QI (2003) s07e04 Episode Script
Geography
Go-o-o-o-od evening, good evening, good evening and welcome to QI, where tonight we're gallivanting round the globe with G for Geography.
Joining me from the four corners of the Earth are the king of the jungle, Jimmy Carr APPLAUSE AND CHEERING King of the jungle, me? The queen of the desert, Jo Brand APPLAUSE AND CHEERING The prince of Port Talbot, Rob Brydon APPLAUSE AND CHEERING And the man in the moon, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING So with that in mind, let's hear their global warnings.
Jimmy goes THUNDER CLAP Rob goes SHIP'S HORN Yes, you do.
Jo goes AIR-RAID SIREN And Alan goes MAN: 'Forties, Cromarty, North Utsire, South Utsire, 'Chingford, Loughton, Woodford Green.
'Mainly poor, veering strangely.
'Minus 75, occasionally Rockall.
' Quite.
Now, tell me, what ruins over 300,000 British car journeys each year? ALAN: Radio One.
Very good.
Very good.
300,000 British car journeys Is it kids in the back going, "Are we nearly there yet?" And you go, "No, put the hood back on your head.
" KLAXON BLARES Oh, so soon! Oh, I'm sorry.
You were barely warmed up.
SatNav sending you down into a field.
Basically, you are right.
for serious road traffic incidents or accidents are put down to SatNav these days.
SatNavs.
We were in the car, my girlfriend genuinely said, "Where would we be without SatNav?" LAUGHTER Thanks for that.
That's added value.
That's very good.
Yeah.
There was a touring acting group whose pink Mercedes van, they had to be rescued off the roof of it by helicopter cos the SatNav directed them down into a ford.
Yeah, but how much of a div would you have to be to actually see it ahead of you and drive into it? It might have been night, you go down a lane and the lane turns out to be JO: But it's quite good these days, cos cars have got headlights.
I know.
It's a fair point.
She's got a very persuasive voice.
She has.
I call her my "Navigatrix".
I know this isn't Dragon's Den, it's QI, but I've had an idea, which is, you get SatNav but you print it out into a booklet that you can just flick through.
What would you call it? Er, oh, er Satlas.
Maybe A satlas? A satlas.
What I don't like about SatNav is when it interrupts the radio.
You'll be listening to a very nice thing on the radio, maybe a play or something, and the voice, of course, cuts over the radio, always at a crucial moment.
You'll be getting to the climax of the play, "And I tell you, David, the reason that we never had children is" "Turn left in 40 yards.
" You do voiceovers, generally.
Have you been asked to do one of the? Cos you'd be very good, if you did that voice of a little man trapped inside a box.
Oh, yes.
Do your man who's trapped in a box or your American radio set that you've swallowed.
Ready? Where are you? I don't know where you are.
Somebody get me out of here.
Isn't that brilliant? APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH It's the small things, Stephen.
Er, actually, people who do SatNav voices, you know, John Cleese does one I thought that was an urban myth.
No, no, he does.
You can record it onto your own SatNav.
You can also do that.
I've done it on ours.
Oh! I didn't tell my wife, and then she went for a drive, and it was me going, "Go left! Go left! LAUGHTER That's the way to talk to her(!) Come on! Right, here! No wonder there's so many accidents.
Apparently the favourite SatNav voices are Nigella Lawson And Joanna Lumley.
Well, you'd think Joanna Lumley, the ones I've got are Billy Connolly and Julie Walters.
Billy Connolly? Yeah.
He's done it? I know! Least favourite, see if you can have a guess.
Nick Griffin.
JO: Brian Sewell? Right.
You all know Simon Cowell JIMMY: Hitler? Cath I think he'd have kitsch value.
Catherine Tate.
Are these impressions? They're not Simon Cowell hasn't gone into a studio and recorded, surely? All he's got to do is "Left, right, straight on" and they fiddle about with it.
Yeah, basically they just, you do a few, and Baroness Thatcher is there.
But, there's also a Julian Clary Right, right, right.
LAUGHTER AS JULIAN CLARY: There's a Julian Clary pack, too, and er Which is advertised as, "with free Dale Winton voice and alerts".
"You're passing a wooded area, park the car.
" Well, now.
Now then.
But yes, there have been several disasters, perhaps the most extreme one was a Syrian lorry driver transporting luxury cars from Turkey to Gibraltar who was diverted to the Grimsby area er, 1,600 miles out of his way.
Because there is a Gibraltar Point off Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, so he just blindly, not blindly, but he er, obediently followed it and was trying to drive into the North Sea when he was stopped.
And of course, a lot of villages' lives are ruined by being cut-throughs.
Friends of mine, back in Wales, quite a few of them have got a Welsh, it's not a famous voice, but it's a Welsh SatNav, which basically goes In Welsh language? No, no, no, no, just a Welsh attitude.
A Welsh approach to life.
Or death.
"Turning coming up now, in about forty yards, get ready for it.
"Getting a bit closer now, get ready, here it comes.
"Oh, you plank, you've missed it.
"Right, do a U-ey.
Do a U-ey.
"Do it.
No Don't, ah! "Pull over, attach a hosepipe to the exhaust and just end it all.
" And that's a very popular one.
Well, apparently, driver distraction contributes to a quarter of all accidents, it seems, according to RoSPA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, using a handheld mobile, or a SatNav is about equal, apparently.
While we're on the subject of directions, who is to the right of Genghis Khan? THUNDER CLAP Yeah? It's just quite funny.
Erm, every taxi driver I've ever met? If it's a dinner party, boy, girl, boy, girl.
Mrs Khan.
Mrs Khan.
Well, there were 500 Mrs Khans.
500?! He married 500.
Oh, that's a sitcom waiting to be made, isn't it? Incredible.
He had so many children, that actually, they recently did a test of Central Asian males and they found that 8% of all Central Asian males are related to a common ancestor about 1,000 years ago, which may well be Genghis Khan.
