QI (G series)

QI Series G
Country of origin UK
No. of episodes 18
Broadcast
Original channel BBC
Original run 26 November 2009 – 16 April 2010
Series chronology
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Series H

This is a list of episodes of QI, the BBC comedy panel game television programme hosted by Stephen Fry. Series G was the first in the show's history to be aired in its entirety on BBC One, beginning its run on 26 November 2009.

Contents

Episodes

Series G featured a total of 16 editions, plus an extra two compilation episodes, making it the longest series yet,[1] and was the first to be broadcast in its entirety on BBC One. As with the previous series, extended "XL" editions were also shown on BBC Two soon after the normal broadcast. Because of scheduling issues, this only began with the fourth episode. The first episode eventually had its "XL" edition aired some time after the original, but episodes 2, 3, 15 and 16 did not have their XL editions aired until the series was first shown on the digital channel Dave.

Nine new guests appeared in this series; Jack Dee, John Hodgman, Barry Humphries, Lee Mack, Graham Norton, Sue Perkins, Jan Ravens, David Tennant and Sandi Toksvig. Another significant first is that episode 2 featured four guests instead of the usual three (with regular Alan Davies also present).

Accompanying the recordings was a little game Stephen Fry had set up for his Twitter followers. The object was to decipher a word the audience had shouted. The response for "glabrous" was so overwhelming that it made Twitter's Trending Topics list on 9 May 2009.

In Australia, this series being currently broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation flagship network, ABC1, on Tuesday nights, and then placed on iView, the ABC's online viewing site after the airing, expiring after 2 weeks.

Episode 1 "Gardens"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme

As part of the "Gardens" theme, the set was decorated with trees and the inner part of the QI magnifying glass became a garden with flowers in it.

Topics
Tangent: Alan begins to use his his saw to cut through things including the set.
Tangent: A bee makes enough honey in its lifetime to fill one teaspoon. Alan claims that bees can't drown.
Tangent: Isham first brought them into Britain in 1847. One of his original 21 still exists today and has been insured for £1 million.
Tangent: The red cap worn by all garden gnomes derived from German miners, as they wore red caps.
Tangent: In Wast Water in the Lake District, gnomes put in at a depth of 48 metres for divers to look at; but 3 divers drowned while looking at them and the gnomes were taken away by the police. But when the gnomes were moved down to 50 metres, the police didn't take them away because of health and safety rules.
Tangent: In Leicester, there is an old quarry where an aeroplane and a bus have been put in for people to look at. In Scapa Flow, there is a massive German fleet, dating from World War I.
Tangent: Starlings come to Brighton in flocks of up to 1 million birds, some even coming from as far away as Germany and Poland.
Tangent: The Grocers' apostrophe has been ridiculed since the 18th century, when the Oxford Companion to the English Language said "there was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people". Birmingham has now abolished the apostrophe.
Tangent: In Dublin, Dara once saw a sign that was written as Grocer,s. This leads to a debate about whether or not sign printing companies deliberately let spelling errors go unnoticed.
Tangent: There are only 5 places in America which have an apostrophe in their name: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark's Mountain, Oregon. (Though not mentioned there is also Carl's Corner, Texas)
Tangent: The oldest variety of apple is called a Pearmain.
General Ignorance
Tangent: A number of fatalities have resulted from accidents caused by redback spiders and Australian funnel-web spiders dropping out of such things as sun visors during car journeys.
XL Extras
Tangent: Rob compares the use of animals in natural farming to owning a goat to eat your grass and thus not use a lawn mower. However, goats are now being replaced by wallabies.
Tangent: Masanobu Fukuoka invented natural farming. He also invented seed balls. It is more economical because less seeds are used than normal sowing.
Tangent: Seed guns are little guns which fire seeds into the ground. The idea is that they encourage people to use guns in a peaceful manner.
Tangent: Guerrilla gardening.
Tangent: Stephen tells a joke, in which he sings the song I'm a Little Teapot. He has his arms both in a handle position and says I'm a little teapot, short and stout. He looks at one arm and says here is my handle, then looks at the other one and says oh I'm a sugar bowl.
Tangent: You should not clean a teapot unless you have to. You should however, rinse it out if it becomes dirty.
Tangent: Different music is played at different times of the day in supermarkets because you are more price sensitive at different times.

Episode 2 "Ganimals"

Broadcast date
Recording date
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Topics
Tangent: Other uses of a goose include the use of goose fat for making roast potatoes, and for people to cover themselves with in order to swim the English Channel, although it's not used much for that any more, because it causes people to slip out of the grasp of the lifeboat crew when being rescued. Geese are also reputed to be better guard dogs than dogs and they were also used as chimney sweeps.
Tangent: It was reputed that at the Nottingham Goose Fair the legendary Robin Hood used goose feathers for his arrows.
Tangent: The bar-headed goose can increase their flight range by 70% by flying in V formation because it reduces wind shear.
Tangent: Giraffes have short necks in comparison to their legs.
Tangent: At birth a baby giraffe comes out head first, and is six-foot tall.
Tangent: The staple diet of the giraffe is the acacia plant.
Tangent: It is said that female goats get sexually aroused by the sweat of a human, because it has a similar smell to goats.
Tangent: Seagulls are not seabirds, but land birds. They live mainly on cliffs and don't go far out to sea.
Tangent: In World War II, parrots were kept in the Eiffel Tower to warn when enemy aircraft were approaching.
Tangent: In Saudi Arabia, the gulas are cut out to make the camels better at camel racing. Saudi Arabia imports its camels from Australia, as well as sand.
Tangent: Sharks can detect electricity, because a lot of fish give off electricity as a weapon.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Along with Russia, the armies of North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile and Iran have all practised the goose-step.
XL Extras
Tangent: Goose fat is better for roasting potatoes because it allows the potatoes to be cooked at a higher temperature.
Tangent: Gooseberries get their name because they taste nice when served with goose. The idea of the gooseberry bush being a place of birth is from 19th century slang.
Tangent: Giraffe tongues are so long they can clean their own ears with them.
Tangent: Sandi knew a couple who imported their Mini into Kenya. One day when they were out driving they got humped by a giraffe and could not get out.
Tangent: The American mountain goat is pure white in colour and is not a goat.
Tangent: In Kenya male goats wear chastity belts so they can only mate at the right time for Kenyan farmers.
Tangent: In 2007 a Nepalese airline slaughtered two goats to a Hindu God to save a plane.
Tangent: Sean's goat call is French for goat. His goats were used for cheese.
Tangent: When the weather is bad all the gulls fly into London, so Londoners know not to go out to the seaside when the gulls fly in.
Tangent: There was a dramatic increase in the gull population in 1956 because of the creation of landfills. 1956 was the year of the Great Smog which killed thousands of people in London. As a result the Clean Air Act was bought in which made it illegal for people to burn rubbish, so landfills were created to keep the rubbish in, which attracted the gulls.
Tangent: Sandi was once carrying a pizza outside a pub by the seaside, but a gull stole the whole pizza.
Tangent: The gerbils most used as pets in Britain are Mongolian gerbils. As they are desert animals their poo is dry and not smelly.
General Ignorance

