APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Good evening, and welcome to QI
where tonight I am queen of a quorum of queens.
Let's meet one's loyal subjects.
Speaking the Queen's English, Colin Lane.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING Thank you. Hello. Thank you.
Taking the Queen's shilling, David Mitchell.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Wearing the Queen's uniform, Sarah Millican.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And the Groom of the Stool, Alan Davies!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Thank you.
Right, let's hear their queenly quartet. Sarah goes...
# Playing with the Queen of Hearts! #
Nice. Colin goes...
# You are the dancing queen... #
Aw, I love a bit of Scandi music.
And David goes...
# And a homecoming queen... #
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Land of Hope and Glory
QUEEN'S VOICE: And what do you do?
Right. What can you tell me about the royal "we"?
It doesn't smell?
APPLAUSE
And we're off and running. Hey!
IMITATES RICHIE BENAUD: Colin Lane there,
edging his first delivery to slip.
Richie Benaud, it's Richie Benaud. Right, yes.
Was that an Australian accent? Oh, come on!
I've been working on that since you were last here. Really?
They don't open their teeth up. "They"? They? They? They? Yes. They?
I've busted my crown, you see? Oh, no.
I'll go over to this side. What can you tell me about the royal "we"?
There was something weird about George III's wee.
I think it maybe was purple and then they thought he had porphyria.
And then, now, they think he didn't have porphyria, but they were
definitely saying there's something up with this guy's wee. Yeah.
Also, he's gone mad. Yes.
That is entirely correct, but I am heading in a different direction.
Why might a royal person say "we"?
Ah, first person plural. It is - the majestic plural.
It's known as nosism from the Latin "nos" for "we".
It's the idea that the royal person,
instead of referring to themselves as "I", in fact, says "we".
Implying there's more than one of them. Yes, well,
we can trace it back to Henry II,
and it used to mean "God and I", that's what it really comes from.
We've got Henry II there and his successor, Richard I,
and it's Richard I that introduced the motto "Dieu et mon droit",
"God and my right", and that remains the royal motto ever since.
He's got your crown on, Dave, he's got your crown!
I like to think this is like a working crown.
This isn't like a Parliament-opening coronation crown... Daily.
Yeah, you can wear it all the time,
you can go into battle... Doing the dishes.
Going to get a paper and some fags. Yeah. Yeah.
Going to the garage at 3.00am for munchies. Yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing, the Queen doesn't actually use the pronoun "one"
as much as you would think. They analysed all her speeches since 1952
and she uses "I" six times more often than she says "one".
It's a parody, really, of how she speaks, because it isn't.
Unless she got bored of it. "One's not doing that any more."
It must be boring being Queen, so, just mix it up a bit.
It must be quite dull, do you not think?
Constantly having to open and close things.
LAUGHTER
I don't think, to be fair, you mean opening as in launching...
Yeah. ..I don't think she closes many things.
You know, when BHS went under...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
When you're in charge, the whole approach to pronouns
can be quite complicated. The very first Qin Emperor,
so the guy who unified China, is a guy called Shi Huangdi,
and he announced when he became Emperor
that the character zhen,
which was the normal singular pronoun, so "I",
was for his imperial use only and it meant everybody else
had to come up with other ways of...
"No, I am zhen. I am zhen."
People used to refer to themselves often as yu,
meaning "this foolish one" or not refer to yourself at all.
In terms of things that you might refer to yourself
if you were in charge, Kim Jong-Il,
he had more than 1,200 titles with which he used to refer to himself,
including Heaven-sent Hero,
Guardian Deity of the Planet
and, my personal favourite, Eternal Bosom of Hot Love.
LAUGHTER
1,102 - Deluded Maniac.
This is a great title. In Swaziland, Queen Mother of King Mswati III
has enjoyed the title of Ndlovukati, the Great She Elephant.
I think I'd like to be that. Don't you think it's a good title?
No. Sometimes it's what I feel like when I'm in the bath.
LAUGHTER
Now, who chews the Queen's food?
Beefeaters!
Bacteria. Oh!
Yes, I would accept that, except that we are in the land of honey.
It's a bee? Is it worker bees, the worker bees?
Worker bees, it is. It's not all the other bees
because they divide up into lots of categories.
So, there's lazy ones as well.
There are drone ones, there are scout ones, there are worker ones.
There are product development bees, aren't there? Yeah, marketing.
And they've achieved very little recently.
I mean, it is just honey, isn't it? Yes.
Unless it's Manuka honey, and then it's 15 quid.
What are those bees on?
