"(applause)" "Hello and welcome to QI, where we hope, finally, to prove Oscar Wilde's theory that there are only two kinds of interesting people - those who know absolutely everything and those who know absolutely nothing." "On tonight's programme, we're lucky enough to have four kinds of people, only one of whom, sadly, fits into either category." "Alan Davies, Bill Bailey," "Linda Smith, Richard E Grant." "Well, now, the rules are straightforward." "I am omnipotent, omniscient, and have a low boredom threshold." "You are quite interesting, or there'll be trouble." "If all else fails, each of you is able to at least make an interesting noise." " Richard goes..." " (fanfare)" " Linda goes..." " (harp)" " Bill goes..." " (bagpipes)" " Alan goes..." " (donkey)" "And I go..." "Let's go." "So fingers on buzzers, please, for our first round, which is on arts and entertainment." "This question." "Why don't pigeons like going to the movies?" " (bagpipes) - (Stephen) Yes, Bill." "Well, I don't know." "Pigeons don't go to the movies." "Nothing much is made with them in mind, really." "Pigeons are much more into German expressionism." "How long does a pigeon live?" "What's the life span of a pigeon?" "(strained grunt)" " You've got me there." " Nine, ten years?" " No, they live a fair old time." " They could only go and see a U film." "That's true." "That's very true." "But birds don't fly at night, do they?" "I mean, they do in some cities." " Owls do." " Can't see where they're going." "Owls do." "But they don't go to the pictures either." "If they do, they spend the whole time looking round the other way." "So they can only go in the day to a U film." " You're narrowing it down." " (fanfare)" " (Stephen) Richard." " Because they're allergic to popcorn." "Quite literally." "Open-air cinemas, like drive-ins, where I grew up, pigeons exploded from eating popcorn." " So it's..." " Becoming increasingly hard to verify." "It is very hard to verify, cos you grew up in Swaziland?" "Yep." "Pigeon country." " Are there a lot of pigeons in Swaziland?" " A lot." "Damn, that's so convincing." "It's not true, but I really like it." "What would happen if a pigeon looked at a film?" " The eyes on the side of their head..." " They go like that." "Or the fact that..." "No." "They'd have to perch on the back of a chair and they can't see anything straight ahead." "So he'd have to keep looking from side to side." "Not that." "Pigeons have extraordinarily good eyes." " (Alan) Do they?" " Yes." "Homing pigeons." "They can see their home from across the Channel." "No, they can see landmarks from high up." ""Look, that's my house."" "Landmarks they see very well indeed from high up, like a lot of birds, like birds of prey." "They're reckoned to have eyesight at least ten times better than ours." "So does that mean they'd prefer to see it on DVD?" " With all the interviews and..." " How does film work?" "How does film work?" " Lots of pictures going really quickly." " Really quickly to us." " But to them, "Why's it going so slowly?" - (Stephen) To them it's a slide show." "It's a slow slide show." "They don't..." "We see 24, 25 frames a second as movement." "They would need, it has been calculated and maybe it has even been demonstrated, they would need 250 frames a second, ten times faster, in order for it to be a coherent image that moved." "So they would be bored stiff by slide shows." "They're watching The Matrix and thinking, "When is something going to happen?"" "Exactly!" ""What is this?" "A Merchant Ivory film?" "What's going on?"" "Who is funding research into what pigeons like?" "Lines and lines of pigeons in the pictures all going... (yawns)" "Pigeons have saved many lives as carriers in wars," " right up even until the Second World War." " So we're rewarding them with a cinema?" "We're rewarding ourselves by researching into all kinds of interesting pigeon-related data." "When they sit in and the Pathe News chicken comes up, do they go, "Bah"?" " For example, I could tell you..." " "Crap eyes!"" "...it costs 105,000 pounds last year, to clean up the pigeon crap" " from Trafalgar Square." " St Mark's Square." "Well, that's..." "St Mark's Square, I think you're probably right, from Trafalgar Square." "Where do pigeons get