Good evening!
Welcome to the QI petting zoo,
where today we are particularly
petting animal pals beginning with P.
At crossed porpoises, Danny Baker.
Thank you. Thank you.
It's that ptarmigan, Phill Jupitus.
Starts with a P!
Cos it's spelled with a P.
And this should put the cat among the pigeons.
It's only Teri Hatcher!
And our very own prawn star, Alan Davies!
And their buzzers this week are birds beginning with P.
Danny Peacock.
Phill Parrot.
I think that was R2-D2.
Teri, Penguin.
And Alan Partridge.
A-ha!
Seeing as it's our P animal show,
there's bound to be at least one question about pigs,
so what I want you to do is to look out for one of those
and, if you spot it,
then you have a pig and you can throw the pig and shout, "Pig!"
For extra pig points. Now...
First question, complete this sentence.
Donald Trump is the first President in 168 years not to have...
Come on, anyone!
Not to have what? A trace of common decency?
Empathy? Empathy...
Charm.
These are all too obvious.
I'm going to go with not to have the ability to pee standing up.
Wow.
So since 1850.
What happened in 1850?
Coronation Street started.
It's all the whole show is about.
Oh, pet, animal!
Pets. He's the first President not to have a pet in the White House.
He's got Melania.
They all had pets. Thomas Jefferson had two bear cubs.
Benjamin Harrison had two opossums
called Mr Reciprocity and Mr Protection.
What?! Franklin D Roosevelt had a great Dane, rather confusingly
called President.
Herbert Hoover's son Allan had a pair of alligators.
Teddy Roosevelt, I think,
gets the prize for best Presidential pet owner.
Nine dogs, two ponies, two cats, a hen, a lizard, a blue macaw,
a garter snake named Emily Spinach...
..named by his daughter Alice
because it's "as green as spinach and as thin as my Aunt Emily".
A small bear, a piebald rat, a pig, a rabbit, a laughing hyena,
a barn owl, a one-legged rooster and five guinea pigs.
He also had six children.
Seems a lot, and a badger called Josiah.
He also had a pony called Algonquin.
He was so beloved by the President's son Archie and that when he was sick
in bed, his brothers Kermit...
Kermit and Quentin brought the pony up in the lift.
"We'll bring the pony up to the room now!"
"Where would you like your pony?"
I don't think mother would allow that!
In 1940, Franklin D Roosevelt was given a Scottish Terrier puppy
that he named Murray the Outlaw of Falahill
after one of his Scottish ancestors, and it was known as Fala
and it travelled everywhere with the President.
He became a celebrity in his own right.
He had his own secretary to answer fan mail.
That's him there with the genius Eleanor Roosevelt,
who really was the power behind
the throne in that particular presidency.
During the Battle of the Bulge - the last sort of big German offensive in
the Second World War - the American soldiers used to ask each other
the name of the President's dog, and if you got the answer Fala,
you knew it probably wasn't a German who was masquerading as an American.
Donald Trump is the first President of the United States
to steer clear of any petting in the White House.
Oh!
I'm just going to let that live in the air for a little bit.
Now, who here is afraid of a tiny dancer called sparklemuffin?
It's going to be an animal, isn't it?
It is, because I said at the beginning,
the whole show is about animals.
Is it one of us who's afraid of it?
I think Phill might be afraid of it. What are you afraid of, Phill?
I'm loosely arachnophobic.
Yes. I don't favour the eight-legged groove machines.
What is it you don't like about them? Is it this?
No, I quite like that.
I think you may have cured me, Hatcher.
That's what I'm here for!
That's shock therapy that I wasn't expecting.
I'm trying to think what I'm afraid of - hang on a minute.
Anyway, here's the thing.
I think you're going to be cured of the whole arachnophobia,
because this is the cutest spider of all time.
The sparklemuffin is a nickname given by researchers
to a newly discovered species of peacock spider.
So these are chia seeds,
and a single one is the size of a chia seed -
that's how tiny, tiny they are.
There are other species -
there is one called a circuit board peacock spider. It's got
a pattern like an electrical circuit board, and there it is.
And there's the bat-like peacock spider, the elephant peacock spider,
which looks honestly like it's got a picture of an elephant
on its bottom. They are really, really small,
and not only are they the only known dancing spiders,
they're also home to nature's smallest rainbow. No!