But when you compare them to Kit Kat, I mean, Kit Kat,
there's orange Kit Kat, there are various others, I mean...
They've really worked on the product development,
compared to honey is just honey.
So, worker bees, they pre-digest the queen's food
because she doesn't have the necessary glands
to digest it herself. Even more unpleasant than that,
they have the power to put her on a crash diet. What?
Yes, I know. So, she gets really big and heavy,
she's too heavy to fly,
and when they want to swarm, which they do once a year,
they put her on a crash diet so that she loses a third of her body weight
and so she's ready to take off. Is there a committee or something,
there's some level of management that goes,
"You know, the queen's getting a bit porky, maybe..."
Well, we genuinely don't know how these decisions are made.
So, for example, choosing a new queen,
they seem to select rather randomly a bee at the larva stage
and they give it a special diet different from all of the workers.
So, these are queen cups, these are new queens being developed.
Most larvae are fed honey and pollen by worker bees,
but occasionally, one is fed only royal jelly
which is a sort of protein that's secreted from the glands
in the worker bees' heads.
And this one is elevated to royal status and becomes queen.
But I like that you asked the question because, the truth is,
we don't know. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you.
We used to think the royal jelly made the queens develop differently.
And we now think it's not what she's fed, but what she is NOT fed.
So, the fact that she does not get pollen and honey like the others,
it actually makes her ovaries grow large,
while the others' reproductive organs,
the ones that get the pollen and honey, they actually shrink.
It's a terrible life, actually, because when it comes time
to get rid of her - she's sick or she's unproductive,
she's not having any more babies - the workers kill her by balling her.
Oh, I don't know if I want to know what that is. No, no.
It's not what I think it is? No.
A large group swarms tightly around her and raises...
It's better than I was thinking, yeah!
..raises her body temperature until she is fatally over-heated.
AUDIENCE: Oh! I know! This is awful.
I love that we're all feeling sorry for this queen bee.
But, actually, we say "queen bee" -
since Aristotle's time, it was always assumed it was a king.
It took until the 1670s,
there was a Dutch scientist called Jan Swammerdam,
and he dissected a king bee under a microscope
and was rather shocked to discover the size of the ovaries
which represent a quarter of a mature queen's body weight.
He also learnt this great thing -
if you remove the queen from the hive on a stick,
all the other bees will follow you,
and this is a bee-keeping trick that people use now.
And the most bizarre use was in the 18th century -
in show business, there was a bee-keeper called Daniel Wildman
and he had a honey shop in London and he promoted it by riding horses
standing up while wearing a beard of bees.
And that made people buy from his shop, rather than think he was mad?
It's pretty startling, if you have a look.
This is not him, but these are other people who have the skill
of getting bees to do as they please.
Do they all have honey shops as well?
I think they were just selling tickets in the end
cos there was a woman called Patty Jones,
she was the wife of the inventor of the modern circus, Philip Astley,
and she used to perform horse riding stunts,
but she used to have a swarm of bees on her hand imitating a lady's muff.
Ooh-ho-ho!
I mean a hand-warmer!
So do I!
LAUGHTER
Now, who has sex for 15 years
and gets licked to death by their own children?
It's going to be an insect or something.
Is it something like a... Like a termite?
It is a termite. It is? You're absolutely right, yes.
How did you know that?
Now, just be warned, even if you like insects,
I think this is a bit gross, OK?
And I don't really like insects.
I accept they're necessary. Yeah, they are necessary,
but this is, honestly, a yellow, pulsating mass.
So, the termite queen, just like bees,
is the only fertile female in the colony,
and she gives birth to all the rest,
but, unlike other insects, mates for life - and I mean literally.
So, after choosing a king,
spends 15 years incessantly mating,
to produce the nest colony.
She produces one egg every three seconds. No!
I know! And we go, ugh!
So, over a quarter-of-a-billion in her lifetime.
ALAN MAKES SPLUTTERING NOISE
It's like a paintball machine.
So, you can just see her head at the front and that is her body,
and her egg-producing organ becomes so massive
that she's rendered entirely... There she is.
GROANING
I know. She's played by Olivia Coleman in the film.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
But she's literally pulsating, producing eggs the whole time.
She grows to be too large to leave the cell.
She can be 100 times the size of the other termites.
Is that the king there, on the end? No, that's her.
The black bit at the end there... Is her. ..that's her?
And the rest is egg-producing organ. Ugh! I said it was gross.
Is she having sex and producing an egg at the same time?
Yeah, so she's endlessly shagging.