that sort of money?" "When you're driving down the road, why does the pigeon not jump out of the way till the last conceivable second?" "Well, that's a fun game and that's proof of how it sees the world slower than we do." "For them, it's got acres of time." "And what do they go?" "What noise do they make?" "(coos) How do they do it?" "Bet you can do it." " You're good at noises." " (coos)" " Who did that?" " (coos)" "Oh." "Five points." " (Alan) Five points!" " (Stephen) Very good." "He got five points for doing a pigeon noise!" "(meows)" "(barks)" " Absolutely nothing like a pigeon at all." " (bleats)" "Pigeons go in other birds' nests." "Like cuckoos." " Pigeon doing an impression of a cat." " I think you may be thinking of a cuckoo." "As in the phrase "cuckoo in the nest"." "But I'll tell you what is interesting." "What else is interesting about pigeons?" " They can suck." " Yes." " The only bird that can suck." " Is that how they raised the ?" "105,000?" " Pigeons can suck, yeah." "All other birds..." " (Alan) Don't use straws?" "They scoop up with the lower part of the beak and tip back." "Exactly right." " I know cos I have parrots, you see." " I know you do." "But it's clearing up." "Pigeons, as we've discovered, the only birds that suck, but why would you invite one to a picnic?" " To suck stuff for you." " (fanfare)" " Go ahead, Richard." " Um..." "Well, if you..." "You don't think of taking toothpicks on a picnic, so if you got spinach or stuff stuck in your teeth, if you grab a pigeon and shove it to your face, like that, it's gonna suck it out for you," "so it avoids gum disease and I think it would be very useful." "I want to tell you that the real answer is even more disgusting than that." "It is repellant." "You don't even use the front end of a pigeon." "This is, I have to say, I think it's a practice that has died out, but it was common right up until a couple of hundred years ago." "What are the dangers on a picnic, for example?" " Bees." " Bees, wasps, or even worse..." "Ants." "Bad company." " Snakes." " A snake." "An adder." "It was believed that a pigeon's arse would suck out the poison." "So you get bitten and then you get a stray pigeon and stick its arse on it." "How do you tell it to start sucking?" "You wait for the pigeon to die, apparently, and then you use another pigeon and another." "And when the final pigeon survives, you know that all the poison has been sucked." " Can an adder's bite be that bad?" " No, that's the weird thing." " The last person to die from an adder's..." " It would have to be pretty bad, wouldn't it?" "1977 a girl died from an adder's bite." "That's the last one." "More people die from peanuts every year than have died from adders every century." "Who discovered that a pigeon's arse can suck poison?" "Well, it goes back to Pliny the Elder." "Oh, not him again." "Everything he says is rubbish." "No, the great Pliny the Elder actually had his own version, which was simply to tear open a swallow, a live swallow, and apply it." "Try this for size, gentlemen and lady." "Which living creature has the largest brain in comparison to its body size?" "(bagpipes)" "Bill." "Wasp." " No, not a wasp, but not a bad guess." " (Linda) Oh, not a wasp?" "A human." " Oh, no!" " (alarm bells)" "Oh, dear, oh, dear." "Oh, dear." "No, not a human." "No, I'm afraid you lose ten for that." "Not a human." " I haven't got ten, though." " No, well, we're..." " A flea." " Not a flea." " Ant." "Some sort of insect." " What?" "Huh?" "Ha!" "Ho!" " Ant." " Ant is the right answer." "Is that how you're awarding points?" " How big is it then?" " It's about..." " The ant's brain, I mean." " About 6% of its body." "The smallest brain is an ostrich, is it?" "Ostriches do have pretty tiny ones, don't they?" "You grew up with ostriches." " I did, yes." " You were adopted by a family of ostriches." " Can you make an ostrich noise, though?" " Yes, but not for you." " Make it for Linda." "Make it for Linda." " I'd love to make it for Linda." "If we applied the same percentage to humans, our heads would have to be nearly three times larger than they are." "We'd all look like William Hague." "They reckon about 40,000 ants, the size of an average colony, has the same amount of neurons and brain