CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Good evening!
And welcome to the QI gallery for a perusal of pictures,
paintings and portraits.
So who have we got on tonight?
Well, I've got four clues right here.
What a colourful bunch they are.
An absolute scream, Joe Lycett!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
With an enigmatic smile, Noel Fielding!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Look at them Van Gogh, Hannah Gadsby!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And the apple of my eye...
..nose, mouth, in fact, my entire face, Alan Davies!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Let's have a quick picture of their buzzers.
Joe goes...
LAUGHTER
♪ If a picture paints a thousand words
♪ Then why can't I paint you? ♪
And Noel goes...
♪ I had a picture of you in my mind... ♪
And Hannah goes...
♪ You don't have to paint me a picture... ♪
And Alan goes...
HIGH PITCHED BEEP
ANNOUNCER: We apologise for the loss of picture.
We're doing everything we can to get it back.
In the meantime, the programme will continue in sound only.
LAUGHTER
Now, does anybody want to get changed before we...
No!
LAUGHTER
I'm more than happy like this for the show.
I'm just half expected to lift this and I'm on 8 Out Of 10 Cats.
LAUGHTER
There are some pictures you may want to look at.
Oh, right, OK.
Ta-da! I think Noel, you look fine.
I've got to go to a Spanish funeral in a minute, so...
LAUGHTER
OK, are we will set to go?
You look really nice, darling.
Scrubbed up.
Yeah, like an undertaker, but cheerful.
LAUGHTER
He looks a bit like Donald Trump.
AUDIENCE GASPS
Here we go.
What mistake did Picasso make when he painted this?
He put lots of glue on the frame.
Yeah, they can't get their hands off.
Can't get their hands off.
"Oh, no!"
"Picasso's done the gluey frame thing again."
LAUGHTER
He left two snooker referees holding it.
LAUGHTER
Does anybody know what the picture is?
It's Marie-Therese Walter.
Yes. She was underage, but not, I don't know...
She was, she was 17.
She was underage for what?
For doing what he was doing with her.
Yeah.
He was 45 when they met.
She's Picasso's mistress.
But when he painted this,
who didn't know that she existed in his life?
Oh, his wife?
Yeah, so the mistake was, even with the picture looking like that,
his wife, Olga Khokhlova, recognised that it was somebody else.
So that's Marie-Therese Walter on the left there.
He picked her up, didn't he? Yeah.
He was like, "Come here, I'm, like, Pablo Picasso."
SHE CLICKS WITH HER MOUTH I don't know, she's not a horse.
Was she a horse?
LAUGHTER
I don't know.
Basically, he wasn't a nice guy.
Oh, no, he was a prickbiscuit.
Yes.
LAUGHTER
That's a horse, Prickbiscuit.
Yeah.
I'd bet on that. 2-1, Prickbiscuit.
Of the seven most important women in his life,
two killed themselves and two went mad.
It's not a good track record, frankly. No.
We've got a picture of Le Reve, which is The Dream,
which also has Marie-Therese.
It's also got his cock on her face. Yes!
If you look at the one on the right, that's his penis on top of her head.
Isn't that part of her head? No.
Well, it was when he put it there.
Yeah.
LAUGHTER
Oh, no, I see, yes.
Look. Yeah.
That.
LAUGHTER
I mean, do you think, did he say, "Yeah, yeah, that's my penis"?
Or did he just accidentally...
Basically, it's an erotic thing, it's that she's dreaming about sex
as well as enjoying it.
That's terrible nap technique.
Like, if you're going to do... She'll get so stiff in the neck.
That's true. So stiff, did you say?
Stiff in the neck, yeah.
LAUGHTER
It looks like she's on the plane, doesn't it? A very small seat,
and he's the row behind putting his cock on her head!
LAUGHTER
This is the kind of art criticism you rarely see.
LAUGHTER
Now, then.
Name a self-insertion artist.
Somebody who does a port...
Something about themselves, a self-portrait.