Episode 3 "Games"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Nash was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind.
Tangent: Another example of game theory was used in a final of Big Brother.
Tangent: In 1995 a British court dismissed a jury because it used a ouija board to contact the dead person in the case.
Tangent: There is an Elvis Presley séance website.
Tangent: Amongst the "Scallywags" were Michael Foot, George Orwell and J. B. Priestley and they were trained to kill anyone who collaborated with the Nazis. Their motto was "Terror By Night".
Tangent: Boy Scouts at ages 12 to 14 were taught at Osterley Park (where the Home Guard trained) how to decapitate motorists using a taut wire stretched across a road. British roller skating champion Harry Lee also taught them how to knee someone in the groin while using roller skates.
Tangent: Bulls are the strongest animal vegetarians, but almost every animal is a vegetarian.
Tangent: Adolf Hitler wasn't a vegetarian.
Tangent: Casinos have introduced a facial recognition system to identify card counters, so that any time they go into a casino anywhere in the world they're instantly recognised.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Greyhound racing is the second most popular spectator sport in the UK, £2.5 billion is wagered on the sport every year.
Tangent: Kenneth Gandar-Dower once tried to see who would win in a race between a cheetah and a greyhound.
XL Extras
Tangent: Many people believe that altruism between humans is genetic proof of game theory. It is better for people to share than keep it to themselves.
Tangent: A rock climber once had to cut off his arm because it was trapped between 2 rocks and he knew no-one was around to save him.
Tangent: Children who are taught to share at an early age will make new connections in the brain.
Tangent: Phill once died on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. He was comic support for The Who.
Tangent: When blindfolded people still make words on Ouija Boards. However, if you turn the board upside-down without them knowing they write rubbish.
Tangent: Alan went to see the swimming at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, but thought it was rubbish because he had no idea what was going on.
Tangent: To win at roulette you can use a laser scanner on a mobile phone to calculate where the ball will land and bet during the last minute.
Tangent: Poker legend Amarillo Slim once said If you can tell my poker hand just by looking I will let you shit in this hat.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Alan did a documentary in Nambia where a baby cheetah had been bought to a reserve. To teach it the skills needed to hunt they had a motor with a cord and pulleys which zigzagged around a field with a rag attached to it. They also drove a pick-up truck containing horsemeat and the cheetah jogged alongside at 30 mph. Cheetahs only eat fresh meat, unlike leopards which will eat rotten meat.
Tangent: Sean was in Barcelona and ate some clams. His wife said that they did not smell right but he ignored her. He ended up with terrible food poisoning. Two weeks later he thought he was O.K and had some razor clams. He was sick again. He is now worried he has an allergy to clams for life.

