This programme contains some strong language
Hello and welcome to a Piecemeal episode of QI,
featuring pieces, PCs, and PC gone mad.
Joining me in the safe space are the achingly inoffensive, Jimmy Carr...
..committed to impartiality, Sally Phillips...
..very much on message, Gyles Brandreth...
..and prepared in an area where
nobody touches their nuts, Alan Davies.
And we've toned down their buzzers this week to avoid giving offence.
Sally goes...
Oh, this is nice. Gyles goes...
Jimmy goes...
And Alan's is very PC indeed...
Step away from the car, please sir!
Tonight, I'll be giving extra points for politeness,
and the really super thing about it is that if any of you gets a bonus
point then everyone else gets one as well.
So we're all winners.
Hoorah!
First off, we are going to have our collars felt by PC Plod.
How can you tell if a PC is cut out for the job?
Is it about... Yes?
Making dummy policemen...
Yes! ..and then deterring criminals by placing them strategically.
This is exactly right! So you get points. Everybody gets points!
I'm slightly miffed that I finally
get points, and everyone else gets points as well.
I know. Life's a bugger.
Um, so various police forces have experimented with stationing
cardboard cut out police officers at potential crime scenes instead of
actual officers, and they have experienced,
honestly, startling results.
In 2013, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police,
they put two cut-outs in bike rack cages at a place called
Alewife Station.
And theft rates instantly fell by two thirds.
So let me give you a sense of what that is like.
I have here... Ahh! Yes, I know.
They've made him deliberately tall.
No, no, he's regular height.
No, he isn't! No, he isn't!
No, he's enormous!
He's standing on tiptoes.
Look at how big his head! His head's that wide!
Let us all get up! Come on!
Let's all get a photo! Come and have a picture with the police.
Come, Sally, come and smile with the policeman.
Oh, this is a photo you'll never see again.
Hold on just a moment. Hang on a second.
This opportunity doesn't come that often.
Are you ready? Grandpa's got his camera out.
Darling, darling, darling! That's the audience! I'm so sorry.
Bless him.
It's amazing. I've got so many photographs of my right ear.
You wouldn't believe it.
Oh, I absolutely would believe it.
You know they're filming this, Gyles? You do it.
I'll do it. There we go! There we go!
Smiling, everybody. You haven't got the policeman in it, now?
I don't give a fuck about policemen.
May I share something with you?
What I know about you, Gyles,
is there's no stopping you once you've decided.
Well, all I will tell you is this.
The uniform isn't necessary.
I only know this because I happen to have made a One Show film about this
very subject. Oh, right?
And it turns out that it's entirely the eyes looking at you that make
the difference. It turns out that it is the head and the eyes in
particular, that looking at people makes them stop doing whatever they
were thinking of doing.
That's true, yeah. Thames Valley Police,
they rotate two life-size cut-outs between the shops in Oxford,
Windsor, Maidenhead and Ascot, apparently,
and that deters shoplifters.
I think I can tell they're not real policeman.
Cos it's the way they're floating.
I have to say, the Police Federation are not too thrilled with this.
They reckon that it's an attempt to avoid paying salary and pension
costs, and of course it is, absolutely it is that.
It's also a bit embarrassing for them that they're just as effective
as a real policeman! Well, if you want to do embarrassing,
I think this is even more embarrassing, several forces have
admitted suffering theft of their cardboard policemen.
Three gone missing from filling stations in Derbyshire,
two were stolen in Cleveland,
and Humberside lost one from the Tesco supermarket in Grimsby.
I noticed that they're all men policemen.
Think how more effective it would be if they had women police persons in
uniform looking at you, beadily.
Like, really, when you're as frightened of your mother as I am...
Yes. That would've...
Or just your mother in a uniform?
I saw those pictures before my father burned them.
Now, who wears the trousers in a pantisocracy?
Oh, it's one of those kinky parties, where people turn up in either
panties or socks, you take your choice.
It has got the word all in it, so panto for all, and then we have...
Socracy. Socracy.
So from isocratia, so equality of power,
so basically it is government for and by... Everybody.
..all, yeah. So it was...
Yes, Gyles? You rarely ask permission to speak.
Well, I know there are bonus points for courtesy.
Oh, yes, very good. What were you going to say, my darling?
I was going to say that I've actually lived in a pantisocracy.
Have you? And it's hell.
When I was about 17, a master from our school...
Where's this going?
