QI (E series)

QI Series E
Country of origin United Kingdom
No. of episodes 13
Broadcast
Original channel BBC
Original run 21 September 2007 (2007-09-21) – 14 December 2007 (2007-12-14)
Series chronology
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Series F

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

E Series (2007)

Series E contained the first occasion of a single recurring theme specific to its run: the "Elephant in the Room" card. In each episode, one (or more) of the answers involved elephants. Whoever played their card at the correct time would score 10 bonus points.

A video podcast (featuring the best moments with some out-takes) was planned to accompany this series, but this was instead turned into a set of "Quickies" featured on the QI homepage of the BBC's website. As this decision was not reached until after recording though, they are still referred to as "vodcasts" by whoever is introducing them (usually Fry but occasionally a panellist or even the audience).[1]

This series contained the fewest number of debutants to date. Only two guests, Charlie Higson and Johnny Vegas, had not appeared on the programme before. This series was the first to contain an extra edition of outtakes.

Episode 1 "Engineering"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Railways had to be flat. Bill tells a story about a Russian Tsar who drew a straight line with a ruler, demanding a straight railway, but his fingers were over the edge of the ruler. As a result, the line had two large curves. This story is attributed as the reason for kinks in the Trans-Siberian Railway and Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway. For which he gets a sweet.
Tangent: The London and Birmingham Railway took the same amount of work to build as one and a half Great Pyramids. Rob's discussion on what would be half of a pyramid gets him a sweet.
Tangent: While building the Central Pacific Railroad in the western United States, the line was laid as fast as a man could walk.
Tangent: One travel book once advised women railway passengers to stick pins in their mouths, to stop men from kissing them when they went in tunnels.
General Ignorance
Tangent: One member of the audience shouted "France".
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Bill Bailey
Tangent: The London Eye and Alan's experience on a ride in a fairground that went quicker because people knew he was on television.
Tangent: Jimmy talks about the Darwin Awards.
Tangent: Vaseline rots latex.

Episode 2 "Electricity"

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Men are 6 times more likely than women to be struck by lightning.
Tangent: Wires in bras superheat from lightning strikes.
Tangent: Lightning strikes the Earth 17 million times a day.
Tangent: A park ranger called Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning 7 times in his life, although he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Tangent: The panel is shown a picture of a horse, which Stephen describes as beautiful. The horse returns to become a running joke for the rest of the episode.
Tangent: The electric eels are not actually eels, but actually a knifefish.
Tangent: There are 69 species of electric fish. The underwater missile was named after the torpedo fish, the largest electric fish.
Tangent: Elephant evolution without tusks.
Tangent: Modern quantum physicists describe electrons as probability density functions.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Jumphaus in German is a brothel, a mobile phone is known as a Handy.
Tangent: Cows burp methane, not fart it.
Tangent: Soldier termites act as suicide bombers, releasing a sticky secretion by rupturing a gland near the skin in their neck producing a tar baby effect in defence against ants. Known as autothysis.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry
Tangent: Alan touched the end of a plug that had been snapped off an appliance while still plugged in and he fell over.

Episode 3 "Eating"

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: Rhubarb leaves are poisonous. Rhubarb acts as a mild laxative. During the First Opium War, Lin Zexu threatened Queen Victoria that China would refuse to send rhubarb, claiming they would kill everyone by mass constipation.
Tangent: Kellogg believed masturbation causes acne, physical and mental debility, heart disease, atrophy of the testes, epilepsy, insanity, and short-sightedness.
Tangent: If you eat a rabbit affected with Myxomatosis, it would have no effect on you. Louis XVIII claimed that he could tell from which part of France a rabbit came from by smelling rabbit stew. Theoretically, two rabbits could produce 33 million offspring in 3 years, but 90% of baby rabbits are killed by predators. Whilst rabbits were introduced to Britain by Normans in the 12th century, they did not become wild until the 19th century.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Snails are hermaphrodites and have a love dart, which may harm the partner when mating, but also increases the chance of pregnancy.
Tangent: One of the two men who discovered that stomach ulcers were caused by this bacterium, Barry Marshall, drank some of the bacteria to prove that it was the cause, and as a result won the Nobel Prize.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry (imitating Johnny Vegas)
Tangent: A Vietnamese coffee is made by taking the excrement of monkeys who eat green coffee, and grinding the beans found within.
Tangent: The philtrum.
Tangent: Stephen's trip with Peter Cook up the River Nile and Cook finding an article about Elizabeth Taylor.