Episode 4 "Geography"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: A Syrian lorry driver was going from Turkey to Gibraltar, but his sat-nav directed him to Grimsby
Tangent: Jimmy's girlfriend once said Where would we be without Satnav.
Tangent: Rob does his impression of a man trapped in a box.
Tangent: People who have done sat-nav voices include John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Julian Clary, Nigella Lawson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters, Simon Cowell, Catherine Tate and Margaret Thatcher.
Tangent: Some musicians had to be rescued by a helicopter, because their van was directing them through a ford.
Tangent: According to Marco Polo, 20,000 people were executed to keep the Khan's burial place secret, including all the slaves who excavated the grave and all the soldiers who killed the slaves.
Tangent: Genghis Khan was married 500 times. It is said that 8% of all males in Central Asia are related to a common ancestor from around 1,000 years ago who may be Genghis Khan.
Tangent: An explorer called Ross (after whom the Ross Sea is named) became the first person to encounter them. Up until that point, the Inughuit thought they were the only people on the planet.
Tangent: Admiral Peary, the first person to reach the North Pole, around 70 years after Ross first reached the Arctic. Peary took from the Inughuit's: their meteorites (which he sold to a museum for US$40,000), six Inughuit children, four of whom died of Tuberculosis immediately. One of the surviving children eventually saw his parents as skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Tangent: The Carib cannibals, who had eaten the last of the Atures.
Tangent: Von Humboldt was a homosexual.
Tangent: Parrots can learn up to 200 words, but they only mimic humans.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Groningen claims to have had a pub that opened non-stop for 10 years.
Tangent: They were inspired to create new lyrics for the anthem after listening to Liverpool F.C. fans singing "You'll Never Walk Alone". A competition for new words was held but withdrawn after five days for being too nationalistic.
Tangent: National anthems with controversial lines include this from La Marseillaise: "Do you hear in the countryside, those ferocious soldiers roaring? They come up to your arms, to slit the throats of your sons and wives!" The 6th verse of God Save the Queen has the line "rebellious Scots to crush!" The current Dutch national anthem has "To the King of Spain, I've granted a lifelong loyalty" as they were part of the Spanish Netherlands 350 years ago.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: The official U.S. difference between a hill and a mountain is that mountains are at least 1,000 feet high from base to apex while in the UK it is 600 yards above sea level. The definition of a desert is that it's a place where more water is lost than falls.
Tangent: The Mediterranean was once the driest lake in the world, until, in the late Miocene era six million years ago, the water from the Atlantic Ocean came over the Rock of Gibraltar, which caused the Mediterranean to flood and the Rock of Gibraltar to crumble.
Tangent: Barbary monkeys are actually miscalled Barbary apes.
  • One has been found that is 250 miles long, 60 miles wide, and one mile deep.
  • The bits that break off from glaciers are known as calves.
  • They can travel up to 65 feet a day, although one in Pakistan did seven and a half miles in three months.
  • One was spotted on a mountain near Uganda and the Congo.
*The only things that live in glaciers are ice worms, which live on red algae. In one glacier they found more worms within than there are people living on the planet.
Tangent: There are no snakes in Ireland because of glaciation, as snakes can't survive in freezing temperatures.
Tangent: Guano once contributed 75% of the economy of Peru.
Tangent: Its properties were first discovered by the aforementioned Alexander von Humboldt.
Tangent: It takes 5lbs of anchovies to make 1lb of farmed salmon.
Tangent: The fourth best-selling book of all-time, Green Eggs and Ham, has a vocabulary of only 50 words.

Episode 5 "Groovy" (Christmas Special)

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Muybridge murdered his love rival in cold blood. He became the first person in American legal forensic history to claim insanity as his defence for a murder charge.
Tangent: A discussion about lane mergers and bar-jumpers. In America, they refer to lane-merging as "like a zip!"
Tangent: David's annoyance at people with more than 5 items going in the "5 items or less" queue in supermarkets.
Tangent: During World War I, a tank toured Britain to help raise money for the war effort. It raised the most money from Glasgow
Tangent: When a law was passed in America to make polygamy illegal, the head of the LDS Church had another divine revelation saying it should stop.
Tangent: Discussion about The Osmonds (the world's most famous Mormons).
General Ignorance
Tangent: This became one of the Beatles conspiracy theories: some believed that NUJV stood for New Unknown John Vocalist.
Tangent: Another conspiracy theory is Paul McCartney being barefoot on the Abbey Road cover.
Tangent: The origin of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds comes from a picture painted by Julian Lennon, at playgroup, of his friend Lucy. It wasn't until much later on that any of the Beatles realised that the initials of the title spelt out LSD.
Tangent: It's popular in the Far East; in Japan it's used daily to signal the closing of most large department stores.
Tangent: Burns was never referred to as Robbie or Rabbie Burns. He signed himself as Robin, Rab or Robert.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: The penny-farthing was known as an ordinary bicycle in its day. Most bikes in the old days were considerably taller than the bikes of today. The first regular-sized bikes with chain drive mechanisms were known as dwarf safeties. The Clark brothers built a tall bike, known as a "flood bike", that could ride through floodwater.
Tangent: Nowadays, many tall bikes are used in jousting, whereby lances would be attached to the bikes.
Tangent: The first smoking ban took place in Nazi Germany in 1933. Adolf Hitler referred to smoking as "the wrath of the Red Indian Man against the White Man, for having been given hard liquor." He even suggested that Nazism might not have worked had he not given up smoking.
Tangent: The earliest known smoking ban was in 1640 when Czar Michael of Russia declared it a "deadly sin". People who did it were flogged and had their lips slit. James I of England wrote a pamphlet about smoking called "A Counterblaste to Tobacco", in which he damned tobacco, mainly citing it as being bad for the eyes, lungs and nose.
Tangent: Lee accidentally ate a hash brownie in Amsterdam.
Tangent: Fly agaric mushrooms in Siberia are eaten by reindeer, and it makes them bounce around. It's believed that's where the idea of the flying reindeer came from. It's highly toxic to humans, so they would drink the urine of the reindeer to avoid the poison.
Tangent: The correct term for the magic mushroom is psilocybin. Experiments involving magic mushrooms seem to try and prove that some religious experiences are based on hallucinations.
Tangent: Magic mushrooms were re-discovered by Albert Hofmann. He more famously discovered LSD. To test it, he took what he thought was a small dose, but it turned out to be a thousand times more potent than he expected. He described his experience as if he were demonically possessed. It was also believed that Hofmann was involved in a CIA operation known as Project MKULTRA, which tried to see if LSD could be used as a truth drug.

Episode 6 "Genius"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Buzzers
Theme
Topics
Tangent: Athletes usually wear a nasal strip while playing sports, which means they are at their most verbally dextrous
Tangent: The Flynn effect was designed to try and bring the scores up above the IQ of 70, because in America you cannot be executed for a capital crime if your IQ was below normal
Tangent: Someone who sort of bred a genius was Leonardo da Vinci's brother Bartolomeo.
Tangent: Graham talks about the time that he hosted an American game show and a female contestant said that her father was a serial killer.
Tangent: In 1902 Hans Spemann cloned a salamander. Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996, she was named after Dolly Parton, because the cells came from a mammary gland.
Tangent: The first cloned cat came from the cat, Rainbow, but its clone looked nothing like the original. It was called CC, which was short for "CopyCat". The first clone dog was the South Korean dog, Snuppy.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Darwin was one of 5 non-royal people to have be buried at Westminster Abbey.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Mozart was so talented at a young age that he regularly entertained for people in the House of Bourbon and the House of Hohenzollern.
Tangent: "Thomas Linley played a concerto at a younger age than Mozart did, died aged 22 when he drowned.
Tangent: Mensa is Latin for "table".
Tangent: If da Vinci's helicopter had been built, it wouldn't have worked.
General Ignorance
Tangent: "Dog cakes", cat shows, Crufts and TV coverage of golf.

