"Good evening." "Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening" "Guten Abend, buona sera, and vive la difference, because tonight, QI is all about "differences"." "To which end we have four different guests." "The one and only Dara O Briain, the incomparable Jo Brand," "the utterly unique Julian Clary" "and the very, very dissimilar Alan Davies." "And of course, the buzzers tonight are as different as ever." "Dara goes:" "Very nice." "Julian goes:" "And Jo goes:" "And Alan goes:" "Oh!" "Oh, I think they should..." "What do they sound together?" "Oh!" "Oh, yes, very good." "Ah, different, but not necessarily dissonant." "Now, according to the feminist novelist and journalist Dame Rebecca West," ""The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots."" "Jo, what would you say is, in fact, the main difference between men and women?" "Is it that men are really great and women are really shit?" " Oh, now, Jo, how is that..." " No, that's the..." "Sorry, that's the wrong way around." "I'm sorry." "Erm, I think it's that, erm, men are rubbish at multi-tasking and women are very good at it." "What it's about though, I think, is the fact that if you ask a man to do something, he does it so horrendously thoroughly that, erm, he can't do anything else at the same time." "I said to my husband the other week, "Can you Hoover the front room while I'm at the shops," right?" "And I came back..." "All the furniture was out in the garden." "He's on his hands and knees with the Hoover, using an attachment I'd never even seen before." "And it just leads me to think that men are probably actually much better at housework than women." " Yeah." " 'Cause women are sluts and people don't realise that we are." "No, we are." "I'm..." "Actually, I've got a pilot ready, erm, for a TV show, which is actually about the truth of..." "of women's domestic capabilities, and it's called "Fuck it, that'll do!"" "It's a very good answer, indeed." "The actual thing, as well, is that, in fact, every woman in the world has got bird flu, but we don't give a shit, 'cause we just get on with our lives, you know." "It's all like, "Oh, I've got bubonic plague, but I've still got to do the Hoovering";" "do you know what I mean?" "This... this women's greater tolerance of pain thing is because, obviously, of childbirth, and frankly, it's completely untested, 'cause we could be brilliant at it." "I'm quite prepared to do an experiment on you, you know." "I've got very disappointing news for you, Dara, which is that women have twice as many pain receptors on their skin." " Thus making them more sensitive." " Supposedly, they are more sensitive to pain than men." "There was an experiment once run by the kind of people who run fun experiments like this, to test this notion of whether women could endure pain or not by the simple expedient of wiring a man and a woman up and running a current through them," "until one of them pressed their button to stop it." "Right." "And the women went for the... much faster than the men did." "It turns out that men could endured pain twice as long as women did." "But then maybe they're only getting half as much pain, as I say, because women have two-and-a-half times more pain receptors.." "But do you know what the originating and defining difference is?" " Presumably, it's... it's a chromosome." " It's the chromosomes." " Yeah." "And do you know how they're arranged?" " It..." "Er, there's X and Y." " There is X and Y. - and Y is useless." "And we have a Y and you have two X's." "Which is why women are twice as varied in personality and physique than men are, which is why men are broadly all borderline autistic and are easily unified by one thing:" ""Oh, did you..." "Did you watch the match?" "And the entire room of men goes, "Yes, I did, actually." "I watched that."" "It doesn't, however, mean that women within themselves are fantastically varied." "It just means that one woman is more different from the next woman." "Is that why women are congenitally unable to explain the offside rule?" " Essentially, yes." " It's that..." "it's that sort of sub-section, perhaps." "Since they've changed it, quite a lot of men are struggling, too." "I think I recognise some of those sperm." "Yes, fundamentally, the difference is Y-chromosomes." "Sociologically, who can say?" "But let's look at some of the latest research." "Dara, does