He was subsequently arrested, but that is a different story.
This master invited some of us to go on holiday to Devon,
and he said we are going to be pantisocrats,
and the idea was we went to a village where Coleridge, the poet,
had been on holiday, and he told us that Coleridge and a friend of his,
I think, Southey... Robert Southey...
They had invented this idea of a society where everybody was equal.
Yeah. And on this holiday,
all eight of us and this one teacher lived this life of being equals,
and we all have to be different romantic poets.
I ended up as Byron. It was a ghastly, ghastly experience...
..and it put me off equality forever.
We went to Faliraki, it was awesome.
But you're right, it is an idealised, egalitarian government,
and it was a sort of pipe dream of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert
Southey. 1794, they were 21-year-old students,
and they were going to go to the banks of the Susquehanna River in
the United States, Pennsylvania.
They were going to start a sort of hippie colony, and difficulties
arose, because Southey clearly assumed that servants would do the
actual work, and women... By servants, you mean women?
I do mean women. Yes.
Women would do all the child-rearing and so on,
and the plan was scaled back, they weren't going to go to America,
they were going to go to Wales,
and then eventually it was abandoned altogether,
and I feel rather sorry for Southey,
because can anybody bring to mind a single piece of writing by
Robert Southey? In fact, I think it's pronounced Southey.
Right, I was going to mention that, yep.
Does anybody remember a single story written, or poem written, by him,
at all? The Hungry Caterpillar?
You're not far off, so he wrote The Tale of the Three Bears...
Oh, yes! Which is the original story of Goldilocks.
Yes! Really? Yes.
And this led to what we all had to do on this holiday.
OK.
The idea was we will all ask to be different poets,
and the fellow who choose to be Southey told us the story of the
three Bears. I had chosen to be Byron, not Lord Byron,
but his cousin, HJ Byron,
Henry James Byron, the man, as you know, Sandy,
who invented Widow Twankey for the pantomime Aladdin,
and also created the character of Buttons.
OK, you live and learn.
And three weeks of this, somewhere in Devon, all pretending to be
characters, it was hell, it was sheer hell.
Three weeks! Yeah, he, the master, of course, was on Coleridge,
and took it seriously, which meant taking opium.
He was a druggie!
And did you... Did you at any stage in the three weeks stop talking?
Oh!
I, for one, would have liked to have seen you give your Twankey.
But to live, to method act the
creator of Widow Twankey for three weeks?!
But also, isn't it appalling that this great man, HJ Byron,
is virtually unknown? He was the first cousin of Lord Byron.
No-one is reading Byron any more, Byron Schmyron,
but every Christmas we go, we cheer at Buttons, Widow Twankey,
we love her, nobody even knows that this man exists.
How did he write just those characters?
He wrote the whole show, but I'm cutting to the chase,
because I don't want to take up too much of your time. No.
Good.
I desperately want to know whether you chose HJ Byron,
or whether he was imposed upon you?
One tiny second, Gyles...
Do not ask him any supplementary questions.
What were you thinking? What is wrong with you?
I so recognise... Sally! I so recognise the way your mind works,
because that's exactly what I would have done,
just like the time I went to audition for Jonathan Creek,
and just as I was going in the door,
I thought, "Oh, hang on, it would be brilliant if she was Spanish!"
Did you get the part? No, no, obviously not.
Obviously not, the character wasn't Spanish.
Excellent.
Right, name a Greek word with a silent P.
Enis.
Do you mean, as in, pterodactyl?
But why are you being klaxoned, why are you being klaxoned?
Is that not Greek in origin?
I don't know... It is Greek in origin.
So it has a silent P because we don't pronounce the P.
Well, I'm just trying to think of
the other words, like psalm and philosophy and...
..Philip.
Philip?
So, the fact is that English speakers dispense with them,
but the Greeks do not, there are no silent Ps in Greek.
So, for example, the letter
Psi, all right, they have a single letter, and we pronounce it "sigh",
but in Greek, that sound is more
like the "ps" that we have in "laps".
Oh, what about philosophy? Well, philosophy doesn't work anyway,
because that makes a "fuh", so without the P, it's hilosophy.
What about ptarmigan, you know the bird?
Why do we think it's spelled in that way? I think I've forgotten how to
read, because none of this is making any...
Do you know what a ptarmigan is?
A ptarmigan? It's like a little grouse, isn't it?
No, it's cheese, you grate it on your pasta.
