Hello and welcome to QI
where tonight's show is one, long
exercise in procrastination.
Struggling to meet their deadlines,
we have the purposeless Holly Walsh...
..the prevaricating Nikki Bedi...
..the postponing Aisling Bea...
..and that never knowingly premature Alan Davis.
Right, their buzzers. Holly goes...
Nikki goes...
Oh, yeah.
Aisling goes...
And Alan goes...
I do dream that noise.
Question one, of course, is all about procrastination itself.
So, I just...I'm sorry, hang on...ah, the elves are telling me
that they haven't got around to writing
the procrastination questions yet.
So, we're going to have to use the emergency back-up questions
that I've got here, just a second.
I don't think these have ever been used.
Wow, OK.
Ah! Here we are. Ooh!
Got some questions... Oh!
What else is in here?
Oh, Alan, it's a picture of Arsenal winning the Premier League.
It won't be a picture of Tottenham Hotspurs winning it.
"OOH"
I have no idea why that's funny.
I'm pleased with my small footballing joke, there.
OK, so, instead, a question on parenting.
What's the best thing to do about a crying baby?
If it's on a plane, put it in a soundproof box.
What we started doing was my son had quite bad nappy rash...
You clean it, just clean the baby.
All right, Supernanny.
So, what we started doing was, before we put him back
in his nappy, we'd get our hairdryer and we'd just blow dry
his naked bum like this.
And then that started to work too well.
Yeah, burns? No, it wasn't...
Then we realised that if we just blow-dried his balls with
a hairdryer, he would go to sleep like that.
The trouble is now I...
It sound like a very good idea.
You could rig it up on a sort of a hook at the end of the bed...
..I'm thinking by myself, now.
I am saying this out loud, aren't I?
You realise when he is grown-up, darling, there's going
to be so much trouble.
I think we have almost certainly given him a fetish.
He's going to be unable to walk past the hairdressers.
He'll be standing over... You know those Marilyn Monroe grates?
You'll never get him off!
Did you go full hairdresser, Holly?
Were you like, "So, are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?"
I have to say that things have changed very much in terms
of how we actually approach the whole thing.
There was an American paediatrician called Dr Walter J Sackett Junior,
and he basically suggested that you should ignore crying babies.
He wrote a bestseller in 1962 called Bringing Up Babies,
A Family Doctor's Practical Approach To Child Care.
And he said if you didn't ignore crying babies,
they would grow up to be socialists.
"If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand,"
"we must admit the possibility of sowing the seeds of socialism."
And, as a parent, that is your worst nightmare.
So, it was 1962, it was the year of the Cuban missile crisis,
America was paranoid about the communist threat
from around the world.
And their solution was leave all the babies crying on their own.
But he also prescribed early feeding.
He recommended that you give
babies cereals at two days, vegetables at ten days,
meat at 14 and finally, at nine weeks,
"Bacon and eggs, just like Dad."
Can a baby digest all that? No, darling. No, it's a terrible idea.
I don't have any children so I'm just checking.
Anyway, he disliked milk intensely.
He said, "To my mind, the dairies of America constitute"
"the number one health hazard."
He recommended giving babies black coffee from six months.
That's all you want, right?
A child that won't sleep.
Did he have any children, I wonder?
He did have children, he did, yeah.
And where are they now? They're all communists.
There are other books that are even worse.
1916, A Mother And Her Child by doctors Leena and William Sadler,
they advised avoiding physical contact with infants
except when spanking.
Crying, again, should be ignored unless the baby cried hard enough
to go black in the face or burst a blood vessel.
Black? Yeah. In the face? Yeah.
At which point, a sound spanking should be administered.
Marvellously titled, The Science Of Eugenics,
who doesn't want to read that?
Written in 1920 by a Doctor BJ Jeffries and JL Nichols,
warned pregnant women not to look at or think about ugly
things or people or their child would turn out ugly.
And the best way to quiet a crying baby?
Gin.
You have the gin, or the baby? The baby.
The heir to the Budweiser dynasty or whatever you'd call it,
every time a baby's born the first thing they have is five
drops of Bud dropped on their tongue.
That's the first thing they consume. Really?
My nanny used to put whisky on my gums when I was teething
and holy water, that classic cocktail combo.
Looking forward to the drinks at the weekend.
And used to rub it on our gums, and I told that to a dentist
recently, and they were like, "It's not actually good."
