QI. Image shows from L to R: Alan Davies, Sandi Toksvig. Copyright: TalkbackThames
QI

QI

  • TV panel show
  • BBC Two / BBC One / BBC Four
  • 2003 - 2024
  • 312 episodes (21 series)

Panel game that contains lots of difficult questions and a large amount of quite interesting facts. Stars Sandi Toksvig, Stephen Fry and Alan Davies.

Episode menu

Series D - Death

A Halloween-themed episode, with Andy Parsons, Clive Anderson and Sean Lock.
Pumpkin

Theme

- The set is 'in mourning', with everyone dressed in black, a coffin in the middle of the set, and the forfeits on the screens written in green as apposed to white.

Topics

- The Black Death was originally spread by marmots.

- British doctors treat depression more than any illness. (Forfeit: Cancer; Flu)

- Tangent: Stephen argues that you are better suffering from manic depression ("Bipolar disorder" - Which he himself suffers from) than normal depression ("Unipolar depression") because you have the advantage of states of joy. Depressed people tend not to mind what you call the condition. K. Redfield Jameson, author of "An Unquiet Mind" calls it "Depression" and sometimes "Madness".

- Tangent: One depressed man took apart a car engine and labelled each part. Then he got the mood swing and threw everything away, so he ended up with no car engine.

- Tangent: Swimming with dolphins can help depression. However, sometimes the dolphins hurt the person because they become too interested in the person.

- The saddest song in history is "Gloomy Sunday" sung by Billie Holiday - a.k.a. the "Hungarian Suicide Song". Written by Rezso Seress, he suggested to his girlfriend that they should get married after he finished writing it. The next day, she poisoned herself leaving a suicide note reading "Gloomy Sunday", which is where the title comes from. Several suicides are attributed to the song. The BBC banned the song until 2002. (Correct answer given by the audience)

- Tangent: Monday is supposedly the most depressing day of the week.

- Tangent: Sean talks about two sentinels he met at Beachy Head, who tried to stop people from committing suicide. They only met once a week, for an hour.

- Killer Mushroom Roulette - the panel are presented with four different mushrooms, and try and guess which is safe to eat. Out of the death cap, the peppery milk cap, the destroying angel and the trumpet of death, the trumpet of death is the safe one.

- Tangent: Out of the 3,500 mushrooms native to Britain, only 100 are poisonous and just 15 are lethal. The last death in Britain by mushroom was many years ago. Correction: The last death-by-mushroom in Britain happened in 2008, where a woman in her 20s on the Isle of Wight died by eating death cap mushrooms.

- The only things that live in the Dead Sea (the lowest place on Earth) are extremophiles.

- Tangent: It is possible to drown in the Dead Sea. If you turn over the wrong way, it is difficult to turn back around.

- Tangent: Out of the 250 drownings in the UK, a third are intentional.

- Lemmings do not commit suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs. This is a myth that first appears in a children's encyclopaedia in 1908. (Forfeit: Myth invented by Disney) Correction from Series A - Episode 1.

General Ignorance

- There is no curse of Tutankhamen. (Forfeit: Death to all who enter here)

- Tangent: The novel "The Mummy" was written by Jane Loudon-Webb in 1828.

- Only five people died in the Great Fire of London. They were the maid of the baker who started the fire, a shoe-lathe and watchmaker, an old man who tried to rescue some blankets from St. Paul's but died of the smoke, and two men who tried to rescue their goods from their houses. The Mayor of London, Thomas Bloodworth, went to bed on the first night saying, "A woman might piss it out." Correction: It is now believed that many more people died during the Great Fire, but deaths went unrecorded.

- Tangent: In the Great Fire of London of 1212, 3,000 died.

- "Ring a Ring O'Roses" dates to 1881 in North America. (Forfeit: The Plague)

- Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, suggested sending Marmite in order to solve the Middle-East conflict. The claimed that a lot of unleavened bread was eaten there. In unleavened bread there is a shortage of zinc. A lack of zinc caused aggression, but Marmite contains lots of zinc. He suggested this idea to the Foreign Office.

Scores

- The Audience: 2 points (First victory)
- Andy Parsons: 0 points
- Sean Lock: -8 points
- Alan Davies: -15 points
- Clive Anderson: -24 points

Notes

For info on the mushroom correction, see the QI Quibble Blog.

For info on the Great Fire of London correction, see QI: Series Q, Episode 3 - Quarrels.

Broadcast details

Date
Friday 20th October 2006
Time
10:30pm
Channel
BBC Four
Length
30 minutes

Repeats

Show past repeats

Date Time Channel
Monday 22nd November 2010 9:00pm Dave
Saturday 1st January 2011 10:20pm Dave
Thursday 24th February 2011 11:00pm Dave
Tuesday 28th June 2011 9:40pm Dave
Wednesday 29th June 2011 12:40am Dave
Saturday 8th October 2011 11:40pm Dave
Sunday 29th April 2012 6:40pm Dave
Monday 22nd October 2012 4:40pm Dave
Monday 22nd October 2012 11:40pm Dave
Monday 24th December 2012 2:40pm Dave
Tuesday 25th December 2012 2:05am Dave
Wednesday 27th March 2013 11:20pm Dave
Sunday 12th May 2013 9:00pm Dave
Sunday 14th July 2013 6:00pm Dave
Thursday 25th September 2014 10:20pm Dave
Friday 26th September 2014 1:00am Dave
Friday 6th February 2015 11:05pm Dave
Tuesday 23rd June 2015 11:00pm Dave
Friday 2nd October 2015 12:20am Dave
Wednesday 28th October 2015 11:20pm Dave
Thursday 29th October 2015 2:20am Dave
Monday 28th December 2015 12:00am Dave
Monday 28th December 2015 6:40pm Dave
Thursday 7th July 2016 2:00am Dave
Tuesday 23rd August 2016 1:40am Dave
Tuesday 23rd August 2016 8:40pm Dave
Monday 17th October 2016 2:10am Dave
Tuesday 28th February 2017 2:40pm Dave
Tuesday 11th April 2017 12:20am Dave
Friday 4th August 2017 11:20pm Dave
Saturday 5th August 2017 1:20am Dave
Thursday 4th January 2018 11:00pm Dave
Friday 5th January 2018 1:00am Dave
Wednesday 7th March 2018 1:00am Dave
Friday 27th April 2018 12:40am Dave
Friday 27th April 2018 2:40am Dave
Tuesday 29th May 2018 8:00pm Dave
Friday 22nd June 2018 11:20pm Dave
Saturday 23rd June 2018 2:20am Dave
Monday 25th February 2019 11:00pm Dave
Tuesday 26th February 2019 1:00am Dave
Wednesday 4th September 2019 11:00pm Dave
Thursday 5th September 2019 8:20pm Dave

Cast & crew

Cast
Stephen Fry Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Clive Anderson Guest
Sean Lock Guest
Andy Parsons Guest
Writing team
Justin Pollard Researcher
Molly Oldfield Researcher
John Mitchinson Question Writer
Piers Fletcher Question Writer
Garrick Alder Researcher
Mat Coward Researcher
Christopher Gray Researcher
James Harkin Researcher
Justin Gayner Researcher
Production team
Ian Lorimer Director
John Lloyd Producer
Lorraine Heggessey Executive Producer
Katie Taylor Executive Producer
Nick King Editor
Jonathan Paul Green Production Designer
Howard Goodall Composer

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