Ptarmigan is in fact a Gaelic word, tamarchan,
and what happened was there was a man called Sir Robert Sibbald,
and he wrongly assumed that it had been a Greek word of origin,
and so he put a P in front of it.
Now, there is no need for the P to be there at all.
It's not Greek in any way,
it is simply a Scottish word that he misunderstood.
Do you know, that's not quite interesting, it's riveting.
It is good, isn't it? So, Sir Robert Sibbald, I really like this, Alan,
this got me very excited, he was the very first person to
describe what creature, scientifically?
Step away from the car!
Is it the blue whale? It is the blue whale, yes.
Yes!
One of them got stranded in the Firth of Forth in 1692,
and it was known for a very long time as Sibbald's rorqual.
So he got the Ptarmigan wrong but he did get the blue whale right,
so I think that's pretty good.
The silent Ps were all pronounced until the preposterous English
purged them. Now, here's one thing the PC brigade haven't got their
teeth into yet - pie-eating competitions.
Or have they? Let's hear your proposals for making pie-eating
competitions a bit more PC.
I went to an extraordinary pie-eating event.
Oh, yes?
True story, 45 years ago,
I was just down from university, and I was invited by a man called
the Earl of Longford, Lord Longford, you may
remember him... I do remember him. He was a social reformer, prison
reform. Yeah, prison reformer. He was a good man, and 45 years ago
he launched a crusade against the scourge of pornography in our
society, and he formed a committee, called the Pornography Committee.
I genuinely became the youngest member of this committee.
Yeah, no, I, seriously, I still have the raincoat I bought at the time.
It wasn't just me and Lord Longford on this committee,
there was a bishop, an Archbishop, a rabbi...
I think I know this, you walked into a pub...
No, we did better than that, we went into a club in Copenhagen.
We went, the bishop, the Archbishop, the rabbi, myself, we all went, on
aeroplane, and we came to this club where they were offering
us a special pie.
True story. And we sat around the edge of this pie,
and when the crust was removed, you wouldn't believe it.
There they were, naked people.
Are we all allowed to tell our sex dreams?
This is fact.
I've still got the photographs!
The point is... And there was an enormous pie... Is there a point?
No, not much of a point... No.
We are going to talk about the World Pie Eating Championship.
It's held in Harry's Bar in Wigan. It's been held since 1992,
and they used to challenge competitors to eat as many pies as
they could in three minutes. And then, in 2006,
they thought we need to reflect modern, healthy eating,
so they eat just one pie, as quickly as they can,
and a vegetarian category introduced, following what was
described as relentless pressure from the Vegetarian Society.
Oh, please!
Oh, please, please...
Oh, please!
Vegetarians, too weak to be too demanding.
Oh, let them have a cheese and onion one.
So the organiser Tony Callaghan, he said,
I realise it may be controversial,
but this is the way forward for pie eating at this level.
Dave Smyth, who was the winner of the first contest in 1992,
he didn't think it was a good idea.
He said, "They've taken things too far."
"Pies are supposed to be meat and potato,"
"and anything else just isn't normal."
What I like is the organiser thinks that reduced pie consumption may be
responsible for the recession.
If everyone eats two pies rather than one, he said,
it follows logically that the pie sector of the economy could double
in size.
I mean, it's flawless logic. I know.
And it's not a competition without its difficulties.
So in 2007, there were 20 pies
prepared for the next day's competition,
and they were eaten in a single
sitting, by a rescue dog, called Charlie.
Well, he's the winner, then. I know.
His owner had been distracted - apparently there was a pigeon up a
chimney and so... This is such a northern story!
It's good, isn't it? So Charlie's owner, Dave Williams,
entered Charlie in the competition,
because he thought Charlie is an absolute natural.
Charlie would have been stuffed, wouldn't he?
Well, that was the problem!
He was entered, but he was full from the previous day, and he
only ate half his pie.
I thought we would have our own pie-eating contest,
and we have strict Pro-am distinction,
so I need to ask you officially,
has anybody ever earned money from a previous pie-eating competition?
I did a voice-over for Quorn.
OK, are we ready? You want us to consume the whole pie?
Yes. Is this...? It's a pie-eating
competition, so you have to eat the pie.
OK. On your marks...
OK. Get set...
Right... Go!
Oh, Jimmy! And the winner is Jimmy!
Aw!
I have eaten a pie that contained a human...
Was it in Copenhagen, 45 years ago?