Episode 7 "Girls and Boys"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
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Topics
Tangent: Female monkeys are attracted to pink because of the pink faces of the young primates.
Tangent: It's believed that if someone is picking up a child, that's not theirs, if the child is dressed in pink, they'd be hugged inwards, and if the child is dressed in blue, they'd be hugged outwards.
Tangent: An experiment with baby chimpanzees showed that when given the choice of which toy to play with, either a toy truck or a doll, the baby boys all chose the truck and the baby girls all chose the doll.
Tangent: The traje de luces, the suit worn by a torero (a matador) in a bullfight, is often pink. It means "suit of light".
Tangent: Pink doesn't appear on the spectrum, it's an extra-spectral colour. It's said that girls head towards the red side of a rainbow, whereas boys head towards the blue sky.
Tangent: It's also believed that nine-tenths of the food collected by hunter-gatherers were provided by women.
Tangent: Alan tells the story of an English couple who went to Thailand to have their baby. A Thai woman told them, "if you look lovely when you're pregnant, you have girl, if you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you have baby boy." She then asked what she thought she'd have and the Thai woman replied, "Boy", and she had a baby boy.
Tangent: Sandi tells of the time when her son brought a friend round and he asked "What's it like having two mummies?", he replied, "It's marvellous, if one of them's poorly, you've still got one to do for you".
Tangent: In the Bantu language, there is a rule that states that is someone got married, the female would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in the male's name, because it is a language of respect that women have to use. Another secret language is Pig Latin, where the first syllable is put to the end of the word with the sound ay', so "Quite Interesting" becomes "Itequay Interestingay". In Germany, they have "Löffelsprache", which means "spoon speak", the French have "Louchébem", the Bulgarians have "Pileshki" and the Japanese is "Ba-bi-bu-be-bo". There's also a camp High church nonsense language where the Holy Communion are referred to as "haggers commagers" and also say "Oooh, Jessica Christ".
Tangent: A discussion about teenagers sounding the same in just about every language. Also, the fact that teenagers never look at you, when you ask them to look at you.
Tangent: Clownfish (made popular in the film, Finding Nemo) are known to be very fierce, but they're also immune to sea anemones. They actually form a bond with the sea anemones and have their babies there. They also have gender assignation, which means they can change their gender in later life. If there's a group of fish consisting of a strong female and male, along with several weak males, when the female dies, the strong male becomes female and one of the weaklings becomes the "alpha male".
General Ignorance
Tangent: People being annoying when asking for directions.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Sandi tells of her love for the colour pink.
Tangent: Sandi's theory about stamina and the speed of sperm, followed by a discussion about the fact that girls have no sperm at all.
Tangent: Alan's suggestion that if you're watching football on television, you'll more likely have a boy. This also leads to a discussion about using remote controls and reading magazines during sex.
Tangent: Marco Polo suggested that Khutulun, the niece of Kublai Khan, was the most fiercest of all warriors, and she suggested that anyone who wanted to marry her had to wrestle her. If he won, he'd marry her, but if he lost, he'd have to give 100 horses to her. She eventually gained 10,000 horses this way and never married.
Tangent: In the United Kingdom, crime committed by women has gone up 25% over the last 3 years, whereas there was a 2% drop for men. It's believed that alcohol is a main component of this, because 50% of their testosterone get sourced through their blood while they're drunk.
Tangent: Discussion about girl bullying by text messaging. Sandi then tells of the first time she came to the UK, after being thrown out of an American school at age 14. She went to boarding school for 6 weeks, and no-one talked to her because of her New York accent. She managed to make it more British by watching the film, Brief Encounter. This leads to Stephen saying that if he was getting bullied at school, he'd tell them not to, because it would give him an erection.
Tangent: Killer Whales can kill their own handlers. Sandi's granny got taken out of three care homes for bad behaviour.
Tangent: Sandi's mum grew up in Maidstone, Kent during the Battle of Britain, and all the terraced houses on her street were bombed apart from hers, she asked her mother why it wasn't and she replied "Granny wouldn't have allowed it". This leads to Sandi's suggestion that the army should be just grannies.
Tangent: Female moustaches and Alan's grey pubic hair.
Tangent: The Tollemache family. They were a double-barrelled family, so they were the Tollemache-Tollemaches, but it was pronounced "Toolmake-Tollmash". One of their family had the longest name of any person in the British Army, Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His elder brither was Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Neville Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His initials spelt out LYONEL THE SECOND.

Episode 8 "Germany"

