- 14 hours ago
First broadcast 2nd December 2005.
Stephen Fry
Alan Davies
Clive Anderson
Jo Brand
Phill Jupitus
Stephen Fry
Alan Davies
Clive Anderson
Jo Brand
Phill Jupitus
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Well, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of QI, where tonight, as I
00:07hope you can sense, we are in party mood, and joining me in the big top for Carnival Capers are
00:13Phil Jupiters,
00:16Clive Anderson, Joe Brand, and Alan Davis, well, my little comic troupe, let's hear your amusing crazy clowny noises, and
00:40Clive goes,
00:46Excellent, Joe goes,
00:51And Alan,
00:56Each of the panel also has, I believe, a swazzle, a small device used by professors of Punch and Judy,
01:02and what, what do they say with it?
01:05Oh, very good.
01:14Which way in does it go?
01:38Which way in does it go?
01:42So, when you think the right answer to any question this evening is squirrel, or anything to do with squirrels,
01:49you press your buzzer,
01:50You play the card, and you shout.
01:52Squirrels, alright?
01:53Without swazzles, Stephen, without swazzles.
01:55Without swazzles.
01:56No, no, don't shout squirrel with a swazzle.
01:59You'll swallow it.
02:00It's impossible.
02:01No, no.
02:03If you want to do that, it will take time.
02:05You don't want this.
02:08If you don't take your swazzles out very soon, I will kill you.
02:14Yes.
02:17Well, at least you haven't swallowed it.
02:18You have to swallow one at least twice in order to be called the professor of Punch and Judy.
02:23Is that the qualification?
02:24Oh, and Clive.
02:25Does it have to be there when you defecate?
02:27Yes, there it is.
02:29Congratulations, Professor.
02:43Are you clear about the squirrels?
02:44Yes.
02:45If you think the answer to the question is squirrel, you hold up your joke and you shout squirrels.
02:49Squirrels!
02:49And if you're right, you will get a bonus of 50 points.
02:52On the other hand, if you are wrong, you will get a forfeit of 10 points.
02:57Steve and Fry sent Simply Red is not available in the shops.
03:06Anyway, in the words of Jack Handy, to me, clowns aren't funny.
03:11In fact, they're kind of scary.
03:12He said, I wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to
03:15the circus and a clown killed my father.
03:20The fear of clowns is called Coolerophobia.
03:23And the fear of squirrels, incidentally, is called Scuero-phobia.
03:28What are you frightened of?
03:32Squirrels!
03:33Oh!
03:38It was a reasonably expensive one.
03:41Jo, Jo.
03:42Yes.
03:43What am I frightened of?
03:44Psychopaths with axes coming into my bedroom at night and killing me.
03:48You're weird.
03:53Fear itself.
03:55And spiders.
03:58Which is called?
04:00Arachnophobia.
04:00Arachnophobia, yes.
04:01And phobia is very different from fear in a sense.
04:03It is a very specific thing.
04:05It has to be irrational.
04:06There is no one of those words ending in phobia, a Greek word, like for lions or sharks.
04:13Because that's a rational fear.
04:14And your fear of psychopaths wouldn't be a phobia because it's, again, it's perfectly
04:18rational.
04:18But to be afraid of moths, for example, is a phobia because they cannot possibly threaten
04:22you.
04:22Have you seen my jumpers?
04:25No.
04:26What about fear of flying, which is partly rational, partly irrational, isn't it?
04:30Fear of crashing?
04:31Now that makes sense, but flying's a good idea.
04:35When I was a psychiatric nurse, we did treat someone who had sperm phobia, right?
04:40And the way that they treated it was making them get in a bath full of sperm.
04:46And the way they got the sperm was to get loads of medical students masturbating furiously
04:52over a long weekend.
04:54God, how we laughed.
04:57This is absolutely true.
04:59That is absolutely true.
05:00Surely.
05:01Yes, I've seen it on the internet.
05:07Yes, we had the picture in our head and we wanted it to stay.
05:10And did it work?
05:11It worked very well for me, thank you.
05:16So, I have to get in a bath full of spiders?
05:18Yes.
05:19You can do it two ways.
