QI

Themes

- The show begins with the titles being played upside-down, and with the film footage inverted with the panel acting as if they too are upside-down. After testing their buzzers the film is put back the right way up.

Topics

- The panel are shown an image and are asked what is wrong with it. It consists of two small upside-down portraits on the sides, and a larger portrait in the middle of Don Felipe King of Spain which is the right-way up. The problem is that the entire image is upside-down, in that the only picture that should be upside-down is Don Felipe's painting. It hangs in the Almodi Museum in Xativa, near Valencia. In 1707, during the War of Spanish Succession, Don Felipe's forces massacred the citizens of Xativa, and the town was burned down to the ground. In 1940, the museum's curator, Carlos Sarthou, decided to hang Felipe's portrait upside-down as a mark of disrespect against him, and it remains so to this day.

- The panel play a game in which they try to figure out if famous paintings are upside-down or not.

- New York City by Piet Mondrian: the picture was hung upside-down for 75 years before anybody had noticed it was wrong. In 2022, curator Susanne Meyer-Buser at the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Gallery in Dusseldorf spotted the error and said: "Once I pointed it out to others, it was obvious." The picture is made of red, blue and yellow-coloured tape, and is meant to be set at night, with the dark sky at the top, but the picture is hung with the sky at the bottom. The museum however cannot turn the picture the right way up because they are worried that the tape might come off.

- Black on Maroon by Mark Rothko: currently hanging in the Tate Modern, for many years it hung horizontally. Then after some research they decided to hang it vertically. Since then it has been hung both horizontally and vertically, meaning no-one actually knows which way it should be hung. Rothko left no instructions as to how they should hang it.

- XL: Oriental Poppies by Georgia Totto O'Keeffe: the most valuable painting in the Weisman Art Museum in the University of Minnesota, for many years it was hung as a portrait for 30 years. Then in 1986 they discovered a photo of O'Keeffe standing next to the portrait hung as a landscape, and corrected themselves.

- Elke I by Georg Baselitz: a German artist, Baselitz specialises in making deliberately upside-down paintings, with this picture being an upside-down portrait of his wife.

- Charles La Trobe statue: La Trobe was the first Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of Victoria, Australia, and there is a 16ft tall statue of him made out of fibreglass and polystyrene, painted look like stone and bronze, which is deliberately upside-down. La Trobe reportedly had a terrible lack of confidence during his lifetime.

- The upside of having almost nobody come to your show is that you can copyright it. Magicians very rarely copyright their tricks, because they have to write down how the trick was done on the patent application. Harry Houdini got around this by putting on a one-act play in London called Houdini Upside Down, would play to a single paying customer, and that would allow him to copyright the play and thus protect the trick. The trick in question was the Chinese Water Torture Cell, the first public performance of which took place in Berlin in 1912. It involved his feet being put in stocks, then lowering Houdini upside-down into a tank of water from which he would escape. Houdini said he would give anyone a £200 reward if they could prove he was receiving air during the performance, and no-one claimed it. Houdini was very aggressive when it came to protecting his copyright, registering three of his tricks as little plays between 1911-14.

- Tangent: Equity rules used to say that you did not have to do a show if there were more people onstage than there were in the audience. When Romesh made his first website as a comic, he put a question on it and people who answered it got two free tickets to a work-in-progress show he was doing in Brighton. Someone he used to teach answered the question, got the tickets, and he and his friend were the only two people who came to Romesh's show. Romesh jokes that he didn't do the show has he wasn't allowed within 500 yards of him. Sandi once did a show with Jan Ravens and Tony Slattery, where the only person who turned up was her mother-in-law. She made Sandi and the others perform.

- Tangent: Houdini trained himself to hold his breath for long periods of time. He could hold his breath for three-and-a-half minutes, and he would keep a key in his mouth which he would use to unlock all the padlocks. Houdini said that some tricks that don't look dangerous were very dangerous, and vice-versa.

- XL Tangent: Teller, of Penn and Teller, bought a big black cross which belonged to Houdini which he thought was just a fun prop, but the guy who sold it to him pointed out that he should not put his fingers in the little holes the cross had to thread rope through. It turned out the cross had a foot-operated mechanism inside that sliced all the ropes at exactly the same moment.