cells as one human being, so an ant colony is an intelligent object." " I had an ant's nest in my flat once." " Did you?" "What did you do?" "Well, I was fairly stupid about it cos I saw an ant," "I thought, "Oh, there's an ant in the flat."" "The next day I saw an ant and thought, "Oh, there he is"." "The same one." "Did you give him a name?" "This went on for a couple of weeks and then one day I moved the telephone table" " and there were loads of them there." " Oh, dear." "They went... (gasps)" " Hoovered them." "Hoovered the lot." " (Stephen) No." " They'd probably survive in the Hoover." " They hang on." " Well, there you are." " Did you suck them up with a pigeon's arse?" "I would have done if I'd thought of it." "Quite interesting, may be worth a point." "I'll give you the point if you can tell me to the nearest hundred" " how many species of ants there are?" " 100." " Two and a half thousand." " 8,000 is the answer. 8,000 species of ant." "How good are they at life-saving, human life-saving?" "What uses can you put an ant to to save a human life?" "A synaptic connection lost in your brain, you can stretch an ant across it." "Well, now, this is getting very close, Bill." "In ancient India, say you were performing an ancient Indian appendectomy, or some such operation, what do you do to sew the two sides of skin left that you've cut through?" "You take a soldier ant and you apply, you pinch the two bits of skin together, get the soldier ant and it bites between." "Then you cut its head off and it stays in the bite position as a stitch." "The ant is a stitch." "So you have rows of soldier ants as stitches." "And they used them to great effect." "Yeah, and then you reach up to the top shelf and ping." "They're some of the kinds of ants you use, and, as you can see, they've got pretty..." "They want to watch those peanuts, they're lethal." "They could have antaphylactic shock, couldn't they?" " Now." " (Alan) Now." "In Thailand they use red ants for something, still today." " What do you imagine they might do?" " Chutney." "I'm thinking of interventionist medical processes here." "Pour in some red ants into an open wound, and they secrete an acid, which is both antiseptic and indeed painkilling as well." " What about possibly using Savlon?" " On the other hand, Savlon." "There are parts of Thailand, I know it's horrible and we must do something about it, where you can't get Savlon." "Ants are cheaper and more readily available, I suspect." " You could get them to carry the Savlon." " Very good." "What do a Greasy Butcher, a Hog's Snout and Gene Pitney have in common?" " (fanfare)" " Yes?" "Richard." "They can all hit top C naturally." " Well..." " And because of all the grease that's..." "Only experienced butchers can have this, the grease that accrues down their larynx and oesophagus, coats the vocal chords so that butchers can, you know, if they need to, can hit a top C." "And if you've ever tried to kill a pig, top C is what it hits naturally, and Gene has just always done it." "Twenty four hours from (high voice) Tulsa." " Sadly not, none of this is true." " You know with pigs, you can have..." "This is amazing, this is a true fact, you can actually have pigs' organs, pigs' valves put into your heart." " If you've got a dodgy heart valve." " (Stephen) Yes, indeed." "They can put the valve from a pig, which I just find amazing." "Cos what are the chances of a reckless young pig getting killed in a motorbike accident?" "It must be... and then carrying a donor card." "It's got to be millions really." "Well, they carry a donor kebab card, which I suppose is slightly different." "No, I want you to think, and there's no real way you can get this, I suppose, unless you know." " They're all types of apple." " What is a Greasy Butcher then?" " It's an apple." " A cooker or an eater?" "A Greasy Butcher is a sweet red eating apple." "Apples are seriously strange, though, that's why you have so many variations of them." "If an apple drops to the ground and seeds and fruits itself, the apples that grow from the tree, that grew from it, are nothing like the parent, in the way that humans are, and even more so." "So in order to have types of apple, you have to graft from the same tree." "The actual seeds will