They diffract light from their bottom,
and it's the only known example of...
You're suddenly excited by this!
No, I was just picturing being able
to have rainbows coming out my bottom. Yes! Now we are!
It's not even raining!
Let's have a look and see if we can see it dancing.
Oh, my gosh!
It's cute!
Look, check it out! That music has been added on after, hasn't it?
I'm pretty sure he's not playing that.
He's miming. So they've tried to recreate
the colours on these microscopic bottoms,
and they simply can't replicate them.
They've used engineers, biologists, physicists.
I've worked a long time to try to be able to make my butt move like that.
And have a rainbow come out of it.
Rainbows or no rainbows, that's awesome.
Being able to move like that.
Half the ones that we know about have been named by a single person -
Australia's Dr Jurgen Otto -
he works for the Australian Department of Agriculture.
He says they have personalities
to match their brilliant colours and intricate dances.
He said, "They display curiosity and fear",
"they hide behind leaves when they're scared,"
"so I often compare them to puppies and kittens."
The female has to be a virgin, that's a pre-requisite for mating,
and then he'll do the dance for her for a couple of minutes.
Not in Essex!
Sorry, it's an open goal. I know, I know.
You just lost Billericay, didn't you?
Sparklemuffin is a tiny dancer with an extremely attractive backside,
which gets Phill Jupitus into a highly emotional state.
What's black and white and pissed all over?
Oh... Er...
A penguin that got into a pirate's stash of rum.
Oh!
Wow!
Wow! Seriously, that was impressive.
Yeah!
No, OK, so it is the giant panda.
In order to introduce giant panda cubs into the wild,
the researchers at China's Wolong Nature Reserve,
they dressed as adult pandas,
and they covered themselves in panda pee.
Why might they do that?
Because they're perverts!
Watching panda porn all night,
which is a very slow watch, I have to say.
Something to do with settling the young ones in the wild, is it?
Yes, here's the thing about pandas - they look very cute,
but let's remember the bear part of their name.
Yeah. They are still aggressive, you don't want them to go into
villages and go, "Oh, those nice people!"
So they wanted them to feel that they were with actual pandas,
and the way to do that is to cover them in the panda urine
so they don't smell of human beings.
The extent to which it's related to the red panda,
that's been debated backwards and forwards. But it isn't, really.
The giant panda is a bear, the red panda is closer to a racoon.
But they have recently discovered
why they've got black-and-white fur. Oh!
The black bits help to camouflage them in the summer,
and the white bits help to camouflage them in the winter.
And it was discovered by a guy called Tim Caro -
he's a University of California biologist -
and he's the same researcher who spent ten years working out
why zebras are black and white. Cheap licence.
It's probably to deter flies who, for some reason,
it is unclear, do not like landing on striped surfaces.
"Oh, no, I'm not going down there!"
I've been to Africa, and I saw plenty of flies around the zebras.
Yes, but they don't land.
Oh, they don't land!
They spin around going, "Has anybody seen a horse,"
"a plain horse?"
That is another thing, if you take a zebra to a supermarket
and you fire a bar code gun at it, it says "zebra".
If you are working in Wolong Nature Reserve
and you're not covered in wee,
you are in danger of causing panda-monium.
Ohh! Hey!
Thank you.
Now for a question on perilous primates.
Who has got the most dangerous elbows?
A chimp.
That seems so obvious. I thought it would go off.
You don't get the buzzer? You don't get the buzzer?
You want me to tell you? Yeah.
It's the slow loris.
Oh! It's the only known venomous primate.
"Come on, Loris, chop chop!"
"I'm not in a hurry."
It has venom... "I'm not in a hurry."
"I'm actually completely lost. It's pitch-black."
"But I've got my poisonous elbows with me wherever I go!"
It has a patch on its elbow, which...
Does it smoke? No, it literally...
It activates it by being mixed with saliva.
What? If it bit you, a human being, it could cause anaphylactic shock,
it can cause death... Wow. ..and they are all endangered.
There are about eight species of slow loris. Well, good! No!
So it licks its elbow, activates the poison in its mouth...
And then it bites you. That's correct. It's a SLOW Loris...
It is a slow loris. So not only is it slow,
its enemy has to wait for it to lick its own elbow
before it goes into action. Yeah. But once it...