She goes through about five to ten kings in her lifetime.
I think they just get exhausted. I think they just can't deal with it.
I mean, does she do it the same way every time?
Like, do they have to experiment with the sex life
to keep it fun and, you know? No, I think she just gets rid of the king.
And she can't move, so her babies tend to her, they feed her,
they clean her, they drink the secretion that she sweats.
Look at this. AUDIENCE GROANS
I did warn you it's revolting.
But when she has outlived her usefulness,
so she's not producing enough babies any more,
the children surround her and they lick her to death.
They literally suck the fluids and fats from her body.
Who'd have thought that there was such a disgusting story
behind something as lovely as a termite?!
LAUGHTER
But here's the weird thing - when she dies,
gradually the whole mound dies away.
So they lick her to death and then everybody dies?
Well, what you need now is to start a new termite mound.
What I need now? No, I mean...
LAUGHTER
When she's died you need to start a new mound
and so what happens is once a year virgin queens will fly out
of the mound and they'll land on the ground
and they instantly shed their wings, so they never fly again,
and they meet a king and they go underground
and they start a new mound. How quickly can she change the king?
Well... Does she have to wear him out? Yeah. Yeah.
In her lifetime she'll go through between five and ten kings.
As one king finishes, does she sort of go, "Quick! Need another!"?
"Get me another one!" "Jump on!"
Talking about royalty, there was a study in 2018, and termite workers,
you have to understand termite workers are generally blind,
they perform a kind of curtsy when they can scent royalty.
So there's a wax coat-like substance that is over the king and queen
and when the workers smell it they pause and start shaking.
Look, see them shaking? It's almost like a curtsy.
Like being in the presence of their leader.
Anyway, moving on. What's wrong with the Queen in this picture?
Nothing at all.
Oh, no, he's kissing her hand. Sorry, I just realised. Sorry!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Did you think that was a clean-shaven gentleman?
Is she dead? She is dead. Oh!
This is Ines de Castro. So, we are back in the 14th century.
She was the mistress of the then future king of Portugal, Peter I.
He had a wife called Constance, and she died.
He was very sad, so he immediately moved Ines in
and they had three illegitimate children.
Now, his dad was still king then, Alfonso IV, he was furious,
so he had Ines killed.
Well, obviously, Peter didn't like this very much,
so he caught two of the killers and he had their hearts torn out
and pulverised before him while he ate dinner.
So, quite cross. I mean, on the whole, quite cross.
Six years later, he became king.
He announced that he and Ines had secretly married.
He dug her up and... GROANING
Yes, and placed her on the throne
and forced the court to swear allegiance to her and kiss her hand.
So, she's not only dead, darling, she's been buried for six years.
Well, in which case, they've done a great job. Yeah.
She looks pretty good. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I look worse than that many days.
There's a magnificent coffin which you can still see.
It's at the Monastery of Alcobaca.
But there's a modern Portuguese expression - agora, Ines e morta.
"Now Ines is dead."
It basically means it's too late, you can't turn back now.
But there she is. Finally laid to rest. Being licked by her children.
Well, it's such a horrific story, lots of people thought it was
a myth but, in fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is,
in fact, a fact. Jesus.
But, actually, in this country, we had a similar sort of thing.
So, in 1667, 230 years after Catherine of Valois -
she was the queen consort of Henry V -
died, her tomb was disturbed.
They were doing some renovations in Westminster Abbey.
And, after that, if you paid a little bit extra to your tour guide,
they would take you to see the corpse.
It became a sort of tourist attraction.
And Samuel Pepys took his wife and daughters to see it,
and this is really weird, he wrote in his diary,
"I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen,
"that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen."
I know! She was 230 years dead.
LAUGHTER
It still counts.
LAUGHTER
If it was his first Queen, was it his first corpse, though?
Maybe he couldn't say it was his first corpse
because he's already done that,
so he had to say it was his first Queen. Awkward! Yeah, yeah.
"Oh, the corpse thing? Oh, that!"
"I did that ages ago. That was my 30th."
Is that the dead Queen? I would suggest that
that's a wooden carving of her. It looks wood, yes.
DAVID: If that's her dead body, it's had work. Yeah.
LAUGHTER
There have been a couple of instances of royals
who were crowned before they were born.
King Louis X of France, he died on the 5th of June 1316.
He was succeeded by his son, John I,
but he wasn't born until the 15th of November,
so he reigned for five months in utero.
Did they have a coronation? Well, he died five days after he was born...
Aw. Yeah. But, I mean,
in that dynasty he's the one who reigned for his whole life.
