Good evening and welcome to QI,
where tonight we're going to be rummaging around an assortment
of parts and generally having a right old knees-up, hint-hint.
So park your posterior as we meet tonight's panel.
Joining me are the perfectly profiled Sara Pascoe...
Thank you!
..in the pinky, Johnny Vegas...
..the very palate-able Ed Balls...
- ..and a part of the furniture, Alan Davies. - Hello.
And let's preview their body parts.
Sara goes...
♪ Dancing cheek to cheek. ♪
Oh, nice. Johnny goes...
♪ You need hands. ♪
Ed goes...
♪ I've got big balls, I've got big balls. ♪
Wow. I think I'm blushing.
And...
..and Alan goes...
♪ Little Willy, Willy won't go home. ♪
Now, here's the thing. There may be a question about a pig, all right?
So look out for that, and if you spot it, then you should all...
Have you got pigs? You've all got pigs. Yeah.
You shout, "Pig!" and then you get extra pig points, OK?
Oh, yours is slightly aggressive, Ed, I think.
Anyway, so...
What is the most useful organ of the body?
I'm going to give you a clue. OK. It begins with a P.
Penis?
Can I just say, that picture of that gentleman...
..is he wearing something underneath or is that...?
Are you going to make us explain the male physique to you?
Perineum. Perineum is very good.
Is that an organ on its own?
It's an area. Yeah.
Just something beginning with P on the body, Pascoe.
How about a paunch? Paunch? A paunch.
How is that useful?
I've always felt a bit sorry for people who've not got a paunch.
Yes. Nowhere to put your beer.
If you're reading in bed, you can rest your book. Yes.
And actually, it's really important for dancing.
Why?
Er, my dance partner from Strictly, Katya,
was on the show this year with a thin person.
- Right. - And they gave her a very bad back
cos she was always leaning in trying to find him.
Right. Whereas I was...
Readily available. ..always there.
At all times, bang.
I'm going to give you an extra point.
That's probably why so many professional dancers
approach me in nightclubs.
"If I dance with you, I'll live to be 100."
I'm sure that's not...
paunch can so easily lead to crying on your own.
If not managed properly.
Yes, that's so true.
But, um...
I think you've curated yours very well.
- I haven't created it, I've just mismanaged it. - Curated, curated.
You know when the Woodland Trust will sell you a forest?
- Yeah. - And then it gets bit overgrown...
Right. So what I'm looking for...
- We've all had one... - Oh. - ..we don't necessarily have one now,
but we've all had one.
Who?
It's the placenta.
In its time, it has performed the roles of the kidney, of the lungs,
of the liver, the guts, the endocrine glands, disposed of waste,
it is...of course, it's made by a woman, it is a multi-skilling organ.
And it's also a superfood. Well...
It's not scientifically proven...
- No. - ..the whole eating the placenta thing. It's very trendy.
The idea is that it's full of protein
cos it's done all these things, but it's waste matter.
Do you know who eats placenta in the world?
Idiots. Idiots.
Can you combine it with anything else?
Well, yes, you can.
There are recipes and I have some advice for preparing a placenta,
if anybody's interested.
Clean it, first by draining all the blood,
then rinsing it until it's pink.
Then you'll have to cut away the umbilical cord and membranes.
Once it's prepared,
it's no different from something you'd get at the butcher's,
so go ahead, roast, steam, saute, flambe,
whatever the culinary winds take you.
Add herbs or garlic, if you like.
So essentially, it's like fish fingers.
You don't really often wash the blood off fish fingers.
I do, but quite often I've fallen over before deciding to cook them.
The only tribe that actually routinely eats the placenta
are affluent people in, um...
..in the USA.
In fact, the Royal College of Midwives
says there is absolutely no evidence
that it does you any good whatsoever.
So it's total trendy garbage?
Generally, it's a stupid idea.
I'd be more concerned...
..because it's not readily available on the shelves...
Right...that if I ate it once and it became the food for me...
Which major chain... Yeah.
You know, I don't want to end up in a conversation going,
"I'm not keen on Tesco's."
You know, "I don't think theirs has been corn-fed."
Where can I get a placenta that had a happy...?
free-range placenta. Yeah. That's had a happy life.
I'm worried you'll be following heavily pregnant women around
just with your hands out, waiting.
"Have you finished with that? Have you finished with that now?"
In France, once the pregnancy's over,
the government pays for something called "la reeducation perineale".
So it's a physical therapy and it is designed
to retrain the pelvic floor muscles, so that all sounds fine. Yeah.