We all kind of want to try it!
Here is the really sad thing about it.
Because they look sort of passive,
they have got those marvellous big eyes, lots of people want them
as pets, and this is really sad that people pull their teeth...
Ahh!
I know! ..and they die of infection.
But the reason they have the big eyes is they've evolved to mimic
cobras. It is an astonishing thing,
and they can not only hiss
but they can undulate in a serpentine fashion,
because they've got an extra vertebrae in their spines.
They seem to have evolved to frighten off people.
They don't want to use the venom would seem to be the thing.
There's a wonderful description by a man called John Still,
writing in 1905 in Sri Lanka.
He's the very first person to record confusing a slow loris with a cobra.
"I saw the outline of a cobra sitting up with hood expanded
"and threatening a cat who crouched about six feet away.
"This was the loris who, with his arms and shoulders hunched up,
"was a sufficiently good imitation of a cobra to take me in
"as he swayed on his long legs and, every now and then,
"let out a perfect cobra's hiss." Wow. Wow.
Wonderful creature.
Now, let's practise a little German.
What type of animal is a Stachelschwein?
Oh! Yes.
Did you throw a pig at me?!
OK, so not that one.
What about a Wasserschwein?
Is it like a water vole?
Heading in the right direction. What about a Schweinswal?
These are all sausages.
It's not a walrus or something, is it?
No, what about a Nabelschwein? They're all related, though.
No, they're not related at all.
Why do they keep using that word?
Let's go back. Stachelschwein - or spike pig - is a porcupine.
Ah! A Wasserschwein - or a water pig - is the capybara.
There it is in the middle. Oh, OK.
And a Schweinswal - or pig whale - is a porpoise.
I love capybaras.
I don't know if you've seen one, they're amazing.
Brilliant, yeah. Largest rodent in the world.
They grow to be about four-foot long,
and there is a special Easter feast in Venezuela,
and they eat it like turkey at Thanksgiving.
Apparently, it tastes a bit like rabbit.
It's like a big version of a guinea pig?
Yeah, like a massive version. But you eat it at Easter.
I've been to Peru, and I've eaten guinea pig.
Oh, how was it? In Lima, Peru, there's three of the top 50
restaurants in the world happen to all be in Lima,
and it's really like a national...
Like, everyone eats it, even in these three
Michelin-star restaurants, they make "the best" guinea pig.
And I had a guinea pig as a child, as a pet,
so I tried it twice and I got to the third time, and I was just like,
"I can't do it."
They sell them in Chile anyway on sticks covered in honey,
and there's kids who've been allowed to stay up and watch this
who are sobbing their heart out.
Some of them are dipping a guinea pig in... I know!
Holding it in front of the fire.
"How long do you think it will take?"
The best way to cook it would be to put it in the wheel
in front of the fire and just let it go round.
"Run faster! I want you well-basted!"
Er... A Nabelschwein is actually what's known as a peccary.
It's a distant relative of the pig,
and again you'll find those in South and Central American.
The German phrase which I really like - Innerer Schweinehund -
and it literally means your inner pig dog.
And it's the tiny voice that says to you,
"Stay on the sofa, don't go to the gym."
I speak fluent German.
Do you? No. Oh.
But I have a certificate that says I do.
Why? I went to a comprehensive school,
and we only did German for three months,
and the teacher left, but they asked if we wanted to do a language exam.
Anyway, I was ill on the one day that comprehensives were taking
languages. Anyway, I came back about two days later and they said,
"You've got to be away from everyone - you have to do it on your own."
And they put me in the library on my own to do it.
Well, I couldn't make head nor tail of the paper,
but there was a German dictionary,
and I got 81%,
and as far as the record shows, I am fluent in German.
So you behaved like a Schweinehund! A Schweinehund!
Moving on to palaeontology, we are going to place a tray of finds -
there are you are, you've got them -
and I would like you to identify the fossil.
Now, you can use any part of your body except your hands.
Thank you.
So, how might you identify any of them?
They told me I wouldn't need my glasses.
OK, do you want to borrow mine? Yes. There you go, sweetie.
These are all pebbles from a standard British B road.
OK. So Phill is heading in the right direction.
Can I put it in my mouth? No, you can't.
Teri!
Teri is exactly right, Teri has got the right answer.