LAUGHTER
He must be the only king to have reigned for five months longer
than he actually lived. Yeah.
Ines de Castro was a bit of a stiff, you know, even for a royal! Now...
..what would you have to do to a mannequin to get yourself arrested?
Have sex with it for 15 years and then lick it to death.
LAUGHTER
I would say if it's your mannequin that would not be a legal issue,
would it? If you want to hump it for years and years
and then lick it to bits then that's fine, as long as it doesn't
belong to Marks & Spencer and you're not doing it in the window.
LAUGHTER
So, if that happens to me, I can say, "David said it was fine"?
Yeah, I promise you, you will not have a legal problem.
Have you trained in any way in the legal fraternity?
No, I have no training legally but...I am right.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
That's all it takes. Yeah.
A different kind of queen. We're talking about drag queens.
In 1941 there was a drag queen called Julian Eltinge.
He was arrested simply for pointing at a mannequin.
So, this is really hard for us... What with? Well...
LAUGHTER
That's him on the left, and the right as well.
And it's impossible for us to imagine,
but he was one of the highest-paid actors in the world in his day.
He was paid 3,500 a week, so that's nearly 60,000 now.
In 1912 he had a Broadway theatre on 42nd Street named after him.
Everybody loved his drag act.
He was always doing lots and lots of costume changes.
But then, after World War I, there was a spate of morality laws
and men were banned from dressing as women.
And shortly before his death he was reduced to performing in a tuxedo
with a mannequin next to him
dressed as he would have done when he dressed as a woman,
and he was arrested in a Los Angeles nightclub for simply pointing.
That was thought to be too much. In what year was that? 1941.
'41? Yeah. So they banned drag acts? Yeah. They banned drag acts when?
It started after the First World War
and then it increased and increased to the extent that in 1941
he was arrested for simply pointing. Jesus.
I know, it's bonkers, isn't it?
In wartime, drag acts would have been very helpful.
Yeah. For morale. I know that's different from moral grounds,
but on morale grounds, more drag, please. Yes.
In terms of morality, probably the worst story about crossdressing
was a man called William T Sloper. He was on the Titanic
and he was invited into one of the lifeboats by an actress
he had just met that evening, Dorothy Gibson.
When only a third of the lifeboats were filled to capacity,
the whole women and children thing hadn't kicked in.
He did survive. He got to the United States and he refused
to talk to reporters cos he had said he would give just a story
to his local newspaper.
And one journalist took umbrage at this and wrote an article anyway
and invented the notion that he had in fact escaped
because he was dressed as a woman, and it wasn't true at all.
But he lived under the curse of this accusation for the rest of his life.
There was somebody who did escape, sort of, by crossdressing,
a steerage class passenger called David Buckley.
He made his way into a lifeboat and then all the men were ordered off,
but a woman he was sitting next to threw her shawl over him
and he stayed in the lifeboat and he did survive.
I don't think it's, strictly speaking, crossdressing,
he just was covered with a thing.
It's where crossdressing meets hiding. Yes.
Now, who was the first queen to get a Brazilian?
Ooh. Oh. Cleopatra.
Why do you think her? She used to bath in milk.
She was up for stuff. Asses' milk. Yeah.
Yeah, not even normal milk. No.
She married several of her brothers.
She was a, you know, what we'd call now a "weirdo".
LAUGHTER
No, it is not her. Did someone get a Brazilian husband?
We are heading indeed to Brazil, if that helps.
I had to have this picture explained to me when I first saw it.
LAUGHTER
Well, we know more about you than we thought we did!
LAUGHTER
I'm in the same gang as you - high-five!
Go, girl!
Honestly, I thought it was caramel, I had no idea what it might be.
LAUGHTER
We're going to 1807, we are going to Portugal -
the Crown Prince, Dom Joao.
Napoleon is approaching and he takes his entire court,
including his Queen, Carlota, and he thinks,
"Let's go to one of our colonies," and they head off to Brazil.
So, they go off in a convoy of ships from Lisbon to Brazil,
10,000 people go with him.
And it's unbelievably overcrowded and unhygienic,
and a lice infestation breaks out.
So, in order to get rid of the lice,
they all, including all the women, they have to shave their heads,
they have to throw all their powdered wigs away
and cover their heads in pig fat.
Now, they're about to arrive in Brazil,
they want to make a bit of a stir. A to-do.
But they've got bald heads and pig fat.
I think that'll do the job, then!
LAUGHTER
They arrive at a place called Guanabara Bay,
and Carlota and all the other royal women
emerged with their bald heads covered with improvised turbans.