always..." "You won't keep the same species at all." "In the jungle, if you run out of batteries for your torch, you can use apple peel and two heads of soldier ants as electrodes." "There's a significant amount of electricity contained within the apple to run a battery." "Yes." "And you must be hard put to find an apple tree in a jungle, that's the only problem." "That's true." "What's the common factor between apples and a game played with headless goats?" " And there is one." " Bobbing, like bobbing for apples?" "Bobbing. "Oh, argh!"" "Bobbing for headless goats." "It would help if you knew where apples came from." " Trees." " Which country?" " Kent." "Kent." " Which country?" "There is one part of the world where apples originated," " where the first apple trees still exist." " Middle East somewhere?" " There's this one country..." " In the Garden of Eden." "Well, there are many..." "Yes, many partakers of this, but there's no evidence it was an apple in the Garden of Eden." "It's always sort of taken to be one, but it never says apple in Genesis, does it?" "It just says "The fruit of the tree where off I said thou shouldst not eat."" " I haven't actually read it." " Not read it?" "Oh, you should, it's hilarious." "Very funny." "Amusing stuff in there." "The first recorded game, as far as we know, that takes place on horseback, like polo, involves a headless goat instead of a ball." "But there were goals and it was a marked pitch, and it was a country..." " China." " No." "It's one of those countries that you vaguely have heard of and couldn't draw on a map." " Tajikistan." " That kind of one." " Uzbekistan." " Oh, it's so like that, but not." " Kazakhstan." " Kazakhstan is the right answer, well done." "I'm going to give you eight for getting that, because it takes you out of the minus zone." " And I now have zero?" " Stephen, I missed the point," " They used the headless goats?" " They have a game there..." " They hit apples into..." " No, nothing to do with apples," "It's what apples have in common with a game involving headless goats." " Oh, I see." " They both originated in Kazakhstan." "Now, from apples to something as American as apple pie - dodgy presidents." "Richard E Grant, this is for you, what ghastly blot on his reputation did your namesake Ulysses S Grant share with John Prescott?" "Uh..." "They both had a condition called "erectus permanentus"." "No, it's serious, it is absolutely true." "From, you know, the age of five, it's been at full woody mast the whole way through." "Which is why John had to get into that Jaguar and travel that one mile distance, because Ulysses did the same thing in a carriage trip from a very small 18th century mile to Washington." " You've mentioned John Prescott's Jaguar." " Right." "And you've mentioned Ulysses S Grant in a wooden cart." "Stick with that thought, try and expunge woody masts from your mind for the moment, and run with the idea of vehicles." " (Alan) Parking offences?" " Ram raiding." " Speeding." " (Stephen) Speeding." ""Two Jags" Prescott was banned from driving for 21 days in 2001, after he admitted going more than 100 miles an hour on the M1, and was fined ?" "200." "In the three previous years, he earned nine points on his licence for speeding." "And the best reason he could come up with was that he didn't want his constituents to catch cold waiting for him." "Now, "Three Buggy" Grant received a speeding ticket while driving his horse and buggy in Washington DC in 1869." "He had to persuade the officer in charge that he was guilty and he was fined ?" "20." "God, was that a speed camera, like a bloke, you know, with a big black hood over him?" ""No, now hold it, now, wait a minute." "In 30 minutes, I'll have this."" "No, it was a sketch artist." "There's something very odd also that they both have in common, they've both won extraordinary prizes." "Ulysses S Grant, as a boy, won a prize for taming a pony in a circus." "But the prize that Prescott won, very odd... 1951, in Brighton," " the Prescott family won second prize..." " (Alan) Knobbly knees?" "The most typical family in Britain competition." "Absolutely true." " (Bill) But second?" " Yeah, but second." "But should have been first, because the winning family was found out to