Good, good for her!
So they've got various ways of distinguishing fossils
from plain old rocks, but one of the ways you do it is to lick them.
Oh, Jesus!
Pay no attention, I'm going to lick this long one.
That's actually a British sweet.
You don't have to... OK.
I really want to touch it.
No. No.
That's the ringtone I want!
It's hot in here. It's hot.
It is hot in here, Sandi.
So, first of all, you can tell by looking
and you can tell a bit by the texture,
but if all else fails, you can identify fossils by licking them.
Which one do you think is the dinosaur bone? Right...
If you look at, you can see A. B. It's A, the dinosaur bone.
It's stickier than a normal stone,
because it's got calcium in, it's porous.
Which ones did you lick?
Just the one in the middle.
You just licked the one in the middle, OK, good.
That's not as hot as when I did it.
No, it's not as hot. It's no way as hot as when you did it, Teri.
Right, what am I...
B. Try B.
Try B? Yeah, just have a lick of it.
No, don't put it all in your mouth!
Just lick it. Just lick it. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?
It's dinosaur poo! Is it?
What's the correct word for dinosaur poo, or any poo?
Delicious!
It's a coprolite.
Yeah, OK.
So it would stick to the tongue.
You don't necessarily have to touch them with your hands.
There is a place in the United States called Big Bone Lick.
It's in Kentucky. I've never been to Big Bone Lick.
That's so weird!
It's on the top of my list now, though!
It's the birthplace of American palaeontology.
So it's an area of very high mineral content,
and it attracted bison, mastodon, moose,
musk ox and so on. Peccary. And unfortunately, also very marshy,
so the animals got stuck there and they left bones and they were
discovered by 18th-century American explorers.
I've got so much rock in my teeth, I can't function.
Are you eating the rock? I had a bit of it, yeah.
If you want to take the taste of rock out of your mouth,
I recommend the dinosaur shit.
Anything else I can put in my mouth, Sandi? What's this?
Which have you got? I don't know, is this tyrannosaurus penis?
I'll pop it in.
Do you know the phrase, lick into shape?
Anyone know where that comes from? Um...
It's bears - there's the clue.
It was a belief in Medieval Europe that bear cubs were born shapeless
and they had to be made into ursine form by their mother.
I had a different thought.
OK!
Wow. We'll just leave that hanging in the air.
If you want to surprise a palaeontologist,
tell them to lick their own fossils.
Let's put the fossils away. OK.
Which people in this studio should we replace with pigeons?
Like a carrier, like a person who brings you...? Like a PA?
Like a sort of runner who brings you things, like a carrier pigeon?
I love this. No.
So the answer is the camera operators.
So here's the thing - birds can't move their eyes.
Their necks have been designed to keep their heads completely still
when they move, so as they walk, if you look at them,
their heads and their eyes move forward
and then they lock into place, then the body catches up with them.
And then the head darts forward again, locks onto something new,
and the pigeon keeps going.
And that static image is what a good camera operator's trying to achieve.
And pigeons have been used since the early 20th century
as aerial photographers.
The very first person to attach a camera to a pigeon,
he was a German called Julius Neubronner.
It's pronounced "Noy-bru-ner."
"Noy-bru-ner." Thank you, darling.
81%!
That's not great with a dictionary - only 81%.
So this guy, an apothecary from the town of Kronberg near Frankfurt,
and he started receiving prescriptions
from a sanatorium in nearby Falkenstein using pigeon post.
He used to deliver medications back by post,
and he thought this was marvellous. So he got some pigeons of his own,
and then one of his birds came back rather mysteriously fed,
and he attached a camera because he wanted to find out where it had been
fed, and it turned out it was visiting a restaurant on the way,
in a neighbouring town.
Now...
What? Just the elaborate web of bullshit this show constantly...
How is it working the camera?
Because if it's got the camera, and it's flying with one wing,
it's just going to go round and round.
Yeah, IT'S not actually working the camera, if you can imagine.
Going like that...
It's two chambers...
It's two chambers, Alan, and one of them has got gas in it,
and that releases very slowly as the pigeon flies,
and then that would depress the shutter button.
You only get one picture.
You only get one? It's not like the pigeon is going, "Smile, everybody!"
"Going in for a closer look!"