Because loads of people are like, "Oh, yeah, it's a great pain
"reliever." It's that it burns your gums more so that you forget
about the pain in your teeth and you focus on the burn in your gums.
So...
But it hasn't had any effect on me, so...
Right, now, Alan, I would like you to put this on, please.
Oh! Why, certainly, Sandi.
Thank you very much. Is it a hat?
It is a hat, yes.
Put that on.
Now, my question is what activity is Alan now perfectly dressed to do?
Is it a taco hat?
At parties, sometimes they get people
to walk around, put a dip in the centre and some tacos
and then you dip the them into the man's head.
Feels like a bicycle tyre.
When you do know what it is,
you'll be horrified at the thought of serving dip from this.
Is it a contraceptive?
It's exactly the reverse of a contraceptive.
It's an erection hat.
It is kind of an erection hat.
OK. Yes. So, this is...
It's not working.
Patience, everyone, I'm 52.
I am very pleased because it's for a falcon.
It's a falcon sex hat.
It was invented to save the peregrine falcon from extinction.
So, the peregrine trainer wears this hat and encourages the birds to mate
with his head. Come on.
Come on, you, you know you want to.
Agh! Well, it's that!
So, in the 1970s, the whole species was threatened to be wiped out.
The pesticides were damaging their eggs and so a captive...
Oh, look, it works!
It does absolutely work.
A captive breeding programme was set up.
So, here is the problem.
Falcons are usually more attracted
to their owners than they are to other birds.
It's a phenomenon called imprinting.
So, when a young falcon comes out of its egg, it gets attached
to the very first thing it sees. It could be a rubber boot
or it could be an electric train,
it could be anything. How about a hairdryer?
Yes.
But, quite often, it is the owner.
So, they want to mate...
They want to mate with their carers, and the hat is invented to catch
the resulting semen.
Oh, God. It can be collected... I know, the thing you're wearing,
it's why I said you don't want to eat dip out of it,
the thing you're wearing... It's not falcon ejaculate, is it?
..it's got little tiny pockets in it.
The falcon wants to mate, and it goes onto the hat because it likes
the owner, and you can catch the semen
from those little tiny pockets. Wow!
It totally works! The 1970s, the population...
..the population...
The population in the 1970s was down to 324, over 6,000
peregrine falcons have now been released into the US
through this programme.
Let's have a quick look at an actual video of the hat working.
So, that noise has been made by the owner.
I'd say this is the most niche pornography.
I love how bored the guy looks!
It looks like he's knobbing a potato waffle.
That hat has seen a lot of action because it is practically
worn out in places.
It copulates into one of the indentations, the same as
you've got on your hat. It comes in a range of colours, the hat.
Comes in a range of colours? Yes.
One of the best things about a falcon.
It's one of those things where I congratulate the person
who invented it, but I never want to meet them in a pub.
Well, how'd you come up with that?
I'm going to come up with, frankly, a jizz hat for falcons.
Why don't you just get a job, Barry?!
You have two degrees, and you're living with me, I'm 84!
Who's wearing the crotchless pants in this relationship?
Oh, sorry, I thought we had to buzz in because it was us.
No, no, in this relationship.
I'm going to go the one on the right. Albert?
Oh, is it Victoria and Albert?
It is Victoria and Albert, yes.
Well, maybe it's Victoria, then.
It is Victoria. When do we think underwear began?
When people first started wearing underwear?
The loincloth, the early loincloth.
Certainly in Roman times, people had underwear.
But it fell out of favour for centuries and in Britain
men got underwear, so you're talking about drawers,
knickerbockers, but for centuries women did not wear it at all.
And, when they did, finally, so we're talking 19th century,
it was crotchless. So, two separate legs
hanging open underneath and held together by a belt around the waist.
And you don't get them sewn together until 1876.
I have no idea what happened that year.
Someone went, "I am not having this breeze."
But it didn't become the norm
to have a crotch in your underwear until 1910.
But it wasn't someone's sexual peccadillo to have crotchless
panties at that point? No, it was practical, really, as well.
Going to the toilet was very difficult when you had
multiple layers of clothing, and it would have been
considered very unhygienic.
There's very early evidence about the Roman underwear.
So, there's a fourth-century mosaic which is found
in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily.
I'd say I think it looks more like a bikini, don't you think? Yeah.