05:20You can do graded desensitisation, where you're gradually exposed to spiders.
05:24Or you can do something called flooding, where you just get chucked in with them.
05:27This is cognitive therapy, isn't it?
05:29Well, it's more sort of behavioural therapy, really, because it's cheap.
05:31Yeah.
05:32Yeah.
05:32I think I'll settle with just screaming like a girl and running around the house if I try.
05:38If you're birds, of course, it's called ornithophobia, and anyone who has it should look away now.
05:43Does anyone here have a cuckoo in their pants?
05:50Can I apologise in advance for this?
05:52No, but I had a big cock in my pants last night.
05:59No, is the answer.
06:02Does that mean that we have got cuckoos in our pants?
06:05We all have a cuckoo in our pants now, with any luck, unless we're not wearing pants.
06:08But the Greek for cuckoo is...
06:11Bumhole.
06:11Cuck.
06:15There's a kind of fierce, relentless logic behind watching TV.
06:20I'd just like that the Greek ambassador isn't watching.
06:24Throwing an ouzo, sitting back for a bit of Stephen and the Chaps.
06:27Bumhole.
06:29No, the Greek for cuckoo is... is cuckox.
06:33Cuckox.
06:33Cuckoxix.
06:34Cuckoxix is exactly the right answer.
06:36Points to me.
06:37Very well.
06:38Half a point or two.
06:40And it was Galen, the Roman physician, father of medicine, many call him,
06:43who observed that the coccyx is much the shape of a cuckoo's beak.
06:47Is there a famous cartoon cuckoo?
06:48No.
06:49You're thinking a woody whooppecker.
06:50No, I'm not.
06:51Because a member of the cuckoo family is officially a cuckoo.
06:54Roadrunner.
06:54Meet meep.
06:55Exactly.
06:56Roadrunner is a cuckoo.
06:57He's a cuckoo, is he?
06:59Cockodynia?
06:59Would that suggest anything to you?
07:01You eat them?
07:02Your coccyx.
07:04No.
07:05Cockodynia, it's a pain in the arse, literally.
07:08Oh.
07:08It's when you get a slightly wobbly coccyx and you sit down and it's very, very painful.
07:13Wobbly?
07:13Well, it kind of, yeah.
07:14It's like, because they are segmented.
07:16People think they're fused, but they're actually in three or four bits.
07:18You can get a fuse.
07:19You can get it fused.
07:21Yes, yes, yes.
07:21Do you get people together and kind of, like with dogs, breed up people so they actually
07:26get tails again?
07:32It would be an ambitious project.
07:34Um.
07:37Because I think it would be great if we had tails, Ian.
07:40But how could we reverse evolution, Stephen?
07:42You should know.
07:44Evolution is all about mutations in the gene pool, so you actually need to have someone
07:47with a tail to start it off.
07:49Might I suggest the ring-tailed lemur?
07:51Lovely tail.
07:52Whoa, that long, striped.
07:54Imagine a six-foot stripy tail just alone.
07:59Yeah.
08:01Answer me this, though.
08:02What goes around in a Greek frock?
08:07Demis Roussos.
08:17I am afraid we were there before you, I'm afraid.
08:21Oh, dear.
08:22I bet it's not a dress.
08:24It's not, really.
08:25It's a Greek word for frock.
08:26You have to know the Greek word for frock.
08:27Ah, ah, ah.
08:28Well, there you are.
08:29Is it?
08:31Squirrels, are you going to say?
08:33Yeah.
08:34Oh, Jesus!
08:38The answer is actually an animal, or could be an animal.
08:42Ah, I see.
08:43It could also be something that isn't either animal or vegetable, but is alive.
08:47Some sort of virus, or, um...
08:49No.
08:50Not in the animal kingdom, not in the plant kingdom.
08:53Fungi.
08:53Yes.
08:54Oh, it'll be some mushroom with a sort of Greek skirt on it.
08:57It looks a bit like a...
08:58No, it's actually...
08:59The Greek skirt is chitin, and all kinds of animals are covered in chitin.
09:03Mushrooms, cockroaches, squid, fungi, ladybirds, ants, crabs, spiders, lobsters.
