Good evening, welcome to QI.
Pull up a pew and assemble your amazeballs because tonight's
show is absolutely phenomenal.
Our guests tonight are the puzzling Cariad Lloyd...
APPLAUSE
..the perplexing Paul Sinha...♪
APPLAUSE
..the preternatural Josh Widdicombe...
APPLAUSE
..and the Pope Lick Monster, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
So, can anybody tell me anything about the Pope Lick Monster?
Well, I deny everything, for a start.
LAUGHTER
And the Pope started it. No, no...
It is part man, part goat, part sheep, and it supposedly lived...
And part Catholic?
Part Catholic, it supposedly lived beneath a railway bridge
over Pope Lick Creek in Louisville, Kentucky. Oh.
It lures people to their death by hypnosis.
Come with me, yes, I have cake, come this way.
Is that how you get your ladies?
LAUGHTER
It could work.
Our guests' buzzers are a peculiar panoply of the paranormal.
Cariad goes...
X-FILES THEME TUNE PLAYS
It's a show about phenomena.
Yeah, things are going to get weird.
Paul goes...
TWILIGHT ZONE THEME PLAYS
Josh goes...
JOHN CARPENTER'S HALLOWEEN THEME
And Alan goes....
♪ Scooby-doo-bee-doo, where are you, we've got some work to do, now... ♪
Actually frightened me.
First of all, we're going to probe your psyches.
What do you see here?
That's my mum that didn't love me.
They're always about the mother.
Yeah, that's my dad that didn't love me, and that one's Alan Davies.
That third one was a bit of loo role I flushed away this morning.
AUDIENCE GROAN
That really did not take long, did it?
LAUGHTER
So, what are these called?
Rorschach tests.
They're Rorschach tests, named after Hermann Rorschach,
or just ink blots, you could just call them,
and he published his first ink blots in 1921... Whoa! Wow!
Why did no-one talk about how hot Rorschach is? I'm sorry...
That is one of those ones on the X Factor, he's not good enough
on his own, but they'll put him in a group.
He's so hot, I'm sorry. Yeah, he is a very good-looking fellow. Gosh.
He was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst... Sure...
..and he was looking for a way in which you could diagnose
schizophrenics, but, in fact, do we think the ink blots worked?
No, isn't that the thing, they proved that they didn't really...?
They didn't do what they were looking for,
which was a substantive test to see...analysing different illnesses,
so on, but it did allow people sometimes to tap
into the unconscious, so, sometimes it makes people talk
about things that they wouldn't ordinarily talk about.
As a GP, it's quite useful to get rid of a patient that you wanted
to get rid of. If they just come in for a cough or a cold,
"Does this remind you of your dead mother?"
Is that how you get them out? Exactly.
I would have thought it might make you stay a bit longer, I'd be like,
"Oh, Dr Sinha's ready to chat, let's go!"
If Dr Sinha looked anything like Rorschach, then you'd be...
Yeah, then I would be, and I'd have to get out.
The fact is that we do have a tendency to look at images
and try and make them into something, it is something
called pareidolia, and it's the human tendency to see
images where maybe they don't exist.
We want it to make some kind of sense.
What he was looking for was a way to look for depression or anxiety
it disorders, violent criminal tendencies,
and that absolutely does not work for, but it works occasionally
to unlock things that people can't articulate,
that they do want to try and talk about.
Does anybody know where the word "shrink" comes from,
which we sometimes use, in terms of psychiatrist?
Is it about shrinking your brain?
Well, it's from a...there's a sort of pseudoscience
called phrenology... Yeah... Ooh...
And phrenologists used to claim that the shape of the skull
indicated the personality, and they could help you shrink
the undesirable qualities, is what they were looking for.
Let's have a look at the first three ink blots that we had up,
and let's see what everybody makes of them. Number one,
what do you see? It looks a bit like a train line,
that's what I'm thinking. A train line? Like train tracks.
Well, where they've entered the toilets, I don't know what that...
What I can actually see there... Yes?
Oh, God, I hope...imagine if I found out I'm a murderer
through this, it's going to be really disappointing.
Imagine you found out? You'd have to have killed someone to...
Genuinely what I can see... Yep? ..is I think it looks like a cat,
in that you've got those two whiskers, and then it looks
like a bit of a cat's face below it. Right.
And then the rest of it doesn't look like a cat.
It could be a cat if it's roadkill.
Yeah, Josh, yeah, that's murderer, if you see a cat.
It's called murderer. Yeah.
Well, it is known as the sex card.
It has the most reported sexual answers. Oh, dear.