OK, in what way?
Someone who puts themselves into, like, the background of a painting.
Yes, and there are loads and loads of examples of it. Yeah, yeah.
And it mostly is in Renaissance art.
You get a great big picture and they think,
"I'm going to put myself in it."
So, if you look at the one on the left there,
that is Botticelli's Adoration Of The Magi,
and the camped guy in the bottom right,
that is supposed to be Botticelli,
the one who's looking out, going, "My picture, I did this."
That's the baby Jesus, and he's like not even looking.
He's just, like, "G'day."
Yeah.
He's like, "See that Jesus? I did that."
Yeah. But he looks shifty, doesn't he? Yeah.
Don't you think that deliberate and he's trying to make himself
detached or something from proceedings?
Cos his costume's not right either.
He hasn't coloured himself in properly.
No, he does look like he's got...
It's either that or he's about to flash.
LAUGHTER
Let's have a look at an another one, this is Rembrandt's The Night Watch.
And it's quite hard to see, but in the detail,
so if we can just see the one on the right,
if you see the little guy looking over the shoulder of the soldier,
you could just see one eye and a flat cap. That's Rembrandt?
It's like Liza Minnelli at the Oscars.
LAUGHTER
He called it The Night Watch cos it got so grubby.
But the actual title is
the Militia Company Of District II under The Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,
which is actually not as good as The Night Watch, I think. Mm.
I know this one, it's in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
and it's really quite big.
And they couldn't get it all in, so they cut quite a big bit off.
Oh!
Like, about 2 million quid's worth.
LAUGHTER
They cut it off the side of it.
Imagine cutting it and then getting dragged in by your boss and going,
"Have you heard of folding?"
LAUGHTER
"Something called folding?"
"It's not going to go, it's not going to go."
"Cut it, cut it, we've got to be out of here by four."
LAUGHTER
The other one that is extremely famous is
the Arnofini Portrait by Jan van Eyck,
possibly, we're not entirely sure, that he is reflected in the mirror.
The way that it's got the fish eye effect of the mirror
is amazing, actually, isn't it? Yeah, it's astonishing.
Here's the weird thing, is that self-insertion...
I have to say this very carefully.
LAUGHTER
Self-insertion appears to be something only boys do.
LAUGHTER
Why is that? It's strange. Why might that be? Why is it a boy thing?
Is it, I mean, a lot of the times only the boys painted.
It's the boys only did big group compositions.
Fundamentally, when women were allowed to paint,
they painted in smaller rooms in little salons.
Or self-portraits. Or self-portraits.
It's hard to insert into a self-portrait. Yeah.
There's not a lot of room for it, yeah.
Have a guess, if you looked at the work featured in major
permanent collections around the world, how much work is by women?
4%?
It's five. It's 5% in total. Yeah.
They did a survey in 2011 of the National Gallery,
2,300 works, and a review revealed there were 11 women artists.
Well, you can assume that's women's fault.
We should just get... We should insert ourselves.
Or maybe just do better painting, maybe!
CROWD GROANS
I don't know...
You are Donald Trump!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH
I'm curious to know how it feels to be on your last show.
LAUGHTER
Of course, it isn't just in art.
So, Alfred Hitchcock, another boy, self-inserted himself
into all his movies.
I love this one.
This is from the movie Lifeboat, and he's in the advertisement,
there he is. And you get it in literature as well, you get Dante
in The Divine Comedy,
you get Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.
It's not uncommon for people to put themselves into their own books.
It is most common in what's called fan fiction
where you get something called a Mary Sue character.
This is where an author makes a character based
on themselves really heroic.
So this is about a woman called Paula Smith.
In 1973... I mean, it's not good.
No wonder we've only got 5%. Yes.
LAUGHTER
She did that on an Etch A Sketch.
LAUGHTER
She's a fan of Star Trek so she wrote a parody story called
A Trekkie's Tale and there's a character in it called Mary Sue.