And, apparently, so the story goes,
the Brazilian women thought this was the height of European style,
and it became the local fashion. But the problem is that Brazil is
full of a wonderful African-Brazilian population,
and I would have thought that the turban thing
would have come from that part of the world originally.
But we don't know. So, they were bald everywhere, then?
Are you worrying about...?
LAUGHTER
Well, I've just grown my winter's coat in.
LAUGHTER
This one looks not unlike David Mitchell.
Do you not think she looks a bit like Marty Feldman?
Yes, crossed with David Mitchell.
This is building up into quite the compliment!
Whether the story is true or not about the Brazilians,
there is a long history of commoners imitating royals.
There was a man called Guglielmo, Duke of Mantua.
He was a hunchback - so we're talking 16th century -
and so all of his courtiers put humps on to compliment him.
Aw! You've got to judge that carefully.
Yeah. Because it might look like you're taking the piss. Just a bit!
The Princess of Wales, Alexandra,
she had a limp because she had a stiff knee joint
and it became fashionable to limp in the same way.
It was known as the Alexandra limp.
Isn't there a thing about waistcoat buttons as well?
What's the thing about waistcoat buttons?
In Britain you're supposed to leave your bottom button
of a waistcoat undone and I'd heard...
Because of some fat bastard? Some fat bastard, yes.
Some king who couldn't do all his buttons up,
so everyone went round leaving some of their buttons undone like,
"Yeah, it's just normal, it's just really stylish."
And you had to have food round your mouth and all down your tie. Yeah.
The waistcoat buttons is true.
Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales.
Oh, her husband. Her husband, in fact, yeah.
Here's another interesting fashion for royals.
Louis XIV, he had a fashion that courtiers should have
one long fingernail. Why was that?
My husband's got one special toenail for scratching his eczema.
It's awful, isn't it?
APPALLED LAUGHTER That's genuinely true.
Is that the sort of thing you were after?
I feel, in this show, you and I are in danger of over-sharing.
And you seem to be fine with that, though. Yeah,
as long as he keeps it to himself, I'm all right. Right. Yeah, yeah.
He hasn't really, has he, now? No.
LAUGHTER
He's only told me quite recently,
and we've been together for nearly 15 years,
so there's nothing I can do about it now, is what I'm saying,
I'm stuck with it. Except maybe pay more attention in the future.
So, the one long fingernail, what do we reckon?
Is that a cane that he's leaning on, or is that the fingernail?
I want that to be it. No, he didn't have the fingernail,
it was the courtiers who had one.
Everyone else had to have the fingernail? Yes.
Was it to do with his anus? Let me just get that out of my head.
GROANING AND LAUGHTER
What it's doing in your head?!
I'm just imagining...
GROANING AND LAUGHTER
That is your takeaway from this show -
a pulsating termite,
and a fingernail up Louis XIV's arse. Now...
In this...
In this reality, he said, "I want any of you to be ready." Yeah.
"There's no telling who I'm going to ask
"to stick their fingernail up my anus,
"so I want you all to grow it. I don't want it to be a specialism,
"I want to say, 'You, now! Up there!'"
No, so, he decreed that nobody was allowed to knock on his door.
So, instead they... Just scratch.
MAKES SCRAPING NOISES
They had to scratch really gently with one finger.
And so it became a thing that you grew a fingernail
especially to scratch on the King's door.
And it really rather suggested you had the King's ear.
I know, weird rules. Honestly, would've been better off
if they'd done it up his arse. I just think...
LAUGHTER
Anyway, moving on.
What was your best chance of seeing the Queen's Ass in the 18th century?
Asking really, really, really nicely.
LAUGHTER
Is she standing underneath some sort of a vacuum that sucked her hair?
No, those are... Those are bees, I think!
You know how if you send a big parcel, you have to get
the bigger stamps? Yes. Has that got the ass on?
Oh, what, the stamps? Yeah, cos you see more of it on the stamp.
LAUGHTER
So you're saying that stamps are like those things that they used to
have peanuts on in pubs,
and the more expensive the stamp, the more of the Queen you'd see?
"I'm going to send a really big parcel. We'll see the whole of her."
Yeah, exactly.
Is it a donkey? Yes, it is.
It's not the Queen's bum, is it? It's not the Queen's bum at all.
This is Queen Charlotte, she was the wife of George the...?
George III? George III, absolutely right.
He's very good on his monarchs, yes. He's very good.
I'm tickling it out of him. Ew!
LAUGHTER
That's my... My secret, yeah, an anus full of facts!