Episode 4 "Exploration"

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
General Ignorance
Tangent: Axl Rose's original name was Bill Bailey. The last person to be hanged in the United States was also called Bill Bailey.
Tangent: The mountain is named after George Everest, the Surveyor General of India at the time. He actually pronounced his name /ˈiːv.rɛst/ eev-rest.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry, through a thicket of jungle plants.
Tangent: Stephen and the panel mess up the "Elephant in the Room" bonus.
Tangent: Las Vegas sells more adult nappies than baby nappies, because gamblers do not want stop gambling. A casino in Melbourne had to change the carpet after a week because people urinated on the floor rather than stop gambling.

Episode 5 "Europe"

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Belgium is named after the Belgae tribe, most of which originated from Winchester.
Tangent: Suite No. 212 in Claridge's was turned into an enclave of Yugoslavia so that Crown Prince Alexander could be born on Yugoslav soil.
Tangent: The Dutch swapped New York City for the Spice Islands with the English. Edward VII drank mercury to cure his constipation.
Tangent: The first person who stole it in 1817 was sentenced to 20 years hard labour, when it was stolen in 1978, the person was let off with a warning.
General Ignorance
Tangent: One eighth of the people who attempt to climb Mount Everest die.
Tangent: In 1997, a Land Rover Defender climbed up Mount Elbrus.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry.
Tangent: Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein wanted more power, and said that if he was not given it, he would sell Liechtenstein to Bill Gates. He got more power, but he later claimed he was only joking.
Tangent: Fry rants about his dislike of Microsoft Windows.

Episode 6 "Everything, Etc."

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: "Suicide Tuesday" is the "downer" you get after taking ecstasy over a weekend.
Tangent: Vic Reeves and Jeremy Clarkson both own chickens.
Tangent: Jeremy's idea of taking care of foxes that invade his chicken coop involves Russian night-vision goggles, a shotgun, and a bottle of Merlot.
Tangent: In Oregon, people prefer to call lumberjacks as treefellers.
Tangent: Clarkson's syndrome involves leaking capillaries.

The 50/50 left the 2 answers in italics. It was invented by the American army during World War I to test recruits wanting to join up.

Tangent: Men are better than women at multiple choice exams.
General Ignorance
Tangent: No edible oysters produce pearls.
Tangent: The largest pearl was found in a giant clam.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry and every panellist on the show that night.
Tangent: Jeremy's fox hunting/Russian night vision goggle story: He accidentally claims that some foxes ate his children's guinea pigs.
Tangent: Fry talks about a documentary about a place similar to Ibiza, where there was a club where the floor was slightly dome-shaped. The ceiling had a shower system in it so that fluids on the floor could easily be moved into the gutters on the side of the floor into drains on the side. Jeremy then claims that officially, the British were the fifth worst tourists in the world, according to a survey of 15,000 hoteliers. The worst were the French. 75% of French tourists holiday in France. The best tourists were the Americans.
Tangent: The Himalayas will cause the extermination of Greece. Jeremy attacks Greece because was he was once put in a Greek prison, but he escaped.

Episode 7 "Espionage"

Broadcast dates
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: The lie detector was invented by William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman.
Tangent: Müller is one of the few senior Nazis never to have been captured, and was last seen hiding in the Führerbunker. He escaped and was never seen again.
Tangent: As a joke, Arthur Conan Doyle once sent five letters to five friends that read, "We are discovered, flee immediately", to see what they would do. One of them disappeared and Conan Doyle never saw him again.
Tangent: Houdini could pick up pins with his eyelashes.
Tangent: Many paintings by Marcel Duchamp were discovered to contain semen, because he mixed semen with his paint.
Tangent: A bank robber from Pittsburgh in 1995 was caught by the police because he thought that by putting lemon juice on his face, he would be invisible.
Tangent: There is an enzyme in pineapples called bromelain that can destroy fingerprints. It was used as a plot line in an episode of Hawaii Five-O. This enzyme could also be used to get rid of mouth ulcers.
Tangent: In the Empire State Building, a lift did have all its wires cut when a B-25 bomber collided with the building in 1945 and the propellers cut the wires. However, the brakes worked and the passengers in the lift were saved.
General Ignorance
Tangent: On 21 November 1981, 104 tornadoes hit the UK during the day.
Tangent: Tornado Alley.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry and every panellist on the show that night.
Tangent: Adolf Hitler was put on a vegetarian diet, because of his flatulence, but he was not a vegetarian.
Tangent: The Nazis were against fox hunting because it was cruel and immoral.