- XL: Sandi asks Alan if he is familiar with the unusual properties of the number 5,318,008. The audience start laughing before Sandi finishes the question, because the number is famous, in that if you put it into a calculator and turn it upside-down it reads as: "BOOBIES". Other numbers that also work are 0.7734 ("HELLO"), 577,345,663 ("EGGSHELLS"), 71,077,345 ("SHELL OIL"), 3,704,608 ("BOGHOLE") and 5,338,336,338,334 ("HEEBIE JEEBIES").

- XL Tangent: The Sator Square is an example of Ancient Roman graffiti. It is a five-by-five square poem which can be read in any way you like. The poem reads: "Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas", which translates as: "The farmer Arepo uses his plough to work". The only issue is that the name Arepo is almost certainly made up to make the square work. This makes "Arepo" an example of a "hapax legomenon", a word that is only said one time. Other examples can be found in the Bibical line: "Give us this day our daily bread" is summed up in a word "Epiousion", which is only found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but no-one is entirely sure what it means.

- XL Tangent: Ludwig van Beethoven was challenged to a piano duel by a guy named Steibelt. Steibelt played a piece had written. Beethoven did not have any music himself, so he turned Steibelt's piece upside-down, and improvised for an hour. Steibelt stormed out and never returned to Vienna while Beethoven was still there.

- XL Tangent: There are many left-handed guitars who played right-hanged guitars upside-down. These included Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and the sadly less well-known African-American Elizabeth Cotten. Cotten received her first Grammy in 1985 at the age of 90. She played the bass with her fingers and her tune with her thumb, in style that became known as "Cotten Picking". At the age of nine she went into domestic service, then as an adult she found a child who was lost in a department store. The child was called Peggy Seeger, and she came from a famous family of folk musicians. The family took Cotten in, employed her as their housekeeper, and they discovered how brilliant she was as a guitarist. In 2022, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

- The most healthy thing to order first in a restaurant is a stodgy dessert. Research at the University of Arizona asked people to choose their starters, their mains and their desserts, but in different orders. Those who ordered dessert first then tended to think that because they already had an unhealthy thing first, then they should have a healthier dish afterwards. Overall, people will eat fewer calories if they start with a high-calorie thing first. People also have different appetites, so if you feel full after having a main, who can make room for a dessert.

- Tangent: Alan used to live near a Vietnamese restaurant, and we went in there one evening and spotted Mo Mowlam and her husband in there dining. After a while they said to themselves that they had better go. Alan asked them where they were going, to which they said they were going to a friend's house for dinner, who never cooked enough food. Sandi says that one of the best nights of her entire life was getting very drunk with Mowlam and Betty Boothroyd.

- Tangent: In January 1914, a group of flying enthusiasts called the Hendon Aviators celebrated the very first British inverted flight (the first time a plane had been able to fly upside-down) by having an upside-down dinner. This involved having upside tables with the legs up in the air, beginning the meal with a toothpick, a round of cognac, and singing "God Save The King". Then a musical comedian sang standing on his head. Sandi and the panel decide to toast them by drinking wine out of upside-down wine glasses. As they drink, Aisling is worried that someone would make a gif out of her drinking from these glasses.

- The front row of the audience wave flags and the panel are asked if they see anything distressing. The audience all wave Union Flags, but they fail to spot that one of the flags is upside-down. People commonly think that flying the flag upside-down is a signal of distress, but nothing in the King's Regulations to say this is true, and the fact that none of the panel spotted the upside-down flag proves that this is a bad idea anyway. The way you can tell if the flag is upside-down is to look at the diagonal red stripes of the red saltire of St. Patrick, which represents Northern Ireland. If the lower red stripe is at the bottom of the hoist-end (the side nearest the flagpole), then the flag is correct.

- Tangent: The panel start waving flags, but Aisling cannot bring herself to wave the Union Flag. Sandi has a large Danish flag and gives to Aisling to wave, who starts doing a comic Danish accent as she waves it. Romesh's flag is upside down.