LAUGHTER
"The Anus of Fact!"
And that's actually the working title of my memoir!
It wasn't a donkey, it was a zebra. It was known as the Queen's Ass,
given to her by the Governor of the Cape in South Africa in 1761.
It was a wedding present. He sent a pair, he sent a male and a female.
Unfortunately, the male, no stamina, died en route.
But the female arrived, only a year late for the wedding, but, hey!
It was a very popular attraction. Lots of people had never seen one
before and she had stables at Buckingham Gate.
And George Stubbs, the great painter,
produced a marvellous large painting.
And, apparently, she bred it. I mean, not...!
LAUGHTER
I say not her personally.
But, apparently, they painted white stripes
on the backside of a male donkey to persuade her to mate with it.
And it worked and gave birth.
So, what would that be - a donkey and a zebra?
A donkra? A donkra, I like that. A zebrey. Zebkey.
It sounds like a condition, it's a zebroid. A zebroid? Oh.
You know how you can't sit very well and go, "Oh, it's my zebroids."
Aw! Aah! Oh, they like that. That's a very good photo.
For 18th-century technology, that's an amazing photo!
It does look like a donkey in leggings, doesn't it?
"Donkeys in tights!"
Apparently, they use the same technique for breeding race horses.
Some stallions will only mate with mares of a particular colour.
I wear a George Clooney mask quite often when I make love.
LAUGHTER
On my bum, you understand.
The very first giraffe to arrive in Britain was a present to royals.
It was sent in 1827. It was a gift from Egypt to George IV.
I like this - the ship that it was transported in,
they had to cut a hole in the deck!
At about the same time Egypt gifted another giraffe to France,
and it was called Zarafa, and it became so popular
it created a craze in Paris for having your hair done a la giraffe.
What was the hair...? Oh!
Yeah. Yeah.
So not like hair, like horns. Yes, more like horns.
That's not, I would say, the most noticeable thing about a giraffe.
LAUGHTER
They look at a giraffe and that was their takeaway thing.
"Oh, yeah, just little horns.
"I'm going to have my hair done like that."
It's got a four-metre neck!
LAUGHTER
They have the most astonishing tongues.
I went to a feeding station once
where you can go up into a tower and feed the giraffes
and, honestly, it's terrifying.
Was it a tower for everybody else or just for you?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Queen Elizabeth II has received lots and lots of exotic animals -
two sloths from Brazil, two pygmy hippopotamuses from Liberia,
a crocodile from Zambia, an elephant from Cameroon,
six kangaroos from Australia - thank you -
and a pig from Fiji which decided to remain on Fiji.
I wonder why Fiji sent a pig.
Maybe they don't have many giraffes there. Yeah.
"She'll expect a giraffe!" "Well, we haven't got one!"
"So embarrassing. We can't send her a pig. She'll HAVE a pig."
LAUGHTER
Now, we've got a dog collar, a hound tether, a game noose
and you've got the horn. What game can we play?
What noose have we got? A game noose.
Oh, a noose that's up for anything. A game noose. It's a game noose.
Well, let's just try and work it out.
What might you do with a game noose? So, that's the third one.
Is it where, you know, you don't want to shoot pheasants,
but you might encourage them to commit suicide?
So, sort of saying, maybe, "I mean, you're a pheasant,
"what is there to live for, you know?
"Anyway, there it is."
I mean, to be honest, if the pheasant's killed itself,
it's not the same thing as eating it having shot it, is it?
You could probably make an argument that it's like a vegan pheasant.
LAUGHTER
It is kind of what David is talking about, it's about pheasants,
but you want to be able to carry them home.
Like little soft handcuffs, or something?
Well, I think more you put it round its neck, darling,
and carry it home on your belt. It's like a pheasant clip.
Exactly, darling, yes. "Where the hell am I going to put my pheasant?
"Oh, I know, I've got my game noose." Yeah.
So, all of these things come from one game.
A dog collar, a hound tether, a game noose and a horn.
From somewhere around 1470, this game.
SARAH: Is it a sex game?
Well, it depends how you play it, I suppose!
Let's not limit ourselves!
Is it cards? It is absolutely cards.
So, the world's oldest full set of playing cards,
it's called the Hofjager Hunting Pack.
It's currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
What's the top one? It looks like a balloon whisk.
So, instead of the suits that we have today,
if we go through them,
the dog collar on the bottom, and then the game noose,
and then the horn, and then a hound tether. Oh, OK.
There weren't any rule books until the 17th century,
so we don't know what kind of games they would have played.
