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, Episode 11 - Denial And Deprivation

White Tower of the Tower of London

Theme

- Everyone on the show is deprived of something. Instead of the normal set, Alan and Mark are sitting behind school desks, whilst Roger and Vic have side tables and whiskey. Stephen has an auctioneers stand with a gavel. The lighting director is 'fired' so there is a lack of light, although some of the studio is lit with candles. The audience are forced to watch the show on the street. The buzzers are hand-cranked.

Extra tasks

- The panel have to try and guess how a potato, a green felt tip pen, dental floss and curry powder have been used to help people escape from prison.

- Green pen: Steven Russell coloured his shirt green, the same as the prison doctors and walked out the door.

- Dental floss: Mafia member Vincenzo Curcio filed his bars down using the floss.

- Curry powder: Five Pakistani prisoners threw the powder into the eyes of a prison officer and ran out the prison.

- Potato: John Dillinger carved a potato into the shape of a gun, blacked it up with boot polish and held up a warden.

- Tangent: The Dillinger escape is referenced in the Woody Allen film "Take the Money and Run", although Allen's characters uses soap instead of a potato. However, when he escapes, it is raining. When it cuts to the wide shot, there is a great ball of lather that leads back into the prison.

Topics

- According to Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, when children play with their food, they are really playing with their excrement.

- Tangent: Sigmund Freud had a fear of the number 62. As a result, he refused to stay in hotel with more than 62 rooms in case he got Room 62. The first time he made this rule he got Room 31, which is half of 62.

- 'Banting' means "to diet". It was invented by William Banting, who wrote A Letter on Corpulence in 1864. Dieting became popular with President Taft, who went on a diet after he got stuck in a bath. It became more popular when Hollywood caught onto the idea. In the 1950s, a big fad was the tapeworm pill, where you swallowed a tapeworm egg to keep you thin.

- Tangent: Alan had a friend who had a tapeworm three foot long. There is an urban myth about getting rid of tapeworms which involves you starving yourself and sticking a Mars bar near your arse. The tapeworm is so hungry it goes for the Mars bar. You then grab it and pull it out.

- Hoover the talking seal was a seal found in Maine in 1971, who was discovered to have a Bostonian accent. He appeared on Good Morning America. When he died in 1985, he got an obituary in The Boston Globe.

- When the Bastille was stormed, there were only seven prisoners in it. Four of them were forgers and two were lunatics, one of whom though he was Julius Caesar.

- Tangent: The Marquis de Sade was transferred from the Bastille to Château de Vincennes a week before the storming because he was shouting both obscenities and anti-monarchist remarks though a tube out the window. He left a lot of his work in the Bastille and asked his wife to get it, but she went on the day of the storming and so the work was lost.

- Tangent: The Bastille and the Tower of London were quite civilised places to be a prisoner. You got wine, food, an allowance, tobacco and you could move around freely.

- The Kray twins were imprisoned in the Tower of London for desertion from National Service.

- Tangent: At the time of recording the ravens were currently prisoners in the Tower of London and kept in cages because of the dangers of bird flu. The ravens are called Gwylum, Thor, Hugin, Munin, Branwen, Bran, Gandalf and Baldrick.

- Tangent: Ronnie Kray was a homosexual, who demanded that everyone should admire his boyfriends.

- Tangent: David Bailey took the famous photograph of the twins standing one behind another. Bailey was once in a pub with Reggie when two drunks came in. Noticing Bailey they asked to take a photo of him. Bailey avoided it but the drunks demanded. Reggie looked at himself at the mirror across the bar and punched toward the side, knocking the drunk onto the piano. The two drunks fled and Bailey got angry with Reggie. Reggie smiled back and said, "Well, to tell you the truth Mr. Bailey, I had my eye on that c**t all afternoon. He'd been eating my sandwiches!"

- Tangent: David Puttman used to manage the Kray twins.

- Tangent: Roger writes a poem about Hoover the Talking Seal.