alcohol have a greater effect on men or on women, would you say?" "Er, the same amount of alcohol would affect a woman earlier, because she is tiny and petite and... and divine." "You're really just luring me into one of these QI traps here, aren't you?" "Yeah." "In tests, men lose their inhibitions quicker." " And their clothes." " And their clothes." "Women respond better to the same amount of alcohol than a man would" " in the same circumstances." " Better in what sense?" " In terms of keeping clarity of mind and, er, not losing inhibitions.." " Not better in terms of throwing their knickers at people and going, "Wey hey!"" " No." "When they get behind the wheel, they don't think they're a better driver." "In the long run, however, women are more prone to alcohol-related brain and liver damage." " Well, that makes it all all right then, doesn't it?" " Yes, doesn't it?" "We get pissed quicker, but they die, so ha ha ha ha ha!" "Is that what you're saying?" "It's..." "No, no, no, no, no, it's very sad that anyone should have alcohol-related brain and liver damage." "Does it affect memory?" " 'Cause I'm... fairly sure it does." " Ooh, I did know..." "'Cause on my thirtieth birthday," "I had got some photos back after..." "We had this dinner and there were people with indoor sparklers." "And I thought, "When did they have them?" "I must have gone to the loo or something;" "I don't remember that."" "And the next one was me with a sparkler, and then it's me with two sparklers, and me lighting sparklers really intently, and handing sparklers out..." "Dara, I'll ask you again." "Suppose..." "Is that meant to be Dara up there?" "In a very ideal world, yeah." "Suppose you got into bed with your wife, is it likely that she might be a bit cold to you?" "As in, would she have expended more energy than I?" "Would she have cooled down in the bed beside me?" "Women certainly moan about being cold more than men, don't they?" "Do you think they have good reason to?" "A man's genitals hang outside to keep cool." "Speak for yourself." "Out the window!" "Yeah, and surprisingly, there's a very, very narrow ambit of temperature within which sperm can live, so if it's too hot, they need to dangle down and get a lot of air through them to cool them down," "and if it's very cold they need to..." "Once they're out, they're alive for eighteen hours, so you should leave the telly on if you're going out or something." "When it gets to a certain temperature, the blood deliberately doesn't go to the extremities, in order to preserve the warmth of the vital organs." "And so the... the toesies and the..." "and the hands will feel colder." "And with women, it'll happen sooner." "At about seventy degrees you will start to get less blood in your hands and feet;" "men, it will be at about sixty-seven degrees." "Fahrenheit, obviously." "As a matter of interest, if you wake up and your wife's feet are completely grey..." "You need an alibi!" "It would be true that your wife would have more likely to have cold feet than you." "Okay, whenever I meet my wife, wherever she is!" "If she's out there, could she email in?" " Are you not married?" " I'm not married." "No, look, I'm not married." "Wei An Lo from Amazon's new department." "I've sent for her." "Her name is Wei An Lo." "She's from Amazon-dot-Philippines-dot..." "and, yeah." " She doesn't mind changing to an Irish name, then, does she?" " Wei An O'Lo, if you prefer." "Anyway, when you're in bed with a girl she'll have cold feet, because it'll be three degrees colder than ours." "That's the point." "But she'll have nice warm internal organs, is that what you mean?" " Yes." " She will, yes." " She will." "Warm the hands on." ""Warm the hands on." I think we'd better move away from gender differences." "Let's have a look at the picture." "What would you call this person here behind you?" " An "Inuit"." " Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear." "We thought you'd fall for that one." " And I did." " Yeah, you see, we have this idea that it's rather politically correct to call anything that lives sort of around about the Arctic Circle an "Inuit"" "rather than an "Eskimo", but she's a Yupik." "Calling her an Inuit would really annoy her, because she would think, "Oh, there goes another Westerner thinking they're saying the right thing without asking me."" " She looks quite