But this would have been one of the first packs to have a queen.
In Europe, they originally had no queen -
they had a cavalier on horseback instead.
But around the 15th century, they start to swap them out
and start to have a queen. We're not really sure why.
It may be that there's a slightly Biblical influence,
so if you look at the queen of hearts there,
she's got the name Judith from the Book of Judith,
the queen of diamonds was called Rachel,
the favourite wife of Jacob.
The queen of spades was linked to the goddess Athena.
Clubs, I think they ran out of ideas, OK?
This was the name for the queen of clubs. Have a quick look
and see why you think she might have been called this.
Argine. It's an anagram.
It's Regina. It is Regina. It just means queen.
But lots of things have changed in games, cos the queen in chess
was originally the vizier, so the sort of adviser, the minister.
The chess board was a battlefield,
and then it eventually became the Royal Court, so you get the vizier,
the infantry, the cavalry, the elephants and the chariots.
They become the queen, the knight, the bishop, and so on.
In the 15th century it was thought inappropriate to promote a piece
that you had more than one queen on the board. Why might that be?
Was there some queen who didn't like even the suggestion that there
might be another queen and banned the practice?
It's thought to symbolise adultery. Ohhh. Yes.
In Monopoly, when did they start having the little dog and the hat
and all of that? When did that kick off?
That is a very good question. Thanks.
There were, in fact, all just charms off a charm bracelet. Oh.
I know. Sorry. Yeah, that's a shit answer. Sorry.
I don't know, Sarah, but let's hope one day somebody finds out. Thanks.
They'll just edit the bit out where I tell you the truth. OK.
I believe they were charms from a charm bracelet.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Did you get that from your Anus of Facts? Yes.
Yeah, I've just popped into my own anus and...
Now it's time for the short walk
to the chopping block we call General Ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
What's the oldest object in the Crown Jewels?
Is it the Queen?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It's not a bad guess.
# Homecoming queen! #
Wow, that's really loud!
I'm sorry, I turned the volume right up.
It's an old spoon.
Yes, you are absolutely right. It is an old spoon.
APPLAUSE
Another one out of the anus. Yeah, I know.
How old, David? How old?
Well, most of the Crown Jewels were lost at the Civil War.
Almost everything is post-Civil War...
ALAN MAKES SQUEAKING SOUND ..and there's the odd thing left.
The anus speaks!
There's only a very few things from before that, so, from before then.
So, it's late 12th-century,
so it's a ten-and-a-half-inch-long anointing spoon,
it's one of only four things that we have which predate the Restoration.
The other three are some 17th-century swords.
It's from about the time of Edward the Confessor.
You get a set of coronation regalia which
gets passed down from ruler to ruler.
But then, of course, as you say, the monarchy was abolished
and the new government decides to melt everything down.
But there was a guy called Mr Kynnersley.
He was the Yeoman of Charles I's wardrobe,
and he bought the spoon for 16 shillings -
about 11 days' wages at the time, so it's not a complete fortune.
And when the monarchy was restored, he returned the spoon.
Did they give him 16 shillings? No, he just gave it back.
He just returned it. What a lovely gesture. Yeah.
Now, what's the best thing to eat to help you with your hay fever?
Is it an antihistamine? That would be the best thing, yes.
But what is the thing people often think?
They say, this is a klaxon one. Yeah. People say honey.
But it isn't, you're absolutely right.
It's a long-standing myth that it would help with hay fever.
Why might you think it would help with hay fever?
Gets the bees on side.
The idea is that it's got pollen in it
and it desensitises you to the pollen that's in the air.
In fact, it's not going to help you at all.
It's really nice, though, isn't it, honey? I love it on toast, or...
..porridge, I like it on porridge.
I've never understood why you would put it on a carrot.
Who puts it on a carrot? People put it... Glaze it, don't they?
Oh, I see. I thought you meant, like... No.
Just to make it, you know, easier. I don't know!
I just thought you were lubing up a carrot. Lube a carrot?
What, to dislodge a particularly hard fact?
APPLAUSE
I've got the dates of the Wars Of The Roses up there somewhere.
Hold on, I'll lube up a carrot! A carrot will shift it.
I don't think honey's a lube. I think it's anything but a lube.
It's going to make the progress of the carrot
altogether more challenging.
Er... Back to honey.
The vast majority of seasonal allergies are caused by wind pollinators
that release the pollen into the air
and bees generally pollinate plants that need insects.
So the pollen you get in your honey isn't the pollen
that's giving you your allergies.
Why is some of it runny and some of it hard?