09:07It's like a kind of polymer that covers things.
09:10The Greek army do wear kilts.
09:12Oh, dear, they look terrible.
09:15Well, that girls are loud.
09:16This is not...
09:18Their kilts have 400 cleats in.
09:20I'll give five points if you can tell me why.
09:23Why 400?
09:23There's a very specific reason.
09:25Are there 400 Greek islands?
09:26No, that's...
09:27That's intelligent, at least.
09:28I don't mean to say...
09:31400 Greek gods.
09:32Not 400 Greek gods.
09:33No, it's 400 years of Greek subjugation by the Turks.
09:37So, the first year of Turkish occupation, plain A-line.
09:39Exactly.
09:40Exactly.
09:42The Highland Regents of the First World War had a lot of trouble,
09:45because they got, um...
09:46I forgot what they call it, all those insects...
09:47Lice.
09:48In their pleats.
09:49In the pleats of the kilts, so they had to be always sort of running
09:51when they could be bothered.
09:53Very good.
09:53Five points away for thinking a louse is an insect, it's an arachnid.
09:57But, um...
10:00You're quite right, but I have arachnid-phobia, so...
10:03Hey!
10:03Five points back again for being amusing.
10:06Now, stop me when you think you know what I'm talking about.
10:08They can't swim, or even float in water, but they grow to the size of a small dog,
10:14can shin up trees, have claws powerful enough to open tin cans,
10:17and can carry a load greater than the maximum luggage allowance on an international flight.
10:26Land crab?
10:28It's a type of crab.
10:30It's a coconut crab.
10:31I've got to give you some points for getting crab.
10:33It is indeed a crab.
10:40The only reason I know that is I had a friend who was in the army,
10:43who was stationed somewhere, and they had these things,
10:45and they would just put kit bags on them, and they would get up and move tons.
10:49They really do, they carry enormous weight.
10:51And the extraordinary thing about coconut crabs is they distribute it all over the Pacific,
10:55but they cannot swim.
10:57They go to the beach to drink, they need salt water in their system,
10:59but they cannot swim, they drown very quickly.
11:01So, what they do is they float on coconuts.
11:04Coconuts can go up to 3,000 miles, they float, and they cling on to the coconuts.
11:08What's coconut milk?
11:10Tasty!
11:11Where's it come from?
11:12What is it?
11:12Coconut cows!
11:18I'd have thought it would have come from a coconut.
11:21It is, yeah.
11:21It's the flesh.
11:22The mushed up flesh.
11:23It's the mushed up flesh.
11:24Ah.
11:24Yeah, exactly.
11:25And the stuff in the liquidy that, you know, is coconut water.
11:29Yeah.
11:29I went to Rio once, and the guy just had the whole, you know, the big, you know,
11:34with the green husk still on, and he just basically got a machete and went,
11:37wallop, wallop, tips and rum in it, and a straw.
11:39It's one of the loveliest things I've ever drunk in my life.
11:42Yeah, fantastic.
11:42And then there was a lady over there with great big breasts and a penis.
11:46It was quite the trick.
11:48And I thought it was a drink.
11:50Exactly.
11:52So, the answer was coconut crabs.
11:55They sound like something you get off radiators, or indeed a particularly unpleasant sort of
11:59children's dish.
12:00But, if I were throwing a tree party, how would you go about serving a cheese log?
12:09I would, it's a slow method, this, but you make an Arctic roll, which I think is out of
12:14sort of milky, ice-creamy stuff.
12:16And then just leave it for a long while, and it turns into cheese, and it's a cheese log.
12:20It would, it would satisfy the conditions of making a cheese log, it's true.
12:25It's an animal we're after.
12:29Any thoughts?
12:35We're so tempted.
12:36Cheese log's an animal, is it?
12:39How would you go about serving it?
12:41How about like this?
12:48There is a recipe for these animals, yeah.
12:51Oh, it's a squirrel, it's gotta be squirrel.
12:52Oh!
12:53No!
12:54No!
12:55No!
12:55No!
12:55No!
12:55No!
12:56No!
12:56No!
12:57No!