But also lots of people see it as an animal skin or a rug,
that's extremely common.
So, let's have a look at number two, Cariad?
I can see two girls looking at each other.
Well, it is sometimes referred to as the mother card,
women and children are often seen in that lot.
I think it looks like two people.
It's two rabbits yelling at each other. Yeah.
Number three, common responses to this blot,
what does anybody else think?
It's surely the rear view of two gorillas high-fiving each other.
Oh, yeah!
This might come back badly on my psychology,
but can anyone else see, like, a screaming rabbit?
No, but I can hear one.
The Silence of the Rabbits, the unsuccessful working title.
Apparently this card can also induce a variety of sexual responses.
Oh, there you go. As I said, can anyone else...?
A silently screaming rabbit.
The Rorschach test has long been used as a personality test,
but I don't know what people see in it.
Where's the weirdest place to feel another person?
Loughborough? Yeah! Loughborough's good.
I was going to say Salford, I don't know why!
Bognor Regis.
Is it on your body? Does it begin with a P?
Is it perineum? Oh!
No, but I like your workings.
I love that you didn't wait for the answer to any of those questions.
We really saw the thought process, the whole way through.
From a doctor's point of view, it's probably the middle
of your gut, because that would suggest that you've gone too far.
Oh...
One way or the other, you've gone too far. That's very unpleasant.
Can you go in both ends? Like, you know when you're building a...
Oh, like when they met at the Channel Tunnel halfway?
When you... Exactly!
And when you're on the beach and you're building a sand castle
and you put a tunnel in.
Where would you meet in the body if you did that?
That's a curious question.
If two people met, hand-in-hand, in the middle of me...
Yeah?
..would I definitely have to die?
Or could I survive that?
I don't know, but your GP would definitely be struck off.
OK, so, the weirdest place to feel another person,
for example, would be on Mount Everest or on an expedition.
It's something called Third Man Syndrome and it is the sensation
of the presence of an extra, unseen person.
So, the weirdest place you might feel another person
is when there's actually nobody there.
It happens in extreme situations, the most vivid
are experienced by adventurers.
In 1933, there was a solo attempt to climb Everest by a British
explorer called Frank Smythe, and he got within 1,000ft
of the top and he had the strongest sensation
that somebody was with him, so strong that he broke off a piece of,
I don't know, Kendal Mint Cake, whatever it was, and he handed it,
or tried to hand it, to this other person.
Probably the bloke holding the camera.
But Ernest Shackleton reported exactly the same sensation
in his book, South. That's really weird.
He says, "During that long and racking march of 36 hours"
"over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,"
"it seemed to me often that we were four and not three."
So, there was a sensation of there being somebody else along.
And I don't know if you know TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland,
it's in there, it's inspired by Shackleton's experience.
That's Gandalf. Shaft!
It did feel a bit karaoke, that, didn't it?
Yeah, yeah. TS Eliot karaoke. I want to do it.
♪ Who is the third who walks always beside you
♪ Only you and I together
♪ But when I look ahead
♪ Up the white ro-o-oad
♪ There is always another
♪ Walking beside you! ♪
So, why do you think it might be?
Why? Because of ghosts.
Oh, there's a bloke on Everest who just keeps turning up.
No, it's possibly a coping mechanism of the brain to provide comfort.
Or ghosts.
Or it's ghosts.
But the electrical stimulation of the temporoparietal junctions
of the brain, so, the sort of bits back here,
these parts of the brain,
they're hugely important in how we interpret all the stuff
that comes into our senses.
Why might you, bearing all of that in mind,
why might you be more likely to see God
wearing one of these? Ooh.
Do you want to have a look? Yes.
Now, can I just say that we made this, this is not a real one.
I can see Dennis Bergkamp.
Why might you be more likely to see God wearing one of those?
Well, because it's not a very good crash helmet
so you could easily die?
Is it stimulating a bit of your brain?
Yeah, a minor electrical stimulation, no more than the,
sort of, electrics in a hairdryer, or in a phone set, or something.
Is it on? Yes.
This is it. This is heaven. It's exactly like it was down there.
I think this one needs a battery, nothing's happening at all.
No, it's called a God Helmet, it was invented by Stanley Koren,
a technologist at Laurentian University in Canada,
and a neuroscientist called Michael Persinger,
and it interferes with the brain's function,
so, it was used in experiments, and to see if it creates the sense
of a religious experience, and some people said that they felt,
when they had it on, they were in the presence of God.
You'd be unlucky, I think, to put that on and get the wrong sort
of religious experience. Yes.