And those, in fan fiction, are these kind of characters
where you've self-inserted. But here's the thing about it.
The character usually helps to save the day,
and then, having done so, is rewarded
by some kind of sexual encounter with one of the main characters.
Of course.
I have written 25 books and so far, had no sex in any of them,
and I...I'm going to sort that out.
LAUGHTER
You need to self-insert, Sandi.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Many of the greats practised self-insertion
although personally I regard it as self-indulgent and narcissistic.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
Oh, my God, I'm so stupid that when that came up,
I looked over there.
LAUGHTER
I'm still looking over there!
That was weird, man.
LAUGHTER
Now, Alan, have a look at this. What's missing from this picture?
Something interesting? I can tell you it's something enormous.
Is it a blue whale?
Yes. Is it?
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
There it is! It is a whale, indeed. That's better!
This is a painting called View of Scheveningen Sands
by Hendrick van Anthonissen.
And in 2014, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
was cleaning it, and they suddenly went,
"My lord, there's a whale!"
The whale had been painted over,
probably in the 18th, 19th century, because they wanted to make
the painting more saleable, and people would go,
"I don't want a dead whale!"
Maybe that was painted by a woman and that's her self-insertion!
LAUGHTER
With low self-esteem, you know.
LAUGHTER
I'd like to imagine that that painting was painted
by a whale that was using self insertion!
LAUGHTER
So it's like...
Is someone standing on that whale?
Yes.
In fact, curiously...
A whale jockey?
LAUGHTER
Unless that was one of his shoes.
LAUGHTER
Do you know, when I get ready for this show, I think I've thought
of everything, and the...
LAUGHTER
..possibility of a small man with a very large shoe had not...
LAUGHTER
There might be another whale behind that whale,
he might have a pair of whale shoes.
LAUGHTER
I was putting the slippers on, there was a whale there,
I inserted my foot in the blowhole.
LAUGHTER
It's an easy mistake to make!
LAUGHTER
OK.
Close your eyes, please, all four of you.
What is the pinkest thing that you can picture?
Oh.
LAUGHTER
The pink elephants on parade in that Disney film. Oh, in Fantasia.
Yeah. I love that, that's very good.
Joe? My own soul.
LAUGHTER
Alan, the pinkest thing you can think of?
Er, I'm not giving you my first two answers.
LAUGHTER
I'm going to say pig.
A pig, oh, yes, that's nice, that's nice.
Hannah, what's the pinkest thing you could picture?
When you go into a kid's store, the girls' side.
The girls' comic shelf.
Yeah, it's so horrible.
So there's a colour called the pinkest pink,
and I will show it to you.
That is the pinkest pink.
That is the world's biggest Hubba Bubba.
LAUGHTER
Er, it is a colour produced by an artist called Stuart Semple
and he has banned another artist from using it,
he's banned Anish Kapoor. So Anish Kapoor you might remember,
made the Orbit tower for the 2012 Olympics. Yes. Yeah.
Stuart Semple is an artist and he produced the pinkest pink
in response to the fact that Anish Kapoor had a paint called
the blackest black, or Vantablack, and he has got exclusive use of it.
And Stuart feels that no artist should have exclusive use
of a particular colour. It is an amazing black.
What it does is it absorbs 99.96% of all light that hits it,
so it makes things look like a sort of a hole. Like a black hole.
Yeah, it was designed for the military, and Anish Kapoor
managed to get exclusive rights to it.
Stuart Semple thought this was outrageous,
so he sells this paint, the pinkest paint but
you have to sign a piece of paper when you buy it
testifying that you are not Anish Kapoor.
LAUGHTER
It says here, "You are not Anish Kapoor,"
"you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor,"
"you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor"
"or an associate of Anish Kapoor."
That's brilliant. It is amazing.
Anish Kapoor did get hold of some and he painted his middle finger
with this pinkest pink and posted it on Instagram.
I thought you were going to say he self inserted it!