12:58No!
13:07No!
13:13No!
13:15No!
13:17The red ones taste of strawberries!
13:21Do you know where these red ones are, in England?
13:24The isle of White there is some red squirrels there.
13:27and then there are a few left in Scotland and a few...
13:29You're on a British Conservancy...
13:32Woodland Trust.
13:32Woodland Trust.
13:33I'm the president of Woodland Trust.
13:33You're on the president of Woodland Trust.
13:34Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the Woodland Trust.
13:36Woodland Trust.
13:43How do you become the president?
13:47Did the squirrels vote for you?
13:50Ladies and gentlemen, president of the Woodland Trust.
13:52Yes, I would love to eat grey squirrels.
13:56Perhaps on the website, there could be a photo of you with a tail hanging in front of you.
14:02Our animal is grey as well, the animal that we want you to eat.
14:04It's a lot smaller than a grey squirrel, however.
14:07Oh, it's our mouse.
14:08And it lives in a tree, or often under tree bark.
14:10A woodlouse.
14:11A woodlouse is the right answer.
14:13Whey!
14:14Well done.
14:16Well done.
14:19And you asked how you would serve it, and the answer is,
14:21in the marvellous book, which I can recommend by Mr. Vincent M Holt,
14:25Why Not Eat Insects? It's cool.
14:28He considers woodlouse superior to shrimp.
14:31And if you look at them, you will see they are not unlike shrimps.
14:33In fact, they're more closely related to shrimps
14:35than they are to millipedes or centipedes, for example.
14:38Shrimps are just insects of the sea, after all.
14:40And we eat them with great, literally with relish, in fact.
14:43I've eaten several insects.
14:45Not woodlouse, but with wasps and locusts and things.
14:47That's how you got the woodland trusky.
14:49Yeah.
14:50I've had locust in chocolate.
14:51What's it like?
14:52Locust in chocolate. It was quite nice.
14:53They're like prawn things, really, aren't they?
14:55Yeah, they are like prawns, exactly that.
14:56Anyway, he recommends quantity of the finest woodlouse.
14:59They swarm under the bark of a very rotten tree, easy to find.
15:01Drop them into boiling water.
15:03It will kill them instantly, but not turn them red.
15:06At the same time, put into a saucepan a quarter of a pound of fresh butter,
15:09a teaspoonful of flour, a small glass of water, a little milk, some pepper and salt.
15:13Place it on the stove.
15:14As soon as the sauce is thick, take it off, put in the woodlice.
15:17This is an excellent sauce for fish.
15:18So that's how you would serve it, Joe.
15:19There was definitely a sort of fudge with wasps in it.
15:22I remember that one.
15:23Wasp fudge?
15:23Wasp fudge.
15:24Leave it out for an hour.
15:25All fudge as wasps.
15:26Yeah, exactly.
15:30Worms, sort of worms as well.
15:31It's straying slightly off of insects, I know.
15:32But it was to do with all this stuff,
15:35wandering around with all the protein in it.
15:36And we arbitrarily say, I don't want to eat that, and I will eat that.
15:38Yeah.
15:39Like picky school children, really.
15:40Well, yeah.
15:42Do you know any other names for woodlice?
15:44Chiggy pigs.
15:45Rather nice, isn't it?
15:46Chiggy pigs.
15:46Again, they're trying to sell it as a foodstuff.
15:48I think they are.
15:49Coffin cutters, which is less likely.
15:51Monkey peas.
15:52Monkey peas?
15:53Yeah.
15:55Bibblebugs.
15:56And in Holland they're called Pissabed.
15:59Because they expel their waste as ammonia vapour rather than liquid urine through the porous shell.
16:04No.
16:04Tuck in.
16:05Yeah.
16:07Anyway, now, what was the emperor Charlemagne's party trick with a tablecloth?
16:15Apparently wearing it.
16:18Well, he comes from a long while ago.
16:21He's sort of 8th century, 9th century, isn't he?
16:23Now, I don't believe they even had knives and forks in those days, that alone tablecloths.
16:27He did have a tablecloth.
16:28His tablecloth was made of something unusual.
16:30Some plant thing?