Part of the course involves using an electronic vaginal re-educator.
Now, it measures how hard the particular muscles are working
and teaches the mother, you know, to control them.
But it can be hooked up to video games so...
There was a journalist called Clare Lundberg at Slate and she wrote,
"I played a Pole Position game at my last session"
"and a friend played what I can only call Cooter Pac-Man."
Yeah. I don't think it's a game I want to play in front of my mother,
that's what I'm thinking.
Womb Raider.
Now, then.
Which part of the body did Painless Parker specialise in pulling?
I'm not saying penis again.
Painless Parker, what do you think?
He did some pulling. With pulling, it makes you think of teeth.
Yes, you're exactly right.
He was America's only ever dentist-cum-ringmaster.
Don't you love this?
Yes! Do you think he looks a bit like Stephen Fry?
With no teeth. Yeah.
So his very first business plan, a very simple technique -
ply patients with cocaine before pulling their teeth out.
Sometimes he would use a tumbler of whiskey.
But he thought this wasn't enough cos he did about six weeks
and he hadn't had a patient and he thought he would promote himself,
so he got sort of a horse-drawn flatbed with a dentist's chair on it
and he charged 50 cents per extraction
and you got given $5 if it hurt, OK?
So he wore a top hat and tails and a necklace made of teeth.
Eventually, he had a live audience, a brass band,
contortionists and dancing women
and he would sometimes enter on an elephant,
throwing coins to the ground
and the brass band was there to drown out the cries of the patients.
I'm currently involved in a lawsuit because I woke up at my dentist's
wearing clothes that weren't mine.
went in as a working-class gentleman and left as a toff
and my horse and trap was not to be found.
This is a tremendous worry to me.
Well, it is.
But now I've got the backstory, I've got something to take in court.
Yeah. So, before forceps, people used to have their teeth removed
by something called dental pelican.
That's what it looks like.
- It sounded nicer than that. - Yeah.
- It sounded like a bird. - They didn't have a dentist's chair,
so the patient had to sit on a low seat
with their head between the dentist's thighs.
But, like, looking upwards at them? Yep, yeah.
OK, while we are in the mouth, we're going to try something.
So you have plastic discs at your disposal and some blindfolds.
And I want you to put the blindfolds on, please.
OK.
There we go.
And I want you to see...
We can't!
That's the one thing we can't do.
"Put the blindfold on, want you to see." "What?!"
I want you to experiment with the disc... OK.
..and see whether your fingers or your tongue
are better at working out the size of the holes in the disc
and the shape.
See which you think is actually more adept at working out which is...
It's the tongue. Sorry?
The tongue. For me, it's the fingers.
It's tongue. It's the tongue. No, it's the fingers.
can feel different edges.
Can you?
can get the tongue further in than you think possible, Sara.
Something I see in a new and more positive light, Alan.
The tongue is much more pliable.
It's called the oral size illusion
and cos your tongue is much more pliable, it will bend around
different surfaces more easily and it should give you
a more accurate picture of what you're looking at.
So when I'm measuring up to put some shelves up, I should...
Yeah. Measure with your tongue.
should go into B&Q and go, "About that big."
"I need some screws about that big."
Do not. "I do two and a half mil." "I don't know."
Right, what's interesting to me, Sandi,
is that there's three shapes on here. Yeah.
did not successfully identify what they are with either my fingers
or my tongue. Ah.
knew two of them with my tongue.
You were right, the tongue was better.
Well, you know when you've got a little thing in your mouth
and it seems, feels so much bigger to you...
- I do know about that, Sandi. - I thought they were all the same.
Stop making it us!
Stop telling her about everything!
Now, then.
How can you tell the time of year using part of a ruddy duck?
There's a beautiful ruddy duck.
Is it actually a thing, ruddy duck?
It is an actual... I thought it was just rhyming slang.
No, no, no.
It is a North American bird. It's named after its colour.
Does the beak change colour?
Er, nope, stays that beautiful blue. It's stunning, isn't it?
It starts with a P. OK.
Plumage. It's not the plumage.
Tail. Well, it's the...
..Latin word for tail...
Penis.
Penis, finally!
There we go.
It's got the most enormous penis, but only for...
Oh, well done. There, it's grotesque.
Oh, look at that! I know, it's astonishing.
But it only has it for a very small period each year.
So, can you see at the top in the middle there,
you can see that it's being measured out.
It looks unwell, doesn't it?
So that's the penis
and then the vagina goes, as it were, the other way.
It screws in? Yeah, so they fit together.
Does it have to spin its way in?