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Theme
Topics
Tangent: The whole notion about Germans "hogging the sunloungers" is supposedly a myth according to a the German writer Ralf Höcker who did a study, which said that the Germans weren't even aware that this thing was associated with them, but a survey done by Halifax Travel Insurance in 2009 showed that the Germans followed by the British were the most likely to reserve sunloungers. This leads to Jo telling a story about crashing into a sunlounger after a confrontation with some fat Germans.
Tangent: The other German stereotype is the fact that they are so efficient, which they themselves believe, but they think that the British think they are lederhosen wearing beer drinkers. The 6 major thoughts that the Germans think that the British are untidy, split into mobs, obsessed with royalty, drink tea all the time, are rather reserved and can't cook.
Tangent: Sean claims that the reason why Premier League footballers get booked for taking their shirt off is because that's when the sponsors are in full view, so by taking them off the sponsors get less coverage.
Tangent: Lederhosen originated in the 18th century when it was decided that the upper classes would ape the peasantry and have expensive wedding and country feasts where they pretended to be extravagant, like Marie Antoinette pretended to be a milkmaid with her silver curls.
Tangent: Rob shows off his "half-hose" socks, which Jo says make him look like a "knobhead". Rob then asks the audience if they think it's cool, with the majority disagreeing.
Tangent: In America, there are a group of people known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are descended from the Rhineland and Switzerland. The reason they are referred to as "Dutch", is because the word "Deutsch" which is German for "German" is correctly used as the word "Dutch", so "Dutch" is "Deutsch". The other reason is the "Dutch Dutch" (or the Hollanders) fought Britain many times and eventually invaded England. (Forfeit: don't mention the war (Jo - although she tried to pass the buck on to Stephen!))
Tangent: During the discussion, a picture is shown of Hitler wearing socks similar to what Rob is wearing.
Tangent: Rob's idea to use giant Jengas to get prisoners out of prison, followed by Alan's idea of using snakes and ladders.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Alan tells of the time that he went to the 1998 FIFA World Cup in Bordeaux, France, where some temporary bars were built up in the city, and when Scotland played Norway, the Scots drank more beer that weekend then the entire population of Bordeaux drink in a year. Each of the bars only sold lager, and there were no food stalls and no toilets. One of the drunk Scots then mistook Alan for Alan Partridge.
Cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels, doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Another of these loanwords id Gesundheit, which means "soundness" or "health".
Tangent: Rob tells of how when he sits down on the toilet, his half-hose falls down to his ankles, if he's wearing something like a jumbo cord. Sean then says that when he's on the toilet, he takes his glasses off and puts them on his pants as a sort of hammock, but then he sometimes forgets they're there and they get "rammed into his under-regions".
Tangent: Sean says that is he were a nudist, he'd put a bit of toilet paper up his bottom and see if anyone noticed.
General Ignorance

Episode 9 "Gallimaufrey"

The full episode title "A Gallimaufrey of Gingambobs", means "an absurd medley of testicles".

Broadcast date
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Stephen then explains that there wasn't much point in doing this because the British Psychological Society says that graphology as a way of interpreting character has zero validity. It's also not allowed in American courts either. Although, forensic graphology is allowable. Amazingly, 3,000 British businesses use graphologists for recruitment.

Tangent: Andy once took a handwriting test to try and become a French train driver. He reveals that his friend's dad was a psychologist for SNCF, and they did test to work out if drivers were maniacs or not, so they made people write with their wrong hand, and put a rubber ring around the middle of the pen and you had to try and trace over what was written there. If you drifted up the page, you were either assertive or slightly aggressive, but if it went down the page, you were deemed as too passive. There was also another test where the applicants were told to press the coloured button they were told to press for 15 seconds and there would be a hooter sounded, if they got it wrong. It would also be heard after the 15 seconds, to make sure they didn't go to pieces.
Tangent: Up until 14 May 2002, women in Lithuania were made to undergo smear tests, or to be more accurate, a gynaecological examination. In China, they have a driving test that consists of 100 multiple choice questions. One of them is "If you come across a road accident victim whose intestines are lying on the road, should you pick them up and push them back in?" Yes or No? The answer is No. It was believed that in China that some traffic lights had the colour sequence altered, so red meant go and green meant stop, but they didn't change all the lights, so some still remained at red for stop and green for go, although in some cases, blue is used instead of green, because red-green is a common form of colour blindness.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Cola, as well as HP Sauce and vinegar are very good at cleaning coins.
Tangent: Andy's mum used to tell him not to drink cola, because it stains the inside of your stomach.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Phill tells of how he used to sleep listening to BBC World Service, and then waking up listening to BBC Radio 4 and thinking he'd dreamt the news that he heard during his sleep, so thought he was psychic. This leads to Stephen telling a story of how he raided the kitchen at boarding school at 3am, just to get blocks of jelly.
Tangent: Andy tells the story of a binman who worked near his house at Hernhill, who always sung the last note of Don't Cry for Me Argentina wrongly.
Tangent: When the American Indians went on dawn raids they used to drink lots of water to make sure they got up early.
Tangent: Andy has a cuckoo clock, which has a monkey, instead of a cuckoo in it, and it only comes out whenever he says something interesting.
Tangent: Alan was once told by Steve Cram that some trainers have to expensively made so people will buy them, an example of "prestige pricing".
Tangent: The Goldilocks Zone is the distance from the Sun that another planet has to be in another solar system which would support water where it wasn't too hot or cold.

Episode 10 "Greats"

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Tangent: There does seem to be cases of heightism in the workplace, short people are paid less than taller people and is comparable in magnitude to race and gender. A study of Fortune 500 companies shows 90% of the chief executives of those companies are above average height, and 30% of those are above 6'2".
General Ignorance
Tangent: Discussion about 18th century paintings depicting horses with small heads.
Tangent: Sean tells of how he once sat next to Lionel Blair, and that he never got the chance to tell his grandmother that fact.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: In the Nazi concentration camps, the Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles on their uniforms, the Jews had yellow stars, the gays had pink triangles.
Tangent: As mentioned in Series C, Samuel Pepys famously buried some Parmesan cheese in his garden to protect it from the Great Fire.
Tangent: Discussion of why cheese has a sell-by date on it.
Tangent: Sean mixing up the Great Train Robbery with the plot of the film Herbie Rides Again. The Great Train Robbery took place on 8 August 1963 and the amount of money stolen was the equivalent of £40 million in today's money. The train was a post office train that was being sent to burn used £1, £5 and £10 notes.
Tangent: The main reason why the Great Train Robbery was referred to as "Great", was because it was simply a train robbery. In 1903, the first ever film that was based on a story, rather than just looking at nature was released and it was called The Great Train Robbery.
Tangent: Alan tells of a café near him that does "good ol' English grub" and on the table there are 3 different menus, one has Sid James and Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film, one has Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their overcoats and the other has the Kray twins.
Tangent: A recent discovery in San Diego Zoo has revealed that pandas don't need Viagra or panda pornography to get sexually excited. It's believed that if they swap cages and smell the secretions in each other's cage, then they're up for it.