16:31No, it was a mineral.
16:33A mineral that could be made fibrous.
16:35Ah, so.
16:36Asbestos.
16:37Asbestos is the right answer.
16:39Is it?
16:39And his party trick was to take his tablecloth in front of guests, other emperors and kings,
16:45and throw it onto the fire.
16:46And then there would be a may...
16:47There's a fire, in case you didn't know what one looked like.
16:50Easy, Clive, it's not a real forest.
16:54Yes, it is.
16:56The grey squirrels going like that.
17:00Now, that's extraordinary.
17:01This is the most interesting thing.
17:03It is interesting.
17:03They had asbestos all those years ago.
17:04They had asbestos.
17:05The Greeks named it, inextinguishable, is what it means.
17:08And the ancients wore, wove handkerchiefs out of it.
17:10You can't have done them any good.
17:11Oh, dear lord.
17:14I remember being given asbestos to play with the Commonwealth Institute on a trip there,
17:18and they must have been mining it all, finding it in an African country,
17:21and we were given it to hold and to play with it.
17:23Asbestos, the wonder material.
17:25The next time you see asbestos being handled, it's a bloke in nine different kinds of suit,
17:30handling it with 12 foot long rods.
17:33Asbestos.
17:33Do you know the name of the town where the biggest asbestos mine is in the world?
17:37Asbestos.
17:38The town is called Asbestos.
17:40Imagine being the mayor of asbestos.
17:44Which brings us, inevitably, to general ignorance.
17:47Now, who goes gathering nuts in May?
17:52Three, two, one.
17:55Squirrels, are you going to say?
17:56I'm not a eater!
18:00I was going to say we.
18:04Here we go gathering nuts in May.
18:06No, we don't grow nuts in May.
18:07Nuts grow in the autumn.
18:08They gather them at the end of the year.
18:10Yes.
18:10So it's knots.
18:11It's knots.
18:11Quite right.
18:12Knots of May.
18:13What does May mean?
18:14Well, it'll be the blossom of a May, which is?
18:16Some sort of Hawthorne.
18:17It is Hawthorne, exactly.
18:18I think you're fine.
18:19The Woodland Trust has a good sense of knowledge on there.
18:23Yes, 220,000 miles of Hawthorne hedge were planted in the 17th and 18th century.
18:28There are two types of Hawthorne that are native to the British Isles.
18:31Midland Hawthorne and Common Hawthorne.
18:33And now, a delightful eight feet remain.
18:37Why was so much planted at that time?
18:39Was that, that was enclosing fields?
18:41Enclosure, exactly right.
18:42Up until then, we could all wander anywhere, and then somebody came along and said, no,
18:45no, we own this now.
18:47Us rich people own it, and we're going to fence it off.
18:48Who made most money from that?
18:50Lawyers, I think, probably.
18:51Clive, didn't they?
18:52Well, whatever you can accuse you, you can't accuse me of making money from being an 18th
18:56century lawyer.
18:57No, no, no.
19:00The Hawthorne, there's more superstition at here, Hawthorne, than any other plant around.
19:04They're not supposed to take May flowers into the house.
19:07May cast a clout till May be out?
19:10Yes.
19:10And that may refer to the month of May, or to the blossom coming out.
19:13Well, it's generally thought it probably means the May blossom coming out.
19:17It smells of death, the May flower.
19:19In what sense?
19:20It's chemical, triethymiline, gives off.
19:23It's the same, it was called the great plague smell.
19:26Oh, I thought you meant the new perfume Joan Collins had just brought out.
19:29Has she brought out a perfume called death?
19:31No.
19:31Oh, sorry, sir.
19:33That is quite a good name for person, let's see.
19:35It is, isn't it?
19:36You think the Woodland Trust would market it, Clive?
19:39You have my blessing.
19:42Now, we all know what to do with a custard pie, but Alan, what's a custard pile?
19:47It's a yellow hemorrhoid.
19:51Shot in the dark, buildings in a geologically unsafe, some sort of liquid foundation.
19:57That's a wonderful thought.
19:59Absolutely nothing like the answer, but...
20:01Apparently...
20:02No, it's squirrel.