It wasn't...
It was just before last Christmas in India.
I was researching a book that I'd been writing,
called, "Have You Eaten Grandma?"
A book about punctuation,
as you can imagine, and I discovered that there is a tribe...
Yes...in India... Yes.
..that likes to eat its grandparents,
and the United Nations has banned cannibalism,
it's not allowed any more in the world,
with the exemption of this tribe in a part of India.
And these people believe that they should consume their grandparents,
literally, in order that the spirit of their grandparents should come to
them. When the person dies, the grandparent dies,
what they do is they feed it to fish,
and then when it's been eaten by the fish, they put the fish in the pie,
and then you eat your grandparents in the pie.
So I have eaten human fish pie.
Well, if only there were points for that. I know!
My favourite bit is, "I've still got the raincoat I bought at the time."
That's going to make me laugh for years!
But in truth, my wife has sewn up the pockets.
Right, next in our piecemeal project,
four pieces of pie, pizza pie.
What's the pizza-litically correct
procedure for eating a piece of pizza?
What is... Yes?
Many years ago...
Many years ago... Yes? I was a friend of, and knew, Fanny Cradock.
Oh, dear Fanny.
The younger people won't know who she was, she was a television chef,
a sort of interesting cross between Mary Berry and Jeremy Clarkson.
A wonderful woman, and she taught me and my wife how to make pizza,
proper Neapolitan pizza, and she explained to us,
A, that you cut it up, but then you don't use knife and fork to eat it,
you have to eat it by hand.
Yes. And you have to feed one another.
Yeah. The fact is, you can eat pizza anyway you please,
but there are certain thoughts,
there's some advice about how to do it and...
It's a fold, isn't it? It's a fold.
So the grease doesn't go everywhere.
Yeah. So what you end up with is a sort of triangular package,
with all the toppings inside, they don't slip off...
That looks exactly like Fanny's...
Yes? No, I think that's, that's the proper way to eat pizza.
It is. Well, I don't think so, I think that's a greedy way to eat
pizza, that's like bunging as much in at a time as you can,
whereas in Italy you tend to put a,
you tend to put a finger in and just sort of bend it.
That wasn't me! We talking about eating pizza!
That wasn't me! That wasn't me!
That was your mind! Put a pizza in and then bend it, yeah?
That is your minds, that is not my mind!
Can I just say that my mother watches this...
Not for much longer.
No. You don't fold it, because then you don't get...
Where do you put a finger in, though, Sally?
Where do you put your finger? Well, you... How do you do it?
I'm just trying to think...
You can't put the finger in! You kind of, you...you make it so
it's like a bent, like a scoop thing, and, so you...
It's basically so that you can hold the end up.
Like a scoop, so you've got to keep it up, but then pop your finger in?
If you hold the triangle flat, the end will go floppy...
You're supposed to do it like that?
Yeah. Can I just say, is anyone else with me?
I've never really had a problem eating a bit of pizza.
I tend to pick it up and bite some off.
Yes, and just get on with it.
Now, we have a treat for you, we are going to do a pizza tossing lesson.
Please welcome Paolo, the group
training development chef from Strada.
Yay!
Hello, Paolo. Hello, there.
OK, so, you've all got some pizza dough.
Pizza dough. So what is the pizza dough made of, Paolo?
OK, the base is water. Yeah.
..and flour. Just plain white flour?
Yes. And when you open them, you open them with semolina and flour.
OK so this has got semolina in here?
And flour, yeah. Oh, right, so...
50-50. Put your finger in, Sal.
Right, Paolo is going to do the demonstration.
OK, the key point in your pizza, now... Yeah?
..is the way we open the pizza,
and not overdoing your edges of the pizza.
Always try to work it from the middle.
From the middle, OK. Why do you do that, what is it...?
Because, if you work your edge, you really kill your pizza,
is how we say, we kill the pizza.
Don't work the edge, you'll kill
your pizza, Gyles. Don't kill your pizza, Gyles! That's the reason
we're using the hands. OK. And we're not using the roll. No, OK.
Oh! Do you throw it in the air at all? And you throw? You toss and you
catch? Yeah. Yeah. Oh! What a shame. Hey!
Oh, hang on... And now, when you open, with your hands,
you always from the middle, you know?
OK. And stretch from the middle?
Moving it out, stretch from the middle? Oh no!
Is it necessary to throw it in the air?
Not really, no. Not really.