General Ignorance

- The four main religions of India are Hinduism (805 million worshippers), Islam (134 million), Christian (23 million) and Sikh (19 million). (Forfeit: Buddhism)

- No-one milks a yak, because yaks are all male. The female is known as a 'Nak'. A wild yak is 6'5", whilst a domesticated yak is 4". They have the longest hair of any animal, with hairs 2 feet long. The hairs are used in wigs. The BBC still has lots of yak wigs, and if you play Santa at Christmas the chances are your beard will be yak. Yaks have twice as many blood cells, but they are only half the size.

- Tangent: They say Tibet smells of butter. People often make sculptures using yak buttermilk.

- Crabs have 10 legs. (Forfeit: 8)

- Tangent: Roger tells a poem about crabs.

- Tangent: Crab lice have 6 legs. They are so called because the latch onto the follicles of pubic hair, eyelashes and beards.

- George Washington said nothing about cherry trees; the story of him chopping down one was invented by a man called Parson Weems.

- The panel try to identify correctly a picture of some Yeomen of the Guard. (Forfeit: Beefeaters)

Scores

- Vic Reeves and Roger McGough: 1 point
- Mark Steel: -6 points
- Alan Davies: -39 points

Broadcast details

Date
Friday 1st December 2006
Time
10:30pm
Channel
BBC Four
Length
30 minutes

Repeats

Show past repeats

Date Time Channel
Saturday 6th February 2010 10:40pm Dave
Monday 8th November 2010 9:00pm Dave
Saturday 11th December 2010 9:00pm Dave
Saturday 26th February 2011 10:20pm Dave
Monday 11th July 2011 6:00pm Dave
Tuesday 24th April 2012 7:20pm Dave
Tuesday 24th April 2012 11:40pm Dave
Tuesday 30th October 2012 4:40pm Dave
Tuesday 30th October 2012 11:40pm Dave
Wednesday 31st October 2012 12:20am
60 minute version
Dave
Friday 28th December 2012 2:10pm Dave
Friday 28th December 2012 11:35pm Dave
Wednesday 3rd April 2013 11:20pm Dave
Sunday 21st July 2013 2:00pm Dave
Sunday 21st July 2013 6:00pm Dave
Tuesday 24th September 2013 11:00pm Dave
Wednesday 25th September 2013 2:15am Dave
Thursday 30th October 2014 10:20pm Dave
Friday 31st October 2014 1:00am Dave
Monday 16th February 2015 11:00pm Dave
Monday 29th June 2015 2:00am Dave
Monday 29th June 2015 11:00pm Dave
Wednesday 16th December 2015 2:20am Dave
Wednesday 16th December 2015 11:20pm Dave
Thursday 3rd March 2016 8:00pm Dave
Friday 26th August 2016 1:00am Dave
Tuesday 14th February 2017 6:40pm Dave
Wednesday 15th February 2017 2:40pm Dave
Monday 6th March 2017 2:40pm Dave
Wednesday 31st May 2017 1:20am Dave
Thursday 1st June 2017 1:10am Dave
Monday 14th August 2017 11:20pm Dave
Tuesday 15th August 2017 1:20am Dave
Tuesday 12th September 2017 1:20am Dave
Wednesday 27th September 2017 11:20pm Dave
Thursday 28th September 2017 1:20am Dave
Thursday 1st March 2018 11:20pm Dave
Friday 4th May 2018 12:00am Dave
Friday 4th May 2018 2:00am Dave
Friday 29th June 2018 11:20pm Dave
Saturday 30th June 2018 2:20am Dave
Wednesday 5th December 2018 7:20pm Dave
Thursday 14th February 2019 1:00am Dave
Thursday 12th September 2019 11:00pm Dave
Friday 13th September 2019 8:20pm Dave

Cast & crew

Cast
Stephen Fry Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Mark Steel Guest
Vic Reeves Guest
Roger McGough 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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