Yeah.
Take a breath and go around again, take a breath and go around again.
Oh!
Can they choose between them who's going to spin this time?
"You spin. You spin, I'm exhausted. I'll go under. You spin."
Does the duck lay little screw eggs that's...
Yeah.
It only has that long penis exclusively for the mating season.
The rest of the year, it practically has nothing.
It withers back, it's a tiny...
- So that's the picture on the far... - Tiny little stumps. - The little one?
- Yeah. The penis size depends on their social circumstances. - Mmm.
So males who are kept with females, they grow to full size.
If males are kept with other males,
only the dominant male is the one who gets a full-size penis.
It's like duck prison.
Well, except that other males will get one for four to six weeks,
so it's a bit more like time -share. Right. Yeah.
So nature does that so that they don't all kill each other.
Yeah. Cos if they were too competitive,
so it has a kind of biological hierarchy.
That's exactly right. It's very clear.
But if you are the non-dominant male and you get the big penis,
then you are a target, so what they try and do
is they try and grow one, sneak in some sex,
then quickly shrink it back again
so that the duck in charge didn't even notice that it had happened.
So I should go back to living in a house share?
If I live with five other blokes, I might just have that "rurr"...
If you're the alpha male,
so you have to be very careful who you choose to live with.
That's true. I'm not by nature an alpha male,
but I will kill them in their sleep and just enjoy that brief moment.
Take some pictures. Yeah. Some selfies.
"Five guys dead, but look at the..."
There was a TV programme on when was little called Why Don't You?
- Yeah. - Why Don't You Just Turn Off Your Television Set?
And they once had a thing which you could do at home
- called the dying duck. - What was it?
can remember...
..I was five years old and I've been doing that duck ever since.
You were wasted in Parliament. That's fantastic.
can remember hearing that George Osborne
used to find you irritating...
..across the bench because, you know, you'd get on his nerves...
- Did you do the duck call? - ...and never knew what you were doing.
...never did the duck call.
So there's only one other animal that adjusts its penis size.
It's the acorn barnacle, OK?
So, acorn barnacle, it lives in the intertidal waters
and it can't move and it's stuck on the sea rocks,
but it still has to get its penis to its neighbours,
it's a hermaphrodite.
And it grows the penis for the mating season every autumn
and then it throws it away the next time it moults,
and the length of the penis depends entirely
on how close you are to the neighbours,
and then the type of penis you grow depends on the water.
So if choppy waters, you want it to be a little bit more muscular,
and in calm waters, bit longer, bit more flexible.
I'm still processing that you said
he throws it away when he's finished with it. Yeah.
Yeah, they moult. Is there some other sea creature going,
"You'll never guess what I've found."
"I thought you were coming out with me."
"Nah, I'm going straight home."
It has the longest penis in relation to body length
- of any animal in the world. - Yes, the whole of nature.
Are female ruddy ducks generally more contented?
Yeah, from other breeds that fancy them.
It's part of sperm competition.
Having really strong sperm matters
so birds started evolving labyrinthine vaginas
which meant that sperm would have to travel further,
which means it would be the strongest sperm
that would impregnate the duck,
and then penises started getting longer and windier
so the sperm would have less to travel, so it's kind of...
Is that the video game you've been playing?
This entire time, yeah.
Nobody can tell.
We're both playing video games while we're sitting here.
Whoa! Score. Um...
Right. Whose internal parts are most like yours?
Oh!
Playing the pig? Playing the pig? Yep.
♪ Little Willy. ♪
Yes, you're absolutely right.
This is a very odd thing,
but between the lips and the anus, basically,
there is very little difference between a pig and a human.
Yeah. So we're both generalists when it comes to eating,
we have evolved to eat nuts, roots... Anything, yeah.
..meat, fat. Pretty much anything at all.
In fact...
wanted to be a puppeteer all my life.
That looked like a cheaper version of Alien then.
Ahhhhh!
Oh, my God, Davies!
- Don't shake your head! - I'm sorry, I was just thinking, if this was...
..if this was school, you'd get told off,
- but they let you do it on television. - I know.
Grow up and you do what you like.
So some people, cannibals...
That's why they called us long pigs because human meats taste like...
Yeah, apparently, we taste a bit like pork
and it's because we eat roughly the same sorts of things.
We have the same sort of construction in our mouth,
we have incisors, canines and molars, we have a single stomach,
we have a colon that tries to extract all the water it can
- from whatever we eat. - Also, before they had synthetic insulin,
they used pig's insulin for people who were diabetic.