be distantly related to the organiser of the competition." "So there was corruption, but not on the part of John Prescott, but there you are." "It's time to grapple with the unknown, the unknowable and the never known." " (Bill) What?" " Yes." " (Bill) The never known?" " (Alan) Stuff no one's ever known?" " Yes." " We're going to be asked about that?" "Because it's the round we call General Ignorance." "What, or which is the largest living thing on earth?" " (donkey)" " It is the blue whale." " (alarm bells)" " Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear." "I'm so sorry, Alan, minus ten points." "It's not the blue whale, have another go." "Largest living thing on earth." " It's a tree, it'll be a tree, like a redwood." " (Stephen) No, it isn't, no." "(alarm bells)" "Giant redwood, ladies and gentlemen." "Not the sequoia sequoia." "Any other thoughts, the largest living thing on earth?" "(bagpipes)" "France." "Oh, dear me, Lord, no, no." "Is it my friend Martin's Uncle Roy?" "He's huge." " Is it in the sea?" " Mammoth." "I'll tell you what it is, it's the honey mushroom," " of which the largest recorded specimen is..." " Bigger than a redwood tree?" "Yes." "The largest specimen is in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon." "It covers 2,200 acres, ladies and gentlemen." " One mushroom?" " It is between 2 and 8,000 years old." "It was initially thought to grow in separate clusters, but researchers have now confirmed the discovery that it is one single huge organism connected under the soil." "Who was the first man to claim that the Earth goes round the sun?" "(bagpipes)" " Copernicus?" " (alarm bells)" "Oh, no, oh, no!" "Oh, no!" "Oh, dear, oh, dear." " Not, not, not Copernicus, it's true." " Galileo." " Nor Galileo, no." " (sings) Galileo." " No, we will not do the fandango." " Aeschylus." " No, it wasn't a playwright." " Euripides' trousers." " No." "He was a mathematician." " Sophocles." "Archimedes." " No, no, not Archimedes." " Ogg the Clever." "No, his name was Aristarchus." "Aristarchus of Samos." "He runs a restaurant on the Seven Sisters Road." " He was born in 310BC, and..." " He's still alive?" "A whole 1800 years before Nicolaus Copernicus." "Not only did Aristarchus suggest the Earth and the planets travelled around the sun, he also calculated the relative sizes and distances of the Earth, moon and sun, and worked out that the heavens were not some celestial sphere," "but a universe of almost infinite size." "Now, which African animal kills more human beings than any other?" "(fanfare)" " Hippopotamus." " Is the right answer." "Well done, very good." "Though, of course, the sad truth is man kills more than any other, but we were of course discounting man." "And there he is, the hippo." "Extraordinary animal." "Did you encounter many in Swaziland?" " I did, yeah, and they're vegetarian too." " They are vegetarian, yes." "They might chomp you in half and then they'll just leave you." "And they're very fast in the water." "And on land, very fast." "Doesn't the tsetse fly kill more people?" "Or the mosquito." "I think you're absolutely right, mosquitoes have killed more than anything." "More than wars, more than anything." "I love this caption here." "One of them's going:" ""And then I bit him in half and I said, 'Funny thing is I'm a vegetarian!"'" "(Stephen) Very good." " (Alan) We had a laugh!" " Oh, we had a laugh!" "If you were to skin a hippopotamus..." "It would be livid." "(Stephen) Furious." "And you were to put that skin on some scales, how heavy would that skin weigh?" " 14 stone?" " No, a ton is the answer." "A ton of skin?" "Its skin weighs a ton, it's an inch and a half thick, bullet-proof, as far as most guns are concerned." "Accounts for 25% of the animal's weight." " In other words, it weighs four tons." " It weighs four tons, like a bus?" "Like a bus, or like any other four-ton weighing thing." "Yes, more or less." "So if you were to say to it, "Oh, you've put on a bit of weight"," " it wouldn't care, it's really thick-skinned." " No, it's really thick-skinned, very good." " You ever smelt a hippopotamus' breath?" " It's diabolical." "And it's actually part of its weaponry, its halitosis is so bad..." " Second to a lion's breath." " Yeah, it's used