So do you think in 1,000 years' time they'll be talking in the same way about Russell Brand? LAUGHTER It's highly possible.
I quite fancy that, being one of 500.
At least you'd only have to have sex with him every year and a half.
True, but he might've chopped your head off afterwards or something.
He was rather violent, as you know.
And in death he was violent too, in a weird kind of way.
What we're talking about I literally mean, who is on the right? Oh, you mean buried alongside him? Yeah.
Is he buried with relatives or with victims or plunder? The thing is, in Mongolian tradition, when a great ruler like that, and there was no great ruler as great as Genghis Khan, obviously, he had to be anonymous, no-one could know.
So this gave them a real problem.
According to Marco Polo, to keep his burial place secret.
All the slaves who excavated the grave were killed by soldiers and then all the soldiers who killed the slaves That's how bad it was, until they suddenly realised they were in danger of killing everybody who knew where the grave was.
So what they did, and this is really peculiar, they realised, right, camels have got long memories, OK? So what they This is really unpleasant.
A suckling baby camel they killed in front of its mother by the grave where they were going to bury Genghis Khan, right? And then they took the mother away and they buried the baby camel next to Genghis Khan.
So that's who's to the right of Genghis Khan.
And every year Ah! I was going to guess that.
Every year Every year, the camel would remember exactly where the grave was, cos it knew exactly where its little baby was.
It's very sad.
JIMMY: That's a nice story(!) Yeah.
Thanks for that.
I might tell my daughters that tonight to get them off to sleep.
Hey, girls, I've got a lovely story about a camel.
So then the camel died JIMMY: Then the camel died And then no-one knew where he was buried.
But anyway, Genghis Khan is buried next to a baby camel, which er, acted like a sort of 13th-century SatNav guiding people back to his tomb.
Now, how did the teacup change the course of Chinese history? Did they used to have tea just in their hands like that before? They invented it, you might almost say We'll have to invent something for this.
They invented it so early, that it was a disadvantage.
It held back the course of Chinese history.
When they were building the Great Wall, was everyone going, "Cuppa? Yeah.
" They had to make 5,000 cups of tea and then, "Well, the day's over, we've got nothing done.
" Unlike the Europeans Is it because they Now, is it something to do with metal and ceramics, or is it because they invented it and they didn't invent other things that would have come before it? Yes.
That's the point.
In our culture, we came to China much later, which we got from them, hence calling it China.
But we had problems We also liked wine which they never drank in China.
And wine, the colour is very beautiful, and we developed a technology for containing wine.
Glass.
Glass.
With glass came lens grinding, came telescopes and microscopes.
And through spectacles, intellectuals and scientists had an extra 15 to 20 years of reading and active life and, further, all the way through to the invention of medical science, flasks, beakers, retorts, because it's chemically neutral, glass - it doesn't react to anything that's in it, and the Chinese had no glass made in all of China from the 14th century right up to the 19th century.
And no mirrors either.
And therefore no mirrors.
So, in fact, just because they were satisfied with the teacup, and didn't bother, this incredibly ingenious race, who would have otherwise invented so many other things, and DID invent so many other things, the one thing they couldn't do And electronics used glass for valves and so on.
The irony is, a lot of them prefer coffee.
Yeah! Go figure! What did they do for a window? They used paper.
Huh! Yeah.
Paper is rubbish for a window.
It's wet and you can't see through it.
And they had dark houses.
I mean, that's another thing Dark houses! Yes, it's because they haven't got any light bulbs, either.
These people are useless! What about lanterns? Turn the lantern out in the dark.
They had Chinese lanterns.
Paper lanterns, that's the worst invention yet.
They probably let off a few indoor fireworks.
They had fireworks.
They had fireworks.
But they obviously, they invented the plastic tub for keeping rice in, centuries ago, and those tin foil ones with the cardboard lid.
Yes.
So, they were way ahead in some areas.
They clearly were.
Anyway, there you are, that's China and glass.
The course of Chinese history changed by their preference for tea which meant they never bothered to develop glass.
Now, in 1851, James Wyld installed a 60-foot-high scale model of the Earth in the middle of London, including all the land masses, and the seas and the mountains built to scale.
What was the best direction to see it from? What about from inside? Yes, is the right answer! JIMMY: Oh, was it made of glass? It was a perfect representation of the Earth, but from inside.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING It was one of the wonders of the age.
It was there, in Leicester Square, between 1851 and 1862.
A visitor said, "I visited several times and never met with anyone "who wasn't delighted with it or didn't find it most instructive.
" I don't know if you can see the details, the top left, you can probably see Scandinavia and Britain just at the very top left, about sort of between 10 and 11 o'clock.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah? What's fascinating about it is that it's obviously, you're inside it, so it's like an inverse of how the world really is, and yet, one of the odd things about the way maps and projections are A globe is an accurate representation of what we think the world is - it's round.
But that one, being inside it, is exactly the same.
In other words, if you were to take a piece of paper and you were to draw the world and do this, and look at the piece of paper on a cylinder, You'd say, "OK, right.
That's kind of like how" But it would look identical if you took the same piece of paper and looked at it when it was concave rather than convex.
JO: So what happened to it, then? Well, sadly, it came down after 12 years.
The lease on the ground was expired, whoever owned Leicester Square.
How utterly pedestrian.
The lease on the ground on which it stood.
So high rents in the West End? It sounds like a brilliant thing to build again.
Wouldn't it be wonderful? It's a very successful It was there to coincide with the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
But it gave everybody joy and pleasure, as you can see, there'sas in all those drawings, someone pointing like that.
But it's a very fine Top hats.
And tops hats.
We'll all wear top hats to go inside the Earth.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? There he was.
A man called Wyld.
His Great Globe in Leicester Square.