20:02Is it squirrel?
20:03No, it's not squirrel!
20:09It is an animal, on the other hand.
20:11A custard pile.
20:12A recognised colour from a breeders' association.
20:15A cat.
20:16Not a cat.
20:16Not even a mammal.
20:17A ferret.
20:18A goldfish.
20:19No.
20:20Not a fish, neither.
20:22A lizard, some sort of lizard gecko.
20:24Not a lizard.
20:24We're running out of major animal groups here.
20:25It's a bird.
20:27A canary.
20:27Not a canary.
20:28A parrot.
20:29A fighting bird.
20:30A cock.
20:31It's a cock.
20:32It's a fighting cock.
20:34A game cock.
20:35Alright, what have you got?
20:36I've got killer lunges, and you, I've got custard pile.
20:41You can have cocks in muff.
20:43You can have...
20:45You can have castle spangle, carp legs, milk and water legs.
20:48Do you think about cocking at all?
20:50Well, I don't like to blow my own trumpet, but...
20:55For 2,000 years, it was Britain's national sport.
20:57Every village would have at least one cockpit.
21:00Can you think of any phrases that come from cockfighting the youth day?
21:04Cockpit is one.
21:05Yep.
21:06Well done.
21:08To show a clean pair of heels, well-heeled.
21:11To pit someone against.
21:12You describe someone as game, as in being up for it.
21:15That's from cockfighting.
21:16Yeah.
21:16It says here, a good cocker would think nothing of cleaning his cock's wounded head
21:20by sticking it in his mouth and sucking it clean.
21:23Yeah.
21:24Yes.
21:26You're watching QI for the straight guy.
21:28Yeah.
21:34Now, what kind of animal caused the tragic death of the Greek playwright, Aeschylus?
21:41Oh, dear.
21:43Oh, no, Jesus!
21:48Yes.
21:48Now, I get these ancient Greeks mixed up, there's Aeschylus, there's the Duke of Edinburgh,
21:53but there's one of them got killed by some sort of tortoise falling out of the sky.
21:59Is the right answer.
22:02Oh, right.
22:06Oh, right.
22:07How would a tortoise fall out of the sky?
22:08Drops by eagle.
22:09Yeah.
22:09Drops by an eagle is the right answer.
22:11Well, a shot.
22:12Yeah.
22:12Yeah.
22:12Yeah.
22:13Thrown by a rival philosopher.
22:17Poor fellow.
22:19Yes!
22:20There's a good story about Croesus, actually, who wanted to see which was the best oracle,
22:26so he decided to go around and give them all a test and say to them,
22:30what am I going to be doing a month from today?
22:33And what he was actually doing in a month was he was boiling a tortoise in a copper pot.
22:38And would you believe it?
22:39One of the oracles got it right.
22:41The oracle at Delphi.
22:43And then he trusted them and said, how am I going to get on in the war?
22:47And they said something like, a great nation will fall.
22:50And he thought, brilliant, we're going to stop them.
22:51But unfortunately, it was his side.
22:54That's a great story.
22:55Thank you very much, then.
22:56Now, what's quite interesting about Robin Hood's tights?
23:01Did he lend them to Fry a tack, and then when he put them back on, he looked like Nora
23:06Batty?
23:09Well, for example, what sort of colour were they?
23:13His tights weren't green, because I know the way this programme works,
23:15and if anyone were to say green, they were probably hempen coloured or beige.
23:20Well, almost certainly scarlet.
23:22Lincoln Grain, G-R-A-I-N-E.
23:25Lincoln was the dying centre of England.
23:29Well, sort of that was Will Scarlet's tights.
23:31Well, they probably all were.
23:32They were rather obsessed with the colour of their clothes,
23:34and in the original Guest of Robin Hood...
23:36This is the New Zealand version.
23:38Of 15th century.
23:39Which is our first source of Robin Hood, which is the 14th century.
23:42They go on and on about their clothes.
23:45And there's a current theory that, in fact, the Robin Hood ballads were written
23:48to tell to the newly formed livery guilds, whose uniform was a hood,
23:53to make a hero and to show how they, as merchant venturers,
23:58had overcome the difficulty of being Saxons and beaten the corrupt aristocracy of Normans.
