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 S - VG: Part I

A selection of the best moments from the recent series. Sandi Toksvig asks questions connected to the letter S, as Alan Davies and the guest panellists try to come up with interesting, point-worthy answers - all the while avoiding the most obvious ones.

Topics

- Sick Best Bit: The toilet on the International Space Station.

- Sideshows, Stunts & Scavenger Hunts Best Bit Tangent: Gyles Brandreth being raised by a nanny who was a circus performer.

- Spooky Best Bit Tangent: The inspiration for Edvard Munch's The Scream.

- Shady & Shaky Best Bit Tangent: The panel plays a game where they shake their heads to say "yes" and nod to mean "no".

- Secrets, Spies & Sleuths Best Bit Tangent: You can send secret messages in eggs.

- Sideshows, Stunts & Scavenger Hunts Best Bit Tangent: Gyles breaking the world record for the longest ever screen kiss.

- Secrets, Spies & Sleuths Best Bit Tangent: Daliso Chaponda on trying to hire a spy for his father.

- Sugar And Spice Best Bit Tangent: Origins of certain tongue twisters.

- Shady & Shaky New Material Tangent: French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil tried to observe the transit of Venus in the late 18th century for the Royal Academy of Sciences. He went to India to see the transit in 1761. However, he got held up in Mauritius for a year due to a war between Britain and France; he was blown off course for five weeks by monsoon winds; the place he wanted to go, Pondicherry, was conquered by the British so he could not land there; meaning on the day of the transit he was still at sea and he could not carry out precise measurements. He thus decided to stay in India for eight years so he could measure the next transit in 1769, but when that transit happened it was cloudy and could not observe it. After this he was in shock for two weeks, almost unable to speak, then he got dysentery.

- Secrets, Spies & Sleuths Best Bit Tangent: When you get Sudoku wrong.

- Sensational Best Bit: The "Ames window".

- Shady & Shaky Best Bit Tangent: The head bobble.

- Sideshows, Stunts & Scavenger Hunts Best Bit Tangent: Hadji Ali, the Great Regurgitator.

- Spooky New Material Tangent: Skunks attack you when their face and bottom are both facing you at the same time. Their spraying is normally a last resort. If they aim right at your face, the spray is enough to knock a human out. Their scent glands are right near their bottom, are the size of grapes, and the spray can be squirted up to ten feet away. Alan had a friend nicknamed "The Squirt", who could stand in front of a pub urinal and urinate out of a window eight feet above him.

- Shady & Shaky Best Bit Tangent: The panel have silhouettes made of them.

- Sick Best Bit: How many ships did Helen of Troy's face launch?

- Shady & Shaky Best Bit Tangent: Silhouettes made out of junk.

- Secrets, Spies & Sleuths Best Bit Tangent: The scytale way of sending hidden messages.

- Sideshows, Stunts & Scavenger Hunts New Material: Female bootleggers outnumbered men about five to one during prohibition. In some states, it was illegal for women to be strip-searched, so they would provoke officers by telling them that booze was hidden in their bra, and then threaten to sue the officers if they searched them. Two prohibition agents, Isidor "Izzy" Einstein and Moe Smith, specialised in costumed disguises. They would arrive at the scene of the crime as German pickle packers or Hungarian violinists, and Einstein would sometimes as a double-bluff said he was a prohibition agent, which the barman thought was hilarious and let him into this bar.

- Sugar And Spice Best Bit: Which South American countries are due south of Mexico?

- Sideshows, Stunts & Scavenger Hunts Best Bit: Where do ponchos come from?

Broadcast details

Date
Tuesday 15th February 2022
Time
10pm
Channel
BBC Two
Length
30 minutes

Repeats

Show past repeats

Date Time Channel
Tuesday 6th September 2022 10:00pm BBC2

Cast & crew

Cast
Sandi Toksvig Host / Presenter
Alan Davies Regular Panellist
Guest cast
Jo Brand Guest
Gyles Brandreth Guest
David Mitchell Guest
Lee Mack Guest
Jason Manford Guest
Richard Osman Guest
Victoria Coren Mitchell Guest
Aisling Bea Guest
Cariad Lloyd Guest
James Acaster Guest
Nish Kumar Guest
Alice Levine Guest
Daliso Chaponda Guest
Zoe Lyons Guest
John Barrowman Guest
Maisie Adam Guest
Jessica Fostekew Guest
Eshaan Akbar Guest
Rosie Jones Guest
Rose Matafeo Guest
Roisin Conaty Guest
Charles Burns Self
Writing team
James Harkin Script Editor
Anna Ptaszynski Script Editor
Sandi Toksvig Script Editor
Mat Coward Researcher
Will Bowen Researcher
Andrew Hunter Murray Researcher
Ed Brooke-Hitching Researcher
Mandy Fenton Researcher
Mike Turner Researcher
Jack Chambers Researcher
Emily Jupitus Researcher
James Rawson Researcher
Ethan Ruparelia Researcher
Lydia Mizon Researcher
Production team
Ben Hardy Director
Diccon Ramsay Director
John Lloyd (as John Lloyd CBE) Series Producer
Piers Fletcher Producer
Justin Pollard Associate Producer
Nick King Editor
Jonathan Paul Green Production Designer
Nick Collier Lighting Designer
Howard Goodall Composer
Sarah Clay Commissioning Editor

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