There's a possibly even earlier one, which is from Upper Egypt.
6,000 or 7,000 years ago, it is called the Badari figure.
Do you think it looks more like it's just got a big bush?
Some sort of a brick wall, by the looks of it.
Do you want a dry-stone wall round there, madam?
It must be tight.
Look at her eyes.
In 2015, a pair of Queen Victoria's underpants sold
for £12,000 and they were exactly able to date these pants.
How do you think they could date them?
So, here's one of the extraordinary things about Victoria,
is the detailed photographic record of her life.
And, so, they could work out by the waistband when it was
cos she just got fatter and fatter and fatter.
She got bigger and bigger, and she got massive hips again.
Yes, so these are nearly 45 inches.
So, this is a waistband in this kind of region
which means it was definitely towards the end. The waist was 45?
Yes, so, we're talking 1890s by then.
Albert was dead, she didn't care, she's just having cake.
She's just eating.
All those lovely puddings, though.
You wouldn't regret a minute of it, would you?
What would you like for breakfast?
Jam roly-poly and custard.
Victoria sponge, please, again.
And a larger pair of briefs.
Now, a question on pronunciation.
Who would like to hear my Katharine Hepburn impression?
Yes, please. Yes, please.
Listen to me, mister, you're my knight
in shining armour, and you're going to get back on that horse,
and I'll be right behind you.
Where is that accent from?
The south in America?
Oh, no, not from America at all.
Is it going to be Danish?
No, but if you were somewhere
between Denmark and the United States?
Mid-Atlantic!
Yes, absolutely right, Nikki!
It is the Mid-Atlantic.
That's not a country! No, it is not.
So, the point is it's not from anywhere.
It was so named because it was halfway between the US
and the British accent, and it was the accent in Hollywood films
before, sort of, 1950.
It was designed to be vaguely sort of British and aristocratic,
and it was thought that it sounded appropriately posh.
They used to, in drama schools, train accents out of people.
Like, when I went to drama school, they didn't.
Though I still have this strong English accent now.
Yeah, but they used to, like, knock off all the edges so people ended...
..up speaking all of the time like this.
That's how British people spoke.
It was a thing in Hollywood films. There was a voice coach
called Edith Skinner. She was actually a Canadian.
And, in the 1930s, she taught this is good speech
or Eastern standard speech. You're talking about Katharine Hepburn,
you're talking about Betty Davis, Vincent Price,
and they all learned to speak that way.
Probably my favourite movie of all time, Some Like It Hot,
Tony Curtis in that movie, he pretends doing a sort of
Cary Grant impression.
It still occasionally surfaces today.
So, Kelsey Grammer used it in Frasier.
That was one of his things.
I got told that I had the worst Hindi accent that an English person
had had on film. I am half-Indian, by the way.
I am not going to be racist right now.
But I was doing films and TV in Bombay,
and I was told that my accent was...
..totally the EP-i-tome
of a Britisher's bad Hindi accent.
And that's from somebody who used the word "EP-i-tome,"
and it's like, get your em-PHA-sis right,
and then we can talk.
Yeah.
You can't record synced sound cos there's too much noise in Bombay.
So, it would all be done in the dubbing.
So, if you make a mistake, they just go...
So, it'll be done in the dubbing.
Actually, you could pretty much do anything if you could lip sync,
but I had somebody sitting there who would deliver me
the dialogue and I was told to look into middle distance
and say things like...
..which means "his steel sword is very strong."
God knows what that actually meant.
And then I'd wait and stare a little bit longer,
listen to the next dialogue and deliver it, that's how I acted.
What kind of things were you in?
Don't you want to see them? I want to see them.
I want to see the rushes with the other person.
Well, the Mid-Atlantic accent was used by lots of villains,
so you got Jafar in Aladdin, Cruella de Vil has it,
Darth Vader has it, the evil queen in Snow White,
anyway, there we are.
This is Pickering's Harem.
What huge discovery did they help make?
Is it Braille?
No, a very interesting choice. Well, because they're all working
very closely. They're definitely researching something.
It is one of the most astonishing discoveries.
It is thanks to these women the universe was discovered
less than a century ago.
So, 1923, Edwin Hubble found evidence that a universe existed
outside the Milky Way, but he couldn't have done it without
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and that is her at the back.
She was a member of a group of astronomers known
as Pickering's Harem.