24:04So, in fact, it's not the triumph of the peasant classes, the triumph of the middle classes, really.
24:08Because it goes on about hoods, mantles, kirtles, coats, breeches, shirts, and six different colours of cloth are mentioned.
24:13So they were early hoodies, were they?
24:15They were early hoodies.
24:16They weren't allowed in shopping centres.
24:18They had to live in the woods.
24:19Exactly.
24:19In the woods only.
24:20Yes.
24:20Which in those days are much more extensive, and the better place for it, I think.
24:25But he was in red, so I don't know what the deal was with how difficult he was to find.
24:31Right.
24:31Red hooded top in a forest.
24:34That's a very, very big Robin over there.
24:39And the people who wrote all the Robin Hood stuff, the TV programme ATV made, Robin Hood, Robin Hood writing,
24:45they were all people booting out of Hollywood under the sort of anti-communist...
24:48They were, weren't they? Blacklisted left-wing waiters.
24:51Anyway, what were Cinderella slippers made of?
24:56Yes.
24:57I know this.
24:58It's a mistranslation of the French for fur.
25:01Vair.
25:01Vair, like a glass, but it's a French for fur.
25:03And they were like those slippers you shuffle around the house in.
25:06You're absolutely right, but what a chance you've missed, because the answer was squirrels.
25:09No!
25:10No!
25:10Oh!
25:11There you are.
25:13Look, why in that story...
25:19Why does the slipper not go back to whatever it was before the fairy godmother passed her spell at midnight?
25:25Everything goes back, the dress goes back to rags, the pumpkin reasserts itself, the mice come again.
25:30Why does that shoe remain still in its made-up state?
25:33That's the weakness in the plot there.
25:35You would never have got past that.
25:36You're right.
25:37The word ver, V-A-I-R, is still an English word, actually.
25:39You'll find it in the OED, meaning squirrel fur.
25:41Ver.
25:42And ver is a glass in French, as you know.
25:45So that's right.
25:46Do you know who was responsible for that?
25:47The ugly sisters.
25:49Yeah.
25:50Perrault.
25:51His name was Charles Perrault.
25:52Because the Chinese in the 9th century had a Cinderella story, almost identical, with gold slippers.
25:58German version, they're silken gold.
26:00And there's a Scottish version called Rashi Coat, and they're made of rushes.
26:03No squirrels.
26:04No trees in Scotland, I suppose that's why.
26:06Loads of trees in Scotland.
26:07Oh, are they?
26:07Oh, good.
26:08Scots pines, cover the place.
26:09Oh, yes.
26:09Can I just tell you, I've recently been made president of the Shut Up About the Woodland Trust.
26:23Very good.
26:24So anyway, yes, Disney's film version of Cinderella, and indeed its version of Sleeping Beauty, were
26:29based on Perrault's tales.
26:30Perrault added the fairy godmother, and the pumpkin, and the mice, and so on.
26:35But the original stories were pretty gruesome.
26:38When the ugly sisters tried to slip into the slipper, they cut off their toes and their
26:44bunions to try and squeeze in, and the slipper's filled with blood.
26:47They probably got that idea from Trini and Susanna.
26:52And the wicked stepmother and the ugly sisters were punished by the king.
26:55They had to dance themselves to death wearing red-hot iron boots.
26:59Now, we come to the matter of the scores.
27:02In first place, with zero point, it's Clive Anderson.
27:07Zero.
27:08Wait.
27:09Nil.
27:13And, second equal, I don't think it's happened before, or minus 23, it's Joe and Phil.
27:23But, ladies and gentlemen, the saddest, saddest clown is Alan with minus 26.
27:31Aw.
27:40Well, that leads me to thank Bill, Clyde, Joe, Alan, and Jack Handy, who brings down the
27:46final curtain with this sad clown closer.
27:49You know what would make a really good story?
27:51Something about a clown who makes people happy, but inside he's real sad.
27:55And also, he has severe diarrhea.
27:58Yes, it was great.
27:58We made me a big company here.
27:58Good night.
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