Episode 8 "Eyes & Ears"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: If you put earwax on top of a pint of beer or stout, the head would disappear because of the oil in the earwax. If you squirt washing-up liquid in a pond where water boatmen are standing, they will sink.
Tangent: Alexandre Dumas once claimed that you could walk from France to America on cod.
Tangent: The question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" always leads to an answer that condemns you.
General Ignorance
Tangent: At the coronation of George IV, all the diamonds in the Crown Jewels were hired because they were so expensive at the time.
Tangent: If you cut the whiskers of a cat, it can get its head stuck in a milk bottle.
Tangent: There is an urban legend about the brace position, which says it is used so that if you die, they can identify you by your dental records.
Tangent: The parrot famously said, "Pieces of eight", because the Spanish dollar was split into eight pieces. Two bits equalled a quarter of an American dollar, and "two bits" is still a nickname for a quarter.
Tangent: Alan mentions he likes After Eights in the hope that someone will send him some. In a similar incident before, he once said on TV that he liked Quorn, and received a box of it.
Tangent: Robert Newton, the first actor to play Long John Silver in a sound version of Treasure Island invented the stereotypical pirate voice. He is considered a "Patron saint" of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Tony Hancock first became well-known as a Robert Newton impersonator.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: The Audience.
Tangent: Susie Dent and the possibility that she is a centaur.
Tangent: David having his ears syringed and how he heard "too much" after it.
Tangent: Biodegradable cricket boxes.
Tangent: The Solar Eclipse in 1999 in Cornwall and Alan watched it in Oxford on Sky News and their presenters had nothing prepared for it.

Episode 9 "Entertainment" (Children in Need Special)

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Jo tells a story about a friend who let off an embarrassing fart.
Tangent: Other famous flatulists include Mr. Methane and Le Pétomane. Le Pétomane earned 20,000 francs a week and was the biggest star of his day. He could smoke and breathe through his bottom.
Tangent: Turold and Taillefer are jesters depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. Taillefer juggled with his sword, and when an Englishman came down, Taillefer cut off his head. In one scene in the tapestry, it says, "William comforted his troops" and shows him sticking a spear up a soldier's backside. However, "comforted" then meant "encourage".
Tangent: Eric "the Eel" Moussambani is another amateur Olympic athlete, famous for being a novice swimmer from Equatorial Guinea in the 2000 Summer Olympics.
Tangent: Jeremy and Stephen talk about the hardships ballet dancers have to suffer, including damage to the body and they are not told what part they will play until the night of the performance.

These Websites are Real

Tangent: Other embarrassing domain names such as www.speedofart.com (The Speed Of Art) and www.powergenitalia.com (Powergen Italia).
General Ignorance
Tangent: Bill once went to a Brazilian zoo, where he was told by a handler to "always approach a jaguar from the front", but, as he prepared to do so, the handler quickly corrected himself: he had meant "never", not "always".
Tangent: Jeremy once bought his dad some ghost koi for his pond, but they disappeared in the pond and killed all the other fish in the pond.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Pudsey Bear holding up a signboard reading "Hello & welcome to the QI vodcast".
Tangent: Liam Neeson and his supposedly large penis.

Episode 10 "England"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Themes

Stephen and the panel have miniature flags of England in front of them, although Alan swaps his English flag for the Welsh flag, (note that in the earlier episode 5 of this series, Alan had swapped his Welsh flag for David Mitchell's flag of England).

Topics
Tangent: During a school exam, Sean tilted over to his side to break wind, and one of his teachers thought he was cheating by looking at someone else's exam paper.
Tangent: One of Alan's classmates in school was called "Jimmy Glasscock", and evidently, one could always see him coming.
General Ignorance
Tangent: The most common cause of death for swans is electrocution.
'England' was still an all-embracing word. It mean indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire. (A.J.P. Taylor, Volume XV: English History, 1914-1945, page v)
Since then there has been a trend in history to restrict the use of the term "England" to the state that existed pre 1707 and to the geographic area it covered and people it contained in the period thereafter. The different authors interpreted "English History" differently, with Taylor opting to write the history of the English people, including the people of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Empire and Commonwealth where they shared a history with England, but ignoring them where they did not. Other authors opted to treat non-English matters within their remit. (Forfeits: England, France)
Tangent: Charlie answers this question expecting it to be a trap, as the fact is well known. However, he is delighted to find out that it is actually a true fact.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry
Tangent: Bill Hicks said that today Christians would have to wear little electric chairs around their necks, because that would be how Jesus would be killed in the present day.
Tangent: Fry wants to tell a story about Kenneth More, but it is too rude to be broadcast. He was introduced to Noël Coward, who asked him, "Do you take it up the arse?" More said "No, actually I don't", and Coward responded by saying, "Oh very well, we needn't quarrel about it."

Episode 11 "Endings"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: The "S" in Ulysses S. Grant does not stand for anything.
Tangent: Alan once took his two cats to the vet by car. Both escaped from their baskets in transit, one urinated on the back shelf of the car, and the other sat on the dashboard and meowed angrily at him.
Tangent: Stephen complains that he keeps getting static electric shocks.
General Ignorance
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen Fry
Tangent: During location scouting for a cowboy film, where a man was to stand on top of a ridge, a ridge was found with a tree on it, so the tree was cut down and when they returned they were asked if the ridge they found was at "One Tree Hill".