So, basically what she did, she worked out how to measure
distance from the Earth with pulsating stars,
and when Hubble spotted one of those stars, he used her methods
to calculate how far away it was and he learned it was much
too distant to be part of the Milky Way. It's unbelievable.
It's less than a century ago he discovered the universe,
but he couldn't have done it without her.
So, when does she get co-credit on that?
OK, so that is one of the extraordinary things.
So, Leavitt was employed by a man called Charles Pickering.
There's Charles Pickering. He was the director
of the Harvard Observatory from 1877 and, originally,
he hired male staff in order to analyse all of the data
that was being collected from the observed sky and he got so angry
with the staff because he found them incompetent
and he said, "My maid could do it better."
And, so, they said, "Yeah, go on, then."
So, he brought his maid in and she could do it better.
In fact, she did it so well he hired other
what were known as female computers,
or, more insultingly, Pickering's Harem.
And it's a classic thing in science, the harem effect.
It's a phenomenon whereby a male scientist in a position of power
predominately hires female assistants,
probably because he has to pay them less, so you get more assistance.
That's why this episode was so cheap to make.
Alan Davis' QI.
Actually, Hubble himself, odd character.
He claimed he'd fought a bear, he claimed
he'd saved two women from drowning, he claimed
he'd set up a successful law practise in Kentucky.
No evidence for any of these things.
He smoked a pipe because he thought it looked British.
He had a, sort of, fake British accent.
He had a Mid-Atlantic accent as well, then?
He did. Yeah.
I have totally run out of questions, but I've been told that my elves
have finally finished the procrastination questions.
So, there is my elf, Anna.
Anna, thank you very much. No, no, it is fine. Better late than never.
Thank you, Anna.
When should we celebrate Procrastination Week?
Umm...Well, erm, we could do, I mean, I would say...
I need to clean my house, so...
..after that? After that, yeah.
It is celebrated every year by the Philadelphia-based
Procrastinators' Club of America.
It takes place at slightly different times each year.
Usually the first couple of weeks in March,
depends, you know, how long he gets put off for.
The club was formed in 1956.
It's 20 membership, if you're interested.
This buys you a licence to procrastinate and access
to the monthly publication called Last Month's Newsletter,
Lists upcoming events that have already taken place.
They celebrate Christmas in June, the 4th of July in January
and they have a Be Late for Something Day on September 5th.
Their motto is "Behind you all the way."
In 1966, they went on a bus tour, brandishing a banner,
Excursion To The New York World Fair,
which had closed a year and a half earlier.
They recently ran a campaign to get the late President James Buchanan
re-elected. He died in 1868.
There are lots of famous procrastinators.
The playwright, this is one of my favourite, Richard Sheridan
who wrote The School For Scandal.
He finished writing it as it was being performed
on the opening night...
..in 1777, bringing down lines to the actors
as they were on the stage.
That is quite late. Isn't it? That is leaving it a bit late.
Where does it come from?
I really suffer from it.
I just always clean the house or do whatever it is.
Where does it come from in the brain, or why do we do it?
Well, it's interesting because lots of people suffer terrible shame
and anxiety about it, and one of the things that they now
think is that they're often perfectionists.
They find it psychologically more acceptable never to tackle
the task rather than to face the possibility of falling short.
- To try and fail. - Yeah, you don't want to fall short on a performance.
They have looked into ways to try and improve people's habits on this.
So, they did a report on the effectiveness of internet-based
cognitive behavioural therapy in improving procrastination.
The main problem with the study
was that people kept putting off doing the treatment.
Leonardo da Vinci, ultimate Renaissance man,
he took 25 years to finish the Virgin Of The Rocks.
Is that a painting or is that an actual woman?
It's the one in the Louvre.
There's another one in the National Gallery.
The Mona Lisa took 15 years
and he lived to be 67.
He actually only completed 15 paintings and a handful
of architectural designs.
And patrons going mad had to call in other people to come and finish.
I have to say, this is absolutely true.
We wrote to the Procrastinators' Club because we were
doing this question and they haven't got back to us.
Now, if you're feeling clueless, we won't postpone it any longer.
It's time for the soul-destroying chore
that we call general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
If you are settling something mano a mano,
how are you doing it?
Yes? Man-to-man.
No, it's not man-to-man.
Ah, yes.