And it was an enormous triumph.
Scale model of the world, viewed from the inside.
Let's try something simpler.
Where did the Arctic Highlanders get their cutlery from? Sheffield.
That's where you get your cutlery from.
KLAXON BLARES Hey! Er, from Nordic JO: IKEA.
KLAXON BLARES JIMMY: When you say, what was it, Northern? Well, that's the clue.
Arctic Highlanders was the Do you mean Eskimos? We now call them Inuit.
Polar Eskimos, yep.
A man called Ross, after whom the Ross Sea is named, he was the first European to encounter And this particular tribe of Inuits, 200 of them he met, it was an extraordinary meeting, they thought they were the only people on the planet.
They didn't know there were any other people in the world.
It's very much like that in Essex.
Is it like that in Essex? It's rather touching, though.
They saw him, they'd never seen anyone else.
But they had cutlery.
Metal cutlery? Metal cutlery.
Where did it come from? Where did it come from? Aliens.
Aliens is not a bad idea.
Was it one of the guys that went up there to the North Pole and just left a bunch of stuff and they found it? No, no, no.
This man, Ross, was the first European ever to go up close to the North Pole.
I'm talking a long time ago.
Look.
See? I'm talking 1818, before anyone had been to the North Pole.
And they had proper knives Pretty proper.
They were a mixture of bone and metal.
Was it mail order? But they didn't have the technology Did they excavate them or something? They didn't have the technology to smelt metal, make metal, they had no knowledge about iron ore or anything of the kind.
And they thought they were the only people? The only people on Earth.
So it's a real puzzle.
But they had cutlery.
Not from a box from Sheffield that got washed ashore.
Not an abandoned Ford Escort? No.
It was still 1818.
It was just Oh, is it because the North Pole is magnetic and and all the cutlery naturally, when You know when you lose a spoon, that's where it ends up.
Drifting shipwrecks.
No.
You were closest with aliens.
Ah! Was it meteorites? Meteorites, Jo Brand.
Points there.
Hey, that's two I've got right.
Three meteorites.
They looked like a woman sewing her tent, and a dog, to them.
So that's what they knew them as.
But they took flakes from the one that they called The Woman, metal flakes and they attached bits of horn and used them as eating implements, as cutlery.
man to get to the North Pole, supposedly? Was it Michael Palin? It wasn't Michael Palin, no.
JO: Ranulph Fiennes? I would have preferred it if it was Ralph Fiennes.
We're talking about 1880.
1880? 1890s.
Queen Victoria.
A man called Admiral Peary, an American.
JO: Oh, Peary.
I've heard of him.
Yes, Peary.
There he was.
He was a rather He was a yeti.
He was a pretty horrific figure.
He went to these same people and stole their meteorites, basically.
Which they'd been taking their cutlery off, and sold them to a museum for 40,000.
He took some children, didn't he? Took some children.
He took six of whom four died of TB instantly.
One of them survived and was brought up by an American couple.
Was then horrified to discover his parents, his father, as a skeleton in the Natural History Museum in New York.
On display.
And complained, and Peary refused to do anything about it.
But reluctantly gave him enough money to carry home.
It wasn't till 1993 that the remains of those Inuits were sent back to their homelands.
That's horrific! Did he know he was going to go and see his father, or was he just wandering around in the museum and went, "I know him.
" That's awful! It is.
It's a horrible episode in the exploitation of a native peoples.
All of these things were done in the name of science, but also entertainment, to a degree.
In the case of Peary, riches and ambition.
He was psychotically ambitious.
Now, most people believe he didn't get to the North Pole himself cos the story he tells, he would have had to have gone at a speed that no-one has subsequently ever gone on Arctic exploration.
Anyway, Polar Eskimos made metal knives and implements, by chopping flakes off three large meteorites that they called The Tent, The Dog and The Woman.
Now, who taught the great father of geography, Alexander von Humboldt, how to speak the Ature language, who spoke it died? A confidence trickster? A teacher? A parrot? Yes! Oh, Jo Brand! That is good.
Brilliant.
JO: Amazing.
You are rocking! You are absolutely rocking.
He was in Venezuela, Alexander von Humboldt, and he heard about this tribe that had been eaten by the Caribs, a cannibalistic tribe of the area, and they'd all gone, apparently.
but someone said, "No, there is a parrot who still is alive.
" Parrots can live quite a long time, "and it knows" JIMMY: How did it talk its way out of that? It had 40 words in the language which von Humboldt wrote down and learned.
But, of course, we can't know how accurate it was.
He was with someone who spoke a related language, and they made guesses as to what the 40 Ature words might be.
Sort of like, "who's a cheeky boy, then?" and that sort of thing.
He would have quite liked that, cos he was gay, Humboldt.
Well, I find that kind of stereotyping rather offensive.
So you're saying that all gay people are like "cheeky boys"? Oh, no! When are you going to let up with your relentless gay bashing? APPLAUSE How many words can a parrot learn? Do you know? 182.
That's good and specific.
There have been some 200, but the odd thing is why they speak at all.
Why is it that they do mimic humans? They have that thing in the back of their throat that I have, where they can go PUTS ON "MAN-IN-A-BOX" VOICE The extraordinary thing is, no parrot in the wild has ever been observed mimicking another bird or another animal.
There are birds in the wild that mimic There are birds that do.
.
.
Noises.
Mynah birds and other birds, but parrots don't.
In the wild they have their own screech and they're satisfied with that.
They don't imitate other birds.
They've never been observed to.
And that is rather a shock.
Do you have the answer to this? I hope so.
I don't.
I'm sorry, no.
It's a real question.
So, Humboldt apparently learned Ature from a parrot.
Which leaves us plummeting over the sheer cliff of general ignorance, so fingers on buzzers, for a quick-fire round.