LAUGHTER
Imagine if he self-inserted and it came out that pink colour.
LAUGHTER
Why does he feel he needs to have exclusive rights over a colour?
Well, that is the point that Stuart Semple is so angry about.
Er, who is the next Rembrandt?
W-who was the last one? Has there been one since him?
It's the sort of a philosophical question, isn't it?
What do we think about this picture here? Is this a Rembrandt?
That is definitely Rembrandt.
No.
It didn't go off. It didn't go off!
Well, it is and it isn't.
It looks like Rembrandt...
It looks like Rembrandt. It's a classic Rembrandt portrait.
Caucasian man in his 30s, black clothes, wide-brimmed hat...
No arms...collar, no arms!
Moustache, goatee, slightly in profile to the right,
it's a classic portrait. But what it is, it's a 2016 project called
The Next Rembrandt.
Oh, is it, erm, a computer?
Yeah. It's done by a computer.
Well, artists and data crunchers analysed 346 Rembrandt paintings
and they created a new one in his style, not just the look of it,
but in terms of the colour schemes,
in terms of the facial structure, and the brush strokes.
So it's been 3D printed but with 13 layers of paint,
so that even the height and depth of the brush strokes
is the way in which Rembrandt would have painted,
but it's been done by a computer.
So, tell me, why do we need this?
LAUGHTER
Well, you know, why do the scientists do anything?
Just to see what they can do, don't they? Yeah.
What I love about science and one of the things we discover
all the time on this show is that a thing that you think,
"What is the point of doing that?"
You find that there is some scientific purpose behind it.
When you analyse something, how did you paint something,
maybe you learn how to preserve a painting,
maybe you learn something about... I hope they learnt something but...
Sure. I would imagine... Just another straight white man
in a painting. It's just like, pfft.
They could have inserted someone else in there.
Yeah, the computer inserts itself. Yeah.
Just a laptop.
So, who was the first person to fraudulently produce Rembrandts?
Rembrandt himself. Yes, absolutely right.
Extra point for Alan! APPLAUSE
So, there used to be more than 650 official Rembrandts.
That's gone down by about 50 or 60%.
They can now identify the genuine Rembrandts,
and, most likely, a lot of them were him signing them.
So, in those days, students would come and study with a master.
He had about 25 students at any one time working,
and he was teaching them.
Copying was a perfectly legitimate way of teaching.
If they're doing a big canvas, they'd have teams of people
working on them, wouldn't they? "You do the trees,"
"do the mountain in the background, I'll come in and do the baby Jesus."
Yeah, they wouldn't think of it as cheating.
But that was a Renaissance thing.
There wasn't an artist who did it, it was a team that did it.
I think Michelangelo worked alone
but apparently he stank.
And he was quite anti-social, so, obviously... Didn't have a team.
He had one assistant called Greg who had a bad sense of smell.
Clothes pegs. He was mainly at Pret getting him salads.
Imagine there was some big Michelangelo painting -
"You see the one at the back with the clothes peg on his nose?"
"That's Greg."
Michelangelo did a self-insertion.
Did you know about that one, on the Sistine Chapel? Which one?
The Last Judgment, he painted himself as a flayed skin.
I went to see the Sistine Chapel.
And all I remember is there's somebody in the middle of the room,
there's about 200 people all going like this,
and there's somebody going, "No pictures!"
"No pictures! No pictures!"
Of course, people immediately go, "Wow!"
Why don't they let them take pictures of it? I don't know.
I was talking to Ronnie Barker's daughter Charlie,
and she said the first time...
"No pictures!" Oh, God!
LAUGHTER
She was always saying it.
The first time she realised her dad was famous,
she was a little girl, and they went to see the Mona Lisa,
and they walked into the room, and she's standing there looking
at the Mona Lisa, and the room filled with British tourists,
and they were all looking at her dad, and nobody was looking
at the Mona Lisa. She said, that was the moment she thought, "Oh, OK."
And then they went home and went, "I saw Ronnie Barker."