Hand-to-hand. It is hand-to-hand.
That is the literal Spanish translation.
So, that dates back to the 1950s,
but in fact it used to refer to a very particular Spanish sport.
Er, arm wrestling.
Is that a very particular Spanish sport?
Oh, sorry.
It is arm wrestling.
Would it be bullfighting?
It would be bullfighting, absolutely.
It used to refer to two bullfighters in a rink competing
for the audience's attention by killing three bulls each,
and it was used to imply that they were on equal footing to each other.
Wait, so they had to kill three each before the audience
would even start watching?
I mean, I've never been to a bull...
..that wouldn't be my thing, to go to a bullfighting thing.
Don't go in that top, whatever you do!
Can you imagine? It does look terrifying.
Well, his trousers look terrifying.
Do you think his arse is always that tight?
I think it's the sight of the bull.
I think his arse is acting on those trousers even as we speak.
Now, here's a brainteaser.
What am I describing? Known as the Great War,
the poppy is used to represent...?
Yes?
World War I?
No, just let me finish.
The main combatants were France on one side and the UK on the other.
Was it the World Cup in 1982?
It's Napoleonic.
The Napoleonic Wars were the original Great War,
and the poppy was the emblem of that war.
Before battle, so, in the case of the Napoleonic ones,
particularly the land was often empty and barren.
And, afterwards, these blood red flowers would flourish.
The reason that scarlet corn poppies do so well on battlefields
is because their seeds rely on light in order to grow.
So, if the soil is disturbed tremendously, they emerge
out of the dark earth and are exposed to the Sun's light
and poppies abound. So, there was an American professor
and humanitarian called Moina Belle Michael.
She was the one who conceived of using the poppy as a symbol
of remembrance for World War I.
She taught disabled servicemen at the University of Georgia.
She began to sell poppies to raise funds for them.
And, then, in 1921, her idea was adopted by the American Legion
and later in that same year by the British Legion.
So, the poppy is an American idea from the Napoleonic Wars.
Which is not what you would think. Right!
We'll end on a question about love and partnership.
What do opposites do?
Attract.
Nope. They did a survey. There's 80% of people who believe
that to be true. But they examined the digital footprints
of over 45,000 people,
and it's really rare that opposites attract.
On the contrary, it's people with similar personalities.
So, based on likes and word choices in posts, you're much more likely
to be become friends and much more likely to be romantic partners.
That's why your partner's more likely to shag your friends,
cos they like you.
That didn't come up in the study, but I think that'll do.
It's fine. We've all had an experience like that.
And he was my best mate!
So, here's bad news.
Dating apps are terrible at pairing up people.
No shit. No! What?
I know, it's shocking to be attracted to each other...
They can pair up murderers and victims though, can't they?
Sorry, is that...
..is that an app?
It might as well be. Are you a murderer or a victim?
I'm sort of a victim. What are you? Murderer. Oh!
We have a house deep in the woods in Denmark and I've been splitting
some wood for the stove, and I'd left the axe outside,
and my mother said to me, she said, "You better bring the axe in."
I said, "Why?" She said, "What if an axe-murderer happens to pass by?"
I said, "I'm going to guess by his job description"
"he's got his own axe."
He's coming in with a butter knife and he's like, "Wait a minute."
He's already like, "I'm going to leave the axe because"
"I'm a butter knife murderer."
"I'm going to spread you to death."
They did a study and they asked participants to answer
100 questions about their own personalities and what they were
looking for in a partner, and then they sent them on a series
of speed dates, and they did a sort of algorithm based
on the answers they'd given to predict how well the dates
would go romantically.
And it was no better than chance at predicting whether two people
would be attracted to each other.
Opposites don't attract, so, if you're a procrastinator,
best to date another procrastinator, er, you know,
when you get round to it.
Well, we've been putting it off, but it's time for
the off-putting matter of the scores.
Busy on the deadlines this week with -4,
in first place, it's Holly!
In the nick of time in second place, with -12,
Alan!
Just a tad too late with -13,
it's Nikki!
And watching the last bus disappearing over the horizon,
in last place, at -14,
it's Aisling!
That's it from Nikki, Aisling, Holly, Alan and me.
I'm going to end on a wise and witty quotation just as soon as
the elves get round to giving me one.
In the meantime, in the words of Mark Twain,
"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day"
"after tomorrow just as well."
Goodnight.