as a warning, as a way of keeping other animals away." "Its breath is so disgusting." "Oddly enough, there was a controller of BBC2 who did the same thing." "There we are." "Its tusks, like an elephant and a walrus, are made of ivory." " Are they?" "How much are they worth?" " George Washington had hippo tusk teeth." " He must have had quite an overbite." " "I've got hippo teeth, you know."" "(muffled) "In the orchard..."" "Hippos like to hang out near slow-moving fresh water bordered by grass, which is pretty much the same habitat favoured by most humans." "Most accidents occur either, as Richard said, because a submerged hippo has inadvertently whacked its head on a paddle or something and is very cross and decides to overturn a boat, or because people are out walking at night, when most hippos leave the water to graze." "Being trampled on by a startled hippo is not a dignified way to die." "Who invented, ladies and gentlemen, the telephone?" "I'm not going to say it." "I'm not going to say it." " I'm not going to say it." " (Stephen) No thoughts?" "(bagpipes)" "Aristarchus." "You're quite right to be suspicious, because the answer is not Alexander Graham Bell." "Who's the first person to do two baked bean cans and a bit of string?" " Not recorded, as far as I know." " Valerie Singleton invented the phone." "Valerie Singleton." "Could have been." "I know that Louis Daguerre, who invented photography..." "Typical bloke, you see, he invented photography and a couple of days later, persuaded a local barmaid to take her top off so he could take a picture." "That's blokes for you, isn't it, really?" ""I've invented photography, this wonderful, this, phwoar..."" " Well, it was ever thus." " But who invented the telephone, though?" "Do you want to know?" "All right, I'll tell you." "Antonio Meucci, Italian-born scientist." "He invented the telephone." "He had perfected it by 1871, couldn't afford the patent." "But do you know what happened?" "It was being assessed for a patent in the offices of Western Union, it fell into the hands of a young Scottish engineer called Alexander Graham Bell." " (Scottish accent) "Aye, I'm nicking that!"" " Boo." "And he grabbed the chance and patented it in his own name." "Meucci took him to court, but died before the judgement was given, leaving Bell to claim his place in history." "What do we say to Alexander Graham Bell?" " You (bleep)" " Boo!" "(Stephen) Isn't that wicked?" "Isn't it as wicked as you get?" "Isn't that..." "It's wicked." "That's what we'd have said in Essex." "Look at him, I don't even like the look of him." "Look at him!" "Doesn't even know how to use it." "He doesn't even know how to use the phone." "(Scottish accent) "Aye, I think it's like this."" "(Italian-American accent) "It was my idea all along."" ""Back in the old country, I invented the telephone."" "This poor man." "This poor man deserves respect." "A quite interesting thing that Alexander Graham Bell said..." "He said, when he was asked what the future of the telephone was, he said:" ""I truly believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in America."" "What a wanker." "My dad, he was shown around a computer once, when he was a young man, and the guy who showed him round very proudly said..." "It was in the West Country, and he said:" ""Yes, right, this is a computer and we predict that in the future there will probably be about eight of these."" "We could go on like this forever, but we're not going to." "A big round of applause for our winner this evening," " it's Richard E Grant, with 12 points." " Oh, thank you." "(applause)" "In second place, ladies and gentlemen, with a whole plus five points, it's Linda Smith." "(applause)" "In third place, with minus two points," "Bill Bailey, ladies and gentlemen." "But our runaway loser, with minus 18, is Alan Davies." "Well..." "That's it, ladies and gentlemen, for another edition of QI this week." "Thank you to Richard, Linda, Bill and Alan, and finally, just to show off that the spirit of Aristarchus is still alive today, here is the crisp and unimprovable description of an eclipse of the sun" "as related by an unnamed Australian Aboriginal Astronomer in 2002:" ""Kerosene lamp belong Jesus gone bugger-up."" "Good night." "(applause)"