annoyed." " She does look annoyed." "I bet she's got cold feet." "Yes, she's got even colder feet." "Yeah." "But they have pretty extraordinary lives." "What's the average height of an Eskimo?" "Four foot ten." "Oh, it's five foot four." "The sad thing is, the life expectancy, the average age: thirty-nine years." "If you were to take every single one that exists and put them five-in-a-car they could all fit in the Los Angeles International Airport car park." "Was there a conference?" "I'd fit in well;" "I'm five foot four." "I'd be regarded as some sort of big, fat, Irish god," "I'd be a foot taller than everyone who'd ever lived there;" "I'd just be..." "I'd stride among them going:" ""Hello, people!" "Greetings." "I bless you, I bless you."" "Hold on a minute." "My Asian wife, she wouldn't fit in at all." ""Why we here?" "Why we here?"" "Have you ever heard Inuit throat singing?" " No, are we about to?" " That's Inuits, not Eskimos." "Well let's hear some." ""That was Inuit throat singing." In my Andy Kershaw impression." ""World Music!" "Great; that is great, actually!"" ""Likes any noise!"" "Yes!" "Yes, the fact is, anyway, that all Inuit are Eskimos, although they often object to being called that, but not all Eskimos are Inuit." "If you were to start from the North Pole, it doesn't matter if you turn left or right:" "you're still heading south." "But what is the actual difference between left and right?" " Oh, don't look at me." "That sounds very difficult." " It's odd, isn't it?" "I mean, almost anything in the world any concept, anything you can describe with words, but "left", you can't." "Left and right for me was always, erm just maybe because I learnt them at the same time was the hand that played the "dun dun dun dun" on the piano" " and this was the melody hand." " Yeah." " Look at him with his tough working class background." " Oh, I know!" "I had to play the piano to get out of the ghetto." "You don't know how I..." "I had to play that piano hard, my friend!" ""More piano, more piano!"" ""All right, all right, all right!"" "There's the famous painting by Manet, the "Bar of the Folies-Bergere, where there's a mirror which doesn't quite work." "Her reflection should be directly behind her, of course." "Well, there's obviously..." "There's an internal difference between left and right, er," " because your organs aren't symmetric down the middle of your spine" " That's true." "except for one in five hundred thousand people have their organs the other way around." " It's about, actually, one person in ten thousand." " Is it?" "Yeah." "It's called situs inversus." "Does that mean your willy's at the back and your bum-hole is at the front?" "It's tough to ride a bike!" "No wonder my wife is cold when I get into bed!" "But there you are." "Erm, how do deaf people applaud" " that's different to us?" " Do they applaud "very enthusiastically at the end of a James Blunt concert"?" "Do you mean is there a symbolic, as in sign language means of applauding?" " I guess I do." " as opposed to a..." "You avoided our trap of saying "louder" or "harder" than us." "I know what they do for "bullshit"." "That's right, it is." "Absolutely great." "Isn't that good?" "But, er, yeah, the applauding..." "It's simply waving your hands in the air." "It has more visual impact than..." "You know, for a deaf person standing on the stage, or a podium." "What if they really want to be sarcastic, do they wave really slowly?" "The slow wave!" "If you want to show drunkenness, you do... you do this... and then..." " Oh, fabulous." " Really drunk is..." "Well, what a lot of differences." "Let's try something slightly different:" ""similarity"." "What is the similarity between herring and teenage boys?" "They're both a delicacy in Norway." " I like that." " Emissions?" " Emissions?" " Spots?" "Yes, emissions, but not emissions..." " Is it farting?" " Yes." " Is it?" "They both communicate by farting, essentially." "I mean, obviously, teenage boys grunt as well." "That's what we used to call farts when I was a boy." " What, herrings?" " Herrings?" " No, "grunts"." "Grunts." "Yes, herrings are the only fish that secrete bubbles from their anus, and it makes an extraordinary noise, called Fast Repetitive Tick," "FRT, as a sort of a joke on the part of marine biologists, I guess." " They're a barrel of laughs, them." " How they laugh!" " They