"Was he smiling? Wasn't he?"
"Why has he got no eyebrows?"
When I was a kid, I had a dog called Ronnie Barker.
You could leave that there if you want.
My dad named him and I was like,
"Oh, it's funny. Barker, it's a pun." But I didn't know...
It was named after Ronnie.
No, I didn't know Ronnie Barker was a famous situation. And...
So I thought, "Oh, I think we just named our dog"
"after Ricky Barker's dad."
And Ricky's just a guy I went to school with. And...
I even told Ricky and he was, "Oh, did you?"
Did Ricky not know his dad wasn't called Ronnie? Yes, he did.
"His name's Michael," and I kind of...
And it wasn't until I was... Years later I was watching Open All Hours.
And he's like, "Why don't you j-j-jiggle it."
And I realised, like, "Oh, my God!"
Poor dog. It's not Ricky Barker's dad.
Oh, I've just got that, because of the bark.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It's like having a troubled child.
Now...
Joe, we have set up a Rembrandt painting to the side
of the studio, with an alarm system.
So, there you are, there's our alarm system, OK.
And what I'd like you to do is to see if you can steal it
without waking the guard.
Good luck.
Why me?
NOEL: - Joe. - Yes? - Good luck.
Yes. We're all counting on you.
I'm doing yoga so that might help.
MUSIC: Mission: Impossible Theme by Lalo Schifrin
He's very like Tom Cruise, isn't he?
ALAN SINGING ALONG Doing well, Joe.
They're definitely lasers.
That is not gaffer tape. Don't listen to them, Joe.
Keep moving.
Oh. Oi!
What the bloody hell's happened there?
KLAXON
Oh, sorry, mate.
Not to worry.
You get back to bed.
So here is a wonderful thing - that galleries in the United States
have discovered that one of the cheapest alternatives
to hi-tech systems is just to put marbles at the back of the frame.
And ribbons for lasers. Yeah, obviously ribbons for lasers.
And that way, if you take the painting off, they fall down,
and immediately you know that the painting is being stolen.
Why don't they just get guards who have had enough sleep?
Well, most real-life art theft is not like the movies.
It's not meticulously planned,
and it's often prompted by a lack of security.
And that seems to be a really cheap alternative.
You just put the marbles at the back, you move the painting,
the marbles fall down, everybody hears
that you're trying to nick the painting. Sounds very Scooby-Doo.
It does sound like it.
And I have to say, we don't which galleries are doing it
because, you know, that would give it away.
I know how we could find out.
A tough decision - you've got painting but then you think,
"Oh, but I do like marbles."
That is true. But most art thieves don't have a specific target,
and people don't know what to do with them,
they don't have to put it on the black market,
so only about 15% of stolen art is recovered,
and it's mainly because it sort of disappears.
Now, it's time for the never ending struggle up the stairs
that is General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
What is the best investment you could have made ten years ago?
The dark web.
That's where you buy drugs, is it? I have no idea.
LAUGHTER
The Dark Web's a pub in Camden.
Is it something to do with pictures and art?
It is, darling, it is absolutely...
How did you figure that out?
I've been here for years. It's gradually sinking in.
Is it a particular picture?
No, it's sort of strange.
There's an Italian artist called Piero Manzoni,
and in 1961, he put some of his poo...
In a can. In a can, there it is.
90 tin cans filled with 30g -
1.1 ounces if you want to do this at home - of faeces.
There's three languages on there, but basically it says,
"Artist's shit. Contents - 30g net."
"Freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961."
So, in 2007, the Tate Art Gallery bought one of these tins
for 30,000.
Today can each can is worth around 300,000.
Is there a sell-by date on these?
Well, here's the thing, nobody's actually sure
if it has poo in it or not. Oh. Because you can't open it.
If you open it, you'll ruin the value of the thing.
And your day. Hm?
He could probably just put another poo in and seal that.
I just love the idea of you going, "Oh, I meant to do the beans."