Episode 11 "Gifts"

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Recording date
Panellists
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Tangent: Since 1992, there has been a ban on all imports from Cuba to the United States, but most United Nations countries have condemned this boycott, except for Israel and Palau.
Tangent: Jan explains that performing impressions of other people's physical movements and mannerisms is called echopraxia. An impression of the way they speak is called echolalia.
Tangent: Trollope also invented the post box, but he regretted doing so. The problem was that women were now able to communicate freely at post offices, because before the post box, every woman had to go to their father or servant to put the stamp on, but now they could do send the letters themselves, so could have relationships without their parents' consent.
Tangent: The subject of the first impression recorded was Socrates in The Clouds, a play by Aristophanes. Socrates was put to death for corrupting youths.
Tangent: An old Greek joke provided by Jimmy that still works today, "A barber asks "How do you want your hair cut?", and the person says "In silence"."
Tangent: In reference to the first question, you're not allowed to bring in anything into America that has been made in a prison, but the prisoners are effectively slave labour. 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests and ID tags and other military essentials are made in jail, along with 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture, which allows the USA to compete with Mexico. All prisoners are forced to work, failure to comply leads to solitary confinement.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Baring-Gould is also believed to have been at a children's party he asked a small girl, "And whose little girl are you?" whereon she burst into tears, and said: "I'm yours, Daddy." He did however have 15 children, so could have been easily confused. Alan tells how a comedian was asked after an act who his agent was, and the comedian replied "You are".
Tangent: Art collector Edward James recalled in his autobiography, his mother shouting "Nanny! I'm going to church. I want one of my daughters to go with me." The nanny then asked which one. Mrs. James replied "The one with the red hair, she'll go with this coat."
Tangent: If you tried to use Newtonian mechanics, by getting everyone to jump up at the same time, the Earth would a tiny bit, but it would be cancelled out by Newton's third law of motion.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Despite the United States-Cuba boycott, you can still get flights to Miami, and people on the flights wear massive coats to hide things that they're not allowed to bring on board from security.
Tangent: In recent times, the Academy Awards goody bag have had to be declared against tax. The 2008 Academy Awards goody bags were worth £57,000. They included a £15,000 holiday, an espresso machine, a cashmere blanket worth £855 and a white gold pearl and diamond pendant worth £740. At the BAFTAs, you get given Tic Tacs and at the British Comedy Awards, they used to give out bowls of Minstrels, as well as plenty of alcohol.
Tangent: Jan tells of the story about one of the first cheapskates, Diogenes the Cynic.
Tangent: It was almost impossible to do an impression of Gladstone or Disraeli in the 19th century, as the population was so big, it would be hard to know if the impression was accurate at all. Harold Macmillan met Peter Cook at the Fortune Theatre, and Cook impersonated Macmillan, the first time a Prime Minister had been impersonated. In 1737, Robert Walpole created an act which forbade any person from doing political satire on him, it also gave the Lord Chamberlain the powers to approve any play before it was staged, with the exception of The Establishment Club.
Tangent: Clive once got given some homing pigeons, which returned to their original owners after a couple of weeks.

Episode 12 "Gravity"

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Tangent: The idea of a gravity train isn't feasible on Earth, but it's possible on the Moon, because there is no molten core, but it would take 53 minutes to go through the Moon.
Tangent: Alan tried to answer which was heavier, a ton of gold or a ton of feathers, but since gold is measured in troy weight, rather than avoirdupois, a ton of gold is heavier than a ton of feathers.
Tangent: Similarly, Isaac Newton's law of gravitation were thought out before he published them in 1687, which was a whole 100 years before the Montgolfier brothers did their first flight in a hot air balloon.
Tangent: The first people to cross the English Channel by air were Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his American backer. While on the flight, they had a massive argument involving their nations, who they were both very proud of. So, Blanchard put on lead weights to give the balloon more ballast, meaning that Jeffries would have to get out, so Blanchard would become the first man to cross, but then both their national flags fell out of the balloon as well. Then they dropped out of the sky too early, so they had to jettison all their food and instruments, as well as the sandbags, before taking all their clothing off and they then peed and pooed out of the basket, and they just made it over the cliffs and landed in a tree to get the record.
Tangent: In World War II, the USS Phoenix managed to survive the attack on Pearl Harbor without even a scratch, it was known as the luckiest ship in the United States Navy. It was sunk in 1982, after it had been sold to Argentina and renamed General Belgrano, which still remains the only ship sunk by a nuclear submarine, with the loss of over 300 lives.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Stephen met an armourer in America who worked on Westerns all his life and said that the only 2 people never to blink when firing a gun were Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. Alan Davies abruptly said one of them was Kenneth Williams.
Tangent: A joke from Stephen: "What do you get when you put "it" in gravy?" – Gravity.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: A discussion about the film Brazil, change machines, tubes, the dangers of aeroplane toilets and sucking up prairie dogs with a grain elevator.
Tangent: In those days, they used a barometer as an altimeter when flying.
Tangent: The body mass index is your weight divided by your height squared. Although the BMI has flaws, because muscular people would be classed as overweight, because of all their toned muscles, but marathon runners would also be classified as malnourished and underweight.
Tangent: Bill reveals the time that he played Adolf Hitler in a play called "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", and his mum said that Bill looked great looking like Hitler.
Tangent: Stephen tells of a Utopian way of exchanging bicycles that happened in Cambridge, where people would just exchange bikes wherever they wanted and it lasted just 2 days.
Tangent: Bill tells of the time he lost a charity limbo dancing match to Sinitta and Lionel Blair. He came 3rd, and Lionel Blair won.
General Ignorance
Tangent: The recommended daily allowance of wine in the United Kingdom is 21 units per week. In Poland, it's 12.5, in Canada, it's 23.75 and in America, it's 24.5, in South Africa and Denmark, it's 31.5 and in Australia, it's 35. In the UK, if you drank between 21 and 30 units, you'd be in the group of people in the lowest mortality rate in the country. To be on the same level as a teetotaller, you'd have to drink 63 units a week, the equivalent of a whole bottle of wine a day. Although, it was later admitted by the person who made the claim, that he made the number up, and was just asked to think of a number.