- Tangent: Other flags are much easier to use as distress signals. The American flag is flown upside-down as a distress signal, with the stars in the bottom-right corner. Other flags could not be used: for example the Japanese flag looks the same both ways.

- XL Tangent: If you turn the Indonesian flag upside-down, it looks like the Polish flag.

- XL: An upside-down sneeze is dangerous because it can be venomous. The Cassiopeia is a type of jellyfish, lies upside-down with its tentacles pointing upwards to catch algae. They are generally found in mangrove forests and lagoons in Florida, Hawaii, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Snorkelers who swim near these creates sometimes develop an itching sensation on the skin as if the water has stung them, but it is actually caused by the Cassiopeia sneezing. They release a cloud of mucus which contains microscopic spheres, which when touched leak a venom which stings anything that touches them.

- XL Tangent: Jellyfish have no control of their tentacles.

- XL Tangent: Other upside-down aquatic creatures include Antarctic krill. When the ocean is covered in ice, they graze upside-down on algae on the underside of the ice. When they are full, they start to sink, splay out their legs, and using a kind of feeding basket they put their food in, start to parachute down. Once they fancy more food, they just come back to surface again. They do this about two or three times a day.

- Your best side in photographs is your upside-down side, because it makes you look thinner. When a face is upside-down, the way you recognise it is looking for the important features like the eyes, nose and mouth. You do not focus on the external stuff such as the jaws and chin. The fatter the face, the thinner it looks when turned upside-down. (Forfeit: Backside)

- XL Tangent: Romesh complains that selfies have reached the point where people who go whale-watching would rather share selfies of themselves watching the whales, rather than photos of the whales themselves. Research has shown that if you watch actors on screen, your eyes are drawn to the actor's faces. The only thing that attracts the eyes more is if you see a dog on screen.

- Tangent: The face-thinning fact appears to be related to something called the Jastrow illusion, named after Polish-American psychologist Joseph Jastrow. To demonstrate it, Sandi holds up two pieces of track from a child's train set, one painted grey and one black. When the grey one is on top, the black track looks longer; but when the black track is on top the grey one looks longer. In fact, they are both the same length. This trick does not work however on chimpanzees.

General Ignorance

- Sphynx cats come from Canada. These furless cats were discovered as a genetic mutation in a litter of domestic cats in Ontario, 1966. The first kitten was called Prune. Most of the cats are descended from two kittens born in Minnesota in 1975, called Dermis and Epidermis. Three more kittens were found in Toronto in 1978 called Bambi, Punkie and Paloma. While people think these cats are good for people with cat allergies, this only applies to people who are allergic to the fur. (Forfeit: Egypt)

- XL: The profession with the worst handwriting is executives, particularly males, according to a 1966 study. Doctors don't have particularly bad handwriting, especially when compared to other medical professionals, but the reason why people think doctors have poor handwriting is that their handwriting matters, and when something goes wrong people notice it more. The National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine reported in 2006 that 7,000 Americans were likely to have been killed by illegible doctors' notes, usually due to the wrong prescription. There were 1.5 million preventable injuries a year due to an error in dosage. (Forfeit: Doctors)

- Honeybees are getting along fine. While many pollinators are in trouble, including many other bee species, there are currently more honeybees now than at any other time in Earth's history. This is because people farm honeybees: any animal that is needed for food is not likely to be in danger of dying out. Colony collapse can happen in honeybee hives, but not enough as to be a danger to this species. Other bee species are under much greater threat, including at least 3,600 species of wild bee in North America, with many facing extinction.

- Tangent: Male honeybees always die after sex. After mating, the male's endophallus, the equivalent of its penis, stays behind in the queen and it rips a hole in the drone's abdomen, then the drone falls to the ground and dies. The bee only has a 1% change of being successful at reproduction.

Scores

- Aisling Bea: 2 points
- Urzila Carlson: -7 points
- Alan Davies: -14 points
- Romesh Ranganathan: -18 points

- Tangent: The episode ends with a series of four humiliating gifs of Aisling.