It depends on how you treat it after it has been gathered.
It's not the bees' choice? The bees don't go...
"Make a bunch of hard stuff."
The product development section, they've come up with nothing.
No peppermint flavoured honey, no strawberry honey.
You get clover honey and lavender honey. Do you? Yeah.
MONOTONE: Do you?
I've never heard anybody more disinterested.
It's like none of you have heard of jam, that's the problem I've got.
Eating honey won't help your hay fever.
Who wrote the Queensberry Rules?
The Marquess of Queensberry?
I didn't say it! I never said it!
He endorsed them, he did not write them.
They were written by a Welshman called John Graham Chambers.
So, he founded the Amateur Athletic Club.
He's probably famous for the fact that he rode beside a man called
Matthew Webb - anybody know what Matthew Webb did?
He was in a sketch double-act. Sketch double-act, yeah!
He was the really funny one. He was really, really funny!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Matthew Webb - first person recorded to swim the Channel in 1875.
But you said the first person "recorded".
Does that mean that other people did it and just didn't tell anybody?
Yeah, ssh! Ssh! People have been doing it for years!
I mean, we don't know, do we, because they didn't tell anybody?
Exactly. Yeah. Just kept it quiet. It's like the moon.
Who knows how many people have been popping up to the moon?
And it wasn't Columbus that discovered the Americas,
the Vikings went there ages ago.
The Vikings probably went to the moon. Yeah.
I read the other day, after Columbus discovered America...
Well, he didn't, but... Went there. When he went there.
There were 55 million Native Americans
and within 100 years, 90% of them were dead.
Mainly from diseases.
That's pretty astonishing, and much worse than I had...
Not to mention nearly all the bison. Yeah.
Carnage of that...
I've been, I'm just... It's the way I mourn the...
Oh, the suffering!
No, it's a fly. Something slipped out the Anus of Facts there.
Some of my facts are attracting flies.
I think the strangest adoption of the Queensberry Rules boxing
was a sport, it was called horse boxing,
and it was the invention of a guy, invented it in Berlin,
an African-American boxer called Bobby Dobbs.
It's essentially a boxing match but you just sit and punch each other...
..on a horse. While the horses have a little chat. Yeah.
Can you think of a quicker way of making horses despise humanity?
Well, apparently, in 1912,
it was demonstrated at a tournament in Germany.
They thought of putting this into the German Army's
proper officer training.
"The new sport will be valuable for the soldier on horseback
"in time of war as, when he loses his weapons,
"he will have to fall back on his natural means of defence."
It didn't work out as a sport. Anybody know why?
Can't hold the reins?
Horses did not want to stand still. Ah!
The Marquess of Queensbury didn't make the rules.
What were tarot cards invented for?
KLAXON BLARES
APPLAUSE
Well done, well done!
Is it telling the future? No.
It isn't at all. What they really are,
they're like an extra fifth suit to the pack, is really the idea.
And lots of people want to trace it back to ancient Egypt
and the occult and Kabbalah traditions and so on.
There's no documentary evidence whatsoever to support
the idea of using it for divination until about 1760s in France.
Before that, they're like trumps in a game,
and then they were also used as an aid to creating a story.
And even then, what you think each card means,
it varies tremendously depending on what tradition you follow.
I once had my tarot cards read and I was quite an old virgin. And...
Was that the conclusion of the reading?
No, I was well aware of that. And I got the naked card,
and I got really excited, thinking, "It's going to happen!"
She just kept saying, "It's new beginnings."
It's so frustrating that they don't mean what they look like they mean.
I just wanted one that just had a cock on it.
I've had somebody explain it to me and they say,
"The death card doesn't necessarily mean death, that means a change."
The end of a stage in your life.
You think, OK, you've got a card system, it's the death card,
why do you have to complicate it? You know, that's death.
Because it upsets people. Don't have the card then!
Change it for the "new job" card.
Yes, the new job card and the cock card. That would be better.
"You're going to be moving house some time in the next 12 months."
Which brings us to the final fanfare of the scores.
In first place...
Oh! ..with a sovereign eight,
it's Sarah!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
I'm really happy.
In second place, with minus one, it's David!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
In third place, with minus seven, Colin!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And in fourth place, with a magnificent minus 25, it's Alan!
What?! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Which means I have only to thank Sarah, David, Colin and Alan,
and leave you with this queenly quotation -
when Edward VII was asked if his mother, Queen Victoria,
would be happy in heaven, he replied,
"She will have to walk behind the angels,
"and she won't like that." Goodnight.