 of books, clothes and toys are sold in the last 8 weeks of the year. 150 million Christmas cards are sent. 7.5 million Christmas trees are decorated. Enough wrapping paper is bought to gift-wrap Guernsey.
Tangent: The Yule Festival, of which the Yule log is named after.
Tangent: What the Royals do on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Stephen is booed because he gets his Christmas tree from the Sandringham Estate, as does the Queen.
Tangent: There is a 25% increase in emergency call-outs in the 2 weeks up to Christmas.
Tangent: Things found inside photocopiers include sleeping cats, a snake, a kitchen knife, a sausage roll, a condom, stockings, a vibrator and a cheque for £6,000.
Tangent: Jo tells about making ginger beer and vodka, and Dara tells the correct way to serve a pint of Guinness, which he learned when he was a barman.
Tangent: In English, turkeys are so called because the first merchants to sell them were from Turkey. Nearly all the other country|countries refer to them as Indian. In Choctaw language, they're referred to as "Fukit".
General Ignorance
Tangent: Saint Brigid's great miracles include laying down a cape and owning whatever land was covered by it. She could also turn used bath water into beer.
Tangent: Alan thinks he looks similar to Saint Bartholomew, but later Stephen thinks he looks like Saint Sebastian.
Tangent: Alan has a picture of "The Creation of Adam" on his mobile phone, even though he was told you weren't allowed to take any pictures.
Tangent: Jo recalls phoning a person called "Mr. Bastard". Stephen then tells of people who irritate Jesus College, Cambridge by ringing them up on Christmas Day and singing "Happy Birthday to You."

Notes

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