What do Mongolians live in? SHIP'S HORN They're called something like yak, it's like a "yult" or a "yat" Do you mean a yurt? Oh! Yes, that's the one.
No, that's not the one.
No.
Yeah, thanks, Rob.
Yurt is a Turkish word, and Mongolians would not be pleased if you called their "ger" a yurt.
JO: Well, I won't then.
No, indeed.
Now we know.
They don't call them that.
That's where they live and it means "home" in Mongolian.
Where in Holland is the Dutch city of Groningen? Is it not going to be in Holland? It's not in Holland.
It's in another one of the Netherlands.
Yes.
You're very smart.
There are two provinces called Holland and they're both south of where Groningen is.
There, you see? So there's two places called Holland? Yep.
The country's called the Netherlands and there are two areas called the Hollands - North and South, in which Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, all the big cities are.
But that part there is not in Holland, it's in the Netherlands.
The photo you showed looked like Guildford.
It did a bit.
That famous shot of Guildford.
That could be Britain, couldn't it? So easily.
If it didn't have a big sign saying "Groningen".
That really was the clue there, I felt.
Yeah.
That's the giveaway.
They have a pub that claims to have been open non-stop for ten years.
So indeed, it could be Britain.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Are you suggesting we have more in common with our European neighbours than otherwise? I'm suggesting the world is becoming homogenised and indistinct, and I, for one, think that's a bad thing.
Hear, hear, hear.
Quite right.
Quite right.
Very good.
If we all think like that, we're all the same.
LAUGHTER Oh, very good.
Yes, Groningen is in the Netherlands but it isn't in Holland, which refers to the two western provinces, an eighth of the country's land mass.
Us calling the whole country Holland is like them calling Britain East Anglia.
Er, which would be nice, but they don't.
What is quite interesting about Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire? Is it to do with the height above sea level? No, but you're so much in the right area.
Is it the height below sea level? Is it not flat and it hasn't got a church? It's not that exactly.
Is it the highest flat bit? No, but it's the sea.
Think of the sea.
You're in Derbyshire.
I-I know, I know this! It's the point in Britain that is the ROB AND ALAN: Furthest from the sea.
Yes, I've got it, Alan.
LAUGHTER I won't have you competing for Sir's favour.
You are both very good boys.
Isn't it something like 72 miles, you can't be more Exactly, well, 70 miles is Nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast.
Which perhaps makes Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire the very middle of the country.
Anyway.
Which language is the Spanish national anthem sung in? Well, I'm going to go for Am I? I'm going to THUNDER CLAP Is it Spanish? N-n-n-no.
KLAXON BLARES It's not, it's not Catalan, is it? Catalan? Is it Catalan? KLAXON BLARES Is it Cas-Castilian? Well, that is Spanish, really.
Castilian is classic Spanish.
Can you just remind me? What was the language that guy was taught, 40 years after it died out, by a parrot? Ature.
It's not that one.
BUZZER: 'Rockall.
' LAUGHTER I didn't say anything.
Don't be aggressive.
Er, is it, is it instrumental? Yes! It's the right answer, well done.
It has no words.
It's very odd, but they have one of the oldest tunes called "La Marcha Real".
It's the only national anthem with no words.
The old ones were dropped after the death of Franco in '75.
But then they were inspired by visiting Liverpool fans listening to "You'll Never Walk Alone", which is a song from an American Broadway musical, bizarrely, called "Carousel" LIVERPUDLIAN ACCENT: 'Ey, 'ey, 'ey! Don't talk rubbish.
It is! You couldn't look any more Scouse.
Erm, so the Sp LAUGHTER The Spanish Olympic committee held a competition in 2007, to replace the words of their Franco Fascist one, but they were withdrawn after five days, having fallen foul of several Spanish regions.
They criticised the new version which was called "Viva Espana", unfortunately, for being too nationalistic.
What? For a national anthem for For a national anthem.
Duh! The words were, "Long live Spain, we sing together with different voices and only one heart.
" It doesn't seem THAT terrible.
Rubbish.
As opposed to the Marseillaise, "Do you hear in the countryside "The roar of those ferocious soldiers? "They come right here into your midst "To slit the throats of your sons and wives.
" Which isquite aggressive.
Well, "God Save The Queen" has the sixth verse, I don't know if you know that.
Of course I know the sixth verse to "God Save The Queen"! Give it, give us Well, I have to sing it all the way through.
Is it about going up to Scotland and killing everybody? "Lord grant that Marshal Wade "May by thy mighty aid victory bring "May he sedition hush "And like a torrent rush rebellious Scots to crush God save the king.
" Hear, hear, yeah! LAUGHTER Oh, I'm sorry.
The oddest one is back to our old friends the Dutch.
The Dutch national anthem.
It's still the Dutch national anthem.
"William of Nassau scion of a Dutch and ancient line "Dedicate undying faith to this land of mine "A prince I am undaunted of Orange ever free "To the king of Spain I've granted a lifelong loyalty.
" In the Dutch national anthem they say they've granted a lifelong loyalty to the king of Spain.
The most deferential anthem ever heard! It is bizarre.
350 years ago, Holland was part of the Spanish Netherlands, but that's a long time ago.
The Spanish national anthem is the only one which officially has no words.
They did try and write some, they were rejected for being too patriotic.
Which brings us to the scores, ladies and gentlemen.
Heavenbless my soul.
I don't know how this could have happened, but in last place with minus 28 points it's Rob Brydon.
APPLAUSE Not good.
And just behind him with minus 21, Jimmy Carr.
So, sort of a winner.
Sort of the first of the winners.
Who can it be? Who can it be? Who can it be? In second place with minus ten is Jo Brand.
APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH And he breasted the tape at the very last minute with an impressive minus seven, Alan Davies.
WILD APPLAUSE AND CHEERING So-o-o-o, it only remains for me to thank Rob, Jimmy, Jo and Alan, to wish you all safe onward journeys.