Manzoni's dead,
so we couldn't get any more poo from him. He passed away.
This guy here, Agostino Bonalumi, he worked with Manzoni,
and he says that the tins are full of plaster and not faeces at all.
"ITALIAN" ACCENT: He never shit in the can.
No, he don't shit in the can. It didn't happen.
He just write "shit" on a can,
and everyone think he shit in it. What, are you crazy?
He don't shit in the can.
It's a joke!
NORMAL VOICE: That's my general southern European accent.
Thank you, I like it. It covers all of the Mediterranean, that accent.
Right, what does the brown note make you do?
Poo?
KLAXON
It's a myth. It's a myth popularised by South Park
that there's a very low sound which might make humans evacuate.
"Screw you guys, I'm going home."
"Oh, no, it's the brown note! Argh!"
Pffft... But there's no such thing.
They'll use that. Trey Parker, he'd use that.
You can have that, Trey.
But there's no such thing. Doesn't exist.
I mean, there's lots of different sounds that are associated
with colours, so, white noise, for example.
It has all the frequencies of human hearing at the same level,
and it's used to soothe babies.
Can I just say, if you're a young mother,
a gin and tonic and the Hoover on, you can't hear the baby.
I always wanted a poo when I was in the library when I was a kid.
Anyone else get that? Nope. No.
Totally on your own.
Joe, back me up now.
You're on your own, kid.
I can remember sitting at a dinner party once,
and a perfectly nice gentleman said,
"Do you remember when you were little,"
"you used to play at being florists?"
And we all went, "No, really, that's not..."
You see, I would have backed that guy up.
There's another myth that standing too close to the subwoofer
at a concert could make your lung collapse.
But it's not true. So don't worry about it.
I cannot believe I've self-inserted into that picture.
If you look closely, I'm pooing into a can.
It's worth a fortune now.
What colour are these railings?
Black. Black?
KLAXON
They're not black.
Most railings in London are... Green.
They're green. You're absolutely right.
It's called invisible green. I mean, it's not actually invisible,
it's a dull, dark green.
It's supposed to blend in with vegetation,
but there's no such thing as invisible green,
nor is there such a thing as reddish green.
It's actually a place in Stockport, Reddish Green.
That is true. But it's what's called an impossible colour.
So you can't have yellowish blue either
because the frequencies of the two colours cancel each other out. Yeah.
Have a quick look at these railings in south London.
They have a hidden secret.
Indeed, there is a society to protect them.
What is the hidden secret about these particular railings?
You'd find them... It's also the game of Connect Four?
Er, no, I like that.
So, you find them in areas like Peckham and Camberwell,
south-east London. There's a weird shape in them.
Yes, so what is that? Is that to put something in? No.
If you flipped them over,
they are all stretchers left over from the Second World War.
Everybody was terrified in the Second World War of gas attacks,
and they thought that steel could easily be disinfected.
And these structures were made for air raid protection officers.
And they had lots and lots of them left over, and lots of the railings
had been taken for the war effort and, in order to save money,
they took the stretchers they had left over from the war,
and they used them as railings.
NOEL: - So cool. - I love that.
Which brings us to the colourful matter of the scores
which are frankly a load of Pollocks!
Now, in first place, the next Rembrandt with eight points,
it's Hannah.
APPLAUSE What does this mean?
You won! Oh, right!
In second place, struggling to stay inside the lines
with seven points, it's Noel!
APPLAUSE
We smashed it.
In third place, a botched Spanish fresco,
with -6, it's Joe!
APPLAUSE
And in fourth place, he may not know much about art
but he knows what he likes,
with -27, it's Alan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you very much.
Thanks to our guests, Hannah, Noel, Joe and Alan.
Time is running out and the clock's gone all weird and soggy,
but I'll "Dali" yet awhile with this final thought
from Salvador himself.
"The reason some portraits don't look true to life"
"is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures."
Thank you, goodnight.