Episode 12 "Empire" (Christmas Special)

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Mr. Bean is very popular in Germany. Alan commented that he was once on a Lufthansa plane to Germany, and the German passengers were all watching Mr Bean. Bill mentions a man in Australia who said that Mr Bean would not survive five minutes in "The bush".
Tangent: One of the assassination attempts on Queen Victoria was foiled by a "PC Trounce". Another attempt was made by a John Francis, who Prince Albert described as "a thorough scamp". If you were convicted of attempting to assassinate the Queen, the maximum penalty was 7 years.
Tangent: The line "We are not amused" was reported in The Notebooks of a Spinster Lady, but Queen Victoria was known to have had a childish sense of humour.

Maria Louisa Shaw-Lefevre, can be identified as the anonymous author of "The Notebooks Of A Spinster Lady, 1878-1903", published by Cassell in 1919. She was sister of George John Shaw-Lefevre, 1st Baron Eversley PC, DL (12 June 1831 – 19 April 1928) who was a British Liberal Party politician. In her notebooks she tells amusing stories of life in the upper classes of society in England at the time, makes candid observations of contemporary people and recounts jokes she heard told. She records that she attended the funeral of her good friend Augustus Hare in 1903. The book's editor, also unnamed, says she died in 1908. 'The Times' January 28 page 10, records "Among those present at the funeral...Miss Shaw Lefevre" and the death records confirm she died in 1908 (First quarter 1908 East Preston folio 26 page 255).

Tangent: Rasputin was poisoned, shot and drowned when they tried to assassinate him but he just would not die.
Tangent: There is a formula for calculating the beauty of the bottom.
Tangent: There is a penis museum in Reykjavík.
General Ignorance
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: Stephen, the panel, and the entire QI production team, in the style of a pantomime with the audience shouting back.
Tangent: Sean and Bill talking argue taking off their hats and their hair loss.
Tangent: Lebanon's attempt to increase tourism. One of the problems was that the 2007 Lebanon conflict happened around the time programme was recorded in June, so they had to pretend it was December as that was when the show was broadcast.

Episode 13 "Elephants"

Broadcast date
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Alan's step-grandfather worked at Stratford fruit and veg market. He used to do very long shifts and would therefore sleep with his bananas after a long shift, because it was warm. He was stopped by the unions.
Entertainment Tangent: Alan and Bill Bailey once did a play at the Edinburgh Festival, where they shared the stage with some Korean ballerinas. The floor was designed to be sprung, so the ballerinas could do their jumps. However, this meant that in their play, almost everything jumped around.
Tangent: Stephen went to see Peter Brook in The Tempest at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a joke, Brook was naked under his coat. When some actors behind him made a human pyramid, he turned around and opened his coat. The woman on the top of the pyramid then urinated in laughter, and the urine dripped all the way down the pyramid and ran off the stage.
Eyes and Ears Tangent: Talking about "Wheelie trainers". Stephen then talks about toys he had as a child, including a space hopper.
Exploration Tangent: Bill talks about his timid guinea pig.
Everything Etc. Tangent: Polar bears are not attracted to the colour black because they are colour blind. Jeremy Clarkson then talks about his hatred for polar bears. Alan successfully remembers how to escape a polar bear from Series A — step back slowly, offering clothes.
Empire Tangent: Stephen attempts to impersonate David Frost, Loyd Grossman and Brian Blessed. This leads to a discussion about Grossman's Massachusetts accent and his sexuality, leading Jo to suggest he could be married to Brian Sewell, and then Jo Brand goes into an anecdote about Brian Blessed's attempt to climb Mount Everest. At one point, they had to camp on a washing line on the edge of a glacier. If they needed to go to the toilet they had to do it over the edge and the wind would carry it off. One of the party did so, and in a few minutes it was realised the wind had blown the faeces back into the hood of the man's coat.
Tangent: Stephen has trouble with his diction on the introduction to the latter fact, causing him to repeat it several times; the panel rib and mock him on this mercilessly, even breaking into song. Although Stephen had tried to move on, the panel had dragged him back into telling them what they said of the Acropolis.
Vodcast/Quickie
Presenter: A shrunken Alan Davies. There is no new material; all clips are taken from the episode.

References

  1. ^ "Comedy — QI". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/qi/. Retrieved 2007-09-22. 
  2. ^ Smith, Tara C. (June 13, 2007). "Malaria: the cure for AIDS?". ScienceBlogs. http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/06/malaria_to_cure_hiv.php. Retrieved June 13, 2011. 

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