No. Pigeons are perfect camera people,
so it's only a matter of time before they put our team out of work.
What's the...?
You're going to be out of focus for months now!
And now it's time for Alan's pet hate,
the round that we call General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
OK. What does the S on Superman's chest stand for?
Love that noise! Well...
Super.
So it's not an S.
Simon.
How can they type that fast?!
So in the 2013 film, Lois Lane actually asks...
I don't know why I'm telling YOU. I don't either, but...
She actually asks Superman what the S stands for, and it's not an S,
it's a Kryptonian symbol of hope.
It just looks like an S by coincidence.
It looks exactly... Apparently. I should have known that.
You should have, yes. Let's try one you should know.
Superman's real name is of course...
Jor-El. No, it's Kal-El.
Oh, Kal-El, you're right!
Jor-El's the dad. Look at me,
I'm the least Superman knowledgeable person on this panel.
How many episodes did you play Lois Lane?
Clearly not enough.
I guess it was four years times 22, so what's that? 88.
Something like that.
Just look at this picture of you.
Can I just say, that picture of you was, at the time on the internet,
the most downloaded image in the world?
Yeah, it was only because that was like the beginning of the internet.
No, doesn't she look amazing? Look at that picture.
So why did you reveal it straightaway?
You should've had us sitting here for 20 minutes going...
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba,
ba-ba-ba-ba-ba...
Any minute now.
Dial-up AOL... Dial-up, right.
But Lois is not Superman's only love interest.
Lana Lang. Lana Lang.
Same initials, so he can keep the tattoo, which I quite like.
Very good. Because the best bit in the story is his disguise,
isn't it? He only has glasses on, then he takes them off.
Which of course is why I really know nothing,
because if I was fooled by glasses on, glasses off...
Wait, take your glasses off.
Oh, my God, where did Sandi go?
Yeah, exactly.
Somebody bring back Sandi - she's running the whole thing!
Thank God you're back!
Oh! We were really lost there.
Superman's S stands for s...
hope.
How does the crow fly?
A-ha! Yeah, Alan?
In a straight line, directly to its destination.
Anybody else? Round and round in circles.
Constantly lost.
No, they did a study at Oxford University, and it is true that
crows and pigeons use
natural magnetic and solar compasses to navigate,
but that's not as important as their knowledge of human transport routes.
So let's imagine that a crow is travelling from Portsmouth
to the Peak District.
It would follow the M275...
..then the M3.
It would get on the M40 to Oxfordshire,
take the A46 to Coventry and follow the M1 for 62 miles.
Really, that's true? Yes, darling, everything I say is true.
There's a start-up company in the Netherlands called Crowded Cities,
and they're trying to get crows to recognise cigarette butts
and drop them into a bin,
and if the camera in the bin recognises the object
as a cigarette butt, it gives the creature some food.
Wow. What sort of food?
It'll be, you know, a bit of grain.
You know, I'm just saying that sometimes when you're abroad
and you've spent all your loose money...
You get a bit peckish... And if it's something yummy...
You're going to pick up cigarette butts and put them...?
Damn straight. OK. And I'll wear a crow suit while I do it.
Cover yourself in panda pee.
Let's not be silly. Sorry.
OK.
Now, how many tentacles does an octopus have?
Ooh!
Isn't it eight?
One? No.
Two. Two?
No.
Ten.
Ten? Ten? No.
Is it none? It's none.
So we used to use tentacles as interchangeable with arms,
but the modern convention is
if an invertebrate structure has suckers
along its entire length, that's an arm.
If it only has suckers at the tip, that's a tentacle.
So octopuses have eight arms, but they have no tentacles at all.
So the ones that do have tentacles are things like jellyfish
and sea anemones and coral.
Octopus suckers not only suck but they can also smell and taste,
and they can stick to any surface except...
The television.
Themselves. They never stick to octopus skin,
because that would be annoying.
But enough of our imaginary menagerie,
it's time for the scores.
In first place, as proud as a peacock...
Oh, my goodness - with -7, it's Danny.
Oh, excellent! Thank you.
In second place with -18, it's Phill.
In third place, making a fantastic debut with -38, it's Teri.
And in last place, as sick as a parrot,
with -54, it's Alan.
Thank you to Teri, Phill, Danny and Alan.
That's all from us, so goodnight.