Yeah, they've used lots of things.
They've used pig valves in operations and so on.
We've lost Alan.
We've lost Alan. He's having the best day of his life!
The thing I did not know is that pigs also suffer
from the same genetic and protein malfunctions
that account for lots of human diseases,
so they get Alzheimer's and they get Parkinson's.
How do they identify that?
Does the pig start putting the car keys in the fridge?
Going to the trough and going, "What have I come here for?"
Between the mouth and the anus,
you're more like a pig than anything else.
Pigs away, please.
Bye, everyone. Bye.
Argh!
Now, from parts to parties.
How can children's parties cause you to age prematurely?
Speaking as a parent... Yeah.
..the amount of carrot batons that you eat at a children's party,
cos they won't touch them for love nor money,
and there are always bowls of them and it's inexplicable -
- just put Smarties out. - Yes. - They don't want carrot batons.
Do they age you?
Er, yes, but it isn't the adults that we are worrying about.
So, it's the children, not the adults? Yeah.
It is the sweetest thing.
At the age of about four or five,
lots of children think that it is the birthday party
that makes you older.
The party is the thing that causes them to age. Aww.
Isn't that the sweetest thing? It is sweet.
So some researchers in Israel asked children,
they said there was a child celebrating their birthday
after one year, and then they celebrated after two years,
but in their third year,
their mother was not well and they didn't have a party,
how old is the child?
And 80% of the children aged four
thought the child was still two because they hadn't had a party.
My niece has just turned four and she's actually...
She's put things together in a different way.
She asked me, "Are you coming to my birthday party?"
said, "Yes." And she went...
.."Father Christmas will be coming."
And why not?
Small children believe that birthday parties cause them to age.
Now, let's head to foreign parts.
Can you tell me what's wrong with this boat?
Well, it's not in the water.
It's not boat-shaped. It's not boat shaped is exactly right.
It is called a popovka and they were circular battleships.
Only two were ever made, in Russia in the late-19th century.
So there was a Russian Vice Admiral called Andrei Popov
and he thought it was a marvellous idea to have a round ship
because it could deflect shells, it would require less armour,
and he got the idea from a Scottish shipbuilder called John Elder.
And he thought that circular hulls
would offer greater level of displacement of the water,
so you could have a greater ratio of guns and so on.
So why did it not work? What do you suppose was the reason?
- Did it go round in circles? - It just went round in circles!
So, the minute you fire a gun, the boat went...
"Whoaa!"
So you had to fire in all directions equally?
Yes, you'd have to fire at everything all at the same time.
So therefore, if you're totally surrounded, it's really useful.
Yeah, you'd have to be right in the middle of the enemy.
But if you've got your guys behind you, they're screwed.
One of them was called the Novgorod
and it got stuck in an eddy in the River Dnieper
and spun round and round, making everybody incredibly sick,
before it was swept out to sea.
That's the thing. The whole thing with naval stuff is kind of
the starboard, the directions, you don't have that either.
Yeah, and the other thing is heat as well,
because it concentrated all the heat inwards.
It made the decks incredibly hot.
There was so much water resistance,
cos it's not cutting through the water,
that they could hardly make any speed at all.
So, for the Russia-Turkish War 1877-1878,
the ships were anchored on the shore
in order to not make them spin round.
What they should have done was twin hulls.
You could have a circular top.
Yes, you could. As long as you... You need a catamaran...
Yeah, with a catamaran thing underneath.
- You're absolutely right. - I've got a degree in marine engineering.
It's too late to try and impress me, Alan.
If your penis is not growing seasonally, she's not interested.
The popovka, one of the world's least ship-shaped ships,
which brings us around again to the perilous part of the show
that we call General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
Can you name a body part that babies are born without?
♪ Hands. ♪ Yes?
Remorse.
Fair enough. Body part.
I'm looking for a body part.
- Teeth. - Yeah, it is their permanent teeth.
A lot of people think that they are born without kneecaps,
that is not the case.
I've never... That's not a thing that people think, do they?
Yeah, cos they don't show up on X-rays.
What? They've got invisible knees?
They're made of cartilage. Up until about three to five...
So there you are. You can see that you cannot see, as it were.
can smell that nappy from here. I just know...
It's not until you're 10 or 12 that you have a firm kneecap
and that's why it doesn't hurt so much
when you fall when you're younger because it is sort of cushioned.
see! That's amazing. Ooh!
In fact, the human foetus, when it's in the womb,
it's almost all cartilage, it's a bit like a sort of giant ear.
But it is the permanent teeth.