And you can make... Look, look! Here's Casper the naughty ghost!
What's the throwing in the air one?
I see people in there, and they throw them up in the air.
It seems more fun. He says it's not necessary.
I know it's not necessary, but a bit of fun?
Yeah. This is a pair of old knickers!
That's fantastic. Paolo, thank you so very much indeed.
You're welcome. Thank you.
And now for the section of this PC
show, which is full of "EC-PC" questions,
it's general ignorance!
But first, Gyles, you're a bit of a maverick, if I may say so.
Do you even know what it means to toe the line?
Well, I do. OK.
Well, I always thought toeing the line went back to my time in the
House of Commons...
You've set me up!
I did, and it's taken three hours.
You have previously asserted that the expression came from the House
of Commons, but we absolutely know that that is not true.
I don't know why you think you absolutely know everything,
because you don't necessarily.
There are the two lines... Yes. On the floor of the House of
Commons, you have to keep your toes behind those lines...
But why were they that distance?
Because it's the length of two
outstretched swords, so they don't allow...
The difficulty, darling, with this
story is that that chamber dates from 1950.
It...
Built on the model of the original chamber, which was built on...
All the paintings of the older versions of the chamber,
where you might actually have had a sword,
show no lines on the floor whatsoever.
The lines were invisible, as in the silent P.
The fact is we don't know, really, the true origin of the phrase.
The most likely is referring to getting your toes on a line to get a
group of people organised, so to start a race or a parade or
something, and another possible source is prizefighting.
So there was always a thing called the scratch,
and it was a line marked in the middle of the ring,
and the two contestants had to stand on the line in order to start the
fight. It's where we get the expression "up to scratch".
But the truth is we absolutely don't know, and I'm sorry,
we did set you up there, Gyles, yeah.
It's OK. Toeing the line has nothing to do with the House of Commons.
If you get this next one wrong, you deserve to be hung,
drawn and quartered.
We all know about being hung and quartered, what does drawn mean?
It means being disembowelled.
You've been set up, this time.
Did they do a little sketch?
Oh, were you hanged and then drawn through the streets in some way?
It is to do with being drawn through the streets,
but it's being dragged to the place of execution,
so in fact we have the phrase round the wrong way, it ought to be drawn,
hanged and quartered, that is the order of it.
Just to be clear, Alan, people were disembowelled,
I'm not saying that they weren't, as part of the execution,
but that would be in addition to the drawing.
So the OED entry for draw has this,
to drag a criminal at a horse's tail or on a hurdle or the like to the
place of execution, formerly a legal punishment of high treason.
They used to behead them, as well.
You could be hung, drawn, quartered and then beheaded, as well.
Well, that would be for quite a serious offence.
Yes, that would be quite a lot.
And then your testes would be made into a desk toy.
I want one of those.
Finally, here's really a deep question for you:
Captain Nemo's submarine was called Nautilus.
How many leagues under the sea did she dive?
Yes, Jimmy? 20,000 Leagues. 20,000. Definitely did! Definitely did?
Definitely did, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
Have you read it, or seen the film?
I've seen the poster.
Yeah, no, so here is the thing,
the 20,000 leagues refers to the distance that they travelled,
and not the depth.
Oh... So, imagine, a metric league, 4 km,
so 20,000 leagues is 80,000 km.
The diameter of the Earth is 12,742 km,
so 20,000 leagues would be six times the diameter of the Earth.
Well, they went too far, and they had to come back.
Yeah. The greatest depth that is
mentioned in the book is four leagues,
that's 16 km, but the deepest part of the ocean is only 11 km.
It's known as the hadal zone and more people have been to the moon
than have been to the hadal zone.
The underwater pressure at that depth,
it's about eight tonnes per square inch,
it's like 100 elephants would be standing on your head.
So how many people have been down there?
Three. And when they come up, they're like Lego mini figures?
It's what happened to me! I used to play basketball for a living...
Which brings me to tonight's league table of scores, but of course,
in this PC world, it's not about winners and losers,
it's about everybody being equally fabulous,
so the prize for the most positive attitude goes to Gyles.
Tidiest desk, Jimmy.
Terrific. Neatest colouring in, Sally.
And waggiest tail, Alan Davies.
So, here's to a peaceful night from Sally, Jimmy, Gyles, Alan and me,
and I leave you with this question: would a simple, politically-correct
policeman's computer be an easy-peasy PC PC's PC?
Thank you, goodnight!