And I leave you with this from Ambrose Bierce, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
" Goodnight.
Joining me from the four corners of the Earth are the king of the jungle, Jimmy Carr APPLAUSE AND CHEERING King of the jungle, me? The queen of the desert, Jo Brand APPLAUSE AND CHEERING The prince of Port Talbot, Rob Brydon APPLAUSE AND CHEERING And the man in the moon, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING So with that in mind, let's hear their global warnings.
Jimmy goes THUNDER CLAP Rob goes SHIP'S HORN Yes, you do.
Jo goes AIR-RAID SIREN And Alan goes MAN: 'Forties, Cromarty, North Utsire, South Utsire, 'Chingford, Loughton, Woodford Green.
'Mainly poor, veering strangely.
'Minus 75, occasionally Rockall.
' Quite.
Now, tell me, what ruins over 300,000 British car journeys each year? ALAN: Radio One.
Very good.
Very good.
300,000 British car journeys Is it kids in the back going, "Are we nearly there yet?" And you go, "No, put the hood back on your head.
" KLAXON BLARES Oh, so soon! Oh, I'm sorry.
You were barely warmed up.
SatNav sending you down into a field.
Basically, you are right.
for serious road traffic incidents or accidents are put down to SatNav these days.
SatNavs.
We were in the car, my girlfriend genuinely said, "Where would we be without SatNav?" LAUGHTER Thanks for that.
That's added value.
That's very good.
Yeah.
There was a touring acting group whose pink Mercedes van, they had to be rescued off the roof of it by helicopter cos the SatNav directed them down into a ford.
Yeah, but how much of a div would you have to be to actually see it ahead of you and drive into it? It might have been night, you go down a lane and the lane turns out to be JO: But it's quite good these days, cos cars have got headlights.
I know.
It's a fair point.
She's got a very persuasive voice.
She has.
I call her my "Navigatrix".
I know this isn't Dragon's Den, it's QI, but I've had an idea, which is, you get SatNav but you print it out into a booklet that you can just flick through.
What would you call it? Er, oh, er Satlas.
Maybe A satlas? A satlas.
What I don't like about SatNav is when it interrupts the radio.
You'll be listening to a very nice thing on the radio, maybe a play or something, and the voice, of course, cuts over the radio, always at a crucial moment.
You'll be getting to the climax of the play, "And I tell you, David, the reason that we never had children is" "Turn left in 40 yards.
" You do voiceovers, generally.
Have you been asked to do one of the? Cos you'd be very good, if you did that voice of a little man trapped inside a box.
Oh, yes.
Do your man who's trapped in a box or your American radio set that you've swallowed.
Ready? Where are you? I don't know where you are.
Somebody get me out of here.
Isn't that brilliant? APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH It's the small things, Stephen.
Er, actually, people who do SatNav voices, you know, John Cleese does one I thought that was an urban myth.
No, no, he does.
You can record it onto your own SatNav.
You can also do that.
I've done it on ours.
Oh! I didn't tell my wife, and then she went for a drive, and it was me going, "Go left! Go left! LAUGHTER That's the way to talk to her(!) Come on! Right, here! No wonder there's so many accidents.
Apparently the favourite SatNav voices are Nigella Lawson And Joanna Lumley.
Well, you'd think Joanna Lumley, the ones I've got are Billy Connolly and Julie Walters.
Billy Connolly? Yeah.
He's done it? I know! Least favourite, see if you can have a guess.
Nick Griffin.
JO: Brian Sewell? Right.
You all know Simon Cowell JIMMY: Hitler? Cath I think he'd have kitsch value.
Catherine Tate.
Are these impressions? They're not Simon Cowell hasn't gone into a studio and recorded, surely? All he's got to do is "Left, right, straight on" and they fiddle about with it.
Yeah, basically they just, you do a few, and Baroness Thatcher is there.
But, there's also a Julian Clary Right, right, right.
LAUGHTER AS JULIAN CLARY: There's a Julian Clary pack, too, and er Which is advertised as, "with free Dale Winton voice and alerts".
"You're passing a wooded area, park the car.
" Well, now.
Now then.
But yes, there have been several disasters, perhaps the most extreme one was a Syrian lorry driver transporting luxury cars from Turkey to Gibraltar who was diverted to the Grimsby area er, 1,600 miles out of his way.
Because there is a Gibraltar Point off Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, so he just blindly, not blindly, but he er, obediently followed it and was trying to drive into the North Sea when he was stopped.
And of course, a lot of villages' lives are ruined by being cut-throughs.
Friends of mine, back in Wales, quite a few of them have got a Welsh, it's not a famous voice, but it's a Welsh SatNav, which basically goes In Welsh language? No, no, no, no, just a Welsh attitude.
A Welsh approach to life.
Or death.
"Turning coming up now, in about forty yards, get ready for it.
"Getting a bit closer now, get ready, here it comes.
"Oh, you plank, you've missed it.
"Right, do a U-ey.
Do a U-ey.
"Do it.
No Don't, ah! "Pull over, attach a hosepipe to the exhaust and just end it all.
" And that's a very popular one.
Well, apparently, driver distraction contributes to a quarter of all accidents, it seems, according to RoSPA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, using a handheld mobile, or a SatNav is about equal, apparently.
While we're on the subject of directions, who is to the right of Genghis Khan? THUNDER CLAP Yeah? It's just quite funny.
Erm, every taxi driver I've ever met? If it's a dinner party, boy, girl, boy, girl.
Mrs Khan.
Mrs Khan.
Well, there were 500 Mrs Khans.
500?! He married 500.
Oh, that's a sitcom waiting to be made, isn't it? Incredible.
He had so many children, that actually, they recently did a test of Central Asian males and they found that 8% of all Central Asian males are related to a common ancestor about 1,000 years ago, which may well be Genghis Khan.