Episode 13 "Gothic"

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Recording date
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Theme
Topics
Tangent: The man in American Gothic was Grant Wood's dentist.
Tangent: Discussion about why everyone wanted to paint their bedrooms black, like Goths.
Tangent: Jimmy points out how the woman in American Gothic looks like Gail Platt from Coronation Street.
Tangent: Discussion about van Gogh giving his ear to a prostitute, and the "possibility" of it being a primitive bugging device, which leads to Alan telling of the similarity between that and the alien in the John Sayles film The Brother from Another Planet.
Tangent: In Seattle, there is a company called SeeMeRot.com, where you can have cameras put into coffins, so you can the person inside disintegrate (This is most likely a hoax).[2] Their slogan is "Being dead and buried doesn't mean you can't have friends over!". This leads to a discussion about being buried alive.
General Ignorance
Tangent: On the top 10 list of play-off tunes for people who die is the theme tune to Countdown.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: Discussion about The Da Vinci Code being a book about "bad monks" and about the fact that Grant Wood sounds like the name of a porn star.
Tangent: Discussion about early Goths, such as Alice Cooper, Robert Smith of The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux.
Tangent: Discussion of the new theory that van Gogh lost his ear in a fight with Paul Gauguin. van Gogh was never good with girls either, the parents of a girl he liked refused him access, so he stood with his hand being burnt by a flame of a candle until he could see her, but her father just blew it out and told him to go away.
Tangent: The exponential growth originated with the rice and chessboard problem, in which a guy puts one piece of rice on the first chessboard piece, then 2 on the next, 4 on the next, etc. The total number of grains needed to fill the board is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (2^64 – 1), which is the amount of rice that would be made in 80 years, if all the arable land was converted.
Tangent: Even though zombies and voodoo are associated with Haiti, it originated in West Africa. "Zombie" comes from the West African word, "nzambi".
Tangent: Jimmy once took his brother through a graveyard and he thought that people who were buried under gravestones with curly bits on the top were chefs.
Tangent: Other odd methods of burials include being turned into compost by being dissolved in liquid nitrogen then being vibrated, then a magnet is used to remove mercury and other metals that could harm the making of it. Then 25–30 kilograms are left over which then gets made into a coffin made out of maize or potato starch, and then you're buried and rot into the earth and biodegrade within 6–12 months.
Tangent: The panellists try to explain to Stephen what the reverse cowgirl is.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Another popular play-off tune is Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. The next track on their album after Bohemian Rhapsody is Another One Bites the Dust.

Episode 14 "Greeks"

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Notes
Theme
Topics
Tangent: At The Battle of Thermopylae, the 300 Spartans were accompanied by 700 Thespians.
Tangent: The word "laconic" means taking your time before you answer.
Tangent: Other things involving the word "gymnos", were "gymnopaedia", where young naked boys went out dancing in public festivals and "gymnologise" means "to debate while naked".
Tangent: Up until the 1948 games there was a medal for town planning.
Tangent: The oldest person to win an Olympic medal was a Briton called John Copley, who won a silver medal in the 1948 engravings and etchings event, aged 73.
Tangent: If the medals today were made out of 18 carat gold, they'd be worth £3,000, or £1.5 million for the whole competition.
Tangent: There is no lead in pencils, as mentioned in series A.
Tangent: Only 161,000 tonnes of gold has ever been mined in human history, most of it being in the last 50 years
Tangent: The island of Yap in Micronesia, used hole shaped stones as its currency, and it makes it a fixed money supply.
Tangent: There are now space debris lawyers to ensure any junk that hits an Earth-orbiting satellite.
General Ignorance
Tangent: In space meteor temperatures are between −240°C and −270°C, inside and outside.
Tangent: Around 50,000 meteorites above 20 grams fall into Earth every year, most of them are lost at sea and most of the rest are found in Antarctica.
Tangent: No human has ever died from a meteorite, a dog was killed by one in Egypt in 1911 and a boy from Uganda was hit, but not seriously hurt by one in 1992.
Tangent: More people outside Finland understand Latin than Finnish.
Tangent: There is a Finnish singer called Jukka Ammondt who has done covers of Elvis Presley songs in Latin.
QI XL Extras
Tangent: The suffix "ship", as in "battleship" or "championship" is of Germanic origin. All the f's in German become p's and the Arabic language removed all its p's. This is known as the fricative shift.
Tangent: Caligula liked to have solid gold food and fish that were blue.
Tangent: A vomitorium was not a place used to throw up food, but was actually an exit from a theatre.
Tangent: tactical chundering.
Tangent: Gymnasiums were originally designed to be places where the middle classes trained for battle. They then became places of education, the two most famous ones being the Academy and the Lyceum. The Academy was where Plato taught and was named after Akademos.
Tangent: The word Odeon as used to describe a movie theatre was named by Oscar Deutsch, who used his initials "OD", to name the cinema chain he created.
Tangent: David O'Keefe created counterfeit Rai stones on Yap and ruined its economy.
Tangent: Eugen Sandow and Monsieur Attila created the bodybuilding craze, later made more famous by Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They made their fame by doing shows in London, and their fans were only allowed to touch them with smelling salts nearby in case they fainted.
Tangent: Phill has a tattoo of a Greek helmet on his wrist (actually the logo for Trojan Records).
\begin{array}{rl} \mbox{Ax. 1.} & P(\varphi) \land \Box\; \forall x [\varphi(x) \rightarrow \psi(x)] \rightarrow P(\psi)\\ \mbox{Ax. 2.} & P(\neg \varphi) \leftrightarrow \neg P(\varphi)\\ \mbox{Th. 1.} & P(\varphi) \rightarrow \Diamond\; \exists x\; [\varphi(x)]\\ \mbox{Df. 1.} & G(x) \iff \forall \varphi[P(\varphi) \rightarrow \varphi(x)]\\ \mbox{Ax. 3.} & P(G)\\ \mbox{Th. 2.} & \Diamond\; \exists x\; G(x)\\ \mbox{Df. 2.} & \varphi\;\operatorname{ess}\;x \iff \varphi(x) \land \forall\psi\lbrace\psi(x) \rightarrow \Box\; \forall x[\varphi(x) \rightarrow \psi(x)]\rbrace\\ \mbox{Ax. 4.} & P(\varphi) \rightarrow \Box\; P(\varphi)\\ \mbox{Th. 3.} & G(x) \rightarrow G\;\operatorname{ess}\;x\\ \mbox{Df. 3.} & E(x) \iff \forall \varphi[\varphi\;\operatorname{ess}\;x \rightarrow \Box\; \exists x\; \varphi(x)]\\ \mbox{Ax. 5.} & P(E)\\ \mbox{Th. 4.} & \Box\; \exists x\; G(x) \end{array}
Tangent: Stephen was in the film I.Q., where Lou Jacobi played Gödel and Walter Matthau played Einstein. Matthau taught Stephen how to gamble.
General Ignorance
Tangent: When Greece won UEFA Euro 2004, a pub near where Alan lived made a homemade blue plaque, which said that a Greek person ran naked down the New North Road to celebrate Greece's victory.
Bonus: Because Alan was in last place, Stephen gave him the chance to switch his points with that of the audience (in a reference to the first question), if he could say what the audience got their points for.