Yeah, what would be the wrong one? When you wake-up circumcised or...
I'll tell you what, if that happens, you've put it on the wrong end.
This guy here, this is the neuroscientist,
Michael Persinger, his theory is that religious
and mystical experiences are actually caused by
disruptions of the brain, so, it's actually some kind of
electrical thing that's happening.
Now, that may be that actually what we can do is we can
artificially produce exactly the same thing,
but that there are real religious and mystical experiences,
the truth is we don't know.
The thing is with this, is this a snapshot,
like a freeze-frame? Yeah.
In other words, could this person be plummeting at a terrific rate?
These wings don't work!
Catch me!
And then really about to hit the ground.
I thought I saw a third angel!
Now, then, what's the most terrifying thing about
Anne Robinson?
LAUGHTER
Where do you start?
Do you know what it is? She's behind you.
You've got Third Anne Syndrome.
It's her wink.
You find that terrifying?
There's no need to wink in society, unless you're telling someone
you don't believe what you're actually saying. Right.
So, at the end of The Weakest Link, when Anne Robinson says,
"Join us again tomorrow for The Weakest Link." And winks,
what she's actually saying is,
"I hope you die in the next 24 hours."
Is it that she's sitting in fire and not burning?
Yes, I'm going to give you a clue.
So, it is quite cold here in the studio,
in fact, I think this studio is possibly haunted, so there is...
CRASHING, LAUGHTER
I genuinely jumped!
APPLAUSE
You've let your gender down.
I know. Josh jumped, too!
You didn't see Josh.
He jumped as well! Old big head jumped as well.
I genuinely...
As it fell, I thought, "What are the chances of...?"
"Oh, wait a minute."
So, one of the most famous poltergeist cases
was the Stockwell poltergeist of 1772.
So, there was a Mrs Golding of Stockwell, and she was terrorised
by a presence that smashed crockery and moved furniture.
One of my favourite books of all time, this is not my copy
because I'd never be able to carry it around,
is the Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds
by Charles Mackay. If you haven't read it,
I really recommend this wonderful Victorian book.
It's not one for the Tube, though, is it?
Sandi, that looks like your bed.
Sorry.
I...
And I am a small person, but...
I don't think you should tell people that you know that.
"Mrs Golding, an elderly lady who resided alone with her servant,"
"Anne Robinson..."
Oh.
"..was sorely surprised on the evening of Twelfth-Day,"
"1772."
250 years old!
Her surgery is amazing.
She looks really good.
That she can wink at all...
If you asked me to guess and put a ballpark on it...
She looks great.
"She was sorely surprised to observe a most extraordinary commotion among her crockery."
"Cups and saucers rattled down the chimney,"
"pots and pans were whirled downstairs, and every room"
"in the house was, in a short time, strewed with fragments."
It turns out that all of this only happened when her servant was there,
and her servant was called Anne Robinson.
And she had tied horse hairs and wires to objects in order
to scare her employer.
And it says, "Anne, it appears, was anxious to have a clear house"
"to carry on an intrigue with her lover and resorted to this trick"
"to effect her purpose."
Of course, there are lots of instances where people
are just mucking about, like Anne Robinson was.
1804, Hammersmith was terrorised by a ghost impersonator,
but the huge publicity meant the culprit came forward.
A man called John Graham, who was an elderly shoemaker,
and he had been pretending to be a ghost by using a white sheet
to frighten his apprentice.
Classic!
I mean, that is route one pretending to be a ghost.
Why do we wear a bed sheet?
What is the reason for it?
Why is that a thing that we all think,
"Ooh, yes, that's to do with ghosts?" I don't know.
I'll tell you why. Yeah?
♪ Scooby-doo-bee-doo... ♪
It probably dates back to the 16th century.
So, people couldn't afford coffins, so all that used
to happen, they'd be wrapped in... In a shroud.
..a winding sheet, yeah, a linen winding sheet,
knotted at the head and foot, and placed in the grave,
so, we have a notion that it's...
Coming back from the shrouds. Yeah.
18th-century London was terrorised by Anne Robinson.
Well, that was such a fantastic question,
let's see what the audience think of it.
Yes!
That was wonderful.
So, my next question, who invented that wave?
Ah.
I've seen the show before, it's not Mexico. It's not.
I think it was popularised, I might be wrong, in the Mexico '86
World Cup and that's what...
Ah-ah-ah. I...
Too late. The referee's decision is final.
VAR, I need on that...
What if it wasn't a person at all?
Oh. Is it a country you're looking for, or...?
No, it is in the world of nature.