So do you think in 1,000 years' time they'll be talking in the same way about Russell Brand? LAUGHTER It's highly possible.
I quite fancy that, being one of 500.
At least you'd only have to have sex with him every year and a half.
True, but he might've chopped your head off afterwards or something.
He was rather violent, as you know.
And in death he was violent too, in a weird kind of way.
What we're talking about I literally mean, who is on the right? Oh, you mean buried alongside him? Yeah.
Is he buried with relatives or with victims or plunder? The thing is, in Mongolian tradition, when a great ruler like that, and there was no great ruler as great as Genghis Khan, obviously, he had to be anonymous, no-one could know.
So this gave them a real problem.
According to Marco Polo, to keep his burial place secret.
All the slaves who excavated the grave were killed by soldiers and then all the soldiers who killed the slaves That's how bad it was, until they suddenly realised they were in danger of killing everybody who knew where the grave was.
So what they did, and this is really peculiar, they realised, right, camels have got long memories, OK? So what they This is really unpleasant.
A suckling baby camel they killed in front of its mother by the grave where they were going to bury Genghis Khan, right? And then they took the mother away and they buried the baby camel next to Genghis Khan.
So that's who's to the right of Genghis Khan.
And every year Ah! I was going to guess that.
Every year Every year, the camel would remember exactly where the grave was, cos it knew exactly where its little baby was.
It's very sad.
JIMMY: That's a nice story(!) Yeah.
Thanks for that.
I might tell my daughters that tonight to get them off to sleep.
Hey, girls, I've got a lovely story about a camel.
So then the camel died JIMMY: Then the camel died And then no-one knew where he was buried.
But anyway, Genghis Khan is buried next to a baby camel, which er, acted like a sort of 13th-century SatNav guiding people back to his tomb.
Now, how did the teacup change the course of Chinese history? Did they used to have tea just in their hands like that before? They invented it, you might almost say We'll have to invent something for this.
They invented it so early, that it was a disadvantage.
It held back the course of Chinese history.
When they were building the Great Wall, was everyone going, "Cuppa? Yeah.
" They had to make 5,000 cups of tea and then, "Well, the day's over, we've got nothing done.
" Unlike the Europeans Is it because they Now, is it something to do with metal and ceramics, or is it because they invented it and they didn't invent other things that would have come before it? Yes.
That's the point.
In our culture, we came to China much later, which we got from them, hence calling it China.
But we had problems We also liked wine which they never drank in China.
And wine, the colour is very beautiful, and we developed a technology for containing wine.
Glass.
Glass.
With glass came lens grinding, came telescopes and microscopes.
And through spectacles, intellectuals and scientists had an extra 15 to 20 years of reading and active life and, further, all the way through to the invention of medical science, flasks, beakers, retorts, because it's chemically neutral, glass - it doesn't react to anything that's in it, and the Chinese had no glass made in all of China from the 14th century right up to the 19th century.
And no mirrors either.
And therefore no mirrors.
So, in fact, just because they were satisfied with the teacup, and didn't bother, this incredibly ingenious race, who would have otherwise invented so many other things, and DID invent so many other things, the one thing they couldn't do And electronics used glass for valves and so on.
The irony is, a lot of them prefer coffee.
Yeah! Go figure! What did they do for a window? They used paper.
Huh! Yeah.
Paper is rubbish for a window.
It's wet and you can't see through it.
And they had dark houses.
I mean, that's another thing Dark houses! Yes, it's because they haven't got any light bulbs, either.
These people are useless! What about lanterns? Turn the lantern out in the dark.
They had Chinese lanterns.
Paper lanterns, that's the worst invention yet.
They probably let off a few indoor fireworks.
They had fireworks.
They had fireworks.
But they obviously, they invented the plastic tub for keeping rice in, centuries ago, and those tin foil ones with the cardboard lid.
Yes.
So, they were way ahead in some areas.
They clearly were.
Anyway, there you are, that's China and glass.
The course of Chinese history changed by their preference for tea which meant they never bothered to develop glass.
Now, in 1851, James Wyld installed a 60-foot-high scale model of the Earth in the middle of London, including all the land masses, and the seas and the mountains built to scale.
What was the best direction to see it from? What about from inside? Yes, is the right answer! JIMMY: Oh, was it made of glass? It was a perfect representation of the Earth, but from inside.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING It was one of the wonders of the age.
It was there, in Leicester Square, between 1851 and 1862.
A visitor said, "I visited several times and never met with anyone "who wasn't delighted with it or didn't find it most instructive.
" I don't know if you can see the details, the top left, you can probably see Scandinavia and Britain just at the very top left, about sort of between 10 and 11 o'clock.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah? What's fascinating about it is that it's obviously, you're inside it, so it's like an inverse of how the world really is, and yet, one of the odd things about the way maps and projections are A globe is an accurate representation of what we think the world is - it's round.
But that one, being inside it, is exactly the same.
In other words, if you were to take a piece of paper and you were to draw the world and do this, and look at the piece of paper on a cylinder, You'd say, "OK, right.
That's kind of like how" But it would look identical if you took the same piece of paper and looked at it when it was concave rather than convex.
JO: So what happened to it, then? Well, sadly, it came down after 12 years.
The lease on the ground was expired, whoever owned Leicester Square.
How utterly pedestrian.
The lease on the ground on which it stood.
So high rents in the West End? It sounds like a brilliant thing to build again.
Wouldn't it be wonderful? It's a very successful It was there to coincide with the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
But it gave everybody joy and pleasure, as you can see, there'sas in all those drawings, someone pointing like that.
But it's a very fine Top hats.
And tops hats.
We'll all wear top hats to go inside the Earth.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? There he was.
A man called Wyld.
His Great Globe in Leicester Square.
And it was an enormous triumph.
Scale model of the world, viewed from the inside.
Let's try something simpler.