Episode 15 "Green"

Broadcast date
Recording date
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Topics
Tangent: In the book, the monster is called Adam.
Tangent: 1.5 million mobile phones are thrown away in the UK every year.
Tangent: All the gold ever mined in human history would form a cube 55 feet (17 m) square.
Tangent: A discussion of the 24-hour clock.
Tangent: The Babylonians devised a 12-hour clock, because they had a base-12 counting system.
Tangent: Jeremy talks about reaching the Magnetic North Pole.
Tangent: Adolf Hitler was not a vegetarian.
Tangent: Bill talks of his tortoise's leg amputation.
Tangent: Attacks on people by cows.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Female mosquitoes are attracted by moisture, lactic acid, carbon dioxide, body heat and movement.
Tangent: Sugar-based Cocktails

Episode 16 "Geometry"

Broadcast date
Recording date
Panellists
Notes
Buzzers
Topics
Tangent: David's rant about people going on about wearing striped clothing.
Tangent: Johnny's rant at Stephen giving ridiculously easy questions.
Tangent: This research was also done by Dr. Peter Thompson, who happens to be in the audience at this recording, and "upsets" Johnny by saying that despite the fact that Johnny is wearing horizontal stripes, he doesn't look too thin.
Tangent: In the Huambisa language of South America, 98% of people who didn't speak it, when hearing the words "chunchuikit" and "mauts", and asked which was a bird, and which was a fish, thought that "chunchuikit" was a bird and "mauts" was a fish.
Tangent: Rob claims that the Welsh for carrot is "moron" (which, in fact, it is), which he thinks is wrong, but then Stephen informs him that "moron" comes from the Greek for "blunt", hence "oxymoron" means "sharp blunt".
Tangent: The main reason why the International Date Line is squiggly and the Greenwich Meridian is straight, is because that the Date Line tries not to got through land, so it goes round island territories.
General Ignorance
Tangent: Despite looking evil and hideous to us, sharks have more reason to fear humans, than the other way round. Their teeth structure is also amazing, considering that they point backwards and every time one falls out, one from the row behind moves forward.

Episode 17 "Compilation Part 1"

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Theme

Episode 18 "Compilation Part 2"

Broadcast Date
Theme

References

General
Specific
  1. ^ Lloyd, John (20 August 2008). "QI creator says BBC1 is 'our natural home'". Broadcast. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/2008/08/blog_qi_creator_on_its_move_to_bbc1.html. Retrieved 8 May 2009. 
  2. ^ "What a load of rot!". 13 March 2011. http://www.qi.com/qi_quibble_blog/2011/03/what-a-load-of-rot.html. Retrieved 29 April 2011. 
  3. ^ Footnote: It was mentioned here that in the 1900 Summer Olympics, there was a gold medal for Poodle Clipping where a farmer's wife won by clipping 17 poodles in two hours. This was an April's Fool joke created by The Daily Telegraph in the run up to the Beijing Olympics. QI are now aware of this. Hooper, Andy (15 August 2008). "How Telegraph struck Olympic poodle-clipping gold in Beijing". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/olympics/2565840/How-Telegraph-struck-Olympic-poodle-clipping-gold-in-Beijing.html. Retrieved 8 March 2010. , "April Fool (Poodle Clipping)". QI Talk Forum. 15 August 2008. http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=18298&start=0&sid=b8c802f93d7a4bb8adea41370ab2a001. Retrieved 8 March 2010. .
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