do like to joke, those marine biologists." " They do, don't they?" "Absolutely." "It's probably not gas from digestion; it's probably from their buoyancy sack." " Yes, in that, they do differ from teenage boys, who..." " Yeah." "To the best of my recollection..." "we didn't have a buoyancy sack." "One of the first times I've heard of an organ in the animal kingdom where I've thought, "I'd love a one of them."" "Well, it's used in conversation, just at a party." ""Oh, really?" "I'm finding this dull."" "Lift you up." "Because at the end of your party your..." "your wife, presumably, would be going," ""Come down." "We're going." "Come down." "I'll..." "I'll..." "I'll get the pronged fork!"" "And do they really communicate?" "Or is it just something they do?" "Supposedly, they do communicate, possibly warning the shoal of danger and in which direction to twist and turn." "But supposing their sack is empty and they've got something important to say?" "I don't know." "Has your sack ever been empty when you've had something important to say?" "No..." "My sack's always half full." "Actually, to be fair, teenage boys do communicate their farts as well." " I never did." " Nor did I, obviously." "I was too busy playing the piano for that evil guy." "Dreaming of a day when my mail order bride would arrive!" "Er, but..." "No, but you'd actually walk to the top of the class and go "I'm going to fart." And then you'd run away again." " You'd run away?" " Yes... yes, well well, you'd leave it there, as some sort of gift." "Oh, I see." "Ah, floating an air biscuit." "I had wind when I met the Queen." " And did you... release it?" " I had to, and unfortunately, I shat myself." "You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen!" "So... ?" "Well she... she'd been there herself!" "Had she?" "She just looked." "Gave me that look." "Moved swiftly on." " You're in a line-up after a show;" "you're at the palace..." " Yes, Royal Variety." "the curtains come in; all the artistes, Bobby Davro is one side of you, and she's shaking people's hands." "You, meanwhile..." "You've got a bubbling going on, or... ?" "It was just a little smidge, er, as I thought." "And I tried to get rid of it by internal squeezing, as can be done, and, er..." "Are the muscles a little lax down there at the moment?" "No, I had this smidge of wind and, erm," "I tried to get rid of it, and it wasn't going to go, so I thought, well, I'll discreetly let it go, and unfortunately, on that occasion, I shat myself." "It was only a little... capsule affair." " Did you tell her?" " No, you know, you can't speak unless you're spoken to." "And so she didn't ask if you'd shat yourself." "No, she moved on to Frankie Dettori." "Strange bi-ways we go down, don't we." "Now tell me, then, what is the difference between brown eggs and white eggs?" "Only the colour;" "there is no other difference." ""Only the colour; there is no difference" is the right answer, and you get full points, indeed." "I'm pretty certain I've known that for years and yet..." "I don't know if you're the same..." "I still find myself drawn to brown eggs." "I still think they're going to taste better." "I think that there were more white eggs when I was younger." "and now there are more brown ones?" "Yes, because people prefer them, people think they're somehow more natural." "And it's not true at all." "Does one hen go either way?" "No." "It's down to the colour of the earlobes, really." "If you've got white feathers and..." "That's a good white earlobe, that." "That'll be a white egg." "But if you have the old red lobes and the..." "and usually, brown feathers, then it'll be a brown egg." "That seems to be the only thing, but no one has ever been able to tell a taste difference." "Now, what would you use to make a difference engine?" "Do you know what a difference engine might be?" "It's a machine, a 19th century/18th century design, er, to solve equations." "Yes, a calculator." "A computer, in fact." " It was one of the first computers, yeah." " Indeed." "And there is, er..." " All these cogs and stuff." " Charles Babbage." "He never completed it." "He ran out of money." "Only in 1991 was it fully reconstructed from his plans and it worked perfectly." " It's taught that he put a couple of mistakes into it..." " Deliberately, yes." "so that if anyone stole the plans and tried to make it... it