The Mexican wave was invented by giant...
Barley in a field.
That's the name of the album.
No, it was invented by giant honey bees. Wow.
It is an astonishing thing to look at.
It's called shimmering and it acts as a defensive mechanism
to warn off predators.
So, each bee flips their abdomen upwards in turn, creating a shining
pattern and it confuses and deters hornets and it forces them to chase
individual flying bees rather than jumping
in and having, basically, a bee buffet.
I think it's an incredible thing to look at.
They're called Apis laboriosa, they're the world's largest bees,
they're 1.2 inches in length. Oh, that's big.
And they live on trees and cliffs in the Himalayas,
and they can make hallucinogenic honey
out of pollen taken from rhododendron plants. Wow.
It's collected by teams of Nepalese men who descend cliffs,
look at that, harnessed to a ladder by ropes, and a single comb
can contain more than 60,000 bees.
Whoa. It's a beautiful thing.
So, a Mexican wave did not originate in Mexico but,
as you say, it was really the '86 World Cup that made it popular.
But its actual origins, we're not really sure.
Possibly in the '70s, in the United States.
Yeah, I think in America they done it... Do you think they do it
quite a lot? Yeah, because their sports go on forever
and they get epically bored. Yeah.
So, they find something to do.
Now, please take a look at some phenomenal people at the pinnacle
of their field and I want you to guess the records held
by our prestigious guests.
So, let's start with the woman on the left,
what do we think? She holds a world record.
Is there any clue in the picture?
Er, no.
It's nothing to do with cooking at all. Is it a sport?
It is to do with sport. Is she a long jumper?
No, it is a little bit more niche.
She holds the women's record for fastest marathon
in a toilet roll costume.
Four hours and 54 minutes at the 2017 London Marathon.
The second one is called Martin Brady and his name, Brady,
holds a clue to his world record.
Do you know what bradycardia is?
I do, has he got the slowest heart rate?
He has got the slowest heart rate in the world,
logged at 27 beats per minute. What?!
Oh, my God, how is he still alive?
So, the average male heart rate's 72 beats per minute.
Let's have a look at our third record-holder.
Now, here's an astonishing thing.
That is Stephen Wildish
and he beat Mo Farah.
Whoa. And what did he beat Mo Farah doing?
Most corn consumed. No.
Yes. Sack race.
He held the world record in 2014, 39.91 seconds.
In 2017, Steve Wildish smashed that in just 26.3 seconds.
What's the distance, sorry? 100m?
It's 100m, yeah.
So, he had tried earlier in the year but his sack
had been deemed too small.
LAUGHTER
Do you know what? I say!
In this weather, I've had the same problem. Yeah.
APPLAUSE
So, the man who beat Mo Farah substantially is in our audience.
Please welcome Stephen Wildish. Oh, lovely.
I mean, how did you know, Steve,
that you're good at doing a sack race?
I was unbeaten since school, so I did all the school races and...
Right. Did your mum say, "Ooh, my boy is very good at sack racing."
Yes, she used to film the sack races at school.
Are you allowed to put your feet into the corners of the sack
and, kind of, run along, or do you have to jump? You have to jump.
You have to jump? Yeah. OK.
Would you mind having a go for us and showing us your technique?
Yes! But, wait, we have to have a competitor, so I feel the only
person I know who's been and reported at the Paralympics
is Josh Widdicombe.
I would like Josh to go. Yes!
Don't let us down, Josh. I won't.
I won... I didn't do the sack race, I did a race at school called
the Dressing-Up Race. Oh, yeah!
I won two years in a row. Really?
I left primary school undefeated.
I now want to see Mo Farah doing the Dressing-Up Race,
but there we are.
So, please be careful, both of you.
Darling, you have to hold the sack.
Have you got any tips?
I use one arm out, a bit of balance.
Whoa. OK.
Ready, boys?
Imagine if I win, how amazing this will be.
If you win, darling, you'll be the world record holder.
Oh, my giddy aunt. On your marks... Come on, Josh!
..get set, go!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Thank you, Stephen Wildish.
I'll tell you what, though. Yeah?
About ten metres in, I thought...
I didn't...
I dared to dream.
Yeah, you did.
I saw the headlines.
I thought, "This is it! This is my moment!" Yeah, world record.
I could see you were keeping a bit back for the final...
I thought, "Finally, I've found my thing."
But you hadn't.
Right, moving on, how many crimes could you commit...
..with one of these?
Lock picking, do you think you could do lock picking?