Where did the Arctic Highlanders get their cutlery from? Sheffield.
That's where you get your cutlery from.
KLAXON BLARES Hey! Er, from Nordic JO: IKEA.
KLAXON BLARES JIMMY: When you say, what was it, Northern? Well, that's the clue.
Arctic Highlanders was the Do you mean Eskimos? We now call them Inuit.
Polar Eskimos, yep.
A man called Ross, after whom the Ross Sea is named, he was the first European to encounter And this particular tribe of Inuits, 200 of them he met, it was an extraordinary meeting, they thought they were the only people on the planet.
They didn't know there were any other people in the world.
It's very much like that in Essex.
Is it like that in Essex? It's rather touching, though.
They saw him, they'd never seen anyone else.
But they had cutlery.
Metal cutlery? Metal cutlery.
Where did it come from? Where did it come from? Aliens.
Aliens is not a bad idea.
Was it one of the guys that went up there to the North Pole and just left a bunch of stuff and they found it? No, no, no.
This man, Ross, was the first European ever to go up close to the North Pole.
I'm talking a long time ago.
Look.
See? I'm talking 1818, before anyone had been to the North Pole.
And they had proper knives Pretty proper.
They were a mixture of bone and metal.
Was it mail order? But they didn't have the technology Did they excavate them or something? They didn't have the technology to smelt metal, make metal, they had no knowledge about iron ore or anything of the kind.
And they thought they were the only people? The only people on Earth.
So it's a real puzzle.
But they had cutlery.
Not from a box from Sheffield that got washed ashore.
Not an abandoned Ford Escort? No.
It was still 1818.
It was just Oh, is it because the North Pole is magnetic and and all the cutlery naturally, when You know when you lose a spoon, that's where it ends up.
Drifting shipwrecks.
No.
You were closest with aliens.
Ah! Was it meteorites? Meteorites, Jo Brand.
Points there.
Hey, that's two I've got right.
Three meteorites.
They looked like a woman sewing her tent, and a dog, to them.
So that's what they knew them as.
But they took flakes from the one that they called The Woman, metal flakes and they attached bits of horn and used them as eating implements, as cutlery.
man to get to the North Pole, supposedly? Was it Michael Palin? It wasn't Michael Palin, no.
JO: Ranulph Fiennes? I would have preferred it if it was Ralph Fiennes.
We're talking about 1880.
1880? 1890s.
Queen Victoria.
A man called Admiral Peary, an American.
JO: Oh, Peary.
I've heard of him.
Yes, Peary.
There he was.
He was a rather He was a yeti.
He was a pretty horrific figure.
He went to these same people and stole their meteorites, basically.
Which they'd been taking their cutlery off, and sold them to a museum for 40,000.
He took some children, didn't he? Took some children.
He took six of whom four died of TB instantly.
One of them survived and was brought up by an American couple.
Was then horrified to discover his parents, his father, as a skeleton in the Natural History Museum in New York.
On display.
And complained, and Peary refused to do anything about it.
But reluctantly gave him enough money to carry home.
It wasn't till 1993 that the remains of those Inuits were sent back to their homelands.
That's horrific! Did he know he was going to go and see his father, or was he just wandering around in the museum and went, "I know him.
" That's awful! It is.
It's a horrible episode in the exploitation of a native peoples.
All of these things were done in the name of science, but also entertainment, to a degree.
In the case of Peary, riches and ambition.
He was psychotically ambitious.
Now, most people believe he didn't get to the North Pole himself cos the story he tells, he would have had to have gone at a speed that no-one has subsequently ever gone on Arctic exploration.
Anyway, Polar Eskimos made metal knives and implements, by chopping flakes off three large meteorites that they called The Tent, The Dog and The Woman.
Now, who taught the great father of geography, Alexander von Humboldt, how to speak the Ature language, who spoke it died? A confidence trickster? A teacher? A parrot? Yes! Oh, Jo Brand! That is good.
Brilliant.
JO: Amazing.
You are rocking! You are absolutely rocking.
He was in Venezuela, Alexander von Humboldt, and he heard about this tribe that had been eaten by the Caribs, a cannibalistic tribe of the area, and they'd all gone, apparently.
but someone said, "No, there is a parrot who still is alive.
" Parrots can live quite a long time, "and it knows" JIMMY: How did it talk its way out of that? It had 40 words in the language which von Humboldt wrote down and learned.
But, of course, we can't know how accurate it was.
He was with someone who spoke a related language, and they made guesses as to what the 40 Ature words might be.
Sort of like, "who's a cheeky boy, then?" and that sort of thing.
He would have quite liked that, cos he was gay, Humboldt.
Well, I find that kind of stereotyping rather offensive.
So you're saying that all gay people are like "cheeky boys"? Oh, no! When are you going to let up with your relentless gay bashing? APPLAUSE How many words can a parrot learn? Do you know? 182.
That's good and specific.
There have been some 200, but the odd thing is why they speak at all.
Why is it that they do mimic humans? They have that thing in the back of their throat that I have, where they can go PUTS ON "MAN-IN-A-BOX" VOICE The extraordinary thing is, no parrot in the wild has ever been observed mimicking another bird or another animal.
There are birds in the wild that mimic There are birds that do.
.
.
Noises.
Mynah birds and other birds, but parrots don't.
In the wild they have their own screech and they're satisfied with that.
They don't imitate other birds.
They've never been observed to.
And that is rather a shock.
Do you have the answer to this? I hope so.
I don't.
I'm sorry, no.
It's a real question.
So, Humboldt apparently learned Ature from a parrot.
Which leaves us plummeting over the sheer cliff of general ignorance, so fingers on buzzers, for a quick-fire round.
What do Mongolians live in? SHIP'S HORN They're called something like yak, it's like a "yult" or a "yat" Do you mean a yurt? Oh! Yes, that's the one.
No, that's not the one.