wouldn't work." "Mr Dara O Briain!" "Well done." "Presumably, this is the bit like when you go out at night, going to the back of your DVD and jamming a fork into it repeatedly, and then going, "Well, they can steal it;" "it'll never work!"" "Slashing your own tyres before your holidays." ""Ha ha ha!" "The..." "The joke's on you, thief!" Okay?" "But in fact, in answer to the question, the reason he couldn't complete it is, it was so vast, with these huge cogs in." "There is a material he could have used to make it, if only it had existed which was invented in 1901 by one Frank Hornby." "The bloke who did the model railways." "The bloke who did the model railways also invented another staple British child's toy...?" "Fake hedges." "They..." "That was all part of the..." "But this was a totally separate invention." " Action Man." "Meccano." " "Meccano" is the right answer." "Those are the only toys I remember." "Yeah." "And there is a Meccano difference engine at work." "It really does work, and it can do trigonometric functions, logarithms and the point about it is it's programmable." "It's not like a clock or something, which is simply dedicated to one analogue task of telling you the time;" "this is actually programmable." "He was an odd man though, Babbage, and he does rather live up to the idea of an early computer nerd." "Tennyson wrote a poem which included the line:" ""Every moment dies a man/ Every moment one is born."" "And he wrote back, "If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill." "In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death." "I would suggest that the next edition of your poems should read:" ""Every moment dies a man/ Every moment 1 1/16 is born."" "Strictly speaking..." "Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."" "What a man." "That's the best impression I've ever heard of him, though." "It is a good impression, obviously." "Erm, he also invented the cowcatcher." "The thing that goes on front of a locomotive." "I'm presuming by the fact that this is designed, it didn't succeed in catching many cows" " Well, no." " as much as dividing them!" "What is the difference between ping-pong and table tennis?" "In table tennis, you serve the ball with a bat, and in ping-pong it's launched from the vagina of a Thai woman." " Is that correct?" " Your wife has got so many surprises in store for you, Dara!" "She has!" "It'll while away those winter years, oh, yes." "Another game Wei Lo? "All right!"" "It's tough to get a rally up, though." "That's the only thing." "It's actually a brand name, owned by Jaques, the makers of croquet hoops and chess pieces, but they sold it in a sort of package called that." "But it was based on an earlier game, apparently, called "whiff-whaff"." "Which is very pleasing." " "Whiff-whaff, anyone?" - "Game of whiff-whaff?"" ""Don't play whiff-whaff with the riffraff!"" ""Daphne!"" "Isn't it... whiff-whaff only lasted until somebody was playing badminton beside them and they looked over and said, "Oh, that's so much more whiff-whaff than this"?" "It was said to be founded by officers in clubs using cigar boxes and, er, champagne corks, but, I..." "I do know it was banned in Russia." " Absolutely right!" "Have ten points." " Thank you very much." " That's extraordinary." "Do you know why it was banned in Russia?" " Erm, because they thought it would affect people's eyesight badly." " Absolutely right." "Give the lady ten." "Did you know that in the 1936 World Championships in Prague, one point lasted over an hour?" "Some things have been different this week, but some things stay much the same, of course, such as the open sewer of misapprehension and confusion that we call General Ignorance." "So, fingers on buzzers, let's hold our noses, and dive right in with the first question." "What do Eskimos have thirty words for?" " Yes?" " Ice?" "Snow?" "I'm afraid you've fallen into our trap." " No, in Eskimo language.." " Huskies." " there's no more than about four words for snow." " Cheese." "SPAM." " Love." " No." " Polar bears." "Not polar bears." "It's very surprising;" "it's very grammatical." " Fur." " You'll probably go, "Oh, boo."" " Dale Winton." " Farting." " No." "No." "Grammatical." "We have only four words for this in English;" "they have thirty-two." "You're going to hate me when I say "demonstrative pronouns"" "is the answer." "You