They take a while for the baby teeth to fall out.
It begins around the age of six.
Anybody know, 2017, UK survey,
what's the average the tooth fairy leaves for a tooth?
♪ Cheek. ♪ Yes.
I'll go £2.
It's 88p. Oh, OK.
Who leaves 88p for a...?
It's an average, it's an average. Yeah.
Ostriches are the only animals in the world
that have a double kneecap.
They have an upper kneecap which looks like that of most species,
but it also has a lower kneecap. Anybody know why?
Nope. No, that's correct. Nobody knows why.
Oh, wow!
Is it to do with trying to take off,
like the amount of weight when they used to fly?
Well, if you could figure it out, everybody would be thrilled.
I'm going to dedicate my life to it. That's it.
What is this man's official title?
Is it the Pope?
Head of the Catholic Church.
Yeah, it's not his official title.
So, we rang... I love this.
We rang the Papal Nunciature. Guess where they are located.
Lowestoft.
Wimbledon. Are they?
And the spokesman translated the Pope's titles
from the Vatican's official directory.
They are Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ,
Successor of the Prince of the Apostles,
Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy,
Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province,
Sovereign of the State of Vatican City,
Servant of the Servants of God,
but not Pope.
Try fitting that on a name badge. I know!
It's a colloquial term from the Italian "papa", so it's a style,
rather than an official title.
Why do you think those guys all round the back
are looking in the air?
- Cos their hats haven't landed yet. - And the Pope's looking forward?
"My hat came first! Ha-ha-ha!"
Supplementary question, is the Pope Catholic?
I mean, literally, is the Pope a Roman Catholic?
He's a Roman Catholic, yes.
Because the Pope, that is this man, is not called the Pope,
then he is a Roman Catholic, this one is a Roman Catholic,
but the actual Pope is the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria
and his official title is
Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy See of St Mark the Apostle.
So he is definitely the Pope but he isn't a Catholic.
He's the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
So the Pope, the man whose actual title is the Pope, isn't a Catholic.
The Pope isn't officially called the Pope
and the man who actually is the Pope isn't a Catholic.
Clear? Yeah.
Name the third largest political party in the UK.
♪ Balls. ♪
The SNP.
No.
Now, you ought to get to this one.
Any other guesses?
Can't be the Liberal Democrats, they're...
It can't be.
It can't be Ukip.
Can't be the Green Party.
So, no, it's a party that you ought to know about.
Co-operative Party? It is the Co-operative Party.
And which party did you stand for?
The Labour and Co -operative Party.
So were you a Co-operative Party person
or were you a Labour Party...? Both. You were both?
Yeah, the Co-operative Party is affiliated to the Labour Party.
There's no Co-operative MPs who aren't also Labour Party MPs,
and so you're always both.
But it currently has 38 MPs and 17 peers,
seven members of the Scottish Parliament.
So there was a pact with Labour in 1927.
What was the reason for the pact?
I mean, cos it made the Co-operative Party sort of disappear.
I mean, even you,who is a Co-operative Party member,
didn't say Co-operative Party. You came up with lots of other ones.
I wonder why it has disappeared.
This has suddenly become Paxman.
No, I'm just curious!
Ask him again, he hasn't answered it.
Answer the question!
don't know!
That is the most refreshing thing any politician has ever said.
Name a movie the owner of this Hollywood star starred in.
♪ Hands. ♪
Oh, it's a trick one, isn't it?
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Is there another?
There are two Harrison Fords on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
What?! So, the original...
Wasn't he gorgeous? Silent movie star.
Isn't he stunning? Made more than 80 films from 1915 to 1932
and got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In fact, the modern Ford initially called himself Harrison J. Ford
because people were still talking about the old Harrison Ford,
although the initial one had actually been dead for ten years.
Maybe people were really spooked out when he turned up for auditions.
Wargh!
And so it's time for the walk of shame that is the scores.
In first place, ahh,
part woman, part human encyclopaedia,
with no points at all...
..it's Sara!
No points. Thank you. No points.
In second place, excellent in parts,
with -27, Johnny!
And in equal last place,
the coalition of chaos, with -36, Alan and Ed.
So it's a big thank you to Ed Balls, Johnny Vegas, Sara Pascoe and Alan,
and I leave you with this.
George Bernard Shaw found himself sat next to a tedious windbag
at a party. Eventually, he got a word in edgeways.
"I think, between us, we know everything in the world," he said.
"How's that?", replied the man. "Well, you seem to know everything,
"apart from the fact that you're a bore, and I know that."
Thank you and goodnight.