No.
Yeah, thanks, Rob.
Yurt is a Turkish word, and Mongolians would not be pleased if you called their "ger" a yurt.
JO: Well, I won't then.
No, indeed.
Now we know.
They don't call them that.
That's where they live and it means "home" in Mongolian.
Where in Holland is the Dutch city of Groningen? Is it not going to be in Holland? It's not in Holland.
It's in another one of the Netherlands.
Yes.
You're very smart.
There are two provinces called Holland and they're both south of where Groningen is.
There, you see? So there's two places called Holland? Yep.
The country's called the Netherlands and there are two areas called the Hollands - North and South, in which Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, all the big cities are.
But that part there is not in Holland, it's in the Netherlands.
The photo you showed looked like Guildford.
It did a bit.
That famous shot of Guildford.
That could be Britain, couldn't it? So easily.
If it didn't have a big sign saying "Groningen".
That really was the clue there, I felt.
Yeah.
That's the giveaway.
They have a pub that claims to have been open non-stop for ten years.
So indeed, it could be Britain.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Are you suggesting we have more in common with our European neighbours than otherwise? I'm suggesting the world is becoming homogenised and indistinct, and I, for one, think that's a bad thing.
Hear, hear, hear.
Quite right.
Quite right.
Very good.
If we all think like that, we're all the same.
LAUGHTER Oh, very good.
Yes, Groningen is in the Netherlands but it isn't in Holland, which refers to the two western provinces, an eighth of the country's land mass.
Us calling the whole country Holland is like them calling Britain East Anglia.
Er, which would be nice, but they don't.
What is quite interesting about Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire? Is it to do with the height above sea level? No, but you're so much in the right area.
Is it the height below sea level? Is it not flat and it hasn't got a church? It's not that exactly.
Is it the highest flat bit? No, but it's the sea.
Think of the sea.
You're in Derbyshire.
I-I know, I know this! It's the point in Britain that is the ROB AND ALAN: Furthest from the sea.
Yes, I've got it, Alan.
LAUGHTER I won't have you competing for Sir's favour.
You are both very good boys.
Isn't it something like 72 miles, you can't be more Exactly, well, 70 miles is Nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast.
Which perhaps makes Church Flatts Farm in Derbyshire the very middle of the country.
Anyway.
Which language is the Spanish national anthem sung in? Well, I'm going to go for Am I? I'm going to THUNDER CLAP Is it Spanish? N-n-n-no.
KLAXON BLARES It's not, it's not Catalan, is it? Catalan? Is it Catalan? KLAXON BLARES Is it Cas-Castilian? Well, that is Spanish, really.
Castilian is classic Spanish.
Can you just remind me? What was the language that guy was taught, 40 years after it died out, by a parrot? Ature.
It's not that one.
BUZZER: 'Rockall.
' LAUGHTER I didn't say anything.
Don't be aggressive.
Er, is it, is it instrumental? Yes! It's the right answer, well done.
It has no words.
It's very odd, but they have one of the oldest tunes called "La Marcha Real".
It's the only national anthem with no words.
The old ones were dropped after the death of Franco in '75.
But then they were inspired by visiting Liverpool fans listening to "You'll Never Walk Alone", which is a song from an American Broadway musical, bizarrely, called "Carousel" LIVERPUDLIAN ACCENT: 'Ey, 'ey, 'ey! Don't talk rubbish.
It is! You couldn't look any more Scouse.
Erm, so the Sp LAUGHTER The Spanish Olympic committee held a competition in 2007, to replace the words of their Franco Fascist one, but they were withdrawn after five days, having fallen foul of several Spanish regions.
They criticised the new version which was called "Viva Espana", unfortunately, for being too nationalistic.
What? For a national anthem for For a national anthem.
Duh! The words were, "Long live Spain, we sing together with different voices and only one heart.
" It doesn't seem THAT terrible.
Rubbish.
As opposed to the Marseillaise, "Do you hear in the countryside "The roar of those ferocious soldiers? "They come right here into your midst "To slit the throats of your sons and wives.
" Which isquite aggressive.
Well, "God Save The Queen" has the sixth verse, I don't know if you know that.
Of course I know the sixth verse to "God Save The Queen"! Give it, give us Well, I have to sing it all the way through.
Is it about going up to Scotland and killing everybody? "Lord grant that Marshal Wade "May by thy mighty aid victory bring "May he sedition hush "And like a torrent rush rebellious Scots to crush God save the king.
" Hear, hear, yeah! LAUGHTER Oh, I'm sorry.
The oddest one is back to our old friends the Dutch.
The Dutch national anthem.
It's still the Dutch national anthem.
"William of Nassau scion of a Dutch and ancient line "Dedicate undying faith to this land of mine "A prince I am undaunted of Orange ever free "To the king of Spain I've granted a lifelong loyalty.
" In the Dutch national anthem they say they've granted a lifelong loyalty to the king of Spain.
The most deferential anthem ever heard! It is bizarre.
350 years ago, Holland was part of the Spanish Netherlands, but that's a long time ago.
The Spanish national anthem is the only one which officially has no words.
They did try and write some, they were rejected for being too patriotic.
Which brings us to the scores, ladies and gentlemen.
Heavenbless my soul.
I don't know how this could have happened, but in last place with minus 28 points it's Rob Brydon.
APPLAUSE Not good.
And just behind him with minus 21, Jimmy Carr.
So, sort of a winner.
Sort of the first of the winners.
Who can it be? Who can it be? Who can it be? In second place with minus ten is Jo Brand.
APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH And he breasted the tape at the very last minute with an impressive minus seven, Alan Davies.
WILD APPLAUSE AND CHEERING So-o-o-o, it only remains for me to thank Rob, Jimmy, Jo and Alan, to wish you all safe onward journeys.
And I leave you with this from Ambrose Bierce, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
" Goodnight.