see?" "Look at you." "If we want to indicate..." "we want to demonstrate something, we can say "this" or "that"." "Or the plural; we can say "these" or "those"." "They have thirty-two of them." "They have "the thing that's up there"," ""the thing that's in there", "the thing that's under there" ... all as one word." " What is the word?" " Well, there are thirty-two of them;" " that's the point." " Oh, I see." "What are they all, then?" "Well, right, okay." "Can you do it as if Babbage was an Eskimo?" "Like a nerdy..." "A nerdy Inuit speaking in Aleution, would say "hakan", which "that one high up there"." "Erm, or "qakun", "that one in there," as in a house." "Or "uman" which is a very good one, which means" ""this one that we can't see"." "Like, it... it could be smelt or heard, you know" "We'd say, "well... well that one that we heard," we'd have to say in English;" "we'd have to use four or five words." "They would just go "uman," Which is interesting." " They have lots of words for snow as well though, don't they?" " No, only four." " How many, four?" " To snow." " Four?" " Yeah, four." " Well, we've got four." " Exactly, we've got at least four." " Sort of powder and all kinds." "Slush." " Slush, yeah." "It's a complete myth, this idea that they have lots of words for snow." "So, what does the moon smell like?" " Yes, Jo?" " Does it smell of Buzz Aldrin's underpants?" " It might." " Did he crap himself there and bury some?" "Well, one of them obviously did, didn't they?" " Wouldn't you?" " "Crap himself there and bury some?"" "I did that as a child;" "I..." "I pooed in my pants and buried them in the garden." "But when I went back to check on them a few weeks later..." " They'd gone!" " they'd gone." "You could have sold them." "People advertise for dirty underpants in the backs of magazines." ""Not in the Spectator, they don't!"" "All I can say." ""What does the moon smell of?" Cheese!" " Oh, Jo, you are sweet." " Sorry." "It was hanging over us." "No, you can get some points back if you know how many humans have walked on the moon." " Twelve." " Absolutely." "You both said it simultaneously" " and you both get five points." " The difference is, I guessed!" "Well, well, you still get the points." "Anyway, apparently it smells of gunpowder." "Lots of moon dust came back, in the module, back to Earth, and, er, it's that mixture of silicon and iron and magnesium and calcium that marks out Special K, amongst other things," "I think, but, er, is also present in moon dust." " What's it taste of?" " "Wensleydale!"" "But, er, perhaps you can redeem yourself with this one." "What was Gandhi's first name?" " Jeffrey, wasn't it?" " "Jeffrey." it wasn't Jeffrey." "I don't know." "Indira Gandhi;" "that was his granddaughter, was it?" "No, they weren't related." "She was Nehru's granddaughter." " Oh, she's not even related to him?" " No." "Well, at least you've avoided our trap in not saying "Mahatma"." " That's not a name, though." " That is not a name." "Er, do you know what Mahatma means?" "It means, "Can I have my hat please, mother?"" "Funny." "Funny enough, W C Fields almost got there before you, because he wrote one of his films under the pseudonym of Mahatma Cane Jeeves, as in "my hat, my cane, Jeeves!" So, there you are." "No, it means "great soul" in Sanskrit." "And it was the title awarded him by a follower." "As early as 1915 he was called that." " Was it Andy?" " It wasn't, no. "Andy Gandhi."" " Andy Gandhi." " And his older brother Randy Gandhi." " Oh, you said "Randy Gandhi", didn't you?" "Oh, is it?" "I think we... we had decided it was minus a hundred and fifty for anyone who said "Randy" was his name." "Randy Gandhi." "No, it was actually Mohandas K Gandhi, the "K" standing for "Karamchand"." "Which brings us to the little matter of the scores." "Look at this." "We have a clear winner in Dara O Briain with three points!" "In second place, only his first visit to our little studio, with minus eight, Julian Clary!" "In third place, with minus sixteen, Jo Brand." "But our loser, or I should say, our "differently-first", with minus one hundred and forty-four, Alan Davies." "Oh." "From Julian, Dara, Jo, Alan, and me, that's it for now." "Come back next week for more of the same, if not more of the sane, for as Salvador Dali said," ""The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad."" "Good night."