No, it was to do with a German criminal so elusive that the German
police spent two years hunting what was known as the Phantom
of Heilbronn, also known as the Woman Without A Face.
So, between 1993 and 2009, the Phantom of Heilbronn was held
responsible for over 40 crimes, and her DNA was found continuously
at the crime scene and they could not work it out.
There was a 300,000 euro bounty placed on her head
and they did two years of investigation,
only to find that this person did not exist.
So, the DNA...
Was it somebody in the forensics team?
It was the factory making the cotton buds.
Oh, my God.
So, they used to take DNA samples, the crime team,
with the little cotton bud,
they had been contaminated with the DNA of the women
who actually made the cotton buds. Oh, that's amazing.
The Bild newspaper ran the headline,
"Are the heads of our police stuffed with cotton wool?"
What I like about them is that, the people make them,
they explicitly print, "Do not insert inside the ear canal."
Yeah, you can cause a lot of damage.
Yes, but it's probably the only product whose main purpose
is precisely the one they explicitly rule out.
Well, that's not where I put them.
There's some awful DNA on that.
I heard a radio programme, and this doctor was saying
that people get addicted to putting them in their ears and even
when someone has had ear damage and it's affected them
and you get more infections that way, they'll then go back
to that patient and they'll be like, "I'm doing it again."
But, am I right, Paul, you're not supposed to remove ear wax,
it's there for a purpose? No, it can build up
and cause conductive deafness,
so you've just got to be very careful with it, that's the point.
And addiction to ear buds can...
Can kill. Well, can kill.
Timpanicide, I believe it's called,
killing somebody by perforating their eardrum. Yeah, yeah.
I made it up. Oh.
LAUGHTER
You done it good.
APPLAUSE
I'm so gullible.
Now, it's time for the point of no return journey to Hades
that we call general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Please show me your best poker face.
Your best poker face.
Wow, that is...
LAUGHTER
Cariad looks possessed.
I nearly mooned you there.
None of those, if I may say so, are any good.
What do you think should be a good poker face? Some neutrality.
No, so, they have studied all sorts of poker faces and most effective
thing is a positive expression.
So, if you're smiling and looking cheerful,
these warmer expressions will lead your opponent
to make greater mistakes.
Do not date any of these people. There's a warning.
That's a hell of a Tinder photo, that. Yeah.
Anyway, there you are.
The best poker face to pull is a trustworthy smile.
What is the fastest creature on land?
X-FILES THEME TUNE PLAYS
That man in the sack. The man...
Wait a minute. I'm sorry I forgot your name.
She... You might have meant me!
Oh, no.
Unbelievable!
I haven't quite finished before you buzzed in. Sorry.
What is the fastest creature on land, relative to body length?
OK?
So... Yes. TWILIGHT ZONE THEME PLAYS
I'm going to say cheetah.
I just wanted to join in!
Oh. So, yes?
Is it you?
LAUGHTER
Definitely.
It is a small thing.
It's called a Californian mite, so it is a tiny, little thing,
it's the size of a sesame seed.
They have been clocked at speeds
of 322 body lengths per second. OK?
Now, that's only about an inch, OK? But if you imagine your body
and how fast you would need to go, 322 lengths of your own body
per second, it is the fastest creature on land.
The previous record holder was the Australian tiger beetle
and that was a paltry 171 body lengths per second.
I was hoping you were going to say
the Australian model Elle MacPherson.
LAUGHTER
You said the cheetah, so, the cheetah is phenomenally fast,
57.8mph, but 16 body lengths per second.
Whoa, lazy.
Yeah.
So, 300 lengths of its body...
Yeah, in a second. But that's only an inch, you see?
Yeah. That's an inch, is it, Alan?
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
So, that brings us to the extremely familiar phenomenon of the scores.
In first place, with a practically perfect ten,
it's Alan!
AUDIENCE CHEER
In second place, with -5,
it's Paul!
APPLAUSE
In penultimate place with -6,
Cariad.
APPLAUSE
And, bringing up the posterior, indeed, falling over in his sack,
with -12, it's Josh.
BIG CHEER FROM THE AUDIENCE
I'd like to thank Paul, Josh, Cariad and Alan,
and I leave you with this to ponder.
British neuroscientist Adrian Owen was told of a girl
that was in a coma but was still aware of her surroundings.
Her mother visited her every day and played the same Celine Dion
album on repeat for months.
It was, she thought, her daughter's favourite album.
The girl was one of the few to recover from this state
and her first words to her mother on waking were,
"If I ever hear that Celine Dion album again,"
"I will kill you."
Have a phenomenal night, goodnight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE